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Introduction
Easter 1990. The outskirts of a village halfway between Kraków and Kielce in southern Poland. Agnieszka, a young Catholic mother, is sitting under garish strip-lighting at the Formica-topped table in her dilapidated kitchen, carefully razoring out Hebrew passages from a Israeli children's book. Next to the growing pile of paper lies a jumble of raw wooden heads, arms, legs and long flat torsos. After painting all but the faces black and the beards grey, she assembles the pieces, sticks on scraps of fake fur, glues a Hebrew text to the hands of each, and stands the resulting foot-high figurines on the shelf behind her, to join a rapidly expanding Chassidic orthodox congregation. The finished dolls, with their fur-trimmed caftans and sable-tail hats, are mounted on springs. If one gently knocks the shelf, they begin to rock backwards and forwards like disturbed, love-deprived, abandoned children, the authentic movement, called shockeln in the Yiddish language, of eastern European orthodox Jews at prayer.
Such a gift at Easter is supposed to bring good fortune and Agnieszka will find plenty of buyers for her handiwork. In the old days, she tells me, children used to run up and touch Chassidic Jews on their way home from the Synagogue for luck. Now, I think to myself, the only growing Jewish community in all Poland is made of wood.
Agnieszka can be hardly more than thirty-five years old, born in the mid-1950s at the earliest. I ask her whether she had ever met an orthodox Jew, or even seen one in the flesh. How does she know what they look like? She replies as if it were a thoroughly stupid question: "It is our tradition, part of Polish culture for hundreds of years."
Autumn 2001. On the way to Kraków airport I look out of the taxi at the market square and catch sight of the statue of Poland's national poet Adam Mickiewicz standing high up on his plinth. Though ambivalent in his attitude towards the Yiddish-speaking residents of Poland, in his great epic Pan Tadeusz he gave a leading part to Jankiel, a Polish patriot and Jew. "To Israel, our elder brother," Mickiewicz once wrote, "honour, fraternity, and help in striving towards his eternal and temporal goal. Equal rights in all things!" How, I ask the taxi driver, do today's Poles cope with the total disappearance of the community that had such a formative influence on their history?
"You must understand," she explains, "that the old Poland is gone for ever. After 1945 we had to start from the beginning again. And then again when the Russians left. Today we Poles are a new people. Even our borders are quite different now. Of course we inherited some memories and some traditions from the past but we feel they do not really belong to us.
"In the distant future Polish people will recount to each other stories about the time, long, long ago, when Jews lived amongst us. But they will be like the folk-tales other nations tell their children about ogres, giants and fairies."
Spring 2002. Rakau near Minsk in Belarus. The village schoolteacher in a shapeless blue dress lifts the glass top of a display case, pulls out a battered register, blows off the dust and opens it onto the world of 1902. The pages are divided up, one line per name, with the year's marks for each subject in a separate column. Mindel and Slavik did well in arithmetic. Ester's grasp of geography needed improvement. Lyuba, Peschke and Vova received excellent marks for writing. Awrum, Moishe, Yasha and Zima came at the top of the class. Well over half have no figure recorded under the heading Religious Instruction. These are the Jewish children.
I don't need to ask what became of most of them. The schoolteacher had earlier taken me to see the well-intentioned and carefully maintained but indescribably hideous and garish blue-painted memorial erected on the spot where Rakau's synagogue was burned to the ground together with its congregation by Hitler's Sonderkommando. So I ask her when Jews first settled here, what brought them and how they lived.
She spreads her hands in genuinely apologetic ignorance. "I don't know. I am really sorry. But you see it is not our Belarusian history."
Then whose history is it, the Jews' thousand-year residence in eastern Europe? The survivors, having moved on and made their homes elsewhere, have mostly shown little interest in recalling the true details of what they take to be no more than a dreadful saga of endless persecution and oppression. Those joining another host society learn the story of their new home, be it France, the UK, Argentina, Australia or the USA. Meanwhile the orthodox pursue their own agenda, keeping in memory only rabbis and sages, those who contributed to the development of their particular religious beliefs. Sephardic Jews, originally from Spain but subsequently displaced to North Africa, Turkey, the Low Countries and seventeenth-century Britain, have their own separate past to look back on. Thus has the life of an entire people faded into a great forgetting. Four hundred years ago a Prague rabbi wrote "It is as if we were all born yesterday." Little has changed.
This essay is a writer's attempt to make sense of that loss of memory, to try and rescue that Yiddish past from its oblivion, to piece together some of the clues with which historians tease us, and to register how much of the Yiddish story we have forgotten.
We have forgotten how it was the Roman Empire which converted what had been a Middle Eastern and North African people into a European nation; how the division of that Empire separated its Jews into western and eastern parental bloodlines; how both sides were nurtured by the Romans' successor states until they mingled again centuries later in central Europe and fused, to give birth to the Yiddish-speaking people—or the Yiddish people, as I shall call them for short. The word Yiddish just means Jewish in the Yiddish tongue and, like English or French, refers equally to the language, the people who speak it, the culture it supports and the civilisation its speakers built.
We have forgotten that Yiddish-speaking Jews were no mere religious or linguistic minority but formed one of Europe's nations, ultimately more populous than many others—eventually to outnumber Bosnians, Croats, Danes, Estonians, Latvians, Slovaks, Slovenians and Swiss, not to mention the Irish, the Scots and the Welsh. What is more, their contribution to central and eastern Europe's economic, social and intellectual development was utterly disproportionate to their numbers. The Yiddish people must be counted among the founders founder-nations of Europe. (Please take note Ireland, Spain, Italy and Poland, who have pressed for "the Christian roots of the continent" to be proclaimed in the constitution of the European Union.)
We have forgotten that the Yiddish language and culture were born, raised and matured in the Slav lands of eastern Europe, in today's Belarus, Poland, Russia and the Ukraine, in originally Slav Austria, Bavaria, Saxony and Brandenburg, as well as in strongly Slavicised Lithuania, Romania and Hungary, from where generations of émigrés travelled west towards the end of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth to find freedom and improve their material lot.
We have forgotten that it was the association and confrontation with Catholic Slavdom that created the Yiddish way of life. Though in the century before the Holocaust a high proportion of the Yiddish folk inhabited Russian Orthodox countries too, there Yiddish ways were relatively late arrivals, projected into the Ukrainian and Russian domains by accidents of history. In their earlier, most formative years, the Yiddish people had grown up among Bavarians and Austrians, Bohemians and Moravians, Poles and Lithuanians, Catholic believers all.
Thus, though neither party may be willing to recognise it, the Yiddish world was a product not just of Jewish but also of Catholic Slav culture; in that sense it was the creation of both Jews and Catholic Slavs together. The inspiration was Jewish; the environment of its growth was Catholic Slav. And just as a rose blooms by reason of its own inherited internal spark of generative fire, but the gardener who tends the bush and nurtures the blossoms has every right to take pride in his or her accomplishment, so Catholic Slavs should justly feel part-ownership, part-responsibility and pride for the achievements of the Yiddish world.
Some hopes! For that would mean confronting the terrible and bitter truth that as the Yiddish-speakers were forced at bayonet-point into cattle-trucks on their way to Hitler's extermination camps, those who stood by in silence or even cheered were attending the mass-murder of their own close kin.
Walking through Kraków's spacious market square, past the imposing fourteenth century bulk of St Mary's Church, past the tiny but exquisite Romanesque Church of St Wojciech, past the great Gothic tower left standing when the original Town Hall was replaced by the stunning Renaissance Cloth Hall, looking as pretty and pleased with itself as a multicoloured and multi-layered Italian iced pastry, one sees bright new municipal signposts pointing "to the Jewish town". By that phrase the people of Kraków, or the city authorities on their behalf, have recognised in the nearby neighbourhood of Kazimierz more than a town where Jews lived.
Roman Vishniac, a photographer of genius, took upon himself in the late 1930s the perilous and desperate task of recording the outward look of Yiddish life in eastern Europe on the very eve of its final destruction. In Kazimierz one can still pause under the very street sign on the corner of Ulica Izaaka, Isaac street, that he captured in a shot from 1938. In front of his camera a snowstorm is raging. A woman in a long skirt, multicoloured shawl and head-scarf, and, behind her, an old greybeard in a squashed hat, hurry by, their heads bowed against the weather. Or one can stand in the middle of Ulica Szeroka, Broad Street, on the exact spot where, also in 1938, the great photographer forever froze the image of three jolly Chassidim conversing animatedly in their long coats, black boots and the kind of wide fur hat called a shtreimel—traditionally made up of seven sable tails—on their way to, or from, the synagogue or house of study.
In spite of the Nazi occupation with its anti-Jewish psychopathy and of the Soviet yoke which immediately followed, with its anti-religious political repression, the streets and buildings of Kazimierz are still almost exactly as Vishniac photographed them. Even the many synagogues, after years of desecration, desertion and decay, still stand.
Yet try as hard as one might to invest the bricks and mortar with emotional and spiritual significance, without the Jews inhabiting the houses and walking the streets, one gets no sense of the Yiddish world that had once flourished fruitfully in this environment. Without the rabbis and Talmud students emerging from their religious seminaries, the peddlers and street-porters on their way to the market place, the stallholders and shopkeepers touting for customers, the rich fur-clad merchants and their shuffling clerks in wire-rimmed spectacles, without the Chassidim, orthodox Jewish pietists, in their traditional costume and the Cheder, Hebrew school, pupils in their ragged shorts and torn school caps, without Mrs Kalitzky stepping out from her doorstep in high-heeled ankle-boots to show off to her neighbours the new fox-fur wrap her jeweller husband has bought her, or Josel and Mendel, the pair of bearded old scholars in shiny black caftans and fur hats, old enough to know better, who are blocking the walkway as they angrily and obsessively dispute some fine point of Jewish religious law, without all these the city suburb of Kazimierz has lost the magic it once possessed.
But even stripped of its former inhabitants, the district is a reminder that the vanished Yiddish-speaking people of eastern Europe created more than a Jewish-Polish or Jewish-Lithuanian sub-culture. Kazimierz wasn't just a town inhabited by Jews—it was truly a Jewish town, part of the Yiddish Civilisation.
By definition the civilisation that Yiddish-speaking Jews created in eastern Europe formed no part of Christendom. Theirs was a life set apart from the Catholicism that surrounded it, with its own language, its own styles of poetry and prose, its own everyday and ritual costumes, its distinctive decorative motifs, its particular flavour of the Jewish faith, its specific value systems and family traditions, its characteristic social layering. Its artefacts are legion: printed books, Hebrew Bible scrolls, religious requisites, housewares and tablewares, synagogues and cemeteries. Its political organisation was unique: a central legislative council appointed by self-governing communities with the duty to register births, marriages and deaths, levy taxation, the power to commend and shame, to arrest and punish, maintaining close relations with, but quite separate from, the state authorities.
The place where it grew up was the territory of the Western Slavs, the eastern part of which later became the Russian Empire's Pale of Settlement, the area in which Jews were permitted to reside after the eighteenth century partition and disappearance of Poland and the incorporation of its Jewish populated areas into the empires of secular Prussia, Catholic Austria and Holy Russia. This was the religious no-man's-land between Roman west and Orthodox east, sweeping in a wide curve from Riga on the Baltic in the north, to Odessa on the Black Sea in the south. Its time was, roughly, from the eleventh century to the middle of the nineteenth, when the last vestiges of its autonomy were abolished—though the dispossessed remnant survived for almost another century, until the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact delivered one half of Poland's Jews into the arms of Hitler's mass-murderers and the other to the hardly less psychopathic if more incompetent depravity of Joseph Stalin's commissars.
The Yiddish Civilisation has vanished from its own homeland, its true reality near to forgotten. But it left an indelible mark, and not only on eastern Europe. For towards its end, mass emigration to the USA at the close of the nineteenth century and the opening of the twentieth carried many of its beliefs, values and traditions to the other side of the Atlantic, where they served among the contributors, through film, music, literature and the arts, not to speak of commerce and enterprise, to what we think of as the American way of life—and therefore, in this era of globalisation, to the way of the entire world.