Polish-Jewish relations in North America 9781874774969, 9781874774976

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Note on Place Names (page xvii)
Note on Transliteration (page xviii)
PART I: POLISH-JEWISH RELATIONS IN NORTH AMERICA
Introduction (MIECZYSŁAW B. BISKUPSKI AND ANTONY POLONSKY, page 3)
'We're all from Poland': Christians and Jews in Polish Immigrant Fiction (KAREN MAJEWSKI, page 55)
Polish-Jewish Relations in America, 1880-1940: Old Elements, New Configurations (EWA MORAWSKA, page 71)
Poles and Jews in America and the Polish Question, 1914-1918 (MIECZYSŁAW B. BISKUPSKI, page 87)
The American Federation of Polish Jews in Polish-Jewish Relations, 1924-1939 (ANDRZEJ KAPISZEWSKI, page 97)
Conflict between Poles and Jews in Chicago, 1900-1930 (JOHN RADZILOWSKI, page 117)
American Polonia and Polish Jewry in the United States, 1940-1941 (DAVID ENGEL, page 135)
The Evacuation of Jewish Polish Citizens from Portugal to Jamaica, 1941-1943 (TOMASZ POTWOROWSKI, page 155)
Coverage of the Holocaust in Winnipeg's Jewish and Polish Press, 1939-1945 (DANIEL STONE, page 183)
The Necessity of 'Bieganski': A Shamed and Horrified World Seeks a Scapegoat (DANUSHA V. GOSKA, page 205)
Constructing Collective Memory: The Re-envisioning of Eastern Europe as Seen Through American Jewish Textbooks (JONATHAN KRASNER, page 229)
The National Polish American-Jewish Council: A Short History (STANISLAUS A. BLEJWAS, page 257)
Why America Has Not Seemed Like the Diaspora (STEPHEN J. WHITFIELD, page 287)
From Auschwitz to Jerusalem: Re-enacting Jewish History on the March of the Living (RONA SHERAMY, page 307)
Contentious History: A Survey on Perceptions of Polish-Jewish Relations during the Holocaust (ROBERT CHERRY, page 327)
A Question of Identity: Polish Jewish Composers in California (MAJA TROCHIMCZYK, page 345)
Three American Jewish Writers Imagine Eastern Europe (ANNA P. RONELL, page 373)
The Jedwabne Debate in America (ANTONY POLONSKY, page 393)
The Holocaust: A Continuing Challenge for Polish-Jewish Relations (JOHN T. PAWLIKOWSKI, page 415)
PART II: NEW VIEWS
'In the Land of their Enemies'? The Duality of Jewish Life in Eighteenth-Century Poland (ADAM TELLER, page 431)
The Controversy over Mickiewicz's Jewish Origins (LAURA QUERCIOLI MINCER, page 447)
The Double Voice in Polish Jewish Women's Autobiographies of the 1930s (TOBY W. CLYMAN, page 459)
The Polish Plan for a Jewish Settlement in Madagascar, 1936-1939 (CARLA TONINI, page 467)
A Historian in Ideological Fetters (JERZY TOMASZEWSKI, page 479)
Polish-Jewish Relations in Vilna and the Region of Western Vilna under Soviet Occupation, 1939-1941 (MAREK WIERZBICKI, page 487)
Jewish-Polish Relations and the Lithuanian Authorities in Vilna, 1939-1940 (SARUNA LIEKIS, page 521)
The Report of the Instytut Pamięci Narodowej on the Massacres in North-Eastern Poland in Summer 1941 (GUNNAR S. PAULSSON, page 537)
The Black Book of Lithuanian Jewry (DAVID PATTERSON, page 543)
An Attempt to Recover its Voice: The Towarzystwo Społeczno-Kulturalne Żydów w Polsce, the Jewish Community, and the Polish State, 1956-1960 (ALINA CAŁA, page 557)
Polish Jewish Identity and the 1968 Events in Henryk Grynberg's Memorbuch (KAREN AUERBACH, page 569)
The Antyk Bookshop: Three Expert Opinions Submitted to the Early 2003 Court Case (JERZY TOMASZEWSKI, page 583)
New Edition of the Memoirs of a Jewish Policeman: The True Testimony of Perechodnik, reprinted from Rzeczpospolita, 11 December 2004 (ANDRZEJ KACZYŃSKI, page 599)
PART III: EXCHANGE
Reply to the Review by Andrzej Trzciński and Marcin Wodziński, 'Some Remarks on Leszek Hońdo's Study of the Old Jewish Cemetery in Kraków (LESEK HOŃDO, page 607)
Explanation (ANDRZEJ TRZCIŃSKI AND MARCIN WODZIŃSKI, page 613)
OBITUARY
Jacek Kuroń: 'The last romantic politician committed to the struggle for the rights of minorities', 1934-2004 (authorname, page 621)
Notes on the Contributors (page 629)
Glossary (page 635)
Index (page 639)

Citation preview

THE INSTITUTE FOR POLISH-JEWISH STUDIES The Institute for Polish—Jewish Studies in Oxford and its sister organization, the American Association for Polish—Jewish Studies, which publish Poli, are learned societies that were established in 1984, following the First International Conference on Polish—Jewish Studies, held in Oxford. The Institute is an associate institute of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and

Jewish Studies, and the American Association is linked with the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University.

Both the Institute and the American Association aim to promote understanding of the Polish Jewish past. They have no building or library of their own and no paid staff; they achieve their aims by encouraging scholarly research and facilitating its publication, and by creating forums for people with a scholarly interest in Polish Jewish topics, both past and present.

To this end the Institute and the American Association help organize lectures and interna-

tional conferences. Venues for these activities have included Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the Institute for the Study of Human Sciences in Vienna, King’s College in London, the Jagiellonian University in

Krakow, the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, the University of Lodz, University College London, and the Polish Cultural Centre and the Polish embassy in London. They have encouraged academic exchanges between Israel, Poland, the United States, and western Europe. In particular they seek to help train a new generation of scholars, in Poland and elsewhere, to study the culture and history of the Jews in Poland. Each year since 1987 the Institute has published a volume of scholarly papers in the series Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry under the general editorship of Professor Antony Polonsky of Brandeis University. Since 1994 the series has been published on its behalf by the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, and since 1998 the publication has been linked with the

American Association as well. In March 2000 the entire series was honoured with a National Jewish Book Award from the Jewish Book Council in the United States, and, in March 2006, volume 17 was runner-up in the East European section of these awards. More

than twenty other works on Polish Jewish topics have also been published with the Institute’s assistance.

For further information on the Institute for Polish—Jewish Studies or the American Association for Polish—Jewish Studies, contact .

THE LITTMAN LIBRARY OF JEWISH CIVILIZATION MANAGING EDITOR Conme Webber

Dedicated to the memory of

Louis THOMAS SIDNEY LITTMAN who founded the Littman Library for the love of God and as an act of charity in memory of his father JOSEPH AARON LITTMAN 712 DDT NAD

‘Get wisdom, get understanding: Forsake her not and she shall preserve thee’

| PROV. 4: 5

The Litiman Library of Fewish Civilization ts a registered UK charity Registered charity no. 1000784.

STUDIES IN POLISH JEWRY

VOLUME NINETEEN

Polish—fewish Relations in North America Edited by

MIECZYSLAW B.BISKUPSKI and

ANTONY POLONSKY

Published for

The Institute for Polish—Jewish Studies and The American Association for Polish—Jewish Studies

| Oxford : Portland, Oregon

| The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization 2007

The Littman Library of Fewish Civilization Chief Executive Officer: Ludo Craddock PO Box 645, Oxford 0x2 oUJ, UK

Published in the United States and Canada by The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization c/o ISBS, 920 NE 58th Avenue, Suite 300 Portland, Oregon 97213-3786 © Institute for Polish—Jewish Studtes 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by

any means, without the prior permission in writing of | The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. The paperback edition of this book 1s sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it 1s published and without a similar condition including this condition being tmposed on the subsequent purchaser

A catalogue record for this book 1s avatlable from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data applied for

ISSN 0268 1056 | ISBN 1-874774-96—X ISBN 975—1-874774-96-9

ISBN 1-874774-97-8 (pbk) ISBN 975-1-874774-97-6 (pbk) Publishing co-ordinator: Janet Moth Production: Ffohn Saunders Copy-editing: Laurien Berkeley Proof-reading: Margot Levy, Sarah Swartz, Phyllis Albert Mitzman Index: Bonnie Blackburn Design: Pete Russell, Faringdon, Oxon. Typeset by Hope Services (Abingdon) Ltd Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Lid., Kings Lynn. www. biddles.co.uk

Articles appearing in this publication are abstracted and indexed in

Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life .

Dedicated to the memory of our dear friend and colleague

STAN BLEJWAS who, but for his untimely death, would have been one of tts editors

This volume benefited from grants from

ROBERT AND ROCHELLE CHERRY THE LUCIUS N. LITTAUER FOUNDATION

THE TAUBE FOUNDATION FOR JEWISH LIFE & CULTURE

Editors and Advisers EDITORS Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, Lublin Israel Bartal, Jerusalem Antony Polonsky (Chair), Waltham, Mass. Michael Steinlauf, Philadelphia Jerzy Tomaszewski, Warsaw

REVIEW EDITORS ChaeRan Freeze, Waltham, Mass. Joshua Zimmerman, New York

EDITORIAL BOARD

Chimen Abramsky, London Jehuda Reinharz, Waltham, Mass.

David Assaf, Tel Aviv Moshe Rosman, Tel Aviv

Wladyslaw T. Bartoszewski, Warsaw Szymon Rudnicki, Warsaw

David Engel, New York Henryk Samsonowicz, Warsaw David Fishman, New York Robert Shapiro, New York

Jacob Goldberg, Jerusalem Adam Teller, Haifa Yisrael Gutman, Jerusalem Daniel Tollet, Paris

Jerzy Ktoczowski, Lublin Piotr S. Wandycz, New Haven, Conn.

Ezra Mendelsohn, Jerusalem Jonathan Webber, Oxford Joanna Michlic, Stockton, New Jersey Steven Zipperstein, Stanford, Calif. Elchanan Reiner, Jel Aviv ADVISORY BOARD

Wladystaw Bartoszewski, Warsaw Hillel Levine, Boston Jan Blofiski, Krakow Lucjan Lewitter, Cambridge, Mass. Abraham Brumberg, Washington Stanistaw Litak, Lublin Andrzej Chojnowski, Warsaw Heinz-Dietrich Lowe, Heidelberg Tadeusz Chrzanowski, Krakow Emanuel Meltzer, Tel Aviv

, Andrzej Ciechanowiecki, London Shlomo Netzer, Tel Aviv

Norman Davies, London Zbigniew Petczynski, Oxford

Victor Erlich, New Haven, Conn. Szymon Rudnicki, Warsaw Frank Golczewski, Hamburg Alexander Schenker, New Haven, Conn.

Olga Goldberg, Jerusalem David Sorkin, Madison, Wis. Feliks Gross, New York Edward Stankiewicz, New Haven, Conn.

Czestaw Hernas, Wroclaw Norman Stone, Ankara Maurycy Horn, Warsaw Shmuel Werses, ferusalem Jerzy Jedlicki, Warsaw Jacek WoZniakowski, Lublin Andrzej Kaminski, London Piotr Wrobel, Toronto

POLIN Studies in Polish fewry VOLUME 1 Poles and Fews: Renewing the Dialogue (1986) VOLUME 2. Jews and the Emerging Polish State (1987) VOLUME 3. The Jews of Warsaw (1988) VOLUME 4 Poles and fews: Perceptions and Misperceptions (1989)

VOLUME 5 New Research, New Views (1990) , VOLUME 6 Jews in LodZ, 1820-1939 (1991) VOLUME 7 Jewish Life in Nazi-Occupied Warsaw (1992) From Shtetl to Socialism (1993): selected articles from volumes 1-7 VOLUME 8 _ Jews in Independent Poland, 1915-1939 (1994) VOLUME g_ Jews, Poles, Socialists: The Failure of an Ideal (1996)

VOLUME 10 Jews in Early Modern Poland (1997) VOLUME I1_ Aspects and Experiences of Religion (1998)

VOLUME 12 Galicia: Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians, 1772-1918 (1999) Index to Volumes 1-12 (2000)

VOLUME 13. The Holocaust and its Aftermath (2000) VOLUME 14 Jews in the Polish Borderlands (2001) VOLUME 15 Jemish Religious Life, 1500-1900 (2002) VOLUME 16 Jewish Popular Culture and its Afterlife (2003)

VOLUME 17. The Shtetl: Myth and Reality (2004) VOLUME 18 Jemish Women in Eastern Europe (2005) VOLUME 19 _ Polish—fewish Relations in North America (2006)

VOLUME 20 Making Holocaust Memory (2007)

BLANK PAGE

Preface THIS volume of Poli is centred around a core of articles devoted to Polish— Jewish relations in North America. This is an important and neglected topic and — we believe that ours is the first comprehensive account of the problems it raises. Almost all the articles deal with the United States. We regret that there is only one on Canada, where conditions have been very different (and not always better) than in the United States, and hope to return to the topic in future issues. As in previous volumes of Polin, in Part II, New Views, substantial space 1s

also given to new research into a variety of topics in Polish Jewish studies. These include an analysis by Adam Teller of the duality of Jewish life in eighteenth-century Poland—Lithuania and an investigation by Laura Quercioli Mincer into the controversy over Mickiewicz’s Jewish origins. ‘Toby Clyman describes the specific features of Polish Jewish women’s autobiographies from the

1930s, while Carla Tonini examines the Polish plan for a Jewish settlement in Madagascar between 1936 and 1939. Jerzy Tomaszewski gives a critical account of

the work of the historian Jan Marek Chodakiewicz and we have translated into English his three expert opinions on antisemitic books being sold by the Antyk Bookshop in the crypt of All Saints’ church, Warsaw. Two views on Polish—Jewish relations in Soviet-occupied Vilna are provided by Marek Wierzbicki and Sarunas

Liekis, while Gunnar Paulsson reviews the report of the Instytut Pami¢ci Narodowej on the massacres in north-eastern Poland in summer 1941. David Patterson describes the new edition of The Black Book of Lithuanian Jewry, Alina Cata examines the activities of the Towarzystwo Spoteczno-Kulturalne Zyd6w w Polsce (Social-Cultural Association of Jews in Poland) between 1956 and 1960, and Karen Auerbach analyses problems of identity in Henryk Grynberg’s recently published Memorbuch. As we explained in the last issue, reviews and review essays are now posted on our website, which enables them to be published much more quickly. We have also

posted other materials on this website, which can be found at . Polin is sponsored by the Institute of Polish—Jewish Studies, which is an associ-

ated institute of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, and by the American Association for Polish—Jewish Studies, which is linked with the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, Brandeis University. As with earlier issues, this volume could not have appeared without the untiring assistance of many individuals. In particular, we should like to express our gratitude to Dr Jonathan Webber, Treasurer of the Institute for Polish—Jewish Studies, to Professor Jehuda Reinharz, President of Brandeis University, and to Mrs Irene

x Preface |

Pipes, President of the American Association for Polish—Jewish Studies. These three institutions all made substantial contributions to the cost of producing the volume. ‘The volume also benefited from grants from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation. As was the case with earlier volumes, this one could not have been published without the constant assistance and supervision of Connie Webber, managing editor of the Littman Library;

I should also like to mention Janet Moth, publishing co-ordinator; Laurien Berkeley and Sarah Swartz, who copy-edited the manuscript; Lindsey TaylorGuthartz, who assisted with the technicalities of editing Hebrew; and George Tulloch, who assisted with Slavonic languages and place names. Plans for future volumes of Poli are well advanced. Volume 20 will be devoted to recording and memorializing the Holocaust, volume 21 to the crisis of 1968 in Poland, and volume 22 to Jews in pre-modern Poland—Lithuania. Further volumes are planned on the history of the Jews in Krakow, on Jewish—Ukrainian relations, and on Jewish elites in the lands of the former Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth. We should welcome articles for these issues, as well as for our section New Views. We should also welcome any suggestions or criticisms. In particular, we should be very grateful for assistance in extending the geographical range of our journal to Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania, both in the period in which these countries were part of the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth and subsequently. We note with sadness the death of Lionel Kochan, a fine scholar who was always

, of great assistance to this yearbook; of David Patterson, for many years president of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and one of the organizers of the seminal conference on Polish—Jewish history which took place in Oxford in

1984; and of Jozef Gierowski, Professor of History, former Rector of the Jagiellonian University, founder of the Interdisciplinary Centre for the Study of

the History and Culture of the Jews at that university, and a member of the editorial board of Polin.

POLIN Sere lesan

OVO) TAO ErO vr Oey O)

We did not know, but our fathers told us how the exiles of Israel came to the land of Polin (Poland).

When Israel saw how its sufferings were constantly renewed, oppressions increased, persecutions multiplied, and how the evil authorities piled decree on

decree and followed expulsion with expulsion, so that there was no way to escape the enemies of Israel, they went out on the road and sought an answer from the paths of the wide world: which is the correct road to traverse to find rest for the soul? Then a piece of paper fell from heaven, and on it the words: Go to Polantya (Poland).

So they came to the land of Polin and they gave a mountain of gold to the king, and he received them with great honour. And God had mercy on them, so that they found favour from the king and the nobles. And the king gave them permission to reside in all the lands of his kingdom, to trade over its length and breadth, and to serve God according to the precepts of their religion. And the king protected them against every foe and enemy. And Israel lived in Polin in tranquillity for a long time. They devoted themselves to trade and handicrafts. And God sent a blessing on them so that they were blessed in the land, and their name was exalted among the peoples. And

they traded with the surrounding countries and they also struck coins with inscriptions in the holy language and the language of the country. These are the coins which have on them a lion rampant towards the right. And on the coins

are the words ‘Mieszko, King of Poland’ or ‘Mieszko, Krol of Poland’. The Poles call their king ‘Krol’. And those who seek for names say: “This is why it is called Polin. For thus spoke Israel when they came to the land, “Here rest for the night [Po /in].” And

this means that we shall rest here until we are all gathered into the Land of Israel.’

Since this 1s the tradition, we accept it as such. S. Y. AGNON, 1916

BLANK PAGE

Contents Note on Place Names XVII

Note on Transliteration XVIIl PART I

Introduction 3 POLISH-JEWISH RELATIONS IN NORTH AMERICA

Fiction 55

MIECZYSLAW B. BISKUPSKI AND ANTONY POLONSKY

‘We’re all from Poland’: Christians and Jews in Polish Immigrant KAREN MAJEWSKI

Configurations 71

Polish-Jewish Relations in America, 1880—1940: Old Elements, New EWA MORAWSKA

Poles and Jews in America and the Polish Question, 1914-1918 87 MIECZYSLAW B. BISKUPSKI

1924—1939 97

The American Federation of Polish Jews in Polish—Jewish Relations, ANDRZEJ KAPISZEWSKI

Conflict between Poles and Jews in Chicago, 1900-1930 117 JOHN RADZILOWSKI

American Polonia and Polish Jewry in the United States, 1940-1941 135 DAVID ENGEL

1941-1943 155 1939-1945 183 Scapegoat 205

The Evacuation of Jewish Polish Citizens from Portugal to Jamaica, TOMASZ POTWOROWSKI

Coverage of the Holocaust in Winnipeg’s Jewish and Polish Press, DANIEL STONE

The Necessity of ‘Bieganski’: A Shamed and Horrified World Seeks a DANUSHA V. GOSKA

xiv Contents Constructing Collectrve Memory: The Re-envisioning of

Eastern Europe as Seen Through American Jewish Textbooks 229 JONATHAN KRASNER

A Short History 257

The National Polish American—Jewish American Council: STANISLAUS A. BLEJWAS

Why America Has Not Seemed Like the Diaspora 287 STEPHEN J. WHITFIELD

March of the Living 307 during the Holocaust 327

From Auschwitz to Jerusalem: Re-enacting Jewish History on the RONA SHERAMY

Contentious History: A Survey on Perceptions of Polish—Jewish Relations ROBERT CHERRY

A Question of Identity: Polish Jewish Composers in California 345 MAJA TROCHIMCZYK

Three American Jewish Writers Imagine Eastern Europe 373 ANNA P, RONELL

The Jedwabne Debate in America 393 ANTONY POLONSKY _ The Holocaust: A Continuing Challenge for Polish—Jewish Relations AI5 JOHN T. PAWLIKOWSKI

PART II

NEW VIEWS ‘In the Land of their Enemies’? The Duality of Jewish Life in

Eighteenth-Century Poland 431

ADAM TELLER

The Controversy over Mickiewicz’s Jewish Origins 447

the 1930s 459

LAURA QUERCIOLI MINCER

The Double Voice in Polish Jewish Women’s Autobiographies of TOBY W. CLYMAN

The Polish Plan for a Jewish Settlement in Madagascar, 1936—1939 467 CARLA TONINI

Contents XV

A Historian in Ideological Fetters 479 JERZY TOMASZEWSKI

Polish—Jewish Relations in Vilna and the Region of Western Vilna under

Soviet Occupation, 1939-1941 487 MAREK WIERZBICKI

1939-1940 521

Jewish—Polish Relations and the Lithuanian Authorities in Vilna, SARUNAS LIEKIS

The Report of the Instytut Pamieci Narodowej on the Massacres in

North-Eastern Poland in Summer 1941 537 GUNNAR S. PAULSSON

The Black Book of Lithuanian Jewry 543 DAVID PATTERSON

An Attempt to Recover its Voice: ‘The ‘Towarzystwo SpotecznoKulturalne Zydow w Polsce, the Jewish Community, and the

Polish State, 1956-1960 557 ALINA CALA

Memorbuch 569

Polish Jewish Identity and the 1968 Events in Henryk Grynberg’s KAREN AUERBACH

Early 2003 Court Case 583

The Antyk Bookshop: Three Expert Opinions Submitted to the JERZY TOMASZEWSKI

New Edition of the Memoirs of a Jewish Policeman: The True Testimony of Perechodnik, reprinted from

Rzeczpospolita, 11 December 2004 599

ANDRZEJ KACZYNSKI

PART ITI

EXCHANGE Reply to the Review by Andrzej Trzcinski and Marcin Wodzinski, ‘Some Remarks on Leszek Hofido’s Study of the Old Jewish

Cemetery in Krakow’ 607

Explanation 613 LESZEK HONDO

ANDRZEJ TRZCINSKI AND MARCIN WODZINSKI

Xvi Contents OBITUARY Jacek Kuron: ‘The last romantic politician committed to the

struggle for the rights of minorities’, 1934-2004 621

Glossary 635 Index 639

Notes on the Contributors 629

Note on Place Names POLITICAL connotations accrue to words, names, and spellings with an alacrity unfortunate for those who would like to maintain neutrality. It seems reasonable to honour the choices of a population on the name of its city or town, but what is one to do when the people have no consensus on their name, or when the town changes its name, and the name its spelling, again and again over time? The politician may always opt for the latest version,

but the hapless historian must reckon with them all. This note, then, will be our brief reckoning. There is no problem with places that have accepted English names, such as Warsaw. But every other place name in east-central Europe raises serious problems. A good example is Wilno, Vilna, Vilnius. There are clear objections to all of these. Until 1944 the majority of the population was Polish. The city is today in Lithuania. ‘Vilna’, though raising the fewest problems, is an artificial construct. In this volume we have adopted the following guidelines, although we are aware that they are not wholly consistent.

1. Towns that have a form which 1s acceptable in English will be given in that form. Some examples are Warsaw, Kiev, Moscow, St Petersburg, Munich.

2. Towns that until 1939 were clearly part of a particular state and shared the majority nationality of that state will be given in a form which reflects that situation. Some examples are Breslau, Danzig, Rzeszow, Przemysl. In Polish, Krakow has always been spelled as such. In English it has more often appeared as Cracow, but the current trend of English follows the local language as much as possible. In keeping with this trend to local determination, then, we shall maintain the Polish spelling.

3. Towns that are in mixed areas should take the form in which they are known today and which reflects their present situation. Examples are Poznan, Torun, Kaunas, Lviv. This applies also to bibliographical references. We have made one major exception to this rule, using the common English form for Vilna until its first incorporation into Lithuania in October 1939 and using Vilnius thereafter. Galicia’s most diversely named city, and one of its most important, boasts four variants: the Polish Lwow, the German Lemberg, the Russian Lvov, and the Ukrainian Lviv. As this city currently lives under Ukrainian rule, and most of its current residents speak Ukrainian, we shall follow the Ukrainian spelling.

4. Some place names have different forms in Yiddish. Occasionally the subject matter dictates that the Yiddish place name should be the prime form, in which case the corresponding Polish (Ukrainian, Belarusian, Lithuanian) name is given in parentheses at first mention.

Note on Transhteration HEBREW An attempt has been made to achieve consistency in the transliteration of Hebrew words. The following are the key distinguishing features of the system that has been adopted: 1. No distinction is made between the a/eph and ayin; both are represented by an apostrophe, and only when they appear in an intervocalic position. 2. Veit is written v; het is written h; yod is written y when it functions as a consonant and 1 when it occurs as a vowel; khafis written kh; tsadi is written ts; kof is written k. 3. The dagesh hazak, represented in some transliteration systems by doubling the letter, is not represented, except in words that have more or less acquired normative English spellings that include doublings, such as Hallel, kabbalah, Kaddish, rabbi, Sukkot, and Yom Kippur.

4. The sheva na is represented by an e. 5. Hebrew prefixes, prepositions, and conjunctions are not followed by hyphen when they are transliterated; thus betoledot ha’am hayehudu.

6. Capital letters are not used in the transliteration of Hebrew except for the first word in the titles of books and the names of people, places, institutions, and generally as in the conventions of the English language.

7. The names of individuals are transliterated following the above rules unless the individual concerned followed a different usage.

YIDDISH Transliteration follows the YIVO system except for the names of people, where the spellings they themselves used have been retained.

RUSSIAN AND UKRANIAN The system used is that of British Standard 2979:1958, without diacritics. Except in bibliographical and other strictly rendered matter, soft and hard signs are omitted and word-final -H, -HU, -bIU, -1 in names are simplified to -y.

PART I

Polish—Jewish Relations

in North America

BLANK PAGE

Introduction MIECZYSLAW B. BISKUPSKI and

ANTONY POLONSKY

Rebekah answered: ‘Isn’t it the country of my ancestors as well? We’re all from

Poland!’ Przygody polskiego detektywa, 1928-9 ALTHOUGH they came from the same geographical area in Europe, the paths of Poles and Jews very quickly diverged in the New World. The initial encounter

between these two groups in the United States, which took place in the years between 1830 and 1880, was marked by considerable mutual sympathy and understanding. ‘Che Poles who went to America were for the most part fugitives from the

unsuccessful national insurrections of 1830-1, 1846-8, and 1863-4, although there were also about a thousand peasant settlers from Upper Silesia who established themselves in southern Texas in the mid-1850s and a much smaller number in the Midwest. The first group of political émigrés, which included at least two Jews, was a group of 235 exiles transported to New York in 1834 on two Austrian warships. They were subsequently joined by another 300 to 500 émigrés after the revolutionary crisis of 1846-8 and a somewhat larger number after 1864. Most of

them settled in New York and other cities, including Albany, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Boston, and San Francisco. The federal census, which probably underestimated their number, reported in 1860 that there were 7,298 Poles in the United States, though more recent calculations increase that number to perhaps 30,000. The political €migrés were mostly drawn from the radical wing of the Polish national movement, which favoured the granting of equal rights to the Jews and their transformation into ‘Poles of the Mosaic faith’. They sought to establish contact with other emigrés who shared their democratic aspirations, actively seeking We are greatly indebted to Jonathan Sarna and Adam Mendelsohn of Brandeis University and Jadwiga Biskupska of Yale University for their assistance in preparing this introduction.

* The lower number is cited in M. Haiman, Polish Past in America, 1608-1865 (Chicago, 1939), 155-8. For later calculations, see J. Radzilowski, The Eagle and the Cross: A History of the Polish Roman Catholic Union of America (New York, 2003), 14.

4 Introduction the support of Italian, Irish, and German sympathizers, as well as Jews of Polish origin.” Shortly after their arrival the first group of emigrés created a ‘national representation’, which continued its activities until 1840. It was succeeded by the Towarzystwo Polakow w Ameryce (Society of Poles in America), which resolved that ‘every émigré Pole regardless of position and faith’ had the right to become a member of the society. This body remained active until 1848, when one of its most dynamic leaders, Henryk Kalussowski, returned to Europe to participate in the revolutionary upheavals there.

In the aftermath of that revolution a new organization originally called Stowarzyszenie Polskich Wygnaticow w Ameryce (Association of Polish Exiles in America) and soon renamed Towarzystwo Demokratyczne Wygnancow Polskich w

Ameryce (Democratic Society of Polish Exiles in America) was established in January 1853. In its constitution it asserted that ‘every Pole, as long as he has the right to the name of an honest person and sincerely professes democratic principles, may become a member of our Society’. Hoping to recruit Jewish members, ‘Citizen’ Skawinski proposed in April 1854 that ‘the Society when calling for a

general meeting should also make mention of the Israelites from the Polish provinces of whom a sizeable number is to be found’. This proposal was rejected in favour of a ‘clear expression’ that ‘everyone who was born on Polish soil regardless of his religious or political faith is to be invited’. As Abraham Duker has shown, a number of Jews did respond to this appeal. Similarly, during the 1863 uprising a

Centralny Komitet Polski (Central Polish Committee) was established in New York—a solidarity organization which included two Jews among its original thirteen founding members and which actively sought the support of “Poles of the Mosaic persuasion’.? There were scattered Polish names in the westward movement and the Texas war of independence from Mexico. A handful of Poles played noteworthy roles in the American Civil War—Whlodzimierz Krzyzanowski and Jozef Karge were both

senior officers for the Union, and Walerian Sutakowski was a key engineering officer for the Confederacy—but they were not connected with any large or organized Polish community in America.* The most celebrated was undoubtedly Adam

Gurowski (1805-66), a tempestuous radical from Kalisz who became a noted abolitionist writing for the New York Tribune before serving as an adviser to Secretary of State William Seward. His criticism of the Lincoln administration for insufficient vigour in prosecuting the war against the Confederacy and his fervent championship of black rights made him a hero of the Radical Republicans but led 2 See J. Pula, Polish Americans: An Ethnic Community (New York, 1995), 4-8; A. Duker, ‘Polish Political Emigrés in the United States and the Jews, 1833-1865”, Publications of the American Jewish Historical Soctety, 39/2 (1949), 143-67; J. Lerski, ‘Jewish—Polish Amity in Lincoln’s America’, Polish

Review, 18 (1973), 41-4. 3 Duker, ‘Polish Political Emigrés in the United States’, 155. 4 Walerian Sulakowski was a Confederate States of America colonel and chief engineer of the Department of the Trans-Mississippi; the others are well known.

Introduction 5 to his political marginalization. These were noteworthy though isolated individuals and ephemeral episodes. Hence even to speak of ‘Polonia’ before 1870 1s probably misleading.° The situation of the Jews in the new United States was very different. The first three-quarters of the nineteenth century saw a huge increase in their number. At

the time of the revolution there were between 1,000 and 2,000 Jews in North America. By 1820 this figure had grown to 3,000 and by 1840 to 15,000. It then increased tenfold, so that in 1860, on the eve of the civil war, the Jewish population

had reached 150,000, five times the number of Poles at the very least. The first ‘official’ census of the community, held in 1877, gave a figure of about 250,000.° The immigrants came from a large number of different countries, including the United Kingdom, France (primarily Alsace, the source of a number of southern Jewish communities), the Netherlands, the German confederation, the Polish lands, the Habsburg empire (primarily Hungary and the Czech lands), the West Indies, and Morocco. Contrary to the belief that this was predominantly an immigration of mobile young men, recent research has shown that nearly 30 per cent of the immigrants were accompanied by their wives and children.’ The great majority came from Bavaria, the Rhineland, and Prussian Poland. In

addition, a significant proportion of those who emigrated from the United Kingdom had first moved there from these regions. Smaller numbers went from the areas further east. According to Salo Baron, between 1821 and 1870 over 7,000 Jews emigrated from the Kingdom of Poland, Galicia, and the Pale of Settlement® and another 15,000 to 20,000 left in the 1870s. The majority seem to have come

from the province of Suwalki, in the Kingdom of Poland, and the adjacent Lithuanian areas, which were affected by severe famine in the 1860s and 1870s. The total number of immigrants from the former Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth at this time was probably about 70,000. This meant that Jews from Poland outnumbered Germans in many places during the ‘German’ period of American Jewish history, although German Jewish cultural models tended to be dominant, as was the case, for instance, in Boston.!° Many of these Jews retained some sense of allegiance to their former homeland. Prussian Poland, as is well known, was the one area in the Polish lands where the

attempt to transform the Jews from a religious and cultural community into > See the useful historiographical essay by J. S. Pula, ‘Review of Research on Polish America, 1968-1988’, Ethnic Forum, 9/1—2 (1989), 10-13; J. W. Wieczerzak, ‘Pre- and Proto-Ethnics: Poles in the United States before the Immigration “After Bread”’, Polish Review, 21/3 (1976), 7-38. A treasure trove of information is to be found in M. J. E. Copson-NieC¢ko ‘The Poles in America from the 1830s to 1870s’, in F Mocha (ed.), Poles in America (Stevens Point, Wis., 1978).

6 J. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven, 2004), 64. ” Tbid. 8 Ibid. 65. 9 Ibid. 75; D. Stone, ‘Jewish Emigration from Poland before World War IT’, in J. Bukowczyk (ed.), Polish Americans and their History (Pittsburgh, 1996), 96.

10 J. Sarna and E. Smith (eds.), The Jews of Boston: Essays on the Occasion of the Centenary (1895-1995) of the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston (Boston, 1995), 5—6.

6 Introduction citizens of the country in which they lived was successful. However, because of the policies of the Prussian government, which sought to make the Jews a part of the burgher class, and the hostility of much of the sz/achta in the province to the grant

of equal rights to the Jews, the process led to the Jews of the area identifying with a liberal form of German patriotism.'! At the same time, as recent research has shown, these Jews, usually referred to as Herzogthiimers, Poseners, or Hinterberliners, felt a strong sense of identification with Wielkopolska and retained a number of features that were characteristic of the remaining Jews of Poland—Lithuania. These sentiments were even stronger among the immigrants from the Kingdom of Poland, Galicia, and Lithuania. Certainly Polish Jews retained their distinctive form of worship, often banding together to form synagogues, and by 1860 there were at least fourteen synagogues in America that fol-

lowed the Polish minhag (rite).‘* The increased emigration from the lands of Poland—Lithuania after 1840 led to a degree of residential concentration and the creation of schools and social organizations, as well as to some conflicts with the previously dominant Jews from Bavaria, the Bayers.'* One reflection of the social consciousness of these emigrants is to be found in the references to a Polish place of birth on many Jewish tombstones in places like California. Indeed, Jews from the Polish lands seem to have been particularly numerous in the west. The Jews benefited greatly from the economic transformation of the United States in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century from a country with a largely subsistence economy outside a few port cities to one in the initial stages of an industrial revolution. Many of them, starting as pedlars, became shopkeepers and some made considerable fortunes. They also carried organized Jewish life across the American continent. By the time of the civil war (1861—5) the number of organized Jewish communities, defined as those in which there was at least one established Jewish organization, had risen to 160, spread over thirty-one states and the District of Columbia, while the US census of 1860 listed synagogues in nineteen states and the District. The distribution of Jews over the country was not uniform, and in 1860 a quarter of the Jewish population was to be found in New York City. Yet, as Jonathan Sarna observes, ‘the fact that as a group, [the Jews] had been dispersed throughout the country by the Civil War remains deeply significant, securing Judaism’s position as a national American faith’.’* In places where there was a relatively large Jewish community, often more than one synagogue was estab4! On this, see S. Kemlein, Zydzi w wielkim ksiestwie poznanskiem, 1815-1848 (Poznati, 2000); K. Makowski, Sila mitu: Zydzi w Poznanskiem w dobie zaboréw w pismiennictwie historycznym (Poznan,

2004); V. R. Mitchell, “The Genesis of German Nationalism on Polish Soil: The Grand Duchy of Poznan, 1815-1850’, Ph.D. thesis (University of Rochester, 2002). 12 Cited in Stone, ‘Jewish Emigration from Poland before World War II’, 97. 13 See H. Diner, ‘Before the Promised City’, in J. Gurock and M. Raphael (eds.), An Inventory of Promises: Essays on American Jewish History in Honor of Moses Rischin (Brooklyn, NY, 1995), 55-8; R. Glanz, “The “Bayer” and the “Polack” in America’, fewish Social Studies, 17/1 (1955), 27-31. 14 Sarna, American Judaism, 70.

Introduction 7 lished, and some of these, as we have seen, followed the Polish rather than the German rite. Attempts to establish in the United States a single co-ordinating Jewish body, such as the Board of Delegates of American Israelites set up in 1859 on the lines of the Board of Deputies in England and the Consistoire générale in France, quickly collapsed, as did the endeavour to create a chief rabbinate on the English model. From the 1840s rabbinic leaders began to establish a strong position in America, something that had not previously been the case. Their views were very varied. Some, like Isaac Leeser, who emigrated to the United States from the Westphalian

village of Neuenkirchen, favoured the German Jewish ideal of Bildung (selfcultivation) and a form of modern Orthodoxy like that established later in Germany by Samson Raphael Hirsch, which Leeser propagated through his monthly journal Occident and his translation of the Hebrew Bible. A similar position was adopted by Morris Raphall, born in Stockholm and educated in Germany, who went to the United States after a period in England and was for many years

the rabbi at the New York congregation of Bnei Jeshurun. Some, like Gustav Poznanski in Charleston, who as his name suggests came from Prussian Poland, and the Bohemian Isaac Mayer Wise, head of the Anshe Emeth congregation in Albany, New York, and later of Bene Yeshurun in Cincinnati, called for moderate reform, the simplification of religious services, and the use of an organ on the sabbath and Jewish holy days. Others, like the members of the Emanu-El congregation in New York, founded in 1845, and the Bavarian David Einhorn, favoured radical change. There were also those, notably the Bavarian Abraham Rice in Baltimore and some

of the immigrants from the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania in the 1850s, who attempted to preserve traditional Jewish religious practice and belief unchanged in the New World. In addition, these years saw attempts to stress peoplehood rather than religion as the unifying element in Jewish life, of which the most important was the fraternal organization B’nai B’rith, founded in 1843. Jews were, above all, too concerned about establishing themselves in their new country, resisting the blandishments of Protestant missionaries fired with the enthusiasm of the Second Great Awakening, and dealing with the widespread issue of intermarriage, to pay too much attention to events in Europe. This concentration on the American situation was intensified from the late 1850s as the Union tore itself apart over the question of slavery. This issue also divided the American Jewish world, with Rabbi Raphall defending slavery using biblical precedents and Rabbi Einhorn adopting a strongly anti-slavery position. The large majority of the Jews of the United States in 1860 were recent immigrants living in the North and they supported the Union but were opposed by the over 25,000 Jews in the South who supported the Confederacy. One important consequence of the war was the acceptance of the right of Jews to serve as army chaplains, ‘a landmark

in the legal recognition of America’s non-Christian faiths’.!° , 15 Tbid. 120.

8 Introduction The political sentiments of most American Jews during this period were liberal. Asa result, both those who had established themselves before the revolution and in the early decades of the nineteenth century and the more recent immigrants from central Europe after 1830 (like so many of their American counterparts) often felt considerable sympathy for the Polish struggle to re-establish national independence. Certainly, the limited evidence available suggests that until the 1870s Jews

shared with their American compatriots a largely positive image of Poles and Poland, an image strongly influenced by the roles of Tadeusz Kolciuszko and Kazimierz Pulaski in the American revolution. This led to an outpouring of sympathy during and after the November 1830 uprising that also affected Jews.'® A minor Jewish poet in Charleston, Penina Moise, published in 1833 a poem entitled ‘Female Patriotism in Poland’, in which she praised the women of Poland ‘who have yielded up to [their] country all that [they] have left, all that women deem most precious in the world, [their] marriage rings’.

The same collection also included several poems praising Kosciuszko, and a number of American Jews linked the actions of Kosciuszko and Pulaski in support of the American revolution with those of the Jewish financier Haym Salomon, who was in fact a Posener from Leszno. Subsequently both Poles and Jews have claimed

Salomon. Joseph Wieczerzak has argued that, for later Polish immigrants, Kosciuszko and Pulaski provided ‘surrogate roots in the American past that psychologically lessened their feelings of being “strangers” to America’.!’ Haym Salomon seems to have fulfilled a similar purpose for Jews. Certainly as late as 1895 Simon Wolf’s The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen, produced to rebut nativist questioning on Jewish patriotism, singled out Salomon as ‘the fellow-countryman and intimate associate of the Polish generals Pulaski and Kosciuszko’.1®

Other than in a few of the larger cities, contact between Poles and Jews was probably extremely limited given the small number of Polish immigrants in America. Yet, as Duker has demonstrated,*? relations between the political elites of the two communities were good. A number of Jews served on the solidarity committee established by Polish political emigrés after the 1830 uprising (not all the Jews were of Polish origin; for example, Mordecai Manuel Noah, a politician and publisher, and leading figure in the Jewish community, was born in Philadelphia and was of Sephardi origin°). The positive contacts between the two communities were maintained after the

outbreak of the insurrection of 1863, a period marked by Polish—Jewish co16 See J. Lerski, 4 Polish Chapter in facksonian America: The United States and the Polish Exiles of 1831 (Madison, 1958), 14-33; Pula, Polish Americans, 2-4. 17 See J. Wieczerzak, ‘Pre- and Proto-Ethnics’, 12. On Kosciuszko in America, see J. Pula, Thaddeus Kosciuszko: The Purest Son of Liberty (New York, 1999). 18S. Wolf, The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen (Philadelphia, 1895), 15-16. 19 Duker, ‘Polish Political Emigrés in the United States’, 145-6. 20 Lerski, A Polish Chapter in Jacksonian America, 21.

Introduction 9 operation in Poland. The Polish National Government agent in America Henryk Kalussowski, who now returned to the United States, and the Centralny Komitet Polski both sought to win Jewish support for the uprising.* The committee issued a somewhat hectoring public appeal in the New York Herald, addressed to the ‘Poles of the Mosaic Persuasion in the United States of America’: The apathy you show to the events which for the last six months have shaken Europe to its foundations and the scanty news you have from the American press about the awful war now raging in our fatherland, impose on us the stern duty of addressing you in this form, and recapitulating a few facts, unknown by many, forgotten by others. The history of Europe has its pages stained with the inhuman and barbarous persecution of the Jews; our country alone stands not only exempt from all religious persecutions, but your forefathers, since Casimir the Great, enjoyed there the privileges of citizenship: Your religion as well as your pursuits of life were always inviolable. Your fathers did not pay exorbitant taxes; your exclusiveness among us was the result of your creed, but the Poles never persecuted you. Our elective system and the consequent wars till our downfall and treacherous partition, left your fathers in quiet possession of their rights; they suffered politically with us, but not through us. Since the partition of our country, your misguided fathers (the truth must be said) sided with the tyrants and formed so to speak a nation within a nation; they persisted

in being Jews and dearly paid for the experience. Noble examples of patriotism under Kosciuszko and in 1831 and the emulation which your brethren in religion show now in the desperate struggle, the sacrifices they lay upon the country’s altar, show conclusively that we too have made progress and the proclamation of our present provisional government demonstrates it to the world. ‘All sons of Poland without distinction of faith or race, origin or station are free and equal citizens of our Mother country.’

In all our attempts to free ourselves from tyrannic oppression, we regarded you as equals; the Constitution of 1815, so basely violated by Alexander the First, so cruelly and ruthlessly abrogated by Nicholas, guaranteed you the perfect freedom of your religion, the perfect right of citizenship. Why should [you] now be indifferent brethren in our gloomy trials? The Muscovite hordes today desolating our country make no distinction among us; they burn and massacre all; your brethren in religion fare worse than any! Why should you be indifferent to the unhappy victims???

The committee asked the Jewish community to raise funds for Poland and to attend the public solidarity meetings that it was organizing. The appeal was distributed widely and was followed by a series of similar proclamations that were translated into Polish and German and sent to The Israelite, the monthly edited by Isaac Mayer Wise, for publication.”* Yet given its tone, it is perhaps not surprising that the Jewish response was muted. Clearly its appeal to Jewish patriotism was 21 Tbid. 155.

22 New York Herald, 29 Apr. 1863, repr. in Lerski, ‘Jewish—Polish Amity in Lincoln’s America’,

45-6. 23 See e.g. The Israelite, 23 Jan. 1864.

10 Introduction undercut by its attack on the Jews’ ‘indifference’ and the criticism of the actions of their ‘misguided fathers’.

While some prominent members of the Jewish community, notably Michael Heilprin in Washington and the Revd H. A. Henry in San Francisco, actively cam-

paigned for the Polish cause, the small network of Jewish supporters of Poland elsewhere in America found little enthusiasm among their fellow immigrants.** The San Francisco representative of the Centralny Komitet Polski speculated that local Jews of Polish origin may have been unfamiliar with the Polish language. Others may have been put off by the Christian character of many committee activities.2° The distraction of the civil war and Russia’s open support for the embattled Union, which was dramatized by the unexpected visit of the Russian fleets in New York and San Francisco, may have added to their reluctance. In addition, by the

mid-nineteenth century some American Jews were probably beginning to hold unfavourable views of Poland. Certainly The Occident, edited by Isaac Leeser, reported periodically on the oppression of Jews in the Polish territories, as did The Israelite, describing, for instance, anti-Jewish violence in Bydgoszcz in 1861 caused

by the desire ‘of the Poles to revenge themselves on the Jews who in the recent elections voted with the Germans’.”° On the other hand, the first Polish-language journal in America, the New York Echo Polski, carried regular reports on Jewish affairs and was published by a Polonized Jew named Schriftgiesser.”’ In addition, Katussowski, who had hoped to win Jewish support by establishing in New York a branch of the Alliance polonaise de toutes les croyances religieuses (Polish Interfaith Alliance), an émigré organization based in France and Belgium and calling for fuller Jewish emancipation in Europe,?® became embroiled in a

dispute about Polish—Jewish relations with a renegade Catholic priest, M. B. Czechowski, who in a pamphlet accused the Roman Catholic Church and, in particular, the Jesuits of maltreatment of Jews in Poland. This probably also undermined his efforts to win support for the ill-fated uprising. At the same time Andrzej Kapiszewski is probably correct in his conclusion that the great majority of American Jews at the time were not of Polish origin and had little interest in a 24 See M. Haiman, Polish Pioneers of California (Chicago, 1940), 77; Lerski, ‘Jewish Polish Amity in Lincoln’s America’, 46-9. 25 Tbid. 76; Duker, ‘Polish Political Emigrés in the United States’, 158—60, 162-3. 26 See e.g. The Occident and American Jewish Advocate, 3/2 (May 1845); 6/2 (May 1848). See also

The Israelite, 8 (1861-2), 390, quoted in R. Glanz, ‘The Poseners in America’, YIVO Annual, 18 (1963), 27. It is perhaps of moment to remember that the Occident was very ill disposed towards Poland, regarding even Polish Jews with utter contempt. 27 A. Kapiszewski, ‘Stosunki polsko-zydowskie w Stanach Zjednoczonych Ameryk’, in H. Kubiak, E. Kusielewicz, and T. Gromada (eds.), Polonia amerykarnska: Przesztosé 1 wspélczesnosé (Wroclaw, 1988), 616, names ‘Schriftgiesser’ as the journal’s editor. Other sources list Henryk Nagiel as editor and insist that ‘Schriftgiesser’ was a pseudonym; see B. Pacyniak, ‘An Historical Outline of the Polish Press in America’, in Mocha (ed.), Poles in America, 511. 28 On this organization, see A. Eisenbach, “The Polish Interfaith Alliance’, Polin, 5 (1990), 193-220.

Introduction II Polish struggle against Russia.*” Hence, this simple explanation for the lukewarm Jewish response to Polish efforts in 1863 appears the most likely.

The situation changed dramatically with the beginning of mass emigration from the Polish lands in the 1880s. The new wave of emigration brought much larger numbers of both Poles and Jews to the New World. Polish immigration accelerated after 1870, spurred by a series of poor harvests, the economic difficulties of the countryside, and political oppression. Initially most emigrants came from Prussian Poland, which was now experiencing increased Germanization and land confiscations, not to mention the impact of the Kulturkampf. It was soon succeeded by massive emigration from Russian Poland and also from Galicia, where the terms of the abolition of serfdom and the forced-labour tribute had greatly increased rural poverty.°° Unlike the earlier exodus, this was primarily economic in character. While the figures are approximate, it has been estimated that perhaps 3.5 million people left the Polish lands between 1870 and 1914.*! This mass emigration fundamentally altered the nature of American Polonia. The majority of the immigrants were peasants who sought to re-establish familiar communal and religious structures in their new environment. The parish quickly became the centre of Polish immigrant life. The first Polish parish was formed

in Panna Maria, Texas, in 1855, and by 1870 sixteen parishes ministered to migrants in Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Texas, and Wisconsin. In the following decades immigration and parish formation increased rapidly: by 1880 there were seventy-four parishes, and by 1900, 300 parishes served an immigrant population that the federal census conservatively estimated at close to 400,000.°* They were served by priests from Poland and by some trained in the United States. In 1885

the Polish Spiritual Seminary was founded in Detroit and soon moved to Orchard Lake, Michigan, and began to train Polish-speaking priests. The parishes

were supported by an elaborate infrastructure that included immigrant aid societies, fraternal orders, charitable organizations, convents, schools, and seminaries.

Efforts at crafting a national organization for the small and scattered Polish

community had all proved evanescent until the late nineteenth century.*° The mass migration now changed that. In 1874 the Zjednoczenie Polskie 29 Kapiszewski, ‘Stosunki polsko-zydowskie’, 616.

°° Duker, ‘Some Aspects of Polish—Jewish Relations in the United States after 1865’, Jewish Quarterly Review, 45 (1954), 531; Pula, Polish Americans, 14-19.

31 See J. Bukowcezyk, And My Children Did Not Know Me: A History of the Polish-Americans (Bloomington, Ind., 1987), 11—12. 82 See W. Kruszka, A History of the Poles in America to 1908 (Washington, 1993), 33-5, 42-3, 77-80}

Pula, Polish Americans, 8-29; see also W. Thomas and F. Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (Chicago, 1984), 239-55.

33 Before 1870 Polonia was characterized by ‘individual actions’ and was not an organized community; see T. Paleczny, Ewolucja ideologii 1 przemiany tozsamosci narodowej Polonii w Stanach Ljednoczonych w latach 1870-1970 (Krakow, 1989), 124-5.

12 Introduction Rzymsko-Katolickie (Polish Roman Catholic Union, ZPRK) was formed in Detroit, later relocating to Chicago. It had very broad ambitions, including building a press network and an educational and welfare system, and organizing theological training. However, its chief goal was ‘keeping Polish immigrants faithful to their traditional Catholic values’.*4 Almost immediately the ZPRK was confronted by the fundamental problem of all Polish organizations in America: who was eligible for mem-

bership. Those favouring a broad definition, essentially admitting anyone who considered himself Polish, were defeated by a faction led by the Resurrectionist Order’s Fr. Wincenty Barzyrski, insisting on Roman Catholic allegiance as mandatory. In response a number of patriotic societies animated by Juliusz Andrzejkowicz created the nucleus of what became the Zwiazek Narodowy Polski (Polish National Alliance, ZNP) in Philadelphia in 1880. A significant early proponent was the millionaire industrialist and philanthropist Erazm Jerzmanowski. Encouraged and pro-

moted by Polish émigrés in western Europe, notably Agaton Giller, the ZNP reflected their view that Poland’s eventual rebirth required the mobilization of the entire emigration on the fatherland’s behalf—a far more political motivation than preserving the religious unity of the Catholic section of the population from Polish lands in America.*° The ZNP, from its inception, emphasized its desire to include

all children of the partitioned Polish fatherland in its ranks, and encouraged Lithuanian, Ruthenian (Ukrainian), and Jewish immigrants from historic Poland in America to join. Though the response from these groups was quite small,° one of the first ZNP treasurers was Ignacy Morgensztern, a Jew.?”

Whereas this seemed to be a division over the question of who indeed was a Pole, the quarrel between the ZPRK and the ZNP reflected other concerns as well.?® The ZNP regarded itself as primarily a political body whose mission it was 34 Radzilowski, The Eagle and the Cross, 47. A detailed though dated history of the ZPRK is in M. Haiman, Zjednoczenie Polskie Rzymsko-Katolickie w Ameryce, 1873-1948 (Chicago, 1948). It contains much detailed information not found in the more recent work by Radzilowski.

35 H. Florkowska-Francic, “The Influence of the Polish Political Emigration in Switzerland on the Formation of the Polish National Alliance’, Polish American Studies, 48/2 (1991), 27-37.

36 It was very clear to certain ZPRK founders that the ZNP, by not insisting on Catholicism as a requirement for membership, was willing to allow Jewish membership in the organization. Hence we read in an 1880 letter from Fr. Moczygemba of the Resurrectionists: ‘We are required to defend the Polish people against Jews and Freemasons, who, under the cloak of patriotism, want to gain control over the masses.’ See Haiman, Zjednoczente, 61. 37 Tt is most unfortunate that Morgensztern, the only prominent Jew in the ZNP, was also apparently an embezzler. The public disclosure of his activities resulted in calls to disallow Jews membership in the ZNP; see D. E. Pienkos, PNA: A Centennial History of the Polish National Alhiance of the United States of North America (Boulder, Colo., 1984), 75-6.

38 As a matter of fact, despite its founding ethos, the ZNP attracted almost exclusively Roman Catholics of ethnic Polish ancestry. Thus, the differences between the two organizations had ideological rather than practical significance. See M. P. Erdmans, “The Transformation of the Polish National

Alliance: From Immigrant to Ethnic Organization’, in T: Gladsky, A. Walaszek, and M. M. Wawrykiewicz (eds.), Ethnicity, Culture, City: Polish-Americans in the US‘A (Warsaw, 1998).

Introduction 13 to prepare the Polish people, historically understood, for eventually regaining national independence. For the ZPRK, national politics was at best a distant goal and at worst a distraction. Their focus was on protecting and developing the immigrant population by seeing to their immediate needs as a community. They saw Catholicism as the essential glue binding the community together in strange and challenging circumstances. Thus, the different views of the Polish Jews taken by the ZPRK and the ZNP were based on a radically different understanding of their mission; the Jewish issue itself was secondary. Ironically, some Orthodox Jews were impressed by the success of Polonia in creating its own self-sufficient society. For example, Rabbi Willowski (Ridvaz) in Chicago in 1903—4 argued that Jews should learn from the Poles and establish their own schools in the United States.°° In addition to the ZPRK and the ZNP a number of other national and regional associations appeared, most of a fraternal nature. Notably different, however, were the several essentially paramilitary organizations which regarded themselves as having the prime responsibility of preparing future military cadres for the Polish

cause. The largest was the Zwiazek Sokolow (Falcon Alliance), which from the outset was strongly influenced by the ZNP.*° The dominant figure among the Falcons was its long-time president Dr Teofil Starzynski. Yet more militaristic was the Zwiazek Miodziezy Polskiej (Union of Polish Youth), which was under radical influence. Closely associated with this movement was the creation in 1888 of the Zwiazek Spiewakéw Polskich (Polish Singers’ Alliance) by Antoni Maltek, which utilized song as a form of patriotic cult.** All of these organizations reflected and ultimately exploited the ardour of the innumerable paramilitary units that mushroomed in Polonia after the late nineteenth century.

Although numerically they represented a rather small section of organized Polonia, these paramilitary bodies provide an important insight into the political outlook of Polonia’s elite. Preparation for service to the Polish cause was the essential motivation. By comparison, strategies to consolidate community advancement did not stir the same passion among Polonia’s leadership. This was an essentially Polish rather than Polanian way of thinking, which peaked in the years just before and during the First World War, and after the rebirth of Poland in 1918 quickly waned and left Polonia in ideological crisis. Religious controversies, though seemingly insignificant compared with the ferment within Jewish ranks, were more divisive for the Poles than they might seem at first sight. The great majority of Poles were Roman Catholics, and relatively few joined established Protestant denominations in the United States despite sporadic 39 J. Sarna, Introduction to Sarna (ed.), Minority Faiths and the American Protestant Mainstream (Urbana, IIl., 1998), 1. 40 ‘There is a extensive history of the Falcons, replete with valuable materials: A. Waldo, Sokdlstwo: Przednia straz narodu, 5 vols. (Pittsburgh, 1953-84). A rather brief recent history is D. E. Pienkos, One Hundred Years Young: A History of the Polish Falcons of America 1887-1987 (New York, 1987). 41'S. A. Blejwas, The Polish Singer Alliance of America, 1888-1998: Choral Patriotism (Rochester, NY, 2005).

14 Introduction efforts at proselytizing. Rather more serious was the wave of ‘independent’ parishes that appeared at the turn of the century, culminating in the formation of the Polski Kosciot Narodowy (Polish National Catholic Church), which grew quite rapidly over the following years. Its founder and dominant figure was Bishop Franciszek Hodur, a radical populist. This schism was the most obvious reflection

of the profound unhappiness of many Poles over the Irish domination of the Catholic Church in America, which led to systematic discrimination against Poles in regard to elevation to the hierarchy and the resultant rather weak position of Polonia within Catholic ranks despite their large numbers. Asa result, the Catholic Church, rather than building up Polanian influence in the United States, has often diminished it. Indeed, Polish—Irish antagonism within Catholic ranks has occasionally rivalled Polish—Jewish frictions among east European immigrants. *” Jewish emigration also increased enormously in the period. Between 1881 and

1914 nearly 2 million Jews emigrated to the United States from the Russian empire, Austria-Hungary (mostly Galicia), and Romania, magnifying tenfold the size of the community. By 1914 east European Jews constituted about 85 per cent of American Jewry. Although smaller in number than the Polish emigration, the proportion of those emigrating was much higher at 27 per cent compared with 8 per cent. Unlike Polish immigrants, most Jewish migrants intended to remain perma-

nently in the United States, although a certain number did return to eastern Europe. By 1910 nearly 60 per cent of Yiddish-speaking immigrants either were already American citizens or had applied for citizenship. The corresponding figure for Poles was only about 30 per cent. New York Jewish dailies devoted nearly 40 per cent of their editorials to matters American, stressing the need for Jews to ‘Americanize’ and arguing the basic similarity of Jewish and American ideals of justice and democracy in contrast to the oppressive environment which the emigrants had left behind. Against this, America-focused articles in the Chicago-

based daily Zgoda (the Polish newspaper with the largest circulation in the country) made up less than 15 per cent of the total; the remainder were devoted to Polish affairs.*° 42 The Revd Stanislaw Orlemanski, infamous during the Second World War as one of the tiny handful of pro-Soviet voices in Polonia (he even visited Stalin in the Kremlin) was best known before , the war for his perfervid denunciation of Irish domination of the Church. His drift to the radical left can be seen, in some ways, as provoked by the view that the Polish position in the American Catholic Church was hopeless owing to the dominance of the Irish. See his Wychodztwo polskie w Ameryce (New Britain, Conn., 1932). In this context we should note the conclusion by Napierkowski that ‘Irish Catholic hostility toward Polish Americans . . . is so basic to the history of the Poles in America that no study can possibly claim to be thorough without carefully considering it’ (T. J. Napierkowski, “The Image of Polish Americans in American Literature’, Polish American Studies, 40/1 (Spring, 1983), 29).

43 See E. Morawska, ‘Changing Images of the Old Country in the Development of Ethnic Identity among East European Immigrants, 1880s—1930s: A Comparison of Jewish and Slavic Representations’, YIVO Annual of Jewish Soctal Science, 21 (1993), 273-341.

Introduction 15 Poles and Jews often lived in geographical proximity to each other in the New

World, and initially replicated the hostile but symbiotic relationship that had existed in the Polish lands, a relationship that Ewa Morawska describes in her chapter below as ‘the old country pattern of “distant proximity” based on continued economic exchange and mutual disdain’. Even after the end of unfree cultiva-

tion and the beginnings of an industrial revolution, most Jews continued to perform their traditional role as economic middlemen—“‘pariah capitalists’ filling a necessary but unpopular position between the two major strata in the Polish lands, the peasantry and the nobility. Contact here between Jews and peasants had been

primarily economic. On market days in the shtetls and during the week as travellers in the countryside, the Jews purchased agricultural produce from the peasants and sold them goods produced in the towns. Morawska has enumerated the other forms of contact that developed from this economic nexus: peasants visited local Jewish store owners or innkeepers to hear the news and ask advice (even in matchmaking), k/ezmorim (folk musicians) were hired to play at peasant weddings, Jewish midwives attended peasant women at childbirth and distributed remedies to the villagers in sickness, peasant servant girls worked in better off Jewish homes in the shtetls, and shabes goyim (non-Jews) took care of the household tasks forbidden Jews on the sabbath and holidays.

This interaction led to the creation of deep-rooted prejudices on both sides which were taken with them by the emigrants to the New World. The peasants despised the Jews for their lack of connection to the land and regarded them as ‘devious and exploitative in nature’. At the same time, as Morawska observes, “peasant perceptions of Jews also contained an element of ambivalence towards, if not positive

admiration for, the initiative, resourcefulness, and astuteness of the Jewish traders’. The attitude of the Jews to their Christian neighbours was equally contemptuous and disdainful. They saw the peasants, to whom they felt greatly superior, as uncivilized and uncultured, and primarily as a source of their material livelihood. As Morawska points out, the term ‘goy’, which although meaning non-Jew was taken to signify a peasant, ‘denoted people and things that were backward, ignorant, driven by unrestrained instincts and physical aggression—everything a Jew did not want to and should not be’. At the same time, ‘the negative attitude of the Jews towards peasants . . . was accompanied by pity for their wretched conditions’, poorer even than those of the Jews. The religious divide reinforced the gulf between the two groups. The peasants

saw the Jews as adherents of a religion that was not only false but deicidal, and found Jewish religious practice bizarre and incomprehensible. To the Jews, Christianity was both idolatrous and hypocritical, since in their eyes it combined a call to ‘turn the other cheek’ with encouragement to antisemitism. Initially Polish and Jewish immigrants often found themselves in proximity in the United States, the Poles as workers in heavy industry and the Jews in clothing

16 Introduction sweatshops or as small-scale entrepreneurs or traders. As a result, for a period the economic relationship that had existed in Poland was reproduced in a new form.

Jewish traders and entrepreneurs, both in the immigrant enclaves of the major cities, above all New York, and in the coal-mining towns in Pennsylvania and Ohio,

sold work clothes, fabrics, second-hand furniture, and jewellery to Polish immigrants. In Morawska’s words, “Their trading practices were familiar, and Jewish immigrants servicing their peasant immigrant clientele had a working knowledge of the Polish language. And, as happened when immigrants were short of money, not infrequently the transactions were conducted in kind, old-country style.’ Asa result, the mutual prejudices brought from eastern Europe were preserved in the New World. There were also a number of new features 1n the relationship. In the first place, because of their urban character and their earlier experience of having lived in two cultures, the Jews adapted more readily to American conditions. They were more upwardly mobile than the Poles and felt more secure in America. While ‘a sense of superiority . . . modified by pity’ continued to inform Jewish attitudes towards their working-class Polish customers, who in their view had not taken advantage of the new conditions in the United States, the fear and anxiety that had underlaid their relationship with the peasants now largely disappeared. In the case of the Polish immigrants, the earlier hostile but dependent relationship with the Jews was transformed by the impact of political socialization. Most of them had gone to the United States with only a local sense of identity. Political activists, mostly of peasant origin, sought to include them in the Polish nation and to inculcate in them their own understanding of Polishness. This was, with some exceptions, an understanding based on ethnic nationalism, breaking with the earlier Polish concept that the Jews could be transformed into ‘Poles of the Mosaic persuasion’. In the years after 1880, as Mieczystaw Biskupski has shown,** Polish politics went through a rapid evolution, which resulted in a victory within organized Polonia of the partisans of the political right. This led to the consolidation of political power by a Chicago-based hierarchy of Poles of Poznanian origin relatively long resident in the country, many of whom were prominent in the national

fraternal organizations. The losers were the more recent arrivals, often from Russian Poland, frequently politically on the left, often unaffiliated with the great

national organizations, and geographically dispersed over the eastern United States, but noticeably weak in the Midwest, particularly in Chicago.

This phenomenon had profound consequences for Polish—Jewish relations since the informing ideology of the Polonian leadership was that of the Endecja (National Democrats), who, under Roman Dmowski’s leadership, became ever more concerned over what he regarded as the inassimilably alien nature of Polish Jewry.*° Thus whereas some of the earlier émigré societies had sought the affilia44M. B. Biskupski, ‘Polonia amerykariska, 1914-1939’, in A. Walaszek (ed.), Diaspora polska (Krakow, 2001). 45 Tbid.

Introduction 17 tion and support of Polish Jews, there was now an active attempt to exclude nonCatholics from immigrant organizations, seeing the Jews as oppressors and hostile to Polish national aspirations. As a consequence, the ZNP came under sustained attack for allowing Jewish membership.*° Links between organized Polonia and Jewish émigrés who had participated in the 1863 uprising, the most important of

whom was Rabbi Marcus (Mordecai) Jastrow of the Nalewki synagogue in Warsaw, who had been imprisoned and then expelled from Russia in 1863 and who

became rabbi of the Rodeph Shalom synagogue in Pittsburgh in 1866, also weakened. In addition, a few years before the outbreak of the First World War the Polanian adherents of the Endecyja, like their European counterparts, reversed their earlier

attitude and dropped their long-standing hostility to Roman Catholicism— previously denounced as a traditionalist, conservative, indeed obscurantist imped-

iment to modernization and integration—and made common cause with the clerical faction in the face of the threat perceived from the left. The resultant Endecja—clerical coalition, when imported to America, became the ideological and organizational juggernaut that crushed all opponents in Polonia. Polonia’s Endecja partisans, utilizing the parish network and the support of the Polonia clergy, formerly the strongest advocates of the exclusion of Jews from Polish organizations, had no difficulty in defeating all attempts to create alternative coalitions that featured politically leftist elements and were not characterized by antisemitic ideological presuppositions. There were still, however, some advocates within Polonia of a broader civic concept of the Polish national idea. Thus in 1905

the Komitet Narodowy (National Committee) formed in 1904 to support the Polish struggle against tsarist rule, condemned ‘the bloody persecutions of and pogroms against Jews’ in the Russian empire, while in 1910 several Jews participated in the Polish Sejm convened in Washington on the occasion of the unveiling

of monuments to Kosciuszko and Pulaski. But they were very much in the minority. The new ethno-nationalism dominated the Polish-language press in the United

States. Stanislaus Bleywas has examined the contents between 1907 and 1920 of the weekly Przewodnik Katolicki, published in New Britain, Connecticut, a centre for the manufacture of hardware, cutlery, metal components, and appliances, where Poles made up nearly a quarter of the town’s population of 68,000 and which had a Jewish population of around 2,500, mainly from the same north-east region of the Kingdom of Poland.*’ The dominant figure within the town’s Polish population was Father Lucjan Bojnowski, who was the parish priest from 1895

until the Second World War and who also founded and edited Przewodnik Katolicki. According to Blejwas, Bojnowski ‘was both a priest and a Polish 46 See Duker, ‘Some Aspects of Polish—Jewish Relations’, 532-7.

“7 S. A. Blejwas, ‘Jews in the Mental World of Polish Immigrants: Przewodnik Katolicki of New Britain, Connecticut, 1907-1920’, in Gladsky et al. (eds.), Ethnicity, Culture, City.

18 Introduction nationalist’ supporting an Endecja vision of the future Poland. He was strongly against Americanization since ‘our travel [to the United States] was only after bread and not a search for a second fatherland’, and he anathematized secular and radical Polish organizations. He promoted support for Polish businesses, which led him to advocate the boycott of Jewish shops, portraying the Jew in his weekly as ‘a figure alien and hostile to both the Polish nation and the immigrant community in America’.*® He also expounded in an extreme form the supersessionist view of Judaism characteristic of pre-Vatican II Catholicism.

Different versions of Polishness that were more or less exclusive were also reflected in the novels and short stories written in Polish by immigrant authors, mostly of peasant origin, as Karen Majewski shows in her chapter. An inclusive view was expressed by the socialist Alfons Chrostowski, who saw the Jew ‘as agent

of transformation, as the facilitator of movement across external and internal boundaries’. Thus in his novel Niewolnik polski (“The Polish Slave’, serialized in Jutrzenka, December 1893—November 1894), a Jewish tavern-keeper helps the narrator to cross the border illegally in order to avoid Russian army service. For the tavern-keeper, this is a matter of business, but for the narrator it is a profound, lifechanging act, as he returns one last time across the border to kiss his native land

farewell. These are certainly monetary transactions, but ‘they are not purely exploitative or without compassion’.

Other works exemplify a much more restricted, even antisemitic, view of Polishness. A good example is the novella 7rzech pachciarzy (“Three Jewish Tenants’), which was published in 1913 under a pseudonym and employs the classic antisemitic trope of the Jewish ‘crypto-assimilationist’ who converts to Christianity for personal gain—a reference to the case in 1889 when Ignacy Morgensztern, the Jewish general secretary of the ZNP, was forced to assign his property to the ZNP when, after he lost office, he was unable to repay funds he had ‘borrowed’. As Majewski points out, ‘The implication of this work is that Polish Christians are the rightful owners of Polonia and of Polishness, but that secular ethnic institutions have allowed Jewish outsiders into positions of stewardship, where they have been able to exploit and betray the nation from within.’ Another antisemitic trope, the seductive Jewish revolutionary woman, can be found in the novel W dniach nedzy 1 zbrodni (‘In Days of Misery and Crime’, 1908)

by a prominent immigrant activist, Stanislaw Osada. It describes how Leon Czolgosz, President McKinley’s assassin, was seduced by Russian Jewish interests, personified by his lover, the revolutionary Roza, modelled on the anarchist Emma Goldman. The massive Jewish immigration that led to the doubling of the Jewish population of the United States every decade between 1880 and the outbreak of the First World War also radically changed the political and religious landscape of American 48 Blejwas, ‘Jews in the Mental World of Polish Immigrants’, 172.

Introduction 19 Jewry. The established Jewish organizations, alarmed both by the unacculturated character of the overwhelming majority of the new emigrants and by the growth of antisemitism, took action to accelerate their adjustment to American conditions. The deteriorating conditions of Jews abroad, in particular the wave of pogroms in the Russian empire that began in Chisinau in April 1903, led to the establishment in 1906 of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the first American Jewish organization intended ‘to prevent the infraction of the civil and religious rights of Jews, in any part of the world’.*° Its founders included several members of the established central European leadership of American Jewry, among them the banker and philanthropist Jacob Schiff, Mayer Sulzberger, Louis Marshall, Oscar Straus, and Cyrus Adler. Both Schiff and Marshall, a leading New York lawyer, were also prominent members of the Emanu-El synagogue in New York, which in 1903 had established a settlement house in the Lower East Side ‘for the purpose of religious uplift’ and to counter the ‘mendacious activity of numerous missionaries’.°° The AJC favoured lobbying behind the scenes and was against strident political gestures. Its structure reflected its elitist character, its membership being limited to sixty people who had to be American citizens, a figure that was raised in 1931 to 350. It was only after the Second World War that it adopted a more democratic structure.°! Through its lobbying it played a role in the defeat of the literacy test requirement for immigrants in 1907 and 1913. Its principal foreign activity before 1914 was to draw attention to the oppression of Jews in the Russian empire, and it was part of the successful campaign which in December 1911 secured the

abrogation of the Russo-American treaty of 1832. Although this campaign stressed tsarist discrimination against American citizens of Jewish origin, which was held to be a violation of the treaty, it was also seen as a way of alleviating the situation of Jews under tsarist rule. There was still no overarching organization to represent all American Jews, although in response to accusations of Jewish criminality in New York a shortlived kehilah was established in 1909, which was to represent all sections of New York Jewry, already by far the largest American Jewish community. There was also

no major group to advance the interests of the east European majority of the community, whose members were mostly organized in landsmanshafin, which brought together Jews from a particular locality and provided mutual aid and support.°” 49 Quoted in ‘American Jewish Committee’, in Encylopedia Judaica (Jerusalem, 1996), ii. 822. 5° Sarna, American Judaism, 186-7.

5! On the history of the AJC, see N. Schachner, The Price of Liberty (New York, 1948) and N. Cohen and Naomi Wiener, Not Free to Desist: The American Jewish Committee, 1906—1966 (Philadelphia, 1972). On relations between the various Jewish organizations, see I. Neustadt-Noy, “The Unending Task: Efforts to United American Jewry from the American Jewish Congress to the American Jewish Conference’, Ph.D. thesis (Brandeis University, 1967).

52 On these organizations, see H. Kliger, Communication and Ethnic Community: The Case of Landsmanshafin (Ann Arbor, 1986).

20 Introduction Many also supported socialist organizations. Zionism was gaining ground, above all among east European immigrants, but it also aroused strong opposition,

particularly among Reform Jews. The Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the body representing Reform Judaism, in a resolution of 1898 stressed that ‘The Jews are not a nation, but a religious community.’°? Under these circum-

stances, the Federation of American Zionists, founded in 1898, was unable to establish itself in an effective manner. At the same time the movement was gaining important adherents, most notably the nationally famous ‘people’s lawyer’, and later Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis. It promised both to regenerate the

Jewish people and to provide a solution to the worsening problems of east European Jewry. For these new adherents, as Jonathan Sarna has pointed out, ‘Zionism became, in effect ...a form of civic religion . . . that developed over time, transcendent goals, sacred symbols, revered heroes, holy days, pilgrimages, doctrinal debates, and even prophets and priests.’°4 In the first decades of the twentieth century the frail bonds between Poles and Jews frayed as developments both in Poland and in America pulled the two groups

apart. The growing strength of integral nationalism both in Poland and within American Polonia undermined much of the earlier Jewish sympathy for Polish national aspirations, and Americanization and Zionism among the Jews increasingly anaesthetized them to their earlier leanings towards Polish loyalties. In New

York and Chicago the communities formed separate and often antagonistic enclaves. In Russian Poland after the failed revolution of 1905-7, a wave of anti-

semitism that erupted during the sharply contested election to the Duma in Warsaw in October 1912 aroused considerable alarm in American Jewish circles. The economic boycott that followed led to attempts to initiate similar boycotts in Chicago and elsewhere, building on the Polish American efforts to support Polish business endeavours.°°? Although sporadic efforts were made to overcome the growing estrangement between the two communities, increasingly Poles and Jews in America could agree on little more than a mutual dislike and distrust.*® The conflict widened during and after the First World War, which saw the three powers that had partitioned Poland in armed conflict with each other. It led ultimately to the collapse of all three, to communist revolution in Russia, to the break-

up of the multinational empires of the area, and to the triumph of the Western Allies following the entry of the United States into the war and the emergence of an independent Polish state. Polish political opinion was divided by the conflict. _ The Endecyja and their allies, the ‘passivists’, supported the Russian war effort and naively hoped that the Russians would satisfy Polish national aspirations. However, the Russians were unwilling to compromise and rejected any Western interference on behalf of the Poles. Hence, with the weakness of the Russian empire becoming 53 Quoted in Sarna, American Judaism, 202. 54 Tbid. 205. 5° See Duker, ‘Some Aspects of Polish—Jewish Relations’, 538-9. °6 See Duker, ‘Polish Political Emigrés in the United States’, 164-5.

Introduction 21 increasingly apparent, the Poles redirected their hopes towards the Western

Powers, and Dmowski moved to Paris, where he established the Komitet Narodowy Polski (Polish National Committee, KNP) in 1917.

These efforts were opposed by those who supported the Central Powers, the ‘activists’, who were for the most part landowning conservatives from Galicia who

hoped that the Congress Kingdom, once incorporated into the Dual Monarchy, would enjoy the same autonomous status. Allied with the activists was the patriotic socialist Jozef Pitsudski, who had created an armed force in Galicia and who was in many ways the direct descendant of the romantic revolutionaries of 1830 and 1863. Piisudski sought to make use of the conflict to spark off an anti-Russian insurrection. When this failed, he was compelled to pursue his goals through co-operation,

first with the Austrians and then with the Germans. The activists were thus divided between those who favoured close co-operation with the Austrians, the so-called Austrophiles, who organized the Naczelny Komitet Narodowy (Supreme

National Committee, NKN) in 1914, and the ‘independence movement’ led by Pitsudski, which regarded co-operation with Austria or even Germany as a tactic and stressed the need for a flexible Polish policy regarding wartime developments.

The threat of war in Europe led to energetic attempts to co-ordinate Polish political activities worldwide, with the Polish community of America regarded as

the principal source of funds and as a potential political lobby and source of recruits for military units. The first American example of this general grouping for unity and co-ordination was the Komitet Obrony Narodowej (National Defense Committee, KON), created in Pittsburgh in 1912 in response to the Balkan crisis and initially linked to the NKN. Originally a loose confederation of virtually all Polanian organizations, it quickly disintegrated when the clerical-—Endecja wing correctly perceived the dominance of leftist Pitsudskiites among the leadership.’

They split away and created the Rada Narodowa (National Council), which proceeded to establish links with similar Endecja bodies in Europe. The Rada, in turn, was subsumed by the 1915 Polski Centralny Komitet Ratunkowy (Polish Central Relief Committee, PCKR), whose political arm, the Wydziat Narodowy (National Department, WN), dominated Polanian politics after 1916. It was the WN that worked closely with the pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski after the maestro

went to the United States in 1915, and became in effect his Polanian staff. Ostensibly the PCKR was under strong clerical influence—notably that of Bishop Pawet Rhode—but in reality lay Endecja political figures were in control.°® The °7 See M. Francic, Komitet Obrony Narodowej w Ameryce, 1912-1918 (Wroclaw, 1983); J. T. Hapak

and M. B. Biskupski, “The Polish National Defense Committee in America, 1912-1918’, Polish American Studies, 44/2 (1987), 70-5. The chief figures here are Stanislaw Rayzacher, ‘Tomasz Siemiradzki, and Bronistaw Kutakowski. None was a major figure 1n Polonia.

58 See L. Zake, ‘The Development of the National Department (Wydzial Narodowy) as Representative of the Polish American Community in the United States of America, 1916-1923’, Ph.D. thesis (University of Chicago, 1980).

22 Introduction key role was played by the publisher, banker, and Republican political activist

Jan F. Smulski, the largest figure in Polonia during that period. Through Paderewski the WN was linked to Endecja politics in Europe, principally the KNP.

By contrast the KON was reduced to a narrow coalition of dissident groups, mostly leftist but including the National Catholic Church and a few Polish Jews who supported Pilsudski. Their status was ultimately beholden to the American

attitude to the war, and as Washington moved towards belligerency with the Central Powers, the KON’s position became increasingly difficult. In eastern Europe the war led to a serious deterioration in the situation of the

Jews. In spite of their grave reservations about tsarist Russia, Jews supported the Russian war effort in large numbers. Over half a million served in the tsarist army, but this did not allay Russian hostility. The Russian government did not modify its anti-Jewish policies in spite of strong pressure from the Western Powers, while the Russian high command did not hesitate to blame its initial defeats on the

Jews, who were also denounced in the Endecja press for spying. Grand Duke Nikolay, the Russian supreme commander, himself a confirmed antisemite, set up a special bureau to deal with espionage which took vigorous action against sus-

pected Jewish spies, over a hundred of whom were executed. Large-scale anti- | Jewish violence also occurred in those parts of Galicia captured by the Russians, and the anti- Jewish campaign culminated in the grand duke’s notorious order expelling from the front line between 500,000 and 600,000 Jews. At the same time all Hebrew and Yiddish newspapers were banned. For the Poles the war promised movement regarding the long-dormant ‘Polish question’ in international politics, but the immediate consequences were catastrophic. At least 600,000 Poles found themselves in Russian ranks by 1915, often in combat against their countrymen fighting under Austrian or German command. The disastrous Russian defeats of 1915 led to chaotic retreat from Polish territories, with wholesale dislocation and attendant outbreaks of disease and famine among a million refugees.°? By 1915 Poland had surpassed Belgium and Serbia as a human tragedy, with the Christian and Jewish population suffering alike. Indeed, it

was the immense hardship in Polish lands, not any political arguments, that brought Poland again to the attention of the world and galvanized both the Poles

and the Jews into responding to their countrymen in distress.°° The Nobel prizewinner Henryk Sienkiewicz joined Paderewski in creating the Polish Victims’ Relief Fund in Switzerland to solicit aid for Poland. It soon developed branches throughout the world. The outbreak of war did not bring to an end the tension between Poles and Jews that had become a feature of life in the Kingdom of Poland before 1914. Majority °° The estimate of 1 million refugees in Russian Poland by 1915 is in W. Roszkowski, Historia Polski, 1914-1991, 2nd edn. (Warsaw, 1992), I1—12. 6° See M. B. Biskupski, ‘Strategy, Politics, and Suffering: The Wartime Relief of Belgium, Serbia, and Poland, 1914-1918’, in id., [deology, Politics and Diplomacy in East-Central Europe (Rochester, 2003).

Introduction 23 Polish political opinion rallied around the Endecja and supported the tsarist war effort. The pro-Russian camp was greatly heartened when Grand Duke Nikolay issued a proclamation in August 1914 promising the Poles national unification under the sceptre of the Romanovs. In an attempt to allay suspicions that they were pro-German, a number of leading Jewish figures in Warsaw issued a declar-

ation welcoming Grand Duke Nikolay’s proclamation and affirming that, ‘together with the entire country, the Jewish group awaits the dawn of new life which has begun for Poland’. This merely provoked from the Endecja newspaper Gazeta Poranna the response, ‘Is it not clear that the consolidation and economic independence of the Polish group, [and] its independence from the Jews, will be one of the elements of reunified Poland’s programme of action?’®’ Other Endecja newspapers called for the commercial boycott of the Jews to be made permanent. Jews were also excluded from the civic committees set up to provide welfare for those in need because of the war. These developments inevitably echoed beyond Poland. The key role here was played by the Jewish community in the United States, now numbering nearly 3.25 million, mostly of east European origin. There was considerable alarm among this community about the fate of the Jews in eastern Europe. The three major philanthropic bodies allied with the AJC, the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations and the Jewish trade union and socialist movements, united to create an organiza-

tion that was to play a central part in east European Jewish life: the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, commonly known as the Joint, which was given the task of allocating and sending money and supplies to Europe for Jewish war relief. Although the principal responsibility for the worsening situation of the Jews lay

with the Russian government, the support of the Endecja for tsarist policies also led to attacks on the Poles. One major critic of Polish behaviour was the Danish Jewish literary critic Georg Brandes, the author of Poland: A Study of the Land, People and Literature (1903) and previously a staunch advocate of the Polish cause.®” Another was Herman Bernstein, the Lithuanian-born founder and editor of the Yiddish daily Der tog, a leading voice of Jewish liberal opinion. Their accusations seemed to call into question Poland’s fitness for national independence and,

as Mieczystaw Biskupski shows in his chapter, led to attempts to rebut their charges in Europe and America. In the United States these efforts were complicated by the desire of the dominant clerical-Endecja coalition to win support for

the Allied cause and to undermine the influence of the Poles supporting the Central Powers. Under these circumstances the strident attacks in the Polish 61 This exchange is quoted in I. Schiper, A. Tartakower, and A. Hafftke (eds.), Zydzi w Polsce Odrodzonej (Warsaw, 1933), 1. 486-7.

62 A useful retrospective analysis from the Polish perspective is Konstanty Buszczynki to Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych, Sept. 1919, Archiwum Akt Nowych, Warsaw (AAN), Archiwum Paderewskiego, vol. 994.

24 Introduction American press on Brandes, Bernstein, and the ‘pro-German’ leadership of American Jewry did little to allay Jewish sensibilities. The sympathies of American

Jewry were rather more complex than the accusation of being pro-German suggests. Initially Schiff declared himself pro-German but not anti-English and would probably have favoured the continuation of American neutrality. Many of the more radical elements of the community were strongly hostile to a war in alliance with the repressive regime of tsarist Russia, while others were pacifist.°° As the war continued, sympathy for Germany waned with the revelations of the aggressive nature of German aspirations and the atrocities committed in the name of German militarism. The February Revolution in Russia further strengthened pro-Allied sentiment, which was consolidated by America’s entry into the war in April. Most leading American Jews, including Schiff and the previously pacifist Rabbi Stephen Wise, now spoke out in favour of the Allied cause. Relations between Poles and Jews in the United States worsened in 1915 when Artur Hausner, a delegate from the principal activist (pro-Austrian) organization the NKN, visited the country. Hausner established a good relationship with key figures within American Jewry but was strongly attacked by the pro-Allied leader-

ship of American Polonia and by Paderewski, who went to the United States to champion Polish relief efforts and to organize a pro-Polish lobby. Paderewski’s political ineptitude led to a situation which, to quote Biskupski, represented him as

, ‘naive and the Poles as a nation of antisemites’.°* He did succeed in forcing Hausner to flee the country under charges of being an Austrian spy. In this way he

‘completely dismantled any links between Polonia and pro-Austrian or proGerman circles in the United States, including influential Jewish ones’. There is some truth in the argument that Jewish opinion in Poland was more favourable to the Central Powers. Indeed, given the way that they had been treated both by the tsarist government and by the pro-Russian camp in the Kingdom of Poland, it is not surprising that many Jews enthusiastically welcomed the Russian defeats in the spring of 1915 and that people of Jewish origin constituted a significant proportion of the officers and soldiers of the Polish legions set up by Pilsudski to fight alongside the Austrians. After the Russian withdrawal the Congress Kingdom was divided into two unequal parts: the larger northern area, with most of the industrial centres, including Warsaw, was governed by the Germans, while the smaller, southern section was ruled by the Austrians. The Germans were now in a position to undertake major policy initiatives in relation to all the peoples of the area to the east of the Reich, including the Jews. 63 For a useful discussion of the attitude of more recent Jewish immigrants, see J. Rapaport, ‘Jewish Immigrants and World War I: A Study of American Yiddish Press Reactions’, Ph.D. thesis (Columbia University, 1951). There is also some interesting material in C. Sterba, Good Americans: Itahan and Fewish Immigrants in the First World War (New York, 2003).

64 A revealing, though admittedly hostile, contemporary evaluation of this is Artur Hausner’s ‘Ignacy Paderewski w Ameryce’, Wojewodzkie Archiwum Paristwowe w Krakowie, Archiwum Naczelnego Komitetu Narodowego, vol. 18.

Introduction 25 With the occupation not only of the Congress Kingdom but also of the Baltic states and large parts of Belarus and Ukraine, the Germans made grandiose plans for the reorganization of Europe under their hegemony and were anxious to find an appropriate place for the Jews in these schemes. The German Foreign Office set up a special Department of Jewish Affairs. It also encouraged a group of German

Jewish activists to create a Kommittee fir den Osten, which put forward farreaching proposals for the reorganization of eastern and central Europe. This body opposed nation-states, favouring rather a multinational grouping covering Russian Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Latvia. Such a state would include within its boundaries 6 million Jews, who would be granted autonomy on an equal basis with the other national groups it contained. Not surprisingly, these proposals intensified Polish suspicions that Jewish leaders were hostile to the establishment of an independent Poland. Later claims by Dmowski at the Paris peace conference that the Jews opposed the re-creation of an independent Poland and sought instead an imperium in imperio echoed this development. Yet it should be stressed that these utopian schemes had little following among

Polish Jews and that the German authorities also had no consistent or clearly thought-out plan for the Jews of Poland. German policy fluctuated constantly and was heavily dependent on changing perceptions of how Germany should make use of Polish national aspirations. By 1917 the difficulties of the war and the successes

of the British blockade had led to severe economic measures in the Congress Kingdom and the other areas under their control, which fell heavily on the Jews of

Warsaw, Lodz, Vilna, and other towns and did much to undermine German popularity in Jewish circles. Confiscations hit the textile industry in L6dZ particularly hard. So too did the arbitrary behaviour of the often antisemitic officers and men entrusted with the confiscations and with levying taxes and implementing forced-labour schemes. At the same time German rule saw a major revival of Jewish political and cultural life. It also led to an improvement in Polish—Jewish relations. The groups that supported the Central Powers had been at odds with the Endecja before the war, and were by and large less antisemitic and less willing to indulge in anti-Jewish demagogy. However, an element of tension did persist, and even those Poles best

disposed towards the Jews were basically unwilling to accept the idea of an autonomous Jewish group preserving its separateness from Polish society, as was

now being demanded by the Folkists, the Zionists, and, in their own way, the Bundists. Zionist claims for Jewish autonomous status were criticized by the assimilationists. In Polish circles they were met with little comprehension and, in addition, were often seen as part of a German plan. Thus, the conservative newspaper Czas commented, on 3 July 1916, ‘We are perfectly well aware that our enemies and opponents are exploiting the Jewish question to break up our national unity.’ On 5 November 1916 the Central Powers proclaimed an ‘independent’ Polish state with undefined boundaries and created a Council of State, seemingly the first

26 Introduction step in creating a Polish government. This was, at first, welcomed both within ‘activist’ political circles and by most Jewish groups. In the course of 1917 and 1918 the essentially fraudulent nature of the German plans became increasingly obvious to Polish opinion and the Germans were massively unpopular with the Poles by this time. Their requisitioning had led to near-famine conditions and their arrogance was widely resented. Pilsudski, who had originally supported the Council of State, moved into open opposition and in July 1917 was arrested and interned in Magdeburg. By late summer 1918 it was clear that the Germans were losing the war and that the leading role in the future Polish state would be played by Pilsudski and Dmowski and their respective followers. In spite of the bitter antagonism between them, they compromised in December 1918 and pledged to work in harmony to establish the new state.

These developments also had considerable resonance in the United States. Paderewski denounced the German declaration as ‘perfidious’, and the Polonian press largely followed his lead. However, as the German ambassador, Joachim von Bernstorff, noted, the Jews of America were not critical of the German action and the German proclamation contained a specific recognition of the Jews as a separate community in Poland. Thus, many American Jews hailed the declaration as the first step

in the improvement of the lot of former Russian Jewry. For much of American Polonia, the leadership of American Jewry had made clear its pro-German leanings. By late 1917 Polonia had been consolidated into a highly effective lobby under

Paderewski’s often capricious command. This lobby was committed to the Allied cause and was linked to the Endecja. Thus, it is scarcely surprising that Paderewski was convinced that the Jews of America would look upon these developments with apprehension, and he tried passionately if unsuccessfully to induce Dmowski to make a conciliatory gesture to American Jewry. Indeed, there was now some concern that American Jews were opposed to the

very idea of Polish independence and would use their influence with the US administration to lobby against Polish aspirations.°° Dmowski wrote to a confidant in the summer of 1917 that the American Jews constituted a ‘huge force’ blocking Poland’s path to independence, which they were resisting at all costs.°’ As a result,

during the summer of 1917 Paderewski held meetings with prominent Jewish leaders in America, including Julius Rosenwald of the AJC, but the results were disappointing.®® In the following year Dmowski arrived in the United States and 65 See e.g. Paderewski to Dmowski and Zamoyski, 24 Aug. 1917, Archiwum Polityczne Ignacego Paderewskiego, i (Warsaw, 1973), 170.

66 J. Daniels, The Wilson Era, 1917-23 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1946), 214 ff. Bernstein’s efforts could not be ignored because of his close ties to Josephus Daniels, who had often acted as a conduit between American Jews and the Wilson campaign during the 1912 and 1916 elections. 67 Dmowski to Wasilewski, 18 July 1917, in M. Kulakowski, Roman Dmowski w Smietle listéw 1 wspomnien, 2 vols. (London, 1968), 11. 69.

68 The Rosenwald—Paderewski meetings are rather mysterious; see Jechalski to Paderewski, 17 Sept. 1918, AAN, Archiwum Paderewskiego, vol. 621, pp. 207—12.

Introduction 27 held an important meeting with the traditional anti-Zionist leadership of the American Jews, including the prominent lawyer Louis Marshall, as well as Zionists such as Justice Louis Brandeis. These discussions produced no result as Dmowsk1

refused any guarantees to attenuate his antisemitism unless the American Jews agreed to support his territorial requests.°? The Jews, Dmowski was convinced, were ‘at the pinnacle of their power’ in America’? and were not opposed to him personally or even the Endecja; in essence this was an attack on Poland which he only incidentally represented.” Polonian suspicions of the Jews in America were strengthened considerably by

the activities of Ludwik M. Hammerling, a Jewish emigrant from Galicia. Hammerling ran a large press network, the American Association of Foreign Language Newspapers, which virtually controlled advertising in approximately 800 periodicals and hence had enormous financial influence over the Polish-

language press. He was widely suspected of both corruption and subversive dealings with the Austrian and German governments. These charges were substantiated in a series of widely publicized public hearings, and in late 1918, after admitting that he had received money from German diplomats, he fled to Europe. To many Poles in America Hammerling epitomized the notion of Jewish collusion with the Central Powers. The great irony was that, although he was born a Jew, Hammerling was probably already a practising Roman Catholic by the time of

his exposure. Moreover, he was personally close to Paderewski and a devout Polish patriot. He is perhaps the most paradoxical of the many figures of the era who oscillated between Polish and Jewish allegiances and often exhibited both simultaneously, to the mistrust of their fellows in both camps. Polonia’s leadership was also apprehensive because of reports they had received

concerning the American preparations for the Paris peace conference. The ‘Inquiry’, the special group created by the Wilson administration to draft provisional recommendations, was badly split between supporters of Poland, led by Harvard’s Robert Howard Lord, and a highly critical faction composed mostly of Russian Jewish immigrants who repeatedly attacked Polish claims. ’” Polish—Jewish accord soon became practical politics as the war drew toa close. A

new coalition government was established in Poland in January 1919 which included both Pilsudski as head of state and Paderewski as prime minister. The KNP was to be enlarged by the addition of ten Pilsudskiite members and was to represent Poland at Versailles, but the dominant figure in the delegation remained Dmowski, with his deeply entrenched view of a Jewish conspiracy against Poland. 69 Dmowski to Zamoyski, 1 Oct. 1918, AAN, KNP, vol. 24, p. 64, microfilm 20750. 70 Dmowski to Paderewski, 2 Sept. 1917, in Kulakowski, Roman Dmowski, i. 83. 71 Zéttowski records a fascinating conversation with Dmowski regarding the latter’s meetings with prominent Jews in America; see A. Zoltowski, Wspomnienia, 11. 305, Biblioteka Narodowa, akc. 7954. 72 See M. B. Biskupski, ‘Re-creating Central Europe: The United States “Inquiry” into the Future of Poland’, /nternational History Review, 12 (1990), 249-79.

28 Introduction The task of representing Jewish interests at the peace conference fell to an uneasy coalition made up of French, British, and American Jewish representatives. The French were most committed to the politics of integration. Jacques Bigart, the

executive secretary of the principal French Jewish organization, the Alliance Israelite Universelle, was wholly in agreement with Eugéne Sée, a senior French Foreign Muinistry official, who argued that “The business of the Conference is to create a sovereign state for Poland, not for the Jews.’” The British delegation was composed of members of both the main AngloJewish representative body, the Board of Deputies of British Jewry, and the more elitist Anglo-Jewish Association, which had established a common body called the Conjoint Committee. Its key member was the veteran Jewish lobbyist Lucien Wolf,

who had made his reputation before the war campaigning for Russian and Romanian Jewry. Though basically integrationist in his politics, he could see the way the situation was developing in eastern Europe and was more prepared than the members of the French delegation to support Jewish civil and political rights in eastern Europe which might involve a degree of cultural and educational autonomy. Like the Alliance, however, Wolf and his associates were unsympathetic to the concept of Jewish ‘national’ rights. The American delegation was an uneasy coalition of the old and the new Jewish politics. Its core was provided by the patrician members of the AJC, with its president, Louis Marshall, at their head. The domination of American Jewry by the AJC had come under attack during the war from the increasingly assertive east European Jews, who now formed the large majority of the community. They rejected the view of the leaders of the AJC that the Jews should be seen solely as a religious community whose political loyalties, and even in some measure their cultural loyalties, belonged unreservedly to the nation-states of their residence and were sympathetic to the idea that the Jews were a ‘national’ group with national demands. They called for a democratically elected American Jewish ‘Congress’ in which their views could be more effectively represented. These elections were eventually held, in the face of considerable opposition from the AJC, in June 1917. More than 300,000 votes were

recorded, the majority going to the Zionists and autonomists. In December 1918 the Congress finally met in Philadelphia and supported both Zionist aspirations in Palestine and Jewish national autonomy in eastern Europe, calling for these positions to be upheld at the forthcoming peace conference.

These disparate groups, which established the Comité des délégations juives, argued strongly for Jewish rights at the conference. Their impact has been disputed—some, notably David Engel and Carole Fink—have argued that it was minimal.’* Certainly the peace conference did agree to impose treaties on Poland 73 M. Levene, War, fews, and the New Europe: The Diplomacy of Lucien Wolf, 1914-1919 (Oxford, 1992), 24.

™ C. Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews and International Minority Protection, 1878-1938 (New York, 2004); D. Engel, ‘Matsav hayehudim bepolin vehadiyunim al

Introduction 29 and a number of other states (Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Turkey, and the Baltic states) establishing the rights of national minorities. The Polish treaty contained twelve articles. The first granted

full civil, religious, and political rights to all citizens of the new Poland and required simply that naturalization be extended to all persons either born or habit-

ually resident in Poland. The Polish government was barred from imposing restrictions upon ‘the free use by any Polish national of any language in private intercourse, in commerce, in religion . . . in publications of any kind’ and ‘adequate facilities’ (i.e. interpreters) were to be provided to members of minorities who testified in their own language before the law courts. In towns or districts with a ‘considerable portion’ of minorities, the treaty obliged the state to establish pri-

mary schools in which non-Polish children would be instructed ‘through the medium of their own language’. Article 10 specified that, wherever Jewish schools

were eligible for state funding, committees of local Jews should themselves be authorized to allocate and distribute those funds. Article 11 exempted Jews from ‘performing any act which constituted a violation of their sabbath’. Nor would the Polish government conduct national elections on the Jewish sabbath. The Allied recognition of the Polish state was made conditional on Polish acceptance of the treaty. Subsequently, the League of Nations would monitor compliance with the treaty.

The minorities clauses of the treaty aroused considerable hostility in Poland, where they were bitterly resented as an infringement of Polish sovereignty and as

providing a lever for German revisionism. Though the Jews were violently attacked as their main instigators, in fact Jewish opinion was divided on the treaty, which was attacked as too provocative by the assimilationists and to a lesser extent

by the Orthodox and some Jewish economic organizations. Nevertheless, the majority of Jewish parties welcomed its conclusion and hoped that it would give them an increased measure of security. Warsaw’s argument was that the treaty meant that Germany, which had ill-treated its Poles for a generation, was not required to undertake any guarantees regarding its Polish minority but that Poland had to make exactly such promises concerning Germans in Poland. This created a hierarchy of states in Europe: those that could be expected to behave in a civilized manner and those that could not. In retrospect the consequences of the treaty were problematic at best and may well have proved injurious to the goal it ostensibly promoted. ”° amanat hamiutim beve’idat hashalom beparis be-1919’, in Proceedings of the Twelfth World Congress of Jewish Studtes (Jerusalem, 2000). 7 See the conclusion of D. Tollet, Histoire des juifs en Pologne du XVI siécle a nos jours (Paris, 1992),

271-2. By comparison Eugene C. Black is less critical of the treaty though ambivalent about its ultimate consequences; see his ‘Squaring a Minorities Triangle: Lucien Wolf, Jewish Nationalists and Polish Nationalists’, in P. Latawski (ed.), The Reconstruction of Poland, 1914-1923 (New York, 1992), 31-2.

30 Introduction Finally, the treaty was yet another occasion for the generation of mutual suspicion. For the Jews, Polish resentment of the minority clauses was motivated by antisemitism tout court. This was, however, a simplistic explanation. Warsaw saw the treaty as placing Poland on a shortlist of states whose sovereignty was compromised by the need to require League of Nations oversight of their internal affairs.

Given Poland’s precarious international situation after 1919, prestige became integral to national security, not just amour-propre. To Warsaw acceptance of the

minorities’ clauses was tantamount to relegation to reduced status in Europe. Hence, the treaty was essentially viewed from the perspective of national security and its specific Jewish component was secondary, a reality which the American Jews understandably either failed to appreciate or rejected. The signing of the Versailles peace treaty did not bring an end to war in the east. A Polish state was now established, but the eastern territories were still an open question. The Endecja favoured extending the borders of Poland only as far east-

wards as they believed was compatible with the Polonization of the native Lithuanian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian peasantry. Pitsudski wanted rather to establish independent Lithuanian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian states that would be

federated with Poland. Poland would obviously be the senior partner in this system, but Pilsudski himself was probably sincere in his expressions of concern for the national aspirations of the peoples in the border area. He came quickly to assume a dominant position in the new Poland, and his policy inevitably led to an armed clash between Poland and Soviet Russia that lasted from the spring of 1919 to the autumn of 1920 and was only brought to an end by Poland’s exhausting victory and the treaty of Riga in March 1921. These years were difficult ones for the Jews of Poland. ‘They were dominated by the struggle to establish Poland’s frontiers, a struggle that had extremely deleterious effects on their position. The new state found the burden of establishing and maintaining a large army a heavy one, and the forced levies and contributions that made this possible fell heavily on the largely urban Jewish community. The Poles showed little understanding of the desire of Jews in ethnically mixed areas such as eastern Galicia and Lithuania to maintain a neutral posture in the national conflicts there. At the same time, the fact that Jews constituted a significant proportion of the Communist leadership both in Russia and in Poland and that a small percentage of the Jews had welcomed the Bolshevik revolution was seized upon as a means of discrediting the post-war revolutionary wave as primarily a Jewish phenomenon. Essentially the Polish and Jewish populations of the Polish lands were differently disposed towards the notion of Polish independence. For the Poles it was an unalloyed good and those who did not instinctively rally to its banner were viewed with suspicion. They did not understand that for Polish Jews the situation was far more complex. Unassimilated into Polish culture before the partitions, they had been exposed to more than a century of integration into the Russian empire and

Introduction 31 Russian culture. They were now being asked by the Poles to support enthusiastically the unknown proposition of a restored Poland that would impose frontiers

across Jewish communities. Additionally, the former eastern borderlands of Poland were a riot of conflicting armies and causes, each representing a radically

different and contradictory approach to borders and politics. Only those Jews completely assimilated into Polish life, and they were a small minority, could share the Poles’ enthusiasm. For the remainder the only reasonable attitude was caution and patience. Under the best of circumstances this would have produced tensions; in the tumult of 1919-21 it resulted in suspicion and violence. Not surprisingly, the end of the war was followed by a series of anti-Jewish outrages. These were partly a result of the privations of the war. The year 1918 had been very difficult in Galicia, with widespread food shortages, and spontaneous popular unrest boiled over and often manifested itself in attacks on Jewish shopkeepers. The most serious problems the Jews faced were in the ethnically mixed east of Poland. Here the towns, such as Vilna and Lviv, were largely Polish, with

substantial Jewish minorities, while the countryside was largely Lithuanian, Belarusian, or Ukrainian. Inevitably Jews were caught up in the conflict that resulted from the extension of Polish power into this region and there was little understanding among Poles of the Jewish desire to remain neutral in the Polish—

Ukrainian and Polish—Lithuanian conflicts or even to take the side of the Lithuanians. In the eyes of many of the Poles fighting in these areas, Jews were | identified with the Bolsheviks. Serious anti-Jewish excesses thus took place as the ill-disciplined and poorly paid troops of General Dowboér-Musnicki and General Haller, strengthened by volunteers from the local population, moved eastwards, driving out Belarusian and Ukrainian nationalists as well as the Bolsheviks. Hence, anti-Jewish violence erupted in both Vilna and Lviv after they came under Polish control. The renewal of conflict with Soviet Russia in the second half of 1919, which culminated in the Polish attempt to dislodge Ukraine from Russian control in April 1920, led to more anti-Jewish outrages. Polish victory in the east was short-lived, and a huge Bolshevik advance soon threatened Warsaw. Russian invasion and the fear of revolution led to heightened antisemitism and to attempts to discredit communism as a Jewish phenomenon. In this atmosphere it is not surprising that the retreat of the Polish troops was accompanied by a spate of antiJewish brutality. Pogroms took place in Minsk-Mazowiecki, Siedlce, Lukow, Wlodawa, and Bialystok, and alleged spies were executed by court martial on the scantiest evidence. In the anti-Jewish violence in the Polish lands between 300 and 500 Jews lost their lives. Reports of what was happening, often exaggerated, partly because of their conflation with the larger-scale violence that accompanied the Russian civil war in which as many as 200,000 Jews may have died, exacerbated Polish—Jewish tensions in the United States.

These tensions reached significant proportions by May 1919, when in New York City ‘hundreds of thousands of demonstrators marched in the streets, and

32 Introduction , thousands more jammed into Madison Square Garden’ to hear perfervid denunciations of Poland and demands for American intervention. A subsequent investigation, led by Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, significantly exonerated the Poles while recognizing that many abuses had taken place. This angered many American

Jews, who had been led to believe that the violence was part of an organized campaign against Polish Jewry. Denunciation of Poland faded. The New York Times was painting Poland in the most lurid colours in the spring of 1919, but had

dramatically modulated its tone by the following year. Nonetheless, the consequences of the events of 1919 were profound and lasting.“ For American Polonia the credence given to reports of pogroms from the eastern theatre of operations was part of a frustrating and incomprehensible reaction of the American public to the events of the Polish—Bolshevik war. ‘The Polish cause

had been genuinely popular in the United States during the latter stages of the First World War, with Paderewski successfully representing it to the public as attractive and worthy. However, the public’s support for European involvement quickly evaporated after 1918 and was replaced by isolationism. As a result Poland’s war with Bolshevik Russia was received with widespread hostility among

both the government and public opinion in America as suggesting dangerous instability in a region they would prefer to ignore. ‘The Poles in America engaged in intensive lobbying to win American support for Poland’s position, but these

efforts were a spectacular failure.”” Factional fighting between adherents of Pitsudski and Paderewski also shattered hopes of raising loans in the United States, a disaster that left lasting bitterness. ”° Reports of pogroms and other outrages no doubt severely hampered efforts to

present the Polish side to the American public in heroic terms, and Polonia regarded the Jews as undermining Poland’s vital interests at a crucial time.’? For both Warsaw and Polonia the anti-Jewish violence was seen essentially as an unfortunate result of a complex and multifaceted war, regrettable but of minor importance in comparison with the overriding issues of national independence and state frontiers. By contrast the American Jews were not only enraged by the reported pogroms—of which many were vastly exaggerated—but feared that this was an 76 N. Pease, ‘“This Troublesome Question”: The United States and the “Polish Pogroms” of 1918-1919’, in M. B. Biskupski (ed.), Ideology, Politics and Diplomacy in East Central Europe (Rochester, NY, 2003). 77 See e.g. M. B. Biskupski, ‘ “Kosciuszko, We Are Here?” American Volunteers for Poland and the Polish—Russian War, 1918—1920’, in S. A. Bleywas and M. B. Biskupski (eds.), Pastor of the Poles: Polish

American Essays (New Britain, Conn., 1982). 78 See T. Radzik, ‘Polonia amerykariska wobec Polskiej Pozyczki Patistwowej w r. 1920’, in Radzik, Spoteczno-ekonomiczne aspekty stosunku polonu amerykanskiej do Polski po I wojnie Swiatowe; (Wroclaw, 1989).

79 The extraordinary depth of Polanian anger at American Jews’ criticism of Poland in 1919—20 is well illustrated by the retrospective account of the prominent journalist and activist Karol Wachtl in his Polonja w Ameryce: Dzteje 1 dorobek (Philadelphia, 1944), 369 ff.

Introduction 33 augury of future Polish treatment of their co-religionists. Jewish criticism of Polish actions was often interpreted by the Poles as reflecting secret support for the Russian side in the war and settled the notion that Polish Jews in America were not reliable. In general the Poles were appalled by what they saw as pro-Russian

sentiments in America, especially characteristic of the political left. This lamentable situation was personified by Dr Franciszek Fronczak. A prominent physician, and health commissioner for Buffalo, Fronczak was also the only American Pole to be a member of Dmowski’s K NP. By coincidence he was visiting Poland in 1919 and sent reports of the outrages back to Washington largely exon-

erating the Poles. When he returned to the United States, he found himself the centre of attacks as an antisemite. Given the enormously heightened sensitivities of the time, both Poles and Jews in America saw themselves as defending their compatriots at a time of historic trial, and neither trust nor goodwill were in large supply.

This also led to a certain amount of intercommunal violence, but as John Radzilowski shows in his chapter on Polish Jewish gangs in Chicago, this was on a much smaller scale than some other inter-ethnic violence in this period. The conclusion to be drawn from this may well be that Polish—Jewish antagonism was

largely a conflict of elite perceptions of policy issues in Europe that had little resonance among the wider community. Radzilowski, to be sure, argues for local causes behind the Polish—Jewish clashes in Chicago and notes significantly that

Irish—Jewish conflicts on a grander scale were occurring at the same time. However, he also allows that 1919 ‘stands out in sharp relief’ in the sad chronicle of Polish—Jewish antagonism in Chicago, and quotes repulsive remarks from the local

press about both groups. It seems incontrovertible that the traumatic events surrounding the rebirth of Poland increased greatly the sensitivities of both communities in regard to inter-ethnic relations. The year 1919 in Chicago was thus a local echo of developments in Europe. The situation did not improve in the period between the world wars, in spite of attempts to mitigate the disputes between the two groups. Polish representatives in the United States were often stunned by the level of animosity they found in the Jewish press, and the Polish diplomat Hipolit Gliwic, himself a Jew, reported to Warsaw that ‘the Jewish press is always hostilely inclined towards Poland . . . reports of Polish—Jewish agreements almost seem to be greeted with disappointment’.®° Attempts to ameliorate the situation were most effective in the period after 1926 when the Pilsudski government made a serious and successful effort to conciliate 80 Quoted in Kapiszewski, ‘Stosunki polsko-zydowskie’, 637. It is depressing to note that in 2005 the Polish consul-general in New York would reminisce that she was ‘shocked’ at the anti-Polish stereotypes she confronted among some in the Jewish community of New York City: ‘I was not prepared .. . for the unequivocally negative connotation of Polishness and the unusually deeply-rooted nature of this stereotype’; see A. Magdziak-Miszewska, ‘Zaktadnicy stereotypow?’, WieZ, 4/558 (Apr. 2005), .

34 Introduction the national minorities, especially with the Jews. However, these efforts were severely undermined by increasing antisemitism after the marshal’s death in May

1935 and by the adoption by the government camp of some of the antisemitic slogans and policies of its erstwhile Endecja opponents. As Poland’s international security deteriorated in the 1930s, so did the democratic nature of its institutions, including fair treatment for minorities. Again the situation in Poland indirectly but adversely affected the relationship between Poles and Jews in the United States, with the radical division between them becoming increasingly hostile. For the bulk of organized Polonia the saviour of Poland had been Paderewski and, as a consequence, Dmowski’s nationalists, with whom Paderewski was perforce linked. Pitsudski, by contrast, was a socialist of dubious religious orthodoxy who was little known to most American Poles. When Poland re-emerged, Pilsudski quickly consolidated power, while Paderewski, after a brief tenure as prime minister, was forced from office and abandoned politics for a bitter exile. Dmowski likewise had only a very short term in office before acting as the moving spirit of nationalist opposition to the Pilsudskiite administration. ‘Though Pitsudski was briefly out of power between 1921 and 1926, either he or his epigones dominated the politics of

the Second Republic. As a result Polonia saw Poland as a country created by Paderewski but controlled by Pilsudski, a situation they found incomprehensible and distasteful.

Warsaw’s representatives in the United States in return regarded Polonia as exceedingly difficult to work with, its major organizations dominated by embittered political opponents. This severely weakened the ability of the Polish government to rally support among American Poles for any initiative, including a wider definition of membership in the Polish nation. After 1918 the Pitsudskuites tried to create the semblance of a new, integrating national cohesion based on civic patriotism and shorn of sectarian or ethnic particularism. This reflected the reality of a multinational and multi-confessional state. ‘To be sure, their efforts were fragmentary and incomplete, and faced ferocious opposition from a powerful nationalist opposition. Nevertheless, they became increasingly determined after 1928, when the tenth anniversary of independence was defined as marking the emergence of a new Poland, albeit still only in its infancy, in which all citizens, regardless of religion or ethnicity, were equal partners. Widespread and enthusiastic Jewish participation in the 11 November Independence Day ceremonies that year made clear that the Jewish community was aware of the implications of these attempts to

create national cohesion, but the changes had no impact on Polonia, which remained defined by a rather simple code of language, ethnicity, and faith. In effect

it retreated into an increasingly isolated intellectual ghetto. This tendency was exacerbated by the virtual end of Polish immigration to the United States after 1924 and the Americanizing pressures of the host society, which looked with suspicion on overly close ties between an immigrant community and its European source. James Pula has correctly argued that the new restrictions on immigration

Introduction 35 were tantamount to the ‘doom’ of a vibrant Polonia.®! Equally, they led to the estrangement of Polonia from Poland. By the 1930s the implications of this division between Poland and Polonia were epitomized by the reaction to the creation of the Swiatowy Zwiagzek Polakéw z Zagranicy (World Alliance of Poles Abroad, Swiatpol). Launched as an initiative by the Polish government to co-ordinate lobbying by Polish immigrant communities

worldwide, Swiatpol was denounced by many prominent leaders of Polonia as Warsaw’s attempt to meddle in Polonian affairs. They rejected membership for their community, arguing that Poles in America were no longer really Poles but Americans attached to Poland only by ties of sentiment. This disagreement revealed the fundamental split in Polonia implicit since the late nineteenth century. Many in Polonia preferred to focus their attention on the immediate needs of the Polish community

and regarded involvement with Polish issues as a distraction. Here we have in essence the original ZPRK-—ZNP split.°? The events of the First World War only

exacerbated these divisions, and after 1918 supporters of the Warsaw regime stressed Polonia’s close support for Poland while their rightist opponents, rankled by the failure of the Paderewski-Dmowski faction to maintain power, resented any close involvement with Warsaw. Swiatpol was an opportunity for opponents of the Warsaw regime to make loud declarations of their American patriotism and to ostracize their opponents in Polonia as émigrés with divided loyalties. The result was the end of Polonia as a ‘Fourth Partition of Poland’ (along with the Austrian, Prussian, and Russian partitions), as it had fancied itself before 1914, and the emergence of Polonia and Poland as two entities sharing a common heritage whose components were frequently the subject of disagreement and mistrust.®°°

With Swiatpol crippled from birth, and both the KON and the WN having quietly collapsed in the 1920s, Polonia was without any unifying agency. This explains the emergence in 1936 of the Rada Polonti (Polish Council, RP), which represented an effort to establish a central quasi-political body. However, the RP was not to be a significant creation. It reflected both the deep divisions within Polonia and the impossibility of galvanizing mass Polonian participation without a dire threat to Poland: ‘the emigration for the emigration’ launched in opposition to Swiatpol was a motto incapable of eliciting much passion; only war would be capable of prompting renewed mass political action by Polonia. 81 J. S. Pula, ‘A Branch Cut Off from its Trunk’: The Effects of Immigration Restriction on American Polonia’, Polish American Studies, 61/1 (Spring, 2004), 44. 82 Only the most loyal Pilsudskiites supported Swiatpol enthusiastically. The Endecja faction was at

best lukewarm and many were opposed outright, launching the motto ‘the emigration for the emigration’ in opposition to the notion of overt ties with Poland. See C. Lusitiski, /7 Rzeczpospolita a Polonia, 1922~—1939 (Warsaw, 1998), 80 ff.

83 Pula argues that, absent the ‘revitalizing flow of polskosé [Polishness]’ by the 1930s, ‘Polonia was no longer Polish’ (see Pula, ‘A Branch Cut Off’, 50). This judgement tends to underestimate the disinclination of many in Polonia to identify with a Poland they regarded as politically alien, a phenomenon apparent by 1919.

36 Introduction Whereas the Polonization of Poland’s Jewry between the two world wars was

quite rapid, it did not have any resonance in Polonia, where there were no grounds for such a change. Jews in Polish government service who went to the United States were often viewed with incomprehension by both the Polish and the Jewish communities in America. By the eve of the Second World War the Polish Jews and the Polish Christians in the United States lived in two com-

pletely separate worlds with nothing save mutual mistrust and conflicting versions of the past to link them. The inter-war period also saw significant developments within the leading American Jewish organizations. The AJC continued its lobbying activities after 1918. During the 1920s its attention became focused on the United States and on the increasing antisemitism there, which manifested itself in the adoption of the severe restrictions on east European immigration in 1921 and 1924. The AJC

campaigned energetically against the equation of Jew and Bolshevik which emerged in the ‘Red Scare’ of 1919-20 and was propagated by Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent, which took as its evidence the tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Louis Marshall, as president of the AJC, formulated the terms

for Ford’s retraction of his endorsement of the Protocols in 1927, in which he apologized for ‘resurrecting exploded fictions, for giving currency to . . . gross forgeries’.°*

Anti-Jewish violence also intensified, the product of the actions both of German Americans sympathetic to Nazism and of Catholic supporters of Father Coughlin with his inflammatory antisemitic radio broadcasts. The rise of Nazism led the AJC to intensify its activities in two directions. First, it applied what pressure it could on the Roosevelt administration, the Vatican, the League of Nations,

and even individual German officials in order to ameliorate the situation of German Jewry; and following its relative lack of success in this area, it also began to support plans for the rescue and emigration of German Jews. The American Jewish Congress continued to challenge the position of the AJC, although the rise of antisemitism led to much greater co-operation between all Jewish organizations.®° Although it had dissolved itself in 1920, the Congress soon re-formed and under Rabbi Stephen Wise, who was the chairman from 1923 until his death in 1949, attempted to defend Jewish interests in what it regarded as a

more forthright and effective manner than the AJC had done. It strongly supported the Zionist endeavour and campaigned against antisemitism in the United States. Wise, like a number of other Reform Jewish leaders such as Emanuel Gamoran and Jane Evans, also pioneered changes that made the Reform movement much more attractive to Jews from eastern Europe. In the Columbus programme of 1937 the Reform movement ‘affirm[ed] the obligation of all Jewry to 84 Sarna, American Judaism, 217. 85 On the American Jewish Congress, see M. Frommer, “The American Jewish Congress: A History 1914-1950’, Ph.D. thesis (Ohio State University, 1978).

Introduction 37 aid in [the] upbuilding [of Palestine] as a Jewish homeland’.®° In the 1930s the Congress emerged as a leading force in the anti-Nazi movement and in efforts to aid the victims of Nazism. With the Jewish Labor Committee it organized the Joint Boycott Council directed against German goods and services. Lobbying for the entry of Jews into the United States was partially successful in spite of strong State Department hostility, and in the 1930s more than 100,000 Jews arrived, in spite of the immigration restrictions. Both the Congress and the AJC remained concerned with the situation in Poland, but they were much more preoccupied

with the strength of antisemitism in the United States and with the rise and consolidation of Nazism in Germany. One Jewish organization that saw its role as improving Polish—Jewish relations

both in Poland and in the United States was the Federation of Polish Jews in America, whose history is described in the chapter by Andrzej Kapiszewski. Originally established in 1908 in New York by Dr Henry Moskowitz as the Federation of Polish Hebrews, it was created out of a feeling that the existing Jewish organizations did not adequately represent the interests of east European Jews. In 1924 it was completely reorganized by Benjamin Winter, a wealthy New York real-estate agent, and Zelig Tygel, a Zionist journalist who had recently emigrated from Poland. It now expanded its activities as an umbrella organization for over 100 Jewish landsmanshaftn representing about 40,000 Jews and set itself the goal of uniting ‘all the Polish Jews in America’ and claiming that it should be ‘the only body to speak in their name’.®” It set out its goals in more detail in September 1930 when it changed its name to the American Federation of Polish Jews: To give aid and relief to Jews in Poland, and to give counsel and material assistance to needy Jewish refugees of Polish origin in the United States and other countries.

To assist Jewish emigrés of Polish origin to a better understanding and appreciation of American ideals and institutions, and to assist them in preparing themselves to become American citizens.

To facilitate the exchange of information between Jewish residents and Jewish communities in Poland with their relatives resident in the United States. To foster a better understanding and deeper appreciation of the cultural, moral and spiritual attainments of the Jews in Poland and of the contribution which Jews of Polish origin have made to American democracy and to progress in other countries in various fields of cultural endeavor.

One of its main goals was the improvement of relations between Poles and Jews

in the United States. In April 1926 the Federation invited Jan Ciechanowski, Poland’s envoy to the United States, to its twentieth-anniversary celebration. In 86 Tbid. 254.

87 The closest parallel in Polonia would be the Chicago-based association of Malopolska clubs; see D. Praszatowicz, K. A. Makowski, and A. A. Zieba, Mechanizmy zamorskich migracy lanicuchowych w XIX wieku: Polacy, Niemcy, Zydzi, Rusin. Zarys problemu (Krakow, 2004), 42.

38 Introduction 1929 Dr Joseph Tenenbaum of the Federation proposed the formation of a good-

will committee in the United States composed of Polish Jews and Polish Americans. This attempt to improve relations had some initial success but foundered because of the growing antisemitism in the early 1930s, which led the

Federation to withdraw its members in January 1932. In that same year the Federation, along with the AJC and B’nai B’rith, several times sent strong protests to the Polish authorities against attacks on Jewish students in Poland. At the same

time the Federation praised the attitude taken by the Polish government to help Polish Jews in Germany, but the worsening of the situation of Jews in Poland after the death of Pilsudski put paid to any hope that the Federation could play a positive role in Polish—Jewish relations in the United States. It did send a cable to the Polish ambassador on 29 August 1939, stating: should . . . Poland be attacked we pledge ourselves to help in whatever way possible. Being American citizens, we are aware that all Jews of Polish origin are deeply concerned that Polish independence be maintained. You may rest assured they will support the just cause of the Polish Republic, which is upheld by the entire democratic, enlightened world, and many of them will be ready to give not only financial and moral support, but also their very lives.°°

There were also individuals who tried to re-create an earlier model of Polish—Jewish coexistence. One almost forgotten advocate of Polish—Jewish rec-

onciliation and of an inclusive version of Polishness in the United States was Jakub Vorzimmer, an assimilated Polish Jew who ran a book importing company in New York. Vorzimmer, a leftist and devotee of Pifsudski, was instrumental in

arranging links between Austrian Poles like Hausner and the Pilsudski camp within Polonia. He was a vital element in the effort to create an international network of Pilsudskiite sympathizers in the early years of the First World War. Another was Vorzimmer’s fellow Pilsudskitte Czestaw Lukaszkiewicz, a leftist who went to the United States in 1914 to work for the KON and returned to Poland for a time in the 1930s to serve as an official in the Pitsudski govern-

ment. During the war he was hounded by the Polanian right for his ties to Pitsudski and the Central Powers. His work is described in Karen Majewski’s chapter. Lukaszkiewicz was a sharp satirist, and his novel Dziwna dztewczyna

(‘The Strange Girl’), set in the Polish American enclave of Hamtramck, Michigan, attacks the worst of the inter-war period’s antisemitic jingoism. A scathing denunciation of businessmen and politicians who exploited Polonia’s sincere desire to help the fledgling nation, his novel appeared in 1923, when scores of joint-venture companies and fundraising institutions were competing for the patriotic Polanian’s dollar in the name of the Polish cause. A similar inclusive but somewhat more naive view of Polish—Jewish relations 1s to be found in the anonymous novel Przygody polskiego detektywa (‘Adventures of a 88 Winter to Potocki, 29 Aug. 1939, Polish Fews (1940), 44.

Introduction 39 Polish Detective’), serialized in Buffalo’s Dzienntk dla Wszystkich in 1928-9. The

novel focuses on hopes for Poland embodied in the marriage of Rebekah, the Jewish American daughter of a grocer, and Andrzej, a Polish American workingclass Catholic. Rebekah and Andrzej return to Poland for good, along with their parents as well as Andrzej’s sister and her Polonized American businessman husband. Majewski comments that ‘Rebekah and Andrzej’s union reflects an increasing assimilationist tendency in Poland between the wars: Rebekah converts, at her own insistence, to Catholicism. But it also models a Polishness that is equally the birthright of Christians and Jews, arguing that all have a place together in the new Poland, and that indeed they are members of a common family.’ A broad interpretation of who 1s a Pole is also to be found in the work of the only individual of Jewish origin among the Polish-language writers in the United States, Peter Yolles. (He was also the editor, from 1934 to 1936, of New York’s influential Polish weekly Nowy Swiat.) In his novel Trzy matki (“Three Mothers’, serialized in 1930) he describes the internal journey of a young lawyer whose love affair with the family’s housemaid forces him to confront the rigidity of the Polish social order. The example and assistance of his Jewish employer, who is happily married to a much younger woman also beneath his social station, finally inspires the young man to reject class and family expectations and to create his own destiny in America with his patron’s assistance. That the Second World War was a particularly tragic period for both Poles and Jews needs no rehearsing here. A few attempts were made to establish a common

front against the Nazis and to a lesser extent the Soviets by Polish and Jewish organizations. However, they were mostly located in France and particularly in England rather than in the United States. Indeed, the war probably exacerbated tensions between the two communities at least at the higher levels, though local relations remain to be explored in greater depth and suggest more variation.®9 Whereas both Poles and Jews in the United States were anguished by their losses at

German hands, their differing attitudes towards the Soviets tended to create mutual suspicion. For the Jews, Soviet victory in the war meant overwhelmingly the defeat of the Nazis and was hence deserving of all support. For most Poles, save on the radical left, Soviet victory meant the threat of new occupation and the spread of communist influence, and hence was a mixed blessing. These views were difficult to reconcile.

After the Polish defeat in 1939 the forces that had opposed the post-Pilsudski regime had succeeded in staging a coup which had brought to power a government

under the moderate centrist and pro-Western politician General Wladyslaw Sikorski. This government established itself in Angers, where it was recognized by the Western Allies as the legal government of Poland. After the fall of France it reconstituted itself in London. It was a coalition of the main forces from right and 89 Kapiszewski, ‘Stosunki polsko-zydowskie’, 6.469 ff.

40 Introduction left that had opposed the Pilsudski regime, and also included a number of the less discredited followers of the marshal. It was committed to the establishment of a

liberal and constitutionalist regime in liberated Poland, as was made clear in Sikorski’s numerous public pronouncements. It also held firmly to the view that, although some frontier modifications should be made in Poland’s favour in the

west, in the east the frontier set by the treaty of Riga in 1921 should be reestablished. This, of course, would have meant retaining areas which, although they included a substantial Polish (and Jewish) population, were primarily inhabited by Ukrainians and Belarusians. In the period before the adoption of the genocide against the Jews by the Nazis,

the Polish government, which was under strong pressure both from the Allied governments and from Western Jewry, on 5 November 1940 issued a declaration guaranteeing the full equality of Jews in liberated Poland.?° The key paragraph reads: The Jews, as Polish citizens, shall in liberated Poland be equal with the Polish community, in duties and in rights. They will be able to develop their culture, religion and folkways without hindrance. Not only the laws of the state, but even more the common sufferings in this most tragic time of affliction will serve to guarantee this [pledge].°*

Its adoption aroused considerable opposition in the Rada Narodowa (the exile parliament), and its implementation was regarded as conditional on the Jews supporting the Polish war effort, including the reimposition of the Riga frontier. Under these conditions, not surprisingly, the declaration did not achieve its goal of a genuine improvement in Polish—Jewish relations. Yet the actual adoption of the declaration was a significant break with the policies of the Polish government after

1935. More important than the strict conditionality were the mutual suspicions created by the deterioration of the position of Jews in Poland in the 1930s. Neither side was able to rise to the very difficult moment, and the declaration was not followed by a concerted propaganda effort by the Polish government in occupied Poland to stress ‘the common sufferings in this most tragic time of affliction’. No pressure was brought to bear on the underground structures, whether political or military, to include Jewish groups in their activities. Very little was done to educate

Polish opinion on the dangers of Nazi antisemitism. Indeed, the reaction to the declaration in the occupied country was not calculated to induce the government to take bold steps to change attitudes towards the Jews. Nonetheless, the Polish government and its representatives undertook a number of initiatives to aid Jews which should not be forgotten and deserve fuller elaboration. Among these was the

little-known effort of the Polish consul in Lisbon to facilitate the settlement of 90 For these and subsequent developments, see D. Engel, In the Shadow of Auschwitz: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1939-1942 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1987); id., Facing a Holocaust: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the fews, 1943-45 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1993). 91 Engel, In the Shadow of Auschwitz, 80.

Introduction 41 a number of Polish Jews in Jamaica, described in the chapter by Tomasz Potworowski. In his chapter in this volume David Engel introduces a set of documents of the

Polish government-in-exile describing the attempt of some Jewish leaders to explore the possibility of forming a coalition with Polish immigrant organizations

in the West, especially in the United States. The belief that Polish American organizations could influence American opinion in favour of entry into the war meant that the government-in-exile paid considerable attention to them. Hence, as Engel argues, some Jews reasoned, ‘if those organizations could be persuaded to put in a good word with the Polish government for Jewish political demands, the government might afford those demands greater consideration than they would otherwise receive’. This was the view of the group of emigré Polish Jews who had fled to the United States at the beginning of the war who coalesced around a special Committee on Polish Jewry established by the World Jewish Congress in late 1939.?2 On 6 September 1940 the committee’s chairman, Arieh Tartakower—who was well known for his sociological studies of the Jewish world and a key member of the Polish labour Zionist party Hitahdut, and who was well established in the World Jewish Congress—wrote to Ignacy Schwarzbart, a veteran Zionist leader from Krakow who represented Jewish interests in the Polish Rada Narodowa in London, that if American Polonia would support certain fundamental principles

concerning the status of Jews in post-war Poland, ‘this could have extremely serious, even decisive importance’ for the government-in-exile’s attitude to this matter. He informed Schwarzbart that his committee was ‘engaged at present in finalizing negotiations with representatives of the local Polonia concerning the legal status of Polish Jewry’, and indicated that his goal was to achieve a joint declaration by spokesmen for both parties endorsing the basic principles on which it hoped the government-in-exile would base its Jewish policy.

In the event, although the representatives of the Polish government-in-exile were in favour of this initiative, it was opposed by the spokesmen of Polonia, and

in particular by Franciszek Swietlik, dean of the School of Law at Marquette University in Milwaukee. Swietlik’s hostility to such a meeting has been variously explained: most important was probably the fact that he was a strong opponent of Swiatpol and hence of Polonia intervening in Polish politics, though hostility to the Jews cannot be ruled out. As a result, no serious contacts between Polish Jewish leaders and American Polonia ensued—another of the many lost opportunities of the Second World War. The fundamental split in Polanian ranks reappeared during the Second World War in a new guise. Sikorski was the darling of the political right in Polonia, not so ~much because of his politics, which were essentially centrist, but because of his

perfervid persecution of the Pilsudskiites after 1939. Furthermore, he had long 92 On the establishment of this committee, see A. Tartakower, ‘Hape’ilut hamedinit lema’an yehudei polin al ademat amerikah bemilhemet ha’olam hasheniyah’, Ga/-Ed, 6 (1982), 169-70.

42 Introduction been associated with Polonia’s hero Paderewski, and the two had worked together in the shadowy Front Morges as a kind of Polish opposition faction in exile in the 19308. Sikorski, whose vanity was Olympian, was intent upon rooting out the Pitsudski cult within Polish politics, and especially within the army, where it was deeply entrenched. Thus, for many reasons Sikorski was the belated and avenging triumph for the Polonian right. He was much more popular in Polonia than any Polish figure since Paderewski.

This resulted in a new organizational division of Polonia with the Pilsudskutes forming a minority faction based in New York City—reflecting the traditional geographical strength of their following and organized as the Komitet

Narodowy Amerykanow Polskiego Pochodzenia (National Committee of Americans of Polish Descent, KNAPP).?° There is a direct link between Polonia’s

rejection of Swiatpol and the inertness of the Rada after 1939. Understandably critical of the Rada for having undertaken no serious political action on Poland’s behalf,°* the founders of KNAPP urged Polonia to rise above the domestic preoccupation implicit in ‘the emigration for the emigration’ and again look to the

plight of the fatherland. Like its spiritual ancestor the KON, KNAPP was dominated by émigrés and focused principally on European issues. By contrast, the major Chicago-based Polonia organizations built upon the Rada Polonii and created the Polish American Congress (Kongres Polonii Amerykanskiej, PAC) ina series of steps between 1942 and 1944, superseding a number of essentially relief organizations created earlier in the war. The latter camp was overwhelmingly populated by Americans of Polish descent with increasingly attenuated ties to Poland, the same people who had rejected Swiatpol a few years before. This split does much to explain the rather ineffective lobbying effort of Polonia during the Second World War. To be sure the geopolitical weakness of Poland probably doomed any efforts on its behalf. However, the fact that the majority of Polonia was organized into a faction that had championed domestic over Polish concerns, and began with the assumption that the pre-1939 Warsaw regime was to be rejected, undercut even the weak basis for their action. As for the Pilsudskiites, they were little more than a group of discredited and distrusted émigrés who played the role of a Cassandra in their warnings about co-operation with the Soviet Union. Under these circumstances, the influence of American Polonia on the government-in-exile was minimal. This government was itself in increasing difficulties, and by the time the Nazis embarked upon their genocide of European Jewry in the summer of 1941, the Polish strategic position had deteriorated significantly. The Polish—Soviet rapprochement of July 1941 did not prove lasting, and disputes over °8 The only history of this organization remains the rather partisan account by a loyalist, W. Jedrzejewicz, Polonia amerykarska w polityce polskiej: Historia Komitetu Narodowego Amerykanéw

Polsktego Pochodzenta (New York, 1954). . 94 See A. D. Jaroszynska-Kirchmann, ‘Displaced Persons, Emigrés, Refugees, and Other Polish Immigrants’, in Bukowczyk (ed.), Polish Americans, 156.

Introduction 43 the Polish eastern frontier, the amnesty for Poles imprisoned by the Soviets, and the formation of a Polish army in the Soviet Union soon soured relations. In early 1942 the Soviets gave permission to Polish communists in the USSR to re-form the Polish Communist Party, dissolved on Stalin’s orders in 1938. The new party, called the Polska Partia Robotnicza (Polish Workers’ Party, PPR), was intended

both as a means of putting pressure on the London government to be more amenable and also as the nucleus of a pro-Soviet government in Poland, should an

accommodation with Sikorski prove impossible. The PPR pursued a ‘popular front’ policy in occupied Poland, but soon found itself in bitter conflict with the underground forces linked with the London government. It also established an underground military formation, first called the Gwardia Ludowa (People’s Guard) and then the Armia Ludowa (People’s Army). In the summer of 1942, after a series of further conflicts, the Polish army formed in the USSR left for the Middle East, and in April 1942, using as a pretext the claim that the Poles were accusing the Soviets of being responsible for the murder of 4,000 Polish officers found by the Nazis at Katyn in Belarus (they had indeed been murdered by the Soviets), Stalin broke off relations with the Polish government in London. Efforts

by the Western Allies to heal the breach failed, especially after the Tehran Conference in December 1943. The Soviets thus proceeded unilaterally to declare

the Curzon line—essentially the Ribbentrop—Molotov line traced in the Nazi—Soviet secret accord of August 1939—as the eastern frontier of Poland and incorporated into the Soviet Union the areas east of it. In July 1944 they established what was in effect a Polish provisional government in Lublin, the first large town taken west of the Curzon line. These developments preoccupied the government in London and dictated the

strategy of the underground it controlled. ‘The communist-controlled forces, which were quite weak, advocated an immediate confrontation with the Nazi occupiers, both to take the pressure off the Soviet Union and in order to radicalize the

situation in Poland by courting savage German reprisals. The Armia Krajowa (Home Army) wanted to avoid a major confrontation, partly to spare the civilian population, but principally because it wanted to gather its strength until the decisive moment when German power was collapsing. Its aim was to use this moment

to take power in Poland and then confront the Soviets with the alternatives of negotiating with the London government and its forces in Poland or crushing them in the eyes of the world. This was a risky strategy and, of course, it failed disastrously and was followed by the Sovietization of Poland. It was dictated by the desperate strategic position of the country and by the realization on the part of the London Poles that they had little chance of returning to Poland. As a result, when the Jews of Poland were being murdered en masse, the minds of the Polish politi-

cians in London and in the underground in Poland were firmly concentrated on what was to them the central issue of how to regain the independence of their country. On 24 February 1942 the government implicitly reaffirmed its

44 Introduction commitment to Jewish equality. Poland, it asserted, would in future be ‘a democratic and republican state’ in which ‘the rights and liberties of all loyal citizens, regardless of national and religious differences’ would be guaranteed. ‘The two Jewish representatives on the Rada Narodowa were not entirely satisfied with this reassurance, alarmed as they were by the return of the Endecja to the government and by the strength of antisemitic groups in the underground state 1n Poland. The government began to receive information about the genocide of the Jews in the summer of 1942. The slowness of its reaction seems to have been less the result of its unwillingness to take up Jewish issues, and more the consequence of problems of communication and the difficulty of internalizing the appalling implications of what was happening, a problem that has been extensively treated by Yehuda Bauer. By October the government understood clearly what was taking place and made the news public in a protest meeting it organized at the Albert Hall on 29 October, where Polish, Jewish, and British figures all spoke and the chair was taken by the archbishop of Canterbury. General Sikorski, in his address, ‘assured Polish Jews that on an equal footing with all Polish citizens, they [would] benefit fully from the victory of the Allies’.°° The government set out its position in a declaration on 27 November in which it denounced the murder of the Jews and argued ‘that the accelerated pace of murder which today 1s taking place in relation to the Fews, will tomorrow affect the remainder of those lef? .°°

This declaration was forceful and impressive, but it was again not followed by much beyond attempts to put pressure on the Western Allies. The government may also have been unwilling to press the underground authorities on a matter on which it knew there was divided counsel in Poland. Indeed, it now seems clear that the British government was reluctant to credit Polish reports about German extermination of the Jews. Pressing the Jewish issue with London merely damaged further the government-in-exile’s weak position.?’ For the two main American Jewish organizations, the AJC and the American Jewish Congress, the most important goal from the outbreak of war in September 1939 was to rescue as many Jews as they could. They hesitated to agitate strongly on behalf of Jews abroad for fear that this would embarrass President Roosevelt, in whom a number of them, most notably Rabbi Stephen Wise, had boundless faith. Until the end of 1941 their preoccupation was with facilitating what they took to be his desire to bring America into the war, and after that they feared that too strident advocacy would work to the advantage of those who saw the conflict as a

% Deziennik Polski, 30 Oct. 1942. 96 Deziennik Polski, 28 Nov. 1942. 97 William Cavendish-Bentinck, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, thought the Poles were ‘exaggerating the German atrocities’. The Foreign Office, as late as August 1943, discounted the very idea of German gas chambers being in use. The Polish envoy Jan Karski was not allowed to speak to Churchill because Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary, feared upsetting the prime minister with tales of the annihilation of Jews. Reports that mentioned this were edited before Churchill read them.

See M. Evans, ‘Why British Intelligence Refused to Believe All Reports of the Mass Murder of Poland’s Jews’, The Times, 6 June 2005.

Introduction 45 ‘Jewish war’. They were very conscious of the strength of antisemitism in the United States. In five polls between March 1938 and April 1940 some 60 per cent of those responding thought that Jews had objectionable qualities. ‘Thus, in 1938, 20 per cent wanted to ‘drive the Jews out of the United States’. In 1939, 31.9 per cent thought Jews had excessive power in the business world and that ‘something should be done about this’; 10.1 per cent thought Jews should be deported. In 1940—I1, 17 to 20 per cent of the population saw the Jews as a menace to the United

States. They were believed to be more of a threat than the Germans and far more dangerous than Catholics or blacks. In ten surveys between 1938 and 1941, 12 to 15 per cent were ready to support a general antisemitic campaign. An additional 20

per cent were sympathetic to such a policy and 30 per cent opposed it. The remainder did not much care either way. Antisemitism in America actually increased during the war and started to decline only at the end of it.?° Upon learning of the genocide, the AJC with other American organizations

staged protest meetings and appealed vainly for concrete assistance from the Bermuda Conference on Refugees in April 1943. It also co-operated in the efforts

of the War Refugee Board. Simultaneously, it attempted to reverse the rise in organized antisemitism in America. A special committee organized a comprehensive educational campaign to counteract hate propaganda. One aspect of this was to present antisemitism as a threat to democracy and to expose the links between the antisemites and the Nazi regime. The AJC, along with other Jewish bodies, also

supported the development of interfaith associations, most notably what later became the National Conference of Christians and Jews. It also became more sym-

pathetic to Zionism, although it opposed the call for Jewish statehood in the Biltmore programme of 1942. The American Jewish Congress pursued similar goals, although it was much more sympathetic to Zionism, which was now gaining support among American Jewry. Both organizations, like American Jewry as a whole, were deeply marked by the tragic experience of the war and aware of the heavy responsibilities that now lay with American Jewry. According to the American Jewish Yearbook for 1941, ‘American Jews are realizing that they have been spared for a sacred task—to preserve Judaism and its cultural values.’?? Neither for the AJC nor for the Congress was the situation in Poland a central issue. Polemics about the stance of the Polish

government in London or Polish society were rather a feature of the post-war period. Certainly what emerges from Daniel Stone’s study of the Polish and Jewish press in Winnipeg (unfortunately the only chapter dealing with Canada in this volume, which we had hoped would be more truly North American) is that both Poles and Jews in that city did have a strong sense of the appalling tragedy of the Second World War and of the common fate of Poles and Jews in the face of Nazi barbarism. %8 For these figures, see C. H. Stember et al., Jems in the Mind of America (New York, 1966), 53-5, 84-5, 123-4, 127-33, 208-10, and Sarna, American Judaism, 261. 99 Sarna, American Judaism, 271.

46 Introduction Very few Polish Jews survived the war. According to the records of the Centralny Komitet Zydéw w Polsce (Central Committee of Jews in Poland), the principal Jewish body in post-war Poland, 74,000 people had registered by June 1945. Of these, 5,500 had returned from concentration camps in Germany, 13,000 had served in the pro-communist Polish army, established in the USSR after the withdrawal of the Anders Army, about 30,000 had made their way back from the Soviet Union, and 10,000 had been freed from concentration camps in Poland. Another 100,000 to 150,000 remained in the Soviet Union, some of whom were repatriated after 1955./°° At its height the community never numbered more than 270,000, and it was soon depleted by the panic emigration that followed the Kielce

pogrom and the further emigration waves of 1955-6 and 1968. Today the membership of the two main Jewish organizations (religious and cultural) is below 5,000. The number of those who have some connection with the Jewish world has been estimated between 30,000 and 60,000. Between 1940 and 1953

almost 180,000 people born in Poland were allowed to settle in the United States. Of these slightly less than a fifth were Jewish. With a few exceptions they followed the established pattern of Jews and Christians being resettled by different agencies and dividing into different communities. This perpetuated

and accentuated the separateness of the two groups both originally from Poland.'°! Today what divides Poles and Jews, whether in Poland or in North America, 1s primarily their different understanding of their former coexistence on the Polish land. These conflicts have centred on the Second World War, when, in the eyes of many Jews, the Poles as a collective abandoned them in their hour of need, if they did not actually assist the Nazis in carrying out their genocide of the Jewish people in Europe. On the Polish side there is a widespread belief that Jews did not under-

stand the difficult conditions of the Nazi and Soviet occupations of Poland and failed to recognize either the limited possibilities available to Poles to assist Jews or the suffering they themselves endured. These conflicts have often been extremely bitter, particularly since the 1960s, when the Holocaust became a central element in American Jewish identity and began to be seen by the wider American public as

the symbol of absolute evil in the twentieth century. For Polish Americans the attention given to the Holocaust is often regarded as unfairly damaging to the Polish image in America. The extent of Polish suffering during the war 1s little known in the West, which tends to equate Nazi atrocities exclusively with the destruction of the Jews. Moreover, the recent attention given to episodes of Polish collaboration with Nazi extermination efforts—the Jedwabne issue has received enormous recent attention—is seen by many Poles as undercutting further their 100 J, Adelson, ‘W Polsce zwanej Ludowa’, in J. Tomaszewski (ed.), Najnowsze dzieje Zydiw w Polsce (Warsaw, 1993), 388-9. 101 A.D, Jaroszynska-Kirchmann, The Exile Mission: Polish Post-War Diaspora in the United States,

1939-1956, The Fiedorczyk Lecture, 2002 (New Britain, Conn., 201), 9.

Introduction 47 claim to sympathy as victims.'°* There is also a deeper level to the conflict. American Jews have been the most fervent exponents of the idea that America has been a haven for the ‘huddled masses yearning to breathe free’—it was, after all, a Jewish poet, Emma Lazarus, who coined this phrase. They were convinced that as a result of American generosity they had escaped an oppressive Old World, which led them not only to magnify the difficulties they had experienced there, but to equate them with an ‘Old World mentality’ which they believed was still held by many Europeans, including the Poles, who failed to acknowledge ‘freedom’ as a fundamental human value. This was very different from how most Poles in the New World saw their mother country. Different aspects of this conflict are examined by a number of our contributors. Robert Cherry attempts to quantify Polish and Jewish attitudes to a number of key

aspects of our understanding of the Holocaust. Although his findings suggest grounds for an optimistic evolution of stereotypical views in both communities, his most important finding discloses that ‘the Polish American community has been

correct in its complaints about the anti-Polish bias found among non-Polish teachers of Holocaust-related courses’. This finding is all the more important because ‘the impact of the views of Polish academics and Jewish faculty members

is unequal’: the widely disseminated views of the latter are ‘often accepted uncritically’, while the Polish perspective has a small audience and is little noted outside Polish circles. This is a bold conclusion which does much to explain the frustration in Polanian ranks in any discussion of the Second World War. Cherry’s conclusion may serve as a preamble to Danusha Goska’s provocative and wide-ranging discussion of the foul image of the Poles in American culture, especially in film, and the associated question of ‘why Jews might focus rage and disgust on Poles rather than on German Nazis’ in discussing the Holocaust. Her

conclusion is that a more generous Jewish understanding of the Poles’ plight during the war might have the consequence of imperilling one of the formative elements of contemporary identity: some Jews, in response to their own identity crisis, ‘insist on preserving victim status as an essence of Judaism. If it becomes more widely known that Poles were also victims of the Holocaust rather than its perpetrators, a Jewish identity based on victim status is threatened.’ There is probably not a clause in this passage that cannot be controverted, yet

it raises fascinating questions about how the Holocaust has distorted the very structure of Polish—Jewish mutual perceptions. Moreover, even if we posit the Holocaust as the central formative element in contemporary Polish—Jewish mutual perception, this relationship far pre-dates the events of the war. Indeed, virtually all of the hostile remarks in the canon of disdain and suspicion each side retains regarding the other can be found in polemics that date to long before 1939.

, 102 Magdziak-Miszewska, ‘Zakladnicy stereotypow?’, 2.

48 Introduction Jonathan Krasner investigates how the stereotype of the crude Polish peasant brought from Poland to America by Jewish immigrants has made its way into Jewish history textbooks and discourse about the Holocaust. His chapter is an important study, which makes clear that Jewish textbooks in America in the years before the First World War relentlessly portrayed the Poles in a negative light and depicted Polish history in lurid colours. Peasants, who made up the great bulk of Polish immigrants to America, were ‘dehumanized’, often described as bestial: ‘epithets like “refuse”, “pestilence”, “wild”, “ruthless”, “bloody”, and “savage” were applied’. (Here a rather more hostile Jewish attitude towards the Polish immigrant is described than that given by Morawska in her chapter.) This situation only started to change a few years before the Second World War, but regrettably ‘tropes familiar from the pre-1920 textbooks’ recrudesced after the war. The

contemporary situation is problematic. Krasner’s study is a contribution to explaining the disposition of the American Jews towards Poland in the crucial years after 1918. Certainly the negative image of the Jews often propagated in Polonia did much to impede the nourishment of a tolerant and generous attitude. Similarly, this examination of textbooks suggests that the Jewish community was not being urged to greater goodwill towards the Poles. Anna Petrov Ronell shows how eastern Europe, and above all the world of the

shtetl, still haunts the American Jewish imagination. This raises the question of what options are open to both Jews and Poles in dealing with a landscape ‘poor in

Jews, but rich in Jewish ruins’. Preservation and cultivation of these remnants risks the grotesquerie of turning an annihilated community into a tourist business; ignoring them distorts history by allowing the Holocaust retroactively to edit the past. There is no solution to this problem save time and goodwill. Suggestions cited by Ronell that Polish efforts to preserve remnants of the Jewish past constitute cynical ‘exploitation’ and ‘cashing in on the absence of Jewish life’ provide no constructive solution to the dilemma. The problems inherent in the way Poles and Poland are presented in the March of the Living are examined by Rona Sheramy. The picture she paints has a number of alarming features and it is therefore reassuring to learn that in May 2005 the Israeli Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of Education announced that they were considering far-reaching changes to the youth pilgrimages to Poland. In the view of the Foreign Ministry the programme’s current format ‘harms Israel—Poland

relations and fosters alienation and hostility between Israelis and Poles’. The Ministry of Education has proposed an increase in encounters between young Israelis and Poles, reflecting the views of Professor Israel Gutman of Yad Vashem,

who has argued that the content of the trips should be recast: “The emphasis should be on past Jewish life in Poland and the catastrophe that took place, and schools should be encouraged to have more encounters with Polish youth and create human connections.’ His analysis is shared by the Polish chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, who believes that the trips’ organizers ignore the fact that the Jewish

Introduction 49 community in Poland has come back to life. It is noteworthy that both Warsaw and Jerusalem have expressed similar concerns over the consequences of the March. The fact that the planned Jewish Museum in Warsaw is conceived as a commemoration of centuries of Jewish life in Poland, rather than being devoted to its final destruction, deserves mention in this context.+? Stephen Whitfield provides a provocative account of why the Jews have felt so much at home in the United States. Relentlessly optimistic, Whitfield’s piece leaves unconsidered the phenomenon that the success and assimilation of the Jews in America have also led to rapid acculturation, of which exogenous marriage is but the most obvious statistic. Moreover, the American reception of the Jews has not been without its dark side, a fact alluded to in impressive detail in the chapter by Danusha Goska. The fact that many Jewish film producers, though anguished by reports of the Holocaust during the Second World War, were extraordinarily reluctant to refer to it in their cinematic depiction of the war owing to what they regarded as the popularity of antisemitism in the United States speaks for itself. The fact that ardent support for Israel seems to becoming more characteristic of the political right in America than the left, and that, like the Poles, American Jews seem to be moving, however gradually, into Republican ranks, raises the question of the degree to which Jewish interests and progressive politics are immutably linked. Jews have bought into national myths elsewhere, most notably in Britain and France, but also with less success in Germany. American Jews are probably

unique in the extent to which they have made themselves comfortable in the United States and reshaped the country’s popular culture. Whether this degree of comfort will survive the worldwide rise of antisemitism and the delegimization of the state of Israel is open to question. These doubts are strengthened by what Alvin Rosenfeld has described as ‘the assault on Holocaust Memory’, ‘a polemical engagement with the Holocaust’ that has sought to diminish its centrality and significance, as well as by the sustained attack of writers like Norman Finkelstein and, in a more moderate manner, Peter Novick on the central role the Holocaust has come to assume in the American Jewish world.1° In retrospect it would, perhaps, have been useful to include a chapter celebrating the success of Polish adjustment to America in the same enthusiastic way in which Whitfield describes the Jewish experience. Here an interesting dynamic is exposed. In Poland the Polish Christians were the great majority and the Polish 103 Ha’arets, 4 May 2005. See also J. Mark, ‘“March” Gets Critical Scrutiny’, Jemish Week, 13 May 2005, ; D. Lincoln, ‘Poland as Victim, not Victimizer’, New York FJewish Week, 17 June 2005, ; L. Bunder, ‘Jewish Poland Today’, Something Fewish, 20 June 2005, ; D. Lazarus, ‘From Poland to Israel: Reveiling in Nationhood’, Canadian Jewish News, 19 May 2005, . 104 A. Rosenfeld, ‘The Assault on Holocaust Memory’, American Jewish Year Book 2001 (New York, 2001).

50 Introduction Jews a minority. It was the former who frequently proved insensitive to the latter and often treated them with at least distracted condescension, and usually worse. However, in the United States the Jews became a significant community at least one and perhaps two generations before the Poles could claim such a status. More importantly, the Jews in the United States, as Whitfield indicates, have become a very successful group—aindubitably the most successful of all the minority communities. By comparison the Poles have done far less well; their presence in politics, education, and entertainment—to name just three very prominent sectors—is markedly inferior. There is no doubt that this relative failure of the Poles has been a burden for them in their relationship with the Jews. It is in America that the roles of Polish Christians and Jews have reversed, with the Jews the dominant community and the Poles the group who often feel disdained. Yet the Polish ‘failure’ is indeed relative. In terms of education and income levels Poles occupy a worthy place, often higher than groups with longer tenure in America. However, they occupy a strikingly low position in indices of social esteem: they are not a respected community. This failure, especially given their financial and educational attainments, is profoundly galling to the Poles, who see that the Jews of Poland have risen to social prominence. The rarely noted element of Polish criticism of Jews in the United States is born of a bitterness arising out of a profound sense of comparative failure. A number of chapters describe attempts to overcome mutual stereotyping. The late Stanislaus Blejwas provides a detailed and valuable account of the National Polish American—Jewish American Council, originally sponsored by both the AJC and the Polish American Congress and still supported by the former organization. Father John Pawlikowski explains why the Holocaust remains a challenge to Polish—Jewish relations in his memoir of his experiences on the United States

Holocaust Memorial Council and other bodies which bring Poles and Jews together to confront the issue of the Holocaust. Without resolving the problem Pawlikowski raises the question of how to include Polish victimization within the framework of the Holocaust. Like most if not all Jewish scholars, he regards the Jewish experience as unique without denying the immensity of Polish suffering. Doubtless much of the Polish American frustration in dealing with the Holocaust stems from their often unspoken conviction that if Polish suffering is not qualitatively equated with the Jewish experience it is being slighted. Whereas this appears to be merely a semantic problem, it has become elevated into a struggle of symbols. Pawlikowski’s position that the Poles must allow the Jews exclusive use of the term ‘Holocaust’ without diminishing the Polish tragedy may appear a logical point of departure but it poses rather than answers the question about terminology. Antony Polonsky shows how attempts were made to steer the debate about Jan Gross’s book Neighbors in a constructive direction. Indeed, the reaction to this vol-

ume is an important indication of the current state of Polish—Jewish relations. Polonsky is at pains to present the range of reactions and essay an initial typology

Introduction 51 of reaction, a difficult undertaking given the dynamic nature of scholarship—and the polemic provoked by Gross’s book. Fears that reaction to the book ‘would provoke an anti-Polish reaction among Jews’ that would reciprocally ‘intensify antisemitism in Poland’ proved to be exaggerated. Indeed, the instinctive defensive reaction of some in Poland appeared to be more characteristic of Polonia than of Poland itself. This probably reflects the fact that for Polonia the Jedwabne issue was widely regarded as another contribution to a vision of the Holocaust in which the suffering of the Poles is largely unknown while their failings are frequently assailed, an attitude noted by Cherry and Goska in different contexts. Here we must also remember Pawlikowski’s lament that ‘Polish Americans have done little to foster a permanent understanding within the wider American community of Polish victimization and rescue . . . Polish Americans cannot continually complain about Jewish commemorations not including the Polish story when they remain reluctant to take any initiative of their own in this regard.’ One important area where the two groups have overlapped has been in popular culture, both in Poland and in the United States. Maja Trochimczyk in her chapter provides an illuminating analysis of the complex identity of Polish Jewish composers in Hollywood. Here Trochimczyk raises two quite different questions, both signifi-

cant. The first, which she addresses in her concluding remarks but is implicit throughout, is the question of cultural or national identity facing Polish Jewish émigrés in America, which often led to Polish Christians and Polish Jews becoming estranged after arriving in the United States, with resulting suspicion and bitterness.

A second, seemingly trivial but really most important theme raised by Trochimezyk is the relative position of Poles and Jews in American popular culture, here specifically the Hollywood film industry. That Jews, many of Polish origin, have played a major role in the creation of the American film industry is beyond question, prompting Neal Gabler to refer to the Jewish role in Hollywood as having created ‘an empire of our own’. This has not, however, led to a particularly ‘Jewish’ content to American films. Indeed, producers like MGMv’s Louis B.

Mayer were at great pains to produce films that fostered a mythic version of America devoid of discernible ethnic or religious heritage identity. Nonetheless, a great many films have been produced that discuss Jewish issues, often written by

and featuring Jewish performers. By contrast Poland and the Poles have been traditionally almost absent from the screen and, when present, have often been portrayed unflatteringly.!°° The causes of this are many and complex, but Trochimczyk’s chapter raises the point by indicating that Polish Jews who moved to Hollywood almost uniformly evolved towards increasing identification with their Jewish rather than their Polish connections. In Hollywood it is simply more convenient to function as a Jew than as a Pole. 105 See M. B. Biskupski, ‘Hollywood and Poland 1939-1945: The American Cinema and the Poles during World War II’, Polish Review, 47/2 (2002). This is part of a forthcoming larger study.

52 Introduction As far as we know this is the first comprehensive volume investigating Polish—

Jewish relations in the United States. We have attempted to show how attitudes inherited from the past and prejudices that have become entrenched and developed in the New World have affected Polish—Jewish relations in North America with negative effects in Poland itself. Poland is today a free country, a model for how to overcome a difficult and painful past. It is a valued member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and of the European Union, and a trusted ally of the United States. We believe that it is important to put behind us resentments caused by past conflicts, no matter how justified, and to concentrate on what has linked Poles and Jews in their long history.

Indeed the new century suggests that the shaping influences long dominant in the Polish—Jewish relationship in North America have begun to lose their forma-

tive power. If we compare the current situation with that a century ago, this becomes strikingly clear. In the years before the First World War the bulk of world

Jewry was concentrated in eastern Europe; Polish lands held as many Jews as North America and far more than Palestine. For American Jews, Poland, like Europe itself, is now a minor concern. The Jewish community of Poland has only symbolic significance. Time has dramatically altered the profile of the Polish and Jewish communities

in America, which are now largely assimilated into the host society, the distinctive neighbourhoods and institutions increasingly gone or transformed. Events that caused mutual suspicion and bitterness are now becoming distant memories of fading resonance with the younger members of both communities. In their place more recent developments have acted to enhance areas of understanding. The fact that the Roman Catholic pontiff who worked most devotedly for Christian—Jewish reconciliation was also a patriotic Pole is highly significant. On the Jewish side there have been important recent laments that Jews ‘misunderstand’ the Poles, or

think of them in stereotypical terms, and that Jews in general harbour instinctive prejudice against Poles.+1°°

With the fall of communism and Poland’s re-emergence as a free society, one of the changes has been a re-evaluation of the Second Republic, the free Poland that

existed before 1939. Though a flawed and troubled creation, in retrospect the Second Republic is gradually emerging with a more positive appraisal. This too

contributes indirectly though significantly to the amelioration of historic Polish—Jewish animosities. Like contemporary Israel, the Second Republic had

simultaneously to deal with a threatening geopolitical situation and a restive minority population. It was often difficult to preserve the highest levels of demo106 The comments of Laurence Weinbaum of the World Jewish Congress in Jerusalem are important in this context; see his interview with Andrzej Niziolek in ‘Czy Zydzi nie lubia Polakéw?’, Gazeta Wyborcza, 15 Aug. 2005, . The

efforts of the Taube Foundation also deserve mention; C. Slutsky, Personal Ties to Poland Spur Philanthropist, Jewish Times.com, 18 Aug. 2005, .

Introduction 53 cratic practice and mutual tolerance in these circumstances. Those who support Israel understand its travails while criticizing its failures; the Second Republic deserves a similar treatment. This is not a historical curiosity. Pre-war Poland was the last incarnation of the Polish tradition of a multinational state including a large Jewish population. If it could be seen as an imperfect home for Poles and Jews rather than a doomed precursor to the Holocaust, our attitude towards Polish— Jewish relations in the century would be altered. All of these developments make possible a more nuanced and empathetic attitude to the shared but divisive Polish—Jewish past. It is our hope that this volume will lead to a better understanding of the disputes which different views of that past have caused in the United States and will help to alleviate them. Perhaps the

last word should be left to literature and the hopes, even if naive, it articulates. In ! the anonymous novel Przygody polskiego detektywa, published in 1928-9, when

Andrzej Topielinski proposes to Rebekah Greenwood and suggests that they spend their honeymoon in Poland, Rebekah responds: ‘What a splendid idea . . . One’s native country is always the best.’ Andrzej, not naive about historical tensions between Christians and Jews, is surprised: ‘And here I thought . . . that you wouldn’t agree to it.’ ‘Why?’ Rebekah counters. ‘Isn’t it the country of my ancestors as well? We’re all from Poland!?!°’ 107 Dziennik dla Wszystkich, 27 May 1929.

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‘We’re all from Poland’ Christians and Fews in Polish Immigrant Fiction KAREN MAJEWSKI

OF the many factors that influenced and interpreted the personal and political, real and perceived, relationship between Polish Christians and Polish Jews in the first

decades of the twentieth century, the power of literature is undisputed. Two recent studies, Harold Segel’s Stranger in our Midst: Images of the few in Polish Literature and Magdalena Opalski and Israel Bartal’s Poles and fews: A Failed Brotherhood, look specifically at the attempts of writers to suggest ways of reading and even rewriting this relationship.t Opalski and Bartal remind us that in Poland, ‘where literature tended to be a substitute for national institutions, literary symbols bore a hidden political potential’ .?

But it was not only Polish writers in Europe who engaged in these issues. Immigrant writers in the United States were equally concerned with intertwined questions of politics and peoplehood. If these activist authors tended to subjugate art to ideology, it was not necessarily the result of a limited artistic imagination or literary skill. Rather, whatever the compelling creative impulse for individual writers, narrative fiction was consciously perceived as a strategy of nation-building. In particular, it was a tool by which to consolidate a national consciousness among its

readers; that is, among Polish-speaking immigrants and their children in the United States. An editorial in Chicago’s Dziennik Zwigzkowy from 1918 articulates this commitment to the Polish cause: The novel stimulates the mind, it awakens patriotic feeling. It reaches the poorest peasant hut, and if it’s a good novel, it educates and ennobles its peasant readers. Because of this, novelists have a great responsibility. They must be apostles, high priests of our Polish faith ... The novelists of free nations can permit themselves to write ‘for art’s sake’ . . . We, in 1 H. Segel (ed.), Stranger in our Midst: Images of the Few in Polish Literature (Ithaca, NY, 1966); M. Opalski and I. Bartal, Poles and Jews: A Failed Brotherhood (Hanover, NH, 1992). 2 Opalski and Bartal, Poles and Fews, 139.

56 Karen Majewski threefold slavery, our enemies seeking constantly to inject into our nation the poison that will disintegrate it, cannot permit ourselves such ‘art’.®

While the imagery of Christianity is embedded in the very terms of the editor’s argument, the national ideal which he asks writers to serve was not universally defined by religious criteria. Polonia’s early writers, like writers in Poland, in fact offered competing visions of nationhood which could complicate, reinforce, or attempt to erase religion as a criterion of Polishness at the same time that other writers were trying to consolidate it. What, then, can we learn from these Polish immigrant works that is not already evident in the well-documented literature published in Poland at the time? What models of interrelationship did they offer as they sought to shape an emerging American Polonia? And what implications were these models meant to have for the long-hoped-for reborn Polish state? Since the existence of a Polish immigrant literature is not well known, it will be helpful to familiarize readers with this body of work. Between about the 1880s and the outbreak of the Second World War immigrants in the United States produced hundreds of works of poetry, drama, and fiction in the Polish language, published by immigrant companies or printed in immigrant newspapers, and distributed in ethnic communities across North America, sometimes even making their way back to Europe.* Because these works were published only in Polish, they bypassed the

mainstream of American literature, and until recently passed under the radar in discussions of ethnic and immigrant cultural history. But they have much to tell us

about the worlds of a developing Polonia, about the culture immigrants were creating for themselves, and about the ideologies through which their experiences were overlaid with meaning.

Most of Polonia’s writers were drawn from the intelligentsia and emerging middle class. But most immigrant readers came from a peasant background. The peasant tendency to identify with the local parish or geographic area, the okolica, rather than with larger, less tangible collectivities, increased the sense of urgency among activist authors to instil in their readers wider national loyalties. Until the failed insurrection of 1863 these peasants had not even been considered part of the body politic—in essence, as Poles. But out of the need to keep Poland alive, as a state of mind, if not as a political state, the tactic of national development through grass-roots education and organization had evolved, a movement known as ‘organic work’.

- Polonia’s activist authors, themselves the product of the historical legacy of organic work and Poland’s own distinct brand of literary positivism, continued these efforts in the United States. And so the literature created there, like much of the work being published by their countrymen and -women in Europe at the same 3 Dziennitk Zwigzkowy, 15 Jan. 1918, trans. Federal Works Agency, Works Projects Administration (Illinois), Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey Records, 1936-41. 4 See K. Stauter-Halstead, The Nation in the Village: The Genesis of Peasant National Identity in Austrian Poland, 1848-1914 (Ithaca, NY, 2001), 59.

‘We’re all from Poland’ 57 time, had a self-conscious purpose, one shared by Polonia’s fraternal, religious, social, and cultural leadership. That purpose was the creation of a true Polish identity and set of loyalties within the immigrant community. Naturally, there was wide, often virulent, disagreement about what constituted that identity, about its permeability, and about its interplay with other competing, coexisting identities. The literature created under ‘American conditions’, as so many of these works are subtitled, offers a written record of those internal disagreements, of the possibilities proposed, debated, rejected, or embraced. Activists argued over the overlapping roles of religion, social class, language and dialect, ancestral background, and political belief as components of Polishness. And questions of religion were apt to take into account the presence of Polishspeaking Lutherans, Baptists, Polish National Catholics, and Theosophists, not to mention agnostics and non-believers, as well as Jews. But the place of Polish Jews in

this internalized Polish nation was a recurring hot spot, one that could be readily mobilized as factions sought access not just to hearts and minds, but to power and resources. It is important to note that, of American Polonia’s scores, perhaps hundreds, of fiction writers in the Polish language, only one, Piotr Yolles, was identifiably Jewish. A rich Jewish immigrant literature was coming into being simultaneously, but it was being written in English or Yiddish, not in Polish. In Poland, as Segel notes, Jews began publishing in Polish in appreciable numbers only during the inter-war period, in the era when Yolles’s first novel was printed.° Thus, with rare exceptions the literature under consideration in this chapter comes froma non-Jewish Polish, though not necessarily Roman Catholic, perspective.

The presence and purpose of this literature is important to the specific discussion of Christian—Jewish relations for several reasons. In America immigrants were

building neighbourhoods and creating institutions from the ground up, determining their shape, content, and purpose. Immigrant writers very deliberately suggested ways of being Polish to readers who may have had little experience of the world outside their village, but who were now confronting an industrialized society that brought them into contact with people from many different geographic, linguistic, class, economic, and religious backgrounds—some of whom, despite these perceivable differences, also came from the lands of the former Polish Commonwealth. They were forming communities that would have to create a space for these interactions and become components in a multi-ethnic America. But besides influencing the American ethnic landscape, these debates were meant to have profound international implications, as American Polonia was being mobilized to work, and even die, for the Polish cause. What is more, immigrant activists intended the relationship they fostered between Jewish and non-Jewish Poles to be carried back to a new Poland. The overwhelming expectation for most non-Jewish Poles in America was that they would eventually return to their home > Segel, Stranger in our Midst, 4.

58 Karen Majewski villages, more prosperous, more influential, and—Polonia’s leaders intended— more Polish.® Henryk Nagiel describes this process in his popular novel Kara Boza idzie przez oceany (‘God’s Punishment Crosses Oceans’, 1896): Our peasants come here, poor, miserable, ragged, ignorant . . . they come and see new worlds, new people, new conditions. They realize that here there’s no policeman standing over them with a baton, no lord with his airs, and they’re taken aback. . . . They start work as the dirtiest and most miserable labourers; but slowly they pick themselves up out of the

dirt. A spirit of freedom takes hold of them . . . Intellectual needs are awakened. The church, the school, the national flag—here is their new creed. They learn everything and raise a new generation here. ... At some point they will return to the old country, carrying back a new civilization. ’

Whatever immigrants learned in America about what it means to be Polish, about

who has the right to call himself or herself a Pole, and about the relationship between Jews and Christians in the Polish collectivity, was expected to shape both Polish American and Polish civic, economic, and political life. It is not surprising, therefore, that one of the most common motifs used to suggest models of true Polishness was the literary relationship between Christian and Jew. Segel suggests that their intertwined history had made them ‘dimensions of each other’.® The paradoxical idea among non-Jewish Poles of Jews as ‘Other’ and simultaneously as ‘Us’ (or at least as ‘our own Other’) may help explain, if not untangle, the ambiguous and conflicted imagery with which writers often depicted Jews and Jewishness. This discussion will look at several common categories of images used by authors with very different answers to the ‘Jewish question’ in their attempt to shape a national identity among Polish readers in America. While the range of images reflects the interests of writers with widely varying political affiliations, these images cannot always be explained entirely in terms of ideology and politics. Jews were alternately, and often simultaneously, objects of admiration and resentment, affection and distrust, portrayed as loyal countrymen and traitorous mercenaries (and it 1s worth remembering that one can only be a

traitor to one’s own nation). Many of these patterns have counterparts in the Polish literature of roughly the same period. But they also reflect the peculiarities of American immigrant life, in which Polish Christians and Jews were finding themselves part of a much wider society in which opportunities for redrawing ethnic boundaries offered alternative readings of identity, in which others did not draw the same divisions the immigrant may have taken for granted, in which internal issues could be freely debated and dissenting views readily disseminated, and in which factions could quickly emerge, each with its own rhetorical arsenal ready to turn the Jew into an example to follow or to shun. 6 Mark Wyman estimates the return rate for Polish immigrants between 1908 and 1923 at about 40 per cent; Round Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, r88o—1930 (Ithaca, NY, 1993), 11. ” H. Nagiel, Kara Boza idzie przez oceany: Powiesé na tle stosunkéw w Ameryce (Chicago, 1896), 152. 8 Segel (ed.), Stranger in our Midst, 1.

‘We’re all from Poland’ 59 Within that rhetoric the ambiguity with which Jews are so often portrayed reflects unresolved questions over Jewish inclusion in the Polish body politic and the historical circumstances that left them straddling the boundaries of Polishness.

It also reflects intra-group struggles for power between and within Polonia’s own communities and institutions, struggles that created their own categories of otherness. And it allows for a kind of conditional Polishness for Jews (and often for non-Jews as well) dependent on moral and patriotic criteria. As an expression of this liminality, one of the overarching patterns in the literature of Polish immigration is the recurring image of the Jew as agent of transformation, as the facilitator of movement across external and internal boundaries. For example, it is often a Jew who makes possible the act of migration itself, and who for good or ill guides the immigrant’s first steps in the New World. This is a role with built-in tensions, because immigration was nearly always portrayed by these activist authors as a necessary evil—the result of human failing, societal rigidity, economic constriction, or political oppression.

Otherwise neutral or even positive portrayals of the Jewish agent are tinged with this inherently conflicted notion of immigration. In M. Alfons Chrostowsk1’s serialized novel Niewolnik polski (“The Polish Slave’), for instance, a Jewish tavern-

keeper helps the narrator to cross the border illegally in order to avoid Russian army service. For the tavern-keeper, this is a matter of business, but for the narrator it is a profound, life-changing act, as he scurries back across the border to kiss his native land one last time.? These transactions have a price, it is true. But they are not purely exploitative or without compassion. The conscript in Wojciech Morawski’s novel Na dwoéch potkulach (‘On Two Hemispheres’, 1907) has disobeyed Russian orders and runs for his life, his safe passage arranged by a Jew, who

also makes sure he is able to say goodbye to his family and fiancée despite the dangers.'° Through their very need to straddle geographic, political, and linguistic boundaries, these Jewish characters make it possible for non-Jewish Poles to cross dangerous borders, and in fact to find a new place and a new way to be Polish. Piotr Yolles’s serialized novel Trzy matki (“Three Mothers’, 1930) develops more fully the theme of the Jewish agent of change.'! Published under the pseudonym Whloczega (Wanderer), 7rzy matki is the only novel in Polish by an identifiably Jewish immigrant (Yolles was also the editor of New York’s influential Polish weekly Nowy Swiat, 1934-6). It concerns the internal journey of a young lawyer whose love affair with the family housemaid forces him to confront the rigidity of

the Polish social order. The example of his Jewish employer, who is happily married to a much younger woman also beneath his social station, finally inspires the troubled young man to reject class and family expectations and to create his 9 M. A. Chrostowski, ‘Niewolnik polski: Na tle stosunkéw polsko-amerykanskich’, Jutrzenka (Dec. 1893—Nov. 1894).

10 W. Morawski, Na dwéch pétkulach: Szkic powieSciowy na tle prawdziwego zdarzenia (Chicago,

1907). 11 Wloéczega [P. Yolles], “Trzy matki’, Nomy Swiat, 10 Mar—15 May 1930.

60 Karen Majewski own destiny in America with his patron’s assistance. 7rzy matki, through this positive Jewish character, who acts as mentor, facilitator, and father figure, as well as the most respected character in the novel, encourages the transcendence of social barriers to create alternative, more inclusive, models of Polishness in Europe and America. It encourages a public sphere in which Jews and non-Jews work together freely, forming relationships based on mutual respect. For writers with socialist leanings, like Chrostowski, Jewish liminality is used as a metaphor for displacement and destabilization, and to suggest the need for new systems of social and economic organization. As Chrostowski’s ‘Polish slave’ is led

lower and lower into steerage, further and further from the secure position of social privilege to which he had been raised, he begins to feel his kinship to other displaced peoples as ‘a member of that great family, or rather that tribe, peopling

the whole world, united in the unravellable knot of misery, like the eternally wandering Jew’.!” Other authors created Jewish characters who were models of capitalist success

to provide attractive alternatives of behaviour and social interaction. Przygody Lejbusta w Ameryce (‘Lejbus’s Adventures in America’) is an exemplary tale in which a Polish immigrant learns how to succeed in America from a Jewish landsman. Lejbus, who has become a well-to-do businessman in the New World, takes in the peasant immigrant from his home village, giving him a job and some advice: go to night school, buy a Polish—English dictionary, and avoid saloons. The author repeats the lesson: When our Poles arrive as grinors [greenhorns]| from the old country, they don’t look for work first thing, but get a gallon of wiski [whisky], a whole keg of beer, and maybe more. The brother or brother-in-law to whom the grinor came stops going to work and they both start to drink . . . two, three days, and sometimes all week. Then they both start to look for a job, sometimes for a week or sometimes a month. When they finally find one, it’s straight to the saloon every night after work—there this grinor begins to learn what’s better: miski or brendy [brandy], and to admire the one who can drink the most beer. But if that grinor learned to

subscribe to a good Polish paper and read it, if he would started to go to najt skol [night school], if he bought himself a Polish—English dictionary, if he started to learn to read and write English—oh, no! God forbid! . . . That’s why it’s bad for the Pole in America, but it’s his own fault. It’s their own fault they want to fight the Jews. They say: ‘Ah! In America the good life is just for Jews. They get all the business in their hands, and we Poles have to work in factories. . . . [But] Jews help one another, while Poles swindle each other.’!*

It is a common lament by many ethnic groups that others are well organized and consolidated, while one’s own group is divided and in disarray. But despite 12° Jutrzenka, 6 Mar. 1984. And of course the title suggests associations with African Americans. In fact, the idea of the oppressed and exploited polski murzyn, or Polish negro, continued until at least the 1980s.

13 T.K., Przygody Lejbusia w Ameryce, czyly Przez cierpliwosé do szczescia i bogactwa (Stevens Point, Wis., 1912), 49-51.

‘We’re all from Poland’ 61 the artistic simplicity of this story, which is clearly meant as nothing more than an exemplum, it is worth examining in more detail. First, the relationship between the characters is significant—that they are called /andsmen suggests that what rivals religion in binding people is their connection to a common geographic place. But Jew and Pole are still clearly differentiated, and these exclusive terms are not only not problematized, but are the basis of the author’s argument. The advice and help the new arrival receives from Lejbus is different in important ways from the assistance he received from his uncle upon his own arrival several years earlier.

The uncle, already a businessman, helped his nephew onto the ladder by lending him money at interest to start up his own business, charging him for room and board, and otherwise incorporating mercantile and individualistic values into their familial relationship. How different from the reception of the typical Christian immigrant the narrator criticizes, in which newcomer and established immigrant may be at the same low economic level but occupy it arm in arm. Contrary to the narrator’s polemic, these ‘Poles’ are shown, not swindling each other, but rather dragging each other down. And the example of Lejbus and his uncle, while it certainly shows Jew helping Jew, lacks familial warmth and is never suggested as the model for Polish Christians to follow. Polish Christians and Polish Jews may both re-create themselves in America, but in this example, at least, they do not invent a new, undifferentiated category of identity that includes them both. The ability to remake oneself in America is both a hope and a danger, an inspiration and a warning, and the portrayal of Jews as particularly ready to adapt is

regularly used to distinguish them from non-Jewish Poles. This perception of Jewish mutability is sometimes set in opposition to a sense of Polishness that is championed at its most clear and uncompromising. In Julian Czupka’s story ‘Irlandcezyk z Smorgonii’ (“The Irishman from Smorgonia’, 1897) an immigrant goes to America at the urging of a Jew, who then conspires to exploit him. Once there, the poor immigrant, Macadlo, becomes Mac Adlo, ‘some kind of Irishman’.'* He marries an American but is reduced to tears after twenty years on hearing someone swear in his native tongue. In “Tyrolcezyk’ (“The Tyrolean’, 1897), another story by Czupka, a Jewish pedlar dressed as an Arab sells a Hungarian vest and a priest’s hat to a Polish immigrant so that he can pretend to be a Tyrolean and pass off the Polish folk songs he sings for spare change in the local tavern as Italian opera. The whole scenario of ethnic trickery is comic, but deadly serious to the would-be Tyrolean, who can’t bear to be anything other than a Pole, even temporarily, even for money. His dignity returns only when he reclaims his Polishness.*° Just as Jews are often placed in the role of facilitating immigration and personal transformation, they are also often shown as 14 J. Czupka, ‘Irlandczyk z Smorgonii’, in Czupka, Obrazki z Ameryki (Wilkes-Barre, Pa., 1897), 18.

15 My translation of Czupka’s story, along with the Polish original, appears in M. Shell and W. Sollors (eds.), The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations (New York, 2000), 348-57.

62 Karen Majewski the foil against whom Polishness can be discerned and measured. Even when used to comic effect, the very qualities of flexibility and adaptability, with which some writers allow Jews to enable Polish survival, are treated along a continuum that runs from neutrality to moral discomfort to outright condemnation. The far end of this spectrum is personified by Henryk Nagiel in the chameleon-

like character of Bolo Kaliski. ‘Beneath the elegant veneer of an effeminate aristocrat’, the narrator warns, ‘is concealed a crook of the worst kind. He’s a man without nationality, a Polish or Russian Jew, half-Germanized, half-Americanized. He has no national ideals, still less morality.’'° Kaliski adopts a series of slippery identities, turning up alternately as a Christian Pole, an American, and even an African American. But it is not just for personal gain that he becomes a master of disguises. He is also working clandestinely for both Prussian and Russian enemies

of Poles and Poland, and for American factory owners in their exploitation of immigrant workers and their families. And it is his ability to transform himself that makes him such a danger to the other Polish characters. After all, the worldly narrator of Kazimierz Neuman’s weekly tales warned his readers in 1897: ‘A Polish name doesn’t mean that someone is a Pole.’!” Neuman’s

humorous pieces commonly show the new immigrant in confrontation with a social world that is bewildering in its possibilities and ambiguities: a world in which the Polish language is so corrupted that a mister is called Miss, a peasant is

told the heresy that the earth revolves round the sun, and Jews write Catholic prayer books. When a newcomer complains that, in a shop claiming to have Polish

assistants, ‘One was an Americanized German Czech and the other, dammit, a pure-blooded Jew from the depths of Russia. Each of them argued that he’s a born Pole’, the narrator insists that practices like these contribute to the Polishness, and dismisses the newcomer as a ‘greenhorn’. The message readers are meant to take away from humorous pieces like this is not always clear: are the newest immigrants, with their strict categories of identity, merely naive, or wise; are the narrators, with their wider experience of the strategies of identity in America, more sophisticated or more cynical?

This uncertainty is underscored in another set of similar short pieces, ‘Listy Wojtka do starego kraju’ (“Wojtek’s Letters to the Old Country’), also published in Dztennik Chicagoski and probably also by Neuman. In a typical episode Wojtek, an

immigrant with just enough experience of America to think well of himself, is spending a Sunday drinking rajwiski (rye whisky) in a tavern, when in walks a Jew selling books and holy pictures. Immigrant publishers frequently employed salespeople—called ‘education agents’— to peddle products from house to house and in the local watering holes. Wojtek calls the Jew gaddem szyni for selling Christian objects. But this is language he learned not in Europe, but in America, where he 16 Nagiel, Kara Boza idzie przez oceany, 234-5. 17 K. Neuman, ‘Gaweda tygodniowa’, Dziennik Chicagoski, 16 Sept. 1899.

‘We’re all from Poland’ 63 explains, ‘Americans don’t ol [call] [ Jews] anything but gaddem szyni [goddamn sheeny].’?®

If Wojtek is shown to be ignorant, however, the saloon-keeper who thinks nothing of this mingling of Jew and Christian (and who buys his liquor from a Jew) is depicted as an opportunist who uses the rhetoric of American democracy, but whose real motives are material. He chastises Wojtek:

, Are you a grinor [greenhorn] or what? Don’t you know that here it’s a frykontry [free country | and everyone does what he wants. Here there are Jews who are Polish doctors and druggists and lawyers and journalists. As long as he comes to Poles and says he’s a great patriot, Pll kiss him right on the sidelocks . . . and write in the papers that although he’s of the Jewish faith he’s a great and honourable Pole in his heart.'”

In an argument that would continue to resurface both in Polonia and in Poland, Wojtek disagrees: ‘Here we have our own Catholic doctors and lawyers, and we don’t need any Jews.’?°

But although Wojtek fancies himself a defender of pure Polishness, his father, writing back from the village, is troubled by his son’s use of unfamiliar English words in his letters, which the village bailiff has told him must be po zydowsku (‘in Jewish’, or Yiddish). And his father fears this could be true, because he’s heard that ‘in America, the Poles stick by the Jews, and that Jews write prayer books and Polish newspapers’.?4 Rumours like these circulate among village Christians and Jews alike. Srul, a Jew from their village, is equally troubled: People say there are Jews [in America], but what kind of Jews are they, when as the Lord God gave them the sabbath, they ride in coaches, though that’s not allowed. For lunch they eat unkosher meat, which is a great sin; then they lie down on the couch and light a cigar, though lighting a fire on the sabbath isn’t allowed, and so they only think of themselves: that’s how the Jewish faith has gone wrong. There all the Jews are one brother and one sister with the Poles.

‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,’ Wojtek’s mother cries, making the sign of the cross.2” Back in the village neither Christian nor Jew is ready for this American phenomenon.

Taken together these works, printed in the daily newspaper published by the Resurrectionists, the most powerful order of Polish priests in the United States, are surprisingly nuanced, with their unreliable narrative voices and comically illinformed commentary, not just on the relations of Jews and Poles, but on issues of the day ranging from ‘Church wars’ to the Lattimer massacre, from local elections to the march of Coxey’s army, from the emancipation of women to the Spanish— American War. And part of the difficulty in arriving at a clear reading may come

from the author’s own complicated position. Neuman was dogged by rumours throughout his career that he himself was one of those Jews writing for Catholic 18 ‘T isty Wojtka do starego kraju’, Dziennik Chicagoski, 10 Mar. 1808.

19 Dziennik Chicagoski, 2 Feb. 1898. 20 Dziennik Chicagoski, 19 Feb. 1898. 21 Dziennik Chicagoski, 12 Feb. 1898. 22 Dziennik Chicagoski, 19 Feb. 1898.

64 Karen Majewski newspapers. Milwaukee’s Kuryer Polski, for which Neuman once worked, printed detailed accusations that in Poland Neuman had ‘passed as a Pole’ and that he continued to hide his Jewish ancestry although ‘no one here in America is ashamed of his background’.”°

However, there is nothing ambiguous about another work attributed to Neuman, probably mistakenly.** 7rzech pachciarzy (‘Three Jewish Tenants’) was published in 1913 under the pseudonym Stary Zwiazkowiec, or Old Alliancer, a

reference to the Polish National Alliance, the most powerful Polish American fraternity. (It is fictionalized as the ‘Pomniejszona’, a word that suggests both a ‘miniature’ and a ‘diminished’ Poland.) This novella raises the spectre of another commonly employed Jewish character, similar to what Segel has labelled, in Polish literature, the ‘crypto-assimilationist’ who converts to Christianity for personal gain.*° In Polish immigrant literature, perhaps because the boundaries of Polishness were more flexible and the opportunities for redefining oneself more accessible, the issue of religious conversion is less important than the outward adoption of Polish loyalties in order to profit from the ethnic community and ultimately undermine the Polish cause. The character remains a ‘Judas’ who ‘dresses his Jewishness in a Kosciuszko uniform’.”° © Exploiting widows and orphans 1s small beer for those ‘ringleaders of American

Polonia, under the influence of Jewish villainy’,2“ who ‘make a living in America off Polish stupidity’.2° Ultimately, they plot to rid themselves of a political rival, a patriotic journalist who has escaped exile in Siberia and entered the United States

illegally under an assumed name, by denouncing him simultaneously within Polonia as a Russian spy and to the US and Russian governments as a nihilist and enemy of the tsar. They hope to get him deported to Russia, where he will surely be killed. This 1s literature at its most openly political and its most blatantly antisemitic. Trzech pachciarzy, which claims to be based on fact, plays on scurrilous stereotypes to attack the Polish National Alliance, which in 1889 famously rejected a resolution to restrict membership on the basis of religion.” The Alliance’s closest 23 Kuryer Polski (Milwaukee), 18 Sept. 1893. No mention of a possible Jewish background is made in Franciszek German’s biographical entry for Neuman in the Polski stownik biograficzny. 24 T have several reasons for doubting Neuman’s authorship of this work, although even the Polski

stownik biograficzny attributes it to him: it was published six years after his death; the pseudonym under which it appeared refers to the Zwiazek Polski Narodowy (Polish National Alliance), with which Neuman is most unlikely to have been affiliated; the writing style and tone is markedly different from that of other works we know Neuman to have written; and finally, a clear typographical error in Alphonse S. Wolanin’s Polonica Americana: Annotated Catalogue of the Archives and Museum of the Polish Roman Catholic Union (Chicago, 1950), 159, seems to be the basis for this attribution of author-

ship. 25 Trzech pachciarzy (1913), 6. 26 Tbid. 19, 15. 27 Thid. 24. 28 Ibid. 6. 29 At its eighth annual convention, in 1889, it was proposed that membership be denied to ‘notorious non-believers and Jews’. See W. Kruszka, A History of the Poles in America to 1908, pt. 1: Introduction, ed. J. S. Pula (Washington, 1993), 220-5. Also D. Pienkos, PNA: A Centennial History of the Polish National Alliance of the United States of North America (Boulder, Colo., 1984).

‘We’re all from Poland’ 65 rival for immigrant loyalties (and dollars) was the Polish Roman Catholic Union, which explicitly claimed Catholicism as a criterion for Polishness and which was closely connected with the Resurrectionists. The implication of this work 1s that Polish Christians are the rightful owners of Polonia and of Polishness, but that secular ethnic institutions have allowed Jewish outsiders into positions of steward-

ship, where they have been able to exploit and betray the nation from within. Polishness clearly becomes as much a moral category as an ethnic one. The nonJewish lawyer working for the Alliance, after cheating a despondent widow out of

her husband’s death benefits and physically throwing her out of his office, is offended when his two Jewish colleagues count him as a co-religionist, mocking his declaration of Christianity: ‘Oj vay! Such a great purist and Polish patriot!’°° In

fact, it is suggested that, when his actions violate moral principles, a Christian ‘Pole’-—protest though he might—1s really a Jew. The supposition of Jewish intrigue against Polish and Polish American interests

is a prominent theme in another overtly political work based loosely on actual events. First published in 1908, W dniach nedzy 1 zbrodni (‘In Days of Misery and Crime’), by the prominent immigrant activist Stanislaw Osada, follows the activities of a fictionalized Leon Czolgosz from his participation in a Coxey-inspired march of unemployed immigrants*! to his assassination of President McKinley in

Ig01. Some community leaders had tried to distance Polonia from Czolgosz by questioning his Polishness. Osada instead suggests that Czolgosz was seduced by Russian Jewish interests personified by his lover, Roza. Roza 1s a fictionalized composite of several women, most notably Emma Goldman, who was arrested and later cleared of involvement in the plot against McKinley.** But Osada makes her the agent of Czolgosz’s downfall and her Jewishness the basis of her seductive power.

Opalski and Bartal note the appearance in Polish literature of Jewish women characters dominated by a ‘dark and dangerous sensuality’.*? Osada’s Roza falls firmly within this mould. When we first see her, she is addressing a group of men huddled round a campfire, trying to inspire them to bloody revolution: ‘She was beautiful,’ Osada writes, ‘like Satan in the full majesty of utter malice.’** Czolgosz steals into the circle, kneels before her against a background of flame and shadow, and, overcome by a passion that is both physical and ideological, kisses her hand. 30 Trzech pachciarzy (1913), 10.

31 In the wake of America’s 1893 economic depression Jacob S. Coxey of Massillon, Ohio, organized an ‘army’ of the unemployed for a march on Washington. All around the country similar marches were begun. In Chicago, Jan Rybakowski, editor of the socialist newspaper Gazeta Robotnicza, set off with a band of unemployed immigrants, most of them Poles. Their march took them through immi-

grant enclaves throughout the Midwest until they were finally routed by sheriffs’ forces outside Buffalo, New York.

32 Tt appears that Czolgosz was present when Emma Goldman gave a speech in Cleveland in May of 1go1 and met her briefly there and in Chicago in the same year, but there is no evidence of any further

contact between them. 33 Opalski and Bartal, Poles and Jews, 110. 34S. Osada, W dniach nedzy i zbrodni (Milwaukee, Wis., 1908), 25.

66 Karen Majewski The protagonist, Osada’s voice of true Polishness, equates Jewishness with the © forces of mindless destruction. As Wacek explains to his less-educated compan-

ions among the marchers, Roza speaks ‘proper Polish’, but she is ‘not Polish’. Rather, she is ‘a Jew by birth, and a Russian by culture... Not only was she raised in Russia, but she absorbed Russian social thought to such a degree that I suppose what remains in her of Jewishness is just the strength of her hatred—the property of the inimitable race from which she came.’ He calls her ‘the daughter of a tribe which for 2,000 years, generation after generation, has inculcated hatred for every-

thing that is not Jewish. So anarchism, which in normal anarchists is poison, became for her a firebrand, which she carries around the world in order to kindle fires wherever she can, and to spread devastation.’®° R6za’s destructive passion is

set against the pure-hearted Christian heroine, Janka. Czolgosz calls her his ‘conscience’, while R6za is his ‘Satan’.*®

Osada uses familiar antisemitic imagery to suggest a world in which Poles are manipulated by Jews into treachery against the interests of the Polish nation and against their better, Polish selves—in essence, as part of a world-view that equates morality with Polishness, against God. The sides, as Osada draws them up, are clear. But other writers vigorously and increasingly warned Polonia’s leadership against scapegoating Jews. Particularly after the First World War, when Poland reappeared on the map of Europe, the position of Jews in the new nation again came into focus. As historians have noted, this was a period of growing ethnic tensions and antisemitism. As ultra-nationalists and socialists competed for power and influence, and as economic pressures squeezed the population as a whole, Jews became convenient scapegoats for the new country’s ills. But among Polonia’s authors there was a shift in rhetoric, which instead criticized the targeting of Jews and which continued to argue, as the Polish National Alliance had decades before, for an inclusive Polishness not dependent on religious faith. This may be in part a product of a simultaneous narrowing of the literary field: by the 1920s and 1930s there were simply fewer writers at work, a result largely of changing ethnic demographics and political realities that shifted the community’s focus. Changes in US immigration laws and Poland’s own new statehood meant fewer new arrivals, so there was no longer the pressing need for a ‘people’s literature’ that would quickly educate, orient, and Polonize masses of

new immigrants. As a result, the vast immigrant publishing network began to consolidate its resources, resulting in fewer outlets for amateur authors. With Polish nationhood secured, Polonia was also facing an internal crisis as institutions

and individuals were forced to reconfigure their loyalties and re-examine their relationship with both Poland and America. A second generation was maturing, with facility in English and its own emerging issues and priorities. The handful of authors who continued to write fiction or whose work first appeared during this 35 Osada, W dniach nedzy i zbrodni, 60-1. 36 Ibid. 34.

‘We’re all from Poland’ 67 period tended to be associated with Pilsudski and the leftists—or at least to be distanced from the nationalist Endeks. ‘The literature is still highly politicized, but with just a handful of writers producing longer, more mature and sustained works, viewpoints are less diluted by the sheer volume of earlier, more ephemeral immigrant efforts. One of the most prolific of these writers to come into his own during this period was Czeslaw Lukaszkiewicz, a leftist who went to the United States in 1914 to work for the Komitet Obrony Narodowy (National Defence Committee) and who returned to Poland for a time in the 1930s as an official in the Pilsudski government. Lukaszkiewicz was a sharp satirist, and his novel Dziwna dziewczyna (“The

Strange Girl’), set in the Polish American enclave of Hamtramck, Michigan, attacks the worst of inter-war antisemitic jingoism. A scathing denunciation of businessmen and politicians who exploited Polonia’s sincere desire to help the fledgling nation, his novel first appeared in 1923, when scores of joint venture

companies and fund-raising institutions were competing for the patriotic Polonian’s dollar in the name of the Polish cause. Lukaszkiewicz’s fictional Union

Victory Company is probably based on several real enterprises, many of which failed, with a loss of investment for thousands of immigrant families. His detailed description of a Union Victory fund-raiser lays out a pattern of Polishness which is cynically and even criminally manipulated by the company’s self-serving organ-

izers. There is the obligatory playing of the Polish national anthem, the prominently displayed Polish and American flags, the trotting out of a (fake) war hero. And there are banners reading, ‘Polish money will build Poland’, ‘Whoever believes in God is a member of Union Victory’, and ‘Who should rule Poland: Us or the Jews?’ American dollars, the organizers claim, will allow Poland to free itself from slavery to the Jews, who must be driven from the country. The wellorchestrated frenzy culminates in the cry “To the gallows with the Jews!’ and the hanging of a Jew in effigy.?”

The scene is shocking not just for its violence and vitriol, but because Lukaszkiewicz makes it clear that all this rhetorical passion is merely a tactic in a cynical con game. He tells his readers that attacks on Jews in the name of Polish interests are part of a soulless strategy by common crooks posing as Polish patriots. What is more, as a journalist working in Detroit at the time, Lukaszkiewicz was no

doubt witness to the actual fund-raising rallies upon which his description is based. Throughout 1921 Detroit Polonia was flooded with appeals by such companies to ‘Countrymen to whom Poland is dear, who feel themselves Poles’,?® including claims that ‘We are mobilizing to strike secretly at the over-mighty foe, hidden under the custodial wings of dissembling Albion—the Jewish banker.’?? Lukaszkiewicz’s warning to Polonia is clear, especially at a time when sm6j na swoim (‘stick to your own’) and other protectionist slogans had become code words for 37 C. Lukaszkiewicz, Dziwna dziewczyna: Powiesé z zycia polsko-amerykariskiego (Toledo, Ohio,

1923), 185. 38 Deztennik Polski, 30 Mar. 1921. 89° Dziennitk Polski, 31 Mar. 1921.

68 Karen Majewski hostile exclusionism, especially at a time when Poland and Polonia were at a crossroads in the creation of a new Polish nation. Faced with the necessity of forging a new nation—and a reconstituted sense of

peoplehood reflected in concrete political and cultural institutions—Polonia’s writers of the inter-war period must have felt a special urgency. And so they wrote very pointedly about the new shapes into which Polishness would have to evolve, given the rebirth of the Polish state and the presence of a second generation that was inextricably engaged in American life and culture—a new generation of ethnics rather than immigrants. The wedding of these shared loyalties to Poland and to America, and the equally intertwined identities of Polish (or Polish American)

Jews and non-Jews is a subtext of the novel Przygody polskiego detektywa (‘Adventures of a Polish Detective’), serialized in Buffalo’s Dztennik dla Wszystktich

in 1928-9. The novel’s multi-ethnic cast of characters reflects the realities of American urban neighbourhoods, but is also a reminder that Poland itself was a multi-ethnic, multilingual, and multi-religious state in which a Polish identity would have to be defined inclusively and liberally. This is the hope for Poland that is exemplified in the marriage of Rebekah, the Jewish American daughter of a grocer, and Andrzej, a Polish American working-

class Catholic. When Andrzej tentatively suggests that the couple honeymoon in Poland (a common theme in these inter-war works), Rebekah is delighted: ‘What a splendid idea... One’s native country 1s always the best.’ Andrzej, not naive about the historical tensions between Christians and Jews, is surprised: ‘And here I thought .. . that you wouldn’t agree to it.” ‘Why?’ Rebekah counters. ‘Isn’t it the country of my ancestors as well? We’re all from Poland!’*° It is the country not only of their common ancestry, but of their future progeny, as Rebekah and Andrzej return to Poland for good, along with both sets of parents

(and Andrzej’s sister and her Polonized American businessman husband). Rebekah and Andrzej’s union reflects an increasing assimilationist tendency in Poland between the wars: Rebekah converts, at her own insistence, to Catholicism. But it also models a Polishness that is equally the birthright of Christians and Jews, arguing that all have a place together in the new Poland, and that indeed they are members of a common family: “The whole Topielinski family was united on Polish soil: the parents; the Greenwoods, who were already called the Krasnodrzewskis;

and young Andrzej and his wife with the rest of the relatives. Are they happy? Enquire of them at their Warsaw address, and they’!I tell you themselves.’**

Though today we cannot read this passage unmindful of the horrors this fictional family will face in another ten years, it is worth considering the hope and idealism with which it must have been written in the 1920s. Here we see the fulfilment of Henryk Nagiel’s contention, decades before, that Polish immigrants and their children would some day take back to Poland the lessons they’d learned in America—about democracy and about Polishness—and create from them a new 40 Dzienntk dla Wszystkich, 27 May 1929. 41 Tbid.

‘We're all from Poland’ 69 nation. The fear expressed by Kazimierz Neuman that ‘the Jews are one brother

and one sister with the Poles’ here becomes the hope that can put the Polish national family back together. The message is not merely, as earlier writers had contended, that Jewishness is compatible with Polishness, that under certain circumstances Polish Jews and Christians can coexist. The message 1s that Jews from Poland are, simply and indisputably, Poles. We know that at the same time other voices countered with messages of distrust and division. And we know that Polish immigrant writers, in the years leading up to Poland’s rebirth, had often used Jewish characters as foils against whom true Poles could be distinguished. But by the 1930s these portrayals were explicitly and pointedly derided. We also know that, despite these bright hopes, the future would bring unfathomable darkness. But in those turbulent years, which culminated in tragedy, we should also remember that strong voices in America argued that Poland was the ~ rightful homeland for both Jew and non-Jew, and Polishness their equal birthright. It was at this juncture that those long-standing arguments of Polonia’s activist authors about the essence of Polishness and the place of Jews in the Polish nation were finding practical application. And during this time Polish immigrant writers made their strongest case for a Polish identity and a Polish state that embraced both Jew and non-Jew, unequivocally, unapologetically, and lovingly.

BLANK PAGE

Polish—Jewish Relations in

America, 1880-1940 Old Elements, New Configurations EWA MORAWSKA RELATIONS between Poles and Jews in American cities where these immigrants

settled during the first half of the twentieth century represent a sociologically interesting case of transplantation into a new environment of the old-country pattern of ‘distant proximity’ based on continued economic exchange and mutual disdain. But the different sociocultural and political context of American society has added new elements to this relationship. In reconstructing this process, I have relied on my previous work on this subject! and a re-examination of the ethnographic studies contemporary with early twentieth-century immigrant enclaves in America as well as the Polish and Yiddish-language press in American cities where both groups settled, letters from immigrants to their families in eastern Europe, and Polish and Yiddish novels and plays depicting Polish—Jewish relations written in America or taken over from Europe and distributed throughout the immigrant communities. The continuity and change in Polish—Jewish relations will be discussed in three phases: the situation in eastern Europe at the turn of the twentieth

century as a comparative background to later modifications, early immigrant settlement in America (1880-1914), and the inter-war period.

EASTERN EUROPE It was only in the five decades preceding the First World War that eastern Europe, including the Polish territories partitioned between Russia, Austria, and Germany, ' E. Morawska, ‘A Replica of the Old-Country Relationship in the Ethnic Niche: East European Jews and Gentiles in Small-Town Western Pennsylvania, 1880s—1930s’, American Jewish History, 77

(Sept. 1987), 27-86; ead., ‘Changing Images of the Old Country in the Development of Ethnic Identity among East European Immigrants, 1880s—1930s: A Comparison of Jewish and Slavic Representations’, YIVO Annual of fewish Social Science, 21 (1993), 273-341; ead., Insecure Prosperity: Jews in Small-Town Industrial America, 1880-1940 (Princeton, 1996).

72 Ewa Morawska entered the phase of accelerated urban—industrial transformation.* This was a protracted, uneven, and incomplete transformation, fraught with contradictions. It was initiated and carried out from above by the old feudal classes; constrained by the dependent character of the region’s economic advance, which lacked internal

impetus and was significantly influenced by and subordinated to the far more developed core countries of western Europe; and encumbered by the ubiquitous remnants of a feudal past in social forms and political institutions.° By 1900 the majority of the Polish population—about 70 per cent in Congress Poland (within the Russian partition) and over 80 per cent in Galicia (within the Austrian partition)—still resided in the countryside. The rapidly increasing numbers of impoverished and landless peasants dislocated by the abolition of serfdom

and the alienation of the noble estates (in 1848 in Austria, 1861-3 in Russia), implemented without any restructuring of the old socio-economic order and combined with demographic explosion, drifted between the countryside and the cities, which could employ only a fraction of them. In that same year about 75 per cent of Jews in Congress Poland and 65 per cent in Galicia were urban dwellers, and 30—40 per cent and 15-20 per cent respectively were occupied in manufacturing. Still, a

significant proportion of these ‘urban’ Jews—nearly 50 per cent in Congress Poland and as many as 70 per cent in Galicia—tresided in miasteczki, semi-rural towns and villages in the countryside, and among those employed in manufacturing, no more than 25 per cent were modern factory labourers in the strict sense, the majority being occupied as artisans in small handicraft shops. Of the remainder, about half of all gainfully employed Jews in Congress Poland and nearly 70 per cent in Galicia were engaged in trade and related commercial occupations, mostly

on a small scale, while at the same time constituting 75 per cent of the entire commercial class in the former, and 80 per cent in the latter region.* | In this ambivalent situation between the old feudal order and the emergent peripheral capitalism, the majority of Jews (and, indirectly, those employed in small manufacturing shops producing fabrics, leather goods, pots and pans, and 2 Since, by the end of the 19th century, the majority of Jews from the German-ruled part of Poland

had already moved west to Berlin and other west German cities, and those who subsequently emigrated to America arrived and adapted as German Jews, relations between Poles and this group are

excluded from this discussion. |

3 I. Berend and G. Ranki, Economic Development of East Central Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York, 1974); eid., The European Periphery and Industrialization, 1750-1914 (New York, 1982); W. Blackwell (ed.), Russian Economic Development from Peter the Great to Stalin (Princeton, 1974); D. Chirot, Social Change in the Modern Era (San Diego, 1986). 4 See Z. Kormanowa and I. Pietrzak-Pawlowska (eds.), Historia Polski, 5 vols. (Warsaw, 1963), 111;

— §. Dubnow, History of the Fews in Russia and Poland, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1916), 1, i; I. Rubinow, Economic Condition of the Jews in Russia (1907; repr. New York, 1975); Sbornik materialov ob ekonomicheskom polozhenii evreev v Rossii (St Petersburg, 1904); S. Baron, The Russian Jew under Tsars and

Soviets (New York, 1964); A. Kahan, Essays in Jewish Social and Economic History, ed. R. Weiss (Chicago, 1986); R. Mahler, ‘The Economic Background of Jewish Emigration from Galicia to the United States’, YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science, 7 (1952), 255-67.

Polish—fewish Relations in America 73 other household and agricultural tools sold to the Polish population) continued to

perform their traditional role as economic middlemen or, more accurately, as pariah capitalists positioned in the ‘status gap’ separating two major classes: the peasantry and the gentry.° The authoritarian and, especially in Russia, increasingly viciously antisemitic political regimes in the region, and the cultural order dominated by the institutions and dominant position of the Christian religion, made the status of Jews as ‘native aliens’ even more acute. ’

Such was the broader societal framework of the relations between the future immigrants to America: the Polish peasants and the Jews. Economic exchange was the main arena of everyday interaction between the two groups: on market days in the shtetls, and during the week as Jews travelled through the countryside buying

agricultural produce and selling their wares. Other forms of contact developed

around this primary relation: peasants visited local Jewish store owners or innkeepers to hear the news and ask advice (even in matchmaking), klezmorim (folk

musicians) were hired to play at peasant weddings, Jewish midwives attended peasant women at childbirth and distributed remedies to the villagers in sickness, peasant servant girls worked in better-off Jewish homes in the shtetls, and shabes goyim (non-Jews) took care of the household tasks forbidden Jews on the sabbath and holidays.®

Against the background of their close proximity and long common historical tradition, this economic symbiosis bound the two groups in daily interaction and made for considerable familiarity in their relationships. It was, however, a familiar-

ity with a built-in distance characteristic of relationships between groups in > J. Rinder, ‘Strangers in the Land: Social Relations in the Status Gap’, Social Problems, 6 (Winter 1958-9), 253-60. 6 On Jews generally as a historical middleman minority, see W. Zenner, Minorities in the Middle: A Cross-Cultural Analysis (Albany, NY, 1991).

7 J. Kugelmass, ‘Native Aliens: The Jews of Poland as a Middleman Minority’, Ph.D. thesis (New School for Social Research, 1980); also L. Rothkirchen, Deep-Rooted yet Alien: Some Aspects of the

History of the Jews in Subcarpathian Ruthena, Carpatho-Rusyn Research Centre Monograph (Bethlehem, Pa., 1986), 147-01. 8 On this and Polish-Jewish relations in Polish territories at the turn of the 2oth century, see A. Cala,

Wizerunek Zyda w polskiej kulturze ludowe; (Warsaw, 1992); O. Goldberg-Mulkiewicz, “The Stereotype of the Jew in Polish Folklore’, in I. Ben-Ami et al. (eds.), Studies in Aggadah and Jewish Folklore (Jerusalem, 1983), 85-90; W. Kula, N. Assorodobraj Kuta, and M. Kula, ‘Introduction’, in Kula et al., Writing Home: Immigrants in Brazil and the United States, r8go—1891, trans. J. Wtulich

from Polish and Yiddish (New York, 1986); A. Hertz, Zydzi w kulturze polskiej (Paris, 1961); H. Abramovitch, ‘Rural Jewish Occupations in Lithuania’, YJVO Annual of Jewish Social Science, 2-3 (1947-8), 205-21; J. Slomka, From Serfdom to Self-Government: Memoirs of a Polish Village Mayor, 1842-1927 (London, 1941); Kugelmass, ‘Native Aliens’; J. Schoenfeld, Shtet! Memoirs (Hoboken, NJ,

1985); yizkor bikher, esp. J. Kugelmass and J. Boyarin (ed. and trans.), From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry (Bloomington, Ind., 1998); published and unpublished immigrant memoirs held at the YIVO Archives, New York, the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, Philadelphia, the American Jewish Historical Society, New York, and the Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota (IHRC).

74 Ewa Morawska societies segmented by the ascriptive statuses and social roles that clearly defined particular groups, and by the profound cultural divergence between them. Peasant attitudes towards their Jewish economic partners were mostly disdainful and mistrusting, although this approach was not wholly unequivocal. As already noted, commercial functions performed by a group ethnically or religiously distinct from the majority of the population were seen in agricultural societies as devious and exploitative in nature, and the two major classes, the gentry and the peasantry, shared this attitude. Since business and commerce were considered as the Jewish domain, by extension Jews were considered to be deceitful and cunning. At the same time, however, peasant perceptions of Jews also contained an element of ambivalence towards, if not positive admiration for, the initiative, resourcefulness, and astuteness of the Jewish traders, expressed in such standard references in the peasant parlance as ‘Jewish smarts’, ‘wise as a Jew’, and ‘to stand up for each other like one Jew for another’. This disdain and mistrust felt by the peasants towards their Jewish neighbours was strongly reinforced by religious images and beliefs. The ‘sins’ of the New Testament Jews against the Christian God were transferred onto their contemporaries, and, as repeatedly witnessed in Jewish immigrant memoirs, the slur ‘Godkillers’ was commonly used against them when peasants were drunk, angry with them for some reason, or religiously aroused, particularly during Easter, by hearing an especially moving sermon about Christ’s martyrdom and crucifixion. By implication, the sinners are equated with evil, and this, in Christian imagery, had a ready symbol in the figure of the Devil. In fact the likeness to and collusion of the

Jews with the Devil and spirits were common themes in turn-of-the-century Polish peasant tales, proverbs, and images. Again, however, these perceptions of Jews, while basically deprecatory, were not unambivalent, and in the area where religion was interwoven with folk magic, they even contained certain positive elements. Inasmuch as they believed in the Jews’ supernatural connections with spirits, peasants, according to contemporary ethnographers, ascribed to the Jews certain magical powers—evil, but also beneficent, influences such as good luck or good health. It was because of this intermingled cognitive and emotional content of peasants’ attitudes towards their Jewish neighbours, in which the dominant elements of disdain and resentment were mixed with fearful wonder, that their daily relations based on the established patterns of service exchange easily broke down into acts of verbal abuse and behavioural aggression. Low as their position was, at the bottom of the social structure in Polish society, peasants, as one of the two major classes and members of the dominant religion, felt secure and superior in relation to Jews, who were a minority. The agricultural, Christian countryside was the peasants’ territory, in which the Jews were a rooted but nevertheless alien addition. This element of security and domination in the peasants’ relationship with the Jews found expression in disparaging names such as Zydek, a term used com-

Polish—fewtsh Relations in America 75 monly by the Polish rural and urban classes alike. This perceived vulnerability of Jews in relation to the generally unfriendly surrounding population made them all the more suitable for peasants to use as social objects against which they could generate for themselves a sense of power in their otherwise subordinate position. As for the counterpart of this relation—Jewish perceptions of the peasantry around them and the mundane realm of the non-Jewish environment in general,

and the inhabitants of villages surrounding the shtetl in particular—they were seen by the Jews primarily instrumentally, as the source of parnose (livelihood) through everyday economic exchange. However, as with the peasants, their every-

day interaction, purely functional as it was, together with their differences in appearance, language, and customs, reinforced rather than diminished the sense of ‘otherness’ felt by Jews towards their economic partners. Underlying this sense among the Jews of the otherness of the peasants were feelings of scorn and suspicion. But if similar feelings among the peasants towards the Jews were prompted

by their perception of the latter as endowed with characteristics beyond their grasp, the Jewish perceptions of peasants were the reverse: they represented the uncivilized and uncultured. The term goy, referring generally to non-Jews, was actually used to denote ‘peasant’ in the everyday Yiddish idiom across the Polish territories. It denoted people and things that were backward, ignorant, driven by unrestrained animal instincts and physical aggression—everything a Jew did not want to and should not be. This value-laden distinction was inculcated in Jewish children from infancy, and their sense of superiority emerged even more forcefully from Jewish religious convictions. Because of their cult of icons, statues, and other ‘graven images’, the Jews held Christians to be idolatrous, especially the rituals observed by the peasantry.

Nevertheless, the negative attitude of the Jews towards peasants generally lacked intensity. Rather, it was accompanied by pity for their wretched conditions. (In immigrant recollections of the old country, Jews, however poor themselves, by

and large saw their own standard of living as higher than that of the peasants.) And, perhaps even more importantly, pity arose from a sense of the superiority of their own values and their whole way of life. Side by side with disdain built upon a sense of material and cultural superiority (yet softened by the feeling of pity), the

second element in the attitude of Jews towards the peasants was fear and mistrust of a powerless minority, reinforced by a perception of the threatening, uncontrol-

lable physicality of their non-Jewish neighbours, who were easily aroused to aggressive acts by momentary upset or inebriation, or by religious and other incitements. As a result of this ever-present anxiety, there developed among the Jews a

compartmentalization in their attitude towards the peasants: externally, a demeanour of accommodation, but internally a sense of superiority and contempt, expressed and reasserted within their own community. Living side by side in ‘distant proximity’, Polish peasants and Jews alike were affected by the structural dislocations and general impoverishment of the lower

76 Ewa Morawska classes that accompanied the capitalist transformation of eastern Europe. Mass migrations to America, which began in the 1880s and were interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War, swept through both groups. Mobilized by political as well as economic motives, the Jewish exodus was relatively much larger than that of Polish peasants: 27 per cent of the former, compared with about 8 per cent of the

latter, left for America in this great wave of migration. Unlike the peasants, the majority of whom intended their American sojourn to be temporary, ‘just to save enough money for a better life [at home|’, Jewish emigration was permanent. But the two groups travelled the same routes (often exchanging information before departure), shared trains to west European ports, crowded the same third-class compartments in transatlantic ships, and nervously waited together to pass immigration inspection upon arrival in America.? As we shall see, their old relationships did not cease in the new country.

EARLY SETTLEMENT IN AMERICA, I1880S—1914 As in eastern Europe, the occupational pursuits of Polish peasant and Jewish immigrants in America followed different patterns: the former were concentrated in heavy industries, where they worked as manual labourers, while the latter found employment either in garment and related manufacturing or as small-scale entrepreneurs. Because the two groups continued to live in close proximity—many Polish peasant and Jewish immigrants settled in the same American cities, often next to each other in foreign enclaves—and because of their mutual familiarity from the old country, the economic exchange between Jews as commercial dealers and Poles as their customers remained the primary form of their relations. Over time, as Jewish immigrants left their original manufacturing jobs for the preferred self-employment, this relationship was consolidated.'°

For Jewish immigrant entrepreneurs from the old country, the large and growing population of Polish peasants, now industrial workers in American cities, ° On the mass emigration to America of Poles and Jews at the turn of the zoth century, see A. Pilch (ed.), Emigracja z ztem polskich w czasach nowozytnych 1 najnowszych (Warsaw, 1984); S. Kuznets,

‘Immigration of Russian Jews to the United States: Background and Structure’, Perspectives in American EMistory, 9 (1975), 35-126; Kula et al., ‘Introduction’.

10 On the residential proximity of peasant, Polish, and Russian Jewish immigrants in several American cities at the beginning of the 2oth century and Jewish shops in these neighbourhoods, see M. Byington, Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town (New York, 1910; repr. Pittsburgh, 1974);

A. Walaszek, Swiaty imigrantéw, 1880-1930 (Krakéw, 1994); O. Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880-1920 (Chicago, 1982); D. Pacyga, Polish Immigrants in Industrial Chicago: Workers on the South Side, 1580-1922 (Columbus, Ohio, 1991); C. Wright, The Slums of Baltimore, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia,

Special Report of the Commissioner of Labor, 53rd Congress, 2nd Session, Ex. Doc. no. 257 (Washington, 1894); C. Golab, Immigrant Destinations (Philadelphia, 1977); Morawska, Insecure Prosperity. On occupational concentrations of Polish and Jewish immigrants in American cities, see Reports of the Immigration Commission: Immigrants in Cities, pt. 1v: Immigrants in Industries, pt. v: 61st

Polish—fewrsh Relations in America 77 represented natural customers who had to be clothed and fed, and whose language, habits, and needs they already knew. Reciprocally, Polish immigrant workers not

only preferred the familiar Jewish businesses over the American ones, whose language and practices were alien and where they felt uncomfortable, but also, as in the old country, they preferred them over the stores of their non-Jewish countrymen, whose business acumen they did not trust. Indeed, the type of business Jewish entrepreneurs were involved in was tailored to the needs of peasant immigrant families, whether trading in the old-country market style in the foreign enclaves of American cities (as on Hester Street on the Lower East Side in New York City) or peddling their wares around coal-mining towns in Pennsylvania and Ohio, where the Poles settled. Jewish merchants sold work clothes for men, fabrics and haberdashery for women who sewed at home for themselves and their children, second-hand furniture, and jewellery items pleasing to peasant tastes, ‘shiny, like those [sold] at the odpust [saint’s day] in Europe’. They also exchanged foreign currency and sold steamship tickets over the counter in general stores. Their trading practices were familiar, and Jewish immigrants servicing their peasant immigrant clientele had a working knowledge of the Polish language. And, as happened when immigrants were short of money, not infrequently the transactions were conducted in kind, old-country style, like those of Hyman K. from Creekside in Indiana County, Pennsylvania: “They gave me chicken and I gave them shirts.” More commonly, the merchandise was sold on credit, and the debt repaid in instalments every two weeks, when the workers were paid." This transplantation to American cities of the economic relationship between Poles and Jews sustained their habitual perceptions of one another. For Polish peasant immigrants, ‘Jewish’ continued to mean ‘doing business’ and Jews themselves as before were perceived half-appreciatively, half-mistrustfully, as ‘very

clever, but unpleasantly so [you had to be alert not to get swindled]’. These customary impressions were maintained in the Polish immigrant press?” and other Congress, 2nd Session, Senate Documents 338 and 633 (Washington, 1911). On Jews’ perceptions of their industrial employment as temporary and their desire to leave it, see J. Lestschinsky, ‘Economic and Social Development of American Jewry’, in The Jewish People, Past and Present, iv (New York, 1955); N. Glazer, “The American Jew and the Attainment of Middle-Class Rank: Some Trends and Explanations’, in M. Sklare (ed.), The Fews: Soctal Patterns of an American Group (New York, 1958); V. Y. McLaughlin, ‘Metaphors of Self in History: Subjectivity, Oral Narrative, and Immigration Studies’, in V. Y. McLaughlin (ed.), Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology and Politics (New York, 1990); I. Kessner, The Golden Door: Itahan and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City, 1830-1915 (New York, 1977).

41 Quotations taken from my study in Johnstown, Pennsylvania (Morawska, Insecure Prosperity); also M. Drozdowski (ed.), Pamigtniki imigrantow: Stany Zjednoczone, 2 vols. (Warsaw, 1977); autobiographies of Polish and Jewish immigrants, IHRC and YIVO Archives; the Polish-language press in America, [HRC. 12 An observation of a contemporary observer of Russian immigrant readership in America applies equally to Poles: ‘In the Grodno, Minsk, Volyn regions, peasants used newspapers as cigarette lighters, while here they become regular readers of periodicals’ (Russkoe slovo, 10 June 1919). Indeed, many

78 Ewa Morawska cultural productions——in fiction, in calendars with their proverbs and anecdotes, and in folk poems, songs, and plays performed by amateur ensembles in the Polish

enclaves. From the early years of Polish settlement in America, Jews and their pursuits were a common feature, cast in their old-country roles as tavern-keepers, moneylenders, and country produce dealers, and as ‘sharp’ shopkeepers and commercial speculators in the American immigrant colonies. Polish immigrant fiction and plays depicting ‘American scenes’ frequently contained the stereotypical Shloyme or Moshke character craftily working his way among the Poles, relentlessly buying and selling, speculating, and making an (unfair) profit.1* It is possible

that the intended temporary nature of their stay in America, and their resulting homeward frame of reference, constituted for the majority of Polish immigrants an additional factor in sustaining these old-country representations of Jews. As in Europe, this deeply embedded sense of the suspicious ‘otherness’ of ‘smart Zydki? among Polish labourers in America was reinforced by immigrant churches that served as centres of ethnic spiritual and social life. The liturgy and teachings of Polish Roman Catholic churches in immigrant neighbourhoods contained familiar themes from the old country, and foreign-language prayer books and catechisms for children were often imports or reprints of Polish editions. As before in Poland, the annual liturgical cycle at Easter was the occasion for the expression of heightened resentment against the trans-historical ‘invidious Jews’ who had ‘accused Jesus... who did nothing but good’. As in the old country, peasant immigrants knew practically nothing about Judaism; the expressions that had been common in Polish villages to refer to Jewish observances were still used to describe, half in jest and half in derision, the incomprehensible behaviour of a member of an immigrant household: ‘Stop rocking like a Jew at a prayer’ or ‘You’re mumbling like a Jew at prayer’.!+

From the perspective of Jewish immigrant entrepreneurs, their Polish customers were seen, as before, predominantly functionally, as the source of the livelihood of Jewish families: ‘Our relationship with them was business’, ‘They were just customers in our store’. As such, they remained the familiar but distant ‘others’. Poor and uneducated, Polish unskilled labourers in American factories, mills, and coalmines occupied the lowest level in the dominant capitalist system, similar to their position in post-feudal eastern Europe. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Jewish attitudes towards them retained a sense of superiority, reinforced, as in the peasant immigrants who went to America illiterate and too old to attend school learned how to read from these newspapers; see R. Park, Immigrant Press (New York, 1922).

13 Quotations are from my interviews in Pittsburgh and Johnstown (Morawska, Insecure Prosperity); representations of Jews in Polish immigrant culture from my analysis of the Polish-language press in America and immigrant memoirs, [HRC and Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies; also Drozdowski (ed.), Pamietniki imigrantow.

‘4 Quoted in Morawska, ‘A Replica of the Old-Country Relationship’, 78; information about religious antisemitism in the Polish immigrant press and in catechisms, from my examination of Polish holdings at the IHRC and Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies.

Polish—Jewish Relations in America 79 old country, both by the Jewish value system and by perceptions absorbed from mainstream American society. In the eyes of their Jewish trading partners, Polish

immigrant labourers were ‘the same people [they had known] from eastern Europe’ and, as before, they represented the ‘base-natural’, uncivilized, uncultured characteristics that were the opposite of what Jewish culture valued most highly: ‘they were ignorant and simple-minded’, ‘backward’, ‘Jews had wider horizons’, ‘Jewish was superior’. As in Europe, however, this Jewish attitude towards the peasant immigrants was modified by pity for their lot as common labourers at the mercy of the exploitative American capitalists.*°

The transplantation to American cities of the core elements of old-country Polish—Jewish relationships notwithstanding, the different context of American society altered the overall ‘field of forces’ in these relations. Even as struggling petty entrepreneurs, Jewish storekeepers in America were more akin to the dominant group than were the immigrant labourers, and were on much more open and hospitable territory than they had ever been in eastern Europe. A felt shift in the balance of power in their relations with their traditional customers enhanced the Jewish immigrants’ newly acquired sense of civic security. While a sense of superi-

: ority mixed with pity continued to inform Jewish attitudes towards their Polish customers, another important component of this old-country relationship—the ever-present mistrust underlying the accommodating demeanour of the Jews when dealing with peasant customers—had either completely disappeared (in large cities, especially in New York, where Jewish communities were large and institutionally complete) or significantly diminished (in smaller towns). While they were important primarily in their economic function as customers of Jewish businesses, Polish peasant immigrants had been, to the Jews, ‘left behind’:

metaphorically, as part of the past, and actually, in the context of the dominant American society, as a basically powerless group at the bottom of its socioeconomic structure. The displays of the ‘supremacy’ of peasants over the Jewish minority in the Polish countryside—the cruel ‘jokes’, the interruptions of religious observances, brawls often ending in attacks on Jewish people and property— had ceased, because although they were still on territory with a Christian majority, it was not ‘theirs’ any more and had a different civil and political atmosphere and

laws concerning public behaviour. Their anti-Jewish feelings, which had transferred from the old country, for the most part latent and occasionally expressed in verbal abuse, did not interfere with individual business dealings and were taken for granted by Jews: acknowledged, and then dismissed: ‘You didn’t expect anything else’, ‘Well, the usual stuff’, ‘[They] repeated what the priest told them’.*© 15 Quotations are taken from my interviews in Johnstown (Morawska, Insecure Prosperity and ‘A Replica of the Old-Country Relationship’); similar representations appear in Jewish immigrant memoirs, YIVO Archives.

‘© Quotations and evidence about Jewish immigrants’ perceptions of their peasant immigrant customers are taken from my Johnstown study (Morawska, Insecure Prosperity and ‘A Replica of the Old-Country Relationship’) and from Jewish immigrant memoirs, YIVO Archives.

80 Ewa Morawska A sense of having left the Poles and their ‘Jewish problem’ behind was intensified by the focus of Jewish immigrants on their future in America and their determination to make the best of it. By 1910 nearly 60 per cent of Yiddish-speaking immigrants were already American citizens or had applied for citizenship, and New York Jewish dailies devoted nearly 40 per cent of their editorials to matters

American. The Yiddish-language press and fiction about immigrant lives in America reiterated the need for Jews to ‘Americanize’, arguing the basic similarity of Jewish and American ideals of justice and democracy, whereas representations of the old country were primarily constructed as a disjunctive ‘we emigrants from east Europe’, in the sense of a place left behind.*’

In contrast, Polish immigrants had remained by and large focused on the old country. In the same year of 1910 the naturalization figure for Poles was only about 30 per cent, and the proportion of America-related articles in the Chicago-based daily Zgoda (the Polish newspaper with the largest circulation in the country) was less than 15 per cent of the total; the remainder were devoted to Polish affairs.1®

This home-country orientation of Polish communities in America found reinforcement in a new development that was transforming immigrant identities and that stood in a sharp contrast to the ‘Americanization fervour’ among Jews. The overwhelming majority of Polish peasant immigrants went to the United States with a group identity and a sense of belonging that extended no further than the okolica, the local countryside. In Poland at the turn of the twentieth century peasants usually replied to the question ‘Who are your’ with ‘We are from around here’, which was then followed by the name of the area. Identification with and

preservation of the wider ‘ideological nationhood’!? was the prerogative of the gentry and the urban intelligentsia. Somewhat paradoxically, it was only after they

left Poland and went to America that peasant immigrants developed national identities as Poles by appropriating the metaphors of the old-country Vaterland, nationhood, as distinct from the local Heimat, the local area of people’s daily activities.”° 17 Naturalization figures after S. W. Cotts (ed.), After Ellis Island: Newcomers and Natives in the 1910 Census (New York, 1994), app. B; references to eastern Europe and America in the Jewish immigrant

press, theatrical plays, and fiction from Morawska, ‘Changing Images of the Old Country’, and M. Soltes, The Yiddish Press: An Americanizing Agency (1925; repr. New York, 1969). 18 See Susan Cotts Watkins (ed.), After Ellis Island: Newcomers and Natives in the 1910 Census (New York, 1994), app. B; Morawska, ‘Changing Images of the Old Country’. 19 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983).

20 S. Ossowski, ‘Analiza socjologiczna pojecia ojczyzny’, in Ossowski, Z zagadnien psychologu spoteczney (Warsaw, 1967); on this and the ‘nationalization’ of Polish peasants’ identities in America,

see W. I. Thomas and F Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (Boston, 1918-20); V. Greene, For God and Country: The Rise of Polish and Lithuanian Consctousness in America (Madison,

Wis., 1975); A. Brozek, Polonia amerykanska, 1854-1939 (Warsaw, 1977); Morawska, ‘Changing Images of the Old Country’. On a similar process among other east European non-Jewish groups, see R. Park, The Immigrant Press and tts Control (New York, 1922).

Polish-Fewish Relations in America 81 The mediators in this process were often émigrés from the lower strata of the Polish intelligentsia, or, to be precise, the pdf-inteligencja (‘semi-intelligentsia’), partly educated petty déclassé gentry active in immigrant cultural forums, for whom passionate nationalism was the main, if not the sole, demonstrable link with the old-country elite. Poland’s enduring subjugation to alien states, and romantic ideas of the Polish nation as an innocent martyr heroically resisting its enemies, had made Polish nationalism an embodiment of the ethnic particularist rather than civic universalist type, informed by exclusionary us-them symbolic distinctions that were assigned the morally opposing values of good and evil confronted in a Manichaean battle. Inspired by such perceptions, the immigrant press regularly

reprinted the prose and poetry of Polish writers heralding glorious deeds of national heroes of the past, contrasting them with depictions of the present undeserved sufferings of the freedom-loving Polish nation. So intense was this preoccupation with the old-country fatherland that the American Catholic Church hierarchy and school institutions, with which Polish immigrant leaders engaged in

bitter battles over language rights in parish and classroom, were commonly depicted as ‘Prussian policemen’ or ‘Muscovite spies’, that is, as extensions of the national oppressors (Poland’s partitioners) in Europe.”!

In this context of heightened Polish nationalism forcefully propagated by pot-inteligencja editors of the Polish immigrant press and leaders of ethnic organizations, core representations of Jews as depicted in the religious and Hezmat-level economic terms familiar to peasant immigrants acquired over time a new, ‘modern’ dimension. Less deeply engraved than the traditional images, these new represen-

tations—of Jews as enemies of Poland’s national interests who obstructed the development of a native capitalist class and, more generally, as conspiring ‘world capitalists’-—nevertheless added another layer to Polish immigrants’ perceptions.7”

THE INTER-WAR PERIOD Economic exchange between commercial dealers and their customers remained the basic form of Polish—Jewish relations in America after the First World War.

Although Jewish families had over time moved out of the foreign enclaves into more prestigious residential areas, those who owned stores in immigrant neighbourhoods usually maintained their businesses there. This relationship was expanded during the inter-war period to include two additional elements. One was the frequent use in Jewish households of Polish (and other Slavic) maids, another 21 Qn the historical circumstances of the emergence of Polish nationalism, see H. Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York, 1944); W. Connor, Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding (Princeton, 1994); A. Walicki, Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism: The Case of Poland (Oxford, 1981); labelling

of immigrants’ American antagonists with the names of old-country national enemies from my content analysis of the Polish-language press in the IHRC. 22 Morawska, ‘A Replica of the Old-Country Relationship’.

82 Ewa Morawska ‘transplant’ of the old-country tradition that had to wait, so to speak, for application in a new environment until Jewish families advanced themselves enough socio-economically to afford such outside help. The other was the services provided by second-generation Jewish professionals, especially doctors and lawyers, to Polish clients. The latter sought out Jewish medical and legal services for the same reasons that they patronized Jewish stores, and because they apparently thought them to be endowed with some ‘special powers’—a secularized version, perhaps, of peasant magical beliefs about Jewish connections with the supernatural.?° In the context of the persisting socio-economic discrepancy between the two groups,~* the continuation of this economic exchange between them also sustained traditional mutual perceptions. Jews who continued to do business with Poles?° perceived their ‘lowly’ customers primarily in instrumental terms as a source of their livelihood, while Poles continued to see Jews as half-feared, half-admired ‘money smart’ operators. The developments that took place during the inter-war period, however, added new elements to these mutual perceptions. The Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917, followed by the re-emergence of an independent Polish state and the subsequent Polish—Soviet war in 1920, generated quite different sentiments among Polish and Jewish populations in eastern Europe, and the repercussions were felt in the two immigrant communities in America.

Poles greeted the re-emergence of independent Poland with understandable enthusiasm and viewed Soviet communism as a continuation in the region of the aggressive tsarist imperial regime, doubly despised because of its ‘ungodly’ (atheist) nature. Jews welcomed the communist revolution, which brought political emancipation and the official prohibition of racism and discrimination against this and other national minorities in the Soviet Union, but they viewed with appre-

hension the redrawn map of the rest of eastern Europe (besides Poland, 23 The latter conjecture derives from my interviews with Polish and Jewish immigrants in Johnstown, and content analysis of Polish-language press and immigrant fiction in America conducted at the archives of the IHRC and the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies; for the continued economic exchange between Poles and Jews during the inter-war period, see J. Parot, Polish Catholics in Chicago, 1850-1920: Religious History (DeKalb, Ill., 1981); C. Golab, Immigrant Destinations (Philadelphia, 1977); Walaszek, Swiaty imigrantéw 1880-1930; Pacyga, Polish Immigrants in Industrial Chicago; E. Kantowicz, Polish-American Politics in Chicago 1888—1940 (Chicago, 1975); M. Erdmans,

Opposite Poles: Immigrants and Ethnics in Polish Chicago (University Park, Pa., 1998); Morawska, Insecure Prosperity.

24 For material on Poles still occupying the lowest echelons of the American industrial capitalist structure and Jews advancing to the middle class, see J. Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington, Ind., 1985); J. Lestschinsky, ‘Economic and Social Development of American Jewry’, in The Jewish People, Past and Present.

25 As they entered mainstream occupations and moved out to better neighbourhoods, increasing numbers of Jews ceased the economic exchange with their old-country partners.

Polish—fewish Rei rtions in America 83 Czechoslovakia gained (bi)national statehood, while Hungary lost most of its prewar territories to its neighbours) and, in particular, intensified national hatreds, popular antisemitic excesses, and a vulnerable future for local Jewish minorities.”° These events reinforced Polish immigrants’ perceptions of Jews as enemies— now not only religious and economic, but also political—of Poland’s national

interests and cultural traditions, and contributed to the addition of yet another ‘modern’ image of this group as communists. Altogether, these perceptions formed a multi-layered set of incoherent representations of Jews as Christ-killers,

capitalists, and Bolsheviks. Polish immigrants’ enduring concentration on the affairs of their native country sustained these representations in relation to eastern Europe; by the 1920s well over a third of Polish-language press editorials—nearly

three times as many as their Yiddish counterparts—were still devoted to oldcountry topics, among which the ‘Jewish problem’ was staple fare.?" At the same time Polish immigrants’ collective identities were undergoing the

process of Americanization or, more precisely, ‘hyphenation’, by shifting from Polish to ‘Polish-American’. By the mid-1920s over half of Polish immigrants were naturalized or had applied for citizenship. In most Polish communities a variety of Polish American Citizens’ clubs sprang up alongside the national associations, while immigrant press editorials on ‘our adopted homeland’ pointed to the advantages of the United States’ economic prowess and the benefits of American

political institutions.2* As they were putting down more permanent roots in America, immigrants began to compare their group’s economic and political position in their new country to the situation and advancement of other groups. In this American context, too, Jews served as a standard frame of reference. Thus, the Polish-language press and Polish American fiction expressed resentment mixed 26 Brozek, Polonia amerykanska 1854-1939; Z. Szajkowski, ‘Private and Organized American Jewish Overseas Relief (1914-1938), American Jewish Historical Quarterly, 57 (Sept. 1967), 52—106; on reflections of these sentiments in the Polish and Jewish immigrant press in America, see Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey, 1918—1923, held at the IHRC; also J. Rappaport, ‘Jewish Immigrants and World War I: A Study of American Yiddish Press Reactions’, Ph.D. thesis (Columbia University, 1951); Walaszek, Swiaty imigrantéw 1880-1930; W. Galush, ‘Faith and Fatherland: Dimensions of Polish American Ethnoreligion, 1875-1975’, in R. Miller and T. Marzik (eds.), Immigrants and Religion in Urban America (Philadelphia, 1977); D. Pienkos, For your Freedom through Ours: Polish Amenican Efforts on Poland’s Behalf, 1863-1991 (Boulder, Colo., 1951).

27 For this and the following, see R. Park, The Immigrant Press and its Control (New York, 1922); Morawska, ‘Changing Images of the Old Country’; my re-examination of files of inter-war Polish immigrant press articles, calendars, fiction, and autobiographies at the archives of the IHRC and the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies; and my interviews with Polish immigrants in Johnstown and Pittsburgh in the early 1980s. 28 This ethnicization of immigrant identities was accompanied by an ambivalence arising out of the expectation of exclusive loyalty that informed the concept of Polish nationality. The same newspapers that wrote appreciatively about the adopted American homeland emphasized—often in the same editorial—the binding force of symbolic membership in nasz polski naréd, the old-country Vaterland, and its enduring claim to serca t mowy wszystkich swoich dziect, ‘the hearts and tongues of all its children’.

84 Ewa Morawska | with admiration for the group solidarity of the American Jews (counterpoised with Polish infighting), their effective organization in civic-political lobbying (as against Polish ineptitude), and pride in their ethnic background (compared with

the self-effacement of the Poles). In particular, the collective socio-economic advancement of American Jews and their increased visibility in American public forums were resentfully admired. In these regards, Poles acknowledged that Jews had left them far behind. Underlying this reluctant appreciation, however, lurked a familiar imputation of cronyism and the ‘sharp practices’ Jews relied on as means to success—the means, as one of my Polish informants in Pittsburgh put it, ‘good [moral] people do not use’ but that are ‘inbred among Jews’ worldwide, in Poland as much as in America.

In comparison, the minds of Jewish immigrants remained firmly fixed on America. Content analyses of the largest-circulation Yiddish and Englishlanguage Jewish newspapers found them ‘utiliz[ing] every possible opportunity to urge their readers to become American citizens. They commended the naturalization work carried out by the special bureaus and classes organized for this purpose

in Jewish centres, and asked their readers to render financial support to these efforts.’*? And indeed, questionnaires filled out in 1922 by immigrants subscribing to these newspapers showed that well over 80 per cent were either naturalized or

had filed applications to become citizens. The largest of these papers, Forverts,

carried advertisements for a ten-cent Yiddish translation of the American Constitution, referring to it as ‘a little Torah . . . the high road to citizenship, employment and success’. The paper began publishing a daily English section in the early 1920s, a practical Americanization initiative without analogue in the

Polish press.°° |

In this dominant American framework of Jewish life-worlds, Poles were nonexistent. They did appear, however, in the east European context on two different occasions and in both cases with a similarly negative connotation. In one of them there were responses in reaction to news of antisemitic incidents in eastern Europe during the inter-war period. On these incidents the Jewish press wrote of “fanatic Poles . . . seeking Jewish blood’ and ‘chauvinists’ who ‘were the fierce enemies of

Jews’. An interesting testimony to the mutual incomprehension of these two groups—in this case, the insensitivity of American Jews to the long struggle of Poles for national independence and the centrality of political oppression to Polish national consciousness—were the repeated sympathetic references in the Jewish press to the Irish people, who had ‘suffered and endured everything so as to remain a nation, and therefore can . . . readily sympathize with the Jew and his national tragedy’.*! I have found no similar compassion regarding Polish history; individual dealings between Poles and Jews notwithstanding, the chasm that existed between 29 Soltes, The Yiddish Press, 127; also Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey, 1923-35.

30 Soltes, The Yiddish Press; the ‘little Torah’ advertisement from A. Liebman, Jews and the Left

(New York, 1979), 339. 31 Chicago Foreign-Language Press Survey, 1923-35.

Polish—fewish Relations in America 85 their collective fates grounded in a long history of cohabitation precluded such recognition.

In the other context, Poles appeared in Jewish immigrant representations in sharp contrast to the increasingly beautified image of the Jewish shtetl, the alte heym projected into the past. This representation, in which old-country goyim or Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian peasants were fused in a generalized image of the alien, intrusive forces encircling the shtetl, in contrast to the internal, Jewish world

with its positive, affinitive significance. Such contrasting portrayals of Jewish shtetls and the surrounding Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian peasantry, ‘a sweetness

amidst fear and oppression’, were depicted in various sources, including immigrant memoirs, ‘Di souvenir zhurnaln’ (Commemorative journals of the /andsman-

shaftn written by members of the group for internal use), and east European Jewish novels in America.*”

Jewish and Polish immigrants both conveyed their own images of the other group to their native-born American children, which were thus carried into the period following the Second World War. In Polish American representations, the image of Jews carried several layers of meaning. They were the familiar Zydki from corner stores in their neighbourhoods (Polish Americans have continued to use this designation in their habitual, unreflective way, often even with friendly intentions to avoid the term Zyd (Jew), which, as one informant explained to me when I asked why she used this belittling diminutive, ‘sounded so bad’ in Polish;

indeed Zyd in the Polish language has traditionally had a pejorative, strongly ‘othering’ connotation). At the same time Jews were the abstract ‘capitalists-cumcommunists’ (depending on the situation) who ‘ruled America’ (and the world) and who conspired against Polish national interests. In both the American and the

Polish context, Jews have remained a reference point against which Polish Americans have assessed the position of their national (in Poland) and ethnic (in America) group in the post-war era. In contrast, for Jewish Americans, the images of Poles have never acted as sucha reference point. But although they surfaced only sporadically, usually in response to events in eastern Europe, they have become images, deeply ingrained and frozen in time, of peasants alien and inimical to everything Jewish-and-good. They are engraved in the collective group memory through family stories, Yiddish novels, and other depictions of the east European Jewish past. It is this collective memory, by its nature ahistorical in that it generalizes and simplifies by removing ambiguities, that seems to have motivated the sustained animosity towards otherwise remote Poles felt by a large number of contemporary American Jews.*° Poles, both in Poland and in America, react to this animosity with frustrated incomprehension, especially in the context of what they perceive as a less intensely felt Jewish 32 See Morawska, ‘Changing Images of the Old Country’. 33M. Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (New York, 1980); see also L. Coser (ed.), Maurice Halbwachs on Collective Memory (Chicago, 1992).

86 Ewa Morawska American grievance against Germans, the ‘real perpetrators’. It may be that because it is ‘personalized’ in family reminiscences, a still image of the inimical Polish (or Ukrainian, or Russian) peasant world that surrounded the Jewish shtetls indeed evokes more intense emotions among American Jews than the more distant and abstract representations of German atrocities.** 34 Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life (Boston, 1999) is probably the best-documented account among recent studies on the belated and mediated recognition of the Holocaust as a significant reference point for the group identity of American Jews.

Poles and Jews in America and the Polish Question, Ig14—1918 MIECZYSLAW B. BISKUPSKI JEWISH reaction to the reappearance of the Polish question in international poli-

tics during the First World War remains a topic without its historian. The American setting of this general phenomenon is accordingly also without its chronicler. How Poles and Jews in America interacted in reaction to the possibility of the reappearance of Poland is a topic of enormous fascination about which we have virtually no evidence save for many scattered references. In this chapter | shall

discuss the dimensions of the issue and the influences that shaped its evolution from a Polish perspective, and devote relatively little attention to what the Jews thought and did regarding the Poles. There is a great deal of work still to be done on this topic, both in elucidating the direction of high policy and in gauging the dimensions of public opinion. I begin by addressing the notion that circumstances conspired to produce the worst possible result in the United States regarding Polish—Jewish amity in the face of the Polish question, and that this foul heritage has had lasting consequences. In the United States, Polish politics went through a rapid evolution in the years before the First World War, which resulted in a victory within organized Polonia of the partisans of the political right. ‘This meant, in effect, the consolidation of political power by a Chicago-based hierarchy of Poles of Poznanian origin who had been resident in the country for a relatively long time, and many of whom were prominent in the national fraternal organizations. The losers were the more recent arrivals, often from Russian Poland, frequently politically on the left, often

unaffiliated with the great national organizations, and geographically dispersed over the eastern United States but noticeably weak in the Midwest, particularly in Chicago. This phenomenon, which I have referred to elsewhere as the victory of an integrating centre over a disparate provincial Polonia, had profound consequences for Polish—Jewish relations. This is because the informing ideology of the leadership of American Polonia was the Endecja (the National Democrats), which, under Roman Dmowski’s direction, became ever more concerned over what he regarded as the unassimilably alien nature of Polish Jewry. ! M. B. Biskupski, ‘Polska diaspora w Stanach Zjednoczonych, 1914—1939’, in A. Walaszek (ed.), Polska diaspora (Krakow, 2001).

88 Mieczystaw B. Biskupski A few years before the outbreak of the First World War, Polanian adherents of

the Endecja, like their European counterparts, had taken a profound change of direction and dropped their long-standing hostility to Roman Catholicism— previously denounced as a traditionalist, conservative, indeed obscurantist impediment to modernization and integration—and made common cause with the clerical faction in the face of the perceived threat from the left. ‘The resulting coali-

tion between Endecja and the clerics, when imported to America, became the ideological and organizational juggernaut that crushed all opponents in Polonia. Hence, Polonia’s Endecja partisans, utilizing the parish network and the support of the Polanian clergy, rather easily defeated all attempts to create alternative coali-

tions that featured politically left elements and were not characterized by antisemitic dispositions. The great bulk of the American Jewish community consisted of recent arrivals from eastern Europe, with few if any assimilated to Polish culture. Rare was the Jew of Polish origin who joined a Polish organization upon reaching the United States. The great majority associated themselves with extant Jewish organizations in which east European immigrants played a modest role, leadership being in the hands of German Jews, many well established in American society, centred around the American Jewish Committee. Polish sources were convinced that the Jews of

America, especially the organized community centred in New York City, were resolutely pro-German until the United States entered the war.” Of late, Zionism had made serious inroads among American Jews, and it took on organizational form in the American Jewish Congress in 1916. Judging by their press, the Poles of America regarded Zionism as unusually hostile to Poland and greeted its spread among American Jews with foreboding. Although there were profound differences between Zionist and anti-Zionist factions, they agreed on the need to protect Jewish minorities in eastern Europe. Both factions were, in Polish eyes, inveterately hostile to Poland, though for obviously quite different reasons. Polish representatives in the United States, both during the war and immediately after, were unanimous in describing American Jewry, especially in New York City, as powerful, well organized and financed, and irremediably anti-Polish. They were, however, at a loss to explain the virulence of this emotion.® Although Polish sources occasionally cited the Endecja’s pre-war hostility to the Jews of Poland—the 1912 boycott campaign being the /ocus classicus—as a possible contribution to the problem, all dismissed it as insufficient to explain the depth of

the anti-Polish sentiment they attributed to the Jews of America. It is quite obvious that the American Poles were unaware of how profoundly the boycott had 2 Thereafter the pro-German Jewish press adopted an ardently patriotic line, only to champion German interests again at the Paris peace conference. The exception to this pattern was the proBolshevik press of the Jewish left, which became of moment only after 1917. 3 A useful retrospective analysis from the Polish perspective can be found in Konstanty Buszezyriski to MSZ, Sept. 1919, Archiwum Akt Nowych, Warsaw (AAN), Archiwum Paderewskiego, vol. 994.

The Polish Question in America 89 alienated Poland’s Jewry. A particularly eloquent demonstration of this is the report from the first Polish diplomatic representative in the United States, Consul-General Konstanty Buszczyfski, who, after analysing quite dispassionately the organization of the Jewish press in the United States, posed the question, what motivates the Jewish campaign against Poland and what do they want? He was at a loss to find an answer.

From the very outset of the war the Jews of America were, like their coreligionists in Europe, deluged by reports of supposedly widespread pogroms carried out in Russian Poland. The accuracy of these reports is highly controversial

and it is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss the issue, save to note its existence as a formative element. In late 1914 the American press gave wide cover-

age to lurid charges by the Danish Jewish literary critic Georg Brandes which denounced the Poles in most violent terms as inveterate antisemites, while he accused them of carrying out pogroms in several places immediately behind the front in the eastern theatre of the war.* These charges were repeated and expanded

by the prominent journalist Herman Bernstein, who combined denunciations of the pre-war boycott with grisly reports of supposed wartime atrocities to argue

that the Poles were too uncivilized for independence, an argument he both repeated in the press and urged upon President Wilson in a memorandum. Polish leaders in Europe were painfully aware that the Jewish community was immensely indignant over the issue and tried to mollify their outrage. The pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski, soon to be the uncrowned ‘king’ of American Polonia, was indefatigable in his efforts to gain the support of prominent Jews for his Polish Relief Committee, which he had founded in Switzerland in 1914 with Henryk Sienkiewicz. He pleaded with Baron Edmond de Rothschild to use his influence with European Jews to curtail what he described as a campaign of calumny against Poland in the European and American press.° Polish organizations in Switzerland repeatedly appealed to Jewish bodies worldwide to cease denunciations of Poland as they were discrediting the Polish cause in Western eyes.° Similarly, reports from America indicated that the Poles were aware that Jewish sentiment in the United States was very agitated and most critical of the Poles. That the Polish political leadership was aware of this situation and regarded it as a serious threat to gaining American support for Polish political desiderata is obvious from reports coming from both the political left and right in Polish circles. From late 1914, for about a year, the press network of the Endecja—clerical wing of American Polonia kept up

a virtual press war with Jewish critics such as Bernstein and Brandes. Its tone 4 “Georg Brandes to the Poles’, Free Poland, 1/7 (18 Dec. 1914), 2; C. Gonski, ‘An Answer to Georg Brandes’s Charges against the Poles’, Free Poland, 1/10 (1 Feb. 1915), 5-7. © Paderewski to de Rothschild, 2 Mar. 1915, Archiwum Polityczne Ignacego Paderewskiego [APIP\, i (Warsaw, 1973), 62-4.

® See the untitled article labelled ‘Bucharest, 30 June 1916’ in Dziennik Kyowski, clipping in AAN, Centralny Komitet Obywatelski w Piotrogrodzie, vol. 510.

go Mieczystaw B. Biskupski became increasingly shrill, and evolved from a defence against charges of atrocity to attacks on Zionism as attempting to shatter the historic unity of Poland. This was often coupled with the veiled suggestion that many German and Austrian Jews were sympathizers, if not agents, of the Kaiser. In 1915 two fascinating lines of development emerged regarding Polish rela-

tions with the Jews in America. Artur Hausner, a delegate from the Naczelny Komitet Narodowy (Main National Committee, NKN) in Austrian Poland, a broad coalition dominated by the left and, obviously, working in conjunction with the Central Powers, reached the United States and made efforts to mobilize the American Polish community in support. An important part of these activities was directed at the Jews of America, who, Hausner discovered, were very unsympathetic to Poland and widely convinced that Polish independence would usher in an era of the greatest danger for the Jews of eastern Europe. Hausner’s efforts were protean, and although it is difficult to gauge their cumulative effects, his meetings with Jewish leaders seem to have led to a considerable improvement in relations and the opening of a less impassioned dialogue. Also, many of the most prominent Jews in America retained at least a modicum of sympathy for the Central Powers; Oscar Straus, Jacob Schiff, and Simon Wolf, perhaps the three most powerful Jews

in America, were all born in Germany and, whereas Schiff retained important business and familial relationships there,’ all despised tsarist Russia and regarded German victory in the war as tantamount to an advance of civilization in eastern Europe. To many Poles, this made the American Jewish leadership highly suspect and associated them with their factional opponents within Polish ranks who were

supporting the Central Powers. |

At almost the same time Paderewski, closely associated with the political right and someone who had been repeatedly rumoured to have antisemitic leanings, arrived in America to organize Polonia according to his own political conceptions. Paderewski’s past, plus his close associations with tsarist Russia, made him highly suspect to the leaders of American Jewry. A source close to the maestro admitted

that he was pathologically sensitive to attacks from American Jews and even insisted that he had nearly been driven to a nervous breakdown by a campaign denouncing him as an antisemite.* Paderewski quickly established the closest working relationship with the Endecja—clerical faction in Polonia, and after a period of intense feuding, reconciled himself to the leadership of Dmowski in international Polish politics, thus effectively opening himself to charges of having,

at the very least, compromised with Dmowski’s often hysterical antisemitism. Soon after arriving in America, Paderewski felt compelled to explain the longstanding charge of his association with a well-known antisemitic Warsaw newspaper, Dwugroszowka. With his usual execrable judgement, he gave a thoroughly inept explanation to the inveterately anti-Polish Herman Bernstein which served ’ G.D. Best, To Free a People: American fewish Leaders and the Jewish Problem in Eastern Europe,

1890-1914 (Westport, Conn., 1982), 206. 8 Gonski, ‘An Answer to Georg Brandes’.

The Polish Question in America QI only to present Paderewski as naive and the Poles as a nation of antisemites.? The interview was widely reported in the Jewish press and Paderewski became almost a laughing-stock to his Polish political opponents. Thereafter, at least until 1917, he largely avoided dealing with the Jews in America, observing what he himself characterized as ‘the greatest reticence’.!° At the same time Paderewski was vigorous in his denunciation of the political

left in the United States, which had often had close dealings with Austria and Germany and at least reasonable relations with American Jewry. Hausner, for example, was virtually forced to flee the country on a charge of being an Austrian spy. Helping to fuel the wartime obsession with spies, a facet of the American fixation on the incomprehensible political manoeuvrings of east Europeans in the

United States, was one of the less publicized and more unpleasant aspects of Paderewski’s efforts in America. A curious feature of this work was the degree to which Paderewsk1’s entourage and British Intelligence worked together to root out those they denounced to the American authorities as German agents. Often immigrants from Austria of Jewish origin were denounced as probable agents of the Central Powers."' Paderewski completely dismantled any links between Polonia and pro-Austrian or pro-German circles in the United States, including influential

Jewish ones. All in all, his efforts to consolidate Polonia did nothing to build bridges with the Jews and helped to define the Poles in America in a manner that was most unattractive to Jewish sensibilities. On 5 November 1916 the Central Powers proclaimed the re-creation of a Polish kingdom. Paderewski denounced this as an example of German perfidy, and the Polanian press largely followed his lead. However, as the German ambassador

Joachim von Bernstorff noted, the Jews of America were not critical of the German action and noted that the German proclamation contained a specific — recognition of the Jews as a separate community in Poland. Thus many American Jews hailed it as a first step in the improvement of the lot of former Russian Jewry. The US State Department made specific enquiries, at the urging of Jews in the United States, regarding the position of Jews in the new kingdom.” In general, the Jewish response was cautious approval of the action, in diametric opposition to the perfervid denunciations issued by the Paderewski camp. Thus, Paderewski and the German Jewish leadership of American Jewry were further distanced over the ° A revealing, though admittedly hostile, contemporary evaluation of this is Artur Hausner, ‘Ignacy Paderewski w Ameryce’, Wojew6dzkie Archiwum Parfistwowe w Krakowie, Archiwum Naczelnego Komitetu Narodowego, vol. 18. 10 See Paderewski’s memorandum of his meetings with Stanislaw Gutowski, 21 Aug. 1917, APIP i. 155-8.

‘An interesting document in this context is the letter from Vojta Bene’ (of the Bohemian National Alliance, which had close ties with British Intelligence) to Paderewski, 31 July 1918, AAN, Archiwum Paderewskiego, vol. 651.

‘2 Lansing to US Legation, Copenhagen, 24 Nov. 1916; and Grew to Secretary of State, 29 Nov. 1916, United States National Archive, Washington, DC (USNA), 860.0116, RG 59.

g2 Mieczystaw B. Biskupski creation of the Polish kingdom.*® For much of American Polonia, the leadership of American Jewry had made clear its pro-German orientation. By late 1917 Polonia in the United States had been consolidated into a highly effective lobby under Paderewski’s often capricious command. The price of this unprecedented degree of Polanian unity was the virtual elimination of the political left and the religiously heterodox from the ranks of its organizations. Further, the Poles of America were closely linked with Dmowski’s Komitet Narodowy Polski

(Polish National Committee, KNP) in Paris, which was monopolized by the Endecja, with only symbolic representation from other factions. It 1s scarcely surprising that Paderewski was convinced that the Jews of America would look upon these developments with apprehension. ‘To his credit, he tried passionately to persuade Dmowski to add at least one Jewish member to the KNP, if only to placate the American Jews, but his efforts were in vain.‘ Indeed, Dmowski provided the best summary of American Jewish fears of KNP ideology, ironically in a letter to

Paderewski: |

Even if we could find a serious and respectable Jew, who could join the committee, and wanted to, adding him to the committee would harm the Polish cause greatly. All Poland is anti-Jewish today—I speak of that huge majority on whom we depend—a Jew would give us nothing and we should lose a significant portion of the confidence which we now enjoy. Moreover, any Jew, even the most respectable, would inform his co-religionists of our internal affairs, and this information would travel very far.'°

Indeed, there was some concern that American Jews were opposed to the very idea of Polish independence—an echo of the early Bernstein memorandum—and would use any influence they could muster with the American government to lobby against Polish efforts.1° Whereas Bernstein’s frequently irresponsible journalism made his fulminations relatively meaningless, this could not be said of the redoubtable Jacob Schiff, who in 1917 publicly questioned whether Poland should be granted independence because of the population’s virulent antisemitism.*’ In the spring of 1917 Paderewski reportedly lamented to a British diplomat that ‘there are many powers behind the scenes that are working against us, especially the Jews, who have become anti-Polish through German propaganda’.'® Dmowski 13 J. von Bernstorff, My Three Years in America (London, n.d.), 298-9. 14 See e.g. Paderewski to Dmowski and Zamoyski, 24 Aug. 1917, APIP 1. 170. 15 Dmowski to Paderewski, 2 Sept. 1917, in M. Kulakowski (ed.), Roman Dmowski w Swietle listow 1 wspomnien, 11 (London, 1972), 78.

16 J. Daniels, The Wilson Era: Years of War and After, 1917-1923 (Westport, Conn., 1974), 214 ff. Bernstein’s efforts could not be ignored because of his close ties to Josephus Daniels, who had often

acted as a conduit between American Jews and the Wilson campaign during the 1912 and 1916 elections. 17 R. B. Ely to W. O. Gorski, 2 Apr. 1918, enclosing Schiff to Ely, 22 Mar. 1918, APIP i. 329-30. 18 R. Landau, Paderewski (London, 1934), 260.

The Polish Question in America 93 had even more nightmarish visions: he wrote to a confidant in the summer of 1917

that the American Jews constituted a ‘huge force’ blocking Poland’s path to independence, which they were opposing at all costs.'* During that summer Paderewski held meetings with prominent Jewish leaders in America, including Julius Rosenwald of the American Jewish Committee, but

the results were disappointing.2° The following year Dmowski arrived in the United States and held a significant meeting with both the traditional anti-Zionist leadership of the American Jews, such as the prominent lawyer Louis Marshall, as well as Zionists such as Justice Louis Brandeis. These well-known discussions

produced no result as Dmowski refused any guarantees to attenuate his antisemitism unless American Jews agreed to support his territorial demands, a most peculiar strategy for him to adopt, which put in question his vaunted ‘realism’.”!

The Jews, Dmowski was convinced, were ‘at the pinnacle of their power’ in America,?” and were not opposed to him personally or even to the Endecja. In essence this was an attack on Poland, which he only incidentally represented.?° Here we find the nucleus of this attack, later much repeated during the Paris peace conference, that American Jews sought a weak Poland, which they could dominate. Quite apart from the megalomania this suggests regarding Dmowski, it certainly

did nothing to assuage the disquiet of American Jews in regard to Poland at the close of the war. (It is perhaps ironic to note that the K NP, which was to denounce

Jewish efforts at the Paris peace conference as attempting to create a separate Jewish state within Poland, used virtually the same argument in 1917 to justify excluding Jews from the KNP. A KNP representative, Erazm Piltz, told the US ambassador William G. Sharp that since the Jews of Poland regarded themselves as a separate nation, they could not be represented on the KNP, which was a ‘strictly Polish committee’.) Besides, as Dmowski airily noted, most Jews in Poland did not consider themselves Poles, and the wealthier Jews were all German sympathizers anyway.”* It is eloquent proof that Dmowski regarded his efforts in the United States to mollify the Jews a failure that in December 1918 he urged Stanislaw Grabski to do something to appease the American

19 Dmowski to Wasilewski, 18 July 1917, Kulakowski, Dmowski w Swietle listém, ii. 69.

20 The meetings between Rosenwald and Paderewski are rather mysterious; see Jechalski to Paderewski, 17 Sept. 1918, AAN, Archiwum Paderewskiego, vol. 621, pp. 207-12. 21 Dmowski to Zamoyski, 1 Oct. 1918, AAN, Archiwum Komitetu Narodowego Polskiego, vol. 24, p. 64, microfilm 20750. 22 Dmowski to Paderewski, 2 Sept. 1917, Kulakowski, Dmomskt » Smietle listém, ii. 83. *8 Jan Zéltowski records a fascinating conversation with Dmowski regarding the latter’s meetings

with prominent Jews in America; see Zoltowski, Wspomnienia, 1871-1939, 11. 305, Biblioteka Narodowa, Dziat Rekopisow, accession no. 7954.

24 Sharp to State Department, 11 Oct. 1917, USNA, RG 5, 860c, 01/32. Piltz differentiated between Jews and ‘Polonais de confession israélite’, but the distinction was probably lost on the American; see Piltz’s memorandum, 11 Oct. 1917, AAN, Akta Erazma Piltza, vol. 13, pp. 20-2.

94 Mueczystaw B. Biskupski Jews as he was convinced that they exercised enormous power over Woodrow Wilson.”° By the end of the war most Poles were convinced that the Jews of America were enormously powerful and were, at the very least, unsympathetic towards Poland.

Ironically, the old German leadership of American Jewry, which was being replaced by (as far as they were concerned) equally odious Zionists, was now being supplemented in Polish eyes by a new pro-Soviet element among the Jews which, for reasons quite radically different, was also resolutely anti-Polish. It would seem, for the Poles, that Jews came in many varieties, but seemingly all were anti-Polish.

Poland, the common homeland of so many Poles and others in the United States, was not a theme that united the Commonwealth’s many children scattered

in America, but, on the contrary, it served to divide them. Several factors are responsible for this lamentable situation. First, the political evolution of both the Polish and the Jewish communities had militated against their co-operation in exile. Among the Poles modern nationalism was exclusionist and frequently antisemitic. In the person of Roman Dmowski, this tendency took an extreme form. Among the Jews the wave of assimilationism proved both brief and limited, and the newer movements, especially Zionism, did not include close co-operation with the Poles among their aims. However, special factors were at work in the United States. It is striking that among the many immigrants from historic Poland very few Jews, once resident in America, identified themselves with the Polish tradition. Jews from Poland in America joined Jewish organizations, often led by German Jews with no historic or cultural attachment to Poland. Exceptions were few. The Poles mirrored this

development and the original goal of the Zwiazek Narodowy Polski (Polish National Alliance), the first Polish ethnic organization in the United States, to unite the ethnically and religiously diverse people originating from Poland and scattered in exile did not survive the nineteenth century. The First World War accelerated enormously the tendency to create a paradigmatic notion of ‘Polak— Katolik’ (‘A Pole is a Catholic’) in the United States. The First World War was the graveyard of many multinational states including the Polish Commonwealth. The same passions that dissolved Austria-Hungary

and the Russian empire precluded the resurrection of a multinational Poland. Among the victims of elevated nationalism was any hope for Polish—Jewish amity

in America. Here, ironically, the victory for Paderewski and his Endecja allies effectively made collaboration with the Jews exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. However, had the Polish political left, especially those associated with the latitudinarianism of the Pitsudski camp, been predominant among American Poles, it would certainly have resulted in suspicion, if not outright hostility, among the American authorities, and jeopardized, if not precluded, the patronage of the 2° S. Grabski, Wspomnienia, 1879-1939, ii, Biblioteka Narodowa, Dzial Rekopiséw, accession no. 846812, 460.

The Polish Question in America 95 Wilson administration for the Polish cause. It is difficult to see how Polish—Jewish reconciliation could have been established in wartime America. The result was two enormously embittered communities poised to regard each other as inveterately

hostile. The American stage for the Polish—Jewish bitterness of the twentieth century was set.

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The American Federation of Polish Jews in Polish—Jewish Relations, IQ24~1939 ANDRZEJ KAPISZEWSKI TENSIONS between Polish and Jewish immigrants in America over the rebirth of Poland’s independence continued throughout the inter-war years. The leaders and organizations on both sides played an important role in shaping relations between the two communities. On the Jewish side the most active and important institu-

tions involved in Polish affairs were the American Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Committee. Another organization to become quite visible in the mid-1920s was the Federation of Polish Jews in America.*

The Federation was originally formed in 1908 in New York by Dr Henry Moskowitz as the Federation of Polish Hebrews.” The main reason for establishing it was that many east European Jews did not believe that the Jewish organizations already in existence in the United States, often led by German Jews, represented their interests. The Federation’s goals were ‘to provide for the sick a hospital in case they cannot afford to pay for their treatment; [and to] take care of the orphans and aged people’.’ It was a small organization until 1924 when it was completely reorganized by Benjamin Winter, a wealthy New York real estate agent, and Zelig Tygel, a Zionist journalist who had recently immigrated from Poland.* Under the An earlier version of this chapter was published in A. Kapiszewski, Conflicts across the Atlantic: Essays on Polish—fewish Relations in the US during First World War and in the Inter-War Years (Krakow, 2004).

' The archives of the Federation of Polish Jews in America have disappeared. Evidence regarding its activities is taken mostly from the Federation’s publications Der Verband and Polish Jews, and from

the reports of Polish diplomats in the United States in the Archiwum Akt Nowych, Warsaw (AAN),

and the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University, California (HIWRP). Information on Federation activities can be also found in the archives of the American Jewish Committee and other American Jewish organizations. See D. Stone, ‘Polish Diplomacy and the

American Jewish Community between the Wars’, Polin, 2 (1987), 73-94. , 2 American Jewish Year Book 1922-3 (Philadelphia, 1923), 227.

3 Tbid. One of the major achievements of the Federation at that time was the founding of the Beth David Hospital in Manhattan in 1912. 4 Z. Tygel, Let’s Talk It Over (New York, 1939), 13-15.

98 Andrzej] Kapiszewski new leadership, the Federation expanded its activities as an umbrella organization for over 100 Jewish /andsmanshaftn (societies of Jews from particular localities) from various Polish regions, representing about 40,000 Jews.° As it was the only

relatively large national organization of Polish Jews in America, it claimed to represent all of them and worked as a pressure group on behalf of Polish Jewry. The resolutions adopted by the Federation in 1925 stated that its aim was ‘to unite all the Polish Jews in America and that it should be the only body to speak in their name’.®

The New York-based headquarters of the Federation, through its many specialized committees, helped to solve legal problems for Polish Jews in America (such as the extension of Polish passports and transfer of wills), to place those in need in hospital, homes for the elderly, or orphanages, and to promote the educational,

social, and cultural activities of /andsmanshaftn, including publishing books and other informational materials, and organizing meetings, lectures, etc. In September 1930 the name of the Federation was changed to the American Federation of Polish Jews (AF PJ), and its aims were set out as follows: To give aid and relief to Jews in Poland, and to give counsel and material assistance to needy Jewish refugees of Polish origin in the United States and other countries. To assist Jewish émigrés of Polish origin to a better understanding and appreciation of

American ideals and institutions, and to assist them in preparing themselves to become American citizens. To facilitate the exchange of information between Jewish residents and Jewish communities in Poland with their relatives resident in the United States.

To foster a better understanding and deeper appreciation of the cultural, moral and spiritual attainments of the Jews in Poland and of the contribution which Jews of Polish origin have made to American democracy and to progress in other countries in various fields of cultural endeavour. To assist in the establishment of opinion favourable to equal rights for Jews in Poland.’

Although the Federation never had the organization to realize these ambitious plans, it expanded its activities over the years and established district branches in several American cities (Pittsburgh, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, and

St Louis), in California, and in Canada. Ezra, the women’s division of the Federation, was also established to serve the parent organization in all its activities.

The leadership of the Federation concentrated mostly on political activities to defend the rights of Jews in Poland, while affiliated organizations established relief > American Jewish Year Book 1925-6 (Philadelphia, 1926), 283. By 1939 the Federation claimed to represent 65,000 members (American Jewish Year Book 1939-40 (Philadelphia, 1940), 464). Far fewer Jews were really involved in Federation activities. Benjamin Winter reported that in 1930 only 15,000 were paid-up members (Universal fewish Encyclopaedia (New York, 1948), vill. 580). Moreover, many landsmanshaftn never joined the Federation, for example the important Galician Ferband, established in 1908 as the Federation of Russian Polish Jews.

© Der Verband (June 1925), 1-2. ” Universal Jewish Encyclopaedia, viii. 580.

The AFPJ and Polish—fewtsh Relations 99 committees to assist their brethren in home towns in Poland, provided aid to their members, and helped to accommodate new Jewish immigrants. The Federation declared its attitude towards Poland to be ‘friendly’ and to be oriented towards making Poland ‘flourishing and prosperous’.® Nevertheless, it was often very critical of Polish attitudes towards the Jews. The very first issue of Der Verband, the Federation’s official monthly newsletter, stated: Polish history is replete with stories of martyrdom suffered by Jews who have sacrificed their lives for Poland’s freedom. During the last war for freedom, as the result of which the state of Poland, with its far-flung lands, was so generously re-created, the Jews of Poland fought no less than the Poles themselves . . . Now, in return .. . Poland tortures her Jewish citizens, a few years ago by pogroms and excesses, and today by economic suppression . . . The leading Poles of today are interested in only one thing: to ruin and, if possible, to annihilate all the Jews who live in Poland.®

Despite these views, contacts between the Federation and the Poles in America during the inter-war years were at times quite good. In April 1926 the Federation invited Jan Ciechanowski, Poland’s envoy to the United States, to its twentiethanniversary celebration. In his speech at the meeting Ciechanowski praised the attitudes and activities of Benjamin Winter, and talked about Polish—Jewish relations. He stated that ‘considerable progress has been made in Poland of a social, cultural and political nature towards eliminating the causes of friction and local misunderstanding’, that the Polish government was showing ‘goodwill’ in its treatment of national and religious minorities, and that the Polish nation as a whole was ‘following the lead of its government’. Ciechanowski also stressed that the Jewish population of Poland had shown ‘considerable goodwill, loyalty to its Polish citizenship, and a gradually increasing spirit of active co-operation in the develop-

ment of the country’. He concluded that the Polish nation had always been free from intolerance and racial prejudice, and that the future of citizens of different races, nationalities, or creeds was safe from all danger.!? Answering Ciechanowski, Winter stated that the meeting had ‘forged closer and stronger links between our brethren and their neighbours in Poland’, and that the presence of the Polish rep-

resentative ‘will further help this new spirit of tolerance in Poland and aid us undoubtedly in assisting the Jews in Poland’. Such statements could not radically change Polish—Jewish relations; they were, however, important as an example of goodwill and of attempts to improve mutual contact. In the mid-1920s the Federation opened up to contact with Polish Americans, at least to an extent. Its representatives participated in several events organized by the Polish American community. In Der Verband information about the activities of some Polish American organizations started to appear, encouraging Polish Jews to attend them. Some Polish American leaders were invited to serve on a committee 8 Der Verband (May 1924), 2. 9 Der Verband (Oct. 1924), 1-2; (Feb. 1925), 1. 10 Quoted in Der Verband (May 1928), 9.

100 Andrzej Kapiszewskt established in 1926 to erect in New York a monument commemorating Haym Salomon, a Polish Jew who had co-operated with Tadeusz Kosciuszko during the American revolution." The Federation soon found itself in the midst of a controversy following a visit to the United States of Yitshak Griinbaum, a well-known Jewish deputy to the Polish parliament, who talked openly of a million ‘superfluous’ Jews in Poland, suggesting that the only effective way of solving the problem would be mass Jewish emigration. In the May issue of Der Verband, Leo Glassman published an article

supporting these views. He stated that American Jews had to realize ‘that a large proportion of Polish Jewry has no economic foothold and there is little hope for it to gain one’. So, although ‘Jews must be regarded as integral elements of the population in every land’, this should not preclude the decision ‘that a million Jews must emigrate’. Glassman added that similar economic factors had also forced hundreds of thousands of ethnic Poles to leave their country. Jewish American leaders were split on the issue. Some, including those from the Federation, strongly criticized the idea of mass Jewish emigration from Poland. Others were favourable to the idea and, for example, joined the United Palestine Drive and supported Polish Jews who had already settled in Palestine.” In the late 1920s the Federation decided to establish direct co-operation with the leaders of Polish Jewry. First, its leaders sent a questionnaire to Jewish organizations in Poland asking whether there was a possibility that the Jews of Poland might cease to require outside help and, if not, what form they thought the relief

effort should take. The respondents rejected all offers of charity, which was ‘demoralizing in its essence’, but instead requested aid to establish professional schools and credit institutions for Jews to assist them economically.'* In August 1928 Zelig Tygel, the executive director of the Federation, went to Poland. After talks with some of the leaders of Polish Jewry he signed an agreement with them for the establishment of a committee for co-operation between Jews on both sides of the Atlantic. Nevertheless, after returning to the United States, Tygel and the Federation were sharply criticized by other American Jewish organizations for ‘usurpation of authority’. In the end, nothing came of the agree-

ment.“ The Federation continued to seek ways to ease the plight of Polish Jews. Its next idea was to arrange a conference in which representatives of the Polish govern-

ment and Polish and American Jewry could discuss practical steps to assist the Jews in Poland. Since this idea was not approved by other parties, in 1929 Dr Joseph Tenenbaum of the Federation proposed setting up a goodwill committee in 11 Despite the fact that Anton Schaaf prepared the ground for the monument project, and the New York Municipal and Park Commissions even assigned a site for it, the memorial was never erected because of failure to raise funds. — 12 See e.g. Der Verband (Jan. 1926), 1; Polish Fews (1933), 2.

13° Der Verband (May 1928), 1. 14 Tbid. 7.

The AF PF and Polish—fewish Relations IOI the United States composed of Polish Jews and Polish Americans.'° This initiative

looked promising; it seemed more likely that some understanding and cooperation between the two groups might be reached on American soil, using their shared American citizenship as a unifying element. The response from the Polish community to this idea was very positive, and the leaders of the major Polish American organizations accepted it wholeheartedly. The official representatives of Poland in the United States also agreed to join the committee. On the other hand, some leaders of the American Jewish community refused to work with the committee, either because they did not believe it would

help the Jewish cause or because they did not want to be linked with the Federation, which in some Jewish circles commanded little respect. One of the main advocates of the goodwill movement was the Polish consul in

New York, Mieczystaw Marchlewski. Marchlewski hoped that approaching American Jews would help to convert Jewish relief efforts into more constructive

economic assistance for their counterparts in Poland and increase commerce between the two countries. In his view a goodwill committee could tone down the public criticism of Poland by various Jewish organizations, and could influence American public opinion in favour of Polish interests. This latter agenda was of

special importance for Poles at that time since Germany had started an international propaganda campaign to revise the treaty of Versailles and to abolish the ‘Polish corridor’, Poland’s only access to the Baltic Sea. At the same time Marchlewski realized that Poland could not expect any substantial help from American Jews without significant moves in Poland to assist

Jews there, and he urged the Polish authorities to put these in place. He also wanted to see the creation of similar goodwill committees in Poland itself. Finally, he thought that the goodwill committee could help to improve relations between the Polish and Jewish communities in the United States. Immediately after his arrival in America in 1929, Marchlewski strove to generate and extend contacts with Jewish American circles, explaining this policy in a

secret memorandum prepared in April 1930.'° Polish activities in the United States, he said, should be carried on in close co-operation with large ethnic groups

and their institutions, rather than with the US government, because the country was highly decentralized and the government had little influence on public opinion. He believed that it ought to have been possible to use Polish emigration to

demonstrate the natural link between Poland and the United States but this approach would not have been successful because Polish Americans had played an insignificant role in American political, economic, and cultural life. It would also be difficult to utilize the fact that Poland was a largely Roman Catholic country, because in the United States the Church was completely separate from the State, 15 Tygel to Tenenbaum, 20 Nov. 1929, US Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives, Washington, Tenenbaum Collection, RG-21.001 (hereafter Tenenbaum Collection). 16 AAN, Collection of the Polish Embassy in Washington (hereafter AAN, Emb. Wash.), 2616.

102 Andrzej Kapiszewskt Roman Catholicism was not the majority religion, and, moreover, it was dominated by an Irish clergy that was in constant conflict with Americans of Polish descent. Therefore, it was necessary to connect more closely with American Jews and to make use of the fact that a large percentage of them came from Poland. Marchlewski tried to obtain support for this approach from other Polish diplo-

mats in the United States. Some, like Antoni Zbyszewski, the Polish consul in Buffalo, supported him. He saw the Federation and its leadership as ‘more capable, cleverer, richer, and more influential than our Polish emigration’, although at the same time he evaluated it as ‘politically and socially unrefined, even primitive’.* Other Polish diplomats expressed serious doubts. The Polish ambassador, Tytus Filipowicz, feared that American Jewish organizations would see the new Polish approach ‘as a sign of weakness which could increase their attacks on Poland’.*® In an attempt to undermine Marchlewski’s efforts, Filipowicz even failed to forward his memorandum to Warsaw. Similarly, Wladyslaw Sokolowski, the first secretary

in the Polish embassy, expressed his concern that attempting to build Polish—

Jewish relations through the Federation could be harmful to the Polish side because of possible manipulation by Zelig Tygel, whom he described as ‘the worst type of Jewish semi-intellectual whose idée-fixe was to organize endless protests

against the situation of the Jews in Poland, just to prove his activism’.'* Nevertheless, all the above-mentioned men supported the idea of maintaining a limited relationship with the Federation. On g April 1930 the Good-Will Committee of Jews and Non-Jews of Polish Extraction was formally established.2° The Polish American newspapers generally welcomed this new form of mutual dialogue. The Jewish press was split on the issue: some praised the step; others criticized ‘the collaboration with Poles’. Tygel announced proudly, ‘the Federation of Polish Jews has become the centre of the interaction between Jews and Poles living in America’.”+ Over the following year the committee organized several conferences in differ-

ent cities. Its members participated in a variety of events. For example, Joseph Tenenbaum, the committee’s vice-president, supported Poland’s right to the corridor at a major Polish American rally in December 1930 in New York. In early 1931 similar goodwill committees were established in Boston and Buffalo. Thus the beginning of a Polish—Jewish dialogue in America looked promising, despite the difficult situation in Poland. Representatives of the Polish government who 17 Zbyszewski to Marchlewski, AAN, Collection of the Polish Consulate-General in New York

(hereafter Cons. NY), 48. 18 Filipowicz to Marchlewski, AAN, Cons. NY. 19 Sokotowski to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, AAN, Collection of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), 2277.

20 The elected officers included Dr Mieczystaw Marchlewski and Benjamin Winter, honorary presidents; Dr Joseph Tenenbaum, president; Counsellor Paul Szupinski, vice-president; Count J. Illiiski, secretary and treasurer; Zelig Tygel, executive director. The Committee consisted of twenty-five leaders of the Polish and Jewish communities; Der Verband (May 1930), 6; (June 1930), 6. 21 Der Verband (Sept. 1930), 1.

The AFPF and Polish—fewish Relations 103 visited the United States also paid much attention to the dialogue with Jewish circles, and initiated a number of meetings with representatives of the Jewish community.?7 However, because of the situation in Poland at that time, these activities failed to

bring about any visible improvement in relations between the two communities. Many American Jews continued to be highly critical of Polish attitudes and behaviour towards the Jews. In May 1930, shortly after the establishment of the GoodWill Committee, the Federation issued a memorandum expressing its ‘strongest protest against the acts of injustice committed against our fellow Jews in Poland’.?° At the Federation’s annual convention in 1931 critics of Poland dominated the floor. On 12 June Detroit’s Dziennik Polski attacked the Federation in an article entitled ‘Unheard Accusations against Poland and the Polish Government’. At the same time Ambassador Filipowicz, referring to reactions in the United States to recent Polish—Jewish tensions in Poland, wrote in a secret report to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that ‘the most uncompromising and heated protests were from the standpoint of Polish Jews united in the Federation of Polish Jews in America and in the Good-Will Committee’, which, ‘instead of quieting protests and showing a reasonable amount of goodwill towards Poland, contributed to increased agitation and provoked a convocation of protest rallies’.*4

Nevertheless, in June 1931 Wtadyslaw Sokolowski, by then a Polish chargé d’affaires ad interim in Washington, still recommended that relations with the Federation should be maintained for a while, since ‘the existence of the Good-Will Committee, a place for an exchange of courtesy gestures designed to make a good

impression on the Jewish masses in Poland, can also bring us some profit’.”° Nevertheless, according to Sokolowski, no further development of Polish—Jewish relations in the United States could ever take place through the Federation because it had no authority within the Jewish community, a very limited membership, and generally poor leadership. On to January 1932 the Federation decided to withdraw Jewish members from the Good-Will Committee. Benjamin Winter explained the move in a special statement.”° Although at the beginning of this statement he praised the activities of the committee, the ‘spirit of sympathy and fair play’ between its members, and especially the ‘helpful and friendly co-operation’ of Consul Marchlewski, he went on to say: Jewish public opinion in this country, which we have no right to disregard, is steadily grow-

ing impatient with a body bearing the name of goodwill and functioning at a time when 22 7. Szajkowski, ‘Western Jewish Aid and Intercessions for Polish Jewry, 1919—1939’, in J. A. Fishman (ed.), Studies on Polish Jewry 1919-1939 (New York, 1974), 171-4; D. Stone, ‘Polish Diplomacy and the American Jewish Community between the Wars’.

23 Copy at AAN, Cons. NY, 408. _ 24 AAN, Emb. Wash., 26109. 25 AAN, MFA 2277. 26 Quoted in Der Verband (Mar. 1932), I.

104 Andrze] Kapiszewski such an appellation is a misnomer. For, although public opinion was for quite a time exceedingly agreeable to the notion of attempting to remove the most glaring Jewish disabilities in Poland via goodwill, its total failure to produce any result whatsoever has tended to alienate even the most devoted friends of the committee.

According to Winter, the situation of Jews in Poland was growing steadily worse: Legitimate Jewish business is being forced out of existence by oppressive and confiscatory taxation. The rigid Sunday laws, a most serious hindrance to Jewish economic endeavour, continue to be enforced with ever-increasing severity, and state monopolies of industry and commerce force tens of thousands of Jewish toilers out of their age-old occupations. The practically total exclusion of the Jews from the municipal and state civil services contribute

to the growing impoverishment of the Jewish population. The virtual operation of a numerus clausus tends to exclude thousands of Jewish students from the legitimate pursuit of studies at institutions of higher learning.

Winter thought that ‘in the face of this enormous accumulation of ill will exhibited with regard to the Jewish minority in Poland’, a continuation of the goodwill movement on this side of the Atlantic would appear ‘as a monstrous incongruity’. The Federation’s decision to withdraw from the Good-Will Committee was strongly criticized by Polish diplomatic representatives. Marchlewski, one of the founders of the committee, was especially embittered. Paul Supinski, the Polish vice-president of the committee, protested against ‘uncalled-for and injurious attacks on the good name of the Polish people and Poland’.*’ Several Jews also criticized the Federation. Aleksander Hafftka, a prominent Jewish politician from Warsaw, wrote to Tygel: The Jewish side accepted the exaggerated and often false reports of the press . . . not waiting for the proper and authoritative comments on the part of the Jewish circle here. I can assure you that you, who are many thousands of kilometres distant from us, picture the situation of the Jewish population in Poland in far darker colours than is the case in reality .. . I am profoundly convinced that in regard to the Jewish problems, the Polish government is guided by goodwill and considers the solutions of these problems to be vital . . . I wish to underline that a renewal of the exchange of opinions between you gentlemen and the representatives of American ‘Polonia’ on whatever other basis would, no doubt, bring positive results and would have a favourable effect on relations in this country; finally, that it would be absolutely desirable to maintain constant and direct contact with Jewish politicians in the old country in order to avoid errors in the future, deriving from a lack of full knowledge.”®

Such opinions, though, failed to change the Federation’s position on the issue, and in June 1932 its annual convention passed another resolution strongly condemning Poland and its government. Many members of the Federation thought, however,

that Winter and Tygel were going too far in their statements. Tenenbaum, after meeting Marchlewski, wrote Winter a letter in which he stated that he regretted 27 Filipowicz to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, AAN, Emb. Wash., 2620. 28 Copy in AAN, Emb. Wash., 2620.

The AF PF and Polish—fewish Relations 105 ‘the improper wording of the resolutions and the omission of praise and endorsement of those acts which the Polish government tried to do in order to remedy the intolerable conditions of the Jews in Poland’ and urged him ‘to give an authoritative explanation’ for that and ‘to recognize a mistake where a mistake has been made’.”?

Winter generally disagreed with Tenenbaum’s position. In response, he stated that although some expressions in the resolutions were ‘maybe a little too hard’, the tragic situation of the Jews in Poland required dramatic action, and he, as the president of the Federation, had to do everything possible to help them.®° Ambassador Tytus Filipowicz described the situation in a secret memorandum: The main aim of the Christian part of the Good-Will Committee, which remained under the control of the consulate-general in New York, was to prove that Polish society, both in that country and in America, is not prejudiced against the Jews and is ready for loyal cooperation with them. The Jewish part of Good-Will, proclaiming at the beginning its honest intentions, assumed at the same time that the Good-Will Committee would be the organization through whose influence it could intervene in Jewish affairs in Poland. Jews from the Good-Will Committee would like to usurp for themselves the privilege of ‘porte parole’ of all American Jewry . . . [In consequence] instead of toning down American public opinion, goodwill became a factor which in a very tendentious, malicious and injurious way claimed lack of authority from the Polish government and antisemitism from the Polish community .. . The experiences of the Good-Will Committee showed that contacts should be maintained not only with Polish Jews but with American ones.**

According to Marchlewski, the Federation’s leadership since leaving the GoodWill Committee ‘travelled the road of spectacular but cheap radicalism which does | not have any constructive elements’. In his opinion, the Federation fell completely under the influence of what he described as ‘a radical Zionist member’ of the Polish parliament, Yitshak Griinbaum, and did not see anything beyond his onesided views on Poland.” Some members of the Federation shared such opinions. ‘Thus vice-presidents Joseph Tenenbaum and Jacob Lichtman refused to continue working with Winter and ‘Tygel and, during the Federation convention in 1932, left the leadership. That same year the Federation, along with the American Jewish Committee and B’nai B’rith, sent several strong protests to the Polish authorities against attacks on Jewish students in Poland. Ambassador Tytus Filipowicz responded to these protests, stating that ‘thanks to the energetic measures of government and university authorities, as well as to the determined stand taken by the majority of mature public opinion, complete calm has been restored’, but adding that ‘it is regrettable that exaggeration on the part of certain organs of the press, being reflected in some of the protests and resolutions, creates unfounded fears, which may only result in 29 ‘Tenenbaum to Winter, ibid. 30 Winter to Tenenbaum, ibid. 31 Filipowicz to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ibid. 32 Marchlewski to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ibid.

106 Andrzej Kapiszewski hindering the normal development of Christian—Jewish relations in Poland’.*? In response the Federation, along with other Jewish organizations, issued a sharp letter criticizing what it perceived as the distortion of facts in this statement, saying that anti-Jewish outbreaks had not ceased. The Federation also strongly disagreed

with the views of David Brown, a former chairman of the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), who in an interview with the Polish Telegraphic Agency stated that ‘the conditions of the Jews of Poland are the same as that in other European countries’, and also with similar opinions expressed in the letter from a correspondent published in the New York Times describing the conditions of Jews in Poland as ‘relatively quite good’.** At the same time the Federation praised the attitude taken by the Polish government to help Polish Jews in Germany. Tygel, in his annual report, wrote in contrast

to the majority of his statements that this was ‘another proof of the historical Polish spirit of tolerance’.®° He also reported that the Federation maintained good working relations with the Polish consulates in the United States, describing them as ‘extremely gratifying’.°° Tenenbaum wrote of the situation to Tygel: I think you will agree with me that in the present crisis of German Jewry the Polish government has shown a splendid spirit of helpfulness and enlightened statesmanship, which deserves the gratitude of the entire civilized world. Not only has Poland given shelter to the refugees escaping from Teutonic hell, but it has promptly suppressed every attempt at antisemitic disturbances by the turbulent National Democratic elements, and dissolved the chief antisemitic organizations, which were waiting for an opportunity to emulate some of the barbaric examples across the border . . . The least we, as Polish Jews, can do is to express our unreserved gratitude in a letter addressed to the Polish representative here in a manner that should be as dignified as it is sincere. May I suggest to you that you call a special meeting of your Executive Committee, at which I shall gladly speak on the matter, and that a special resolution be adopted and forwarded to the proper authorities.*’

The results of Tenenbaum’s proposal are not known. In 1933 the Federation was preoccupied with the problems Polish Jews faced in Germany, but it also monitored closely the development of the situation in Poland, intervening with Polish authorities over matters affecting Jewish life there. At that time, despite existing tensions, some Polish American circles were still trying to maintain contacts with American Jews, especially those of Polish origin. For example, Polish American organizers invited the Federation to participate in Polish Day at the Century of Progress exhibition in Chicago, and to attend special celebra33 Polish Jews (1933), 12. Polish Jews was the Federation’s new annual publication. It always included Tygel’s detailed report of the Federation’s activities. Because of the Federation’s financial difficulties, its monthly Der Verband (which in the meantime became entitled just Verband) appeared

in the 1930s on a very irregular basis. 34 Polish Jews (1933), 7-8, 13-14. 35 [bid. 14. The problem concerned Polish Jews who went to live in Germany after First World War but maintained Polish citizenship.

36 Thid. 6. 37 ‘Tenenbaum to Tygel, 3 Apr. 1933, Tenenbaum Collection.

The AFPF and Polish—fewtsh Relations 107 tions to honour the Polish and American heroes Kosciuszko and Pulaski; in New York, Polish American organizations, together with the Federation, organized an exhibition of works by the Polish Jewish painter Artur Szyk at the Brooklyn Museum. Both groups also protested against the New York theatre performance of The Romance of a People, which they claimed presented false scenes of Polish— Jewish relations in old Poland. In November of the following year the Kosciuszko Foundation invited the Federation to take part in a patriotic gathering commemorating the regaining of Polish independence.*® These instances, however limited in number, were important examples of opportunities for mutual co-operation. At the same time Tygel’s autocratic methods of managing the Federation’s activities were generating growing criticism among its members. There were even talks about establishing a second organization of Polish Jews in America.*” The year 1934 kept the Federation leadership very busy. It protested against Goering’s visit to Poland, demanded that the Polish government prosecute right-

wing extremists who murdered the Jews, and expressed serious concern that Poland was withdrawing from its responsibility under the Minorities Treaty. It praised Poland, however, for condemning Hitler’s actions and for opening its frontiers to Jewish refugees from Germany. It also expressed regret about the assassination in Poland by Ukrainian nationalists of Minister Bronistaw Pieracki, who was

known for his good relations with the Jews. The Federation also created the American Polish Industrial Bureau to help increase business between Poland and the United States, realizing that only an improved Polish economy could help to solve the plight of Jews. Benjamin Winter, working closely on this matter with Polish representatives in America, also became one of the directors of the Polish American Chamber of Commerce.*° In that same year Winter and Tygel invited Michat Kwapiszewski, a counsellor at the Polish embassy in Washington, and Dr Henryk Szoszkies, a leader of the

Jewish co-operative movement in Poland and a representative of the Polish American Chamber of Commerce, to the Federation’s annual convention in New York. Their participation had an important impact on the proceedings. The presence of an official representative of the Polish government meant that attacks on Poland were somewhat restrained. Szoszkies, who was received enthusiastically, gave a first-hand account of Jewish life in Poland, and challenged an earlier and “more critical speech by Nathan D. Perelman of the American Jewish Congress. Szoszkies was also one of the authors of the resolution calling for the development of economic co-operation with Poland.*! 38 Reported in Polish Jews (1934), 9.

89 Report by Dr Jozef Fisch, Polish consular attaché, 10 Aug. 1933, HIWRP, Collection of the Polish Embassy in Washington (hereafter HIWRP, Emb. Wash.), box 65. 4° Polish Fews (1934), 10.

4" It is interesting to note that Szoszkies co-operated closely with the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Warsaw and its representatives in the United States. He consulted with them on his actions

108 Andrzej Kapiszewskt When Jozef Piltsudski died in May 1935, the Federation sent a telegram to the Polish government expressing its deepest grief, as ‘Jews respected Marshal Pitsudski as aman whose whole life was dedicated to right and justice, whose unswerving objective was the destiny of Poland and whose thought embraced all of Poland’s children, regardless of race or creed’ .* With Pilsudski’s death the situation of Jews in Poland gradually deteriorated. The new government did not object to the economic boycott of the Jews, antisemitic agitation increased, extreme nationalists incited street attacks against the Jews, Jews were banned from some state enterprises and found it more difficult to enter certain professions, and ‘ghetto benches’ were introduced in some universities. The Federation actively responded to all of these developments. In 1935 it

sent several letters of protestation to the Polish consul-general in New York, Sylwester Gruszka, who as usual assured the Federation that the Polish government would not tolerate anti-Jewish demonstrations and that those found guilty of anti-Jewish behaviour would be severely punished. ‘Tygel, however, did not accept these explanations and wrote to the Federation’s members: We have always co-operated with the Polish government in the friendliest spirit, and we shall continue to do so. But we shall no longer live in a fool’s paradise. If Poland insists before the world that she treats the Jews ona par with non-Jews and her representatives do all in their power to create the impression that this is true, we, being in possession of facts proving the contrary, shall stop at nothing to make the real truth known.**

In 1936 the Federation protested against the bill in the Polish parliament forbid-

| ding Jewish ritual slaughter of cattle and against closing two Jewish schools in Vilna. It also submitted a memorandum on these matters to the secretary of state, Cordell Hull.** Further expanding its activities in April, the Federation organized a number of meetings in New York, Boston, Detroit, Chicago, and other cities, where it accused Poles of being influenced by Nazi ideology. This new campaign culminated during the Federation’s annual convention, when a declaration was passed stating that Polish leaders were ‘under the influence of anarchy and anti-

semitism, and undoubtedly will pay dearly for this in the future’ and that the Polish government was ‘consciously developing a policy which is bringing the Jews in Poland to economic ruin and it is responsible for the terror, riots and pogroms of

which the Jews are the victims’.*° According to this declaration, Polish antisemitism greatly outstripped even the antisemitism of the tsars and the Nazis. All of this strained relations between the Federation and Polish representatives in the United States. The Poles became especially unhappy that the Federation in America and provided them with detailed confidential reports of his activities (HIWRP, Emb. Wash., box 67). In the following years Szoszkies played an increasing role in the Federation’s politics. By 1939 he had replaced ‘Tygel on the board.

42 Polish Jews (1935), 10. 43 Verband (1935), I.

44 Polish Fews (1937), 9-10. 45 Tbid.

The AF PF and Polish—femish Relations 109 tried to coordinate anti-Polish protests internationally through the newly established World Federation of Polish Jews Abroad, in which the American Federation

of Polish Jews played an important role. | The high public visibility of Federation activities did not correspond with its actual size and power. Most of its work was conducted by a few people within its central executive body. Wladyslaw Sokolowski wrote to the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs that the Federation did not really exist as an organization since the landsmanshafin were not really connected with the central authorities. In reality

this was a ‘private business’ of Winter and Tygel, who, through continuous protests, were trying to persuade the Jewish and American public of their alleged political importance.*® The Federation’s broadly advertised fund-raising campaign for the relief of Jews in Poland was, according to Sokolowski, poorly organized, and the funds collected were mostly spent on administration and propaganda. On 5 November 1936 the leaders of the Federation held a meeting with the new Polish ambassador, Jerzy Potocki. During the meeting the delegation protested

strongly against the treatment of Jews in Poland, and Potocki put forward his views on Polish—Jewish relations. Tygel reported on this meeting: The interview with the Polish ambassador was an unpleasant disappointment to us... He began with the antisemitic statement that many Polish Jews are communists, which has a bad effect on the masses. He glossed over our arguments regarding the economic boycott in Poland and said that, in his opinion, the boycott was merely a struggle which the world of today recognized as free competition. He also intimated, by citing various facts, that the Jews are not at all as poor as they would have others believe, and that Polish peasants also suffer grievously.*’

On the other side, the Polish representatives saw the Federation’s evaluation of the

situation in Poland as highly biased and unfair, and its actions as anti-Polish. According to Ambassador Potocki, reporting on this meeting to the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Federation was only nominally headed by Winter but was in fact under the leadership of Tygel and Margoshes, the editor of the

Jewish daily Der Tog and the head of the Polish commission in the American Jewish Congress. Potocki wrote that ‘the last two belong in the category of people with whom we should not even attempt to get into any kind of agreement, the category that seems to have in mind only personal goals and benefits’.*® Potocki thought that sooner or later they would discredit themselves with their own organization and that ‘to help them in this task is actually an issue to be considered’. Describing the status of the Federation, he wrote that, on the one hand, it had very limited importance, had insignificant influence, and was ineffective. On the other hand, it was ‘big in numbers, could be very loud, and in certain situations even

box 65. 47 Polish Jews (1937), 5. 46 Report by Sokotowski to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 20 May 1936, HIWRP, Emb. Wash.,

48 Polish ambassador to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 17 Nov. 1936, HIWRP, Emb. Wash., box

66.

110 Andrzej Kapiszewski very prominent and independent Jews here had to take it into account’. According to Potocki, the funds collected by the Federation for the elimination of poverty for Jews in Poland were mostly used by Tygel and other executive officers for personal gain and were not reaching Poland at all. Potocki suggested ‘that all relations with these men should be abolished and maximum disregard should be shown towards them’. Finally, following a radio address by Maldwin Fenig, one of the Federation leaders, perceived by Poles to be very unfair in his opinions, Sylwester Gruszka, with the approval of Ambassador Potocki, formally broke off relations with the Federation. He sent Winter a letter in which he described the current activities of the Federation as ‘highly detrimental’ to the interests of the Jewish population in Poland. He stated that he would be deficient in his duty to Poland if he maintained relations with the organization in the present circumstances.*? Answering Gruszka’s letter, Benjamin Winter disagreed with his evaluation of the Federation’s role, stressing that through the efforts of the Federation millions of dollars were sent to Poland to aid the Jews, and that the Federation also tried to help increase imports from Poland to the United States and bring about better relations between the two countries.°°

Over the following months the Federation continued to criticize the Polish authorities. For example, when it learned that the Polish government was having talks with Vladimir Jabotinsky’s New Zionist Organization about Jewish emigration from Poland, it immediately issued a strong protest and send it to the press, branding this approach ‘as a betrayal of the inalienable civil rights of the Jewish minority in Poland’, as the Polish Jews ‘constitute an integral part of the Polish state and are not to be treated differently from the other component parts of the population of Poland’.?! In the mid-1930s the Federation’s leadership concentrated on combining relief efforts for Polish Jews, realizing that sporadic attempts made by various groups in the United States were failing to reach any meaningful level. This issue became especially important at that time when world Jewry was preoccupied with saving Jews in Germany, and, as Tygel stated, ‘In this struggle, the vastly more difficult situation in Poland had been relegated to the background. Lacking the dramatic externals that distinguish Nazi oppression, Jewish misery in Poland needed an educational campaign to bring it to the forefront of Jewish and world awareness.’°” For that purpose the Federation set in train a number of initiatives. It established the non-sectarian American Committee for the Relief of Jews in Poland, which included a number of prominent Americans and started a $1 million drive; it helped to create ‘an appropriate’ distribution committee in Poland; and it cooperated closely with the Federation of Polish Jews Abroad and its affiliate organ49 Gruszka to Winter, Polish Jews (1937), 6. See also Gruszka to the Polish ambassador in Washington, 16 Nov. 1936, HIWRP, Emb. Wash., box 65.

5° Winter to Gruszka, Polish Fews (1937), 6. 51 Tbid. 8. 52 Polish Jews (1936), 2.

The AFPJ and Polish—fewish Relations III izations in many countries. At the World Jewish Congress in Geneva in 1936 the Federation’s representatives held a number of meetings with Jewish leaders from Poland. Seeking support for its actions from non-Jewish circles, the Federation

planned to organize a number of conferences with leaders of the American Protestant churches, ‘to bring about a move on the part of the Catholic authorities in Poland to stop their savage antisemitic propaganda from the Catholic pulpits’.°° Planning for these conferences, however, was broken off as several Jewish leaders

expressed their doubts about the Church representatives, who in their opinion were ‘missionaries . . . which could affect the Jewish cause unfavourably’.°*

Some of these activities in 1936 led to conflict with the American Jewish | Congress, which accused the Federation of working ‘too independently’.°? The million-dollar drive brought an even bigger clash with the JDC. The Federation accused the JDC of sparing ‘no efforts to interfere with our work’, ‘to hamper it’, and ‘to organize rival landsmanshaft actions’.°® It also criticized the American Jewish Committee for its inadequate work on behalf of Jews in Poland. (“The AJC has been passing protest resolutions and this is as far as it has gone.’ °’) In return, Joseph C. Hyman, the executive director of the JDC, condemned in 1937 ‘the separate and competitive’ fund-raising campaigns carried out by the Federation. According to him, ‘the relatively small sums’ raised by the Federation were frequently collected ‘at the expense of the much larger potential income of the JDC’. The Federation created ‘unfounded hopes’ abroad and ‘tended to divide and confuse’ the communities only because it was dissatisfied with the budgetary allocation of the JDC, which tried to help Jews not only in eastern Europe but also in other lands.°® Zelig Tygel replied to Hyman’s criticism stating that the Federation was conducting its fund-raising campaigns after being urged to do so by a number of Jewish leaders from Poland and that the sums collected were not small. For example, a report for the year ending 30 June 1938 revealed that the Federation had raised $96,000 during the preceding year. In addition, landsmanshaft groups

had raised $150,000 for aid to Jews in their native towns in Poland.®? The Federation agreed, though, that united action could bring better results, and that American Jewry must abandon its emotional approach and work out a plan ‘to resist the dark, medieval methods of exterminating, through economic strangulation, the three million Polish citizens’.°° However, the Federation’s activities and all its relief efforts were severely restricted by a diminution in donations caused by the economic depression. In the meantime, the situation of Jews in Poland, according to the Federation leadership, continued to deteriorate because of the economic struggle ‘ruthlessly waged against them by the recently adopted Nazi method of boycotting Jewish

°3 Polish Jews (1937), 7: 54 Tbid. 55 Tbid. 13. 56 Polish Jews (1936), 19-20. See also (1938), 11; (1939), 16-17. °7 Verband (1937), 1. 58 Quoted in American Jewish Year Book 1938-9 (Philadelphia, 1939), 113.

59 Tbid. 14. 60 Verband (1937), 15.

112 Andrze Kapiszewski ‘businessmen in general, of depriving the Jew from being able to make a living and

employing all sorts of unscrupulous and brutal means to accomplish it’. Tygel wrote in Verband that ‘nothing indeed is beneath the dignity of the Polish government when it comes to this attempt to exterminate the Jews’ and that this policy ‘is openly preached in the Polish Sejm’.*®! Similarly, during the twenty-ninth convention of the Federation in June 1937, some speakers called for a boycott of Poland and for severance of all diplomatic and trade relations with the country. Condemning new anti-Jewish outbreaks in Poland, Benjamin Winter stated that democratic forces around the world should be aware of ‘the dangers to democracy implied in the racial oppression, religious persecutions, and pogrom terrorization which afflict the Jews in Poland’.®”

The Federation then sent a new protest to the Polish authorities ‘against the pogroms aimed at our Polish Jewish brethren, which continue unabated’, and a letter to Cordell Hull, the secretary of state, asking him ‘to do everything in your discretion to stop the bloody pogroms against our brethren in Poland who are persecuted only because they are Jews’. The State Department, however, did not want

to get involved. Pierrepont Moffat, chief of the Division of European Affairs, answered that ‘under the accepted principles governing international relations this government cannot make representations to a foreign government with regard to matters which do not directly involve the interest of American citizens’.©? In a further approach to the American government on 15 October 1937, the Federation’s leadership went to see Frances Perkins, secretary of labour, and submitted a memorandum requesting that, at the very least, all Jews included in the immigration quota established for Poland be allowed to enter the United States

and that Polish Jews should be regarded as victims of religious persecution. Eventually the American government allowed a few more Jews to emigrate to the United States. The Federation’s activities also had repercussions in Poland. As John Cudahy, the American ambassador in Poland, reported to the State Department, ‘there is no doubt that general resentment is felt in Poland at the attempt of Jews of Polish origin residing abroad to bring pressure to bear on the Polish Government’. According to Cudahy such pressure might be counter-productive, both for the government and for the Polish people, as the Jewish problem in Poland ‘is in large part an economic one and can only be solved by the emigration of Jews from Poland’.® 61 Verband (1937), 1. ©2 Quoted in New York Times (13 June 1937). See also HIWRP, Emb. Wash., box 64. Only Szoszkies,

who attended the convention again, appealed ‘to look for supporters among those parts of the Polish nation which are not possessed by anti-Jewish psychosis’ (ibid.).

°3 Polish Jews (1938), 4. Polish Americans strongly criticized the Federation’s appeals to the American government. See e.g. the editorial in Nowy Swiat (14 July 1938).

64 Polish Jews (1939), 10. 6° Quoted in Szajkowski, ‘Western Jewish Aid’, 169.

The AFPJ and Polish—fewish Relations 113 At the meeting of the Federation on 31 January 1938 criticism about Poland was expressed again. For example, George Gordon Battle, the principal speaker, said that ‘there is no land in all the world where the unfortunate Jewish people are in such utter destitution and degradation as in the so-called Republic of Poland’, and

that even in Germany ‘the economic conditions of those Jews who manage to remain there are far better than those of their fellow countrymen in Poland’. ‘These views became widespread when the New York Times quoted them in detail.

A more balanced view on the Jewish situation in Poland was taken by the Federation only after the tragic fate of Jews in Germany during Kristallnacht became fully known in America. Describing the events of 1938, Winter stated in

his annual report that ‘by comparison with the gruesome and unspeakable situation in Nazi Germany the plight of the Jews in Poland had a semblance of normality’.© Attempting once more to underline the importance of the Federation, Winter demanded, at the 1938 annual convention, that ‘it would be in the best interests of

the Jews in Poland if the other Jewish organizations in America were not to interfere with the activities of the Federation of Polish Jews in the diplomatic and political spheres’, and that ‘when they undertake negotiations with the representatives of the Polish government they should notify and consult with the leaders of our Federation’.® When tensions between Poland and Germany increased to the extent that the Nazi invasion became inevitable, the Federation changed the character of its communications to the Polish authorities. On 13 April 1939 it submitted to the Polish ambassador a resolution stating that ‘in this critical moment of European history

when Poland is faced with the imminent possibility of having to defend its integrity we go on record with the wholehearted assurance of our deep concern for the safety of the Polish Republic’, being ready ‘to aid in any emergency that may arise’. The Federation wrote: ‘We are joining hands across the seas with our fellow Jews in Poland, who for a thousand years have given their undivided loyalty and devotion to that country and have demonstrated their patriotism in every period of crisis when the interests of the Polish cause demanded heroic sacrifices.’°® In the same month the leaders of the Federation participated in a large meeting organized under the auspices of the Polish National Alliance at the Cooper Union in New York. Benjamin Winter stated there that the danger brought Polish Christian organizations closer to the Jews and that ‘we join with you in protesting against the attempts of Nazi Germany to invade Poland . . . as only if we unite, can we destroy Nazism’. ‘We are with you for a free democratic Poland.’©? The Federation favoured Jews contributing to the Polish National Fund, and urged them to join committees being established for this purpose ‘even by non-Jewish Poles’.

66 Polish Fews (1939), 7. 67 Tbid. 3.

69 Tbid. ro. 7 Tbid. 68 Ibid. 9. The American Jewish Congress, however, did criticize the Federation for this declaration.

114 Andrzej Kapiszewskt The Federation’s annual convention in June 1939 took place in an atmosphere ‘of complete friendliness to Poland’, expressing its readiness to offer ‘moral and

material support in her present struggle to maintain independence against the wave of Nazi imperialism’.”’

Finally, on 29 August the Federation sent a cable to the Polish ambassador in Washington saying: We hope and pray that war can still be averted. However, should the hour arrive and Poland be attacked, we pledge ourselves to help in whatever way possible. Being American citizens, we are aware that all Jews of Polish origin are deeply concerned that Polish independence

be maintained. You may rest assured that they will support the just cause of the Polish Republic, which is upheld by the entire democratic, enlightened world, and many of them will be ready to give not only financial and moral support, but also their very lives.”

But it was too late to do anything. At that moment German troops were ready to invade Poland. The terrible Jewish and Polish tragedy was about to happen. How important a role did the Federation play in the complex Polish—Jewish relations between the wars? Contacts between the Federation and Polish Jews in America—despite exaggerated statements often made by the Federation’s leadership about representing all Polish Jews in the United States—were rather limited. The Federation failed to reach most members of this community. Many of the Federation’s members did not even receive its publications or listened to its radio programmes. The landsmanshafin, although formally belonging to the Federation, usually did not take part in its activities, only participating in its annual conventions. The Federation’s leadership seemed to need this constituency only to convince certain people and organizations of their alleged importance, but in fact did not care much about it. In particular, the Federation was not doing much to help Polish Jews to advance in American society. Communication between the Federation and the Jews in Poland was also rather sporadic. It seems that the Federation’s leadership was often not much in favour of these relations, because they feared that their partners in Poland would limit their freedom to undertake various activities. The Federation did not become the centre of contact between the Jews in Poland and organized American Jewry, even though it should have been expected to play such a role.

The Federation’s leadership was also afraid of potential domination by other major American Jewish organizations. Nevertheless, in many cases its separatism limited the potential results of actions taken by American Jews. The Federation usually maintained friendly relations with the American Jewish Congress, but was often in conflict with the American Jewish Committee and the American Joint Distribution Committee. However, at the international level it was a leading force in the World Federation of Polish Jews Abroad. "1 Gruszka to Potocki, HIWRP, Emb. Wash., box 66. ” Winter to Potocki, 29 Aug. 1939, Polish Jews (1940), 44.

The AFPF and Polish—fewish Relations IIs Contacts between the Federation and the Polish American community, despite their potential, were limited to occasional participation in each other’s organized

events. This reflected the mutual negative attitude and mistrust that existed between the Polish and Jewish communities in Poland. Even American citizenship failed to become a unifying factor.

Only relations between the Federation and the Polish authorities—to be precise, the Polish diplomatic representatives in Washington and New York—were extensive. They were somewhat influenced by the special interest of the Polish government in developing good relations with American Jewry. As previously mentioned, the Polish government tried to obtain the support of this group to receive more economic assistance from various American sources for the country in general and for Polish Jews in particular, to persuade the American public to support the idea of massive Jewish immigration from Poland, and to neutralize anti-Polish protests that would severely damage the Polish image on the international scene. The Polish authorities hoped that the Federation of Polish Jews in America would serve these purposes well, but their efforts were generally unsuccessful. The Federation’s attitudes towards Polish representatives changed over time owing to the Federation’s politics and the changing character of the Polish government. Attitudes were more positive when Pilsudski was in power, but they deteriorated after his death in the second half of the 1930s, when the government often took an antisemitic stand. Finally, a potentially very important mutual Polish—Jewish accomplishment, the Good-Will Committee, was short-lived and failed to produce the anticipated results. Reflecting on the whole spectrum of the Federation’s activities, one must remember that in most cases only a very few people were involved, particularly Zelig Tygel, its executive director. ‘Tygel’s personality and his one-sided views on many Polish issues often put the Federation in a position that was disapproved of by its members and was not representative of the entire American community of Polish Jews.

The role of the Federation should not be overestimated. First, relations between Poles and Jews were shaped by so many factors that no single organization could have exerted a decisive influence on them. Secondly, despite the high aspirations of the Federation’s leaders and due to its limited membership, the significance and effectiveness of organizations such as the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and the Joint Distribution Committee were always much greater. On the other hand, the Federation leadership’s activities and propa-

ganda helped to bring the plight of the Jews of Poland to the attention of many American Jews and of the American public in general. Fund-raising campaigns and relief efforts directly organized by the Federation and its member /andsmanshafin helped at least some Jews in Poland. The organization of various protests against the situation of the Jews in Poland, the charges against Poland brought to the American government and to Congress, public statements, and press and radio

116 Andrzej Kapiszewskt reports made many Americans believe that antisemitic Poles constituted a grave danger for the future of the Jews. In general, the Federation and its activities became part of complex and often dramatic relations between Poles and Jews on both sides of the Atlantic.

Conflict between Poles and Jews in Chicago I1QOO0—1I930 JOHN RADZILOWSKI LITTLE attention has been paid to the relationship between Polish and Jewish immigrants in the New World. Scholars have tended to assume that negative attitudes—in particular Polish antisemitism—were simply imported from Europe and adopted wholesale in American ethnic communities as a kind of European leftover that had little reference to the American context. In his classic 1927 study of urban gangs in Chicago, the University of Chicago sociologist Frederick Thrasher wrote: ‘Chicago has the character of a vast cultural frontier—a common meeting place for the divergent and antagonistic peoples of the earth. ‘Traditional animosities often carried over ... Among the most bitter of these intercultural enmities transplanted from the old world is that between the Jews and the Poles.’ Although Thrasher’s analysis of this conflict was complex, it has been commonly interpreted through the

dominant paradigm of Polish antagonism and Jewish victimization. Stories of alleged incidents of Poles in Chicago attempting to stage pogroms against their Jewish neighbours and raising the spectre of “blood libel’ charges have seemed to

reinforce this picture.* Moreover, since the most significant cases of conflict between Poles and Jews occurred in 1919 when allegations of Polish atrocities against Jews in Europe made international headlines, scholars could easily make a link between events in Europe and those occurring in the streets of America. Paradoxically, however, Poles and Jews in America have lived side by side for

generations often by choice. During a time in American history punctuated by frequent racial and ethnic violence, one looks in vain for major incidents of Polish—Jewish violence that compare in scope to the infamous race riots of ‘Tulsa or Chicago. Most observers acknowledge that Poles sought out Jewish merchants and

Jewish merchants habitually opened stores in neighbourhoods populated by Poles and other non-Jewish immigrants from east-central Europe. Thus, the Polish—Jewish relationship in the United States seems fraught with the same paradoxes scholars find in that relationship in Europe. Nevertheless, a study of 1 FE M. Thrasher, The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago (Chicago, 1927), 194-5. 2 See e.g. I. Cutler, The Jews of Chicago: From Shtetl to Suburb (Chicago, 1996), 207.

118 John Radzilowski Polish—Jewish interaction in America prior to Second World War can provide us with an unexamined new perspective on how and why these two groups might conflict or co-operate and on the nature of communal conflict itself. Polish and Jewish immigrants in America were markedly different from their

European counterparts. First, there exist almost no definitional problems of distinguishing Poles from Jews and Jews from Poles. In America few Jewish immigrants chose to identify themselves as Polish, and if anything more chose to identify

as ‘Russians’. In their adopted country Jews developed a new ethnic identity as Jewish Americans. A similar process occurred among Polish immigrants who arrived in America with a relatively unformed ethnic consciousness and formed a Polish identity grounded in and referent to the America milieu. Secondly, in the United States prior to the Second World War, Jews and Poles were both minorities and both relatively powerless and marginalized. This marginalization was due to being immigrants and being of ethnic groups widely considered in the eugenicist language of the time as ‘inferior’. In addition, both Judaism and Catholicism were viewed as ‘foreign’ religions, and adherents of both faced considerable hostility and prejudice from the Anglo-Protestant political establishment as well as from nativist groups (including the Ku Klux Klan). Unlike in Europe, in pre-Second World War America, neither Poles nor Jews held the upper hand numerically—at least not to a _ degree that mattered—and neither group was openly favoured by the elites. Just as crucially, both groups formed just part of a much larger and more complex racial and ethnic milieu. Thirdly, both groups were better off in America, economically and politically. On average, income and living conditions were better than in the old country and while American democracy, especially in cities like Chicago, was often rough and tumble, both groups had better and more direct access to local political leadership than in Europe. The economic and political competition that existed in

east-central Europe between Jews and non-Jews at the local level simply did not exist to the same degree in the new world. If Polish—Jewish conflict is somehow an endemic part of the relationship between the two groups, whether due to ingrained Polish antisemitism or some other factors, then it should be obvious in continued conflict outside the European setting. In this scenario, conflict is imported from Europe as part and parcel of the relationship and is little altered by the new setting. A different scenario, however, is that ethnic conflict is motivated primarily by specific local factors and only secondarily by ethnic or national ideologies.

CHICAGO Chicago is an obvious place to study Poles and Jews in the New World. The city was home to both groups in large numbers. Table 1 shows the size of the two groups.® 3 The table, based on published federal census figures, excludes the city’s older German Jewish population, which cannot be calculated with census data and played little role in the events related in this

Poles and fews in Chicago 119g Table 1 Poles and Jews in Chicago, 1890-1940.

1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940

Poles n/a 172,146 3=n/a n/a 401,622 n/a

Foreign-born 24,086 112,433 125,604 137,611 149,622 137,837

Native-born n/a 59,713 n/a n/a 251,316 n/a

Polish mother tongue n/a n/a 230,132 318,360 n/a n/a Foreign-born n/a n/a 126,059 139,360 130,439 n/a

Native-born n/a n/a 104,073 178,978 n/a n/a

Jewish (Russian) n/a 62,767 n/a n/a 169,736 n/a Foreign-born 7,683 24,178 n/a n/a 78,462 71,951

Native-born n/a 38,589 = n/a n/a 91,274 n/a

Yiddish/Hebrew

mother tongue n/a n/a 111,098 159,518 n/a n/a Foreign-born n/a n/a 68,771 87,798 86,551 n/a

Native-born n/a n/a 42,327 71,720 n/a n/a

Poles n/a 11.8n/a n/a Jews n/a10.1 3.610.5 5.0 11.8 5.9 5.2

Asa % of Chicago population

n/a = not available. Source: Federal census figures.

By 1910 one in ten Chicago inhabitants was Polish and one in twenty was Jewish.

Individual Poles or Jews could be found throughout the city, but the two groups were concentrated in well-defined ethnic communities, which were also in relatively close proximity to one another. The earliest Polish communities formed on the near Northwest Side. The North Side Polish community grew rapidly and developed a large number of Polish institutions by the 1880s. Poles settled in even larger numbers in South Chicago, around the steel mills and packing houses in neighbourhoods such as Back of the Yards. Three modest-sized Jewish communchapter. The figures enable comparison between birthplace and mother tongue data, which indicate an

extremely close match between those born in Poland and those whose mother tongue was Polish. ‘The | number of people born in ‘Poland’ whose mother tongue was not Polish is very small. This is a strong

indication that groups such as Jews, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians from historic old Poland largely identified as something other than Polish when coming to the United States. Census samples from other Midwest cities show a similar pattern (see J. Radzilowski, ‘Hidden Cosmos: The Life Worlds of Polish Immigrants in Two Minnesota Communities, 1875-1925’, Ph.D. thesis (Arizona State University, 1999), 194; cf. Cutler, Jews of Chicago, 63). Jews from historic old Poland identified largely as Russian (the ethnicity ‘Jewish’ was not reported by the census). After 1920 a very small number of

ethnic Russian refugees found a home in Chicago; there was also a small group of Russophile Ukrainians who might have had cause to identify as Russians. These caveats aside, however, the numbers reported for ‘Russian’ in the US Census correlate closely with the known size of the Jewish pop-

ulation. For other efforts to survey the size and composition of Chicago’s Jewish community, see E. Rosenthal, The Jewish Population of Chicago, Illinois (Chicago, 1952).

120 John Radzilowski ities emerged north of downtown Chicago: Northside, Northwest Side (West Town—Humboldt Park), and Albany Park—North Park. To the south was Lawndale—easily the city’s largest Jewish community with perhaps a third to half of the city’s Jewish population—and a number of smaller clusters.*

Although the city’s earlier-arriving German Jews and some of the earlierarriving Poles from the Prussian partition were relatively well off, the majority of east European immigrants—Jews and non-Jews—lived in poverty. The majority of Jews worked in small factories and garment-making shops, while others found a living as street pedlars or small merchants. Poles also found work in the garment industry but were the most heavily concentrated in Chicago’s massive slaughterhouses and steel plants. Both communities were strongly focused on internal matters, and mixing with outsiders was not encouraged. One Jewish American from Chicago recalled: ‘Our home and that of our relatives and friends were typical of Americanized “shtetl homes” where no non-Jew ever tread. We children were not allowed to play with goyim (non-Jews), and our lives were as circumscribed in this respect as they had been in Poland.’”° For Poles it was similar. As early as the 1870s the visiting writer Henryk Sienkiewicz commented that in Chicago ‘it seemed at times as though I were in Poland’.®

Religious faith was the central organizing principle of intellectual and social life. Clergy had strong positions of authority in both communities. Socialists and various radical movements made incursions into both communities, though they had a larger impact on Chicago Jews. Nevertheless, both communities remained quite traditional in important ways, though this sense of tradition was one adapted to

New World conditions. The ethnic cultures, foods, and even language were hybridized—carefully worked out accommodations between Old World obligations and New World realities. Alongside Poles and Jews were large numbers of other ethnic groups. The Irish were particularly crucial to the city’s ethnic make-up, serving as political brokers in the Democratic Party apparatus that usually ran the city government. Irish political savvy made them enemies, but also allowed them to build coalitions that other groups could not. Germans, Swedes, and Norwegians also settled in large numbers, especially prior to the 18g9os. Yet it was central, eastern, and southern Europeans who would dominate the ranks of the city’s newcomers from the 1880s to the early 1920s. In addition to Poles (the largest group) and Jews from east-

central Europe, Chicago provided a home to Czechs, Italians, Lithuanians, * J. Radzilowski, The Eagle and the Cross: A History of the Polish Roman Catholic Union of America,

1873-2000 (New York, 2003), 35—7; Cutler, Jews of Chicago, 193-4; M. Holli and P. d’A. Jones (ed.), Ethnic Chicago, rev. edn. (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1984). > A. Netboy, A Boy’s Life in the Chicago Ghetto (Chicago, 1980), 44. 6 H. Sienkiewicz, Portrait of America: Letters of Henryk Sienkiewicz, ed. and trans. C. Norley (New York, 1959), 277-8.

Poles and fews in Chicago 121 Magyars, Slovaks, Ukrainians, and a host of smaller communities. By the 1910s these ethnic communities were joined by a growing number of migrants from the American south—primarily African American, though some poor whites as well— and immigrants from Mexico and the Philippines. This made Chicago’s ethnic and racial mixture both highly complicated and potentially volatile. All groups were essentially new, and their relative positions on the lower rungs of the city’s social ladder were not clearly defined.

THE YOUTH PROBLEM From a demographic standpoint, both Jewish and Polish communities were quite young. Preliminary data on immigrant birth rates indicate a substantial ‘baby boom’ among eastern and southern European immigrants in the United States after the turn of the century, reaching its peak between about 1915 and 1925.’ One result was that, by the end of the First World War, both communities had a substantial number of young people—especially boys and young men—1in the age bracket where crime and delinquency is historically most common. Both Poles and

Jews in Chicago experienced many of the social problems that have plagued America’s urban poor since the mid-nineteenth century, especially gangs and juvenile delinquency. Some of the gangs identified by University of Chicago researchers in the 1920s were merely groups of boys who hung around with each other, played sports, and

sometimes engaged in petty mischief or theft. Others had a more dangerous nature. One researcher’s field notes stated: A very noticeable development in the summer months have been [sc] the universality of boys’ gangs in the segregated residential areas [1.e. ethnic neighbourhoods]. Every commu-

nity where there are any considerable number of children living in somewhat congested community has the boys’ gangs developed [szc]. These appear to flourish most often during evening hours. These gangs are often found on the street at relatively late hours. ‘Their danger to individuals and to communities is very apparent.°

In addition to petty crime, and, sometimes, serious crime, gangs provided a sense of peer group identity. The rapid growth of ethnic communities meant that institu-

tional development within these communities—which might have otherwise ” Bureau of the Census, ‘Age of the Foreign Stock by Country of Origin: 1960’, rg60 Census of the Population, Supplementary Reports, PC(SI)-47, 28 July 1965; US Immigration Commission, Reports of the Immigration Commission: Occupations of First and Second Generation Immigrants in the United States/ Fecundity of Immigrant Women, 61st Congress, 3rd Session (Washington, 1911), xxvill. 765, 769, 786-8, 790. 8 On the more benign form of the Polish youth gang, see B. W. Taylor, ‘Our Club Juniors: A Study

of a Boy Gang in South Chicago’, Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, Special Collections, Ernest Watson Burgess Papers, 1916-66 (hereafter Burgess Papers), box 179, folder 7. ? P. Cressy, ‘Report on Summer Work with the Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago, 1925’, Burgess Papers, box 129, folder 5, p. 3.

122 John Radzilowskt helped provide a sense of identity for young people—had not kept pace. In addition, immigrant families faced major strains and were often unable to deal with the problems of their own young people. Gangs were organized around neighbourhood, a function of geography and residential concentration, and thus ethnicity

was an important factor.‘ |

The Polish community was particularly hard-hit. Thanks to the work of the University of Chicago Department of Sociology’s pioneering work in urban sociology—led by luminaries such as Florian Znaniecki, William Thomas, E. W. Burgess, Clifford Shaw, and Louis Wirth—Poles in Chicago became poster children for urban social problems of the day.'' Although the methodology of works such as The Polish Peasant in Europe and America has been criticized with some justice, the problems uncovered by University of Chicago researchers were real enough. From 1910 to 1925 Polish boys made up the largest ethnic or racial group in Cook County juvenile court. In 1920 one in four boys in the juvenile system in Chicago was Polish. Polish girls also suffered high rates of delinquency.’ Poles led all other ethnic groups in the number of street gangs in Chicago. Such problems were frequently discussed in Chicago’s Polish-language press, which urged social reform in the community and

greater discipline at home. Catholic papers such as Naréd Polski and Dziennik Chicagoski were among the most forceful in decrying the community’s social ills.

Although less noticed by researchers, the Jewish community in Chicago also suffered from the problems of crime and delinquency. While Jewish rates of youth Table 2 Gangs in Chicago by ethnicity, 1920

Ethnic group No. of gangs Ethnic group No. of gangs

Polish 148 Jewish 20 Italian 99 Slavonic’? 16

Irish 75 Czech 12 Black 63 German Native white 45 Lithuanian86 4 The category Slavonic may have included gangs made up of Russian-speaking Jews. , Source: FX. M. Thrasher, The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago (Chicago, 1927), 192-3.

10 See C. Shaw, F. M. Zorbaugh, H. D. McKay, and L. S. Cottrell, Delinquency Areas: A Study of the

Geographic Distribution of School Truants, Juvenile Delinquents, and Adult Offenders in Chicago (Chicago, 1929), 44-51 and maps III, v. See also C. Shaw, The Jack-Roller: A Delinquent Boy’s Own Story (Philadelphia, 1930), 50—1.

11 The best-known studies are W. I. Thomas and F. Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (Chicago, 1919-21); and Shaw, The Fack-Roller. 12 Tllinois Association for Criminal Justice, [/linois Crime Survey (Chicago, 1929), 666-9. See also Burgess Papers, box 42, folder 1. For a more detailed discussion of the Polish underworld in Chicago,

see J. Radzilowski, “The Youth Problem: Crime, Delinquency, Deviance, and Reform in Polish Chicago, 1890s—1940s’, Fiedorczyk Lecture Series, Polish Studies Program, Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, 2006.

Poles and Fews in Chicago 123 delinquency were about a third of Polish rates and there were fewer Jewish street gangs, Jews were well represented in the ranks of the city’s organized crime syndicates (though less so than Italians and Irish).‘* According to researchers, Jews dominated some types of crime in Chicago, such as pickpocketing.** As was the ~ case with the Poles, problems with delinquency in the Jewish community were felt most keenly in South Chicago among relatively recent immigrants from central

and eastern Europe. In December 1918—just months before the most serious confrontations between Poles and Jews in Chicago—the Chicago Hebrew Institute Observer drew the community’s attention to the problems of Jewish youth delinquency in the Lawndale neighbourhood, denouncing the ‘shame’ of Jewish boys hauled before the juvenile court judge, and calling on the Jewish community to act, much in the same fashion as Polish newspapers had been doing for several years in their community.*°

THE YEARS OF CONFLICT The period 1919—20 was a time of particular conflict between Poles and Jews in the

United States. The allegations of pogroms in Poland and _ sensationalized American newspaper stories about the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews in eastern and central Europe fuelled conflict in the respective diasporas. ‘The politi-

cal leadership of the two communities engaged in bitter denunciations of one another and tried to gain the attention, sympathy, and support of the American media and political elite.‘° While charges and counter-charges flew thick and fast and American daily papers had regular stories about events in Europe, aside from a

| few individuals such as Clarence Darrow, prominent Americans rarely took sides in the conflict and there is little evidence that public opinion was swayed one way or the other. 13 J. H. Cohen, ‘Who’s Who in Organized Crime’, Burgess Papers, box 128, folder 9. One odd tribute was that the notorious Polish gangster Earl Wojciechowski changed his name to Hymie Weiss, which apparently sounded tougher. See Radzilowski, “The Youth Problem’. 14 Burgess Papers, box 129, folder 9g, esp. p. 34. 19 Chicago Hebrew Union Observer (Dec. 1918—Jan. 1919), trans. in Chicago Foreign Language Press

Survey (CFLPS), Jewish, sect. 1 H . For examples of Jewish delinquent youth, see autobiographies in Burgess Papers, box 42, folder 14; box 128, folder 5.

16 See A. Kapiszewski, ‘Polish—Jewish Conflicts in America during the Paris Peace Conference: Milwaukee as a Case Study’, Polish American Studies, 49/2 (Autumn 1992), 5—18; id., ‘Polish—Jewish Conflicts in the United States at the Beginning of World War I’, Polish American Studies, 48/1 (Spring

1991), 63-78; id., “Stosunki polsko-zydowskie w Stanach Zjednoczonych Ameryki’, in H. Kubiak, E. Kusielewicz, and T: Gromada (eds.), Polonia amerykanska: Przesztosé 1 wspotczesnosé (Wroctaw, 1988), 623-31; id., Hugh Gibson and a Controversy over Polish—fewish Relations after World War I (Krakow, 1991), and my review of this book in Polish American Studies, 48/2 (Autumn 1992), 92—4; T. Radzik, Stosunki polsko-zydowskie w Stanach Zjednoczonych Ameryki w latach 1918~1921 (Lublin, 1988).

124 John Radzilowski Community newspapers were the major venue for the verbal campaigns of 1919 and 1920. The Daily Jewish Courter was one of the most vociferous in its denunciations of Poles and Poland, even appearing to oppose Polish independence. In August 1919 the newspaper announced its opposition to the League of Nations,

primarily because it would guarantee the existence of what the editors called ‘greater Poland’: ‘We have often mentioned the fact that there can be no greater menace than a greater Poland, which must naturally be imperialistic, reactionary, and antisemitic. . . . Should Poland and Rumania be guaranteed their territorial

integrity by the League of Nations, then every movement for freedom will be

crushed in blood.’!’ Earlier the newspaper had written articles supporting Lithuanian claims against Poland and encouraging Jews to take up arms against Poles.'®

Polish newspapers in Chicago were equally ferocious in their attacks on Poland’s Jews. Responding to a protest meeting sponsored by the Jewish community, Nardd Polski stated that ‘not one of the speakers mentioned the Jewish treacheries in Poland, extortions, bribery, and the rascally practices of Jews in business or politics’. Polish newspapers repeated a familiar litany to their readers: Jews sought to control the new Poland through control of business, banks, and railroads and to ‘to de-moralize the Polish population; in short, to make new Palestine

out of Poland’.'? In June Dziennik Zwigzkowy printed an open letter to Jewish leaders from a ‘Pole of Jewish origin’, Dr Vorzimer: Did your investigators never hear of the so-called Litvaks who, when persecuted in Russia, came to Poland and took a most hostile attitude towards Poles? While on Polish soil they acted as Russians and in a provocative and most offensive manner declared loudly that ‘this is Russia not Poland’. Could you be truly ignorant of the fact that ever since the beginning of the war Jews of Russia, Germany and America waged a campaign of slander against

Poles, accusing them of massacring the Jew at a time when there were absolutely no pogroms made by Poles, but rather by Russians? Could you have forgotten already the orgy of lies and calumnies against the Poles indulged in by Jews, particularly in America, when the Jews attempted to show the world at large that Poland was not worthy of independence and that she should be kept chained like a vicious dog? Would you really suppose that such good services rendered by the Jews to Poland at a time when the latter was breaking the bonds of prolonged bondage could possibly enhance a feeling of special sympathy for the Jews???

Although charges and counter-charges about events far away in Europe had little appeal for Americans weary of war news, leaders in both communities did not stop 17 Daily Jewish Courier, 1 Aug. 1919, CFLPS 1G. 18 Daily Fewish Courier, 9 June 1919, CFLPS 1c; Sunday Jewish Courier, 8 June 1919, CFLPS 1c;

Sunday Jewish Courier, 18 May 1919, CFLPS 1c. This attitude contrasted with a more favourable view expressed a year earlier. See the article on Poles enlisting in the Haller Army ‘On the Community Stage’, Daily fJewish Courter, 5 June 1918, CFLPS 1G.

19 Naréd Polski, 29 May 1919. 20 Dziennik Zwigzkowy, 27 June 1919.

Poles and Jews in Chicago 125 there. Their local rivals were just as bad as in the old country. If Poles were pogromists in Europe, surely they were pogromists in America. If Jews were exploiters in Europe, of course they would be exploiters in the New World. The Sunday fewish Courier explained that Poles in Chicago, who are fundamentally no better than those in the old country, in spite of the fact that they live in America and have had the opportunity to learn of local democracy, freedom, tolerance, and justice administered to citizens, have declared war on the Jews of this city. . . . Poles in Chicago wish to duplicate here the situation in Poland concerning Jews.??

Polish newspapers responded in kind. During one Jewish demonstration when Jewish shop owners closed their stores in protest, Naréd Polski wrote, ‘we saw, with utter disgust, how this vermin, how these parasites brought up on our bread, in the

heart of the Polish quarter, poured upon us a torrent of slander and lies. Remember, brother, continue feeding and breeding this vermin; buy from them, and you will live to see the same results as in Russia!” The message was that the other was not merely a threat overseas, but presented a threat to American civic

peace. This was perhaps an effort to craft an argument to which mainstream Americans would pay attention more readily, especially in a time of heightened patriotism and a very real fear of foreign radicalism spilling over onto American shores.

In response to Jewish protests and articles appearing in the English-language press, Polish newspapers and several organizations urged Chicago Polonia to boycott Jewish-owned businesses.7? One Jewish newspaper retorted, ‘They fear to make pogroms; first, because Jews here can match their strength in a fight; second,

because American authorities would not permit incitement. They, therefore, advocate the boycott.’4

POLISH—JEWISH VIOLENCE, I919 The heated rhetoric of community newspapers might suggest a fully fledged Polish—Jewish battle royal on the streets of Chicago. But one looks in vain for concrete actions that match the passions of the newspaper editors. Little came of most of the mass protest meetings held by either community. Jewish merchants valued their livelihoods, and whatever they may have thought about Poles in general, they did not stop serving Polish customers. The Polish boycott of Jewish businesses was a glaring failure. Whatever they may have thought about Jews in general, Poles in 21 “On the Local Stage’, Sunday Jewish Courier, 25 May 1919, CFLPS Ic.

22 Naréd Polski, 28 May 1919. See also ‘“Nothing Doing” na Milwaukee Avenue’, Dziennik Chicagoski, 11 June 1919.

23 See e.g. Dziennik Chicagoski, 4 June 1919, 1; 22 July 1919, 5; D. Pacyga, Polish Immigrants and Industrial Chicago: Workers on the South Side, r880—1922 (Chicago, 2003), 224. 24 “On the Local Stage’, Sunday Jewish Courier, 25 May 1919, CFLPS 1c.

126 John Radzilowski Chicago continued to patronize Jewish stores. Poles and Jews continued to live in close proximity to each other, for the most part without significant problems. Nevertheless, the spring and summer of 1919 were marked by a series of incidents and confrontations that at first glance seem to contradict this ‘live and let live’ picture. These events, long forgotten by the Polish community of Chicago and long remembered by the Jewish community, can be placed in three categories: minor incidents, the Douglas Park ‘pogrom’, and the South Chicago blood libel case.

Minor incidents. One visible Jewish presence in non-Jewish neighbourhoods of Chicago was the street pedlar. In the summer of 1919 Jewish newspapers in Chicago reported a number of attacks on Jewish street merchants in Polish areas. A typical report read: ‘B. T’shertcof, a Jewish junk dealer . . . was attacked yesterday as he rode in his wagon on 22nd Street by twenty Polish youths who threw stones at him and tried to pull him off his wagon. Mr. Tshertcof escaped by spurring on his horse which was also injured by the stones.’*° The situation was also discussed by the Citizens Peddlers Protective Association, an organization created to represent Jewish street merchants. The organization held protest meetings and sent a delegation to City Hall demanding better police protection for Jewish pedlars. It is unclear whether anything came of this initiative.”°

The Douglas Park ‘Pogrom’. Douglas Park, in South Chicago, was public space

close to large concentrations of Poles and to the big Jewish community of Lawndale. Asa result, it was a continually contested zone between young people of both ethnic groups (see below). Beginning in early June 1919, as the war of words

in the opposing newspapers heated up, the Jewish community press began to report a series of incidents in the park in which groups of young Poles were reputedly attacking Jews at random. The Lawndale Press wrote: ‘A gang of hoodlums, said to be young Poles, has terrorized the Douglas Park neighbourhood for some time, and last Saturday and Monday evenings, bloody riots broke out. The Jewish men and women that were in the park were beaten up, some seriously, until the police arrived and cleared the park.’?’ Daily Jewish Forward reported: ‘A group of Polish ruffians, under the agitation of Polish “pogromists”, attack Jews every evening in different sections of Chicago. The bloodiest attack on Jews occurred in

Douglas Park. A band of young Poles overwhelmed a group of old Jews, threw some in the water, and injured the others.’*° The most extreme accounts, as always, appeared in the Jewish Courier under headlines such as ‘Chicago Poles Prepared for a Pogrom Today. . . . 5,000 Poles to March Today around Douglas Park.’*? 25 Daily Jewish Courier, 18 June 1919, CFLPS 1c. See also Daily Jewish Courier, 28 May 1919; C. Eastwood, Chicago’s Jewish Street Peddlers (Chicago, 1991), 24-32. This account also contains a highly inaccurate translation of the quotation from Naréd Polski, 28 May 1919 (see the text to n. 22). 26 Daily Jewish Courier, 10, 13 June 1919, CFLPS Ic. 27 Lawndale Press, 6 June 1919, 1, CFLPS 1c. 28 Daily Jewish Forward, 3 June 1919, CFLPS 1c. 29 Sunday Jewish Courier, 8 June 1919, CFLPS 1c.

Poles and Jews in Chicago 127 The South Chicago ‘Blood Libel’ Case. The most bizarre incident between Poles and Jews in 1919 was the alleged case of ‘blood libel’. In July the Jewish community press reported that a mob of Poles in South Chicago had accused a Jewish store owner of murdering a Polish child and were attempting to start a pogrom. The Sunday Jewish Counter wrote: Poles in South Chicago are very angry. They are seeking Jewish blood. Several times since Friday afternoon, Poles, numbering thousands, have besieged Buffalo Avenue where most

Jewish stores are located, and have sought to carry on a pogrom. Police and firemen dispersed them, but they returned again. Twelve Poles who cried ‘Kill the Jews!’ were arrested. Neither police nor firemen were able to dispel all the Poles.°°

The incident had begun on 4 July, when a group of Poles accused a Jewish store owner, H. Kahn (or Cohen), of being open on the Independence Day holiday. For reasons that are unclear, the incident escalated. One Pole, Casimir Lota, and some unnamed associates (who may or may not have been part of the original group) began to spread the rumour that Kahn had locked a Polish boy in his basement. The story soon spread and mutated into a tale of Kahn killing a Polish child. After crowds were dispersed by police batons and fire hoses, Lota and seventeen other Poles were arrested for attempting to incite a riot. Lota spoke little English and was not able to present coherent testimony in English, though he claimed he had tried to prevent a riot. In late July he was found guilty and fined $100. The other Polish defendants received lesser fines.*?

COMMUNAL VIOLENCE IN INDUSTRIAL CHICAGO These incidents, taken in isolation, point to a familiar story of innocent, helpless Jews victimized by violent, brutish Poles. Seen against the backdrop of contemporary communal violence in Chicago, however, the incidents are more complicated and less remarkable than they might first appear. Violence between ethnic gangs was endemic to Chicago and other major American cities. For example, one account notes: “The residents of a Polish colony . . . led by such gangs as the “Hillers”, who dug themselves in along canals, would wage pitched battles with many Greeks and Italians from the southwest. A boy was shot through the heart in one of these fights.’®? In August 1927 a member of the Polish Stagg gang was killed by a Mexican attacker, according to one account, as a result of threats by the gang to attack Mexican pool halls in the neighbourhood of 47th and Ashland.*° 30 Sunday Jewish Courier, 6 July 1919, CFLPS tc. See also W. Roth, Looking Backward: True Stories from Chicago’s Jewish Past (Chicago, 2002), 51-5. 31 Jewish Daily Courier, 25 July 1919, CFLPS rc. 82 Observations of a park director quoted in Thrasher, The Gang, 198—9. The name Hillers may be a confused translation of ‘Gorale’. 33 Tllinois Association for Criminal Justice, [/linois Crime Survey, 957.

128 John Radzilowski Thus, Polish and Jewish gangs engaged 1n conflicts not only with one another, but

with any group that happened to be in close proximity. It was proximity, rather than specific ethnic characteristics, that mattered the most. One of the major omissions in the accounts of violence in 1919 that appear in Chicago’s Jewish newspapers is their failure to mention the role played by Jewish gangs. For this dimension we must turn to English-language sources that come from neither the Polish nor the Jewish community. Thrasher’s study of gangs addresses the Douglas Park conflict directly: Use of the privileges afforded by Douglas Park, which was a common meeting place of the

, two groups, has always been a bone of contention. There is a refectory and boathouse in the northern portion of the park, which under normal circumstances is open to members of any race or creed. During this period, however, it was a different story. Some days the Jews

dominated, but when a gang of Poles larger in number approached, the former would leave. On one occasion, the two gangs were of about equal size and the result was a pitched battle. Not only did the gangs along Roosevelt Road participate in these encounters, but also the social and ‘basement’ clubs of Lawndale found a good opportunity for sport in the ‘Polock hunt’. A club starting out on such an expedition would almost certainly become a nucleus for a mob before it finished. Usually the Jewish boys involved were not personally acquainted with their enemies. It was enough that they were Poles and vice versa. It was a matter of racial, cultural, and religious solidarity.**

The Chicago Daily News reported that ‘Chicago Jews to-day are pointing a guilty finger at the Poles and the Poles are laying the blame on the Jews [for the Douglas Park incidents]. Police Chief Garrity said to-day he got his information concerning the threatened trouble from a big employer of labor.’ Another informant quoted by the paper stated that ‘the disorder in the Douglas Park district was due to trouble between Jewish and Polish baseball teams [i.e. gangs]’.*° Nearly all English-language reports, most of which quote police sources, place equal blame for the Douglas Park troubles on rival groups of Polish and Jewish youth who used the park for recreational activities, but also as a stage for local turf wars. The Chicago police chief stated: ‘I believe the gang fight . . . is intended to bring about a final settlement of the dispute between the two factions. . . . Indications point to plans for a desperate struggle.’ The ‘desperate struggle’ (if that is what it was to have been) never took place, thanks to an extra deployment of police to the area.°° 34 Observations of a local resident quoted in Thrasher, The Gang, 197. See also ibid. 195-6. 35 “Poles and Jews “Pass Buck”’, Chicago Daily News, 10 June 1919. Given the highly antagonistic nature of labour relations in South Chicago, information coming from ‘a big employer’ raises additional questions. 36 See ‘Poles Heatedly Deny Plans for a Pogrom Here’, Chicago Sunday Tribune, 8 June 1919; ‘Says Publicity Nips Riots’, Chicago Daily News, 9 June 1919.

Poles and Jews in Chicago 129 IT MUST NOT BE HUSHED UP While the events of 1919 and the intensive research on the problems of the Polish community in the work of the University of Chicago sociologists has tended to focus attention on Polish—Jewish conflicts in Chicago, conflicts between the Jewish community and other ethnic groups have received far less attention. Just a few years before the tensions of 1919 the Jewish community press reported a widespread attack on a Jewish business district by an Irish gang that far exceeded in

its level of violence any of the above incidents between Poles and Jews. The

Irish attacked Jewish shops, smashed windows, and beat merchants and bystanders: The attack instigated by Irish bullies on Jews Monday evening . . . is apparently more serious than it seemed to be at first. The seriousness of the attack is attributed to the fact that it was premeditated and that it was going to be launched was known in advance by peaceful

Jewish residents and the police of the 13th Street Police Station. The attack is serious because the Jews, expecting it, had requested police protection and failed to get it. Three Jews lie at the hospital in a critical condition; fifteen are confined to their beds in their homes, and windows still remain shattered. And not one single policeman came to investigate until everything was over. The district around Taylor and Cypress Streets looked like the aftermath of a battle. It

has been learned that the number of injured is much larger than what it was originally reported to be.”

In 1920 the Jewish press reported that ‘several hundred’ Irish Chicagoans were banding together to prevent the building of a synagogue in their neighbourhood.*® In the streets and parks of Chicago both Poles and Jews played the roles of perpetrator, victim, and bystander. Neighbouring groups fought over ‘turf’ or for no particular reason at all. Although death tolls were low, the conflicts were quite violent. These conflicts had nothing in particular to do with European events. There was no ‘traditional’ animus between Irish and Jews (nor, for that matter, between

Poles and Irish, who had their own conflicts on the streets of America) to be brought across the Atlantic. Although historians of Jewish Chicago have chronicled and celebrated instances of Polish violence towards Jews, Jewish violence towards Poles and Irish violence towards Jews have been largely forgotten, perhaps because these incidents did not fit well within existing Jewish American paradigms about brutal and debased Polish pogromists. Neither the Polish nor the Jewish community was a stranger to gang violence. To a certain extent, gangs in both communities were no doubt viewed as protectors of the community, despite the fact that they preyed on their co-ethnics as much if not more than they preyed on members of other groups. Nevertheless, the Jewish 37 Daily Jewish Courier, 2 Aug. 1916, CFLPS rE 2. 38 Daily Jewish Forward, 7 Sept. 1920, CFLPS Ic.

130 John Radztlowski press tended to whitewash the actions of Jewish gangsters to a greater extent than

did its Polish counterpart. At the height of the tensions in Douglas Park one Jewish paper proclaimed: Jewish boys who frequent the lunchrooms of Davie Miller, Pudi Anikster, Raffleson, Balotin, Erhlich, Bartlestein and Bloom [all known gang leaders], and many more did not remain at home yesterday. They were in the streets and in the park. Some on motorcycles and in automobiles . . . The streets were literally packed with Jewish boys, one stronger than the other .. . The audacity of these brave boys was enough to frighten even a greater number of Poles than we have in Chicago.®?

The I/linois Crime Survey reported that when a certain west side gangster was told that there were no Jewish gangsters in Milwaukee, his first question was ‘Do the Jews get pushed around much in Milwaukee?’ The attitude of gangs to protect the community’s safety against hostile foreign groups in the race conflict was the reason for the status of gangsters among law-abiding people in the neighbourhood. Davy Miller and his gang were considered defenders of the race; they defended the Jews from the Poles. There are innumerable homelier everyday incidents, as in the following example: A young Jewish workman was frequently attacked by gangsters on his way to his shop. He went to Davy Miller’s place, told him his story, and Davy Miller assigned two of his gangsters to accompany the young man to his work. The attacks ceased to occur after the Irish

gangsters near the shop observed the companions of their victtms—the erstwhile lone Jewish workman.*°

Of course, such ‘protection’ often had a price as well. The same gangs that protected local merchants usually demanded some pay-off later on.

When the Jewish gangster Nails Morton died after a fall from a horse, his funeral was a major community event: ‘Over 5,000 Jews paid tribute to Morton as the man who made the west side safe for his race.’ The prominent rabbi Julius

Levi, Jewish veterans, and other groups also participated, despite the fact that Morton was implicated in the murder of two policemen. A memorial on the first anniversary of his death planned by community leaders (including some with underworld connections) was cancelled only after a prominent Jewish veteran, General Abel Davis, spoke out against it publicly.**

While Morton’s case was unusual, it stands in sharp contrast to the attitude in the Polish press and community leadership in Chicago, which waged a constant— though not always successful battle—against gangs and gang violence. In 1911, for example, it was stated in Narod Polski: In a few days four bandits will be hanged; young Polish men just beginning life. ‘Two others

are awaiting a life sentence. We do not wish to mention the murder they committed... . 39 Daily Jewish Courier, g June 1919, CFLPS tc.

40 Illinois Association for Criminal Justice, [//inois Crime Survey, 1049-50. 41 Tbid. 1031-2.

Poles and Jews in Chicago 131 They killed an innocent man without mercy. How did they become such cold-blooded murderers? Who has injured and hardened those hearts? Who is to blame?’*”

There were few references in the Polish press to the city’s numerous Polish gangs as defenders of the community, though such an attitude was common in the neighbourhoods. Although Jewish and Polish gang violence existed before and after the events of 1919, that year stands out in sharp relief. Events in Europe—a major concern for the leadership of both communities—undoubtedly added some additional animosity to Polish—Jewish conflicts in Chicago. Nevertheless, other events, closer to home, played an even greater role in setting the stage for communal violence. The Polish—Jewish conflicts in Chicago occur against a backdrop of severe ethnic and racial violence in the city. Poor economic conditions, a flood of returning veterans without jobs, a campaign of violence by radicals, the lack of services and amenities for many of the city’s poorest residents, and blisteringly hot temperatures turned the summer of 1919 into a cauldron of indiscriminate violence.

Just days after the conclusion of the strange case of Casimir Lota, the city exploded into racial warfare as a conflict over the death of black youth on a Lake Michigan swimming beach ignited the Chicago Race Riots, among the most serious and violent racial incidents in American history. Initially, neither Polish nor Jewish gangs were involved, as African American and Irish gangs were the main

participants. Both groups were soon drawn into the conflict, whether in selfdefence or to gain an advantage over rivals.*? A large residential section in Back of the Yards, mainly Polish and Lithuanian, was attacked by arsonists (probably Irish) and scores of families lost their homes. Jewish businesses were also targeted by rioters—both white and black.**

CONCLUSION Polish—Jewish gang violence in Chicago was not unique to 1919. In the hot, violent summer of that year the clashes at Douglas Park were a minor footnote in the news columns of the city’s press. The bizarre case of Casimir Lota—whatever the inter-

pretation of the sparse facts of the matter—merited even less attention. It was widely reported in the Jewish press but apparently ignored elsewhere. The violence of that era was not a result of some ancient race hatred between Poles and 42 ‘Warning’, Naréd Polski, 20 Dec. 1911. For more on the Polish American press and leadership’s

reaction to the community’s social problems, see Radzilowski, “The Youth Problem’. 43 The best account is found in Pacyga, Polish Immigrants and Industrial Chicago, 212-27. Cf. W. M. Tuttle, Jr., Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (Chicago, 1996).

44 See ‘List of Homes Burned in “Back of the Yards” Fire’, Chicago Daily News, 2 Aug. 1919; ‘Jewish Businesses Ruined: All South Side Stores Closed’, Daily Jewish Courter, 30 July 1919, CF LPS 1C; ‘Pogroms of Negroes’, Naréd Polski, 6 Aug. 1919.

132 John Radzilowski Jews. If it were, how would we explain the equally bitter clashes between Poles and , Mexicans or Irish and Jews? Jewish pedlars who did business in Polish neighbourhoods were subject to abuse and attacks from Polish youth gangs. However, established Jewish-owned stores in the same neighbourhoods did good business and were relatively unaffected by the events of 1919. Hence, the violence was directed against Jews who were seen as transient or interlopers in the neighbourhoods. Established businesses that were part of the fabric of the community were left alone. There were no Polish counterparts in Jewish neighbourhoods, but given the nature of communal violence in Chicago, it is reasonable to assume that the reaction would have been similar had such counterparts existed. The Jewish local press portrayed the Jewish community as innocent victims of brutish Polish attacks. This reinforced prevailing ethnic stereotypes of the readership, but was not borne out by the evidence.*? The Polish local press portrayed Jewish charges as slander designed to undermine the Polish community in the eyes of English-speaking Chicago. In this context neither side mentioned the central role of their own youth gangs in fomenting violence. Both Poles and Jews initiated and were victimized by gang violence.

The rhetorical battles in the pages of the city’s Polish and Jewish newspapers provided some additional incentives for communal strife and provided a ready formula for justifying or condemning acts taken by one side or the other. There is, however, no evidence that any mass rallies or meetings organized by either Poles or Jews in Chicago resulted in acts of violence. Nor is there evidence of heated newspaper editorials and cartoons sparking such conflict. To the contrary, leaders of both communities were well aware of prevailing nativist sentiment among many of the Chicago elites. Neither side wanted to appear as if it was fomenting riots or disorder. Instead, Polish and Jewish newspapers took great pains to portray themselves as true Americans—orderly, decent, and patriotic—who were facing the irrational hatred and slander of their neighbours. For the city’s English-speaking elite and for some contemporary university researchers, it was not uncommon to view such violence as a result of overly loose immigration laws that allowed ‘inferior’ peoples with un-American attitudes into the country. Blaming local violence on events in Europe fit a ready-made intellectual framework that saw foreigners and America’s involvement in Europe as something to be avoided. Old corrupt Europe was viewed as the source of ethnic conflict, not America. Ironically, the attempt by leaders of both communities to use the events to gain some advantage in the effort to win the hearts and minds of fellow Chicagoans probably resulted in equal blackening of the reputation of both groups. 45 'The Polish community press lodged frequent complaints about Jewish use of anti-Polish stereotypes. See e.g. ‘Arousing Race Hatreds’, Chicago Society News, 2/1 (Sept. 1923), CFLPS 1 c. Such stereotyping continued to be an issue into recent times. See e.g. John Bukowczyk, And My Children Did Not Know Me: A History of the Polish Americans (Bloomington, Ind., 1987).

Poles and Ffews in Chicago 133 The rhetoric found in the Polish and Jewish community press in 1919 was important only in the sense that it cemented negative stereotypes in the mentalities of both communities. But such stereotyping was not uncommon and not confined to Poles and Jews. Nor did such stereotypes result in much practical action—Poles and Jews continued to live side by side in Chicago.*® Aside from the aforementioned gangs, they did so more or less amicably. The violence between Jews and Poles in Chicago was—as is the case with much

communal violence in general—determined and driven by local events, local rivalries, and local participants whose connection to the larger debate over the events in Europe and the place of Jews in the new Polish state was at best tenuous. Far more important was the desire to defend one’s own neighbourhood, one’s own ‘turf’, from rivals outside the neighbourhood and outside the ethnic community. In this sense, the events of 1919 in Chicago were a result of the city’s local ethnic

rivalries. They were a manifestation of American ethnicity among first- and second-generation Polish Americans and Jewish Americans and not an import from Europe. 46 This is not the case with other stereotyping. Polish stereotypes of blacks as strike-breakers or the stereotypes of Poles held by the city’s English-speaking elite did have real long-term consequences.

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American Polonia and Polish Jewry in the United States 1940-1941 DAVID ENGEL DURING the first two years of the Second World War, before the systematic murder of Poland’s Jewish population by the German occupiers had begun, the political leadership of Polish Jewry outside the occupied homeland concentrated a significant proportion of its efforts upon obtaining guarantees that the regime to

be established in the country following liberation would be more favourably inclined towards Jewish interests than most believed the pre-war regime had been.! The search for allies in this quest led some Jewish leaders to explore the possibility of forming a coalition with Polish emigrant organizations in the West, especially in the United States, where ethnic Poles numbered an estimated 10 million in 1940, of whom some 2.5 to 3.5 million were organized in a wideranging network of fraternal, religious, social welfare, educational, and cultural associations, known collectively as American Polonia (Polonia Amerykanska). This organized ethnic community constituted a force of some note in American politics, not only at the national level but even more so in the key presidential elect-

oral states of Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania, and particularly in large and medium-size cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Buffalo.” Not surprisingly, in light of this presence, the Polish government-in-

exile—which believed, even before the United States entered the war, that Washington was likely to play a crucial role in determining the outcome of the conflict (and hence in Poland’s political future)—valued the active support of American Polonia and sought close co-operation with it.? 1 For a detailed discussion of these efforts, see D. Engel, In the Shadow of Auschwitz: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1939-1942 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1987), 46—113.

2 For estimates of the number of Polish Americans, including the organized section, see S. Wloszczewski, Polonia amerykanska: Szkice historyczne 1 socjologiczne (Warsaw, 1971), 84—g1. On the

history and organizational structure of American Polonia and its political activity, see ibid. 138-212; J. A. Wytrwal, America’s Polish Heritage: A Social History of the Poles in America (Detroit, 1961), 155-262; E. R. Kantowicz, Polish-American Politics in Chicago (Chicago, 1975), esp. 28-42, 165-95. > Perhaps the clearest statement of the government-in-exile’s appraisal of the political importance both of the United States and of American Polonia is found in the instructions given by the Polish

136 David Engel Because of this estimation of the importance of Polish American organizations, the government-in-exile paid attention to what they had to say. Hence, some Jews reasoned, if those organizations could be persuaded to put in a good word with the Polish government for Jewish political demands, the government might give those demands greater consideration than they would otherwise receive. Such, at least, is how the situation was perceived by a group of émigré Polish Jews who had fled to the United States at the beginning of the war and coalesced

around a special Committee on Polish Jewry established by the World Jewish Congress in late 1939.* On 6 September 1940 the Committee’s chairman, Arieh Tartakower, a pioneer in the social-scientific study of Jewry and founding head of the Polish labour Zionist party Hitahdut who also directed several other major World Jewish Congress operations, wrote to Ignacy Schwarzbart, a veteran Zionist

leader from Krakéw who represented Jewish interests in the Polish National Council in London, that if American Polonia would support certain fundamental principles concerning the status of Jews in post-war Poland, ‘this could have an extremely serious, even decisive impact’ on the government-in-exile’s attitude on the matter. Tartakower informed Schwarzbart that his Committee was ‘engaged at present in finalizing negotiations with representatives of the local Polonia concerning the legal status of Polish Jewry’, and indicated that his goal was to achieve a joint declaration by representatives of both parties endorsing the principles on which it hoped the government-in-exile would base its Jewish policy. In fact, he noted, a bilateral Polish—Jewish commission had already met in New York and prepared a draft Polish—Jewish declaration that he hoped would receive broad endorsement in Polish American circles (see Document 3).° In order to persuade Polish American groups to accept Tartakower’s proposals, several prominent Jews connected with the Committee had been meeting with both Polish American spokesmen and representatives of the Polish government in the United States to discuss ways in which Jews might foster Polish and Polish American interests. However, the results of these meetings turned out to be quite different from what Tartakower had anticipated. He had expected Polonia to welcome his overtures and exert its influence upon the government in accordance with Jewish requests, probably on the dubious basis of his contacts with two Polish Americans from New York, with whom he had formulated the draft agreement but foreign minister, August Zaleski, to the newly appointed ambassador to the United States, Jan Ciechanowski, before the latter took up his post in early 1941. Ciechanowski was charged with ‘activating our propaganda in the United States’ in such a way as ‘to influence both American public opinion and the local Polonia’, as well as with ‘collaborating closely with American Polonia in the spirit of the governments of the United Nations’ (‘Instrukcje dla Ambasadora RP w Waszyngtonie’, n.d. [filed 15 Jan. 1941], Archiwum Instytutu Polskiego, London, PRM 21/4). * On the establishment of this committee, see A. Tartakower, ‘Hape’ilut hamedinit lema’an yehudei polin al ademat amerikah bemilhemet ha’olam hasheniyah’, Ga/-Ed, 6 (1982), 169-70. > Tartakower to Schwarzbart, 6 Sept. 1940, Yad Vashem Archives, Jerusalem, M2/530.

American Polonia and Polish fewry 137 who carried little weight in Polonian circles, and because of the initial response of government officials, especially Poland’s consul-general in New York, Sylwester

Gruszka, who appeared receptive to the Jewish deputation (see Document 1). However, Gruszka’s encouragement notwithstanding,° Polonian spokesmen were markedly unreceptive, even hostile, to Tartakower’s advances, to such a point that the consul-general in Chicago, Karol Ripa, the diplomat who worked most closely with Polonian circles,’ advised the Foreign Ministry to dissuade the Jewish representatives from seeking the joint declaration Tartakower was hoping to obtain (see Document 2). Ripa’s warning was evidently heeded, for nothing came of ‘Tartakower’s draft agreement. The agreement did resurface briefly, however, in August 1941, after the Polish government’s political position had been significantly complicated by

the recent entry of the Soviet Union into the war on the Allied side and the conclusion, under strong pressure from the British, of a Polish—Soviet agreement

that failed to address earlier Soviet annexations of Poland’s pre-war eastern territories. In this situation the government-in-exile found itself in acute need of public support in Britain and the United States, and possibilities for enlisting American Jewish backing had to be seriously entertained.® No doubt sensing the

government’s new position, Tartakower visited Poland’s ambassador in Washington, Jan Ciechanowski, at the end of August to propose a series of sugges- , tions for Polish—Jewish co-operation, including a resurrected joint declaration, whose text he sent to the ambassador shortly after their meeting.? Ciechanowski appears to have wished to support Tartakower’s initiative: when the Polonian leader Francis Xavier Swietlik, dean of the School of Law at Marquette University in Milwaukee,?° visited Washington in early September, the ambassador asked the resistant Swietlik to meet the Jewish leader and ‘to show extensive goodwill’ towards his ideas (see Document 4). 6 An additional indication of Gruszka’s favourable attitude was contained in a letter of 16 January 1941 to the Polish interior minister, Stanislaw Kot. Gruszka wrote that ‘with regard to winning over American Jewry and obtaining its support for the satisfactory resolution of a broad range of Polish issues, I have many indications that the matter is progressing here in a positive direction and should turn out well’ (Archiwum Instytutu Polskiego, Ag.V/2). ” Not only was Chicago American Polonia’s unofficial capital, but Ripa himself had considerable experience working with Polish émigré groups, beginning in 1924-5, when he took part in negotiations with the German government over the status of Polish emigrants from that country. In 1934 he served as a commissioner for the Second Congress of Poles from Abroad, held in Warsaw, which resulted in the establishment of the World Alliance of Poles Abroad. 8 On this situation, see Engel, In the Shadow of Auschwitz, 114-25.

9 Tartakower to Ciechanowski, 30 Aug. 1941, Hoover Institution Archives, Poland, Ambasada (US.), box 64, folder 3.

10 Swietlik was a censor of the Polish National Alliance of America and president of the Polish American Council. On these organizations, see below, nn. 17, 31. 11 See also Ciechanowski to Tartakower, 16 Sept. 1941, Yad Vashem Archives, no. 851-e/SZ-56, O55/1.

138 David Engel The Polish Foreign Ministry in London backed Ciechanowski’s approach (see Document 6), but it recognized that many elements of American Polonia might prove recalcitrant and expressed its own misgivings about the text of the draft joint declaration (see Document 7). Ripa, in contrast, made it clear to the ambassador that he did not wish to be placed in a position of having to put pressure on Polanian leaders in Chicago to enter into discussions that they obviously found disagreeable

(see Document 5). In the end Ripa’s view carried the day: in late October he arranged for Tartakower and his deputy to meet several Polish American represen-

tatives, but, as he explained to Ciechanowski, the discussions were strictly a formality, and neither he nor the Polanian spokesmen had any intention of continuing with them (see Document 9). Meanwhile, the Foreign Ministry’s reservations concerning the joint declaration hardened: it now found any declaration about the status of the Jews in post-war Poland ‘inadvisable’ (see Document 8). As a result, no further serious contacts between Polish Jewish leaders and American Polonia

ensued.

Tartakower and his colleagues blamed the failure of their initiative in the first instance on the Polish government.!* However, the following documents reveal that their reproach was at least partly misplaced. According to the Polish diplomats who dealt with Tartakower’s proposals, the principal source of resistance was to be found within American Polonia, much of whose membership displayed, in the estimation of Ripa, the Polish diplomat most familiar with the situation, a

deeply rooted suspicion of and antipathy towards Jews (see Document 2). Nevertheless, the diplomatic correspondence surrounding Tartakower’s efforts to reach a political agreement with American Polonia does indicate that ultimately the Polish government was not prepared to endorse the principles set forth in the draft declaration, no matter how great the potential political benefit it might have obtained from doing so. That unwillingness was a source of considerable frustration and disappointment for Jews of a wide range of political orientations; it was one factor that marred relations between the Polish government-in-exile and the Jews, even as each party was pushed in its own way towards oblivion, and as the need for co-operation between the two groups mounted.?®

| 12 Tartakower, ‘Hape’ilut hamedinit’, 181. 13 It was, of course, hardly the only factor making for difficult relations between the parties. Polish government officials were also frustrated and disappointed over Jewish responses to their demands of Jewry. For a summary of the complaints of each side towards the other, see Engel, In the Shadow of Auschwitz, 203-13; id., Facing a Holocaust: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1943-1945 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1993), 172-8.

American Polonia and Polish Fewry 139 DOCUMENT I | Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, California, Poland, Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych, ser. 851¢e]

Consulate-General of the Republic of Poland, New York 28 August 1940

No. 791/FR STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL To the Ambassador of the Republic of Poland, Washington: Yesterday I had quite an interesting conversation, whose contents I take the liberty of summarizing for Your Excellency. The conversation took place over a breakfast arranged by Dr J. Tenenbaum," president of the Jewish Anti-Nazi Committee,'°

with the participation of Mr Wazeter,’® president of the fourth region of the Polish American Council!’ in New York; Dr Szoszkies;!8 Dr Apenszlak;'? and the undersigned.

I would characterize the matter concerning which Dr Tenenbaum invited us as follows:

American opinion with regard to the war has changed quite radically of late. This is true both of the government and of public opinion sensu largo. The attitude of neutrality, which for the past several months has been the 14 Joseph Tenenbaum, physician and author. Born in Galicia in 1887, Tenenbaum was a member of the East Galician Jewish delegation to the Paris peace conference in 1919. In 1929, after emigrating to

the United States, he became a chairman of the executive committee of the American Jewish Congress. He also served as an officer of the American Federation of Polish Jews. At the time of the meeting recounted in this document, he was chairman of the Joint Boycott Council of the American Jewish Congress and the Jewish Labour Committee, an organization campaigning for cessation of trade with Nazi Germany. 15 The reference is evidently to the Joint Boycott Council of the American Jewish Congress and the

Jewish Labour Committee. | 46 Franciszek Wazeter, a New York attorney, who also served as president of Centrala PolskoAmerykariskich Towarzystw w Nowym Yorku (the Central Organization of Polish American

Associations in New York). 1” Rada Polonii Amerykariskiej, a charitable organization founded in April 1938, which took the lead

in raising funds for the Polish cause among Polish émigrés in the United States during the Second World War. For a description of its activities during this period, see Rada Polonii Amerykarskiej, Sprawozdante z dziatalnosci od pazdziernika 1939 do pazdziernika 1948 (Buffalo, NY, 1948). See also W. Bialasiewicz, Pomiedzy lojalnoscig a serc porywem: Polonia amerykanska w wrzesniu 1939 roku (Chicago, 1989), 73-8. *8 Henryk Szoszkies, well-known Yiddish-language journalist from Warsaw, who had been a member of the first Warsaw Judenrat before escaping to the United States. 19 Jakub Apenszlak, Polish-language poet and editor of several Polish-language Jewish newspapers in Warsaw, including the Zionist Nasz Przeglgd.

140 David Engel alpha and omega of all good Americans, has recently become ‘a dead letter’.*° It is possible to cite a very large number of examples. Americans of Polish origin—both Poles and Jews—have been occupied in recent months mainly with the problem of relief;?’ political issues, as well as any others, have been foreign to them. Today relief is being questioned, both because of

the American position?” and because of the donors themselves, who are becoming increasingly unwilling to give money without the assurance that what they send will reach the intended hands. Similarly, the problem of refugees, which was once quite acute, has become less so of late, because the bulk of Poles and Polish Jews have been sealed off in France, where access is

becoming increasingly encumbered. In this situation, if Americans of Polish origin wish to help Poland, they must think about changing their current methods. Pondering this problem over the last few weeks, I have come to the conclusion that at present and in the future the only valid way is to help the Polish army. I have in mind either purchasing arms or aeroplanes

with monies we collect here or designating them as a grant to the Polish Government towards the eventual recruitment of additional units, either here or in Canada.?° Speaking concretely, I would propose the establishment of a society [to be known as] ‘Friends of the Polish Army’,** in which several dozen outstanding Americans, led perhaps by General Pershing,”° would be asked to serve as honorary patrons and whose fund-raising base would be Polonia or the Polish Jews in America.

A fairly lively discussion developed over this theme, in which all recognized the validity of the speaker’s argument. The only serious objection was raised by Mr Wazeter, who, while expressing himself in favour of such activity in principle, explained that he wished first to know what attitude the State Department would adopt, since it is still obligated to stick to the letter of neutrality. Dr Tenenbaum 20 ‘The phrase appears in inverted commas in English in the Polish text. 21 The word ‘relief’ is used in the Polish text. 22 The US Neutrality Acts of 1935 and 1937 prohibited the export of arms and certain other materials of strategic importance to any belligerent country, or the purchase, sale, or exchange of bonds or any other financial instruments with such states. An amendment in 1939 permitted warring states to

purchase arms on a ‘cash-and-carry’ basis, but it also banned American vessels from entering war zones. The provisions of these Acts caused considerable difficulties for both Jewish and Polish organizations in the United States who sought to raise funds and send arms and relief supplies to Poland. See Bialasiewicz, Pomiedzy lojalnoSscig a serc porywem, 43-5; D. S. Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis 1935-1941 (New York, 1968), 122-6. 23 Early Polish government efforts to recruit volunteers among ethnic Poles in North America had not gone well. See Wytrwal, America’s Polish Heritage, 261; Bialasiewicz, Pomiedzy lojalnoscig a serc porywem, 118-28; H. Znaniecki Lopata, Polish Americans: Status Competition in an Ethnic Community

(Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1976), 25. 24 In English in inverted commas. 2° John Joseph Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Force in Europe during the First World War.

American Polonia and Polish Jewry 141 responded that if the State Department were to be asked directly, a point blanc, then of course it would reply that such a thing is impossible. On the other hand, if one takes into account the changes that have taken place in public opinion of late, as well as the fact that the American Government is helping the Allies [and] that the White Committee”° has come into existence, then it is evident that such a thing will be allowed to pass. Even so, he would not advise attaching too much weight to

the State Department’s position, which must be more or less formal. It was decided to call another meeting about this matter towards the end of next week, with ten Poles and ten Jews from New York taking part, with the goal of considering the matter more substantially. Iam calling Your Excellency’s attention to this matter because this is a weighty in1tial step of a political character. Its results may well be of great consequence for us, because the voices demanding the politicization of our activities here are becoming ever louder, while relief is beginning to decline in importance. There is no ques-

tion that action of this sort will easily find mass support, as shown indirectly bythe

warmth with which our people here supported FON [Fundusz Obrony Narodowej, the Fund for National Defence] even before war broke out. Besides, this type of action, carried out publicly, would not be without an American angle; it would look like a progressive move comparable to what the White Committee is doing, namely raising funds to purchase aeroplanes. This has not happened here so far... .?/ Finally I add that this matter can establish an excellent basis for eventual recruitment activities here and in Canada. The participation of the Jews here might pres-

ent a certain problem. To be sure, Jewish participation will always give us a financial trump card, but from an organizational point of view it may cause difficulties of a certain kind. We might, however, be able to get round these difficulties

more easily by keeping the fund-raising committees as they are currently—in other words, Poles and Jews would raise money separately, although all funds collected would go to a joint ad hoc committee in which Americans would participate, along with Poles and local Jews.

/-/ Dr Sylwester Gruszka Consul-General of the Republic of Poland

26 ‘The popular name of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, established in May 1940 by the renowned newspaper editor William Allen White and others to press for amendments to the US neutrality laws and mobilize popular opinion in favour of active US government support for the countries fighting Nazi Germany. 27 Formulaic passage requesting the opinion of the Polish Foreign Ministry omitted.

142 David Engel DOCUMENT 2 [Hoover Institution Archives, Poland, Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych, ser. 851e]

Consulate-General of the Republic of Poland, Chicago II September 1940

Tjn. 263-SZ-17 CONFIDENTIAL! Re. Polish—Jewish Collaboration in America

To the Consulate-General of the Republic of Poland, New York: In connection with the letter of 22 August this year, No. 791/RF [sic], concerning the prospects for collaboration between Polonia and Jewish organizations, the Consulate-General announces that, in accordance with relevant bulletins in Polish _ publications, it has conducted unofficial discussions on the subject with several leaders of Polonia.

In the opinion of these people, a call to raise funds to arm the Polish army is not likely at present to elicit a desirable response, for the reason that the [Polish] community has been hearing appeals for funds for the past seventeen months and will respond only to exceptionally forceful slogans. People will no doubt reason that if such a rich country as England has taken upon itself the cost of maintaining the Polish army, then England, who 1s fighting in the first instance in her own defence, ought to be supplying the army with arms, without resorting to penny-ante public fund-raising. A call to raise funds would be popular if a recruiting campaign were announced in the United States and volunteers enlisted in the Polish army. The cost of organizing an army from within Polonia’s own ranks would be covered by Polonia to a large degree.

No matter whether, when, and to what end a call to raise funds might be issued, the

opinion of the people in question is that Polonia would not agree to any manner of co-operation with Jewish organizations. Any future effort aimed at such

collaboration would be opposed, as I already know, first of all by the Catholic

clergy and by that portion of Polonia over whom the clergy has influence. Merchants would oppose it because of competition, the union”® on principle, and the veterans and elders of the Sokol athletic club?* because of their pronounced 28 Zjednoczenie Polskie Rzymsko-Katolickie w Ameryce (the Polish Roman Catholic Union in America), founded in 1874. Its aims were to strengthen the national spirit among Polish Americans, to preserve Catholicism among Poles, to promote an interest in things Polish among young people, and to

establish and maintain local schools for Polish American children. It was strongly opposed to the insurrectionist tradition and the more militant Zwigzek Narodowy Polski (Polish National Alliance);

for the latter, see n. 30. See also Wytrwal, America’s Polish Heritage, 168, 177, 212-15. a 29 Zwiazek Sokotéw Polskich (the Polish Falcons Alliance), a sport and physical fitness organization that identified itself with the movement for Polish independence before and during the First World War.

American Polonia and Polish Jewry 143 antisemitic tendencies. Of the remaining organizations the National Alliance eschews on principle any sort of political action.®° Even in the event that the lead-

ership of the National Alliance responded positively to such collaboration, the leaders would have to be prepared to face articulate and effective criticism at the next sejm. Characteristic is the following formulation by the president of the Polish Roman Catholic Union, Mr Kania: ‘When the Zionists launched a campaign not long ago to raise a 111,000-man Jewish army, the remaining Jewish groups were quick to oppose it.?) The Jews are not capable of committing their lives and blood to the defence of even the highest ideals. ‘They would, on the other

hand, be ready to commit money—not their own, but what they earned from ~ American Poles.’ On the basis of Bulletin No. 4 of the American Federation of Polish Jews, we can conclude that the Federation regards a fund-raising campaign for supplying the Polish army as a prelude to a ‘Pittsburgh’ agreement with American Polonia.” Notwithstanding the fact that today only the Polish government is authorized to

conclude such an agreement, it must be stated categorically that from the perspective of Polonia such an agreement does not have good prospects. It 1s characteristic that to date only three publications (Wiadomosci1 Codzienne, Dziennik Chicagoski, Dziennik Zwigzkowy) have quoted what the federation bulletin had to say, and none of them commented on the suggested collaboration. 30 Zwigzek Narodowy Polski (the Polish National Alliance), the largest Polish American organization, founded in Philadelphia in 1880, ostensibly as an umbrella organization for Polish societies in the United States. Organized as a fraternal association, its main aim was to provide assistance to Polish

immigrants. However, it also took a strong position calling for restoration of Polish independence. Following the establishment of independent Poland, it largely abandoned politics in favour of cultural, educational, and social activity. See D. A. Pienkos, PN.A.: Centennial History of the Polish National Alhance of the United States in North America (Boulder, Colo., 1984), 119—50.

31 The reference is evidently to the call by Vladimir Jabotinsky, the leader of the New Zionist Organization (which had seceded from the World Zionist Organization in 1935), to raise a force of 100,000 Jews to fight on the British side. The call was issued at a rally in New York in June 1940 and published in London a month later (V. Jabotinsky, Hazit hamilhamah shel am yisra’el (Jerusalem, 1941), 207). See also M. N. Penkower, The Jews Were Expendable: Free World Diplomacy and the Holocaust (Urbana, Ill., 1983), 12; R. Medoff, The Deafening Silence: American Jewish Leaders and the Holocaust (New York, 1987), 82.

82 This is probably a reference to the 1912 meeting in which delegates from Polish American organizations met to formulate a common platform concerning Poland’s political future. The outcome of the meeting was the establishment of the Komitet Obrony Narodowej (Committee of National Defence). The Committee adopted a line generally in concert with the political programme espoused by J6zef Pitsudski, an orientation that was not to the liking of several of its constituent groups. The following two years witnessed significant secessions. The Polish Roman Catholic Union withdrew, underwriting the formation of a rival political body, the Polish National Council in America. Five other organizations left

to form the non-political Polish Central Relief Committee. See F Renkiewicz (ed.), The Poles in America, 1608-1972: A Chronology and Fact Book (Dobbs Ferry, NY, 1973), 16-17.

TA4 David Engel I gather that the Federation of Polish Jews is planning to approach the Polish American Council with a proposal. Since the Council will reject that proposal, the

Consulate-General respectfully requests that the federation be informed that under present conditions, and with regard to the council’s current attitudes and concerns, a proposal for collaboration would not be advisable.

/-/ Dr Karol Ripa Consul-General of the Republic of Poland

DOCUMENT 3 [Hoover Institution Archives, Poland, Ambasada (U.S.), box 64, folder 3. Language: English]

Draft of a Joint Polish—Jewish Declaration Prepared by a Commission composed of Professor Dr. Abel,?? Docent Dr. Piotrkowski,** as representatives of the Polish population in the United States;

Editor Apenszlak, Dr. Tartakower, representing the Jewish population of Poland.®°

A. Polish Jewry regards the re-establishment of the independence and the existence of a free and mighty Poland as one of its chief aspirations. Therefore Polish Jewry stands ready for all possible sacrifices in order to achieve and permanently establish the independent existence of Poland. B. We regard the co-operation of all citizens as the fundamental basis for the perpetuation of the strength of the Republic. Such co-operation is possible only upon recognition of the peculiar inner structure of the Polish state, of which the Jewish population constitutes a distinct national—cultural group identifying itself with Polish statehood. C. From this existing state of affairs proceed the following mutual interests: 33 Theodore Abel, associate professor of sociology at Columbia University, author of Why Hitler Came into Power: An Answer Based on the Original Life Stories of Six Hundred of his Followers (New York, 1938). See Tartakower, ‘Hape’ilut hamedinit’, 181.

34 Evidently a writer for the New York Polish American newspaper Nowy Swiat; Tartakower, ‘Hape’ilut hamedinit’, 181. 3° A Polish version of this document was sent by the World Jewish Congress to Jan Ciechanowski in Washington on 4 September 1940; Ciechanowski to Edward Raczyriski, Polish foreign minister, 16 Sept. 1940, Hoover Institution Archives, Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych, ser. 851e. This English translation was prepared on 19 September, most likely by Tartakower.

American Polonia and Polish Ffewry 145 1. Polish Jewish citizens must not be restricted in their rights by reason of their religious or cultural—national affiliation. This principle [is] to apply to all aspects of life as well as to the representation of the Jewish population in parliamentary and self-governmental bodies.

2. The incitement of one group of citizens against the other for reason of religion, race, or nationality is not in the interests of the state and should be punishable. 3. Cultural—national affiliation must not serve as [a] criterion for selection to

positions in state and self-governmental institutions and organizations. Objective examination of the professional qualifications of the individual should serve as the only determining factor. 4. Asacultural—national group, Jews must have complete freedom to establish their own schools with their own language of instruction.

5. Entrance into any Polish educational institution should be guaranteed to all citizens irrespective of religion. No discrimination toward any particular group of students shall be tolerated. 6. The religious prescriptions of the Jewish community should not be violated by laws or regulations of the state or municipalities. In case of appropriations by the Polish state for religious or national communities, the Jewish

population shall benefit by the subsidies in the proper proportion. The same [1s] to apply to possible state subsidies for schools of minority groups. _

7. The Jews, as loyal citizens of Poland, constitute a permanent element, and the attitude toward them as a national—cultural group should leave no room for any plans about emigration or evacuation.

DOCUMENT 4 | Hoover Institution Archives, Poland, Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych, ser. 851e]

Embassy of the Republic of Poland, Washington 16 September 1941 To the Minister of Foreign Affairs, London: Following my letter of 3 September this year I am sending in addition . . .2° a copy of the letter of the World Jewish Congress of 4 September, to which a proposed Polish—Jewish declaration is attached.®” 36 Reference to a joint declaration by the World and American Jewish Congresses noting the second

anniversary of the German invasion of Poland omitted. 37 Document 3, above.

146 David Engel At the same time I am communicating that in accordance with the wishes of Dr Arieh Tartakower, I took advantage of the occasion provided by the presence in Washington of President Swietlik on the roth of this month to convey to him the

desire of the Central Representation of Polish Jews to establish future cooperation in America. I confess that I did not encounter enthusiasm on President Swietlik’s part. He explained to me that the Central Representation of Polish Jews is made up of Jewish citizens of Poland, which is why American Polonia, which consists of American citizens of Polish descent, could not enter into normal collaboration with such a society. Nonetheless, at my request, President Swietlik promised to receive Dr Tartakower, to enter into discussions with him, and to show extensive goodwill towards investigating whether it might be possible to work

together on matters concerning, for example, aid to Poland, enlisting Jewish elements in [our] fund-raising campaigns, and [generating] press support for Poland. I request Your Excellency’s opinion about the above matters. Jan Ciechanowsk1

Ambassador of the Republic of Poland |

DOCUMENT 5 [Hoover Institution Archives, Poland, Ambasada (U.S.), box 64, folder 3 |

Consulate-General of the Republic of Poland, Chicago 11 October 1941

T. 263-SZ-5 CONFIDENTIAL Re. Polish—Jewish Understanding

To the Ambassador of the Republic of Poland, Washington:

In connection with my discussion with Your Excellency concerning a Polish—

Jewish understanding, I respectfully report that on the 4th of this month Mr M. Kochanski came to me once again with authorization from Dr Tartakower, requesting assistance for the Jews in reaching an agreement with American Polonia and in setting up a meeting with Polonia representatives, especially with the president of the Council, Mr Swietlik.

Keeping in mind the instructions I received from Your Excellency, I conducted myself in the discussion with the Jewish representatives with the utmost restraint, indicating that: 1. The points of the proposed Polish—Jewish agreement sent to me in a letter of 23

September of this year are unrealistic, and in no way can discussions with American Polonia be conducted on this basis. (I presented this argument to Your Excellency in Washington on 29 September of this year, which is why I am not repeating it.)

American Polonia and Polish Fewry 147 2. | indicated clearly that this matter cannot be forced in the way that the representatives of the Jews are doing at present. American Polonia is not prepared for this type of negotiation. It will be necessary to prepare the groundwork in advance.

This will take at least a year. Secondly, during this interval, the Jews in America | will have to demonstrate that they are truly thinking not only of their own aims but also about the good of Poland, which can be the sole basis for any sort of discussions with American Polonia.

3. I indicated that the Polish American Council will not refuse to meet Dr ‘Tartakower should he come to Chicago. As far as I know either the president of the Polish American Council or the vice-president and director of the Council, Mr Midowicz,*® will speak with him. As I had already arranged for Mr Kochariski to meet with Mr Midowicz and with the executive secretary, Mr Hoinka, he held this meeting before coming to me. He indicated that he was quite satisfied with the course of these discussions and that they seemed to augur well for future developments in this matter. Mr Kocharnski thanked me sincerely in the name of Dr Tartakower and the Jewish executive for showing interest in this manner and especially for providing access to the representatives of the Polish American Council. I regard the conversation of the 4th of this month as the final one. In accordance with the tactics that Your Excellency and I have prescribed, I believe it unnecessary to receive any further delegation of Jews or to take part in this entire matter. Wishing to hear the opinion of the president of the Polish American Council, I raised the matter with him on 7 October. He stated the following: 1. American Polonia, which consists first and foremost of American citizens, does not regard itself competent to enter into any sort of agreement with Jews from Poland. 2. The president of the Polish American Council, who is familiar with the atmos-

phere both within the Council and among the entire Polish community in the United States, regards the issue as not yet ripe [for discussion]. It will require a long time to prepare the ground and to create an appropriate frame of mind. 3. After deep consideration of this matter, in which I interested Mr Swietlik a few weeks ago, he has come to the conclusion that he himself is unable to deal with it for the time being. Wishing, however, to comply with our wishes, he is authorizing

the director of the Polish American Council, Mr Midowicz, to receive Dr Tartakower in his absence with all courtesy and to discuss the entire issue with him, without committing himself in any way. President Swietlik believes that for the moment this should be the end of the entire matter. It will be possible to return to it only after a long interval, when it will not 38 Kazimierz Midowicz was one of four vice-presidents of the council.

148 David Engel arouse such bewilderment and possible opposition among American Polonia, as it would at the present moment. Dr Karol Ripa Consul-General of the Republic of Poland

DOCUMENT 6 [Hoover Institution Archives, Poland, Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych, ser. 851e|

Republic of Poland London, 21 October 1941

Ministry of Foreign Affairs SECRET To the Ambassador of the Republic of Poland, Washington:

In connection with Your Excellency’s report of 16 September of this year, I am communicating that in the opinion of the Foreign Ministry the development of contacts between American Polonia and the Central Representation of Polish Jewry, and even collaboration in certain areas (for example, in fund-raising for assistance to Polish citizens in Russia), must be regarded as desirable. There is no doubt that any action attesting to the normal development of Polish—Jewish relations and to a tendency towards the gradual amelioration of existing grievances must meet with our support, especially if it takes place in the United States, where

it can bring about the mitigation of unfriendly attitudes towards us in circles where the notion of an allegedly unalterable antisemitic atmosphere within the Polish nation and government still prevails. On the other hand, the ministry is aware that the problem of agreeing upon collaboration with the Jews may encounter major difficulties within Polonia. Under

certain conditions it could even become a cause of serious complications in the process of its internal consolidation. For these reasons, it appears advisable that Your Excellency and the consuls serving under him arrange for contacts between Polish and Jewish figures while leaving the initiative in formulating [plans for] col-

laboration to the interested organizations, to the extent that this is possible, and concerning yourselves only that whatever friction might ensue not assume a drastic form.

/-/ Karol Kraczkiewicz Secretary-General

American Polonia and Polish fewry 149 DOCUMENT 7 [Hoover Institution Archives, Poland, Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych, ser. 851e|

Republic of Poland London, 21 October 1941

Ministry of Foreign Affairs SECRET To the Ambassador of the Republic of Poland, Washington:

In connection with Your Excellency’s report of 16 September of this year, to which a copy of Dr Tartakower’s letter and the Draft of a Polish—Jewish declaration was attached, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs requests that you clarify more precisely the origin and character of this declaration.

The ministry is especially concerned with obtaining the following information: What was the source of the initiative to formulate a proposed Polish—Jewish declaration? Who worked on putting it together (especially from the Polish side)? Which Polish and Jewish agencies do the authors believe ought to sign the declaration? In the final analysis, what purpose is it supposed to server

Without going into detailed analysis of the Draft, the ministry is letting Your Excellency know confidentially that in its view the declaration, which does not take into account the actual conditions that might exist in the Polish lands following the war (conditions that cannot be foreseen at present), does not define the position of the Jewish minority with sufficient flexibility, while at the same time it places too strong an emphasis upon the distinctiveness of the Jews’ situation as a permanent and separate national group.

/-/ Karol Kraczkiewicz Secretary-General

DOCUMENT 8 | Hoover Institution Archives, Poland, Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych, ser. 851e]

Republic of Poland London, 10 November 1941 Ministry of Foreign Affairs CONFIDENTIAL To the Ambassador of the Republic of Poland, Washington:

From the report of the Consul-General of the Republic of Poland in Chicago of g October this year, which includes a report of a conversation with President

150 David Engel Swietlik et al. on Polish—Jewish themes, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has learned that the first meeting between the representative of the Polish American Council, Mr Midowicz, and a Jewish representative has already taken place and that the Jewish side was purportedly satisfied with the conversation. In connection with the above news, the ministry requests a report of that conversation. The ministry also requests information concerning possible future contacts and discussions involving Minister Stariczyk, the Polish American Council, and Jewish organizations about their collaboration. Confirming its earlier instructions concerning the necessity of proceeding cautiously in our satellite communities in encouraging discussions between American Polonia and Jewish organizations, the ministry asks Your Excellency at the same time to exert as much influence as he can upon the Polish American Council to continue those discussions. It appears that the most appropriate and most pressing theme for discussion might be collaboration in the area of fund-raising to assist Polish citizens in Russia, and also establishing a certain modus vivendi in the press, which must find expression first of all in a cessation of press attacks upon one another. From the above-mentioned report of the consul-general of the Republic of Poland in Chicago, it appears that the Polish American press 1s planning to publish several favourable notices about Polish—Jewish relations. This must be greeted with satisfaction.

On the other hand, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs 1s entirely in agreement with

the opinion of President Swietlik that negotiating an agreement with Jewish organizations or ratifying a declaration concerning the situation of the Jews in post-war Poland is not only premature but actually inadvisable. For its part the ministry adopted an identical stance towards former National Council member Schwarzbart,*” who asked our diplomatic posts for help in bringing about an agreement between Polonia and Jewish organizations 1n the United States.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs explained explicitly to Mr Schwarzbart that initiating Polish—Jewish discussions in the United States with such a sensitive issue as a declaration must inevitably be would surely doom the entire matter of an under-

standing to failure. As a result, Mr Schwarzbart promised to persuade Polish Jewish agencies in America to renounce such a project. On the other hand the min-

istry assured Mr Schwarzbart of its positive attitude and the assistance of our diplomatic posts in the matter of bringing about Polish—Jewish rapprochement (while not hiding that the diplomatic posts will have to proceed cautiously on this matter). It pointed out the directions in which the Polish—Jewish contacts that have already begun might continue with the greatest prospects for success. /-/ Karol Kraczkiewicz Secretary-General 33 The description ‘former National Council member’ reflects the interregnum between the dissolution of the first National Council in August 1941 and the convening of the second Council in February 1942.

American Polonia and Polish fewry 151 DOCUMENT 9 [Hoover Institution Archives, Poland, Ambasada (U.S.), box 64, folder 3]

Consulate-General of the Republic of Poland, Chicago 12 October 1941

T. 263-SZ-5 CONFIDENTIAL Re: Visit by Dr Tartakower and Mr Kochajski to the Director To the Ambassador of the Republic of Poland, Washington:

In connection with previous reports concerning a Polish—Jewish conference, I respectfully report that on 31 October of this year Dr Tartakower, a delegate of the Jewish Congress, and Mr Kochariski, representing Jewish interests in the Chicago area, came to see me.

Dr Tartakower once again presented me with the Jews’ extensive proposal for establishing close contacts with American Polonia, including some sort of agreement concerning collaboration within the United States in rescue matters and also in certain political areas. The Jews are especially concerned with the co-operation of American Polonia in guaranteeing full rights for the Jews in the future Poland. Mr Tartakower described his programme quite extensively. I shall not repeat it, since Your Excellency and Polish government agencies are already undoubtedly familiar with it. Because I had earlier conducted discussions on this theme with the presidium of the Polish American Council, the presidium of the Polish Roman Catholic Union, and all authorized decision-making agencies in Chicago, I was able to explain to the Jewish delegation that:

1. Their reference to the agreement concluded earlier in New York, signed there by Mr Piotr[k]owski, and allegedly approved by certain Polish agencies with Mr Wazeter and Yolles,*° cannot be regarded in any way by the authorized organs of Polonia in Chicago as setting the direction of political action by the entire [Polish] émigré community in the United States.

2. This document is not generally known to Polonia, even though, as Dr Tartakower explained to me, it was concluded a year ago and even though he was assured in New York that it would be sent to the authorized agencies of the [Polish| community in Chicago.

3. I explained to them that the conclusion of an agreement between American citizens of Polish origin and Jews who are citizens of Poland is dubious from a legal standpoint. 40 Peter Yolles, the publisher of Nowy Swiat.

152 David Engel 4. In order for them to reach some sort of agreement they will, in my opinion, need to prepare the ground, to mould the opinion of the Polish community in the United States, which is altogether unprepared for a document of this sort. 5. I presented to the Jewish delegation a plan that should be followed if they really

want the matter to take a positive turn. It will require at least a year of work in order for this to happen. *K

I assured the delegation that I would arrange all contacts in Chicago with the leading representatives of Polonia and that I could assure them in advance, on the basis of prior discussions, that they would be warmly received. The delegation thanked me in the name of the Jewish Congress for the ostensible efforts I had made*! towards Polish—Jewish rapprochement, which, in Dr Tartakower’s opinion, had already led to the reception of the delegation in the Chicago area by authorized Polish agencies who willingly had discussions with them. *K

On the same day, I arranged for the delegation to hold discussions with Mr Midowicz, the head of the Polish American Council in Mr Swietlik’s absence, and

with the executive secretary of the Council, Mr Hoinka. In addition, I set up a conference with the president of the Union for Polish Liberation, Dr Zurawski, as

the representative of the progressive elements in this area.** Independently I invited Mr Swietlik to speak with the delegation by telephone at least, if he was too busy to meet them personally. —

All of the above conferences and discussions came about on 4 November. Before leaving for New York, Dr Tartakower communicated with me once again, stating that he was very satisfied with the discussions he had held. He saw that within

Polonia there is some sort of desire to establish contact with the Jews, and he agreed with what I had told him earlier about the so-called New York agreement being entirely unknown here.

President Swietlik promised Dr Tartakower that he would be in New York this year and would personally speak with Jewish agencies about matters of interest to 41 za rzekome moje dotychczasowe starania.

42 The reference is most likely to those Polish circles led by Oskar Lange, an economist at the University of Chicago, who advocated mitigating any opposition towards the Soviet Union and who in 1944 transferred their support from the government-in-exile to the Soviet-backed Polish Committee of National Liberation. Tartakower later recalled that in Chicago he met ‘a few [Polish] intellectuals of a liberal persuasion . . . headed by Oskar Lange . . . who were ready to contact and negotiate with rep-

resentatives of the Jewish community’. The influence of this group, according to Tartakower, was ‘limited’ (‘Tartakower, ‘Hape’ilut hamedinit’, 181).

American Polonia and Polish fewry 153 them. He indicated in particular that he would be ready to speak about Polonia’s collaboration with the Jews on rescue matters. In the name of the Polish American Council, Mr Midowicz told the delegation what I have mentioned above. *K

It is my impression that with this, the first phase of Polish—Jewish discussions has come to an end and that now there will ensue a lengthy interval in this area. His promises to the Jews notwithstanding, President Swietlik will shy away from continuing these discussions, 1n order first to win over the general [public] opinion and

to prepare the ground for such discussions, which, as I have mentioned, will require a longer amount of time.

/-/ Dr Karol Ripa Consul-General of the Republic of Poland All documents, except no. 3, translated from the Polish by David Engel

BLANK PAGE

The Evacuation of Jewish Polish Citizens from Portugal to Jamaica 1941-1943 TOMASZ POTWOROWSKI THE unwillingness of the majority of countries to accept Jewish refugees from Europe during the Second World War, despite continual reports of Nazi persecution, remains a shameful example of widespread antisemitism. The admission of a group of about 200 Jews, mostly Polish citizens stranded in Portugal, to the British colony of Jamaica in 1942 is therefore of interest as an unusual, albeit small, excep-

tion to this general reluctance. This chapter investigates the circumstances surrounding the British decision! and seeks to shed light on the attitudes of the other institutions involved, namely the Polish government? and the Office for Refugees of the League of Nations.°®

It is possible, thanks in large part to the work of Stanistaw Schimitzek,* to reconstruct the background to how two groups of Jewish refugees came to be stranded in Portugal. We also have valuable documentary evidence relating to one of the groups in the form of a memoir by a member of this group, Mrs Miriam Stanton (née Sandzer), who tells of their desperation, culminating in their decision to send a personal plea to Winston Churchill in the form of a birthday greetings telegram. Shortly afterwards the group received permission to settle in a camp in Jamaica.° 1 Colonial Office (CO) and Foreign Office (FO) records for 1941-3 were searched at the National Archives, Kew (TNA).

2 The following two collections were searched in the archives of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, Stanford University, California (HIWRP): Poland—Legation—Portugal (hereafter PORT); Poland—Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MSZ). The archive of the Polish Institute and Sikorski

Museum, London (IPMS), coll. A/42 Poselstwo w Hawanie, was also searched. (I intend to deposit copies of most of the documents mentioned in this chapter in a collection of my papers at the HIWRP.)

3 Copies of documents from the League of Nations were found among the Foreign Office and Polish papers. 4 Na krawedzi Europy: Wspomnienia portugalskie 1939-1946 (Warsaw, 1970). Schimitzek was at the time head of the Lisbon office of the Polish Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare. 5 M. M. Stanton, Escape from the Inferno of Europe (London, 1996), chs. 26-30. Further communi-

cation took place with Stanton, née Sandzer, and her husband, Ben, in their flat in London on 23 September 1994.

156 Tomasz Potworowski Paul R. Bartrop, a researcher on the subject who had access to Stanton’s memoir, studied the British action and concluded that it was indeed an example of humanitarianism amid an otherwise bleak disregard for Jewish safety.° This chap-

ter, however, suggests a complex and far from disinterested decision-making process within the British government and the London-based Polish government, with the Office for Refugees of the League of Nations, also at the time based 1n London, was also involved and acted within its humanitarian remit. Another focus of this chapter is on the origin of the contrast between written complaints from refugees that reached the Jewish community in the United States and Stanton’s description of conditions in the camp in Jamaica, as confirmed in my interview with Alan Rae, the son of its administrator, Ernest Rae,’ as well as in the report quoted below in the section ‘Polish Diplomatic Inspection at Gibraltar

Camp’. The chapter suggests that these complaints caused concern within the colonial government of Jamaica.

BACKGROUND After Poland was occupied by German and Soviet forces in September 1939, the government re-formed in France. Most of the soldiers and airmen who were able to cross the border into neutral countries managed to escape internment, and they formed military units in time to take part in the short-lived defence of France in the summer of 1940. These units ignored the French order to surrender at the end of June 1940 and, if they did not manage to reach the Basque coast to be evacuated by the British, they disbanded or crossed the border into Switzerland. A considerable number of Polish civilians also found their way to France and then had to flee the advancing German army. A few of them, including members of the Polish government, managed to reach the evacuation points on the Basque coast. Among the civilians who fled Poland in September 1939 were many Jews, and these were joined by other co-religionists who had left the country in the years between the two world wars. Some of these expatriates had lost their Polish citizenship as a result of the 1938 Nationality Act, but later had it reinstated by the government-in-exile. By July 1940 the government had regrouped in London, and a Polish army was marshalled in Scotland. Polish airmen joined the Royal Air Force, where they served mostly in separate squadrons. The Polish government retained its diplomatic representation in neutral countries. In Portugal there was a legation under Minister Karol Dubicz-Penter, who in September 1943 was replaced by Gustaw Potworowski.® 6 P. R. Bartrop, ‘From Lisbon to Jamaica: A Study of British Refugee Rescue during the Second World War’, Immigrants and Minorities, 13/1 (London, Mar. 1994), 48-64. 7 Meeting with Mr Alan Rae at the Liguanea Club in Kingston, 20 Feb. 1995. 8 At the time most foreign missions in Portugal had the rank of legation, headed by a minister. Only

Brazil, Great Britain, Spain, and the United States maintained embassies. The papal nuncio held

Evacuation of Fewish Poles to famaica 157 The fall of France at the end of June 1940 created two particular problems for the Polish authorities: how to evacuate its employees and military personnel to Britain, together with volunteers anxious to join the Polish armed forces in Britain;

and how to find safe havens for its remaining citizens fleeing the advancing Germans—among whom many were the especially vulnerable Jews. Meanwhile, France was highly insecure and the area controlled by the Vichy government was occupied in November 1942. Franco’s Spain was coming under

increasing pressure to follow Axis policies and it closed the Polish legation in Madrid in March 1942. Portugal was marginally safer as it was bound by treaty with Great Britain. (There are good reasons to believe that there was an agreement between the two Iberian dictators, Franco and Salazar, regarding the interpretation of the Hispano-Portuguese non-aggression pact of 1939: Spain would play the Axis card, Portugal the Allies’.) The flow of thousands of Polish citizens through Spain and Portugal, after the fall of France in 1940 and then after the German occupation of southern France in 1942, forced the Polish government to set up offices dedicated to the problem under the umbrella of their legation in Lisbon. Colonel Fredryk Mally and later Captain Roman Badior were in charge of the office for military evacuation, and Stanislaw Schimitzek? and his deputy, Karol Maxamin,’° ran the office that dealt with civilian refugees. A rough estimate of the number of Polish civilian refugees who passed through Lisbon between 1939 and 1945 is between 5,000 and 7,000; the figure for the military is 5,500.1’ The British armed forces supported the evacuation of the military personnel efficiently enough, but the British embassy in Lisbon, despite its goodwill, was limited in its ability to help those civilian refugees who were unable to contribute to the war effort.

THE FIRST GROUP OF JEWISH REFUGEES

IN PORTUGAL, 1941 The Portuguese government restricted the number of refugees of any nationality who could be present in Portugal at one time, and refused in principle to extend transit visas beyond a year. Those who overstayed their term were considered illegal immigrants, as were those who crossed the border clandestinely. Such people were confined to designated areas;!* those with Polish citizenship were ambassadorial rank. Gustaw Potworowski (my father) was chargé d’affaires and was given the title of minister because the Portuguese government did not want to irritate the Germans with the pomp that would have accompanied the presentation of plenipotentiary credentials to the president of the republic.

* A member of the Polish diplomatic service. |

10 A socialist railway trade union leader and, as far as I know, a Jew. 11 Schimitzek, Na krawedzi Europy, 695-6. 12 Tn the official French used for correspondence with foreign missions, these areas were called eux de résidence forcée (‘places of compulsory residence’). The opening paragraphs of Stanton’s memoir

158 Tomasz Potworowski originally confined to Figuera da Foz, then to Caldas da Rainha and Ericeira, all small provincial towns designated as réstdences forcées. The few who could be employed in Polish offices were allowed to remain in Lisbon, but those confined to the provincial towns could obtain short-term permits to travel to the capital on medical or compassionate grounds. No distinction was made between Jews and

other refugees. Control over all refugees, as over other foreign nationals in Portugal (except those covered by diplomatic privilege), was exercised by the Policia Internacional de Vigilancia e Defesa do Estado (the security police, PIDE) under the command of Hipolito Agostinho Lourenco.?? Polish citizens who were willing to join the Polish forces in Britain or who could be employed by the Polish government could, after security clearance, get British visas for themselves and their families. Those who were able to prove their usefulness to the war effort, such as engineers, technicians, and their families, could

obtain visas for Canada. Subject to wartime transport delays, such people, includ- : ing some Jews, left Portugal usually before their transit visas expired, although under these circumstances the PIDE frequently extended the period. For the remainder, Brazil became the prime destination, but, like practically all other countries, it refused to grant visas to Jews.'* Other Latin American countries granted visas to Polish citizens only if they had resident sponsors, and even then

often discriminated against Jews. The Lisbon office of the Polish Ministry of Social Welfare tried in vain to obtain immigration permits to Australia (where the application form included the question ‘Jewish or not?’) and to French Equatorial Africa, in relation to which approaches to the Gaullist representative in Lisbon proceeded no further than a request on his part for a list of Polish citizens applying for entry, of which no more than 30 per cent could be Jewish.*° Schimitzek reported that on 1 November 1940, together with a representative of a Belgian welfare organization, he discussed the issue of the Jewish refugees

with Tropper, the head of the Lisbon office of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the Joint).1© Although prepared to defray the cost of the transatlantic passage for any Jew who could obtain a visa, the Joint felt equally powerless to accelerate the evacuation. All three men considered it imperative to move swiftly in view of the perceived threat of a German invasion of the Iberian peninsula. In February 1941 the US-based emigration committee HICEM had approached the Polish government offering to contribute 50 per cent of the costs

of transport, but remittance of such funds proved impossible in most cases as British exchange controls allowed this only for people residing in Poland at the describe dramatically the announcement of the impending transfer there and its effect on the group of Jewish refugees stranded in Lisbon without visas for onward travel (Stanton, Escape from the Inferno of Europe, 193; Bartrop, ‘From Lisbon to Jamaica’, 52). 13 The fact that Lourenco was an army officer probably led to the belief among the refugees that the military had taken over control of them (Stanton, Escape from the Inferno of Europe, 193).

14 Schimitzek, Na krawedzi Europy, 261. 15 Tbid. 360. 16 Tbid. 296.

Evacuation of fewish Poles to Jamaica 159 outbreak of the war, or about 5 per cent of the total of the Jewish citizens stranded in Lisbon at the time.'” All such arrangements were, of course, complicated by the thorny problem of obtaining entry permits for this group to some territory outside Europe.

The Polish government obtained an agreement from Canada to receive 300 refugees, and Canada gradually issued these visas during the course of 1941. However, the Canadian immigration officer in Lisbon advised Schimitzek that only 20 per cent of the applications could come from Jews. While the Jews could

get the cost of their passage paid by the Joint or HICEM, funds for the others had to be obtained from a variety of sources, and this slowed down the evacuation.1®

Until May 1941 it was still possible for Jewish organizations in America to obtain a limited number of immigrant permits under sponsorship arrangements with US residents.’ In June the United States introduced new, stringent immigration regulations, which in effect barred entry to anyone in territories under

Axis control. The British embassy in Lisbon reported on 18 June that the American consulate there had received instructions to that effect and, on 11 July, that the ban had been extended to cover not only German-occupied territories but also neutral countries.”° In the course of 1941 the number of Polish citizens in Portugal decreased considerably, but the Portuguese authorities advised that no further transit visas would be granted until those who had been in Portugal for more than a year had departed. In mid-1941 there remained a core group of Polish Jews with little chance of relocation. In a cable to the Foreign Office dated 8 June 19417! the British ambassador to Portugal, Sir Roland Campbell, stressed the need to create a reception area for about 400 refugees with no final destination in sight. Of these, just over half were Polish citizens.?2

THE KULLMANN REPORT The Polish government, in addition to exerting pressure on the British (who were anyway keen to keep up the flow of people useful to the war effort), approached the

office of the League of Nations high commissioner for refugees, Sir Herbert 17 Correspondence between the MSZ and the legation in Lisbon, Feb. and Mar. 1941, HIWRP,

MSZ 518/30. 18 Schimitzek, Na krawedzi Europy, 349. 19 An interesting side issue is the initiative by Charles Harwood, then newly appointed governor of the US Virgin Islands, to create a safe haven there ‘with appropriate safeguards’ for Jewish refugees

from Europe (TNA, FO 371/29221, W 625/48, 21 Feb. 1941). Evidently nothing came of this project.

20 TNA, FO 371/29221, W 7425/625/48, W 8445/625/48. 21 ‘TNA, FO 371/29231. 22 The Polish authorities in Lisbon estimated the size of this group at about 230 (Schimitzek, Na krawedzt Europy, 425).

160 Tomasz Potworowskt Emerson, to emphasize the humanitarian aspect of the issue.?* Sir Herbert held the posts of both international high commissioner and director of the office of the British Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees,‘ positions that he sometimes confused, to the annoyance of the Foreign Office.*° His office was already concerned about the increasing flow of refugees through the Iberian peninsula. The arrest of 12,000 Jews by the Vichy government in France, a cable from the British ambassador in Lisbon, and the approach from the Polish government no doubt contributed to the decision to dispatch the assistant high commissioner, Dr C. G. Kullmann, a Swiss national, to Portugal in July 1941.”° Kullmann’s report from his visit (which took place between 23 July and 6 August) estimates that immediately after the fall of France in 1940 there were 12,000 refugees in Portugal, but that by the end of July 1941 the number had dwindled to 1,500.7’ Analysing the composition of the remaining group, the report classified the stranded refugees by citizenship: 400 German, 300 Polish, 100 Austrian, 50 Czechoslovak, 20 to 30 from Luxembourg, the rest of various nationalities, including from (German) ‘satellites’. Kullmann stresses the humane and liberal policies of the Portuguese government and the help to refugees delivered by the Joint and HICEM, the Quakers, and the Unitarians—all American-based organizations—as well as the Polish, Belgian, and Dutch diplomatic representations, which had created special offices in Lisbon for the purpose. According to the report, the bulk of the remaining refugees were indigent. The Portuguese Jewish Refugee Committee was supporting 630 refugees, with 80 escudos per month for lodging, vouchers for six meals or 35 escudos per week, a small weekly allowance for pocket money, and free medical and dental services. In his annexe dealing with refugees of Polish citizenship, Kullmann reports that while the Jewish Refugee Committee provided lodging and food allowances, the pocket money (6 escudos per day), free medical treatment, and clothing were provided by the ‘Polish Committee’ (that is, the Polish Ministry of Social Welfare). Similar shared arrangements existed between the Polish government and HICEM regarding transport to countries of emigration. (As far I know, costs for indigent Jews 23 HIWRP, MSZ 5518/30. 24 Schimitzek calls him Robert (Na krawedzi Europy, 422); Bartrop says Hubert (‘From Lisbon to Jamaica’, 53-4). Yet correspondence in both British and Polish archives as well as in the 1941 Who’s Who proves he was Herbert.

25 TNA, FO 371/29221, W 7805/625/48. 26 TNA, FO 371/29221, W 8085/625/48; also Schimitzek, Na krawedzi Europy, 422.

27 C. G. Kullman’s report was forwarded to the Foreign Office under cover of Sir Herbert Emerson’s letter to A. W. G. Randall on 27 August 1941 (TNA, FO 371/29221, W 10681/625/ 48). The report also contains details of the difficulties created for those in possession of US entry permits by the closure of US consulates in Axis-occupied territories and for those in unoccupied France and neutral countries who missed the deadlines imposed by the new US immigration regulations.

Evacuation of Fewish Poles to Jamaica 161 who had been resident in Poland up to the outbreak of the war were borne entirely

by the Polish authorities.) , The Portuguese government assured Kullmann that they would continue their present policies, but in view of the increasing number of refugees unable to continue their travel because of recent American restrictions, some would have to be transferred to Caldas da Rainha. The first party of ninety-five refugees of various nationalities was sent there on 1 August. Kullmann visited the town, a spa for rheumatism sufferers located in the hills about 60 miles north of Lisbon. He was favourably impressed by the place and the conditions it provided for the refugees, who were free to move within an area of several miles, including a beach on the Atlantic coast. Passes to visit Lisbon for interviews at diplomatic or refugee offices were available.

Annexe 3 to Kullmann’s report, written at the request of the Polish government, provides details of the position of Polish citizens who found themselves refugees in Portugal. After the fall of France more than 3,000 entered Portugal, of whom only half had been resident in Poland immediately before the war. The rest were long-term residents of France, Holland, Belgium, Italy, and Germany. Of the total, half were what Kullmann describes as Aryan, though only a minority of those resident abroad would have fallen into that category. About 2,600 transferred

on to other destinations, and 50 per cent of these went to the United Kingdom (mostly men fit for military service or technical specialists and their families), 25 per cent travelled to the United States (mostly Jews), and less than 25 per cent went to Canada. About 300 ‘non-Aryan Catholics’ obtained entry into Brazil. Kullmann’s report indicates that by the end of July 1941 there were just under 400 Polish citizens left in Portugal, about 60 per cent of whom were Jews. By the end of his visit 290 were ‘Polish refugees stranded in Portugal without valid visas for any other countries’. The Polish legation claimed that most of the remaining Polish refugees had not

resided in Poland in the years just before the war and were not capable of contributing to the war effort. These refugees were causing a bottleneck in the evacuation from France of people with skills needed in Britain and Canada. For example,

Kullmann heard that about 700 Polish air-industry specialists were stranded in France. The recent tightening of Portuguese regulations meant that the original gentleman’s agreement between the Polish minister to Portugal and the head of PIDE was no longer operative; it was only possible to obtain transit visas in groups

of twenty to thirty at a time, provided that the flow through Portugal was main- | tained.

Kullmann suggested two ways of dispersing the remaining stranded Jewish Polish citizens. One idea, of ‘splitting the group and finding visas for individual families’, he mentioned only briefly, presumably because all concerned realized that this course had been exhausted by the individuals themselves, the Polish authorities, and the American Jewish organizations. He also suggested, however,

162 Tomasz Potworowski that cases of diamond workers could be discussed with the Belgian Diamond Office, which apparently had an arrangement with the British authorities to provide specialists for the nascent British diamond industry, important for the war effort. Kullmann also suggested what he called ‘a global solution, 1.e. the transfer of the whole group to some other country’. He was well aware of the difficulties experi-

enced by the British government in finding a haven for these people within the British empire. He reports having explained to the Polish minister that boatloads of illegal immigrants were constantly arriving in Palestine and that ships carrying Jews trying to reach Latin America ultimately had to be accepted 1n British possessions in the Caribbean. Nevertheless, he reports that the British minister counsellor Sir Noel Charles*® suggested to the Foreign Office that Jamaica or St Helena could be possible havens. Sir Noel was encouraged by the initial reactions from

London and agreed that ‘further dispatch of valuable elements was impeded by the residue of stranded refugees’. Although the head of PIDE had stated that he would deny transit visas to Poles en route to Britain, Kullmann stressed that the Joint delegate Dr Schwartz had attached such great importance to the dispersal of the remaining refugees that his organization was prepared to maintain them in any country of destination. On the subject of the Jewish refugees and the Polish authorities in Lisbon, Kullmann wrote: My impression is that the Polish Committee [1.e. the delegation of the Ministry of Social Welfare] endeavoured to give fair treatment to the Polish Jews, but of course when it comes

to a selection of people for British or Canadian visas granted en bloc to the Polish Authorities, reliable and useful elements for the war effort receive priority and it is understandable that the greater proportion of those selected are Aryans or people who resided inside Poland up to the declaration of the war.”9

Kullmann’s report was forwarded to the British government on 27 August 1941. Combined with the suggestions from Sir Noel Charles in Lisbon, it resulted in a search for a solution by Whitehall.°° 28 ‘The deputy head of mission in large British embassies usually has the title ‘minister counsellor’. 29 My father, Gustaw Potworowski, told me after the war that, on taking over from Dubicz the post of Polish minister in Lisbon in September 1943, he had to work hard to improve the strained relations between the legation and the established colony (as distinct from the refugees) of Polish Jews represented by the Stowarzyszenie Obywateli Polskich (Association of Polish Citizens). It must be stressed that, from the moment it was created, the Lisbon delegation of the Ministry of Social Welfare under

Stanislaw Schimitzek managed to maintain a benevolent attitude towards all Polish Jews. Jewish organizations arranged a joint farewell party for Schimitzek (Schimitzek, Na krawedzi Europy, 595,

628, 967). A similar party was held when my father left Lisbon, as a private person, in 1951. Schimitzek’s book throughout provides a very interesting picture of the life of all Polish citizens in Portugal and their relations with Polish offices in Lisbon. 30 Whitehall is the London street where the principal offices of the British government are concentrated. The extent of the debate between officials in the Foreign Office, the Colonial Office, and the

Evacuation of Jewish Poles to Jamaica 163 THE CABLE TO MR CHURCHILL The Kullmann report resulted in conversations and correspondence between the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office. A letter dated 23 October 1941 and signed by A. W. G. Randall of the Foreign Office confirmed that Jamaica had been mentioned as a destination for the remaining group of Polish citizens at the suggestion of the British embassy in Lisbon and that P. Rogers of the Colonial Office had indicated that there was some space in a camp housing evacuees from Gibraltar and originally prepared to hold refugees from Malta as well. Rogers answered on

28 October that he was prepared to ask Sir Arthur Richards, the governor of Jamaica, for landing permits under the condition that the refugees would be in ‘semi-internment’, that is, confined to camp at night and not allowed to work outside the camp without express permission from the colonial government, which would also have the right to intern anyone completely, should it be judged necessary. Ihe Colonial Office raised security concerns and had to be assured that the move was essential from the point of view of the British war effort.*+

On 23 November, known in the German Afrika Corps as Totensonntag (Sunday of the Dead) after the battle of Sidi Rezegh, the British overran Rommel’s headquarters.** Schimitzek speculates on how ‘events in North Africa’

provoked rumours in Spain and Portugal that in order to obtain better access to North Africa, the Axis powers might invade the Iberian peninsula.*? Apparently some British subjects were advised by their embassy to be prepared to leave; Foreign Office correspondence shows that the British were contemplating the possibility of an overall evacuation from Portugal of Allied government employees and citizens useful to the war effort.** All of this obviously caused anxiety among the Jewish refugees. Miriam Stanton writes in her memoir: We all sat there in a café [in Lisbon], very gloomy, drinking one cup of coffee after another, not knowing where to turn. Suddenly we heard a voice saying ‘It’s Churchill’s birthday very soon, let’s send him a birthday telegram . . . begging him to send us to any country in the world under the British flag. Signed by all Polish Jews in Lisbon.’*° colonial government in Jamaica can be gathered by perusing the TNA files FO/371/29221, W 10681/625/48 and CO/323/1846/6 (which includes the especially interesting minutes by P. Rogers of the Colonial Office).

31 TNA, FO 371/29233, W 14825j634¢/ 48. 32 P Young (ed.), The World Almanac Book of World War II (London, 1981). 33 Schimitzek, Na krawedzi Europy, 401. 34 At the request of the British authorities, on 12 January 1942 the Polish legation prepared a list of citizens divided into four categories in order of priority: active officials (64), life in danger [in case of German takeover] (37), potentially essential to war effort (120), others/no official guarantee (88). All four categories include clearly Jewish names (TNA, FO 371/32655, W 508/205/ 48). 35 Stanton, Escape from the Inferno of Europe, 193.

164 Tomasz Potworowski The voice was that of Dr Schlichter, and, according to Stanton, it was he who was asked to draft the telegram and lead a delegation to the post office to send it off. In fact, the telegram received in London was sent from Caldas da Rainha, presumably because that was the legal place of residence of most of the refugees. It was signed by the person who was the recognized spokesman for the Jewish group there. It was received in London on 1 December 1941, and read: Primeminister Winston Churchill Sincerest birthday wishes from too Polish Jews at Caldas da Rainha Portugal stop request urgent help to get away from danger zone after yours [sic] suffering stop all have useful professions stop you are their last hope. Rosenbaum Caldas da Rainha.*©

A SOLUTION By invoking the requirements of the war effort, the combined efforts of the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office succeeded in persuading the governor of Jamaica to cable London on 26 December 1941: I am prepared to accept these people on the conditions set out in paragraph | of your telegram, but provided that the disposal on arrival in this colony is at my unfettered discretion, and that I am at liberty to intern any or all of them... . All cases should be very thoroughly scrutinized by the Polish authorities before departure and full reports concerning each should be furnished prior to their arrival. To these reports should be added any information concerning them in the possession of the British authorities. .. . lam advised that if many of them have to be interned, the internment camp may have to be enlarged and the question of additional guards considered.®’

The Foreign Office concluded that the sailing of the SS Serpa Pinto, which had been chartered by the Joint, offered ‘probably [a] unique opportunity for removing the two hundred odd Polish Jewish citizens whose presence has for so long hindered .. . the evacuation through Portugal of Polish citizens of value to the war effort’. A. W. G. Randall of the Foreign Office thus requested assurances from the Polish government that it would maintain the refugees as long as they remained on British territory and admit them to Poland at the end of the war.?® 36 The original is in TNA, FO 371/29233, W 14638/6349/38. 37 TNA, FO 371/29233, W 14638/6349/38. 38 Although the Polish government was based in London at the time and maintained direct contact with the British government at various levels, formal communication continued to take place through the Foreign Office and the Polish embassy, and between the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the British ambassador to Poland. From the correspondence among the Polish authorities concerned (HIWRP, MSZ 518/30, 529/14, 545/15), it is clear that the majority of the ‘Polish’ group had left Poland many years earlier—mostly for Germany, Belgium, and France—and that many of them had no knowledge of the Polish language. Many of their passports had been issued or extended on the basis of the 1940 repeal of the 1938 Polish Nationality Act, which deprived ‘those who had lost their ties with Poland’ of citizenship. Miriam Sandzer Stanton, who speaks excellent Polish, told me that she had lived with her family for several

Evacuation of fewish Poles to Jamaica 165 Randall’s notes show that, under pressure from the Colonial Office, the Joint was to pay for the passage and maintenance of a group of about 200 refugees.*” Randall added that he had consulted with Sir Herbert Emerson and telegraphed requesting Lisbon to provide a formal guarantee from the Joint to maintain the refugees for a year in Jamaica. The Polish government was also pressing the Joint for such an assurance and offered to provide a guarantee to accept the refugees after the war. Randall learned from the Treasury that the British government could not accept the Joint promise to maintain the refugees unless it was backed by

a guarantee from the Polish government.

A note from J6ézef Marlewski, head of the refugee affairs section at the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in London, shows that at a coordinating meeting held there on 2 January 1941 it transpired that such guarantees would be issued by the appropriate Polish authorities and the costs of passage and maintenance were to be borne by the Joint. A flurry of correspondence between the Foreign Office, the Colonial Office, the League of Nations High Commission for Refugees, the Polish

embassy in London, and the British and Polish missions in Lisbon ironed out further details,*° and on 7 January 1942 Randall announced that ‘all is now in place for the final instruction to Lisbon’.*! Later, names of a Dutch Jewish family were added*? and the Czechoslovak government in London asked for a quota of twentyfive.*? The governor of Jamaica agreed to add a total of twenty refugees of Allied nationalities to the Polish group, thus bringing the total to 220.

When called to the Polish consulate with their passports, the refugees were not yet sure whether this was good or bad news; they were still afraid of being sent

to places of compulsory residence by the Portuguese authorities. When they learned that they were to be offered asylum in Jamaica, ‘Some were crying, some

screaming, some just stunned, not being able to believe what they heard; but once outside the consulate, the celebration started, and we were all dancing in the street so much that we stopped the traffic. Our relief and happiness were boundless,’44 years in Germany and Romania before moving to France, from where she fled in 1941 to Portugal. In regard to four persons of dubious citizenship, a letter dated 31 March 1942 from the Lisbon legation in reply to a query from London confirms that they all carried valid Polish documents and had there-

fore to be regarded as covered by the guarantees given to the British (HIWRP, PORT/15/ 538/Z/1942).

39 "TNA, FO 371, W 205/205/48. 40 TNA, FO 371/32655, W 507/205/48.

41 TNA, FO 371/32655, W 1312/205/48. 42 HIWRP, MSZ 529/14. 43 TNA, FO 371/32655, W 1468/205/48. 44 Stanton, Escape from the Inferno of Europe, 194-5. Stanton added the interesting information that at one time the family had obtained from the Polish consulate surplus space in a group entry permit to the United Kingdom issued by the British authorities to facilitate the transit through Portugal of military personnel and civilians contributing to the war effort. However, after checking, the British consular authorities prevented them from boarding the ship. This caused the Sandzer family particular anxiety on boarding for Jamaica (pp. 156-8).

166 Tomasz Potworowski The Serpa Pinto sailed from Lisbon on 24 January 1941. The Polish legation reported that 164 citizens left on that date, eight remained for reasons beyond their control, and one ‘because of ill will’.*° The British embassy put the count at 165 Polish and four Dutch refugees.*® In addition to those under the aegis of the British and Polish authorities, the ship carried refugees from Casablanca and Lisbon to Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and the United States, most of them also financed by the Joint.

However, it seems that at the time the refugees were not advised of the conditions attached to their landing permits or that they would have to reside in a camp and not engage in employment outside it. All this took the concentrated effort of two governments and the agency of the League of Nations before the governor of Jamaica agreed to the scheme; and in the end it was the American Jewish organizations that bore most of the costs under an ultimate guarantee from the Polish government.

LAST OPPORTUNITY The Joint organized a further sailing, that of the MV S. Thomé, with a similar itin-

erary scheduled about a month later. The day after the departure of the Serpa Pinto, Sir Ronald Campbell cabled the Foreign Office asking whether it would be possible to include a Lithuanian politician imprisoned in Portugal, to whom the Polish legation was prepared to issue the same guarantees as for its own citizens among the remainder of the quota of Jamaican landing permits. The answer was an immediate and categorical ‘no’ ‘for political implications. No reason should be given to the Polish legation.’ No doubt the reason was that the Foreign Office was unwilling to irritate the USSR, which considered Lithuanians to be Soviet citizens, and that the person concerned was a known opponent of the 1940 annexation. Further correspondence shows that several Jews of various Allied citizenships wished to join the group awaiting departure on the S. Thomé. The Joint had organ-

ized another sailing with a similar itinerary for a month later with the United States and Cuba as its final destination. A letter from Michal Budny at the Polish embassy in London to Randall at the Foreign Office extended to those awaiting the next sailing the same formal guarantees that the Polish government had granted to Polish citizens for the original passage.*’ It appears that all the officials concerned chose to ignore the fact that people of other nationalities were not covered by such guarantees. After an exchange of cables between the Colonial Office and the governor of Jamaica, agreement was reached on the total number of Jewish refugees of Allied 45 TNA, FO 371/32656, W 4047/205/48. 46 TNA, FO 371/32656, W 4198/205/ 48. 47 The sailing date is reported as 21 March 1942 in a copy of a general report on the refugee situa-

tion in Portugal, probably generated by the Polish Ministry of Social Welfare (HIWRP, PORT /15/738/1941—-1942).

Evacuation of Fewish Poles to Jamaica 167 citizenship to be admitted to Jamaica. The British embassy in Lisbon was informed by cable on 18 March 1942 that the total of permits issued should not exceed 220. Ten days later the embassy reported that the S. Thomé had sailed with thirty-three Jewish refugees: thirteen Polish, nine Czech, four Dutch, and seven from Luxembourg.*® Schimitzek mentions that this solved ‘the problem of the hard core’ of refugees.*? At the time he did not know that by the end of 1942 the extension of the German occupation of France over its southern provinces would create another such ‘nucleus’.

Throughout April and May rumours of a possible German move into the Iberian peninsula and across the Strait of Gibraltar persisted. When the Polish embassy in London requested UK visas or Jamaican permits for a group of fifty refugees stranded in Tangier, it was told by Randall that Jamaica had filled its quota and normal procedures for UK visas should be followed. Of course, none of these people could qualify for entry to Britain as they could not be classified as necessary ‘for the war effort’.°°

ARRIVAL IN JAMAICA Letters from the Foreign Office to the Polish embassy in London report the arrival in Kingston, Jamaica, of the Serpa Pinto on 7 February 1942 and of the S. Thomé on 7 April.°! Paul Bartrop mentions 500 Jewish refugees.°” Stanton gives a similar figure for the refugees who travelled with her, but this presumably includes those heading for Cuba. The documents surveyed show that a total of about 200 landed in Jamaica from the two vessels. Upon entering Kingston Harbour, everyone on board, including the captain, had to be put in quarantine because of a case of typhoid. This disappointment was

exacerbated when the group received the impression that those who were to remain in Jamaica were to be interned, even though the remainder had been allowed to go on to Cuba. To make matters worse, an outbreak of dengue extended

their strict confinement by two weeks as soon as they were transferred to the _ Gibraltar camp. This outbreak caused some concern among the authorities as they feared that the illness was again typhoid, but a team of doctors and nurses specially

flown in from Canada quickly determined the real cause. Stanton reports that 48 TNA, FO 371/32656, W 4703/205/48. 49 Schimitzek, Na krawedzi Europy, 453. °° "TNA, FO 371/32656, W 6997/205/ 48.

©! HIWRP, MSZ 545/15. A letter from the honorary Polish consul-general in Havana, dated 24 August 1942, reports the arrivals of Polish Jewish citizens in Cuba in April ona ship called the Guinea (they had presumably transferred in Kingston from the quarantined Serpa Pinto) and in May on the S. Thomé (HIWRP, MSZ 528/45/Cuba). Despite having met the stringent financial conditions imposed by the Cubans, all refugees, except for Swiss citizens, were kept isolated in a camp at Trisconia. Later documents show that they were released after a change of government in Cuba. °2 Bartrop, ‘From Lisbon to Jamaica’, 61.

168 Tomasz Potworowski initially the refugees had suspicions that the quarantine would turn into permanent strict internment. Otherwise the conditions were quite satisfactory: Most of us wanted to learn English, some asked for some books and newspapers, which were supplied as well as radios. The food was not too bad and was plentiful. We had lots of milk and dairy products, good white bread, and fresh vegetables. My family, being kosher, could not eat meat, so we asked for fish. It was supplied. One of our refugees was allowed to go into the kitchen to take over the kosher cooking, so we had quite nice meals. . .. We were more comfortable in the camp than on the ship. The weather was good, a little too hot, but very nice. The people in the camp left a lot to be desired, but the camp was big enough for privacy. We had our little group . . . we made plans [about] what . . . to do when the quarantine ended.**

REFUGEES IN JAMAICA Stanton describes in detail her family’s first visit to central Kingston, where they set off by public bus as soon as the refugees were allowed out after the eight weeks’ quarantine.°4 She reports a pleasant reception by strangers in the streets and that they were impressed by the Kingston synagogue.°° The family must have brought some British currency with them as they could afford lunch at the best hotel in town, the Myrtle Bank.°® They certainly seem to have enjoyed their first contact

with life in Jamaica.°’ :

The Sandzers returned to the synagogue the following Saturday for a service, after which a member of one of the prominent local Jewish families, Florence Matalon, introduced herself and welcomed them to Jamaica. She and her husband, Joe, invited the newcomers to a sabbath lunch, which proved the start of a friendship that lasted throughout the Sandzers’ stay in Jamaica. Later they had close relations with other families, the Henriqueses, and the DeLeons. From then on ‘we saw our internment through different eyes’.°®

53 Stanton, Escape from the Inferno of Europe, 201-2. °4 If one assumes that they disembarked from the S. Thomé on or about 7 April, this visit would have

taken place in mid-May; see p. 175. |

55 In ‘From Lisbon to Jamaica’, 58, Bartrop writes that Jews were already present in Jamaica when the English arrived in 1655. Having become important in trade, they were emancipated in 1831 and soon reached positions of influence in the economic life of the island. By 1846 one-sixth of the members of the island’s assembly, including the speaker, were Jewish. Bartrop quotes Gordon K. Lewis in The Growth of the Modern West Indies (New York, 1968), who says that they ‘developed a powerful sense of Jamaicaism’ and that this caused an ‘attenuation’ of Jewish faith and tradition, as well as a lack of Zionist tradition or identity. Nevertheless, Bartrop adds that ‘the Jews of Kingston opened themselves thoroughly to the refugees from Camp Gibraltar, helping in whatever manner possible’, and quotes examples from Stanton’s text. 56 The Myrtle Bank was a jewel of colonial hotel architecture, but was unfortunately pulled down about 1970 during the redevelopment of the Kingston seafront.

°7 Stanton, Escape from the Inferno of Europe, 205-6. 58 Ibid. 207-8.

Evacuation of fewish Poles to Jamaica 169 According to Stanton, the camp administrator, Ernest Rae, impressed her family from the moment he first greeted the refugees on their arrival.°? As time went by, they felt that he and his wife, Veta, were befriending the refugees and striving to make life in the camp more acceptable. They facilitated the setting-up of support services by camp inhabitants, who could work as tailors, barbers, hairdressers, and shoemakers. A doctor worked in the camp hospital, and another professional found employment in the camp office. Ernest Rae was also helpful in obtaining premises for a camp synagogue and the services of a carpenter when the refugees obtained the necessary paraphernalia from HIAS in the United States.©° Later Rae helped to obtain US visas, which allowed Stanton’s mother to go to the United States for

surgery, accompanied by her husband.°®! ,

The HIAS gave the refugees a fund of $2,000 for occasional compassionate help, asking a prominent local Jewish businessman, O. K. Henriques, to supervise the disbursements in order to ensure impartiality. Stanton writes that, when that money had been spent, O. K. Henriques provided funds for anyone in the camp who needed help.®? Presumably these funds came from family resources.

The Sandzers’ friend Joe Matalon arranged for the education of the Jewish children in the schools that his own children attended. Granville and Horty DeLeon worked hard at obtaining entry visas for those who had the means to join relatives in such countries as the United States, Australia, and South Africa.®? Stanton estimates the total population at over 3,000 at the time when it housed its original inhabitants, the Gibraltarians, the Lisbon contingent of refugees, and a Dutch group in transit to Surinam. The camp had been ‘completely self-sufficient. It had schools, a hospital, shops, offices . . . concerts, weddings, fights, scandals. . . [and] funerals.’ After the Gibraltarians left in late 1944, it became a ghost town and eventually most of the Jewish refugees also departed, and the few remaining, including herself and her grandmother, were moved to a convent. She goes on to report that

Ernest Rae was the right person for the position of head of such a vast project. To be commandant of that camp and to have to deal with 3,000 people from different cultures and traditions, plus 1,000 employees, must have been a mammoth task—which he handled to perfection. . .. He was on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. . .. He was always there when one needed him.®

COMPLAINTS The positive impression of conditions at the Gibraltar camp and of the reception by the Jamaican Jewish community given in Mrs Stanton’s memoir contrasts with

59 Tbid. 201. 6° Ibid. 210. 6! Tbid. 211-12. 2 Ibid. 211. 63 Tbid. 215-16. 64 Tbid. 218. Stanton was not the only one to be satisfied with the treatment of the Jewish refugees by the Jamaican authorities and community. In his book Schimitzek notes that from correspondence received in Lisbon it was apparent that many others in the group found conditions acceptable (Na krawedzi Europy, 453).

170 Tomasz Potworowski the string of complaints from some of the refugees received by the British and Polish governments. Some of these apparently also reached the American Jewish press. This section and the following one give an overview of the official reactions to these and suggest the reasons that caused them. Worst in his attitudes towards the unfortunates in the camp was the commandant. ‘Though

a half-breed himself, who is consequently barred from many hotels in Jamaica, he has unlimited power over our fate. For any one of us to obtain a visa to leave the country, he must issue a favourable report. He is our only judge. . . . He deprives whomever he wishes [of] the right to leave the grounds. . . . The trouble, however, is not only the commandant, but the whole system—the concentration camp. . . . These refugees, who were afraid of finding themselves in ghettos or concentration camps and therefore made plans to leave Europe, were faced with just that as [a] bitter and unexpected surprise in Jamaica.

This description of conditions in the Gibraltar camp, in such contrast to Stanton’s comments, comes from the transcript of a Czechoslovak national’s letter delivered by a Dr Kundrat during a visit to the Foreign Office in London at the beginning of December 1942. A. W. G. Randall refers to it in a letter dated 12 December 1942 to Adolf Prochazka at the Czechoslovak prime minister’s office in London, in which he paraphrases a paragraph of the governor’s dispatch of 13 October 1942 to the

secretary for the colonies in London, Lord Cranborne. Writing on 13 October 1942, the governor stated: Certain Polish refugees at Gibraltar Camp have been making attempts to foster in the United States a propaganda campaign describing conditions in Gibraltar Camp in highly undesirable and untrue terms. Amongst various other misrepresentations of Jamaica now being given currency in the United States of America are references to the Gibraltar Camp as a sort of ‘concentration camp’, not widely different from similar institutions in Germany. There is no doubt that this campaign has been instigated by Polish Jews who have left the camp for the United States of America and hope their telling harrowing stories will persuade the United States Authorities to grant entry permits to a large number of Polish Jews now in the Gibraltar Camp. .. . there is a certain feeling of unrest among the Polish Jewish section . . . [where people] claim that they were brought to Jamaica under false pretences and were given to understand that they would be free to work and live where and how they chose. It suits these persons to allege that they are interned.°°

No correspondence from either the Foreign Office or the Polish government provides any evidence that the refugees were, on their departure from Lisbon, warned that they would be sent to a camp and not given total freedom of movement in Jamaica. These restrictions were made explicit only in correspondence between the governor and the Colonial Office. Although they were transmitted to 65 TNA, FO 371/32657, W 16036/205/48. In addition to the governor’s report, this file contains correspondence on the subject between Randall at the Foreign Office and Polish and Czech officials, the League of Nations Office for Refugees, and the British embassy in Washington.

Evacuation of Jewish Poles to Jamaica 171 the Foreign Office, whether they were passed on remains unknown. Stanton’s memorr does reflect an initial disappointment at being housed in a camp, and she notes that the harshest deprivation was that they were not allowed to seek employment or engage in business outside the camp. In the next paragraph of his dispatch the governor states that, for security rea-

sons, he is not prepared to alter the conditions under which the refugees were admitted or to allow their employment on the island. He concludes his letter by saying that those who were not satisfied might ‘seek permission to enter other countries’ and that those obtaining such visas would be free to leave. The governor’s refusal to amend the regulations led Randall to reply in the negative to a request from Dr Kullmann for the Sandzer family to live outside the camp should a relative in Britain send the necessary funds.

Another complaint concerned the colonial authorities’ retention of sterling notes carried by the refugees on arrival. This apparently followed currency control

regulations, but {10 per person was soon released and further payments were made on ‘compassionate grounds’. The more general complaints made by the refugees about the conditions in the camp and directed to Jewish circles in the United States, which so preoccupied the Jamaican and British authorities, were also addressed to the Polish government in London, the embassy in Washington, and the Ministry of Social Welfare commissioner for refugees in New York. As early as 8 April 1942 (two months after the arrival of the Serpa Pinto in Jamaica) the minister of social welfare, Jan Stariczyk,

wrote to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs requesting their intervention with the British authorities. This led to extensive written and oral exchanges between Michal Balifski and Randall, during the course of which the latter asked the Colonial Office to relax the regulations limiting freedom of movement and forbidding employment outside the camp. As we have seen from the governor’s dispatch to Lord Cranborne, this request was refused.©®

As for employment, on 29 May 1942 the Foreign Office advised that the employment restriction applied to all foreigners on the island. Apparently Ernest Rae had suggested to the colonial secretary in Jamaica, the senior British civil servant reporting directly to the governor,°®’ that Dutch Jewish refugees skilled in diamond-cutting could be employed to develop the industry in Jamaica, but met with the argument that the labour unions would oppose such a move (just as they opposed all other attempts to employ foreigners).°° It must be remembered that

the political and labour situation in Jamaica during the Second World War °° Correspondence on these subjects is contained in HIWRP, MSZ 529/14, 545/15, and PORT /15/538/Z/1943. Baliriski was first secretary at the Polish embassy in London.

°7 The title of this official was colonial secretary, not to be confused with the secretary for the colonies, a member of the British Cabinet.

68 Recollections of Alan Rae, son of the camp administrator, during my meeting with him on 20 February 1995 (see n. 7).

172 Tomasz Potworowski presented great difficulties. The two trade unions maintained close connections with the two political parties and both unions and parties shared the same leaders, Alexander Bustamante and Norman Manley. Both were pushing for far-reaching

political and social reform, with the ultimate goal of abolishing the colonial system. The tragic labour riots of 1938 remained fresh in everyone’s mind, and the presence of important US naval and air bases on the island, as well as of a strong British army garrison, made the maintenance of civil peace essential for the colonial government. The unwillingness of the governor to abolish the rather unobtrusive restrictions

on freedom of movement and the more onerous ban on living outside the camp may be attributed to fear of US and British military intelligence and of infiltration of the refugee groups by German agents. Many people believed that some refugees with families remaining in German-occupied Europe could be forced to work for enemy intelligence, especially in the areas of shipping and air traffic. Finally, the exaggerated reports spread in the United States about conditions in

the camp, especially the comparisons with German concentration camps, must have been galling to an administration that had accepted a group of refugees rejected by the rest of the world. To make matters worse, references to the camp administrator, Ernest Rae, as being of mixed race found its way to the American press, where the references were seen to be degrading in themselves. A cable to the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs from the Polish embassy in Washington dated

21 August 1942 quotes a reference to Rae’s being called a negro—certainly an offensive term in the American mind of those days.°? By that time, many, if not most, Jamaican civil servants were of mixed race themselves, so such references could not endear the complainers to those hearing of their complaints. Official government policy strove to discourage all forms of racial discrimination, and although twenty years separated them from independence, there was already a consciousness tending towards what was to become Jamaica’s national motto: “Out of many, one people’. The Colonial Office, as well as the governor, would have been very wary of anyone likely to cause offence on that score. The same cable from the embassy in Washington refers to a suggestion by the

Joint that the Canadian government should be approached regarding transfer of the group to Canada. It is possible that the Joint recommended such a move to the authors of the complaints, as on 24 August 1942 twenty-seven of the refugees from the Gibraltar camp wrote a petition to the prime ministers of Canada, Britain, and

Poland. This document, after referring to the tribulations of their flight from Europe and to the horrors of the Nazi persecution of Jews, does not complain about anything other than enforced inactivity, and it expresses the desire of the sig-

natories to contribute to the British—Canadian war effort. It ends with a list of fifty-three names, the signatories and their families, listing their trades and skills. Most of the men were artisans, the women dressmakers. While most of the older 69 HIWRP, MSZ 529/14/738/Z.

Evacuation of fewish Poles to Jamaica 173 people were born on Polish territory, many of their younger family members were

born abroad. The appeal ends: ‘In our despair and helplessness we decided to address ourselves to you . . . to deliver us and our families Canadian visas. In Canada we will put ourselves at the governments [s7c] disposal, some for active service, others for war work.’’° On receiving this petition, the Foreign Office concurred with the view of the Colonial Office that it should ‘instruct the governor [of Jamaica] that the matter is for the decision of Polish and Canadian authorities’. The Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs replied by letter to the cable from the embassy in Washington. It anticipated a negative response from the Canadian government, but nevertheless promised once again to urge the Foreign Office to press for a relaxation of the Jamaican regulations. The Ministry also mentioned that the Jewish organizations should be made aware that the public airing of such complaints would make the Jamaican authorities more reluctant to allow further entry of refugees. The Ministry was especially worried at the time about the group of Jews in Tangier, whom they feared the Spanish authorities would hand over to the

Germans.”

POLISH DIPLOMATIC INSPECTION AT GIBRALTAR CAMP The Polish government started to receive direct requests and complaints from members of the group soon after they arrived.’* Some were justified and could be dealt with as requests for assistance with documentation problems such as the extension of passports. This was resolved after correspondence within the Polish

Foreign Service by assigning the responsibility first to the honorary consul in Havana and then to the newly created legation to Cuba.” 7 HIWRP, MSZ 529/14. 71 To the best of my knowledge, the members of this group remained in Tangier until the Allied landings in North Africa at the beginning of November 1942 delivered them from this threat. A list of the twenty-six people, two of them of dubious citizenship, exists in HIWRP, PORT /16/738/Z/1942. 72 Schimitzek, Na krawedzi Europy, 540-1.

73 HIWRP, PORT/15/738/Z/1943. From a formal point of view, the delegation of consular care over Polish citizens in Jamaica was a thorny issue. Jamaica was British territory and, before the war, consular care of Polish citizens fell within the competence of the Polish consul-general in London, but communication and transport difficulties during the war made it impossible for that office to deal with the extension of passports, providing legal protection, or investigating complaints from refugees on the island. The nearest Polish consular office was in Havana under the care of an honorary consul, a Cuban national of Jewish extraction. As part of the widening of Polish diplomatic representation in Latin America in order to provide services for the numerous war refugees in that part of the world, a legation was established in Cuba in the course of 1942. (A number of Polish citizens evidently able to meet the stiff Cuban financial requirements had found their way to Havana.) The legation consisted of the minister Roman Debicki and one junior official. Formal agreement was obtained from the British government to transfer the Jamaican duties of the consul-general in London to that legation. This was regarded by the Foreign Office as an internal Polish arrangement, not prejudicing British sovereignty over Jamaica in the way that the earlier involvement of a Cuban national had done. Voluminous correspondence on this esoteric subject is preserved in IPMS, A/42, folder 364.

174 Tomasz Potworowski A routine was also established to deal with any problems or developments arising in connection with Polish citizens in Jamaica to be reported by the Colonial Office to the Foreign Office, and by the Foreign Office to their Polish counterparts. As it happens, the only communications of this sort on file are regular reports of the departure of Polish citizens from Jamaica, mainly to the United States. _ The head of mission at the newly established Polish legation in Havana, Roman Debicki, reported on 14 September 1943 that about twenty people had managed to leave Jamaica. ‘* However, there was little hope of further departures as the British authorities had refused to issue re-entry permits, without which it was impossible to obtain visitor visas for countries from which some refugees had in the past obtained documents for onward travel. Debicki reported that complaints similar to those received from the inmates of the Gibraltar camp had forced the Joint to consider closing Camp Sousa in the Dominican Republic, where the local government was prepared to accept several thousand Jews from Europe. Only 500 were placed in that camp, of which only too at the most adapted to life and work there. Based on his experience with the Polish refugees in Cuba and Haiti, most of whom, like those in the Gibraltar camp, had little connection with Poland, Debicki realized that these people found it difficult to adjust to the tropical climate and other local conditions. He expressed sympathy for the frustration of the refugees in Jamaica at being unable to work or conduct business, as well as at being isolated from normal urban life, and suggested that he should visit the island in order to demonstrate the Polish government’s concern for the welfare of its citizens. He asked the honorary consul-general in Havana, Karol Sachs, to accompany him since he felt that Sachs, as a Jew, would inspire confidence among his co-religionists and would facilitate communication with those unable to speak Polish. A year earlier, before Debicki arrived in Cuba, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had suggested such a visit to the embassy in Washington, one of whose counsellors was acting as chargé d’affaires in Havana.’ Debicki’s proposal was now reinforced by the arrival in London of a letter of complaint from a refugee, Berta Polak, who had left the Gibraltar camp. She had given it to Karol Sachs, whom, as a Jew, she trusted more than she did Debicki. Her letter, written in faultless Polish and dated 12 August 1943,’ not only rages against the ‘commandant’, but refers to the brutality of a ‘camp police’ and contrasts the care extended by the Dutch authorities to their citizens in another compound to the abandonment of the Polish group by their government.”’ It also suggests that preparations for the opening of a com7 IPMS, A/42/364. 7 Note from Edward Raczyrski (acting minister of foreign affairs and ambassador in London) to Jan Ciechanowski, ambassador in Washington, 27 Aug. 1942. Ciechanowski was also accredited as minister in Havana and sent out Jan Drohojowski in preparation for the establishment of a separate legation there. HIWRP, MSZ 529/14/738/Jamaica.

7 IPMS, A/62/42. ™ HIWRP, MSZ 545/15.

Evacuation of Fewish Poles to Jamaica 175 pound for interned Germans proved the real character of the Gibraltar camp. In fact according to recollections shared with me by several Jamaicans, enemy aliens,

including some German naval prisoners of war, were kept under military jurisdiction in an enclave at Up Park camp, an army establishment about 2.5 miles away.

Polak’s letter also describes a revolt in the Gibraltar camp in 1942 in which the ‘commandant’ and several guards are purported to have been attacked by the inmates, of whom several were later given prison sentences. It is not clear when this was thought to have happened, but it presumably pre-dated the arrival of the Polish group, so that those involved would have been Gibraltarians.

On receipt of Polak’s letter the head of the refugee section at the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote to his counterpart in the personnel section urging that Debicki and Sachs be authorized to visit Jamaica, and a cable to this effect was sent on 23 October 1943.” The Ministry had already advised Debicki that there was no hope of relaxing the regulations on the employment of refugees in Jamaica and that he should use his influence to persuade them to accept this state of affairs as further complaints not only would irritate the governor but would make it more difficult for the Polish government to obtain asylum in British territories for other similar groups.” Debicki’s report, written in Havana and dated 27 December 1943, concludes: ‘objectively speaking, and considering the possibilities that exist in Jamaica, the living conditions of the Polish citizens in Camp Gibraltar II are satisfactory, but subjectively the mood of this group is frankly poor. Their endlessly prolonged inactivity in tropical climatic conditions with no prospects of preparing a future for themselves is causing growing bitterness.’°° Among the attachments to Debicki’s report there are two lists of names, one identifying those who arrived on the Serpa Pinto and the S. Thomé, and the other, those who were still in the camp at the time of his visit. Debicki pencilled in on the first list the dates of departure of individuals, and continued to do so during 1943. Surprisingly, these lists show the Sandzer family as having arrived on the S. Thomé and not the Serpa Pinto. Obviously over the passage of time the names of the two vessels had become confused in Mrs Stanton’s mind, and the Sandzer family must have been among the eight people who at the last moment had for some reason been unable to board the Serpa Pinto.®! 78 HIWRP, MSZ 253/18.

72 IPMS, A/62/42. Letter dated 25 July 1943. By that time the restrictions on residence and employment outside the camp were taken as given, but this letter stresses that the British authorities did not oppose the departure of those who obtained residence permits from other countries and closes by stating that, according to information available to the Ministry, the group in Jamaica, with a few exceptions, was not composed of ‘positive elements’. Most lived outside Poland before the war and many did not speak Polish. The Ministry was therefore reluctant to obtain a global transfer to other countries on the American continent.

80 HIWRP, MSZ 154/32/738. 8! HIWRP, MSZ 729/14/738/Jamaica.

176 Tomasz Potworowski THE SECOND GROUP OF JEWISH REFUGEES IN PORTUGAL The new influx of refugees precipitated by the occupation of the south of France by the Germans on 11 November 1942 caused new problems for the Polish legation in Lisbon and the delegate of the Ministry of Social Welfare. In view of the Axis’s reverses in the Mediterranean and North Africa, this increased movement had already started before that date. Some of the refugees crossed the Portuguese border illegally and a new centre for them had to be created at Oeiras. However, despite occasional run-ins with the PIDE, usually caused by the refugees’ not abiding by the relatively mild restrictions imposed on their movements, the evacuation of both military and civilian Polish citizens progressed fairly smoothly. In January 1943 there were only 209 civilian transients, of whom 159 had been in Portugal for more than three months and formed a new core group. All in this last group were Jews, of whom 158 had lived outside of Poland before the war and had little chance of obtaining residence permits anywhere.®*”

The Polish legation in Lisbon was worried that the increase in illegal entries into Portugal, combined with the difficulty of evacuating the Jewish group, would cause a new tightening of Portuguese controls on the number of Polish citizens present in the country. The legation approached the British ambassador requesting renewed attempts to obtain permits for a group of about 120 Jews (of whom fifty had entered Portugal illegally) to be sent on to Jamaica. ‘The ambassador, hav-

ing given an offhand answer that there was ‘no space’ for more refugees on the island, cabled the Foreign Office on 11 November 1942.°? Having already failed in March that year to arrange Jamaican permits for ‘friendly enemy aliens’ (mostly German and Austrian Jews threatened by German invasion of the Iberian peninsula) while succeeding in obtaining temporary entry permits for up to 225 Dutch citizens en route to Surinam, the Foreign Office had little expectation of success.*4

Nevertheless, under the impression that they had managed to persuade the League of Nations high commissioner for refugees, Sir Herbert Emerson, to argue _ on their behalf, Polish officials in London hoped that during a forthcoming visit to the capital the governor of Jamaica could be talked into accepting another party from Lisbon. Also in a letter dated 8 January 1943 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs urged the embassy in Washington to advise Jewish organizations in the United States that it would be useful if the refugees in the Gibraltar camp were to write to the governor thanking him for the care they were receiving on the island.®° As it happened, the conversation between Sir Herbert and the governor in all probability took a different turn. The former, aware of the forthcoming British—American * Schimitzek, Na krawedzi Europy, 540-1. i TNA, FO 371/32587, W 15304/205/48. *“ On ‘friendly enemy aliens’, TINA, CO 137/854/69184, docs. 1 and 2. On Dutch refugees, see the governor’s telegrams of 13 Aug. 1942 and 23 Oct. 1942, accepting a total of 225 people.

°° HIWRP, PORT/15/738/Z/1943.

Evacuation of fewish Poles to Jamaica 177 Bermuda conference on refugee issues, probably placed his requests in a wider framework. He had also been advised by the Foreign Office that there were now only about 400-500 spaces left in the Gibraltar camp as the remaining huts were being transferred elsewhere for military use.

On 15 January 1943 the governor sent a telegram to his deputy in Jamaica informing him that he had told Sir Herbert that there was no more space in the Gibraltar camp. The reply came within three days: “There is accommodation at Gibraltar Camp for 500 which is being reserved for emergencies such as sudden influx by refugee ships. It might be inconvenient if it were given up permanently.’°° On 13 March the Colonial Office wrote to Randall that he must assume

that Jamaica would not accept more refugees of any description. Thus, on 22 March the Foreign Office decided to advise Baliriski at the Polish embassy: The possibility of sending a further contingent of refugees to Jamaica was discussed with the Governor of Jamaica by Sir Herbert Emerson when the former was in London a short while ago. The position is that there is only a small amount of accommodation left in Jamaica and this is being reserved in case of emergency and the Colonial Government are unwilling to give it up for the benefit of those who came to Jamaica for the duration of the war.®"

The Bermuda conference took place on 19—29 April 1943. The British delegation was headed by Richard Law, under-secretary of state for foreign affairs, and the US team by Harold Dodds, the president of Princeton University. Randall acted as secretary.°° Paragraphs 19 and 20 of the final report by the two delegations deal with 6,000—8,000 refugees, mainly Jews, stranded in Spain, as does recommendation 5, which suggests the admission of a limited group to Jamaica. Among other recommendations was the creation of a British-American intergovernmental committee on refugees (which eventually merged with Sir Herbert Emerson’s office to become the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees).

The British government approved this report and published a release on the subject on 19 May 1943. This was followed a few days later by a debate in the House

of Commons, and caused an angry reaction among Jewish circles in America. It was reported on 21 May in the Christian Science Monitor of Boston under the

headline ‘Defeat of Nazis Put Ahead of Aid to Refugees’, a reference to the confer- | ence’s rejection of an approach to Germany, advocated by some American organizations, requesting the release of Jews from Germany and occupied territories in

exchange for German prisoners of war. On 26 May the British ambassador in

. TNA, CO 323/1846/7, doc. 43. °? HIWRP, MSZ 545/15/738/Jamaica. TNA, FO 371/36725, contains all relevant principal documents and includes the folder W 6711 containing, among others, the official minutes of the Bermuda conference agreed by both parties. There is also in the file a very interesting set of confidential remarks by the British delegation, dated 23 June 1943. The other delegates were: from the United Kingdom, Osbert Peale (Home Office) and G. H. Hall (Admiralty); from the United States, Senator Scott W. Lucas and Representative Sol Bloom. The US delegation was assisted by R. Borden Reams from the State Department.

178 Tomasz Potworowski Washington, Lord Halifax, reported that the President approved the report but did not wish to make a public statement on the subject in order to avoid pressure

for publication of the full text. ,

~ Qn the same day Lord Cranborne sent a cable to Sir Arthur Richards with a

formal request for the 400 spaces in the Gibraltar camp to be reserved for European refugees from Spain; he followed this with another cable making a personal appeal, presumably to counter objections in private correspondence. Four days later the governor’s agreement was received in London. On 11 June Randall wrote to the British ambassadors in Madrid and Lisbon advising them that limited space was available in Jamaica for the Jewish refugees stranded there.®? Nevertheless, the Colonial Office considered that the Dutch refugees temporarily at the Gibraltar camp in transit to Surinam should be considered as part of this contingent, and obtained the governor’s agreement that they would be replaced after they had left Jamaica.”° Although the Foreign Office still hoped to use the space for at least some of the second party of Polish Jews stranded in Lisbon, A. Walker, head of the Foreign

Office Polish desk, minuted a conversation with Gustaw Potworowski on 19 August, prior to the latter’s departure to take up his post as Polish Minister in Lisbon, as follows: ‘we thought it just as well not to inform him [of this possibility] at this stage’.?! Attempts to find a haven for this core group in Mexico, French North Africa, Australia, South Africa, Surinam, or Madagascar proved futile, and Palestine (at the time a League of Nations mandate under British administration) still imposed

qualifications that few of the group could meet.?? Censorship reports in November 1943 show that at least some refugees did not wish to leave for Jamaica, probably realizing that the danger of German invasion had passed and that the war was turning in the Allies’ favour. Thus the group remained in Portugal until 1944, when, presumably as a result of the Bermuda conference, emigration to Palestine

became easier and the Canadian government established special procedures for 89 TNA, CO 323/1846/8, doc. 42.

*” The first party of eighty Dutch refugees for Jamaica travelled on the SS Magellanes in January—February 1943 and another group of fifty to sixty was to leave in August by the SS Marques de Comillas. The Dutch government hoped to be able to move them on to Surinam within a month of the

arrival of the second ship (TNA, CO 137/864/69184, various documents on the subject, governor’s

agreement to replacements, CO 323/1846/8 doc. 59). ia TNA, FO 371/36642, W 12082/46. ”° Schimitzek, Na krawedzi Europy, 541-2; also HIWRP, MSZ 545/18/738/Portugal. TNA, FO 371/36638, contains a series of documents on the subject of the possibility of creating a camp for refugees in North Africa, by then under Allied control. It is interesting to note that even once the permission of the Allied supreme commander, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, had been obtained, the French authorities dragged their feet and, by the end of 1943, the camp had still not been established. The idea of using it for the Jewish refugees in Lisbon, first raised early that year in a letter from Marlewski at the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and preserved in this file (doc. W 8054/46/48), became out of date as a year later permits for Palestine became easier to obtain.

Evacuation of Fewish Poles to Jamaica 179 issuing entry permits for Jews. By mid-1944 only ninety refugees remained in Portugal awaiting the opportunity to return to France or Belgium, where they had lived before the war.?°

THE GRADUAL DEPOPULATION OF THE GIBRALTAR CAMP According to a Foreign Office report to the Polish embassy in London dated 10 September 1942, the first departure of Jewish refugees from the Gibraltar camp to the United States consisted of four people, who left Jamaica on 23 and 24 May.” From a series of similar reports preserved in the papers of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs it can be deduced that in 1942 a total of twelve people left for the United States and one for Colombia. During 1943 eight people departed for the United States and one for Venezuela.®°

On 14 June 1944 Debicki reported that, of the 109 members of the group he had met at the Gibraltar camp, sixty-four remained, and out of these over a dozen had already obtained visas.°° He also felt that the conditions for the fifty or so others were improving, the local Jewish community in Cuba organizing collections for the benefit of their co-religionists in Jamaica.

According to correspondence between the Foreign Office and the Polish embassy, 1n 1944 seventy-four people left for Cuba (presumably in transit to the United States), nine left directly to the United States, and five for Canada. Among these was a baby born in Jamaica to Otto and Renela Stansky.?’

Sir John Huggins, the governor of Jamaica since mid-1943, wrote to the Colonial Office on 20 September 1944 requesting that the remaining sixty-nine refugees be removed from Jamaica, as administering the Gibraltar camp for such a small group was becoming a burden and their release on the island was ‘impracticable’.?® The Colonial Office passed on this request to the Foreign Office but did not receive a favourable response and had to advise the governor on 14 December that there was no possibility of removing them at an early stage.*? Sir John continued to press for resolution of the issue,!©° but it no doubt became

part of the much larger problem of the post-war resettlement or repatriation of Polish refugees dispersed through the British empire. Thus it was not until 16 December 1945, well after the Allies had recognized the post-Yalta administration "° HIWRP, MSZ 155/6/312/Portugal. On 12 June 1944 the Polish legation in Portugal reported that within the framework of an agreement between the Canadian government and Jewish relief organizations, forty-one people had obtained Canadian immigration permits. This agreement (called Contingent 345) covered only complete families and as a result eleven Jewish people, single or in incomplete families, had to be included in a ‘Polish’ quota of citizens allowed entry for ‘the duration’ only. Extracts from censorship reports are preserved in TNA, CO 137/864/69184.

"4 HIWRP, MSZ 529/14/738/Jamaica. ”° HIWRP, MSZ 545/15/738/Jamaica. *° HIWRP, MSZ 529/14/738/Jamaica. *" HIWRP, MSZ 154/40 and 41/312/Jamaica. "s TNA, CO 137/864/69184, doc. 8. ° Ibid., docs. 11, 12, 14. oe Ibid., docs. 15-19.

180 Tomasz Potworowski established in Warsaw, that the Foreign Office advised the Colonial Office that the Polish government would be approached to request the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration to help with the issue, including the contingent on Jamaica.'°"

By the time of Mrs Stanton’s departure from Jamaica on 27 May 1945, the Gibraltarians had left, and some of the few remaining refugees, including herself, had been rehoused in a convent.'?” The records of the Jewish community in Jamaica, kept at the time of writing by its spiritual leader, the Revd Ernst H. deSouza, show only a few entries referring to the inmates of the Gibraltar camp, including the death of Mrs Stanton’s grandmother.'°? Three more deaths, one birth, and a marriage were also recorded in the

community’s books,'°* but it is possible that less religious refugees used only the official records of the colony.

The last British documents on the subject of Polish citizens in Jamaica that could be located at the Public Record Office consist of correspondence initiated by

an unsigned letter from the Polish charge d’affaires in London to the Foreign Office dated 22 May 1946. Having stated that these people, ‘although the [wartime] conditions have changed, still appear to be under strict camp regulations and their personal freedom severely restricted’, the Polish diplomat asks the Foreign

Office to ascertain conditions for them and the possibility of financial help, as well as the prospects for their repatriation or settlement in South America. The Foreign Office reply was based on a cable from the governor to the Colonial Office, dated 10 August. Only fifteen of the original refugees remained on the island, none of whom wanted to return to Poland, and all were arranging to travel to the United States. They continued to receive an allowance from the Joint, and some were get-

ting assistance from friends abroad. Free admission to cinemas had been secured

for them, and a representative of the Joint had recently visited the camp and expressed his satisfaction at conditions there. On application from responsible persons, the refugees were allowed to live outside the camp. They could also apply for permission to work, but no such requests had been made.!°° st TNA, CO 137/864/69184, doc. 13. 102 Stanton, Escape from the Inferno of Europe, 219. In conversation, Mrs Stanton told me there were about twenty or thirty people left at the time.

°° Tam very grateful to the late Revd deSouza for letting me peruse these records at his office in King’s Drive, Kingston. Deaths: (1) sheet 18, entry 574: Michael Krausz, age 59, ‘refugee from Czechoslovakia’, 30 Apr. 1942; (2) entry 577: Yvonne Krakowiak, aged 4, 4 June 1942; (3) entry 598: Mazzletob Hatchwell, aged g1, 29 Mar. 1943 (it is dubious whether he was actually a Gibraltar camp inmate); (4) sheet 19, entry 627: Sara Mayerowicz, aged 82, 25 Apr. 1945 (Mrs Stanton’s grandmother). Births: (1) sheet 20, entry 670: George Milton Kuttner, parents Jacob and Salome Kuttner, Sept. 1942. Marriages (ketubah): (1) 14 Dec. 1943: Maurice Flugelman and Janine Casotto. In addition there were two weddings and one birth among the Dutch Jewish refugees.

“0° TNA, FO 371/56490, N 6798/166/55; FO 371/56493, N 12290/166/55.

Evacuation of Ffewish Poles to Jamaica 181 SUMMARY 1. The Jewish refugees from Portugal found a haven in Jamaica primarily because the Polish and British governments wished to keep the Iberian peninsula open for the evacuation from the Continent of people useful to the war effort. The office of the high commissioner for refugees of the League of Nations influ-

enced the extent to which humanitarian considerations were taken into account.

2. The Polish government in London, and especially its Ministry of Social Welfare, felt responsible for the fate of all its fellow citizens, although most of the Jewish party stranded in Lisbon had not lived in Poland at the start of the war and some did not even speak Polish.

3. The maintenance in Jamaica of the refugees was paid for by Jewish organizations based in the United States; the cost of transport was shared by the Polish

government and these organizations. The British government obtained a guarantee from the Polish Ministry of Finance in case the payments from the United States were not forthcoming. In addition the Polish government was asked for, and gave, a guarantee that all members of the group, even those

of dubious citizenship, would have the right of entry to Poland after the war.

4. The colonial government in Jamaica operated within the framework of restrictions imposed by wartime security concerns and by a precarious political and social situation on the island. Although, in common with the evacuees from

Gibraltar who constituted the majority of the inhabitants of the camp in which they were lodged, the Polish refugees were prevented from residing or working outside it, they could move freely within the island, and obtain per-

mits for short overnight visits to friends outside the camp. The official appointed to administer the Gibraltar camp spared no efforts to make life in it bearable. ‘The long-established and influential Jewish community in Jamaica extended a warm welcome to their co-religionists.

5. The impossibility of leading an independent life free of the limitations imposed by the circumstances led to considerable frustration among the group. Some of them exaggerated the hardships in letters to relatives and friends, especially in letters to the United States probably in the hope that the

US government could be prevailed upon to make exceptions to the strict immigration regulations. Others wrote more reasonable petitions to the Polish, British, and Canadian authorities asking at least for a relaxation of the Jamaican employment prohibition. These complaints caused much irritation for the colonial government, especially as they found their way into the US press.

182 Tomasz Potworowskt 6. The Polish government’s request to send a second, similar group to Jamaica at the end of 1942 met with resistance not only because of the colonial government’s irritation at the complaints, but also because of the movement through Jamaica of Dutch citizens en route to Surinam and the need to incorporate the limited space available in the camp to the framework of the Bermuda conference on refugees held in April 1943.

7. By the end of 1943 the reversal in the tide of war made most refugees unwilling to leave Europe for life in a camp in the tropics, and in 1944 immigration regulations to Canada and Palestine were relaxed. Of the 187 members of the group, many gradually departed for Cuba, South America, and the United States, and only sixty-nine remained by the end of 1944; departures continued

| throughout 1945. 8. None of the Polish refugee group established themselves in the island, although the fifteen remaining by 1946 could have applied for employment and residence outside the camp.

Coverage of the Holocaust in Winnipeg’s Jewish and Polish Press 1939-1945 DANIEL STONE THE Holocaust has become the subject of confrontation between the Jewish and Polish communities of North America in recent years. The lingering controversy over Auschwitz and assessments of Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, to mention only two issues, have brought long-standing resentments to the fore. These issues reflect a general alienation between the two communities, deepened by differing perceptions of the long history of Polish—Jewish coexistence. Negative stereotypes endure in both communities. Fortunately, group antagonisms rarely carry over into personal relations between Poles and Jews, which generally remain amicable. Furthermore, as members of the same wave of immigration, Poles and Jews have often worked together on North American issues such as unionization in the 1930s and anti-Soviet agitation in the Brezhnev era. Despite the problems that the Holocaust has caused for Poles and Jews in recent years, there is nothing to indicate that North American Poles and Jews had any serious differences over it between 1939 and 1945, if the experience of Winnipeg is indicative. The ethnic newspapers of the day directed no accusations or recriminations at anyone other than the common Nazi enemy. The only hint of future conflict lay in the lack of contact between Winnipeg’s Poles and Jews. No meetings appear to have taken place between the two communities, despite their common interest in expelling the Nazi occupier from Poland, and they participated independently in the Canadian war effort. A medium-sized city of 300,000 according to the 1941 census, Winnipeg pro-

vided a home for 17,000 Jews, and another 1,000 lived in other parts of the province of Manitoba. The Jewish community was overwhelmingly east European in origin, but there is no way of telling how many came from Poland. Since Canada kept its doors open to immigrants longer than the United States, the percentage of new immigrants from Poland was probably higher than in comparable US communities. Winnipeg was also home to 12,000 Poles, while another 21,000 lived in

184 Daniel Stone other parts of the province. Both groups formed networks of ethnic organizations and supported their own newspapers.’

Polish readers had the choice of two Polish-language newspapers. Gazeta Katolicka (‘Catholic Gazette’) was a weekly newspaper established in 1908 by the Oblate order which presented local, national, and international news from a clerical point of view. The paper changed its name to Gazeta Polska (‘Polish Gazette’) in 1940 and moved to Toronto 1n 1951. A 1935 Polish consular memo described 1t as sympathetic to the National Democratic Party of Poland and hostile to the policies of the Polish government. In contrast, Czas (the Polish Times) was linked to the Polish National Alliance and called itself a ‘progressive’ newspaper. It was cool on clerical attitudes, although certainly not anti-Catholic. Founded in 1913 by a Czech publisher, Czas was purchased by a Polish community firm in 1931 in order to save it from bankruptcy during the Depression. The Polish Foreign Munistry, which described it as loyal to Polish government policies and sympathetic to the labour movement, helped Czas to survive by buying shares and placing advertis-

ing. During the inter-war period neither newspaper discussed Winnipeg’s Jews and both referred to Jews in Poland only when issues arose that received coverage in the English-language press. Both papers defended Poland’s reputation and attacked Jewish reports of Polish antisemitism. In 1935 Czas had a circulation of 4,000 copies and Gazeta Katolicka of 2,500.” Winnipeg’s two Jewish newspapers were divided by language rather than by politics. The Yidishe vort (“Yiddish Word’, usually called the ‘Israelite Press’ in English) was founded in 1910 as a weekly and became a daily newspaper in 1914. Despite its Yiddish socialist origins, the editors appealed equally to all segments of

the Jewish community: socialist, Zionist, and business-oriented, Yiddishist and Hebraicist. In 1925 a former member of the staff established the English-language weekly Jewish Post along similar lines.* Circulation figures are not available, but the papers’ size and format suggest that they equalled or exceeded those of the Polish press. Both the Polish and the Jewish press in Winnipeg provided noticeably better coverage of the Holocaust in Poland than the English-language press and at least

some of the Jewish press elsewhere, but neither made it a primary focus of its attention. Front-page headlines tended to be dominated by the war in general, the ethnic group’s contributions to the Canadian war effort, and domestic news. For Winnipeg’s Polish community, the primary war-related issues centred on the fate 1 Canadian Census, 1941; G. Tulchinsky, Branching Out: The Transformation of the Canadian Fewish Community (Toronto, 1998), 7-10; V. Turek, Poles in Manitoba (Toronto, 1967).

| 2-V. Turek, The Polish-Language Press in Canada: Its History and a Bibliographical List (Toronto, 1962); H. Radecki with B. Heydenkorn, A Member of a Distingushed Family (Toronto, 1976), 113-15; W. B. Makowski, History and Integration of Poles in Canada (n.p., 1967), 188-206. See also D. Stone, ‘Winnipeg’s Polish-Language Newspapers and their Attitudes towards Jews and Ukrainians between the Two World Wars’, Canadian Ethnic Studies, 21/2 (1989), 27-37. 8 A.A. Chiel, The Jews in Manitoba (Toronto, 1961), 123-7.

The Holocaust in Winnipeg’s Press 185 of Catholic Poles in Poland and the shape of Poland after the war. For Winnipeg’s Jewish community, the fate of Jews throughout Europe (not just in Poland) and the shape of the international Jewish community after the war were most important. It is impossible to know how fully the views presented in the newspapers reflected those of the communities as a whole, but it seems likely that they were similar. Publishers of small newspapers such as these, with limited readerships and slender resources, tend to take great pains to express ideas acceptable to their readers. Being out of step can quickly lead to going out of business. This chapter examines the Polish and Jewish ethnic press of Winnipeg to determine how much attention was paid to the Holocaust and to explore the attitudes

that coverage suggests. Press coverage provides some clue to the underlying attitudes of publishers, journalists, and intellectuals, and of ordinary readers. Historians have already shown that the North American press provided considerable information about the Holocaust—mostly on the inside pages, where these articles rarely discussed harrowing reports and were overshadowed by the frontpage accounts of military and diplomatic developments.* This chapter deals with the two Polish newspapers separately because of their differing points of view, while the two Jewish papers are covered together. The discussion is organized chronologically in three periods: persecution (September 1939—June 1942), mass murder (July 1942—July 1944), and after liberation (July 1944—May 1945).

CZAS Persecution, September 1939—fune 1942 Czas was keenly aware of Polish Jews and reported their patriotic, pro-Polish attitudes at the outbreak of hostilities. Early reports on the position of Jews focused on the possible emergence of a ‘reservation’ around Lublin for almost 2 million Jews to be expelled from the Reich, the Czech lands, western Poland, and the General Government. Czas condemned this as ‘an unprecedented violence and bestialness 1n civilized times’ and predicted that similar brutal methods of resettlement would be used on the Poles.° The paper soon developed this theme under the

headline ‘Germans Moving to Destroy the Polish Race’, concluding that ‘currently, the Germans are destroying the entire nation, and want to wipe out the Polish race, or at least weaken it so that it is unable to recover spiritually or materi-

ally’.© Despite its focus on ethnic Poles, Czas did not overlook reports that the 4 W. Laqueur, The Terrible Secret (Boston, 1980); D. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief (New York, 1986);

A. Grohman, ‘What Did They Know? The American Jewish Press and the Holocaust, 1 Sept. 1939-17 Dec. 1942’, American Jewish History, 68/3 (1979), 327-52; D. Goutor, “The Canadian Media and the “Discovery” of the Holocaust, 1944-1945’, Canadian Jewish Studies, 4-5 (1996-7), 87-116.

Piotr Wrobel, ‘Dziennik Polski, the Official Organ of the Polish Government-in-Exile, and the Holocaust, 1940-1945’, Gal-Ed, 17 (2000), 57-83.

> Czas, 12 Dec. 1939. & Czas, 19 Dec. 1939.

186 Daniel Stone Nazis had already killed 250,000 Polish Jews,’ and the inclusion of Jewish organizations in a list of Polish recipients of American charity emphasized the unity of

the two groups.® When reports began to come in of anti-Polish acts by the ‘Bolsheviks’ in newly annexed western Ukraine, Czas made no reference to Jewish ‘Bolsheviks’, a popular subject in post-war Polish—Jewish polemics; it focused instead on building bridges with Winnipeg’s large Ukrainian community, which

had been strongly anti-Polish before the war. And when a public meeting was organized in Winnipeg in late February to protest against both Nazi and Soviet crimes, Jews were not mentioned in any context.? Czas continued its extensive reporting of the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Poland in the spring of 1940. One report estimated that 200,000 Jews in Malopolska were starving, as goods shortages destroyed the livelihood of small traders.'° A long article on the difficult economic conditions in Warsaw included an anecdote expressing positive attitudes towards Jews. The author sympathized with a Jewish street pedlar and his Polish protector, a member of the educated classes, against criminal elements who sought help from the German police to force him to lower

his prices." C'zas also described Jewish participation in the Polish military effort and reported promises that ethnic strife between Poles and Jews would cease after the

war. It reported a ‘Manifesto to Polish Jews’ by the Zwigzek Weteranow Zydowskich w Polsce (the Union of Jewish War Veterans in Poland) encouraging

, enlistment in the Polish army (presumably in France) and predicting full equality after the war./* A small article on page 1 entitled ‘Jews Looking for the Best Way to

Fight the Nazis’ reported a statement by the revisionist Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky that most American Jews were eager to fight as soon as the United States joined the war. It also quoted comments by a British colonel, Patterson, that

Jews made good fighter pilots, and a speech to the Federation of Polish Jews in America by Count Jerzy Potocki, the Polish ambassador to the United States, in which he promised that ‘there will be no place for antisemitism’ in Poland after the war.!?

C'zas subsequently reported a letter from President Wladyslaw Raczkiewicz of the Polish government-in-exile in London thanking Polish Jews for their loyalty and patriotism, and expressing confidence that Jews would enjoy equal rights in Poland after the war. The same issue reported the creation of, as the headline put

it, ‘A Jewish Newspaper—In the Polish Language’, Nasza Trybuna (‘Our Tribune’), published by émigré Jewish journalists. Czas observed that ‘the articles ... are on a very high level and written in excellent Polish. They are filled with sincere patriotism and a deep love for the Old Country.’ Jewish support for Polish military action indicated to the editors ‘that the Jews have revised their attitude

” Czas, 25 Dec. 1939. 8 Czas, 5 Mar. 1940. ° Czas, 20, 27 Feb. 1940. 10 Czas, 19 Apr. 1940. 11 Czas, 9 Apr. 1940. 12 Cas, 14 Mar. 1940. 13 Czas, 18 June 1940.

The Holocaust in Winnipeg’s Press 187 towards Poland’. The editors implicitly identified pre-war Polish Jews as anti-

Polish, and refused to admit to the existence of antisemitism in Poland. Nevertheless, maintaining good relations with Jews was consistent with the editors’ denial of the idea, current in some Polish circles, that Poland had fallen in 1939 because it had made too many concessions to its national minorities.** Affirmations of equality after the war became a major theme in an editorial defining what it called “The Future Poland—People and Citizens’. The article

developed the Pilsudskiite idea of a federal union of Polish, Ukrainian, and Belarusian states. The Polish element would be further developed by the emigration of Germans and the return of Poles from abroad. Jews should become Poles or emigrate. The author welcomed members of the Jewish religion who accepted Polish nationality, while Jews ‘with aspirations to form their own state’ should be able to move to a Jewish state, an aspiration that the Polish state had consistently supported.+®

The year 1940 ended with accounts of the continuing German persecution of Jews in Poland. Winnipeg’s Poles quickly learned about the creation of the walled Warsaw ghetto.!© A headline stated that ‘Poland Faces the Greatest Hunger’ and cited the German governor Hans Frank as supplying provisions for the army first, Germans second, Poles third, and Jews last.1’ Czas also reprinted a variety of reports of the mistreatment of Jews in L6dZ, Krakow, and Bydgoszcz.'* It published, but made little comment on, information about the alleged mistreatment of Jewish converts to Catholicism by other Jews in the Warsaw ghetto.‘ C’zas reprinted in full the long and important speech by the minister of labour, Jan Staficzyk, in which he denounced antisemitism and promised that post-war Poland would be free of antisemitism. Staficzyk pointed to Polish help for Jews in the ghettos. Raising the thorny question of emigration, a pre-war point of controversy, he claimed that pressure for emigration came from economic backwardness, which post-war industrialization would cure, and promised that Jews would not be obliged to leave against their will. Staficzyk’s speech was part of a significant initia-

tive on the part of the government-in-exile to improve relations with Jewish organizations.”° It was backed by a sympathetic article entitled ‘Jews in Europe’.

The author, Czeslaw Poznatski, reported that the Gestapo was arresting fewer Jews than ethnic Poles, but that overall the Jewish position was ‘even worse’ than that of the Poles. Jews received much smaller rations (half as much bread as the Poles, one-third as much sugar, and no meat) and had to work in forced labour brigades. Furthermore, synagogues, if they survived at all, were used as bookstores. The greatest tragedy, in Poznanski’s opinion, was ‘the complete, absolute

separation of Jews from social life’ in the ghettos, which ‘are so crowded and

14 Czas, 3 Dec. 1940. 19 Czas, 31 Dec. 1940. 16 Czas, 19 Nov. 1940. 17 Czas, 24 Dec. 1940. 18 Czas, 31 Dec. 1940. 19 Czas, 10 June 1940. 20D. Engel, In the Shadow of Auschwitz: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1939-1942 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1987), 80; Czas, 10 June 1940.

188 Daniel Stone jammed that the average room holds five to eight people’, causing health and other problems. ‘The author remarked on ‘grotesque situations’ of particular interest to his overwhelmingly Catholic readership, such as Catholic priests wearing Jewish

armbands and ministering to Jewish converts ghettoized for their ‘racial’ identity.21 Despite government efforts at creating good relations between Poles and Jews, there is no indication that any meeting took place between the governmentin-exile’s vice-premier, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, and Jewish groups when he visited Winnipeg in June 1941.77 Jewish matters continued to feature prominently in many issues of Czas, sometimes emphasizing the common cause between ethnic Poles and Jews. The visit to the United States of the Polish prime minister and commander-in-chief, General

Wladyslaw Sikorski, and his meeting with the World Jewish Congress in New York, were reported, along with his statement that any Pole who objected to equal rights for all Polish citizens regardless of religion or nationality was ‘acting against the interests of his own nation’.2° Mikolajczyk made a similar speech to Polish Canadian soldiers.7* A front-page story about the presence in Winnipeg of ‘Polish volunteers’ who had crossed Siberia, Japan, and Canada to join the Polish forces in Britain demonstrated the common interests of Jews and Poles. Readers might infer their Jewish identity by thanks expressed to the Jewish Administrative Council of Vancouver.” Czas also reported the death by heart attack on the floor of the US Congress of a Polish-born Jew, Congressman M. Edelstein. The situation of both Poles and Jews in Poland continued to deteriorate in the

second half of 1941. Reports about Auschwitz, ‘a camp of death and torture’, began to circulate.2© Auschwitz was at this time a punishment camp for Poles without the death and labour facilities for Jews that were added later. A long article on

national groups discussed conditions in the Warsaw ghetto, which were getting worse as a result of business failures, pauperization, and poor housing. It claimed that antisemitic feeling in Poland was decreasing but that anti-Polish feeling was growing in the ghetto, as residents blamed Poles for their plight and turned to the Soviet Union for help. Growing death rates in Warsaw showed that ghetto residents were dying at a greater rate than other Varsovians. ‘The article also discussed Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Belarusians in Poland.?’ The mass murder of 35,000 Jews from Kiev in mid-December and smaller massacres in other Ukrainian cities were reported along with pressure by Ukrainian ‘extremists’ on Poles, especially the intelligentsia.2® The year ended with a report from Jerusalem that Zionist representatives had spoken favourably of Polish assurances that Jews would be treated as equals in post-war Poland.?° The year 1942 saw an increase in reporting from Poland because of the deepen-

ing Jewish tragedy. Higher death rates by natural causes were published in

21 Czas, 10 June 1941. 22 Czas, 17 June 1941. 23 Czas, 29 June 1941. 24 Czas, 8 July 1941. 25 Czas, 17 June 1941. 26 Czas, 29 July 1941. 27 Czas, 14 Oct. 1941. 28 Czas, 11 Nov., 16 Dec. 1941. 29 Czas, 31 Dec. 1941.

The Holocaust in Winnipeg’s Press 189 February. Polish death rates had doubled, while Jewish death rates had quadrupled. It was asserted that the Germans were intending to ‘wipe out the Jewish people by disease and were shipping Jews from all over eastern Europe to die of typhus in the Warsaw ghetto’.®° Czas reported the decision by the state of Slovakia to deport all 90,000 Jews and strip them of their citizenship.* It also announced

the deportation of Lublin’s Jews to Majdanek and the destruction of Lublin’s yeshivas.°”

Mass Murder, July 1942—fuly 1944 On 7 July 1942 Czas summarized Shmuel Zygielboim’s detailed report to the Polish National Council in London that German plans existed for ‘the physical extermination of the Jewish People in Poland’. Zygielboim, the representative of the Jewish Socialist Bund on the Polish National Council in London, identified mass shootings across eastern Poland and the western Soviet Union, and the use of gas wagons to kill Jews in the Chelmno region. He reported that at least 700,000 Jews had already been killed, and that conditions in the enormous Warsaw ghetto had reached breaking point in terms of crowding and poor medical facilities. Zygielboim concluded that the Germans intended to kill all Jews and were starting in Poland. He called on the Polish government-in-exile to take steps to halt the extermination and requested Allied governments to act, perhaps by executing Germans who had been interned in the United States and other Allied countries.*° News of the deportation of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto reached Czas with a three-month delay, in mid-October. A headline on the front page stated, ‘More than 400,000 Jews Already Deported from Warsaw’, leaving about 100,000. Czas knew only that they had been sent ‘in an unknown direction’.** The Treblinka death camp, where many of them had been sent, was at that time known only as a place of imprisonment for Poles.®° Reports of Nazi brutalities abounded, but the awful truth disappeared from the

newspapers until December 1942, when Czas reported, ‘Germans Murder Hundreds of Thousands of Jews in Poland’. Relaying news from the Polish government in London, Czas stated that the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, had decided to murder 50 per cent of Poland’s Jews in 1942 and, after visiting the Warsaw ghetto in July, had insisted that the pace be accelerated. The newspaper gave a detailed account of the massive presence of German soldiers, the deportation of 6,000 Jews a day, and the suicide of the ghetto ‘elder’ Adam Czerniakow.

Packed in 150 people to a freight wagon, the Jews were taken to Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec to be murdered. Among them, the world-famous teacher, educator, and author Janusz Korczak was known to have gone to his death with the children from his orphanage. Between July and September 250,000 Warsaw Jews had been killed and other ghettos were liquidated. The only significant inaccuracy

8° Czas, 3 Feb. 1942. 31 Czas, g June 1942. 32 Czas, 30 June 1942. 33 Czas, 7 July 1942. 34 Czas, 13 Oct. 1942. 35 Czas, 14 Sept. 1942.

190 Daniel Stone in the report was that Jews were being electrocuted in the death camp in Belzec.*®

The next issue of Czas headlined a ‘Polish Protest against the Persecution of the Jews’.°”A statement by the government-in-exile condemned the murders, accepting its responsibility for telling the world about these Nazi crimes and doing what it could to stop them. The priority, the statement concluded, was to win the

war by opening a second front in Europe. The government-in-exile called the Holocaust ‘bestiality without precedent in history’ and, referring to Poles abroad, added that ‘no one should remain passive’. Polish Catholics should speak up and protest since ‘we do not want to be Pontius Pilates’. Czas evidently thought that in

publishing the statement it had done enough; it never produced an editorial denouncing the mass murder of Polish Jews. Reports of the Warsaw ghetto uprising appeared along with numerous accounts of massacres and ghetto liquidations. A news article on 30 March 1943 passed on an ‘SOS from the Warsaw ghetto’ predicting its liquidation and the murder of its residents. Sources in the ghetto begged the outside world to intervene,*® but little help was forthcoming and Czas reported Zygielboim’s suicide in protest against ‘the indifference of the entire Allied world’. The article described letters left for the Polish prime minister, Sikorski, and President Wladystaw Raczkiewicz, but the texts were not released at this time. The same issue relayed news of a concentration camp being set up at Majdanek.*? Czas printed more details about Zygielboim and his suicide as they became available. An accurate first report of the death camp

at Treblinka gave its death rate as 5,000 per day; it incorrectly identified the method as using steam.*° A news article collected the pattern of murders together in late July under the

heading ‘Bestial “Liquidation” of the Jews’, calling it ‘one of the greatest mass crimes in history’, which aimed at ‘the complete elimination of the Jewish element through all possible and impossible crimes’. Noting that ‘all Poland is a place of death following torture’, Czas expressed no surprise that Zygielboim had committed suicide as a sign of protest against the ‘inability or unwillingness of the world to act’.*" An article on the editorial page reported the chief rabbi of Great Britain, J. H. Hertz,

as mourning the death of 2 million Jews.*? Similarly, Czas reported that Representation of Polish Jewry, an organization of Polish Jewish politicians in Palestine, had made 1 September ‘a day of Jewish mourning’ for Jews around the world. A news article printed speculation that 12,000 Jews might still be fighting in the Warsaw ghetto.** It also published the first eyewitness report of the camp at Auschwitz from a Polish escapee, who said that he had not been able to visit a separate Jewish section, but had been shown places where ‘thousands’ of Jews had been killed. While reporting these Jewish tragedies, Winnipeg’s Poles staged a public demonstration against the murder of Polish children by the Nazis, but no Jews were listed

36 Czas, 8 Dec. 1942. 37 Czas, 15 Dec. 1942. 38 Czas, 30 Mar. 1943. 39 Czas, 25 May 1943. 40 Czas, 1, 8 June 1943. 41 Cas, 20 July 1943. 42 Czas, 3, 17 Aug. 1943. 43 Czas, 7 Sept. 1943.

The Holocaust in Winnipeg’s Press Ig! among the platform committee.** Editorials in late April and early May understandably concentrated on revelations of the Soviet massacre of Polish officers at Katyfi.*° Czas’s only editorial on a Jewish subject appeared in mid-October, devoted to

the ‘armed Jewish uprising in Warsaw’.*® The lengthy editorial pulled together previously scattered reports to give an accurate and detailed description of the fighting. ‘The editorial concluded, ‘German barbarism is simply unprecedented and documenting it would require an enormous book.’ Czas gave two examples, the shooting of Jews in hospitals and German soldiers ‘applauding’ Jewish girls jumping to their death from burning buildings. There is no way of knowing why this, rather than the Holocaust in general, provided the only Jewish subject for an editorial; the stereotype may be correct that heroic military action appealed to Polish values more than passive martyrdom. More details on the Holocaust were published as they became available. Sources in London reported that Auschwitz had started as a concentration camp and was now a ‘death factory’, with three huge crematoria (in fact, there were five), which

burned up to 10,000 corpses a day. The report stated that no figures for the number of victims were yet available, but they certainly amounted to more than 500,000, mostly Jews from Poland and the surrounding countries. Separate articles discussed the recent murder of tens of thousands of Jews from Greece, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. Another discussed the ‘hellish camp for women’, which lacked water and hygiene facilities. Typhus raged and ill women were killed, at first only Jews and then everyone. It reported, without detail, medical ‘experimentation’ with impregnation and sterilization.*’ An interview with two Jews who had survived the Warsaw ghetto uprising provided more details about the fighting and noted the continuation of the Masada tradition of suicidal heroism, initiated when the Romans captured the Jewish fortress of Masada in AD 72. The article also noted that American Jews had commemorated the first anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising on 19 April 1944.*° Similarly, new details were published about the life and death of the Lublin ghetto.*9 Reports appeared in the English-language press about antisemitism among the Polish units stationed in Britain, but rather than rail against Jewish critics, Czas printed articles pointing up the good relations between Poles and Jews. Under a headline ‘Chief Rabbi of Scotland Denies Accusations of Antisemitism’, it quoted him as saying that ‘real friendship’ existed between Polish and Jewish soldiers. Czas blamed ‘former National Democrats’ for antisemitic incidents and denied that the Polish authorities were responsible.°° In November the paper took pains to 44 Czas, 28 Sept. 1943. 45 Czas, 27 Apr., 4 May 1943. 46 Czas, 12 Oct. 1943.

47 Czas, 4 Apr. 1944. 48 Czas, 3 May 1944. 49 Czas, 31 May 1944. °° Czas, 14 June 1944. Two recent books that discuss the topic are T: Gasowski, Pod sztandarami Orla Biatego. Kwestia zydowska w Polskich Sitach Zbrojnych w czaste [I wojny Swiatoweg (Krakow, 2002),

Aviv, 2001), 23-8.

146-51, 163, 181-8, 214, and B. Meirtchak, fews—Officers in the Polish Armed Forces, 1939-1945 (Tel

192 Daniel S'tone report on the good relations that existed between Poles and Jews in General Anders’ Polish division in Italy. Presumably repudiating prejudiced remarks in some parts of the Polish community, it said that there were 250-300 Jewish soldiers in this Polish division and that they fought well, receiving as many decorations as other soldiers. Czas blamed reports of serious Polish—Jewish friction on enemy propaganda.°!

After Liberation, fuly 1944—May 1945 As Polish territory was liberated from the Germans, further details on Nazi crimes in Poland emerged. A long piece headed “Two Million Graves in Majdanek’ gave news of the widespread murder of Polish and other Jews as well as the imprison-

ment and killing of non-Jews. The article included sickening details of other camps in Poland and Germany, concluding that ‘when the guns eventually go quiet and peace returns, the concentration camps will remain as the blackest stain on the conscience of the Germans in world opinion’. A further report estimated the total number of Polish dead as at least 5 million, including at least 2 million Jews. It also

described camp conditions and the deportation of Poles to Germany for slave labour.°* The government-in-exile continued to intervene on behalf of Polish Jews, for example when the Germans separated Polish and Jewish officers captured in fighting on the western front.°® A report from Moscow put the number of dead at Auschwitz at 4 million.°* Czas denounced the Yalta agreement, which recognized the largely communist government in Warsaw and effectively prevented the government-in-exile from

returning to Poland. It reported favourably a message sent to London by sixty rabbis expressing their appreciation of the government-in-exile’s fight for ‘the ideas for which the democratic world fought with the Germans’. The rabbis expressed confidence that ‘in democratic Poland, free of exploitation, the Jewish nation will find the conditions that will allow it to create a new life in peace and honour’.®° Similarly, Czas denounced the ‘harmful activity of Professor Infeld’, a noted Polish-born physicist who had endorsed communist control of Poland in an interview in the Joronto Star; Infeld’s Jewish origins were not mentioned.°® In summary, C'zas showed awareness of Jewish issues throughout the Holocaust and provided an accurate record, given the limitations of the day. Almost all of the articles were printed on page 2, in a column entitled ‘News from Poland’, although some appeared on the front page. There was only one editorial, on the ‘Warsaw 51 Czas, 1 Nov. 1944.

52 Czas, 17 Jan. 1945. Between 170,000 and 235,000 died in Majdanek, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, ‘Majdanek’, , accessed 22

June 2005. 53 Czas, 7, 14 Mar. 1945. 54 Czas, 16 May 1945. Approximately 1 million Jews and 110,000 non-Jews were killed in Auschwitz

according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, ‘Auschwitz’, , accessed 22 June 2005.

55 Czas, 14 Mar. 1945. 56 Czas, 30 May 1945.

The Holocaust in Winnipeg’s Press 193 ghetto revolt’. Czas’s publishing strategy accorded with the position of the Polish

government in London, which provided extensive reports on Nazi atrocities against the Jews. A small provincial newspaper without resources, Czas relied on Polish news services, chiefly from London. No clear individual point of view, other than loyalty to the government in London, is evident from coverage of Holocaust

developments such as ghettoization, deportation, and mass murder. Still, the extent of Czas’s coverage of Jewish issues, and its willingness to see Jews as Polish

citizens if not fully as Poles, as indicated by the favourable publicity it gave to promises of equal treatment after the war, were impressive. Furthermore, it made some effort to play down potential differences between Poles and Jews in order to maintain wartime solidarity, particularly over the question of antisemitism in the Polish army.

GAZETA KATOLICKA AND GAZETA POLSKA Gazeta Katolicka, which changed its name in 1940 to Gazeta Polska, provided less than half as much coverage of the Holocaust as Czas and was free of antisemitic content. Less devoted to the Polish government in London, and more involved in clerical networks, it reported on major developments throughout the war and also on Jewish relations with the Church.

Persecution, September 1939—Jfune 1942 Gazeta Katolicka mentioned Jews for the first time in articles on the possible cre-

ation of a Jewish ‘reservation’ around Lublin at the end of 1939 and also on isolated Nazi atrocities against both Jews and Poles.°’ It seemed very interested in covering news of the support for the Polish government by Jews of Polish origin in England and France. It was also keen to publish a statement by the noted historian Louis Finkelstein, head of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, praising two popes, Pius XI and Pius XII, for opposing Nazism and condemning discrimination.°® Like Czas, it gave details of an appeal by the Union of Jewish Veterans in Poland calling on Jews to enlist to fight for a ‘free and powerful Poland which will be a good mother for all its sons regardless of their nationality and belief’.°? It also reported on Jewish organizations that expressed solidarity with Poland on the first anniversary of the outbreak of war.®° Interested in Zionism and the Holy Land, it published items on the possible formation of a Jewish army in Palestine and pledges by American Zionists to defend Palestine.*® The paper also published numerous articles on conditions in Poland. Curiously,

the establishment of the Warsaw ghetto in October 1940 was not mentioned, 57 Gazeta Katolicka, 15 Dec. 1939, 2 Jan. 1940; Gazeta Polska, 15 Apr. 1940.

°8 Gazeta Polska, 15 Apr. 1940. 5° Gazeta Polska, 8 May 1940. 60 Gazeta Polska, 10 Sept. 1941. 61 Gazeta Polska, 12 June, 12 July 1940.

194 Daniel Stone although Gazeta Katolicka noted the creation of ghettos in Krakow and Lublin and, later, the expansion of the Warsaw ghetto.°? Jews were not mentioned in general articles about conditions in Poland or in the 1941 end-of-year review.®? An

insensitive, although not necessarily malicious, joke in a humour column mentioned a sick Jew who summoned a priest to write his will because he had typhus and did not want to risk infecting his rabbi.®*

Mass Murder, July 1942—fuly 1944 Like other papers, this one, by now called Gazeta Polska, published the appeal by Shmuel Zygielboim to the world ‘to stop the massacre of hundreds of thousands of

innocent people’. It stressed the broader aspect of Nazi crimes, emphasizing Zygielboim’s claim that the ‘execution of the Jewish people in Poland is only part of

a plan to liquidate the entire Polish nation’ and, still more broadly, a reference to ‘the physical extermination of oppressed nations’.®° Greater detail about atrocities perpetrated on the Jews was provided by Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, including the summary statement that more than 2 million had been killed.©° Surprisingly, this

news did not persuade the editors to mention Jews in their editorial entitled ‘Poland, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow’, which described the contemporary situation as one of the worst periods of ‘painful suffering, misfortune, and defeat’ that the Polish nation had ever experienced.®’ However, an editorial four weeks later made a passing reference to high mortality rates in the ghettos.©° Gazeta Polska seems to have paid more attention to the persecution of Jews in France because of protests by the Vatican and numerous French Catholic groups.®? However, widespread publicity about the Holocaust in New York in December 1942 brought the matter to the bottom of the front page with a headline ‘Germans Murder 1,000,000 Jews and 400,000 Poles’, based on a report from the Polish minister of state in the government-in-exile, Henryk Strasburger. The article also quoted Rabbi Stephen Wise, head of the American Jewish Congress, as saying that the Germans were trying ‘to wipe out all Jews’.’° Again, the news did not prevent the editors from selecting the deportation to Germany of 1.25 million Poles for slave labour as ‘the darkest card of Hitler’s criminology’, rather than mass murder. 4 As the floodtide of terrible news rolled in, Gazeta Polska reported it. A front-

page article in early June 1943, entitled ‘Last Days of Bloody Fighting in the Warsaw Ghetto’, provided the first news of that uprising. The paper stated that the ‘heroic fight’ had subsided to a few isolated spots after the Germans burned down whole blocks, killing many Jews; others were summarily shot or taken to

death camps.’2 While Gazeta Polska overlooked Jews in a report entitled 62 Gazeta Polska, 9 Apr., 14 May, 3 Dec. 1941, 21 Jan. 1942.

68 Gazeta Polska, 24 Dec. 1941. 64 Gazeta Polska, 3 June 1942. 6° Gazeta Polska, 15 July 1942. 66 Gazeta Polska, 22 July 1942. ®7 Gazeta Polska, 5 Aug. 1942. 68 Gazeta Polska, 26 Aug. 1942. 69 Gazeta Polska, 30 Sept. 1942. Gazeta Polska, 2 Dec. 1942. 1 Gazeta Polska, 9 Dec. 1942. 7 Gazeta Polska, 23 June 1943.

The Holocaust in Winnipeg’s Press 195 ‘Majdanek—Death Camp for Poles’ in late June, a more complete version soon

corrected the omission. ‘The Terrible Death Camp at Treblinka’ accurately described the expansion of an existing camp in March 1942. After providing details of the camp’s operation, the article overestimated the number of Jewish deaths there at more than 2 million.’* There was also an item on the protests and

demonstrations in Tel Aviv over Nazi crimes against children; and the Polish consul, Henryk Rozmarin, passed on information about the murder of Jewish children. However, an article on the editorial page, “The Torture Place for Children’, protested against the mistreatment and murder of Polish children without a single reference to Jews. Several editorials and articles discussed the sad plight of Polish children, and only one, entitled ‘Catastrophic Decline in the Number of Children in Poland’, mentioned, towards the end of a long piece, the sufferings and murder of Polish Jewish children.“

Jewish issues were sometimes reported in order to demonstrate good Polish—Jewish relations. In late 1943 a headline recounted, ‘Poles Killed in Defence of Persecuted Jews’. The article summarized an account by ‘PolishJewish circles’, and told the story of a Polish baker whose whole family had been shot because he had hidden a Jew. ”° One editorial, ‘Poles Actively Defending Jews’,

claimed that the Polish underground had remained in constant touch with the heroes of the Warsaw ghetto uprising and had supplied material help. Like Czas, Gazeta Polska called on Poles to continue to aid Jews in hiding from the Nazis,“ and carried a headline pronouncing that ‘Polish Jews Declare Solidarity’. The article cited the British-based Polish Jewish Observer, showing Jewish contributions to the Polish war effort, and expressed confidence that post-war Poland would guarantee equal rights to all Poles.’” Another article reported that about a million Jews were serving in the Allied armies and that all Polish units included Jewish soldiers. ”®

Other accounts simply provided the news as it came in. Gazeta Polska told the remarkable story of Henryk Karboriski, who escaped from the L6dz ghetto and made his way across Poland until the Germans picked him up and sent him into forced labour. He escaped from Germany and travelled across France to Scotland, where he joined the Polish army.’ In the middle of 1944 the number of Polish Jewish victims of the Nazis was put at 3.5 million, leaving only 50,000 Polish Jews alive.°° An earlier article had reported the liquidation of the Lwow ghetto, which had originally held 160,000 Jews.** 73 Gazeta Polska, 2, 23 June 1943. 700,000-850,000 Jews were killed Treblinka according to the

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, ‘Treblinka’, , accessed 22 June 2005.

7 Gazeta Polska, 29 Sept. 1943. Gazeta Polska, 15 Dec. 1943. 76 Gazeta Polska, 26 Apr. 1944. ™ Gazeta Polska, 16 Feb. 1944. 78 Gazeta Polska, 5 Apr. 1944 7 Gazeta Polska, 5 Jan. 1944. 80 Gazeta Polska, 3 May 1944. 51 Gazeta Polska, 12 Jan. 1944.

196 Daniel Stone In its accounts of Nazi concentration and death camps, Gazeta Polska indicated that Poles and Jews suffered equally. A long and detailed article on Auschwitz entitled ‘Camp of Slow Death’, based on French sources, reported only 10,000 prisoners, including Poles, French Jews, and Jews from other countries.®* The art-

icle “The Truth about the Camp at Treblinka’, based on a Polish eyewitness account, reported that the ‘Hitlerites’ were killing Poles and Jews by the trainload and making them into soap. One eyewitness claimed to have been in another camp where priests and rabbis were housed together.®° Quite a few articles rebutted press reports of antisemitism in the Polish army. A correspondent who had visited Polish troops in Britain reported good relations between Polish and Jewish soldiers.®* An editorial commented on a public letter by a Polish Jewish soldier from Latin America denying that any problem existed. Gazeta Polska also reported that Polish rabbis in Palestine had expressed thanks for Polish assistance.®° An editorial, ‘Catholics and Antisemitism’, cited public condemnation of antisemitism by Catholic lay people and clerics.®© Friendliness on the part of the Catholic clergy towards Jews was claimed in the humour column, which told of a priest who warned his bishop that an elderly charity recipient was Jewish; the bishop then doubled the contribution.®”

After Liberation, FJuly 1944—May 1945 Jewish issues faded from the agenda as Gazeta Polska concentrated on Polish suffering during the war. “The History of Sophie from Auschwitz’ gave the account of

a Polish woman who suffered and escaped from the camp. An article headed ‘Polish Losses during the Present War’ reported that 1 million Polish soldiers and g million civilians had died; these figures included 3 million Jewish deaths and 2 million Polish, 3 million Poles deported to Germany, 1.25 million Poles deported to the Soviet Union, and 200,000 Poles killed in the 1944 Warsaw insurrection.

The number of dead at Auschwitz was put at 4 million.2° Two articles were directly critical of Jews in minor ways: Gazeta Polska credulously reported that the Germans had created a Jewish unit and supplied the soldiers with prayer books,

while an article entitled ‘What Do Jews Want?’ carried complaints from Polish Jewish groups that American Jews had not done enough to help.®° In general, Gazeta Polska’s coverage of the Holocaust was considerably briefer than Czas’s and more devoted to specifically Polish concerns. The former provided

the basic facts about ghettoization and murder, often emphasizing that Poles helped Jews. There was much less coverage of pledges of civic equality between Jews and Poles after the war than in Czas. 82 Gazeta Polska, 1 Mar. 1944. 83 Gazeta Polska, 5 Apr. 1944. 84 Gazeta Polska, 3 May 1944. 85 Gazeta Polska, 21 June 1944. 86 Gazeta Polska, 23 Apr. 1944. 87 Gazeta Polska, 12 Sept. 1944. 88 Gazeta Polska, 4 Apr., 16 May 1945. 89 Gazeta Polska, 10 Jan. 1945.

The Holocaust in Winnipeg’s Press 197 THE JEWISH POST AND YIDISHE VORT Persecution, September 1939—fune 1942 Jewish newspapers paid close attention to developments in Poland from a specifi-

cally Jewish point of view. Comment was generally restricted to matters that affected Jews, and little or no background information appeared about the Polish situation in general or the situation of Catholic Poles.

On the eve of war the Winnipeg fewish Post, which, unlike Yidishe vort, appeared in English, expressed fears that war would result in the ‘complete

| destruction’ of the Jewish people in central and eastern Europe. Little did the editors know how true their words would turn out to be.9° While the Post hastened to report offers of assistance to Poland proffered by the Federation of Polish Jews

in America, it reminded Canadian Jews that they were British subjects whose efforts should go primarily to the Canadian war effort.?! The Post reported the mistreatment of Jewish civilians in Poland extensively and concluded that ‘less than half of the Jewish population of Poland will survive the holocaust’. This appears to be the earliest use of the word ‘holocaust’ to describe the fate of Jews in the Second World War; its use was not repeated.®* Reports of the Nazis’ creating a

Jewish ‘reservation’ near Lublin brought the observation that ‘History repeats itself, but never in exactly in the same way.’ The editors recounted with approval the autonomous position of Jews in early modern Polish history, but called the Nazi plans a “diabolical scheme’ to rob the Jews and expel them from the expanded

Third Reich.”? A lead article in December 1939 reported the death of 250,000 Jews, and an editorial a month later asked why the world was ignoring the Polish Jews.*4

News from Poland inexplicably disappeared from the Jewish Post for almost a year, but an annual review in September 1941 noted that Poland was once again ‘the source of harrowing news’. The Post finally reported the creation of the large, walled Warsaw ghetto and extensive restrictions on Jews in other parts of the country.?° Reports from London said, ‘Nazis “Use Typhus” to Exterminate Jews’; one out of six residents of the Warsaw ghetto had already died of the disease.*°

Even more ominously, a headline announced, ‘Fate of European Jewry in

90 Jewish Post, 31 Aug. 19309. 91 Jewish Post, 7 Sept. 1939. 92 Jewish Post, 28 Sept. 1939; J. Lukacs, The Hitler of History (New York, 1997), 177, reports that the

word was probably first used in March 1944. The Jewish Virtual Library attributes the word ‘Holocaust’ to Morris Cohen (1944): . Yad Vashem identifies the word ‘Holocaust’ as coming into common usage in the 1950s:

, accessed 27

June 2005. °3 Jewish Post, 14 Dec. 1939. 94 Jewish Post, 21 Dec. 1939, 25 Jan. 1940.

% Jewish Post, 16 Sept. 1941. °& Jewish Post, 29 Jan. 1942.

198 Daniel Stone Suspense, Diplomats Assert’. Sources in Stockholm reported that the Germans’ spring offensive in Russia could create ‘the largest prison in history’ as 5 million Jews would be placed in a so-called Jewish state ‘enclosed by barbed wire and machine gun nests and shut off completely from communication with the outside

world’. This would ‘realize the ultimate aim of the Nazi anti-Jewish policy, namely, of ridding Europe of the last Jew’.?’ Threats to Jews in Hungary, France, and Lithuania were also reported.”® Most reports in the Jewish Post emphasized good relations with ethnic Poles, although concerns persisted over antisemitism. Good relations started at home. An editorial celebrated inter-ethnic harmony as Winnipeg’s Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish young men joined the Winnipeg Light Infantry regiment ‘out of a sense of loyalty to their part of the city’.2? Abroad, the Post noted the ‘intensification of [Nazi] hate propaganda among the Poles’, but focused on good relations between Poles and Jews in the government-in-exile. A long editorial entitled ‘Poland’s Pledge’ reflected a conscious decision to consider past Polish—Jewish conflicts as ‘water under the bridge’. The editors preferred to ‘look forward to the future and place our faith in recent actions of the present Polish Government’, which pledged to create ‘a reborn Poland’ with ‘equal rights . . . in regard to nationality, race, or creed’. The editors welcomed the appointment of the first Jewish cabinet member, Dr Herman Lieberman, as minister of justice, and the refusal to place members of the antisemitic National Democratic Party in cabinet.1°° The newspaper suggested approvingly that the repeal of the 1938 law depriving Jews living abroad of citizenship and the discussions over a possible Polish—Czech federation pointed towards improvements in the Jewish situation in Poland.1°! Soon, however, an editorial asked, ‘Is Poland Sincere?’, as the admission of National Democratic members to the Polish cabinet ‘tempered . . . the first flush of enthusiasm’ over Polish pledges of equality. The editors called on Prime Minister Sikorski to explain.1©? Similarly, conflicts were reported within the government-in-exile between National Democrats and Socialists over equality for Jews in post-war Poland.'°? Nevertheless, the publication of a quaint legend in the annual Passover issue (which was over 100 pages) suggested a generally favourable attitude towards Poland. The story, “King for a Night: The Jew Who Once Ruled Poland’, told of Saul Wahl, who became

king of Poland during an interregnum because of an apocryphal decree that Poland must never be without a king. During his brief reign the Jewish king decreed that the murder of a Jew would be punished with the same severity as the murder of a noble. The editors commented ingenuously that the kingship might be legendary and that ‘few of Poland’s Christian historians mention the episode’.*°*

97 Jewish Post, 12 Feb. 1942. 98 Jewish Post, 30 Apr., 7, 30 May 1942. 99 Jewish Post, 26 Aug. 1941. Winnipeg’s North End was a noted district of east European settle-

ment. 100 Jewish Post, 16 Sept., 2 Oct. 1941. 101 Jewish Post, 18 Dec. 1941, 22, 29 Jan. 1942. 102 Jewish Post, 5 Feb. 1942.

103 Jewish Post, 4 June 1942. 104 Jewish Post, 2 Apr. 1942.

The Holocaust in Winnipeg’s Press 199 More seriously, the Jewish Post reported the high degree of participation of Jews in General Anders’ army and in other Polish forces. An article by a Major H. Melcer praised the Polish government for making it possible for Jewish soldiers in the Polish army in Britain to attend religious services and for providing Jewish military chaplains. He concluded that ‘the Jews in the Polish army, together with their Christian brethren, believe in the victory of justice and in the resurrection of a free, great Poland’.1°°

Mass Murder, fuly 1942—fuly 1944 The Jewish Post carried the dramatic announcement by the Polish government in July 1942 that the Nazis were carrying out a ‘plan to slaughter practically the whole Jewish population of Poland’ along with news of a protest rally in Madison Square Garden in New York.'°° Subsequently, world leaders made public statements and American Jews planned a Day for Polish Jewry on 1 September.!°’ Winnipeg ran its own protest in October, at which the Polish consul, Dr Juliusz Szygowsk1, spoke along with the premier of Manitoba, John Bracken, the consuls of other countries, Protestant and Catholic clerics, and trade union leaders; a written message from

the Canadian prime minister, Mackenzie King, provided the Post’s headline, ‘Prime Minister Speaks Out Against Nazi Bestiality’.‘°° Detailed information about the deportations from the Warsaw ghetto had not arrived, but an article by Dr Henryk Szoszkies, a prominent Warsaw Jewish refugee in the West, celebrated the ‘martyr of the Warsaw ghetto’ Adam Czerniakow, who had committed suicide rather than accede to Nazi demands. Even more significantly, he reported that the Germans were demanding 100,000 Warsaw Jews for deportation to an ‘undesig-

nated area’, which he knew to mean ‘destroy[ing them] ruthlessly by means of poison gas’./°? Further details and protests followed.’° Additional reports from London increased the estimated number of dead to 2 million Polish Jews, and mentioned participation by ‘notoriously antisemitic Ukrainian and Latvian hooli-

gans’.1 The Jewish Post reported that the Polish government-in-exile ‘took the initiative in calling a meeting of the foreign ministers of all exiled governments in London to consider ways of stopping the unprecedented mass slaughter of helpless men, women and children’. They were rewarded with assurances of assistance from the

United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, while the United Nations undertook to ‘discuss measures of rescuing Jews from Nazis’.1‘2 News of the Warsaw ghetto uprising appeared in the Yidishe vort in late June 1943, but unaccountably was not published by the Jewish Post until September.*!? In addition to

105 Jewish Post, 21 May 1942. 106 Jewish Post, 16 July 1942. 107 Jewish Post, 23 July, 20 Aug. 1942. 108 Jewish Post, 15 Oct. 1942.

109 Thid. 110 Jewish Post, 3 Dec. 1942. 111 Jewish Post, 10 Dec. 1942. 12 Jewish Post, 17, 31 Dec. 1942, 28 Jan. 1943. 113° Vidishe vort, 25 June 1943; Jewish Post, 2 Sept. 1943.

200 Daniel Stone reporting the tragedy in Poland, the Jewish Post reported problems in Vichy France, Yugoslavia, and the Netherlands.'!* The Vatican was praised for ‘giving all

possible aid to Jews in occupied countries’, while antisemitism in Quebec was condemned.1!° Poland received mostly positive comments 1n 1943. The Jewish Post gave editorial-page placement to an article by Wiadyslaw Sikorski ‘pledging equality of treatment for the Jews in post-war Poland’. The Manitoba legislator Morris A. Gray

cited Sikorski approvingly while describing the plight of Polish Jewry, adding, ‘The Polish people, because of their own terrible suffering, know the story first hand.’"'© The Post reported Sikorski’s radio broadcast to Poland praising the fighters of the Warsaw ghetto uprising and expressing pleasure that ‘Poles are lending their aid to the Jews in the ghetto.’""’ The death of General Sikorski was reported

in the Yidishe vort, while the Jewish Post mentioned it in the context of his memorial service, conducted by Rabbi Stephen Wise, leader of the American Jewish Congress. Wise praised Sikorski for viewing ‘the Jews of Poland not as tolerated guests but as one of the groups which together made for a great future for the Polish Republic’.‘® In September the Jewish Post published posthumously an

article by Sikorski, reprinted from the monthly magazine of the Reform Jewish movement, denying that the Polish government-in-exile tolerated fascists and calling pro-Jewish sentiment in Poland ‘deep-rooted’.

Furthermore, an editorial in the Jewish Post entitled ‘Canadian Poles Speak’ expressed ‘sincere satisfaction’ over a resolution passed by the Federation of Polish Societies of Canada condemning ‘systematic acts of bestiality and experimentation being committed by these forces [the Nazis] against the Jewish people’. The editorial reminded Winnipeg Jews that these friendly sentiments were consistent

with statements made by the government-in-exile over several years. It averred that ‘the suffering of the Poles under the Nazi tyranny has been as great as that of the Jews’, and expressed confidence that ‘their common suffering and their common heroism has done much to bind the Jew and Pole closer together’.1!9 Later the editors acknowledged a ‘debt of gratitude to the Polish government-in-exile for its efforts to inform the people of the United Nations on the plight and suffering of

the Jews in Nazi-dominated Poland’. It also noted that the Polish Telegraph Agency issued a special Jewish bulletin providing extensive information on Jews; only the Norwegian Press Agency received similar praise. The Post expressed disappointment that Canadian newspapers had ‘never . . . given more than passing notice to items of Jewish heroism and Jewish martyrdom’.‘2° Not all comments were positive, however. A strange report in the fewish Post headed ‘Self-Styled Polish King in England Opens Up Anti-Jewish Campaign’ 114 Jewish Post, 22 Oct. 1942, 4 Feb. 1943. 15 Jewish Post, 18 Feb., 20 Apr., 20 June 1944.

116 Jewish Post, 1 Feb. 1943. 117 Jewish Post, 20 May 1943. 18 YVidishe vort, 6 July 1943; Jewish Post, 22 July 1943. 19 Jewish Post, 2 Sept. 1943. 120 Jewish Post, 6 Jan. 1944.

The Holocaust in Winnipeg’s Press 201 signalled a more negative turn. The article concerned remarks of Count Wladystaw Potocki to the Polish Royalist Association in London.'*! More significantly, Jewish groups complained about the absence of representatives of Jewish political parties in the restructured Polish cabinet in London. The Post reported alleged mistreatment of Jews in a Polish settlement in Mexico and urged the Polish government to investigate, citing a remark from the Jewish Daily Forward in New York that ‘all liberals and democrats will take up the cudgels for a democratic and progressive Poland but not for a reactionary and antisemitic Poland’.'2? The Post failed to report the Katyn forest massacre, and Yidishe vort criticized the London Poles for showing the same ‘lack of reality’ in its response to the Soviet Union that had caused the partitions. It suspected that a Nazi plot had deluded the Poles into taking a position that would undermine the war effort.'*° The paper expressed hope that Poland and the Soviet Union could be reconciled. ‘** Some of the goodwill between Poles and Jews was clearly eroded by the controversy that erupted in 1944 concerning Jewish soldiers in the Polish army stationed in Britain. Jews were reported to have fought heroically in the Polish army, but an

editorial related that 600 Jewish soldiers in Britain had requested transfer from : Polish to British units ‘in order to escape the antisemitic atmosphere they encounter[ed]’, and 3,500 more in the Middle East were requesting transfer to British or Jewish units.'*° Churchill was reported to have intervened with the Polish authorities in London, and a Polish government commission including Jewish members was appointed.'”° Nevertheless, controversy continued as Jewish soldiers who had been charged with desertion when they left their units to arrange transfer outside regular channels remained in their cells, rather than accept a presi-

dential pardon and return to their Polish units.12” An editorial praised Polish politicians for their promises of Jewish equality in post-war Poland, but said that the actions of Polish military officials had ‘shaken the confidence of many who believed that the aims of the Polish authorities were sincere’ .1?®

After Liberation, July 1944-—May 1945 With the expulsion of the German army in the second half of 1944 by the Red Army and the installation of the communist-dominated government in Lublin, Soviet authorities became the primary source of information about Jews, and the Polish government-in-exile practically disappeared from the consciousness of the Jewish newspapers. Stories of Jewish survivors and additional details of the Holocaust became lead issues. Jewish relief agencies began to send goods to survivors in Poland through Russia with the assistance of the Soviet authorities, and the Jewish Telegraph Agency reported information supplied by the communistdominated Polish Committee of National Liberation about the numbers and needs

121 Jewish Post, 15 July 1943. 122 Jewish Post, 2 Dec. 1943. 123 Vidishe vort, 20 Apr. 1943. 124 Vidishe vort, 21 May 1943. 125 Jewish Post, 20 Apr., 8 June 1944. 126 Jewish Post, 18 May 1944. 127 Tbid. 128 Thid.

202 Daniel Stone of Polish Jews.'22 A Moscow correspondent provided an eyewitness account of the Majdanek death camp from a trip organized by the Soviet authorities.‘°° Another Moscow correspondent provided the first eyewitness report of the Jews in liberated Lédz.131 A Zionist perspective dominated coverage in Winnipeg’s Jewish press as the war ended. Articles and editorials in 1943 had started to call for the emigration of Jews to Palestine, and coverage increased late in 1944. Massive Jewish emigration

to Palestine was predicted.'°* The Post supported the Yalta conference because good relations with the Soviet Union made emigration possible, and it ignored the entrenchment of communism in Poland.'** An editorial that linked Yalta with the forthcoming United Nations meeting in San Francisco only discussed Jewish issues and concluded that ‘conditions in Europe have no chance of improvement until the refugee question is settled, and this means rehabilitation and immigration for the Jews’.'*4 A concluding editorial entitled ‘Victory’ generalized from difficult

Jewish experiences in the liberated Netherlands and France, and concluded that ‘in every country, a shattered nation struggling to regain its feet has no place for the thousand-year stranger within its gates’. The editors thanked God for victory over Hitler and prayed ‘to make that victory real’ by building ‘a permanent place for our people among the nations of mankind’ through the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.1*5

In general, the Jewish Post and Yidishe vort presented extensive information on the Holocaust in Poland as part of their overall Holocaust coverage and interest in a Zionist solution to European problems. Their reportage was generally sympathetic to the Polish government in London because it provided the major source of information about Polish Jews, possessed a modest ability to assist Polish Jews, and promised to provide equality for Jews after the war. An underlying sympathy for Poland can be inferred from scattered articles praising ‘Old Poland’ for its tolerance. They firmly believed that a less antisemitic Poland would emerge after the war, although the acceptance of National Democratic ministers in the Polish gov-

ernment in London and the controversy surrounding Jews in the Polish army caused the Jewish Post to temper its enthusiasm. However, the power of the Soviet Union and its Polish allies after liberation led the Post to alter its focus. It expressed no sympathy with Soviet policies or ideals, but recognized the need to maintain

working relations in order to improve the conditions of Jews remaining within Poland and encourage their emigration to Palestine. It showed no interest 1n the Polish state and the situation of non-Jewish Poles. 129 Jewish Post, t Sept., 19, 26 Oct., 16 Nov. 1944; 15, 22 Feb. 1945.

130 Jemish Post, 30 Nov. 1944. 131 Jemish Post, 4 Feb. 1945. 132 Jemish Post, 28 Jan., 1, 18 Feb. 1943; 9, 16 Nov., 31 Dec. 1944.

133° Jewish Post, 4 Feb. 1945. 134° Jewish Post, 26 Apr. 1945. 135 Jemish Post, 10 May 1945.

The Holocaust in Winnipeg’s Press 203 CONCLUSION In contrast with much of the North American press, Winnipeg’s Polish and Jewish newspapers presented extensive information on the Holocaust in Poland. Polish news sources in London provided most of the information, although later in the

war Jewish papers also drew on the Worldwide News Service, a Jewish news agency. Polish papers considered the news significant because the events affected Polish citizens (or inhabitants of ‘Old Poland’), and Jewish newspapers considered

it important because the victims were Jewish. Some differences of emphasis appeared. Czas provided the most thorough coverage of all these newspapers and welcomed the prospect of equality between Poles and Jews in post-war Poland, while Gazeta Polska emphasized help given to Jews by the Catholic Church and

ethnic Poles. The Jewish newspapers showed little interest in Catholic Poles, despite their mistreatment at German hands, or in the future of the Polish state. They demonstrated residual sympathy for Poland based on ‘Old Polish’ toleration and the London government-in-exile’s promise of equality for Jews in post-war Poland, but they quickly abandoned the London Poles after liberation when Soviet

domination made it clear that the communists would determine the fate of Holocaust survivors. Winnipeg’s Poles and Jews avoided criticizing each other, except in occasional articles with little follow-up. The Polish papers ignored issues that have become commonplace in the post-war world such as the behaviour of Jewish communists in Soviet-annexed Poland between 1939 and 1941 and anti-Polish attitudes among Jews. Similarly, the Jewish papers published no allegations about Poles assisting

Germans in rounding up Jews and few complaints about Polish antisemitism. However, coverage of the Holocaust in the ethnic press between 1939 and 1945

does not signal that the old antipathies had completely disappeared. Recent disputes over the Holocaust indicate that in Winnipeg, as elsewhere, underlying tensions in Polish—Jewish relations persist. Nevertheless, for a few years at least, antagonisms were buried in the common war effort.

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The Necessity of “Bieganskr A Shamed and Horrified World Seeks a Scapegoat DANUSHA V. GOSKA I was still full of rage and darkness and pain. I felt like murder in my heart... If I knew who was truly guilty, probably nothing would have stopped me. LOLA POTOK

Holocaust survivor, commandant of a post-war concentration camp for Germans in Poland

Someone, after all, has to be guilty of the Holocaust. We have to hate someone, and we’ve already made up with the Germans. Israeli Holocaust tourist in Poland

THIS chapter hypothesizes one reason why, in folk and popular culture, Poles and Poland have been singled out for particular blame for the Holocaust, and why Poles

are often falsely depicted as having enjoyed a relatively easy time during the Second World War. One reason for the recurrence of the ‘antisemitic Polak’ motif in folk and popular narratives, this chapter argues, is a pre-existing, ready-to-hand stereotype, which this chapter refers to using the shorthand “Biegansk1’, the name of a prototypically antisemitic Polish character in the American novel Sophie’s Choice.

Although convincing Bieganski images occur in folk and popular narratives that

underplay or do not mention Polish suffering during the Second World War, historical research does not corroborate such narratives: Poles and Poland were victimized by the Holocaust. The historian Michael Steinlauf, the son of Polish Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, has written that Poles, ‘after the Jews and the

Gypsies [were] the most relentlessly tormented national group in Hitler’s Europe’. Auschwitz was built expressly in order to destroy potential leaders of the Polish people, for example teachers and activists. For almost the first two years of its existence most of its inmates were arrested and detained as Poles. Estimates of non-Jewish Poles killed by the Nazis run between 2 and 3 million. Approximately 1M. Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (Syracuse, NY, 1997), p. X.

206 Danusha V. Goska 3 million Polish Jews were murdered; their presence in Polish life was all but erased. One estimate of non-Jewish Poles enslaved by the Nazis puts the number at 2 million.” Polish slave labourers in Germany had to wear a purple patch emblazoned with the letter P. By one estimate, 250,000 Polish children were taken from

their parents and relocated to Germany to be raised as Germans because their allegedly German traits revealed German ancestry.* The Nazis erased Polish villages; men were killed, leaders sent to concentration camps, houses burned. An incomplete post-war count put the number of such villages at 299.* As agreed in the 1939 Molotov—Ribbentrop pact, the Soviets invaded from the east as the Nazis invaded from the west. By some measures, the initial phase of the Soviet invasion was worse. ‘Very conservative estimates show that [between 1939 and 1941]| the Soviets killed or drove to their deaths three or four times as many people as the Nazis from a population half the size of that under German jurisdiction.”°

The Polish Armia Krajowa (AK), the largest underground army in Europe, played a vital role in communicating to Britain and the United States the reality of the Holocaust. Poles made the first, essential contributions to the decoding of Enigma and the breaking of Nazi encoded messages. The Allies’ ability to read Nazi messages has been cited as crucial to their victory.° AK intelligence provided the Allies with the location of V1 flying bomb development and V2 rocket development. Captured V2 rockets were delivered to London for investigation. In addition to the over 5,000 Polish rescuers honoured at Yad Vashem, the largest of any national group, more Poles than will ever be counted rescued Jews from the Nazis,

under the most challenging set of conditions in Europe. For example, although nuns were themselves the targets of both the Nazis and the Soviets, two-thirds of female religious communities helped Jews.’

Despite these facts, in many influential folk and popular North American Holocaust narratives Poles and Poland are not victims of the Holocaust, but rather are either its perpetrators or its approving witnesses. This motif remains popular in spite of constant protest and attempts to correct it by prominent historians and activists—Polish, Jewish, and others. In the American novelist William Styron’s critically and popularly successful novel Sophie’s Choice (1979), Professor Bieganski is a stereotypically evil and anti2 B. Meier, ‘Poland Seeks Role in Fund for Nazi Forced Laborers’, New York Times, 15 Feb. 1999, A3.

3 W. J. Lukaszewsk1, ‘Polish Losses in the Second World War’, Sarmatian Review, 18/2 (Apr. 1998),

. 4 N. Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, ii: 1795 to the Present (New York, 1982), 455. > J. T. Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton, 1988), 229. 6 P. Wrobel, The Devil’s Playground: Poland in World War Two (Montreal, 2000). 7 E. Kurek-Lesik, ‘The Conditions of Admittance and the Social Background of Jewish Children Saved by Women’s Religious Orders in Poland from 1939-1945’, Polin, 3 (1988), 246.

The Necessity of ‘Bieganskt’ 207 semitic Polish character who violates any standard of historical or essential truth.® It is Bieganski, Sophie’s father, a Pole, rather than any Nazi, who conceives of the Holocaust.? In this, he is typical of the Poles in Styron’s book: Poland ‘practically

| invented anti-Semitism’, one Polish character announces.*° Poles are not just murderers; Poland is not just a site of great evil; they are disgusting, characterized as ‘crazy Polack’, ‘schmutzige Polin’, and ‘Dreck-Polack’.“' In contrast, Styron’s Nazis can be humane, polite, and appealing.” Thus the name ‘Bieganski’ is used in this chapter as one would use ‘Sambo’ or ‘Shylock’. Bieganski-like images and narratives occur in a plethora of sources. The following examples represent just a few of many similar depictions of Poles in a variety of popular and scholarly media. James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword won the 2001 National Jewish Book Award; Beliefnet.com named it the best spiritual book of the year. In his back-cover com-

ments, scholar Garry Wills calls the book ‘searingly honest’; author Eugene Kennedy identifies it as ‘an astonishing work of historical research’. Poland is essential to Carroll and his book; Carroll announces that he will ‘remain . . . at the foot of the cross at Auschwitz .. . throughout the telling of this story’, the story of

Catholic antisemitism. The cross is appropriate, he says, because ‘Polish Catholicism is particularly inclined to define itself around the idea of its victimhood.’ Jews, in Carroll’s text, are not ‘inclined to define themselves around the idea of victimhood’; in Carroll’s book, Jews really do suffer. In order to support his use of a Polish cross erected at Auschwitz as the central symbol for his entire book about the genuine horrors of Catholic antisemitism, Carroll plays with the facts of Polish history, Polish self-definition—presenting a skewed reading of the Polish

image of the messiah'’—and Polish suffering. In the excerpt quoted below, through verbal legerdemain, Carroll leads his readers to believe that only 150 Poles died at Auschwitz, compared to a million and a half Jews who died there: In Poland, the cross at the death camp wall was seen by some Catholics as a commemoration of the many Catholics who had died there; in the disputed field itself, it was said, the Nazis had executed some 150 Polish Catholics. But were they to overshadow the memory of about a million and a half Jews who died at Auschwitz?"*

In a lengthy scene of a 1999 PBS documentary, John Paul IT: The Millennial Pope, carefree Poles are depicted riding a merry-go-round while the Holocaust 8 See e.g. J. R. Krzyzanowski, ‘What’s Wrong with Sophie’s Choice?’, Polish American Studies (Spring 1983), 64-72; T. J. Napierkowski, ‘Sophie’s Choice: The Other Holocaust, Revisited, Revised,

and Renewed’, Polish American Studies, 40/1 (Spring 1983), 73~87; T. Radzitowski, ‘The “Final Solution” for Southern Guilt’, Polish American Studies, 40/1 (Spring 1983), 59-63.

9 W. Styron, Sophie’s Choice (New York, 1979), 306. 10 Thid. 575. 4 Styron, quoted in Krzyzanowski, ‘What’s Wrong with Sophie’s Choice?’, 71. 12 Krzyzanowski, ‘What’s Wrong with Sophie’s Choice?’, 70; Napierkowski, ‘Sophie’s Choice’,

81-2, 84. 13 J. Carrol, Constantine’s Sword (Boston, 2001), 60. 14 Tbid. 230.

— 208 , Danusha Ke Goska takes place before their eyes. After viewing this documentary, a professor of religion commented to me, ‘It was devastating. It exposed how the Poles did nothing while the Jews were being killed.’ In 2000 Andrea Peyser, a New York Post columnist, wrote a column entitled “There is No Way to Apologize for the Holocaust’, directed at Pope John Paul II, who, as a Pole, it was suggested, ought to apologize for the Holocaust, but cannot. “The pope grew up in Poland at a time when too many of his countrymen’, the column explained, ‘collaborated with killers.’ ‘After all, how can any man apologize for the slaughter of six million people—most of whom were put to death in camps located in his native country—without sounding hollow? And how can any Jew accept such an apology?’ Peyser asks, never mentioning the Poles who were also ‘slaughtered’ by German Nazis, whom Peyser does not mention in her article, either as the authors of the Holocaust or as persecutors of Poles.!° ‘Bieganski’ is disseminated even in a popular book meant to be all about dialy, a Polish Jewish bread.'® The Bialy Eaters purports to be a heart-warming memoir of a food, the bialy, and ‘a lost world’—the life of the Jews who once lived in Poland. The book’s cover features a sepia-toned photo of a pair of hands holding a crusty, flour-dusted bialy. The jacket flap announces the book as a ‘tribute to the human spirit’, capable of ‘delighting everyone’. The book’s author, Mimi Sheraton, self-

identifies as being of Polish Jewish descent.'’ The jacket flap announces that Sheraton found, in Poland, a place of ‘utter desolation’. On page 2 Sheraton reported that she found in Bialystok, a city in north-eastern Poland, a ‘deserted town square’, a place of a ‘shadowy sense of loss .. . empty streets . .. ominously haunting’. Bialystok is not deserted; Poles inhabit it. The Poles Sheraton did see were un1formly debased specimens. She described ‘jeering and pillaging’ antisemites and ‘Polish punks’,'® a ‘grumpy, half asleep, half besotted man’ who ‘grumbled’ and ‘rumpled his hair, hiking up unbelted pants, and grunting’.‘? This man went out of his way to help Sheraton; adjectives like ‘helpful’ were not used to describe him. Sheraton’s Poland is ‘dreary’, ‘drab’, ‘gray’, with ‘sagging carved wood cottages

... the only signs of human life were mushroom hunters at the roadsides’ and ‘crudely built brick houses . . . ramshackle wood cabins . . . [a] grimy white warehouse’ and bad-smelling buildings.2° The buildings smelled bad because Poles were cooking in them. Elsewhere in the book Sheraton made clear that the smell of Jews cooking Jewish food, using the same ingredients as the bad-smelling food being cooked by Poles, was ‘nurturing’.”! In stark contrast to the smelly, drunken, grunting Poles of The Bialy Eaters are the book’s Jews. Unlike Poles, who have never suffered and only cause others to 15 A. Peyser, “There is No Way to Apologize for the Holocaust’, New York Post, 14 Mar. 2000, 2. 16 M. Sheraton, The Bialy Eaters: The Story of a Bread and a Lost World (New York, 2000).

17 Ibid. 18 Thid. 16. 21 19 Tbid. Thid. 79. 24. 20 Tbid.9.22-3, 24, 27.

The Necessity of “Bregansk1’ 209 suffer, Jews have suffered, and yet are paragons who never cause others to suffer. The seventh word in the book’s text is ‘Auschwitz’. This word, of course, situates every Jew mentioned in the book as a survivor of genocide. When Jews in the book speak of hating ‘Polaks’ and never forgiving them, these Jews’ hatred and bigotry, and their repeated use of the slur ‘Polak’,?” are rendered understandable. After all, as the book tells us, Poland is a ‘cursed land’ of cursed people. One must not ‘forgive’ these Poles.?? The immediate invocation of Auschwitz serves to render these Jewish survivors’ triumphs all the more impressive. These Jews are, indeed, part of, as the dust-jacket puts it, the book’s celebration of ‘astonishing endurance’. Poles, in Sheraton’s narrative, are not understood to be victims; their survival is not a celebration of anything. The Bialy Eaters tells its readers that Auschwitz was built in Poland because ‘the Poles were partners in our destruction’ .** The shabby

Poles Sheraton disdained were not positioned as evidence of ‘astonishing endurance’, though they and their parents had survived three of the most devastating invasions and occupations of the twentieth century: the Soviets, the Nazis, and then, again, the Soviets. Sheraton mentions antisemitic Poles; she does not mention Jews who betrayed their Polish neighbours to Soviet occupiers, though such incidents did occur. Such Jews were not, in Sheraton’s picture, ‘partners in destruction’ as Poles who betrayed Jews were.*° Sheraton does not even mention Jews living in Poland today, who are presumably, as are their Polish fellow nationals, ‘shabby’. Sheraton describes only Jews who are paragons of humanity: one has ‘worldwide’ financial influence, another is a Nobel prizewinner, and another is a best-selling author, friend of Elizabeth Taylor, and adviser to American presidents.”° Folk histories of the Holocaust, as well as those found in popular and scholarly

culture, often identify Poland as a genocidally, exclusively, and essentially anti-

semitic country that escaped the Second World War relatively unscathed. In autumn 2000, as part of my dissertation research at Indiana University, I interviewed American adults of Jewish descent. Many, though not all, of my informants—while, as revealed in a questionnaire, knowing little about Poland, or even about the history of Jews in Poland—reported at least some of the following incorrect narrative details as if true: that Poland as a nation and individual Poles significantly accepted Nazism, significantly participated in the Holocaust, and significantly escaped suffering. In these folk histories ‘Poland’ is a metonym for ‘the Holocaust’ and ‘Pole’ is a synonym for ‘antisemite’. This identification is an ineradicable stigma. When asked about travel to Poland today, most admitted that the only association they had with Poland was the Holocaust and attendant negative responses to Poles. Several times the same informant who associated Poland exclusively with the Holocaust spoke enthusiastically about possible travel to more desirable European destinations, for example Germany and Austria, which do not

22 Thid. 82, 93, 125-6. 23 Tbid. 149. 24 Tbid. 25 Tbid. 26 Ibid. 76, 95, 98-9.

210 Danusha V. Goska suffer the same permanent stigmatization. In these respects, this research agrees with previous research by Jack Kugelmass.”? ‘Robert’ was typical.2° When asked for any associations he had with Poles or Poland, he recounted this anecdote: I found myself marching one time when I was in Washington D.C. when I was about 13 or 14 during Solidarity, when they were fighting for independence and whatever his name was. It was a school trip. I just went. I was dragged along. I did the march, but then I left because I was really not interested in the Poles having their freedom. I was a bitter 13 year old at the Poles.

I asked him why he was bitter: They turned in the Jews, and the concentration camps. The Poles gave in to the whole Nazi thing without a lot of fight. To save themselves, basically, the government and everybody. The concentration camps were set up there, and no one remembering them. Same with the Germans.

After being asked, ‘You’re ona T'V game show. You’ve just won an all-expensespaid, round-trip ticket to Poland. Your reaction?’ ‘Go to Auschwitz’ were the first

words out of Linda’s mouth. ‘I think of concentration camps’, she said. Her response fell into the majority of responses, most of which associated Poland with the Holocaust and with little else. Jeff refused to go. When asked the game show question, he replied that his thought would be ‘Who do I know who’d really enjoy having this gift?’ In other words, as Jeff explained, he would want to give the ticket away. ‘I might go to Poland just to see if I could see where my mother’s family were

from. Probably horrify myself by going to look at some of the concentration camps. I don’t know much about Polish people. Anybody complicit in the Holocaust is not on my most favourite person’s group. Then again, the people who are responsible are probably already dead. But I have no great desire to revisit those horrible scenes.’

Darren admitted that he had no positive information about Poland to counter his negative associations. When asked his likely reaction after winning a trip to Poland, Darren said, It’s not the kind of place that I would normally think of that I would ideally want to go. What immediately came to my mind was: What am I going to see, what am I going to do, what’s in Poland? I think of Poland and I think of ghettos where Jews were forced to, you know, were pushed into little ghettos and then these terrible things were done to them that I know too well about. Meaning, basically the genocide, the torture, the slavery, the forced work. The Holocaust. That’s what I think of when I think of Poland.

Julius was one of several informants who associated images of Poland in the Second World War with stereotypes of Poles as stupid. He told this joke: How did 27 J. Kugelmass, ‘The Rites of the Tribe: The Meaning of Poland for American Jewish Tourists’,

YIVO Annual, 21 (1993), 395-45. 28 Interviewees’ names are pseudonyms.

The Necessity of ‘Bieganskt’ 211 the Germans beat the Polish in the Second World War? After the Polish threw grenades at them the Germans pulled the pins and threw them back. Julius seems unaware of the neutral term in English for a Polish person, ‘Pole’, and, to avoid using the derogatory, but familiar, ‘Polak’ must resort to using the grammatically incorrect adjective form, ‘Polish’.

CHALLENGES INHERENT IN THE HOLOCAUST NARRATIVE The story of the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews is one of the most nightmarish narratives an audience will ever encounter. The Nazis were compulsive recordkeepers. Detailed descriptions of their means of torture and photographs of their torture victims are readily available. In the traditional response, and certainly the response most storytellers work for, confronted with a narrative, the audience identifies with the story’s protagonist and anticipates his victory, and opposes the designs of the antagonist and anticipates his vanquishing. This response is heightened when one is confronted with as high-impact a true narrative as the Holocaust. Most audiences do not want to be associated with the perpetrator. Given the systematic attempts at dehumanization and isolation from human

community to which the Nazis subjected their victims, audiences often have trouble identifying with typical Holocaust victims, who were often bald, cowering, skeletal, and vermin-ridden, and, of course, doomed. Steven Spielberg famously got round this dilemma in his critically acclaimed and financially successful movie Schindler’s List (1993), which has been called Hollywood’s first serious mainstream

direct treatment of the Holocaust. Spielberg did not make typical Jewish Holocaust victims the protagonists of that ground-breaking treatment. His film was not built around hounded victims who died a horrific death. Rather, a sexy, wealthy, glamorous and kindly Christian German Nazi, Oskar Schindler, was the protagonist. Audiences could identify with that protagonist. Even children of Holocaust survivors have trouble witnessing film evidence of what the Holocaust was really like. While watching a film shown at Auschwitz that

featured footage of actual victims at the time of their liberation, Julie Salamon reported: ‘One thought went through my head repeatedly: My father and mother were good people, decent people. I felt desperate, as though I were trying to believe

what my parents had taught me despite what I was seeing—that decency was possible and they were proof.’2°

Any Holocaust narrative, and any audience that confronts it, faces the same dilemma. ‘The average audience member will desire to define themselves as clearly

opposed to the perpetrator, and perhaps even as thoroughly different from the victim. Those who unwillingly come to see themselves in Holocaust perpetrators or victims may be less likely to be willing to hear the Holocaust narrative, and this story, for intellectual and ethical reasons, must be told. To accomplish this 29 J. Salamon, The Net of Dreams (New York, 1996), 63.

212 Danusha V. Goska audience member self-definition, a Holocaust perpetrator—who 1s clearly opposite to the typical Holocaust audience member—must be found. Genocide scholar Philip Gourevitch writes, ‘It is not the Holocaust that is suddenly such a huge popular draw.’*° Packaged versions of the Holocaust, the movie Schindler’s List for example, offer their audiences a surprisingly feel-good experience: ‘an affirmative

public response to representations of the Holocaust places today’s secondhand witnesses firmly on the side of the struggle of good against evil’.*!

When a crime is committed, the surrounding community asks, ‘Who did it?’ Follow-up questions focus on how guilt affects the life of the perpetrator: ‘Is he in gaol?’ ‘Has he made amends?’ In the mid-1980s, the 1ggos, and beyond, a series of works explored Holocaust guilt. The questions these works hoped to answer were, in essence, ‘Who did it?’ and ‘What are they doing about it now?’ One answer was

obvious: the Nazis committed the crime of the Holocaust, and some were punished at Nuremberg and subsequent trials; however, the Holocaust was too huge and too notorious a crime for that answer to suffice. Noteworthy and well-received explorations of these vexed questions included Tom Segev’s The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (1993), Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life (1999), Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996), Michael C. Steinlauf’s Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (1997), and PBS’s documentary America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference (1994).°* Books had already come out in the 1980s enquiring into American Jews’ contemporaneous response to the Holocaust.

The message of these books could be summed up in the title of a controversial article by Lucy Dawidowicz that had appeared in 1983: ‘Indicting American Jews’. The cumulative message of all of these works was shattering. ‘The puny lunatic Adolf Hitler could never have carried out the Holocaust had he not been enabled or at least allowed by millions of people who had the power to resist, and never used it.?? During the 1990s and beyond, American highbrow popular culture consumers’ television screens, news-stands, and new-book tables were flooded with media that complicated America’s heretofore spotless Second World War image. Movies like 30 P. Gourevitch, ‘What they Saw at the Holocaust Museum’, New York Times, 12 Feb. 1995, F45. 31 This quotation appeared in Utne Salon on 6 May 2003 as part of a review of the film The Pianist. The remainder of the review reads, ‘Yes, it is powerful, disturbing and engrossing . . . however, what holocaust movie isn’t? I think the movie fails in that, although I was shocked at the horror, I wound up sympathizing more for the kind German officer than all those victims. I think the movie goes overboard on the shock and violence aspect of the holocaust so that the victims are almost dehumanized. I thought Schindler’s List was a better movie on this subject.’ 32 'T. Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York, 1993); P. Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston, 1999); D. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (New York, 1997); Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead.

33 L. S. Dawidowicz, ‘Indicting American Jews’, Commentary (June 1983), 36-44. See also the numerous and impassioned letters that responded to her article ‘American Jews and the Holocaust’, Commentary (Sept. 1983), 4 ff.

The Necessity of ‘Biegansk1’ 213 Saving Private Ryan (1998) depict America as having saved the world during the Second World War. The movie is probably right; American GIs probably did save the world. They didn’t save Europe’s Jews, though. In fact, as new works suggested, American racism played a role in the Holocaust. The PBS documentary America and the Holocaust presented an America that, in its first encounters with rising Nazism, was blinded and paralysed by its own racism and isolationism. Antisemitism had been strong throughout the West in the inter-war period. The anti-Immigration movement earlier in the twentieth century had generated powerful racist images of east Europeans, Jews and non-Jews alike, as threats to the United States who had to be excluded from American citizenship because of their

racial inferiority. In the inter-war era in the United States, antisemitism manifested itself by limiting job, housing, recreational, and associational opportunities for Jews and other minorities. Fields that excluded or limited employment of Jews included engineering, the telephone industry, insurance, the big three auto companies, schools, and hospitals. In 1939, 53 per cent of Americans polled agreed that ‘Jews are different and should be restricted’. When, in 1942, Americans were asked who posed the greatest threat to their country, Americans placed Jews third, after the Germans and the Japanese. America was fighting its greatest war yet against

the Germans and the Japanese; that Jews might be named third in alleged dangerousness after America’s most intimidating enemies is remarkable. Inter-war

America produced several antisemitic newspapers and hosted more than one hundred antisemitic organizations, including a home-grown Nazi party. FDR sent

these American Nazis his best wishes when they gathered in Madison Square Garden in 1939; and the antisemitic American radio star Father Charles Coughlin claimed an audience of 3 million. Entrenched American racism was made policy by State Department official

Breckinridge Long, who used his power to prevent racially undesirable east Europeans, including Jews, from entering the United States. America and the Holocaust focused on Long’s antisemitism. In fact, Long was opposed to any immigration from eastern Europe, Jewish or non-Jewish. He denounced east Europeans, specifically Russians and Poles, as ‘entirely unfit to become citizens of this country . . . they are lawless, scheming, defiant, and in many ways unassimilable’.*4 His policies designed to keep east Europeans out of the United States were

carried out even as refugees were trying to escape the Nazi threat. America, including America’s leaders, knew about the Holocaust; the response was muted. Coverage in newspapers was underplayed; war policy ignored it. In 1999 the second volume of Blanche Wiesen Cook’s multi-volume biography of American heroine Eleanor Roosevelt revealed her to be an antisemite who published an article stating that Jews ‘may be in part responsible for the present situation’—after Kristallnacht, an event that certainly made Nazi policy and intentions, and Jewish victimization, clear. Again and again, when the Roosevelts and their 34 D. Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938-1941 (Amherst, Mass., 1968), 146.

214 Danusha V. Goska friends, including their Jewish friends, had every reason, every bit of necessary information and power, and every precedent to speak up against the brewing

Holocaust and to act, they remained silent or passive, or indulged in antisemitism.°*° In 2000 The Nation reported that the American hero Henry Ford supplied Nazi ideology with his own antisemitic publications, including The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem,*© and that Ford and his company contributed significantly to the Nazis’ industrial might, so much so that a US army report characterized Ford’s operations in Germany as an ‘arsenal of Nazism’.?" In 2001 Edwin Black published a monograph exposing IBM’s intimate and essential support of the Holocaust.*® America was still antisemitic after joining the war, according to Peter Novick. As late as 1944, citing antisemitism in the American army, the army resisted communicating the nature of Nazi atrocities against Jews.®? One propagandistic fabrication,

‘Jewish warmongering’, a central justification Hitler had offered for his plan to murder all Jews, was raised by the US Congress and used to intimidate Hollywood figures with ‘Jewish-sounding’ names.*° In the post-war era American social service workers serving displaced persons struggled to communicate that DPs were not all Jews—if the image of the displaced person were to be associated with Jews, their campaign, they feared, ‘public-relations-wise’ would be a ‘dead duck’.*! The rest of the Western Allies have fared no better. David Engel, surveying the

record, reported in 1986 that ‘the Allied Governments did little to extricate the Jews of Hitler’s Europe from their mortal peril because they could see no compelling political, strategic, or legal reason to do so’.** Imperilled Jews had asked these Allies to help: Our entire people will be destroyed. A few may be saved, perhaps, but three million Polish Jews are doomed. This cannot be prevented by any force in Poland, neither the Polish nor the Jewish Underground. Place this responsibility on the shoulders of the Allies. Let not a single leader of the United Nations be able to say that they did not know that we were being murdered in Poland and could not be helped except from the outside.*°

So spoke a Jewish leader in Warsaw in 1942. According to Jan Karski, the Polish courier who delivered that message to Winston Churchill and FDR, the appeal was all but ignored. Thorough understanding of the West’s complicity in the Holocaust has not yet

seeped into popular culture creations through vehicles as popular as the films Shoah and Schindler’s List. Both these films depict Poles as living relatively easy 8° B. Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, 1i (New York, 1999), ch. 16.

36 Dearborn Publishing, 1920. 37 K. Silverstein, ‘Ford and the Fithrer’, The Nation, 24 Jan. 2000. 88 E. Black, [BM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s

49 Tbid. 28. 41 Quoted ibid. 82.

Most Powerful Corporation (New York, 2001). 39 Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 27.

42 D. Engel, “The Western Allies and the Holocaust’, Polin, 1 (1986), 312. 43 Tbid. 300.

The Necessity of ‘Bieganskt’ 215 lives while they passively watch, or eagerly cheer on, the Holocaust occurring in their midst. Julie Salamon pointed out that Steven Spielberg, maker of Schindler’s List, has never made a film about American antisemitism.** British journalist and child of survivors Anne Karpf pointed out that Claude Lanzmann, who disseminated Bieganski via his film Shoah, though himself ‘a French Jew, remained silent

on the wartime fate of Jews from France: though one of the film’s dominant languages is French, Lanzmann nowhere brings in French witnesses to talk about the events on his doorstep’.*° Perhaps most shattering of the explorations of Holocaust guilt are those that expose the indifference and inaction of Jews in the United States and Israel. Tom Segev’s The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust*® provides an extraordinary and extraordinarily detailed indictment of a yishuv, and then an Israel that often ignored the Holocaust while it was happening, and was exploitative of and callous and contemptuous towards survivors—the ‘human debris’, the ‘sabon’, or ‘soap’—who found their way to Israel afterwards. Segev’s book also provides a disturbing peek at inter-Jewish conflict among survivors. Under the conditions of fascism, some had survived at the cost of others. This history resulted, inter alia, in a bizarre circumstance at the Eichmann trial. Fifteen survivors wanted the Jewish councils to be put on trial. They wanted this so badly that they offered to speak in exculpation of Eichmann. In her 1983 article ‘Indicting American Jews’, Lucy Dawidowicz caused great controversy. In this article, and in the outpouring of letters that followed, one finds the same rhetorical devices used against American Jews that would later be used against Poles. American Jews, some alleged, were passive and uninterested during the Holocaust. They could have helped and they didn’t. Books with similar themes followed: Haskel Lookstein’s 1985 Were We Our Brother’s Keepers? The Public Response of American Jews to the Holocaust and Rafael Medoff’s 1987 The Deafening Silence: American Fewish Leaders and the Holocaust, for example. ‘The pain these accounts communicated is suggested by Elie Wiesel:

While Mordecai Anielewicz and his comrades fought their lonely battle in the blazing ghetto under siege . . . a large New York synagogue invited its members to a banquet featur-

ing a well-known comedian . . . The factories of Treblinka, Belzec, Majdanek, and Auschwitz were operating at top capacity, while on the other side, Jewish social and intellectual life was flourishing, Jewish leaders met, threw up their arms in gestures of helplessness, shed a pious tear or two and went on with their lives: speeches, travels, quarrels, banquets, toasts, honors... If our brothers had shown more compassion, more initiative, more daring ... if a million Jews had demonstrated in front of the White House . . . if Jewish notables had started a hunger strike . . . who knows, the enemy might have desisted.*’ 44 Salamon, The Net of Dreams, 42-3. 45 A. Karpf, The War After: Living with the Holocaust (London, 1996), 210. 46 ‘Trans. Haim Watzman (New York, 1993).

47 Quoted in Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 30. ,

216 Danusha V. Goska Even more devastating was a 1943 appeal to American Jews from their coreligionists in the Warsaw ghetto. ‘Brothers! The remnants of the Jews in Poland live in the knowledge that in the darkest hour of our history you did not help us. Say something. This is our final appeal to you. . .’.4° Novick argued that American Jews paid more attention to the Holocaust in 1993 than they had in 1943.*° At least one prominent Holocaust survivor, the novelist Jerzy Kosinski, expressed bitterness about this. He wrote in 1ggo: ‘Almost as if trying to make up for their inaction toward the slaughter of European Jewry during World War II, the Jews of North America turned to the canonization of the Holocaust long after the cannons of that war went silent.’°? One American rabbi did protest. Arthur Hertzberg’s father preached this Yom Kippur sermon in 1940: ‘If we had any Jewish dignity, we would picket the White House. You hesitate because your sons and daughters have jobs in the New Deal and you are afraid that you are going to rock the boat.’ Within an hour of the end of the Yom Kippur fast, the rabbi was fired.°?

‘THEY DID IT!’ THE SEARCH FOR A ‘THEY’ As we can see, the urgent need for an antagonist that the horrific Holocaust narrative generates has been complicated by massive shared guilt. Millions and millions of individual crimes, or merely missed chances, produced a glut of horror, terror, blame, and shame. A guilty party, the traditional scapegoat who can take on others’ guilt, real or imagined, and then die so that the important intellectual, spiritual, economic, and military communities may be exculpated and then live on, has had to be found. One might ask, given the huge amount of guilt the world has been burdened with since the Holocaust, why the focus has fallen, to the extent that it has, on Poles. Those who are invested in Bieganski point to antisemitic individuals, movements, or events in Poland.°” But, as has been pointed out again and again, 48 Quoted in A. Polonsky (ed.), ‘My Brother’s Keeper?’ Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust

(London, 1989), 152. 49 Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 37. 5° J. Kosinski, “The Second Holocaust: American Jews Are So Obsessed with the Nazi Killings that They’re Destroying Their Own Culture and Character’, Boston Globe, 4 Nov. 1990, 17—19. 51 America and the Holocaust. 52 Sophie’s Choice was first published in 1979, and thus preceded all the works mentioned here that problematize Holocaust guilt. The theory that guilt anxiety plays a role in the scapegoating of Poles, via the Bieganski image, still applies to Sophie’s Choice if an article by Thaddeus C. Radzialowsk1 is correct

(‘The “Final Solution” for Southern Guilt’, Polish American Studies, 40/1 (Spring 1983), 59-63). Radzialowski convincingly argues that Sophie was an attempt by Styron to exorcise his own demons about having been a white Southern man who profited from slavery. Thus, Styron created a fictional Poland that had more in common with the American South than with any actual Poland, and cast Jews

in the role that African Americans played in the South. This casting, of course, is absurd and contrary to historical fact. ‘Comparisons between the lot of Polish Jews with that of black slaves in America are misconceived’ (N. Davies, ‘Ethnic Diversity in Twentieth Century Poland’, Polin, 4 (1989), 150).

The Necessity of ‘Bieganskt’ 217 many nations, including Japan, with no significant history of Jewish settlement, and including England and the United States, have hosted antisemitic movements or generated deadly pogroms. Antisemitism did not reach its first, last, or most important expressions in Poland. No scholar of note has ever even tried to make, never mind succeeded in making, the case that, as alleged in popular and folk understandings, Poland is somehow unique in its antisemitism, that antisemitism is essential to Polish identity, or that Polish antisemites have done more harm than, say, German Nazis. The Polish Jewish author Eva Hoffman floated one theory as to why Jews might

focus rage and disgust on Poles, rather than on German Nazis. A Jew told Hoffman her personal Holocaust story. The story included episodes of help extended to that Jew by several Poles. The teller closed her story by saying, “Now you see why we hate the Polacks.’ “There was no word about hating the Germans’, Hoffman remarked. Hoffman speculated on why this might be. ‘It is hard to direct true, living hatred at an impersonal death machine, at the monolithic Nazis. . . German soldiers . . . existed at such a remove of power and terror that they were hardly individual; they were embodiments of an abstract force.”°? On the other | hand, when Poles betrayed Jews, that betrayal felt more intimate. But there was another problem. Poland has, throughout its history, been a significantly rural and/or agrarian nation, relatively lacking in an indigenous middle class. Polak jokes and other folk forms featuring crude and ‘dumb’ Polaks, disseminated, in their various incarnations, by Germans in Germany,™ Jews in Poland,®° and then Americans, encapsulated the hostilities relatively urban and literate peoples feel for relatively rural

and/or agrarian and oral peoples. ‘How do you know if your house has been robbed by a Polak?’ one such joke asks. ‘Because the dog is pregnant and the garbage can is empty.’

Of course Polak jokes are not the final word on stereotypes of Poles. The American literature scholar Thomas Gladsky followed in detail the evolution of the American image of Poles. When Polish nobles fled westwards in the 1830s after a failed insurrection, Americans formed an image of Poles as dashing, romantic, and aristocratic. But that stereotype, and the historical and demographic conditions that gave birth to it, as Gladsky demonstrates, is marginal today, having been

superseded by the mass immigration of Polish peasants westward, circa 1880—1924.°° Rather, asserts the folklorist Alan Dundes, today another image of °3 E. Hoffman, Shietl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews (Boston, 1997), 245.

°4 A. Dundes, ‘A Study of Ethnic Slurs: The Jew and the Polack in the United States’, Journal of American Folklore, 84 (1971), 186-203.

°° H. Bar-Itzhak, ‘Relationships between Jews and Gentiles in Folk Narratives as Told by Polish Jews’, fewish Folklore and Ethnology Review, 13/1 (1991), 8-10. °6 'T: Gladsky, Princes, Peasants, and Other Polish Selves: Ethnicity in American Literature (Amherst, Mass., 1992).

218 Danusha V. Goska Poles is paramount in the West. In this image Poles, a largely rural, sylvan, and, in

America, working-class people, are significantly seen by their social betters as ‘poor, dirty, stupid, inept, vulgar, boorish, and tasteless’.°’ This stereotype is an old one; its roots go back centuries.°®

Another caution when considering stereotypes is that they change as contexts

change. The 2003 Iraq war produced ample pop culture images of cowardly French, quite different from the brave ‘Free French’ of the Second World War era

movies like Casablanca. Similarly, context alters stereotypes of Germans and Poles. Centuries ago, when compared with the French, some stereotypes of Germans may have occupied a similar niche to that occupied by stereotypes of Poles today, in that Germans were seen as less sophisticated.°? And, of course, there are stereotypes within groups. The stereotype of a Prussian is different from that of a Bavarian.°° All cautions factored in, though, as various studies have shown, in recent history, in America and Germany as well, the image of Poles that Dundes outlines becomes paramount.®! One of the few relatively recent surveys to test American attitudes towards Poles supports this: respondents ranked Polish Americans’ social standing near the bottom, well below that of Germans, Jews, etc., and comparable to that of ‘Negroes’ and Native Americans. ®° As numerous commentators have remarked, Germans are similar to the most important audience of the Holocaust narrative. Germany was and is seen as signif-

icantly, although of course not exclusively, Western, urban, educated, rational, literate, secular or Protestant, ‘civilized’. As Richard Pipes, who was a high-school student in the pre-Second World War era, put it: ‘None of us had the slightest suspicion that the Germans, universally regarded as an outstandingly cultured nation, were preparing a massacre of the Jewish people.’©* Germany itself is a central member of the European traditions and military and economic communities that are vital to the United States. There are more Americans who claim Germany as

the country of their ancestors than claim any other country, including Great Britain. This may partly explain why, as Mariana D. Birnbaum wrote in an article ©” Dundes, ‘A Study of Ethnic Slurs’, 200-1. °8 L. Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, Calif., 1994); W. Weintraub, “Tolerance and Intolerance in Old Poland’, Canadian Slavonic Papers, 13 (1971), 21-44. °9 W. Walker, ‘Comments and Reflections’, Polish Review, 17/1(Winter 1972), 66. 6° FE Seiler, Deutsche Sprichworterkunde (Munich, 1922).

6! R. W. Tims, Germanizing Prussian Poland: The H-K-T Society and the Struggle for the Eastern Marches in the German Empire 1894-1919 (New York, 1941); M. Schlottmann, ‘The Disintegrative Personality of a Pole in Germany’, Periphery, 4—5 (1998-9), 31-3; L. Dyczewski, ‘Poles in Germany, Germans in Poland: The Border and Minorities’, Periphery, 3 (1997), 6-0. 62 L. Lewin, ‘Study Points to Increase in Tolerance of Ethnicity’, New York Times, 8 Jan. 1992,

Ato. ,

63 Richard Pipes, quoted in I. C. Pogonowski, Jems in Poland, a Documentary History: The Rise of

Jews as a Nation from Congressus Judaicus in Poland to the Knesset in Israel (New York, 1993), 5.

The Necessity of ‘Breganski’ 219 exploring ethnic slurs, ‘although they were enemies of [the United States] in two world wars, except for actual military slang, there exist far fewer anti-German expressions than the historical relationship would suggest’.®* Germany is and has long been among the leaders of the Western world. Money and power are attractive. Even Jews, though victims of antisemitism, are susceptible to the simple allure of station, money, and power. In commenting on rhinoplasty, or ‘nose jobs’, the plastic surgery technique that in the United States used to be a rite of passage for well-to-do Jewish girls, Sander Gilman quoted one German Jew who, in the 1920s, recorded the admiration that some Jews felt for ‘superior’ Germans: ‘I have known many Jews who have languished with longing

for the fair-haired and blue-eyed individual. They knelt before him, burned incense before him, believed his every word, every blink of his eye was heroic, and when he spoke of his native soil, when he beat his Aryan breast, they broke into a hysterical shriek of triumph.’©

In some Holocaust memoirs Polish and other east European peasants are described with contempt; this contempt jibes with the attitudes expressed in Polak jokes; expressions of contempt like it have been found for centuries in Jewish writing.°° German Nazis, on the other hand, are described as ‘civilized’ or ‘elegant’. Fania Fénelon’s Playing for Time (1977) 1s a case in point. Fénelon was a French

Jew who was imprisoned in Auschwitz and was allowed to survive because she played music for the Nazis in the camp orchestra. Her contempt for the stereotypical, Bieganski-style Poles she describes is evident throughout her memoir. Poles are ‘ineffectual’, ‘brick faced’,°’ ‘monstrous’, and ‘servile’.® One is a ‘female

mountain’; others are ‘bitches’, ‘pests’, and ‘a real cow’.°? When Polish women remain ‘frozen at attention’ in the presence of a German Nazi, Fénelon reported that ‘it was an agreeable experience to see them locked in that respectful pose’.’° A Polish woman has ‘piercing little black eyes like two glinting gems of anthracite set in a block of lard; she was shapeless and gelatinous’; this woman does not speak Polish, rather, ‘she shrieked something in Polish’.’’ A Polish woman ‘was big and fat and as strong as a man—a monster! One would have been hard put to find any human traits in her at all.’“? Poles are possessed of a ‘particularly disturbing’ ‘bestiality’; they are ‘monsters’, ‘pigs’.’° There is one decent Pole. The decent Pole is not, like most Poles, a peasant at all, but, rather, an aristocrat. This aristocratic Pole joins the Jews 1n describing Polish peasants as animals. She is quoted as describing one peasant Pole as a ‘brute’, another is a ‘vicious’, ‘cunning’, ‘frightful creature’; 64 M. D. Birnbaum, ‘On the Language of Prejudice’, Western Folklore, 30 (1971), 256.

6° S. Gilman, ‘The Jewish Nose’, in L. J. Silberstein and R. L. Cohn (eds.), The Other in Fewish Thought and History: Construction of FJewish Culture and Identity (New York, 1994), 377.

6° D. Goska, ‘Golem as Gentile, Golem as Sabra: An Analysis of the Manipulation of Stereotypes of Self and Other in Literary Treatments of a Legendary Jewish Figure’, New York Folklore, 23 (1997),

39-64. 67 F Fénelon, Playing for Time (New York, 1977), 19.

68 Tbid. 25. 69 Tbid. 28, 20. 7 Tbid. 31.

71 Tbid. 40. 7 Tbid. 132. 73 Thid. 42.

220 Danusha Ve Goska one is a ‘solid peasant type’ and ‘the worst of all’, another is ‘stupid and hysterical’. ’4

Fenelon knew that Poles were victims too. She reported the execution of Edek Galinski, or Kaliriski: a real man; known to many, his story has since become a legend. Galiriski was a Polish escapee who had consciously thrown his fate in with the Jewish

girl he loved. For this choice, he had been tortured until he was a ‘swollen bloody mass’. His last words were the opening line of the Polish national anthem: ‘Poland 1s not yet lost while we are still alive.” Fenelon witnessed this, but apparently Galinisk1’s choice to surrender his life for the Jewish woman he loved, his fate, and his Polish patriotism did not cause her to reconsider her overall assessment of Poles. ’° In stark contrast to Fénelon’s descriptions of her peasant Polish fellow inmates

are her descriptions of German Nazis. One is ‘very beautiful, tall, slender, and impeccable in her uniform . . . the SS walked ahead with long, flowing strides; she must have waltzed divinely’.’° On another occasion, ‘there was a holiday bustle;

the SS were looking particularly dapper, whips tucked under their arms, boots gleaming’.’” Another elegant Nazi was none other than the most notorious sadist and war criminal of the twentieth century, Josef Mengele. He was handsome. Goodness, he was handsome. So handsome that the girls instinctively rediscov-

ered the forgotten motions of another world, running dampened fingers through their lashes to make them shine, biting their lips, swelling their mouths, pulling at their skirts and tops. Under the gaze of this man one felt oneself become a woman again. The elegance of Graf Bobby in comparison seemed affected. Dr. Mengele wore his uniform with incomparable ease and style, like a sort of Charles Boyer. A smile played over his lips. Insouciantly he laughed and joked, conscious of his charm. He was even civilized enough to fall silent

when Lotte—Suzuki, and I—Butterfly—started our duet, and he showed even greater consideration in omitting to laugh at the unusual couple we made.

Fénelon expressed an urge for revenge against her fellow Polish inmates that she never expressed against German Nazis. ‘If I ever get out of here, PII kill a Polish

woman. And Ill see to it that all the rest die; that shall be my aim in life’, she recorded herself as vowing. ”” In another Holocaust memoir, An Uncommon Friendship: From Opposite Sides of the Holocaust,®° Bernat Rosner reported that, as a child, he sang folk ditties that characterized east European peasants as low-class, violent drunks.®' In another portion of his book Rosner offered his description of his encounter with Adolf Eichmann: Seeing their elegantly tailored uniforms and neatly polished high jackboots, the boy immediately realized that these Germans were important people. They all wore the Totenkopf

133. *® Tbid. 166-7. 7 Tbid. 31. 7“4 Fénelon, Tbid.Playing 191.for8 Time, Tbid. 159. 73 Tbid. 19. 80 B. Rosner, EC. Tubach, and S. P. Tubach, An Uncommon Friendship: From Opposite Sides of the

Holocaust (Berkeley, 2001). 81 Tbid. 40.

The Necessity of ‘Bieganskt’ 221 skull emblem of the SS on their hats. One displayed the four-star insignia of an SS Obersturmbahnfiihrer on his lapel. These uniforms impressed the young Bernie . . . and today Bernie is still able to draw for me the insignia of the top SS brass exactly .. . At one point [Eichmann] turned toward [Bernie] and said ‘Kleiner Bube’ (little boy).°?

German Nazis also associated themselves, and their antisemitism, with elegance

and power, and east Europeans and peasants, and any antisemitism they might express, with an animal brutality and criminality. In Nazi ideology the Nazi elimination of the Jews, as well as the elimination of other undesirables, was to be clean and rational, a genocide dictated by the science and reason typical of elites, not by the unkindness or bloodlust typical of peasants, east Europeans, and other lower

creatures. Norman Finkelstein wrote, ‘What distinguished Nazi anti-Semitism was the reluctant and mechanical, as against the gratuitously cruel implementation, of the Final Solution.’®? Certainly, Nazis displayed cruel behaviour; thus, this assessment is not accurate as an assessment of actual Nazi behaviour. It sums up, though, a trend in Nazi thought. Nazis wanted to see their own genocidal behaviour as a mechanical carrying out of benign and necessary sanitation actions, not as an indulgence of the human passions, including cruelty, exercised by lesser races

in their antisemitism. One text that typifies this attitude is Heinrich Himmler’s speech before SS group leaders in Posen (Poznan), in occupied Poland, in 1943. The following quotations from Nazi writings, compiled by Finkelstein, and including a section of this speech, present these contrasting images of Nazis engaging in image management to present themselves as neither ‘rough’ nor ‘heartless’, in contrast to ‘peasant’ east Europeans. The soldier had to ‘understand’ this. If for any reason he was instructed to help the SS and Police in their task, he was expected to obey orders. However, if he killed a Jew spontaneously, voluntarily, or without instruction, merely because he wanted to kill, then he committed an abnormal act, worthy perhaps of an ‘Eastern European’... Herein lay the crucial difference between the man who ‘overcame’ himself to kill and one who wantonly committed atrocities. The former was regarded as a good soldier and a true Nazi; the latter was a person without self-control . . . Rejecting ‘from inner conviction’ the “Bo/shevist method of physical extermination of a people as un-Germanic’, SS leader Heinrich Himmler resolved to implement the Final Solution ‘coolly and clearly; even while obeying the official order to commit murder, the SS man must remain “decent”.’ . . . ‘We shall never be rough or heartless where it is not necessary; that is clear’... Repeatedly professing profound disgust at the ‘malignancy, wickedness and brutality’ of SS guards who did gratuitously torture camp inmates, [1940-4 Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf] Hoess muses, “They did not regard prisoners as human beings at all... They regarded the sight of corporal punishment being inflicted as an excellent spectacle, a kind of peasant merrymaking. I was certainly not one of these.” The Kapos—{often Polish or Jewish] prisoner-functionaries in charge of the work 82 Tid. 69. 83 N. G. Finkelstein, ‘A Critique of Hitler’s Willing Executioners’, New Left Review (London, July 1997), 39-88.

222 Danusha \. Goska detachments—indulging in orgies of violence aroused Hoess’s deepest contempt: “They were soulless and had no feelings whatsoever. I find it incredible that human beings could ever turn into such beasts . . . It was simply gruesome.’®4

Other examples could be provided. Even while committing genocide, German

Nazis associated themselves—and their genocidal acts—with the West, with science and civilization, and culture, and associated cruelty, barbarity, and antisemitic violence with the East, with Slavs and peasants. Finkelstein reported that German Nazis had good reason to regard themselves as representatives of Western civilization’s elite: Of the twenty-one Nazi leaders indicted at the Trial of German Major War Criminals, six scored ‘superior’ and twelve ‘very superior’ on the IQ test. Truly these were the ‘whiz kids’ of Germany. Or consider the Nazi elite murderers sitting in the dock at the Einsatzgruppen trial. ‘Each man at the bar’, recalled the Nuremberg Tribunal in its final judgment, has had the benefit of considerable schooling. Eight are lawyers, one a university professor, another a dental physician, still another an expert on art. One, as an opera singer, gave concerts throughout Germany before he began his tour of Russia with the Einsatzkommandos . . . No doubt the intellectual class singing Goldhagen’s praises much prefers his conclusion that, unlike the crazed Nazis, truly ‘civilized gentlemen’ do not commit mass murder.”

As we have seen, there are cultural reasons why Germans might not make the ideal focus of rage and disgust in the evolving Holocaust narrative. There are also economic, military, and geopolitical reasons for separating the popular image of Germany from the crimes committed by the Nazis. In chapter 5 of The Holocaust in American Life, Peter Novick worked out how and why, in the late 1940s through

the 1950s, American anger, hostility, and grief over the Holocaust were, in conscious policies of the government and publications, channelled away from Germany and towards the Soviet bloc, including, of course, Poland. Novick showed that in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s Americans avoided discussion of the Holocaust. After the war ended, the Soviet Union, America’s ally in defeating Hitler, became America’s number one enemy. The Cold War, a hostile competition between the United States and the Soviet bloc, would define world politics for the next several decades. After the end of the Second World War, and at the onset of the Cold War, Germany was moved back into the centre of Western cultural, economic, and military life through initiatives like the Marshall Plan and a massive public relations offensive. Within one month of the liberation of concentration camps, Time magazine warned against identifying them as ‘German’.®® Racist pre-war images of eastern Europe as savage and alien were dusted off and reused to aid in this effort.®’ 84 Finkelstein, ‘A Critique of Hitler’s Willing Executioners’, 39-88, emphasis added.

8° bid. 86 P. Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston, 1999), 86. 87 Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 365, 370.

| The Necessity of ‘Bieganskt’ 223 During this same time period, that is, the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, Jews faced a public relations problem. A powerful American stereotype associated Jews with communism. In fact, Jews (and Finns) were disproportionately represented in the American Communist Party. Communism was being depicted as America’s principal enemy. Communists and suspected communists, in for example the 1954 army—McCarthy hearings, were being persecuted in America. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a Jewish American married couple who were convicted of spying for Moscow, were executed in 1953. Germany was America’s ally in the

new, spotlight-assuming war on communism. Poignant images of Berliners besieged by evil Russians were an important tool in that war. American Jewish leaders wanted to find a way to publicly dissociate Jews from communism. Plans were worked out to ‘control emotional Jewish responses’ to Germany,®® and to

divert Jewish hostility and grief associated with the Holocaust away from Germany and towards the Soviet bloc. If Jews were seen to be expressing great anger against the Soviet bloc, Americans would be less likely to perceive them as

communists—and that is the outcome the Jewish leaders wanted. As Novick demonstrates, in a quite conscious plan to dissociate Jews from communism, and to depict Jews as loyal Americans who, like other Americans, were united against America’s number one enemy, the Soviet bloc, Jewish publications and organizations used Holocaust vocabulary like ‘Auschwitz’ and ‘final solution’ to portray the Soviet bloc as the true perpetrator of the Holocaust—even going so far as to make use of ‘grotesque fabrication’ of Soviet policy in this effort.2? Perhaps the epitome of this process was a book title that said it all: The Nazification of Russia.°° The book discusses antisemitism in Russia, a real and serious problem. The sensational title, though, suggests the kind of agenda that Novick describes. A post-Second World War process of de-stereotyping and embracing Germany also occurred in Israel. ‘It is doubtful whether bridges were ever built so quickly over so deep an abyss’, wrote Segev of this process. Israel found it difficult and counter-productive to boycott Germany. David Ben-Gurion, in a pragmatic move, insisted that Israel ‘make up with the “different Germany” ’.?! Why? The Cold War declared that Israel had to take sides with Germany against the Soviet bloc. In addition, there were financial reasons. Israel was a new and struggling country. Germany was a source of financial reparations to its former Jewish victims. It would have been unseemly for Israel to accept reparations from a country that had not been seen as significantly different from the perpetrator of the Holocaust— thus Ben-Gurion’s repeated insistence on the ‘different Germany’.°” Even the Eichmann trial was seen by one Israeli observer as a way to clear Germany’s name. One captured Nazi, Adolf Eichmann, as opposed to a whole country, Germany,

88 Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 97. 89 Tbid. 99. 90S. Reznik, The Nazification of Russia: Anti-Semitism in the Post-Soviet Era (Washington, DC,

1996). 91 Segev, The Seventh Million, 191, 384. 92 Tbid. 305.

224 Danusha \. Goska could be identified as guilty, executed, and eliminated.®* Today ‘great care is taken not to accuse the German nation’ at Israeli Holocaust remembrance events, which typically include the German ambassador.** This ‘great care’ extends to a commit-

tee assigned to monitoring Israeli textbooks to ensure that they do not present a negative image of Germany.”° Their work has been successful; according to Segey, as of 1990 ‘Most Israelis no longer considered Germany an enemy.’”® Segev pointed out that the Israeli-German détente coincided, not with a forget-

ting of the Holocaust, but rather with an increase in Holocaust consciousness.°?” Indeed, the very Israeli newspapers that had ignored the Holocaust while it was happening came, decades later, to place it on their front pages.?® Who was the antagonist of this Holocaust narrative? Poland. ‘Jew hatred is as natural to Poland as blue is to the sky’, Israeli schoolchildren are instructed.?? ‘The Polish nation’, wrote an Israeli author, ‘is the victor’ of the war against the Jews. Poland ‘despoiled Jewish property and inherited it . . . it has made [the Holocaust] into a commercial

venture’.'°° Israeli students Segev visited ‘clearly identified the Holocaust with Poland’.'°! These same students, on a visit to Poland, were trained, as Holocaust tourists’”” are, to practise tunnel vision, to see nothing human in Poland.1% “Revenge, revenge, revenge’ was how one leader expressed what students could learn from their Holocaust tour of Poland. Revenge could be found in Poland’s poverty and ‘gray and sad’ condition.1°* These students insisted that suffering belonged to them exclusively. They didn’t care about, for example, the Roma (Gypsies) who died at Auschwitz, or the Cambodian genocide; they certainly didn’t express any concern about Poles who had died.°° Novick’s work also stresses the ideological importance of placing Poles as the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Novick points out how the change of focus from those who actually perpetrated the Holocaust—Nazi murderers—to the citizens of the country in which, for the most part, the Holocaust took place—Poles—served an ideological end.1°° Some, like Samuel Freedman, Paul Breines, and Rich Cohen have argued that American Jews are facing what some identify as an ‘identity crisis’.1°” They feel less Jewish, or they are not satisfied with the type of Jewish identity that they feel. Jewish leaders, Novick claims, rely on the Holocaust, over and above less popular elements of Jewish identity like obedience to the Levitical commandments, to attract Jewish identification and support.'°® As long as the focus is on the actual planners and perpetrators of the Holocaust, the Nazis, the usefulness

93 Segev, The Seventh Million, 365. 94 Ibid. 439. 85 Tbid. 456.

% Tbid. 457. 37 Thid. 384. % Ibid. 412. 99 Tbid. 491.

103 Tbid. 408. 104 Tbid. 500. 100 Quoted ibid. 101 Tbid. 102 Kugelmass, ‘The Rites of the Tribe’, 395-453.

105 Tbid. 501-2. 106 Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 179-81. 107 S. G. Freedman, Jew vs. few: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (New York, 2000); P. Breines, Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry (New York, 1990);

R. Cohen, Tough Jews (New York, 1998). 108 Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 7-11, 198.

The Necessity of ‘Bieganskt’ 225 of the Holocaust is limited. The Nazis, after all, have been militarily defeated, and

most of them are dead. When the focus switches to an alleged group of ‘bystanders’, namely, Poles—non-Jewish neighbours of Jews who, for no good reason, sat around and did nothing while Jews were being killed—the Holocaust becomes something that could happen at the drop of a hat and its drawing power increases. Very few Jews have Nazi neighbours; many Jews live next door to poten-

tial ‘bystanders’ who could be thought of as doing what the Poles are alleged to have done. As Novick writes, the new emphasis on alleged ‘bystanders’ promotes a ‘wary suspicion of gentiles’. All Jews can now look at all their non-Jewish neigh-

bours and wonder, ‘Would you hide me?’ or ‘Might I entrust my children to you??!09

The emphasis on bystanders has a powerful appeal for an added group: today’s Holocaust audience. As Philip Gourevitch pointed out, an event as gruesome as the Holocaust can be successfully marketed because today’s audiences can imagine themselves as ‘firmly on the right side in the struggle of good against evil’ when, without clarifying context, they are invited to measure themselves with all their privileges, status, resources, and security, against Second World War era Poles who did not do enough to save Jews. In this narrative, Poles become necessary to afford Americans a sense of moral superiority, a sense that is pleasant enough to protect them from the horrors of the Holocaust. Novick describes a variety of devices for the encouragement among Jews of a sense of victimization and attendant grief and rage, including a Passover haggadah that encouraged expressions of ‘righteous indignation’."° Many young American

Jews show little interest in maintaining the faith of their fathers—but the Holocaust has proven ‘consumer appeal’.'!! ‘The Holocaust works every time’, one Jewish leader said.'!* Part of this marketing of the Holocaust has been a cultivation of a sense of victim status as central to Jewish identity. Victim status, according to Novick, appeals across other divisions between Jews. Jews on both the far left and far right like it. “The status of Jews as . . . persecuted outsiders is at the core of what Judaism and Jewishness is all about’, according to one Jewish journalist. 112

One reason why some Jews refuse to acknowledge Polish suffering and why some Jews express more shrill rage against Poles than against German Nazis, becomes clear. Some Jews insist on preserving victim status as an essence of

Judaism. If it becomes more widely known that Poles were victims of the Holocaust rather than its perpetrators, a Jewish identity based on victim status is threatened. German Nazis do not pose that threat to this new Jewish identity. Rather, they support it. German Nazis are perceived by many as the embodiment of pure evil. German Nazis were certainly empowered and were certainly genocidal. That accurate image supports an image of Jewish victimization. That Jews

199 Tbid. 180, 181. 10 Tbid. 184. 41 Tbid. 187.

112 Tbid. 188. 113 Quoted ibid. 191.

226 Danusha V. Goska and Germans ‘made up’, as Segev put it, supports an image of Jews as forgiving and rational. The image of the Polish victim, on the other hand, undermines a Jewish identity which stresses victimhood. At the least it encourages an unedifying competition in victimhood—who suffered most becomes the feature of Polish— Jewish polemics.

Of course, in addition to being victims, some Poles—the szmalcownicy who betrayed, or threatened to betray, Jews to Nazis for financial gain, or the peasants who participated in the massacre at Jedwabne, for example—were either collaborators with Nazis or murdered Jews on their own during the war. That reality—that

persons who are themselves victims can turn on their fellow victims and cooperate with evil oppression—introduces a fly into the ointment of the image of the immaculate victim whose very victimization renders him immaculate. This applies to Poles no less than Jews. Discussion of the szmalcownicy invariably leads to the raising as a form of Polish apologetics of those Jews who collaborated with the Nazis, like the member of the Nazi-created Jewish councils, or who collaborated with Soviet invaders in sending Poles to their deaths. A search on the internet for the words ‘Jedwabne’ and ‘Judenrat’ turned up what is identified as a letter

representing the position of the Federal Council of Polish Associations in Australia. In it the author argues: No one disputes that there were elements in the Polish community which participated in the atrocities. No one can dispute that such an element exists in any community, including the Jews. For example, the so called ‘Judenrat’, German established Jewish councils, supplied on demand Jews for slave labour and ultimate extermination. Not to mention the notorious Jewish ghetto police.!'4

For its part, the Canadian Polish Congress responded to the press furore over publication of Jan Tomasz Gross’s book about Jedwabne"’? with accusations that Stalinist Jews murdered non-Jewish Poles in the village of Koniuchy.*"® The unfruitful attempts to equate Jedwabne with the Judenrate or Jedwabne with Koniuchy will obviously never yield any final, transcendent ethical truth; rather, these are routes that human minds and hearts have taken when attempting to make sense of the complexities of victimization and perpetrator status. Exactly

because of the massive guilt and complexities associated with the Holocaust, according to an article in the Jerusalem Post, “The “black hole” of the Holocaust has provided the pretext for violent controversy between rival political factions; hypocrisy and bad faith more than sincere disagreement often marked these bitter fights.’!” All in all, the victim image becomes problematic when the victimization of Poles under the Nazis 1s factored in. Recently, according to authors like Segev, Novick, Kugelmass, and Breines, many Jews have attempted to interpret the Holocaust through a teleological under4 . 115 Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne (Princeton, 2001).

16 . 11” Cohen, Tough fews.

The Necessity of ‘Bieganskt’ 227 standing of the history of Jews in Poland. Teleology is a narrative world-view. It sees history as working as a well-crafted historical novel works—each detail supports the novel’s denouement. This view damns Poland. Since most Jews in the world have some ancestry in Poland, since Jews established their longest-lived large community in Poland, and since the Holocaust happened in Poland, Polish history must be a narrative designed to create the Holocaust, and all Poles must be | Bieganskis. This Holocaust narrative, one in which Polish history had to climax in Auschwitz, serves important political ends in Israel; in fact, it has become a founding myth of Israel. Rabbi Byron Sherwin put it this way: We [American Jews] need to see antisemites stalking us. Poland is just such a natural enemy because of the antiquated [anti-Polonist] stereotypes that I have mentioned . . . For [Israel1

Jews] the fate of the Jews in Poland and the Holocaust are proof of the correctness of Zionist ideology . . . Jews who think this way are therefore interested in maintaining the negative image of Poland . . . Jews from Israel and America have a psychological need to maintain the stereotypes. 1!°

What other options are there? If one does not single out Poles, or a posited

Polish biological or cultural essence as being diagnostically guilty for the Holocaust, what can one blame? The answer is simply too terrifying to attract a very wide audience. Given the world’s response to the Holocaust, and given luckier people’s response to events since the Holocaust, like the auto-genocide in Cambodia, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski wrote: Humanity has failed, and continues to fail. . . the only people who did not fail and who completely confirmed their humanity were those who responded to this test by making the ultimate choice and who died helping their neighbours. No one living can say that of himself. No one living can—whether for political or polemical reasons—demand it of others.*'?

The Polish journalist Jacek Borkowicz, reflecting on Halina Birenbaum’s account of Holocaust survivors being mocked and shunned in Israel, wrote in 1996 that ‘such reactions are typically human, and not, for example, typically Polish, Catholic, or Eastern European . . . the meaning of the Shoah is universal: Jews cannot count on gentiles, Jews cannot count on Jews, people cannot count on people .. . yesterday, [ Jews] were the victims. Tomorrom, it could be us.’'*° Zofia Natkowska, a Polish member of a committee that investigated Nazi crimes, wrote in 1946 one of the most frightening sentences about the Holocaust: ‘People prepared this fate for

people.’ Nalkowska provided no adjective that separated the audience member from the perpetrator. Nalkowska did not speak of ‘German people’, though she was studying crimes committed by German Nazis, including their effort to make 418 Quoted in Z. Nosowski, ‘Dialogue Is an Effort at Translating Symbols’, in Under One Heaven [ Wiez special issue] (Warsaw, 1998), 156. 119 W. Bartoszewski, ‘Some Thoughts on Polish—Jewish Relations’, Polin, 1 (1986), 286; my emphasis. 120 J. Borkowicz, ‘A Few Words about Poles and Jews’, in Under One Heaven, 91; my emphasis.

228 Danusha V. Goska soap out of Polish victims. There is no adjective here that releases the audience from responsibility, or that elevates the audience. No one is an immaculate victim—everyone must be responsible for, as both Finkelstein and Novick emphasized, the 10 million children who starve to death and die of preventable diseases every year.'*! In this narrative no one can be regarded as a perfect ally, and no one is safe. 121 Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 255; Finkelstein, ‘A Critique of Hitler’s Willing Executioners’.

Constructing Collective Memory The Re-envisioning of Eastern Europe as Seen Through American femish Textbooks JONATHAN KRASNER THE energy in the classroom was unusual for a late Thursday afternoon. A group

of Boston area tenth-grade day-school students had just finished watching the PBS Frontline documentary Shtet/, and an animated discussion was unfolding about the nature of Polish—Jewish relations both prior to and during the Second World War.' The first part of the film, which was made by the Holocaust survivor Marian Marzynski, traces an American Jew’s exploration of his family’s origins in the Polish shtetl of Brarfisk. There, with the help of the filmmaker and a local nonJewish historian who has taken an interest in Brarisk’s Jewish past, the American explores the town, asking elderly people about Jewish life before the war and Polish reactions to the Nazi occupation and the rounding-up of the Jewish population. To what extent did the Poles collaborate with the Germans? To what extent were they terrorized into acquiescence or co-operation?

The reactions of the townspeople struck the students as insincere and selfserving. Even those interviewees who did not appear to be implicated in any blatant wrongdoing seemed to betray deep-seated antisemitic convictions. ‘It’s like

these people were almost hardwired to be antisemites’, exclaims one girl. ‘It’s amazing how you can live next to a person for years but never get beyond the stereotype.’ Her classmates seem to agree. ‘Poland was a tinderbox’, proclaims an earnest-looking boy. Mixing his metaphors, he explains: ‘All it took was a spark and

all of this poison bubbled up to the surface.’ As the conversation continues, it is fascinating to watch how students selectively borrow and mould images of Poles in the film to reinforce their preconceptions, which in turn reflect American Jews’ collective memory of eastern Europe. Where the film has attempted to introduce nuance and contradiction, where it has overtly taken on the complex question of ' This anecdote derives from personal experience while teaching at the Gann Academy (formerly the New Jewish High School of Greater Boston) in April 2000.

230 Jonathan Krasner history versus memory, the students seem unable to get beyond their reflexive cognitive dissonance. The powerful collective memory of eastern Europe that so arrested the students was shaped by a variety of sources, from books and films to relatives’ stories and family heirlooms. One student later told me that she had learned more about east-

ern Europe from playing one of the leading roles in her summer camp’s production of Fiddler on the Roof than she had from her formal studies. She is not alone. As the historian Steven Zipperstein observed 1n his collection of essays /magining Russian Jewry, this musical would define for American Jews, more than any other cultural artefact of the 1960s and beyond, the content of their Jewish past.” But in a deeper sense it is the destruction of European Jewry that provides an almost inescapable lens through which American Jews see pre-war life in eastern Europe. In the words of the author Eva Hoffman, The shadow of the Holocaust is long, and it extends backward as well as forward. Our readings of the prewar Polish—Jewish past have been burdened retroactively by our knowledge of what came at the end. For some descendants of East European Jews, the lost world of their parents and grandparents has become idealized, sequestered in the imagination as a quaint realm of ‘before’. For others, the whole Polish past is seen in darkened hues, as nothing but a prelude and a prefiguring of the catastrophe.®

Of course, American Jews’ envisioning of eastern Europe pre-dated the Holocaust.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century images of Poland and Russia were most often refracted through the prisms of immigration and acculturation. How the collective memory of eastern Europe evolved between the 1880s, when the major wave of east European Jewish migration to the United States began, and 1964, when Fiddler on the Roof was first performed on Broadway, is the underlying question of this chapter. Among the principal sources of collective memory are school textbooks, which, by their very nature, are designed to influence the socialization of the child. They

provide the child with narratives that transmit social values and delineate boundaries, which help to define group identity. These stories often contain intensified versions of deeply held ‘truths’. This chapter explores a range of American Jewish textbook images of Jewish life in eastern Europe. In particular, it focuses on representations of the Jews’ mostly Slavonic neighbours. Cultural differentiation, what Sander Gilman calls ‘inscribing the Other’,* has been a fundamental endeavour of Jewish authors of school textbooks. Textbook images are ideal subjects for study because they allow the cultural historian to chart change over time. Indeed, I argue that the confluence of a variety

of forces ensured that textbook representations of eastern Europe remained 2 S. Zipperstein, Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity (Seattle, 1999), 34. 3 E. Hoffman, Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews (Boston,

1997), 7. 4 S. Gilman, Inscribing the Other (Lincoln, Nebr., 1991).

Eastern Europe in US Jewish Textbooks 231 relatively fluid throughout the immediate post-war era. These included the changing profile of the Jewish authors of textbooks, the increasing accessibility of scholarship, shifting communal priorities and the intrusion of outside forces such as the mass migration to the United States of 1881-1924, the Holocaust, and the creation of the state of Israel.

THE YEARS 1880-1920 A Primitive Outpost American Jewish textbook writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took a dim view of Poles and other east European peoples. The most popular Jewish history textbook of the period, Lady Katie Magnus’s Outlines of Jewish History, published by Bloch in 1890, reflected the general tone, oscillating between indifference and hostility. Writing about circumstances in the Pale of Settlement during the nineteenth century, Magnus took the view that “The ignorance and fanaticism of the native population, and the unintelligent policy of the governing classes, combined to make the position of the Jews a painful and a precarious one.’ She had nothing specific to say about tsarist policies towards the Jewish population—and did not even consider the impact of Russian rule on the Poles—but wrote of ‘ “ukase” after “ukase”’ having been ‘conceived in this “Middle Age[s]” spirit’. Relations between Poles and Jews in the early modern period she characterized as ‘tolerable, but somewhat sordid’. She acknowledged that Polish leaders gave the Jewish population ‘a certain legal status’, but she regarded it as ‘not a very elevated one, and mostly of a “protective” nature’. Her bile was reserved primarily for the Cossacks, the Tatars, and the Russians, whom she blamed for the slaughter of ‘more than 200,000 Jews’ between 1648 and 1651.° What stands out about the treatment of Poles and other east Europeans in these textbooks is how little space they were accorded—a function of the marginal attention devoted to east European Jewry. Of Magnus’s 363 pages, for example, a mere three relate to Russia and Poland. Maurice Harris’s Modern Jewish History (Bloch, Ig10) is somewhat more generous, with an entire (fourteen-page) chapter entitled “The Passing of Poland and the Rise of Russia’. But here too, attention to eastern

Europe is fleeting. This lack of interest is striking when one considers Jewish demographics. By the seventeenth century the two main centres of Jewish life were the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman empire, but a significant drop in the infant mortality rate among European Jews in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led to the eclipse of the Ottoman empire as a Jewish centre. By 1880 the Jewish population in the Russian empire was approximately 4 million.

The Austro-Hungarian empire had the second-largest Jewish population at 1.5 million, while the figure for the Ottoman empire remained relatively stagnant at > K. Magnus, Outlines of Jewish History (Philadelphia, 1890), 311, 277—8.

232 Jonathan Krasner 300,000. Germany’s Jewish population was approximately 500,000. By contrast, the Jewish communities in western Europe were only a fraction of this size, outnumbered even by the American Jewish population, which is estimated at 250,000. Despite these statistics, Magnus devoted her post-1492 section overwhelmingly to

western and central Europe. Her American editors rectified her neglect of the Jewish communities in the Americas by inserting three new chapters, ghostwritten by Cyrus Adler and Henrietta Szold, but her relative inattention to the largest Jewish community in the world was allowed to stand.°®

Ostjuden: The Other Within Us Still more striking than the omission of east Europeans from the textbooks of British and American Jewish writers in this period is their unsympathetic portrayal of Polish and Russian Jews. Again, it is Magnus’s book that is most illustrat-

ive. Her hostility was relentless. Even the earliest eleventh-century Jewish immigrants to Poland were described as a ‘very poor and hunted sort’, and indeed in Magnus’s opinion the Jews of Poland ‘were not at any time, a very high class of Jews’: ‘It was a community in which Judaism struck deep roots, but the soil was poor to begin with, and was always terribly in want of modern methods of manuring. In theory and practice, in manners, outward appearance, language, views, and opinions, these Polish Jews were the most conservative, some might even say stagnant or regressive.’ After the Khmelnytsky massacres, ‘those [ Jews] who remained in Poland relapsed into something, to superficial gaze, not very unlike barbarism’. ’ The Ostjuden (east European Jews) are not the only Jews to be disparaged in these books. Negative portrayals of Jews abound in Jewish history textbooks published before 1920. However, in relation to western and central European Jews, they are largely confined to discussions of the medieval and early modern periods,

before emancipation, while such stereotypes of east European Jews actually become more pronounced in the modern period. Events such as the 1648-9 pogroms in Ukraine were portrayed in some books as having a deleterious effect both on the development of Judaism and on the character of the Ostjuden. East European Jews seem to have been singled out for abuse in the modern period precisely because, in the authors’ estimation, they remained in habits and demeanour thoroughly medieval. This can be seen, for example, in their treatment of hasidism, the Jewish pietistic movement that spread rapidly from Volhynia to Ukraine, Galicia, central Poland, and even Lithuania during the late eighteenth century, at roughly the same moment that the Haskalah was dawning in Germany and the Enlightenment ideals of the French revolution were stirring up Europe.

When it was not ignored entirely, these authors lambasted hasidism. In one account Israel ben Eliezer (the Ba’al Shem Tov) was reduced to a magician and ® For more background on Magnus’s volume, see J. Sarna, JPS: The Americanization of Jewish Culture, r88S—1988 (Philadelphia, 1989), 29-33. ” Magnus, Outlines of Jewish History, 276-8.

Eastern Europe in US Jewish Textbooks 233 fanatic, and none used his full name. ‘Bigotry and fanaticism flourished as never before, reason and knowledge were stifled by ignorance and superstition, wrote Sigmund Hecht in his Epitome of Post-Biblical History (Bloch, 1882).° Harris char-

acterized hasidism as an attempt to ‘escape the dry formulas of rabbinic law through the fantasies of mysticism’. Unlike his colleagues, he judiciously attempted to describe the movement objectively, but even he saw little to commend it after the death of the Ba’al Shem Tov. His most trenchant criticism was for the esteem in which the masses held the tsadikim, which, he believed, bordered on idolatry. These religious leaders were charlatans who preyed on the weak-minded and the desperate, and hasidism ‘degenerated into a worship of wonder-working rabbis by the unintelligent masses’.°

If the authors decried the emotional and mystical Judaism exemplified by hasidism, they were equally critical of what they believed was the overly legalistic

Judaism that had invited such a reaction. Magnus wrote of ‘long-winded, hair splitting arguments over trivial, abstruse points . . . these ringleted, gaberdined, bigoted heroes . . . for generations turned their faces to the wall, and seemed, to superficial gaze, to hug their chains’.1°

Inscribing the Other _ Attitudes towards east European Jews set the tone for the authors’ treatment of the non-Jews in their midst. While these authors placed the blame for their deplorable situation mainly on their environment, they also disparaged the Ostjuden for their backwardness and did not shrink from criticizing the Jews themselves, particularly for their clannishness. Martin Meyer, for example, argued that the separation of Jews and Christians not only ‘fostered mutual prejudice and misunderstanding’, but encouraged Jewish indifference to their outward appearance and contempt for secular enlightenment. Harris noted, in hindsight, that the Jews in Poland freely chose to live apart with little concern for their non-Jewish neighbours or for external politics. “This by the way was not an unmixed good and Jews in Poland are suffering from it today.’ However, these same authors also contended that the violent and backward ways of their neighbours gave the Jews little incentive to foster

closer relations, and it was the consensus among them that persecution and exploitation by non-Jews were largely to blame for Jewish degradation."

Elsewhere I have argued that negative images of non-Jews in pre-1920 textbooks can be divided into a number of general categories. Non-Jews, particularly Christians in medieval Europe, were imagined as greedy, ignorant, impure, 8 S. Hecht, Epitome of Post-Biblical History for Jewish American Sabbath Schools (Cincinnati, 1881),

196. 9 M. Harris, Modern Jewish History (New York, 1910), 60, 63. 10 Magnus, Outlines of Jewish History, 283-4.

11M. Meyer, Methods of Teaching Post-Biblical History, ii (Philadelphia, 1915), 109, 113; Harris, Modern Jemish History, 56.

234 Jonathan Krasner — violent, cruel, fanatical, and lascivious.'? It has already been mentioned that medieval stereotypes continued to be applied to modern Poles and Russians, and images reflecting all of these categories can be found in the textbooks. However, when it came to eastern Europe, textbook authors laid particular emphasis on the violence and cruelty of the population: little effort was made to spare readers graphic descriptions of the torture and murder inflicted on the Jews. Some authors

almost seemed to take perverse delight in recounting them. The 1648-9 Khmelnytsky massacres in particular provided writers with an opportunity to relate gruesome and fantastic tales rivalled only by the Spanish Inquisition. They recounted how Jewish men were ‘flayed and roasted alive’ and women ‘were cut open and live cats [sewn] into their bodies’.1* One writer summed up the popular stereotype when he concluded that non-Jews were ‘wild animals’, a description derived from the popular Yiddish epithet vilde khayes, which was often derisively applied by Ashkenazi Jews to their non-Jewish neighbours. Many of these images were indeed based on contemporaneous or historical accounts. For example, the

horrific images of the Khmelnytsky massacres were drawn from Nathan Neta Hannover’s Yeven metsulah (‘Abyss of Despair’), published in 1653. According to Hannover’s account, The enemy slaughtered infants in the laps of mothers. They were sliced into little pieces like fish. They slashed the bellies of pregnant women, removed their infants and tossed them in their faces. Some women had their bellies torn open and cats placed in them. Their bellies were then sewed up with the live cats remaining within. They chopped off the hands

of the victims so they would not be able to remove the cats from the bellies. !4 , How historically reliable such chronicles are remains a subject of debate among scholars. Of course, even in cases where particular images may have some basis in fact, their elaboration by the writers could still be misleading because they suggest that such abuses were pervasive, when in fact they were often more the exception than the rule. But regardless of the historicity of the accounts, an analysis of the images as

presented by the textbook authors is illuminating. As a rule, members of the Christian lower classes were always treated as a group, reinforcing Ilan Peleg’s contention that ‘individuals belonging to a group defined as the Other are not seen as individuals, but rather as part of a chaotic, disorganized, and anonymous collectivity’; hence the frequent use in the textbooks of words like ‘mob’, ‘masses’, and ‘rascals’. Epithets like ‘barbarians’ and ‘cruel savages’ effectively dehumanized the Christians. Peleg wrote that 12 J. Krasner, ‘Representations of Self and Other in American Jewish History and Social Studies Schoolbooks: An Exploration of the Changing Shape of American Jewish Identity’, Ph.D. thesis (Brandeis University, 2002), 23-76. 13 J. Golub and A. Green, A Short History of the Jews (Cincinnati, 1944), 87. 14 Nathan of Hannover, Abyss of Despair, trans. A. Mesch (New York, 1950), 43.

Eastern Europe in US Jewish Textbooks 235 Otherness is a perpetual device through which an inter-group conflict is sustained. It is a normal, expected outgrowth of such a conflict, particularly a severe one. In fact, not to view the adversary as the Other often produces a painful ambiguity, a serious unsettling cognitive dissonance. Perceiving an adversary as a totally negative, evil entity is thus not an unreasonable solution for people locked into conflict.+®

The German Reform Outlook In trying to understand the inspiration for these images it is important to consider the ideological and religious allegiances of the authors. Lady Magnus, the accom-

plished children’s author and wife of the renowned educationist Sir Philip Magnus, was active in London’s liberal Berkeley Street synagogue, where her husband served for a time as minister. Harris served for many years as the spiritual leader of Temple Israel, a Reform congregation in Harlem. Three other popular textbook authors of the period also had ties with the Reform movement. Sigmund Hecht and Martin Meyer were ordained Reform rabbis, both of whom spent many years serving congregations in California. Adele Bildersee, a faculty member at Hunter College, ran the religious school at the Reform movement’s principal synagogue in New York, Temple Emanu-E1.!°

The authors’ affiliation with the Reform movement, or liberal Judaism, and their support for the Enlightenment project necessarily dictated their historical perspective, and they used Poland and Russia, as vestiges of medieval times, to provide a foil for progress in Enlightenment Europe. This point was most effectively made when the authors discussed the policies of tsarist Russia: the tsars who were receptive to Western ideas received sympathetic treatment, while those who turned inward were excoriated. As a rule, the authors explained, the more ‘liberal’ (1.e. pro-Western) tsars were more kindly disposed to their Jewish subjects. Harris, for example, described Peter the Great as a ‘reformer’ who forced open a window onto Europe: ‘he endeavored to bring something of Western enlightenment into his barbaric country though the civilization he brought was but skin deep.’ Harris went on to praise Peter’s attitude towards the Jews: ‘Although he shared some of the prevalent prejudice and misconceptions about the Jews, he was not ill disposed towards them. In time of war he prevented their massacre.’ In contrast, Alexander III was described as ‘a thoroughgoing reactionary’ who had ‘turned back the hands on the dial of time’, and it was no wonder that such an unenlightened man should be responsible for instigating the ‘barbaric’ May Laws. Similarly, his successor, 15 J. Peleg, ‘Otherness and Israel’s Arab Dilemma’, in L. Silberstein and R. Cohn (eds.), The Other in Jewish Thought and History (New York, 1994), 261-3. 16 Jewish Encyclopedia.com, s.v. Sir Philip Magnus, Lady Katie Magnus. See also F. Foden, Philip

Magnus: Victorian Educational Pioneer (London, 1970); A. Bildersee’s obituary, New York Times, 21 Nov. 1971; Richard Stern to Jacob Marcus, 20 Apr. 1972, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Adele Bildersee Nearprint file; obituary for Maurice Harris, New York Times, 24 June 1930, 25; Encyclopedia Judaica (Jerusalem, 1971), s.v. Martin Abraham Meyer, 1463; S. Hecht, American Jewish Year Book, v (Philadelphia, 1903), 62.

236 Jonathan Krasner Nicholas II, who had presided over Russia during some of the bloodiest pogroms and a modern-day blood libel trial, was characterized as ‘superstitious and vacillating’ and ‘at the mercy of adventurers’. Harris concluded that tsarist Russia was a

‘country of Egyptian darkness’, in contrast to the ‘more enlightened lands’ of western Europe and the United States. This interpretative lens continued to be

, employed after the First World War. In his 1929 revision of Magnus’s volume, Solomon Grayzel wrote that the May Laws illustrated to traditional Jews and maskilim alike that ‘prejudice, and not reason, ruled the Russian mind’.?’ To these authors, that such an environment produced backward Jews practising a debased Judaism was a fundamental tenet of their faith. It was no accident that Magnus’s description of “Talmudic mountebanks’ and ‘ringleted, gaberdined, bigoted heroes . . . hug[ging] their chains’ appeared only sentences before her introduction of the true hero of her story, Moses Mendelssohn. Magnus intimated that the man whom she called ‘the emancipator’ broke ‘the fetters which degraded’.'® The paradigm of Jewish regeneration was central to the arguments of the (Jewish

and non-Jewish) proponents of emancipation and Jewish religious reform. In _ Germany one need look no further than the debates over Jewish emancipation to appreciate that Jews were considered debased in character and lacking in morals,

even by their supporters. Jacob Katz observed that this view of the Jewish character was generally accepted by enlightened Jewish society. The entire Enlightenment project was based upon the notion that education could ‘remedy these deficiencies by rectifying the basic situation that had produced them’.!? Asa champion of historical Judaism, and an advocate of moderate reform, the historian Heinrich Graetz was influenced by this paradigm, as were leaders like Leopold Zunz, the pioneer of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, and Abraham Geiger, often referred to as the father of Reform Judaism.

The ideas of the Jewish Enlightenment were transplanted from Europe to America by the first and second generation of American Reform ideologues, and

found their way into the textbooks. One of the earliest Reform leaders, Max Lilienthal, translated from the original German the first English-language Jewish history textbook to be published in the United States.2° The optimistic and selfassured posture of the post-Civil War Reform movement—reflecting, in part, the general confidence of the age, and later influenced by the Progressive movement— also encouraged textbook writers to embrace a positivist teleology. For many of its rhetorical defenders, the legitimacy of the Reform movement lay in its purification and distillation of rabbinic Judaism’s excesses. 17 Harris, Modern Ffewish History, 62-8; K. Magnus, Outlines of Jewish History, rev. edn. with new chapters by S. Grayzel (Philadelphia, 1929), 369. 18 Magnus, Outlines of Jewish History, 283-4. 19 J. Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Fewish Emancipation 1770-1870 (New York, 1973), 68. 20 M. Lilienthal, Synopsis of the History of the Israelites: From the Time of Alexander the Macedonian,

to the Present Age; rev. trans. of a work by Emanuel Hecht (Cincinnati, 1857).

Eastern Europe in US Jewish Textbooks 237 A careful reading of the textbooks makes clear that the paradigm of Jewish regeneration was, in the minds of the writers, intimately connected with the Reform movement. Some, including Magnus, employed the imagery of night and dawn when discussing the transition from the ghetto to religious enlightenment and political emancipation. Harris actually used the term ‘religious regeneration’ when discussing the Reform movement. He described the innovations of the early Reform movement as ‘the severing of certain foreign growths, not intrinsically Jewish but which had come to adhere to Judaism in its different lands of sojourn, like barnacles to a ship’. Harris, of course, was only articulating the long-held

position of the reformers, particularly those involved with Wissenschaft des Judentums. The very rationale behind Reform Judaism, according to the authors (clearly drawing on the writings of both American and German proponents of Reform such as Abraham Geiger and Kaufmann Kohler), rested upon the conviction that Jews and Judaism needed to be cleansed. Meyer wrote that the mission of Reform was to ‘restor[e] Judaism to its original standards’.*?

Impugning the Migrant But the writers of this era had a special motivation for impugning the Ostjuden and the environment that produced them. These textbooks were written during the height of east European emigration to the West. The attitudes expressed towards the Ostyuden betrayed the anxiety and resentment with which many of the ‘sons of Emancipation’ viewed the migrants. According to Geoffrey Alderman, tensions were particularly high in Magnus’s London community. The appearance

of thousands of immigrants in London’s East End reinforced the resolve of the native community to foster and preserve ‘the image of an assimilated and acculturated community, as indistinguishable from that of the host society as it was possible for the Jews to possess in Christian Britain’.2* Perhaps this explains why Magnus’s book is easily the most vitriolic of the group. For Magnus, the hunched, gabardined Orthodox Jews with their superstitious ideas and supposedly unintelligible language bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the reference group’s ‘mirage of the Other’ that native (British) Jews had tried so hard to overcome. To the insecure, the Ostyuden conjured up feelings of personal inadequacy and disingenuity. They served as a reminder that in spite of their efforts to acculturate, the indigenous Jews were still not completely accepted by non-Jewish society. And, finally, they became the object upon which the indigenous Jews projected the wider society’s Jewish stereotypes.7° 21 Harris, Modern Fewish History, 87; Meyer, Methods of Teaching, ii. 193.

22 G. Alderman, ‘English Jews or Jews of the English Persuasion? Reflections on the Emancipation

of Anglo-Jewry’, in P. Birnbaum and I. Katznelson (eds.), Pathways to Emancipation (Princeton, 1995), 143.

23 Magnus’s distaste for east European Jews played a significant part in turning her against Zionism. At one point she wrote to Israel Zangwill that she ‘could not countenance the idea of the Holy Land turning into ‘a dumping ground for sad, soiled rubbish. I ache for those poor refugees—but I can’t

238 Jonathan Krasner This pattern was as much in evidence in New York and Chicago as in London

and Berlin. Moses Rischin demonstrated it in his description of the reception given to the east European immigrants by their German Jewish co-religionists in the United States. Nothing in the newcomers seemed worthy of approval. Yiddish, or Judeo-German, ‘a language only understood by Polish and Russian Jews’, though intelligible to non-Jewish Germans, was denounced as ‘piggish jargon’. Immigrant dress, ceremonials, and rabbinic divorces were anathema. Yiddish theaters were barbarous, Yiddish newspapers, collectively stigmatized as ‘socialistic’, even worse. Furthermore, ‘dangerous principles’ were ‘innate in the Russian Jew’. . . . ‘Uptown’ and ‘downtown’ separated employers from employees, desirable from undesirable, ‘classes’ from ‘masses’, ‘Americans’ from ‘foreigners’, and icily confirmed the most categorical judgments.”*

In the United States, German Jewish resistance to the east European immigrants was palpable, if sometimes overstated in the scholarly literature. American Jewish authors portrayed Polish and Russian Jews as inferior in manners and culture. The sharpest criticism of east European Jews came in the form of attacks on their religious practices and convictions. As we saw above, hasidism and traditional Judaism were portrayed as debased and retrograde.

The World According to Graetz Another important influence on these writers was their sources. Authors of textbooks rarely rely on original research for their information, and unfortunately most of the books surveyed do not include bibliographies. Harris included a Notes and References section at the end of each of his chapters, but these were incomplete and were more like lists of suggested further reading. Still, from the numer-

ous passing references to Heinrich Graetz both in Harris’s work and in that of Sigmund Hecht and Adele Bildersee, it is fair to say that his history exerted the most influence over these writers. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Graetz propounded the notion of Jewish ‘debasement and decadence’ in the late Middle Ages and early modern period. He referred to this era as ‘an ice-cold, ghastly winter’ when internal and external events work|ed] together to strip Jewish history of the greatness it had possessed hitherto, and to force upon its bearer, the Jewish people, the repulsive image of a serf. Along with this debasement and subjugation came spiritual stagnation. The luxurious help put them where the prophets trod—it isn’t fair to our memories nor our hopes that Zion should be repeopled except by our best.’ Her husband, Philip, and son Laurie shared her anti-Zionist sentiments. Both would become involved with the anti-Zionist League of British Jews (founded in 1916) in the years after the publication of Outlines. According to Philip Magnus’s biographer, ‘The unalterable

Magnus view was that Jews are English, German, French and Russian according to their birth.’ S. Cohen, English Zionists and British fews: The Communal Politics of Anglo-Jewry, 1895-1920 (Princeton, 1982), 96; see also Foden, Philip Magnus, 95. 24M. Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s fews 1870-1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 97.

Eastern Europe in US Jewish Textbooks 239 leaves and blossoms of a glorious ascent of the spirit gradually fell to earth, exposing a coarse, brittle stump, entwined with the ugly threads of a hyperpiety robbed of spirit, a bewildered secret doctrine, and all manner of perversions.?°

The textbook writers were generally faithful to Graetz’s analysis, some almost paraphrasing him. Nor is it surprising that the only author to dissent somewhat from the reductionism of Graetz’s view was also the only trained historian. Maurice Harris’s edu-

cation at Columbia University may have inspired him to read Graetz more critically, pointedly rejecting some of the master’s more disparaging conclusions. Commenting on yeshiva learning, Harris wrote that this constant exercise of legal discrimination made [the rabbis] keen lawyers but marred

somewhat their religious function and value. The historian Graetz asserts that it also vitiated their ethical sense. This may be sweepingly severe. Certainly it may be said that economically the prudent, sober and industrious Jews of Poland supplied a.needed human complement to the somewhat unsteady Polish nationality.*°

While Harris went on to argue that the yeshivas ‘imparted a manner, style, and ges-

ture that became characteristic of Polish Jews’, he declined to pass judgement on their demeanour. His dispassionate discussion of Jewish—Polish relations set the tone for textbooks that appeared between 1920 and 1965, and the Jewish Publication Society’s publication of Simon Dubnow’s three-volume History of the Jews in Poland and Russia between 1916 and 1920, translated into English by Israel

Friedlaender, did much to expand the succeeding generation’s view of east European Jewry.

A Mask of Insecurity Pointing to Graetz, or even to the immigration into the United States of the Ostjuden, however, does not explain sufficiently the abiding hostility directed by the writers of these textbooks towards medieval Christians and by extension the

Poles and Russians. Nor does it adequately address the question of why these authors employed the particular images that they did. Certainly, recounting stories of persecution and expulsion, particularly in the context of a group history where members of the group were the victims, invited expressions of shock and outrage. But in this case, we have a well-developed repository of images and vocabulary upon which these authors were drawing. Thus, it seems proper to conclude that the hostility reflected in the prose gave voice to a collective Jewish consciousness that had been forged over centuries of conflict between Christian and Jew, and continued to find resonance even in an American environment. Despite the almost 25 These quotations are taken from Graetz’s introduction to vol. v of his History. The English translation of the original German was rendered by Michael Meyer in his Jdeas of Jewish History

(Detroit, 1987), 241-2. 26 Harris, Modern Jewish History, 58-9.

240 Jonathan Krasner universally sanguine portraits that appear in these textbooks of Jewish life in America, the reality was more precarious. Moreover, since social separation between Jews and Christians was still perceived to be appropriate and preferable by both groups in this period, the perpetuation of negative stereotypes was intrinsic to the maintenance of the social order. ‘Thus images immortalized by Nathan Neta Hannover and other medieval chroniclers, often refracted through the writings of

Heinrich Graetz, were further embellished by writers like Magnus, Hecht, and Bildersee and served up to a new generation.

Peleg wrote that, ‘when Otherness characterizes a society, it is inevitably disseminated through the process of socialization in which one generation transmits values, norms, and beliefs to other generations’. In particular, he noted that ‘a high degree of intergenerational congruence is likely to exist in societal atti-

tudes towards the Other’.*” His observation remains true even in an American context, where the degree of hostility was mitigated but social separation was still normative. Thus, images continued to be disseminated even if they were spatially and temporally misplaced. To some extent in the 1930s and especially after the Second World War, these de-contextualized images would be adapted or supplanted by images that better reflected the group’s ever-evolving existential conception of Self and Other in the United States. But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the vast majority of Jews in America were first- or second-generation, it is safe to assume that the images were largely reflective of their European context. So what we are dealing with is representations that were shaped primarily by an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ashkenazi milieu. To familiarize oneself with this repository of images is to recognize that they were applied with considerable discrimination: Christians were not viewed monolithically, even in the coarse world of stereotypes, and no less than religion, the images code assumptions about class. The images also hint at the web of power

relationships that existed between Jew and Christian, which was integral to the way in which the Jew conceptualized his superiority. In the case of the constellation of stereotypes relating to Christian carnality, it is no accident that they were applied almost exclusively to the lower classes. Many of

the books differentiated between three enemies: the Church, the law (government), and the mob.”° Cruelty and violence could be and sometimes were attributed to the aristocracy and the clergy, but here it was usually associated with them as a locus of power: kings and nobles legislated oppression, while the clergy used the tools of religious domination to achieve their aims. The lower class, however, expressed its will through mob violence and explosions of animal rage and passion. 27 Peleg, ‘Otherness and Israel’s Arab Dilemma’, 263. 28 E. E. Levinger and L. J. Levinger, Story of the Jew for Young People (New York, 1929), 119-26, is most explicit in delineating these categories.

Eastern Europe in US Jewish Textbooks 241 It was in reference to the peasants alone that epithets like ‘refuse’, ‘pestilence’, ‘wild’, ‘ruthless’, ‘bloody’, and ‘savage’ were applied.”

The dehumanization of the peasants was also ‘an instrument for sustaining a social and political order in which the Other is a victim’.°° In central and eastern Europe, particularly in Poland and Ukraine, the Jews were frequently cast in an exploitative role in relation to the peasants. Although they were often acting as agents of the aristocracy, whether as estate managers, tax-collectors, or merchant capitalists, the face of the victimizer was Jewish. Peasant outbursts directed at Jews in the form of pogroms were more often than not fomented by perceived Jewish exploitation. The Jew could not escape awareness of his position, but rather than question the social and political order, he unconsciously justified that position by labelling the lower classes as subhuman, as animals. The occasional violence on the part of the peasants only served to reinforce this image. Even in communities where the pattern of exploitation was not evident, Jews tended to view themselves as superior. Representations of the boorish Christian peasant effectively drew the boundaries of idealized Jewish conduct. The term that Jews used to refer to the sum of desirable behaviour was eydelkeyt. The eydel Yid was meek, sweet, honest, modest, and, not least, studious. As Daniel Boyarin observed, elements of this Jewish ideal type were ‘very deeply rooted in traditional Jewish culture’, and can be traced back to the Babylonian Talmud. Eydelkeyt was the antithesis of the dominant image of masculinity in Europe, which coded ‘activity, domination, and aggressiveness as “manly” and gentleness and passivity as emasculate or effeminate . . . Jewish society needed an image against which to

define itself and produced the goy—the hypermale—as its countertype, as a reverse of its social norm.’*! In modern Yiddish culture the paradigm of the eydel Yid was the mentsh.*”

Many of the textbooks overtly contrasted the carnal goy with the eydel Yid. Bildersee directly followed her description of mob violence against Jewish taxcollectors with glowing descriptions of ‘the nobility of character of the medieval Jew’. In contrast to the bestial ‘rabble’ who ‘might fall upon [the Jew’s] house . . . without any pretext’ and ‘hunt him from house and home’, the Jew was described 29H. Braver, Great Figures and Events in Jewish History (New York, 1930), 140-1; Magnus, Outlines of Jewish History, 158-9; M. Harris, History of the Mediaeval Jews from the Moslem conquest of Spain

to the discovery of America (New York, 1924), 123-5; Meyer, Methods of Teaching, 95-7; S. Ish-Kishor, Everyman’s History of the Jews (New York, 1948), 128-9; A. Sachar, History of the Jews

(New York, 1965), 188-9. 30 Peleg, ‘Otherness and Israel’s Arab Dilemma’, 262. 31 TD. Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley, 1997), 2. Boyarin reminded his readers that despite the fact that eydelkeyt belies the conven-

tional Western image of masculinity, ‘these characteristics . . . were not supposed to render the male even slightly unappealing or desexualized’. 82 For a derivation of the relatively modern term mentsh, see M. Kaminsky, ‘Discourse and Self Formation: The Concept of Mentsh in Modern Yiddish Culture’, American Fournal of Psychoanalysis, 54/4 (1994), 293-316.

242 Jonathan Krasner as ‘high minded and cultured . . . upright and blameless . . . charitable . . . generous’. Even in the face of persecution and death, Bildersee wrote, the Jews would maintain their demeanour, their ‘unequalled patient endurance of the insult and humiliation of their daily lives’.*°

THE YEARS 1920-1965 The Revolution in Textbook Publishing The inter-war years were truly a turning point in the history of American Jewish textbook publishing. Until then, publishing companies did little to give their school-books the aesthetic feel of contemporaneous state school textbooks. The new attention to age-appropriate content and design was a by-product of the socalled Benderly revolution in Jewish education. Samson Benderly was appointed director of the New York Kehillah’s Bureau of Jewish Education in 1910, and con-

tinued to run the Bureau until it was incorporated into the Jewish Education Committee in 1940. Benderly was one of the first Jewish educators to introduce progressive reforms into the classrooms of supplementary schools.

As Miriam Heller Stern has observed, ‘Benderly believed very strongly that Jewish education was the key to the survival of the Jewish people in America, and if it was to succeed, it would have to adapt to a modern American form to appeal to the Americanized children of immigrants.’** To that end, he tried to incorporate pedagogical strategies and teaching materials that were comparable to those used in the most progressive state schools. Among his priorities was the publication and dissemination of a new generation of textbooks. He recognized as early as 1912 the need for a ‘graded, well-printed, properly bound, illustrated series of textbooks’.*° Ultimately, the Bureau of Jewish Education was only responsible for a few of the many titles published between the world wars, but the mainstream Jewish presses and most of the authors of textbooks were inspired by Benderly’s vision.*© Some of the most prominent of these writers 1n this period, including Deborah

Pessin, Mamie Gamoran, Elma Ehrlich Levinger, and Jacob Golub, worked directly with Benderly at the Bureau or were employed in one of its progressive

supplementary schools. During the first decades of his career at the Bureau, Benderly trained a cadre of disciples who, over the next half-century, went on to 33 A. Bildersee, Jewish Post-Biblical History through Great Personalities (Cincinnati, 1918), 162-3. 34 M. H. Stern, ‘“A Dream Not Quite Come True”: Reassessing the Benderly Legacy’, paper presented at the annual meeting of the Network for Research in Jewish Education, Baltimore, June 2004.

35 §. Benderly, ‘Aims and Activities of the Bureau of Education of the Jewish Community (Kehillah) of New York, 1912’, repr. in Jewish Education, 20/3 (Summer 1949), 106-7. 36 For more on Benderly and textbooks, see Krasner, ‘Representations of Self and Other’, 109-67. See also K. Olitsky, ‘A History of Reform Jewish Education during Emanuel Gamoran’s Tenure as

Educational Director of the Commission on Jewish Education of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1923-1958’, Ph.D. thesis (Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion, 1984).

Eastern Europe in US Jewish Textbooks 243 take up key positions in the field of Jewish education. He insisted that their formal training include an advanced degree at Columbia University Teachers College as well as the Teachers’ Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary. At the former institution they studied with leaders in progressive education such as John Dewey and William Heard Kilpatrick. The latter scholar, in particular, profoundly influ-

enced how Benderly’s protégés and others conceived of the Jewish textbook. Emanuel Gamoran, who wrote his Ph.D. under Kilpatrick’s supervision, went on

| to become director of education of the Commission on Jewish Education of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, where he edited and published many of the most innovative Jewish textbooks of the era.°’ It was also at Columbia that some future textbook writers were introduced to the ideas of advocates of the New History such as James Harvey Robinson and Charles Beard.*®

New History, Social Studies, and Cultural Pluralism By the late 1910s the vogue in history education was social studies, the study of ‘the organization and development of human society, and . . . man as a member of social groups’.®? Social studies drew on social science disciplines such as sociology, political science, and economics, as well as humanistic subjects such as

history. Jewish educators in particular were attracted to the social studies approach. Because it concentrated on the development of civilization as a whole, rather than narrowly focusing on political or intellectual history, it was perceived as an ideal vehicle for promoting Jewish adjustment to America within a framework of cultural pluralism. Accordingly, the new crop of Jewish history textbooks concentrated more on daily life, including Jewish—non-Jewish relations. While accounts of persecution were not expunged from the books, they appeared alongside descriptions of economic and social relations, resulting in a more nuanced portrait. At the same time textbook authors moved away from the negative portraits of east European Jews that had characterized pre-1920 textbooks. In 1929, as the Jewish Publication Society prepared a revised edition of Lady Magnus’s history, its editor, Cyrus Adler, reread the original manuscript and was shocked to come across ‘a perfectly libellous statement about the Polish Jews’.*° Ironically, Adler had been intimately involved in the preparation of the 1890 edition, but clearly,

sensibilities had changed in forty years. The east European immigrants were rapidly acculturating and beginning to assume positions of power within — the organized community. Even within the bastion of the Reform movement, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the education department was placed under the direction of an Ostjude, Emanuel Gamoran. Likewise, many, but not all, 37 Krasner, ‘Representations of Self and Other’, 168-258. 88 For more on the New History and its impact on American education, see G. Nash, C. Crabtree, and R. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York, 1998), 32-46.

39 Ibid. 37. 40 Quoted in Sarna, JPS, 33.

244 Fonathan Krasner of the textbook writers were of east European lineage, as were the vast majority of their intended readership. The history of Polish and Russian Jewry was considered personal history, as the author Mordecai Soloff explained at the beginning of his unit on Polish Jewish life: Jews in this country are interested in the Jews of Poland first because they are our brothers, and second because most American Jews, as well as the large majority of Jews who live in other lands, are descendants of Polish or Russian Jews . . . To know the history of our own fathers and grandfathers, we must be acquainted with the heroic and tragic story of Polish Jewry.*!

Writers inclined to be sympathetic towards the east Europeans also benefited from

new scholarship on the Jews of eastern Europe, including works by Simon Dubnow, Louis Ginzburg, Solomon Schechter, Alexander Marx, and Max Margolis, and later Salo Baron and Martin Buber. Dubnow’s history in particular, as adapted and translated by Friedlaender, was designed to provide the immigrant masses in the United States with a foundation story that would connect them with their east European past. Baron’s attack on the lachrymose approach to Jewish history, which he directed specifically at Jewish educators in a 1939 article in the journal Fewish Education, also contributed to the shift in focus and tone.*”

Dorothy Zeligs: Embracing Complexity Jacob Golub first adopted the social studies approach in his three-volume textbook on the biblical and Graeco-Roman periods, which was published by the Union of

American Hebrew Congregations under Gamoran’s supervision between 1929 and 1931. Gamoran followed it up with a trilogy by Soloff entitled How the Jewish

People Lives Today,**® which covered the entire span of Jewish history. But, - arguably, the most successful attempt to apply the approach in a comprehensive treatment of Jewish history was Dorothy Zeligs’s trilogy, published by Bloch between 1935 and 1938. Based on an experimental edition published a few years earlier by the Cincinnati Bureau of Jewish Education, the books had already gone through seven impressions by 1945. A Child’s History of the Hebrew People begins with a description of nomadic Hebrew life and concludes with the destruction of the Second Temple. The saga is picked up in A Child’s History of Jewish Life, 41 M. Soloff, How the Jewish People Lives Today (Cincinnati, 1940), 27. 42 Among the books specifically included in the textbooks’ bibliographies were S. Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, from the Earhest Times until the Present Day, trans. I. Friedlaender, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1916, 1918, 1920); L. Ginzburg, Students, Scholars and Saints (Philadelphia, 1928); A. Marx and M. Margolis, History of the Jewish People (Philadelphia, 1927); S. Schechter, Studies in

judaism, 2nd ser. (Philadelphia, 1908); S. Grayzel, A History of the Jews (Philadelphia, 1947); M. Buber, Tales of Hasidism: The Early Masters (New York, 1947); and S. Baron, “The Modern Age’, in L. Schwarz (ed.), Great Ages and Ideas of the Jewish People (New York, 1956). On Dubnow’s history, see Sarna, JPS, 66—7. Salo Baron’s presentation of his lachrymose theory of Jewish history to educators can be found in ‘Emphases in Jewish History’, Jewish Education, 11 (Apr. 1939), 8—22, 39. 43 Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1934, 1936, 1940.

Eastern Europe in US Jewish Textbooks 245 which takes the reader to the sixteenth century. The final volume, 4 Mistory of jewish Life in Modern Times, brings the story to Zeligs’s own day, with the shadow of Nazism hanging over its chapters on Germany and Poland.

The bibliography at the end of Zeligs’s third volume indicates that she consulted a number of the newer Jewish histories. Works by Elkan Adler, Jacob R. Marcus,** and Cecil Roth exerted a considerable influence on her depictions of Spain, Turkey, Germany, and the Netherlands, providing her with material on cultural and social mores as well as political and intellectual history. The availability of new general histories by Alexander Marx and Max Margolis, Abram Sachar, and Roth also influenced her trilogy. Marx reviewed portions of her manuscript

prior to publication.*° But the historian whose influence is most perceptible is Simon Dubnow. Not only did Zeligs rely on his History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, but she adhered to his sociological view of Jewish history. Moreover, her organization of the material followed his periodization. A Child’s Mistory of Fewish

Life was divided into four units, corresponding to what she identified as the four major epochs of late antiquity and the medieval period: Palestine in the days of the

Mishnah and Palestinian Talmud; Babylonia in the late talmudic and gaonic period; Spain from the Islamic conquest to the expulsion; and Ashkenaz from the days of Rashi to the early modern period. Chapters in Zeligs’s A History of Jewish Life in Modern Times were organized around modern Jewish centres, rather than adopting a strictly chronological approach. But if scholars like Dubnow shaped her outlook on Jewish history and helped her to conceptualize the organization of her books, Zeligs’s training at Columbia Teachers College heavily influenced their style and pedagogic approach, including her adoption of the methodology of New History. The Teachers College professor William McCall wrote the preface to the first volume, praising it as ‘a welcome contribution to child literature for the progressive classroom’. Zeligs made the case for applying the methodology of New History to the writing of Jewish history texts in articles published in Jewish Education and the Jewish Teacher, journals that were edited by disciples of Benderly. First, she emphasized the growing acceptance of the New History by general historians and popular textbook authors such as the Columbia Teachers College professor Harold Rugg. Next she sought to clarify the reasons for teaching history. She recognized that the uses of history had changed over time, but that in the present (1.e. the 1930s) its primary purpose was to give people a sense of continuity with the past, a sense of rootedness. In order to achieve this aim, it must describe ways of living and thinking that were characteristic of whole groups rather than startling episodes, concerning single individuals . . . To a greater degree than ever “4 In the introduction to her third volume Zeligs thanks Marcus for allowing her to use his few in the Medieval World (Cincinnati, 1938) prior to its publication. She also relies heavily on his The Rise and Destiny of the German Jew (Cincinnati, 1934). * D. Zeligs, Child’s History of fewish Life (New York, 1935), acknowledgements.

246 Jonathan Krasner before, historians emphasize the need of presenting history as the story of civilization, showing how people lived in the past. History can no longer be regarded merely as a string of names and dates. . . . If the function of history is to re-create the past, 1t must picture as faithfully as possible the daily life of the average man as one of its essential elements.

Zeligs quoted James Harvey Robinson, a father of the New History, to justify the accentuation of the ‘normal and homely’ over the ‘spectacular and romantic’.*6 Zeligs also pointed out that applying the New History to a Jewish context would result in a more balanced view of the Jewish past, a history characterized by peaceful coexistence and cultural achievement as much as by conflict and sorrow. The Jewish heritage is not entirely one of tears and woes. There have been many peaceful and happy intervals during which Jewish life flourished and progressed. The achievements of the Jewish people during these periods were greater than during times of stress. We cannot close our eyes to the tragic moments in the life of Israel, but neither should we present them to our children as the sole monuments of our people.*’

Zeligs did not gloss over or even play down anti-Jewish preyudice and persecution. But she tried to provide more perspective than had past textbook authors. One of the more remarkable examples of her treatment of non-Jews comes in her

chapter on Poland. Earlier authors considered Poland a semi-barbarous land. Zeligs, in contrast, did her best to humanize the Polish people and animate their daily routines. In her tale of seventeenth-century Polish life, Joseph and David, sons of a steward to a Polish nobleman, or pan, take a tour of a Polish village. There

they meet the serf Stanislaw and his wife. The text discusses the difficult conditions under which Stanislaw lived and describes his home. ‘His young wife was boiling potatoes over an open fireplace. There was no chimney for the smoke to escape, so the hut was thick with it and grimy with soot. A bed covered with an old cloth stood in the corner. The children had to sleep on wooden platforms near the fire. On a rough table stood a few earthenware dishes and wooden bowl.’ Similarly, in a chapter on Russia, Zeligs described the peasants as ‘rough, uneducated folk, but not unkind’. Peasant dwellings, she asserted, ‘were generally even poorer than the poor Jewish homes’. She went on to discuss peasant costumes and religious customs.*®

One could argue that some of Zeligs’s descriptions only reinforced the antiChristian images of earlier texts. Alternatively, one might be tempted to protest

that what set Zeligs apart from authors like Magnus and Meyer, was that, in 46 Zeligs, Child’s History of Jewish Life, p. v; on Zeligs and the New History, see D. Zeligs, “The “New History” and the Jewish Schools’, femish Teacher, 5/3 (1937), 32-6; D. Zeligs, “The New Psychological Approach to the Teaching of History in Intermediate Grades’, femish Education, 4/1 (1932), 36-44. Rugg’s series of social-science-oriented texts, including A History of American Civilization, were published by Ginn in the late 1920s and early 1930s (F FitzGerald, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (Boston, 1970), 229).

47 Zeligs, ‘The “New History”’, 36. 48 D. Zeligs, A History of fewish Life in Modern Times (New York, 1938), 47-9, 205-8.

Eastern Europe in US Jewish Textbooks 247 descriptions like the one above, she did not ascribe difference to what she described. However, neither of these arguments is quite fair. As the quotations above indicate, Polish and Russian peasants were described as dirty and ignorant. Such generalizations were, arguably, accurate, but as Sander Gilman maintains, almost all representations are ‘rooted in some type of observable phenomenon which is then labeled as pathological’.*? Zeligs did not allow her non-Jewish characters to speak in their own voices, but one should not dismiss her intentions, nor can one ignore the perceptible differences between her texts and those of earlier authors. She clearly wished to avoid the excesses born of chauvinism, and strove to make her portrayals multidimensional. According to both McCall’s preface and

Zeligs’s bibliography, she consulted non-Jewish, as well as Jewish, historical sources.

Thus, while Zeligs did present some of the same anti-Christian material that characterized the earlier books, she provided perspective. Antisemitism was placed

in the context of economic competition between Jews and burghers, as well as superstition and ignorance. The wariness of Jews among Polish peasants was also portrayed as a consequence of the economic role they played as middlemen between the noble landlords and the serfs. Consider the following dialogue between Joseph and Stanislaw’s wife: ‘I must go to the mill and get my grain ground into flour. For that, too, a tax must be paid to your father.’ ‘Father is only the steward, or manager for the Pan’, Joseph reminded her. “The money

which he collects from the peasants for grinding their grain and for the mead they drink really goes to the Polish noble.’ ‘IT understand’, the woman answered gravely. ‘Stanislaw has explained it to me several times, but I always forget. All I can see is your father collects the money. Many peasants feel that way and they think that it is the Jews who take their money from them. But your father and mother are nice people and we all like them’, she ended with a smile.°°

This fictional discussion unapologetically dramatizes the potential source of conflict. Consequently, when the pogroms of 1648 are described three pages later, Zeligs’s readers are able to place the massacres in some context. Zeligs also introduced an unprecedented level of historiographic sophistication, which served to temper her portrayal of anti-Judaism and antisemitism. For exam-

ple, she distinguished between prescriptive and descriptive, observing that in many localities existing anti-Jewish laws were not enforced.°* Zeligs’s attempt at balance throughout her series was noticed and applauded by

the critics. One reviewer observed that ‘the very delicate problem of treating the story of persecution in a manner that will avoid chauvinism on the one hand and maudlin self-pity on the other, has been admirably solved’. Another praised Zeligs for 49 S. Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York, 1991), 1-2.

5° Zeligs, A History of Fewish Life in Modern Times, 48-0. 51 Tbid. 185.

248 Jonathan Krasner refus[ing] to treat Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks and Romans as mere contemptible idol worshippers . . . She re-creates the life of Babylon as vividly as the life of Palestine. The children are thus saved from that distorted sense of history which has been the lot of thousands of children who were taught in religious schools to have nothing but contempt and hatred for those splendid surges of human spirit which, granting their many shortcomings, account for the great civilizations of the Nile, the Euphrates and the Mediterranean.””

Zeligs did not remove the barriers between Jew and non-Jew. Her stories and historical narrative continued to present the two groups—as a binary opposition. Her rich descriptions of Jewish life, coupled with her expressed disapproval of Jews who abandoned their people, were designed to engender identification and group loyalty; nor did she omit or play down instances of conflict and persecution. Yet she attempted to minimize the demonization of the Other. Her dedication to portraying the complexity of relations between Jews and non-Jews, and her rejection of a lachrymose view of Jewish history, resulted in a text where the Otherness of both Jew and non-Jew was, to some extent, qualified by recognition of their shared humanity.

POST-WAR CONTINUITIES The Jewish history textbooks that were published after the war exhibited considerable continuity of approach and style. The social studies method was adopted by Deborah Pessin in her three-volume The Jewish People°® and, to a lesser extent, by

Mamie Gamoran in The New Jewish History.°* Accordingly, chapters on prepartition Poland continued to provide a sketch of day-to-day relations between Poles and Jews. Pessin, for example, has an entire chapter called ‘A Day in Lublin, circa 1600’. She tried to re-create the atmosphere of the annual fair and noted that Jews and Poles mingled freely and peacefully. Most intriguing is her description of the Jewish fair-goers: “There are Jews in sheepskin coats and fur turbans and Jews in long black coats that are called kaftans. There are Jews with pale blue eyes and wide cheekbones, like those of their Slavic neighbours, and Jews with black eyes and narrow faces.’ Writing in the aftermath of the Second World War, her intention was likely to ridicule Nazi racial ideology, but her observation implicitly raised the question why some Jews had distinctively Slavonic features. Unlike authors who portrayed the Jews as living in a world apart from their neighbours, Pessin’s description suggests a diverse Jewish population and various levels of Jewish interaction with the non-Jewish world.*> _ Writing in 1940, Mordecai Soloff warned his readers not to extrapolate from

events in the recent past to Jewish life in Poland in previous centuries. ‘Today, 52 FE Freedman, review of D. Zeligs, Child’s History of Fewish Life, Jewish Education, 9/2 (1937), 102; L. Fram, review of D. Zeligs, A Child’s History of the Jewish People, Jewish Education, 3/3 (1931), 198.

c United Synagogue, 1951-3. °4 Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1953-7. °° D. Pessin, The Jewish People, iii (New York, 1953), 63.

Eastern Europe in US Jewish Textbooks 249 more than ever before, we are concerned with the problems of our fellow Jews across the sea, especially those in Poland. Their difficulties have in recent years been so many and so great that people are led to believe Polish Jewry was always in

need of help. Happily, this is not true.’ As in previous books, authors carefully portrayed Jewish—Polish relations in pre-partition Poland as a complex web, with some elements of the population, notably the kings and nobles, favourably disposed towards the Jews, and others, including the peasants and ethnically German merchants and craftsmen, antagonistic. They emphasized that the Jews played a necessary role in the Polish economy. ‘A wide gulf separated [the nobles and the peasants]. The country needed a third group—what we now call a middle class,’ wrote Mamie Gamoran.°°

In the Shadow of the Holocaust: A Return to Reductionism There was an air of sentimentalism, however, in the prose of these later textbooks that was not as evident in Zeligs’s books. For example, both Pessin and Gamoran

wrote tender accounts of heder and yeshiva life that bordered on the quixotic, standing in stark contrast to clear-eyed memoirists’ accounts like those found in Chaim Weizmann’s Trial and Error and Isaac Leib Peretz’s Memories.°’ The agen-

das of the textbook authors, writing during or soon after the Holocaust, were shaped by American Jews’ understandable tendency to romanticize the world that had been destroyed, as well as their need for inspirational stories that would shore up their faith. In his introduction to his wife’s The New fewish History, its editor, Emanuel Gamoran, wrote that the series was designed above all to emphasize “the inner fortitude that made it possible for Jews and Judaism to survive, holding aloft their social, religious, and cultural ideas, despite tragedy’. Gamoran went on to note that, when writing, his wife ‘kept in mind the desirability of developing positive attitudes on the part of our young people’. These goals, of course, were not

peculiar to the post-war textbooks, but healthy socialization took on an added urgency in the years leading up to and directly after the Holocaust.*®

This turning inward inevitably had an impact on representations of east European peoples within the books. Authors became less interested in exploring Jewish—non-Jewish relations than in extolling the virtues of Jewish life. Steven

Zipperstein has observed that ‘in the years since the Second World War, the Russian Jewish past [has] emerged as a source of pedigree, as proof that Jews had 56 Soloff, How the Jewish People Lives Today, 27; M. Gamoran, The New Jewish History, iti (New York, 1957), 50.

57 C. Weizmann, Trial and Error, i (Philadelphia, 1949), 4-5; I. L. Peretz, ‘My Memoirs’, in R. Wisse (ed.), The I. L. Peretz Reader (New Haven, 2002), 267-305.

58 Gamoran, The New Jewish History, vol. iii, pp. vii, viii. On the impact of the Holocaust on American Jewish education, see R. Sheramy, ‘Defining Lessons: The Holocaust in American Jewish Education’, Ph.D. thesis (Brandeis University, 2001), and J. Krasner, ‘When the Present Took Precedence over the Past: Social Adjustment and the Mainstreaming of American Jewish History in the Supplementary School’, Journal of Jewish Education, 70/3 (2004), 27-39.

250 Jonathan Krasner previously personified spirituality, wholeness, and communal cohesion, [and] perhaps also scholarly distinction’. Having rehabilitated and reclaimed the Ostjuden, the books adopted the common tactic of using the Other as a foil. Tropes familiar from the pre-1920 textbooks were reinstated, albeit in less inflammatory prose. Thus ignorant peasants and rich, acquisitive nobles concerned with goyishe nakhes

(non-Jewish pleasures) such as hunting game and imbibing alcohol were contrasted with pious, learned Jews. “The Jews of Poland prized learning above every-

thing’, gushed Pessin. “Their nobility did not consist of kings and princes and noblemen. The yeshiva students, spending their days and nights over the pages of the Talmud, are the Jewish nobility.’ Similarly, Poles were dismissed as lazy and ineffectual, while the Jews were complimented for their industriousness. ‘Like the Turks, the Poles knew nothing about business management; neither were there any

skilled workmen among them’, one author declared. ‘The Polish pans, many of whom did not know how to care for their land and wealth, were especially glad to have the Jews come into Poland. They found among the newcomers honest and capable men who knew how to take care of their property better than they themselves could or would.’°?

Similarly, the Catholic Church was portrayed as fanatical and manipulative, persuading gullible peasants to turn on the Jews with accusations of ritual murder. And the violence of the peasants was overshadowed only by the inhumanity of the Cossacks, both of which were contrasted with the devout self-restraint of the Jews. The ‘savage hordes from the East’, wrote Gamoran, ‘went through the country like a fiery torch. City after city, town after town, fell before them. And first and last, they ran to the Jewish quarter to pillage and kill. Sometimes they offered conversion. The Polish Jews displayed the courage of heroes. Entire communities stood

together as one, accepting death rather than conversion.’ She later contradicted herself, allowing that some Jews did indeed convert to escape death. Casualty figures for the massacres varied widely between the books, with Pessin alleging that

half a million Jews were slaughtered between 1648 and 1660, and Soloff putting the number closer to 100,000." Interestingly, if not unpredictably, authors seized upon accounts of Jewish

resistance during the Cossack raids that were ignored in earlier textbooks. ‘Ordinary tradesmen, workers, householders, and students rose with their rabbis to a moment of defiant glory,’ recounted Gamoran, apparently referring to efforts of the Jews of Tulchin to defend themselves. When they could, they used whatever

‘poor weapons’ they had to fight with. ‘When even those who should have defended them turned against them, they were ready to join the long roll of 59 S. Zipperstein, Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity (Seattle, 1999); Pessin, The Jewish People, i. 69; Soloff, How the Jewish People Lives Today, 31. On goyishe nakhes, see Boyarin, Unherotc Conduct, 33-80.

6° Gamoran, The New Jewish History, iii. 52, 65; Soloff, How the Jewish People Lives Today, 33-5; Pessin, The fewish People, iti. 91.

Eastern Europe in US Fewish Textbooks 251 martyrs.’© Still stinging from the accusation that the Jews in Nazi Europe went meekly to their deaths, the authors were intent upon portraying Jews engaged in acts of resistance. Another intriguing distinction between accounts of the Khmelnytsky massacres written prior to and after the Second World War can be seen in the way in which Polish reactions to the bloodshed were portrayed. Inter-war accounts were careful to point out that many Polish peasants saved Jews by hiding them from angry mobs. This detail was dropped from the post-war accounts, which, on the contrary, portrayed the Poles as willing to hand over the Jews to the Cossacks in order to save their own lives. Whether or not the events of the Holocaust prompted this shift in emphasis is unclear. Certainly Poles, Ukrainians, and others, who would later be accused of collaborating with the Nazis, were not implicated in the round-up or murder of Jews in these textbooks’ accounts of the Second World War. In fact, one of the earliest of these accounts of the Warsaw ghetto uprising allowed that Some Christian Poles secretly helped the Jews because they too hated the Nazis; many of their people had, like the Jews, been thrown into concentration camps and forced to work as slave labourers; some had been killed. Though they were not persecuted as harshly as the Jews, they nevertheless suffered a great deal and many of them hated the Nazis.°

This sympathetic assessment was revised in later textbooks, a reflection of a more particularistic understanding of the Holocaust that American Jews had embraced by the 1970s, as well as more critical scholarship and accounts from survivors. By the late 1970s the most popular Jewish history textbook of the day, My People: Abba Eban’s History of the Jews, adapted by David Bamberger, instructed readers that the Warsaw ghetto fighters ‘asked for help from the Polish resistance, but they received little or none’. The author asserted that the Polish and Ukrainian underground movements ‘hated the Jews even more than they hated the Nazis. In these countries the Jews found themselves with little choice—they had to fight alone.’ From the outset Poles were conspicuously omitted from any specific accounts of ‘righteous Gentiles’ who saved Jews during the war. To be sure, authors acknow-

ledged that individual Jews were aided throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. Moreover, dramatic stories such as that of the flight of Danish Jews to Sweden made for better storytelling. Still, authors carefully mentioned countries such as the Netherlands, France, Denmark, Sweden, and even Germany by name. Perhaps the choice of countries—particularly in the volumes written before 1965—reflects a general bias towards western Europe rather than any specific animus against Poland. No mention was made in any of the books of Bulgaria’s refusal to deport most of its Jewish population.®° 6! Gamoran, The New Jewish History, iii. 66. 62 Soloff, How the Fewish People Lives Today, rev. edn. (New York, 1949), 340. 63 TD, Bamberger, My People: Abba Eban’s History of the Jews, ii (New York, 1979), 182. Note the discussion on ‘righteous Gentile’ in Gamoran, The New Jewish History, iii. 295-6, and Soloff, How the Jewish People Lives Today, 340-1.

252 Jonathan Krasner Interestingly, the textbooks had little to say about the Jews in Poland between the wars. At most, the subject received a few paragraphs, and usually in the context

| of the Versailles peace conference’s plan for minority rights for Jews and other - groups in central and eastern Europe. The most extensive treatment appeared in Mamie Gamoran’s The New Jewish History, where she observed that ‘no treaty is stronger than the men who have the power to make it work’. She went on to compare Poland unfavourably with Czechoslovakia, ‘the one real democracy in central Europe’, where the rights of Jews were protected and the community flourished. ‘Poland [had] observed minority rights for a few years,’ Gamoran wrote, but ‘antidemocratic forces’ had soon reversed whatever gains had been achieved.**

Russia’s Role in the Modern Fewish Drama If the Nazi genocide played a role in shaping post-war images of Slavs, so too did the other seminal drama in twentieth-century Jewish history, the growth of the Zionist movement, culminating in the creation of the state of Israel. This had its greatest impact on depictions of Jewish life in tsarist Russia. As we have seen, Russian Jewish life only began to attract substantial attention in these books in the Ig1os, and even then, as Deborah Dash Moore astutely points out, American Jews of east European heritage tended to focus on the immigration saga as a touchstone,

rather than life in the ‘old country’.® Interest was heightened in the inter-war years as the supplementary school assumed a greater role in socializing immigrants’ children. The publication in America in 1916—20 of Dubnow’s threevolume history of Jewish life in Poland and Russia provided authors with a plethora of material. Dubnow had devoted much of his professional career to rectifying east European Jews’ ignorance of their past: it was a task that he approached with a mixture of analytical rigour and missionary zeal. But his tendency to concentrate on Jewish trials and persecution—Cyrus Adler once charac-

terized him as essentially a ‘chronicler of misfortunes and pogroms’—had a profound effect on both the tone and the subject matter of the textbooks that relied so heavily on his scholarship. The 1920s and 1930s also witnessed the rapid Zionization of the textbooks.

Zionism was still a young minority movement before the First World War, a subject of great controversy, particularly in German Jewish circles. As such, it received little or no attention in most textbooks. But the Balfour Declaration and the establishment of the British Mandate in Palestine conferred a new legitimacy upon the movement, as did the coming of age of the more supportive east European immigrants. The rise of Hitler and the deteriorating conditions in 64 Gamoran, The New Jewish History, iii. 264-5. 6° See D. D. Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York fews (New York, 1981), 9. 6° Steven Zipperstein even cites a quotation from Dubnow’s diary in 1892 in which he writes: ‘My purpose in life has been made clear. I have become a “missionary of history” ’ (Zipperstein, Imagining Russian Jewry, go—1). Adler’s characterization of Graetz is quoted in Sarna, 7PS, 67.

Eastern Europe in US Jewish Textbooks 253 Europe during the 1930s won the movement many new adherents and encouraged long-term American Zionists to become more vocal in their support. ‘Textbooks, beginning with Lee and Elma Levinger’sThe Story of the Few for Young People®' and Solomon Grayzel’s revised edition of Magnus’s Outlines of Jewish History, began to devote a generous amount of space to the development of the Zionist movement and the growth of the Jewish national home in Palestine.°® The increased interest in Zionism and the Yishuv in Palestine helped to shape the coverage of tsarist Russia. Writers like Harris had already embraced a narrative of persecution and despair culminating in the mass emigration to the United States. Now an emphasis on the deteriorating conditions in Russia also became central to the second great story of the modern period: the return to Zion. Textbook narratives documented the lives of disappointed maskilim who embraced Zionism when their hopes of integration into Russian society were dashed by the oppressive policies of the tsarist regime. Pessin used the example of Leo Pinsker, ‘one of the first of the Maskilim’, who ‘had hoped that the Jews would find emancipation through attending Russian schools. But the pogroms and the May Laws. . . destroyed his hopes.’ Hammering home the contention that dreams of emancipation in the East were at best naive, Pessin bitterly observed that “Thousands of Jews had responded to the call of the Maskilim, eager to be accepted by the Russians as brothers. But the government had not met them with the “brotherly embrace” Judah Leib Gordon had promised [in his famous poem ‘Awake, My People!’], but with pogroms.’ Pessin’s book, published by the strongly Zionist Conservative movement, also made its message clear through the organization of its chapters. A unit entitled ‘In the Land of the Tsars’ included, in the following order: ‘Oppression under Tsarism’, ‘Enlightenment’, ‘Auto-Emancipation’, and ‘Zionism’. Interestingly, the Reform movement’s competing series chose to follow its chapters on tsarist oppression and the Russian Haskalah with a unit entitled “The Land of the Free’, the United States. This difference in emphasis may have been determined in part by the somewhat divergent orientations of the movements, notwithstanding the Reform movement’s adoption of a pro-Zionist platform in 1937. But not too much should be made of tt, since the narrative of the Reform series is no less explicit about the connection between the deterioration in Russian Jewish life and the birth of Zionism. Naturally, textbook accounts focusing on cantonists, pogroms, the May Laws, and the trial for ritual murder of Mendel Beilis did not leave much room for positive portrayals of the non-Jewish population. Aside from passing references to 67 Behrman’s Jewish Book Shop, 1928.

68 On American Zionism before 1948, see M. Urofsky, American Zionism: From Herzl to the Holocaust (Garden City, NY, 1975); M. Raider, The Emergence of American Zionism (New York, 1998). On Zionism in American Jewish textbooks, see J. Krasner, ‘“New Jews” in an Old-New Land: Images in American Jewish Textbooks Prior to 1948’, Journal of Jewish Education, 69/2 (2003), 7-22. 69 Pessin, The Jewish People, iti. 174-5, 169; Gamoran, The New Jewish History, iti. 179, 238.

254 Jonathan Krasner noblemen ‘living in idleness and luxury’, virtually the only images they presented were those of ignorant, violent, primitive peasants. As the ‘civilized world watched in horror’, wrote one author, ‘Mobs broke into Jewish homes and stores, spreading

terror, ruin and death.’ Another wrote that ‘Peasants gleefully carried off garments and stuffed their pockets with small articles. Some Jews lost their lives while countless others were brutally beaten.’ Even when the descriptions weren’t depicting peasants rioting, they adhered to the stereotype. ‘Russia slumbered on in the feudal past’, wrote one author in the first paragraph of her chapter on the tsars and

the Jews. ‘Serfs lived in primitive huts clustered around untidy villages. Overlooking the villages were the estates of the noblemen, who lived in idleness and luxury. Hand in hand with Russia’s backwardness went ignorance and super-

stition.’’° But, in truth, the authors were primarily interested in indicting the tsarist regime. While the peasants were not excused their violent rampages, they were largely dismissed as unwitting tools of the tsar and his police. Consider Pessin’s emblematic description of the 1881—2 pogroms: In each pogrom, the attackers, who were usually peasants, robbed and destroyed and killed for two days. And on the third day they were halted. They were stopped because the police did not want the rioters to get out of hand. They were to be used only to attack the Jews, and no more. So well had the rumors done their work, that many peasants were afraid not to attack the Jews, believing that they were following orders from the Czar.”

As with the descriptions of the Khmelnytsky massacres, textbooks written during and immediately after the Second World War depicted Jews physically resisting the riots, an image that had been ignored in earlier accounts. Soloff, for example, described a defence society in one town that was organized by a group of Jewish butchers. “The moment they heard that the gang of ruffians was coming, each seized his butcher|’s] knife or cleaver and ran to meet the attackers.’ In Soloff’s account the local police, who were content to stand by as the peasants descended on the Jews ‘with clubs, swords and pistols’, were suddenly spurred into action

when they saw the butchers ‘getting the better of the fight’. This story further reinforced the view that the authorities orchestrated these attacks, since the judge presiding in the case imprisoned the Jews brought before him while freeing the

peasants. CONCLUSION ‘A past flattened into something relentlessly grim or (incredible as the juxtaposition may seem) insipid and sweet’ is how Steven Zipperstein describes American Jews’ post-war memories of eastern Europe. ’® Certainly the trend among textbook 7 Pessin, The Jewish People, iti. 168-9, 147; Gamoran, The New Jewish History, ii. 156-7.

71 Pessin, The fewish People, iii. 168-9. 7 Soloff, How the Jewish People Lives Today, 178. 73 Zipperstein, Imagining Russian Jewry, 13.

Eastern Europe in US Jewish Textbooks 255 representations of Russia and Poland in the 1950s and 1960s was in this direction; by the 1970s and 1980s it had become a convention. The earlier subtleties in the representation of both east European Jews and their non-Jewish neighbours that

had characterized the first half of the twentieth century reflected the ongoing efforts of the American Jewish community to integrate into wider society while maintaining a distinctive cultural identity. The later creeping sentimentalism and resort to images whose veneer of truth obscured their lack of depth in an aversion to complexity reflected the attempts of American Jews to face the destruction of European Jewry and the creation of Israel. Even in the immediate post-war era, conscious and unconscious attempts were made to reshape the collective memory so as to nurse the pain of national trauma and enable the first, sometimes tentative, efforts at integration. The one constant is, of course, that the images put forward in these textbooks ultimately shed more light on the authors and editors themselves, and on their Weltanschauung, than they do on their subject matter. While textbook images reflect an amalgam of popular memory and ostensibly dispassionate history, their ultimate shape and the ways in which they are deployed remain in the hands of their creators. What these images attest to 1s the centrality of the continuing exist-

ential need to inscribe difference. Educational materials such as school-books remain among the tools of socialization employed by societies to instil their young with a sense of identity and to shore up boundaries between them and the outside.

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The National Polish American— Jewish American Council A Short Aistory STANISLAUS A. BLEJWAS ON 13 September 1979 representatives of the American Jewish Committee and Polish American cultural, religious, and academic organizations met at St Mary’s College, Orchard Lake, Michigan, to discuss relations between Polish Americans and Jewish Americans. This national dialogue sought to break through ‘massive walls of hostility and suspicion erected on Polish soil’. Those gathered at Orchard Lake intended ‘to try to build a new, creative relationship between the Polish and Jewish peoples that would strengthen common solidarity and fraternal respect’.' The representatives established the Polish American—Jewish American Task Force ‘to Overcome misunderstanding and to promote mutual respect’ by exploring shared historical experiences and contemporary common concerns.” Although the

new dialogue was not theological, it occurred following the Second Vatican Council and Nostra aetate. It was not about understanding and appreciating the common sources and subsequent differences between Christianity and Judaism.? It was rather about the shared history of Poles and Jews in Poland, a dialogue conducted by Americans of Polish Jewish and Polish Catholic heritage living in the United States. What prompted this Polish—Jewish dialogue in America, which, over more than two decades, has convened fifty meetings and conferences?

MOTIVATION The Task Force originated with informal trilateral talks in 1977 among members of the St Mary’s staff, the Detroit chapter of the American Jewish Committee ' The Orchard Lake Statement on Polish-American Jewish-American Relations, 4, Central Connecticut State University, Polish American Archives (CPAA), Revd Leonard F. Chrobot Papers (CP), Orchard Lake Statement file. 2-N. Seifer, ‘A Short History of the Polish American—Jewish American Task Force’ (Mar. 1983), CPAA.

3 For thoughtful reflections on Christian—Jewish dialogue, see S. Krajewski, Zydzi, judaizm, Polska (Warsaw, 1997).

258 Stanislaus A. Blejwas (AJC), and the Michigan district of the Polish American Congress (PAC).* The talks were initiated by the Revd Ronald Modras, then a member of the Michigan PAC’s Sentinel Committee, a group that had been organized ‘to combat Polish defamation’. Committee members believed that there was a link between so-called ‘Polish jokes’ and Jewish comedians. One exasperated member exploded: ‘It’s a conspiracy. There is a Jewish conspiracy to defame us.’ The NBC TV drama documentary Holocaust (1979), which compared the Poles to Nazis, only deepened such suspicions. Believing that Polish Americans judged the Jewish community to be monolithic, and that the two communities ‘had been in virtual noncommunication since coming to this country’, Modras approached the Jewish Community Council in Detroit proposing discussions between Poles and Jews.° This was a time when Polish jokes were in vogue in the American media and entertainment industry, when relations between blacks and Jews were experiencing difficulties, including antisemitic expression, and when relations between blacks

and Poles were strained in Detroit. Furthermore, since 1968 the question of Polish—Jewish relations during the Second World War and the Holocaust had increasingly become a topic of public debate and polemic. Popular interest in the Holocaust was growing in American society, and Poles and Jews were arguing over the shaping of this public memory. It was also a time of expectancy. In 1978 a

Polish cardinal, Karol Wojtyla of Krakow, was elected to the papacy. Polish Americans rejoiced, while American Jews were uneasy about a pope from Poland.

The informal discussions in Detroit occurred within this context, and in 1979 leaders of both communities convened to formalize the dialogue.® This was not the first Polish—Jewish dialogue in the United States. Between

1967 and 1970 the antisemitic purge within the communist Polish United Workers’ Party and in state agencies had blackened Poland’s international image. Western observers frequently mentioned Poland’s ‘traditional’ ‘endemic’ antisemitism. To counter these charges, to explain developments in Poland, and to defend Poland’s good name, in 1968 the national president of the PAC, Aloysius A. Mazewski, initiated discussions with the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. At a meeting in 1969 celebrating the PAC’s twenty-fifth anniversary, both sides agreed that dialogue and the anticipated cessation of conflict was in their mutual interest.’ A Permanent Committee on Polish Jewish Community Relations was 4 “Polish American—Jewish American National Task Force’, fact sheet, n.d., CPAA. Participants

included the Revd Leonard EF Chrobot, Mr and Mrs Robert Geryk, Harold ‘Red’ Gales, and Sherwood Sandweiss. > R. Modras, ‘Jews and Poles: A Relationship Reconsidered’, America, 9 Jan. 1982, 5.

6 L. E Chrobot, A Report to the National Council of Directors of the Polish American Congress, November 8, 1985, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota (IHRC), Papers of

Aloysius A. Mazewski (AAM), box 106, file 3. . ’ J. Bialasiewicz, ‘Sprawozdanie Komitetu Spraw Zydowskich’, in E. C. Rozariski (ed.), Protokot dsmej Krajowej; Konwencjt Kongresu Poloni Amerykanskiej odbytej w dniach 14-g0, 15-go 1 16-go sterpnia

1970 roku w Chicago, Illinois, 135-6, CPAA, Maliszewski Papers, box 6, file 36.

The NPAFAC 259 established, and in November 1970 a conference on Polish—Jewish relations met in Chicago, when both sides agreed to pursue further co-operation.® Discussion was

at times acrimonious. Still, agreement existed about the need for better understanding and appreciation of the relationship between Poles and Jews before the Second World War, and of the destructive impact of the war upon both communities, for greater sensitivity to the damaging effects of antisemitism and anti-Polish feelings, and for co-operation on domestic and foreign issues. Although this first effort at the national level did not endure,’ local discussions in Baltimore, New York, Chicago, and Milwaukee ensued.!°

The desire for improved relations motivated Polish—Jewish dialogue in America. The 1979 Orchard Lake Statement articulated a triple common agenda: to combat the defamation of both communities, to generate a balanced view of the history of Polish—Jewish relations, and to demonstrate concern for global human

rights. The new initiative, in the face of the animosity transplanted from their shared ancestral homeland of historic Poland, was to ‘reflect Polish—Jewish alliances of earlier centuries’ preceding partition of the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the eighteenth century." It was the contemporary environment that prompted the need for dialogue. ‘The immediate concern on both sides was persistent negative stereotyping as expressed

in anti-Polish and antisemitic slurs. The participants proposed joint scholarly studies of these cultural biases as a basis for educational programmes to eliminate such slurs from ‘the educational system, communications media and [the] popular culture of American society’. Next the participants acknowledged the need for a better understanding of the Holocaust and the history of Polish—Jewish relations. Candidly recognizing selectiveness within both traditions of writing the history of Polish—Jewish relations, the Orchard Lake Statement agreed that some Poles tended to emphasize the ‘golden age’ of Polish Jewry and Polish assistance to Jews during the Holocaust, while minimizing the reality of antisemitism before and during the Second World War. Conversely, some Jewish spokespersons concen-

trated on the anti-Jewish attitudes and behaviour of Christian Poles, while 8 “Z Kongresu Polonii Amerykariskiej: Stosunki polsko-zydowskie tematem konferencji’, Straz, 17 Dec. 1970.

9 D. E. Pienkos, For Your Freedom Through Ours: Polish American Efforts on Poland’s Behalf, 1863-1991 (Boulder, Colo., 1991), 165-6. 10 A. Kapiszewski, ‘Stosunki polsko-zydowskie w Stanach Zjednoczonych Ameryki’, in H. Kubiak, E. Kusielewicz, and T. Gromada (eds.), Polonia amerykanska: Przesztosé 1 wspotczesnosé (Wroclaw, 1988), 664. In 1978 the PAC’s Wisconsin division participated in a Polish—Jewish discussion about the conflicting views over the Second World War and the Holocaust. An organizer of this local initiative

considered it the ‘beginning of a dialogue’. Both sides were pioneers and believed their effort ‘an example for others’. Waclaw Zurowski to Kazimierz Lukomski, 16 July 1978, IHRC, AAM, box 87, file 1. Zurowski was chair of the Polish Affairs Committee of the Wisconsin Division and Lukomski chair of the national PAC’s Polish Affairs Committee. 11 Seifer, ‘A Short History of the Polish American—Jewish American Task Force’.

260 Stanislaus A. Blejwas ignoring or minimizing those who had helped and the moral significance of the fact that Poland was once home to the bulk of world Jewry. The assembled leaders promised support for the preparation of ‘an objective joint Polish—Jewish history’. Scholarly publications and conferences would ‘modify polemical tendencies’ and encourage deeper relations between future generations of American Polish and Jewish citizens. Both sides also endorsed the incorporation of Holocaust education | into the nation’s religious and private schools. Human rights violations, particularly the suppression of religious freedom, the status of religious education in Poland, and the denial of the right to emigrate from the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, were other areas where both sides had common interests. Finally, the time for dialogue was particularly auspicious. The election of the Polish Pope was ‘of unprecedented symbolic and social significance to both communities’. ‘Those who signed the Orchard Lake Statement ‘felt the need to seize this moment as an occasion to try to build a new, creative relationship between the Polish and Jewish people that would strengthen common solidarity and fraternal respect’.

THE PARTICIPANTS As befits a dialogue, the Task Force was co-chaired by the president of St Mary’s College, the Revd Leonard Chrobot, and Harold ‘Red’ Gales, the chairman of the

Detroit chapter of the AJC. The Jewish American participants (Hyman Bookbinder, Miles Jaffe, Irving Levine, George Szabad, and Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum) were affiliated with the local and national AJC. The Polish representation was organizationally more diverse. It included representatives from the PAC

(Leonard Walentynowicz), the North American Center for Polish Studies (Professor Andrew Ehrenkreutz, executive director), the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs in Washington (Dr John Kromkowski, president), the Kosciuszko Foundation (Dr Eugene Kusielewicz, president), St Louis University

(the Revd Ronald Modras), and St Mary’s College (Dean John Gutowski).'” Subsequently the PAC became the ‘Polish’ patron of the dialogue. In 1983 the PAC designated Chrobot as chair of the Polish-American and Jewish-American

Dialogue,'* while on the Jewish side David Roth of the AJC’s Institute on 12 This is the complete list of Jewish participants: Harold Gales, chair of the Detroit chapter of the AJC; Robert Amberg, vice-president of the Detroit chapter of the AJC and chair of the Domestic Affairs Committee; Marge Halper, treasurer of the Detroit chapter of the AJC and chair for interreligious affairs; Miles Jaffe, vice-president of the AJC; Irving Levine of the AJC Institute on Pluralism and Group Identity; David Roth of the AJC Institute on Pluralism and Group Identity; Sherwood Sandweiss, area director of the Michigan chapter of the AJC and meeting recorder; George Szabad of the National Board of Governors of the AJC; and Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, director of the AJC Interreligious Affairs Department (Update Image, 1 (Fall 1979); this was a publication of the Detroit chapter of the AJC). 8 A. A. Mazewski to L. F Chrobot, 3 Dec. 1983, CPAA, CP, file dialog—Mazewski.

The NPAFAC 261 Pluralism and Group Identity became the Task Force’s de facto moving spirit. By the end of its first decade the Task Force was a recognized forum where Polish American and Jewish American leaders came together in a ‘face to face relationship’, ‘a permanent part of our lives—imperfect and incomplete as it may be, but a living organism with its own reality’.14 This sense of permanence led the Task

Force in 1988 to transform itself into the National Polish American—Jewish American Council (NPAJAC), a programme unit of two prestigious national organizations, the PAC and the AJC.*° This mutual relationship existed until 1996, when Edward J. Moskal, the PAC

president since 1988, publicly admonished the Polish president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, about ‘the excessive submission of the Polish authorities to Jewish demands’. Moskal’s letter disrupted Polish—Jewish dialogue. The AJC protested ‘the unmistakable ring of old-style antisemitism’ at a time when the Polish government and private institutions in Poland were denouncing it.4° David Harris, the

executive director of the AJC, expressed his ‘dismay’ with the letter’s ‘harsh, insensitive tone and wildly distorted contents’. Harris found the letter ‘contrary to the spirit of Polish—Jewish relations’ that characterized the AJC’s work, ‘principally through the Polish-American Jewish-American Council’, and terminated immediately ‘our relationship with the Polish American Congress through the Council’ while remaining determined to ‘advance Polish—Jewish ties’.1’ The rupture raised questions about the NPAJAC’s future. Since there was no other Polish American organization of stature to replace the PAC, could dialogue continue without a Polish organizational patron? Two Council members, David Harris of the AJC and Jan Nowak-Jeziorariski, reaffirmed the crucial importance of dialogue for both communities. The Council reorganized itself, and its members now served without affiliation, the Poles coming from ‘the Polish American community’. The Council acknowledged a special relationship with the AJC, and the possibility of its entering into a special relationship with other Jewish American and Polish American organizations was left open.'® Since 1996 the Council has continued without a Polish organizational sponsor, a situation that has allowed the PAC leadership to denigrate the Council’s Polish members as speaking only for themselves. The PAC and the Polish National Alliance (PNA) have even labelled Polish members as renegades from their community, quislings, de facto hirelings of the AJC, and not representative of the ‘Polish American community’.!* 14 Minutes of the Executive Committee meeting, 25 Jan. 1989.

15 The minutes indicate the participation for the first time of the PAC president, Aloysius Mazewski, on 3 December 1986. He spoke with George Szabad on the Office of Strategic Influence of the US Department of Justice. On 17 March 1987 he discussed the film Shoah. 16 AJ Committee News, 14 May 1996. 17 David A. Harris to Edward J. Moskal, 14 May 1996, CPAA. 18 News release of the National Polish American—Jewish American Council, 22 Nov. 1996.

9 See e.g. E. J. Moskal, ‘Dialogue... Real or Sham?’, at ‘The President’s Corner’ (Nov. 1997), PAC home page, ; T. R. Jasinski-Herbert, ‘Moskal Responds to Critics of

262 Stanislaus A. Blejwas THE COURSE OF DIALOGUE In 1981 the Task Force proposed a national conference on Polish Christian—Jewish relations, and in 1984 a conference was held on the perspectives and experiences

of Jews and Poles in America.*° The group also proposed to help resolve the controversy around the charges that the US President’s Commission on the Holocaust had paid too little attention to Christian suffering. The ‘Task Force endorsed a formula recognizing both the uniqueness of Jewish suffering and the reality of universal suffering, and agreed to write to the Commission urging recog-

nition of Polish and other martyrs in the proposed memorial and to make the Commission more representative. Other initiatives reinforced nascent Polish American—Jewish American co-operation. The AJC and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, in co-operation with the Kosciuszko Foundation, sponsored a luncheon in honour of the 1980 Nobel literature laureate Czestaw M£utosz. Professor Thaddeus V. Gromada, the secretary-general of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, delivered a major address at the Jewish Community Centre in Greater Buffalo. He foresaw ‘a new, more cooperative, more friendly, and more productive era’ and the overcoming of mutual stereotyping. The Nazis had victimized both Jews and Poles during the Holocaust, and Gromada called for a ‘brotherhood of responsibility’ among survivors. Finally, Polish Americans and Jewish Americans had a common stake in a pluralistic America that encouraged diversity and freedom.”!

These developments were the prologue to major co-operation. General Wojciech Jaruzelski’s declaration of war against his nation and Solidarity on 13 December 1981, and the regime’s use of antisemitism to battle against its opponent, occasioned an unprecedented series of joint declarations. Such co-operation

was particularly noteworthy considering that many Jews did not support Polish aspirations and evinced an ‘incredible lack of sympathy in face of the totalitarian crackdown against the Polish democratic movement and the impending Russian intervention’.2* Lawrence Weschler reported in the New Yorker on the ‘sheer

hatred of the country [Poland] and its people’ that he encountered among American Jews, the ‘cold fury in reminiscences of the antisemitism that, it was claimed, pervaded Polish society in the years’ preceding the Second World Cross at Auschwitz’, Polonia Today Online, 14 Aug. 1998. Jasinski-Herbert writes frequently for the PAC and the PNA.

Chicago.

20 The sponsors of the conference Human Rights, Group Identity and the American Future were the AJC, the PAC, St Mary’s College, the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, and the Cultural Pluralism Research Center, National Organization for Research at the University of 21 Seifer, ‘A Short History of the Polish American—Jewish American Task Force’, 3. 22 “Jews on Poland’, Village Voice, 30 Dec. 1981-5 Jan. 1982.

The NPAJAC 263 War.”? Thus developments in Poland were an opportunity to construct a new relationship. The AJC called for an end to martial law in Poland, and it and its affiliates contributed to Polish American relief efforts and participated in Polish American rallies. Polish American leaders joined with Jewish American spokespersons in condemning antisemitism and its use by the Jaruzelski regime.** This period of intense mutual interaction culminated with the release from internment in 1982 of Professor Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, an iconic figure in Polish—Jewish relations. A letter from the AJC’s George Szabad published in the New York Times on 17 March of that year was an influential element in the campaign for Bartoszewski’s release. Bartoszewski wrote to Szabad: ‘I am deeply convinced that the understanding of the misery of others comes from a deep experience about persecution and suffering so closely connected with the history of the Jews in the diaspora.

The ancient Jewish philosophical idea that “whoever saves one life saves the world” was reflected in practice in my case.’”°

History, the Holocaust, and defamation dominated the dialogue in the 1980s. Between 1983 and 1988 Polish, other European, Israeli, and American scholars, including Task Force members, examined the painful Polish Jewish past at five

major conferences at the universities of Columbia and Oxford, Brandeis University, the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, and the Hebrew University in 23 L,. Weschler, Solidarity: Poland in the Season of its Passion (New York, 1982), 28-36, 214-15. The book is drawn from Weschler’s articles in the New Yorker. There was an occasional indication of hope. I. Eisenberg wrote harshly in the Los Angeles Times about personal humiliations inflicted by Poles during and immediately after the war. Yet every morning he looked in the newspapers for news of Poland,

and wanted ‘the Poles also to be free, to have free trade unions and free elections’. He concluded by asking himself, ‘why is there in my heart such a feeling for Poland? Why do I care so much for the Poles?’ (I. Eisenberg, ‘I Still Care for Poland, but Sometimes I Wonder Why’, Los Angeles Times, 23 Mar. 1982).

24 Co-operation occurred in Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and in Bergen County, New Jersey. 25 Seifer, ‘A Short History of the Polish American—Jewish American Task Force’, 8-12. The Task Force publicized its first three years in a pamphlet, Speaking Out! Jews on Polish Freedom, Poles on Antisemitism: A Report of the Polish-American Jewish-American Task Force. The pamphlet summarized the response to the Polish crisis and the condemnation of the attempts of the Jaruzelski regime to use antisemitism in battling Solidarity (CPAA, CP, file NPAJAC, Mar. 1991). Among those quoted were John Cardinal Krol and Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum. The membership as listed in the pamphlet included the PAC president, Aloysius Mazewski; Thaddeus Gromada, secretary-general of the Polish Institute

of Arts and Sciences; the Revd Leonard Chrobot; Leonard Walentynowicz, vice-president of the National Advocates Society; the Revd Ronald Modras of the Department of Theological Studies at St Louis University; and the Revd John Pawlikowski, professor of social ethics at the Catholic Theological Union. The Jewish members were George M. Szabad, the Task Force vice-president and co-chair; Harold Gales, the Task Force co-chair; Emily Sunstein, chair of the AJC Institute on Pluralism and Group Identity; Irving M. Levine, director of the AJC Institute on Pluralism and Group Identity; Robert S. Jacobs, chair of the AJC Interreligious Affairs Commission; Rabbi Marc

Tanenbaum, director of the AJC Interreligious Affairs Department; and Professor Lucjan Dobroszycki of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Professor Bartoszewski subsequently visited the United States under the auspices of the Kosciuszko Foundation and the AJC.

264 Stanislaus A. Blejwas Jerusalem. Task Force members also urged an accurate representation of Polish Jewish history in the British-made and PBS-sponsored television documentary Struggles for Poland (1987), and discussed Stanford University’s denial of tenure to the prominent scholar Professor Norman Davies. The appointment of non-Jews to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council concerned the Task Force. Regarding the memorialization of the Holocaust by the US Holocaust Museum, the Task Force concluded that the uniqueness of the Jewish experience and the suffering of non-Jews must be recognized.”° Other items on the Task Force’s agenda were: negative Jewish reaction to Pope John Paul II’s beatification of the Revd Maksymilian Kolbe; the participation of some Jewish groups in the fortiethanniversary commemoration of the Warsaw ghetto uprising organized by the Jaruzelski regime; and American restrictions on the admission of Polish refugees.

Responding to PAC concerns about media representation, the Task Force endorsed the establishment of an Office of Ethnic Affairs in the Federal Communications Commission to curtail ethnic defamation in the media. Six of its members (three Jews and three Poles) appealed in 1985 to Cardinal Andrzej Maria Deskur to bring about major changes in the Oberammergau passion play and to remove ‘the continuing distortions of the Jewish people’.2’ The Task Force united its members in support of the work of the Office of Special Investigations to root

out former Nazis and their collaborators who had entered the United States illegally.° While the dialogue was productive, Claude Lanzmann’s documentary film Shoah (1985) tested it severely. French previews that focused on Polish antisemitism and ignored the complexity of Polish Jewish history, and the protests of Jan Karski and Jerzy Turowicz about Lanzmann’s one-sided presentation of the Holocaust,” set off tremors in advance of Shoah’s American debut. The AJC and the Task Force tried to anticipate and diffuse controversy. Gary Rubin, the AJC’s deputy director of national affairs, explained why the Jewish community ‘will see 26 Polish-American Jewish-American Task Force, minutes of the Pittsburgh meeting, 14 Nov. 1983, CPAA. On the politics of defining the place of the Holocaust in American public memory, determin-

ing representation on the US Holocaust Memorial Council, and planning the US Holocaust Museum’s permanent exhibition, see E. T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum (New York, 1995), 1-56, 114-18, 154—6, 249; J. Weinberg and R. Elieli, The Holocaust Museum in Washington (New York, 1995), 161. Members of the NPAJAC who have

served on the US Holocaust Memorial Council include the Revd John Pawlikowski, Hyman Bookbinder, Ambassador John F. Kordek, and Professor Stanislaus A. Blejwas. 27 New from the [American Jewish] Committee, 13 June 1985, IHRC, AAM, box 128, file 1. The

signatories included three priests (John Pawlikowski, Ronald Modras, and Leonard Chrobot), two members of the AJC (George Szabad and Harold D. Gales), and Professor Lucjan Dobroszycki of YIVO.

28 See Aloysius A. Mazewski to Director of the Office of Special Investigations, 9 Jan. 1985, IHRC, AAM, box 57, file 4.

29 J. Karski, ‘Shoah (Zaglada)’, Kultura (Nov. 1985), 121-4; and J. Turowicz, ‘“Shoah” w polskich oczach’, Tygodnik Powszechny, 39 (10 Nov. 1985), no. 24.

| The NPAFAC 265 in Shoah a unique opportunity to interpret their continuing concern with the Holocaust to new audiences’, but anticipated a ‘more ambivalent’ Polish American response. The Polish reaction had to be understood against the complexity of the Polish past, and Rubin concurred with Pope John Paul II’s praise for Lanzmann for conscientiously collecting testimony ‘to help the human consciousness so that it may never forget, so it may never become accustomed to perversions of racism and its abominable ability to kill’. Rubin believed that Lanzmann’s film, ‘interpreted in all its fullness and complexity’, did indeed do this.*° The response of the PAC’s president, Mazewski, was uncompromisingly sharp. Shoah was a distortion of history that polarized opinions and did not heal wounds,

a ‘vicious propaganda film’ that could not be passed on to posterity ‘as a true historical representation’, and the PAC would fight it.? The PAC not only objected to accusations of Polish complicity with the Nazis and the omission of the Nazi victimization of Poles and of Polish assistance to the Jews during the occupation. It criticized the ‘apparent inability of the Jewish leadership to comprehend the stark reality of the “final solution”, and their virtually passive, as if fatalistic, submission to the German terror’.** This last assertion, published in the Chicago Tribune, prompted a rejoinder from Robert S. Jacobs, chair of the AJC board of

trustees. Jacobs accused Mazewski of distorting Polish Jewish history and seriously maligning ‘the victims of the greatest crime in human history [when he] call[ed] them passive agents in their own destruction’.*° 3° G. E. Rubin, “The Film Shoah: Understanding Jewish and Polish Responses’, IHRC, AAM, box 127, file 5. Mazewski’s response may have been influenced by the draft of a statement for the PAC Executive Committee from the national PAC vice-president, Kazimierz Lukomski. In addition to protesting Shoah’s one-sidedness, Lukomski drew attention to an interview that Lanzmann gave, where he ‘admitted that his purpose was the indictment of Poles, except that . . . it is not he, himself,

who [was making] the accusations, but the Poles themselves’. In reference to the Polish American—Jewish American dialogue, Lukomski ended the memo: ‘We expect the Jewish American leadership to correct the record’ (IHRC, AAM, box 127, file 5). 31 Aloysius A. Mazewski to Gary Rubin, 25 Feb. 1986, IHRC, AAM, box 127, file s. 32 ‘Statement by the Executive Committee of the Polish American Congress: Shoah—One-Sided Presentation of the Holocaust’, IHRC, AAM, box 127, file 5. The statement, also issued in Polish, was signed by Mazewski, Helen Zielinski, Kazimierz Lukomski, and Dr Edward Rozariski, and reprinted in the Polish American press. 33 Chicago Tribune, 19, 26 Feb. 1986. Jacobs recalled Jewish resistance, and described Mazewski’s

misstatements about several points in Shoah, repeating issues raised previously by Rubin. Finally, Jacobs expressed the hope that ‘on reflection, Mr. Mazewski will once again join with us in combined

efforts to advance the cause of human rights and understanding’. Maynard I. Wishner of the AJC unsuccessfully attempted to intervene with Mazewski to prevent the publication of the PAC statement, part of which ‘will cause incalculable damage for years to come to our common objective of improving relations between two great communities’ (mailgram from Maynard I. Wishner to Aloysius A. Mazewski, 14 Feb. 1986, IHRC, AAM, box 127, file 4).

34 For a discussion of this issue, see E. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum (New York, 1995); R. Lukas, The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles under German Occupation, 1939-1944 (Lexington, Ky., 1986). 6 J. Karski, Story of a Secret State (Boston, 1944).

7 W. Bartoszewski and Z. Lewin (eds.), Righteous among Nations: How Poles Helped the Jews, 1939-1945 (London, 1969); K. Iranek-Osmecki, He Who Saves One Life (New York, 1971). 8 For an exception, see P. Friedman, Their Brothers’ Keepers (New York, 1957). ° R. Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe (London, 1974); Y. Gutman and S. Krakowski, Unequal Victims: Poles and fews during World War Two (New York, 1986).

Survey on Polish—fewish Relations 320 In addition, explanations of Catholic and agnostic anti-Jewish attitudes vary. While there are those who focus on the history of religious antisemitism and economic competition, others emphasize the alleged anti-Polish behaviour of Jews

during the Second World War. In particular, many Poles contend that it was the support given by Polish Jews to the Soviet invaders in 1939 that explains the antipathy of many Catholic Poles towards German anti-Jewish policies.‘° Are Poles perceived as Jewish benefactors or as German accomplices? How do the assessments of academics, members of fraternal organizations, and survivors dif| fer? These are some of the questions this chapter hopes to answer.

SURVEY PROCEDURES This survey does not judge the historical record. Instead, it attempts to increase understanding by measuring the differences between views held across various groups and within each group. By analysing the responses to a questionnaire, the perception of representative respondents from each of the relevant groups can be measured in a number of contentious areas. The three major areas surveyed reflect assessments of the attitudes and behaviour of the Polish Home Army, Catholic Church leaders, and ordinary Christian Poles. Some other measures will also be developed. These results can promote dialogue between Polish Americans and Jewish Americans, and advance our understanding of the perceptions of those who teach Holocaust-related courses. The project began in February 2002 when the National Polish American— Jewish American Council (NPAJAC) allowed me to survey its seventy members. This organization is funded by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and consists of leaders of Polish and Jewish organizations that have some involvement in Polish—Jewish relations.

The study then went on to survey members of other organizations and groups, as well as teachers of college-level Holocaust-related courses. Polish American fraternal organizations were quite apprehensive, fearing that the study would reinforce the unfounded negative Polish stereotypes held by many within the Jewish community and the wider society. They considered the study unbalanced and felt that certain questions were offensive. A few examples will illustrate these concerns.

One individual rejected the following statement: ‘Polish Catholics rarely actively participated in the mass killing of Jews’, and countered that there should

be a corresponding statement that read: ‘Polish Jews rarely participated in the killing of Christian children in order to use their blood for matzoh’. I responded that the proposed question reflected a myth, while it is true that at least some Poles

did participate in killing Jews. He answered that they were only the criminal 10 For a recent discussion of the historical record, see J. Zimmerman (ed.), Contested Memories: Poles and Jews during the Holocaust and its Aftermath (Brunswick, NJ, 2003).

330 Robert Cherry elements. I then asked what he thought about the following wording: ‘Law-abiding

Polish Catholics never participated in the mass killing of Jews’. He responded, ‘ “Never” is too strong a word.’ Other individuals believed that the following statement was biased: “The Polish Catholic Church has been unfairly criticized for the limited efforts it undertook on

behalf of Jews during the Second World War’. They proposed changing ‘for the limited efforts it undertook’ to ‘despite its efforts to do all that it could’. I pointed out that this revision would make it logically impossible to disagree with the statement: all criticisms would be unfair if the Church had done all that it could. As a final example, the following statement was found to be offensive: “The desire to gain Jewish property and eliminate Jewish influence helps explain why a

significant proportion of Poles were indifferent to the plight of Jews.’ Critics claimed that there is no evidence to support this, and such statements offend the

Polish people, who were themselves victims of German policies. They were unmoved by my explanation that the value of the statement was to quantify the share of Poles and Jews that embraced this viewpoint—that it was important to know whether 20, 60, or go per cent agreed with it, and how that percentage varied across groups. I was sympathetic to some of these concerns and added a few statements concerning the attitude and behaviour of Polish Jews during the Second World War to give the questionnaire more balance. In addition, I changed slightly the wording of a few statements in ways that I believe did not affect the answers but eliminated

unnecessary language that some found offensive. For example, I changed the phrase ‘those who collaborated with the Nazis’ to “those who aided the Nazis’. Finally, I eliminated a few statements in response to concerns. Despite these adjustments, a number of Polish American organizations chose not to participate in the study.

NPAJAC RESULTS Table 1 presents NPAJAC results for twenty-two statements consistently included in the questionnaires, plus one additional statement that was added after the NPAJAC was surveyed. The responses are coded from 1 for ‘strongly disagree’ to 6 for ‘strongly agree’. The average difference in assessments between Polish and Jewish NPAJAC respondents was 1.17 points on the seven statements assessing the attitudes and behaviour of the Polish people, with statistical significance on five of the

questions. There was a 1.03-point difference on the six statements related to the attitude and behaviour of the Catholic Church, with statistical significance on five of the statements. There was a 1.92-point difference on the five statements related to the attitude and behaviour of the Home Army, with statistical significance on all five statements. (The full wording of all statements can be found in Appendix 1.)

Table 1 National Polish American—Jewish American Council summary

Statements Polish Jewish Absolute score score difference (N=16) (N= 24) Polish people

1. Jewish groups underestimated efforts of Poles to save Jews 4.94 4.50 0.44 2. During war Polish groups moderated anti-Jewish behaviour 4.00 2.95 1.05?

3. Surprising how much aid Poles gave to Jews 4.69 4.33 0.36

4. Poles rarely played role in the mass killing of Jews 5.31 3.71 1.60? 5. Western media overstates Polish anti-Jewish behaviour 4.94 3.68 1.26?

6. Less contempt for pro-Nazis than pro-Soviets 2.00 4.33 2.33?

7. Desire to gain Jewish property and eliminate Jewish 2.53 3.73 1.20*

Average difference 1.17? influence explains Polish indifference

Cathohe Church

8. Christian teachings conditioned the majority of Poles to 3.81 4.92 1.09? have negative attitudes of Jews

9. Vatican gave substantial aid towards Jews 3.93 2.64 1.29? 10. Polish Catholic officials embraced anti-Jewish stereotypes 4.50 5.00 0.50

11. Unfair criticisms of Catholic Church 4.56 3.14 1.423 12. Church hierarchy supported those who aided Jews 4.23 3.47 0.76° 13. Vatican has made a genuine effort to give a complete 4.47 3.33 1.14

Average difference 1.03? account of its behaviour towards Jews

Home Army (AK)

14. Military principles not antisemitism explain lack of Jews 5.27 2.71 2.56° in Home Army

15. AK had adverse effect on ghetto escapees 2.57 4.62 2.05? 16. Jan Karski’s efforts reflected AK leadership 4.93 2.91 2.02? 17. AK ignored the anti-Jewish behaviour of anti-Soviet 3.10 4.16 1.06° groups

18. Home Army committed to equal rights for Jews 4.93 3.00 1.93?

Average difference 1.92? Supplemental measures

19. Should not judge whether Poles or Jews suffered more 4.63 3.67 0.96°

20. Jewish survivors base their assessment of Poles on 5.18 4.50 0.68° memories rather than historical evidence

21. Most Poles today minimize the effects of Polish Christian 4.35 5.20 0.85° behaviour on the fate of Jews

22. Jews’ support for Soviet occupation (1939-41) is an 4.42 3.42 1.00? important reason for Polish animosity towards Jews 1 = strongly disagree; 2 = disagree; 3 = slightly disagree; 4 = slightly agree; 5 = agree; 6 = strongly agree. 4 Significant at 0.01 level. > Significant at 0.10 level. © Significant at 0.05 level.

332 Robert Cherry While the three areas above reflected the most important aspects of the study, I also delved into some additional perspectives. Statement 19 asked respondents to judge whether it was appropriate to make judgements on the relative suffering of Polish Catholics and Jews during the Second World War. Not surprisingly, Jewish NPAJAC respondents were statistically significantly keener to make these comparisons than Polish respondents. Statements 20 and 21 asked respondents to judge the relative bias of Jewish survivors and the contemporary Polish community, respectively, in their evaluation of Polish—Jewish relations during the Second World War. Once more, there were statistically significant differences, with Polish respondents believing that Jewish Holocaust survivors were more biased than the contemporary Polish community while Jewish respondents thought the opposite. Finally, statement 22 asked respondents to assess the attitudes and behaviour of Polish Jews during the Second World War. Polish NPAJAC respondents were more willing to judge Jewish support of the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland as an important reason for anti-Jewish sentiment than Jewish NPAJAC respondents. (Question 23 was added after surveying NPAJAC members.)

EXTENDED SURVEY When the survey was extended to other groups, I decided to emphasize those statements on which there was a statistically significant difference between Jewish and Polish NPAJAC respondents since these were clearly the most contentious. As a result, I eliminated from statistical analysis the three statements where there was no Statistical difference: statements 1, 3, and 10. Survey results were tabulated for

319 respondents: 119 Polish respondents, 167 Jewish respondents, and 33 nonJewish, non-Polish academics. Table 2 summarizes the distribution of Polish and Jewish respondents. Polish respondents were divided into three subgroups: (1) a dialogue group consisting of NPAJAC and California dialogue group members; (2) a fraternal group consisting Table 2 Summary of Jewish American and Polish American respondents

Group Jewish American Polish American Fraternal Holocaust organizations 58 PAC chapters 45 Conference guests 14

Dialogue PAJAC 24 PAJAC 16 California group 7 California group 7 Academic Holocaust listserver 14 Holocaust listserver 9 Museum researchers 13 Museum researchers 2

TOTAL 167 119 College teachers 51 College teachers 26

Survey on Polish—fewish Relations 333 of non-academic Boston and Buffalo PAC members and non-academic PIASA conference guests; and (3) an academic group consisting of all respondents who indicated that they had taught college-level courses or were members of the Holocaust listserver or museum researchers. Jewish respondents were divided into the same three subgroups: (1) a dialogue eroup consisting of NPAJAC and California dialogue group members; (2) a fraternal group consisting of non-academic members of three Holocaust organizations (the Auschwitz Center Jewish Foundation, the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization, and the Generation After); and (3) an academic group consisting of teachers, museum researchers, and participants on the Holocaust listserver. Since the Jewish samples were large enough, the three subgroups within the academic

grouping were separated for some statistical analyses. Finally, the thirty-three non-Jewish, non-Polish respondents were all college teachers of Holocaust-related courses or participants on the Holocaust listserver. In order to give a quick assessment of the divergence between groups, ‘Table 3 indicates their responses to some of the statements. The scores represent the percentage of each group’s respondents who agreed on some level with the statement: the sum of the share of respondents who answered ‘slightly agreed’, ‘agreed’, or ‘strongly agreed’. Table 3 illustrates the dramatic variation between groups. For example, 91 per cent of Jewish dialogue group respondents but only 11 per cent of Polish fraternal group respondents agreed that ‘Catholic Poles rarely participated in the organized killing of Jews’. Ninety-one per cent of Polish teachers but 16 per cent of Jewish

college teachers agreed that the ‘Home Army desired full rights for Jews in Poland’. For every statement, the most negative assessment made by any Polish grouping

was still more favourable than the assessment by any Jewish grouping. (This was true of the other statements not shown.) Polish versus Jewish differences were smallest among dialogue group respondents and largest among fraternal group respondents. Consistent with the NPAJAC findings, Polish versus Jewish differences among teachers and fraternal group respondents were much larger when assessing the Home Army than when assessing either the Polish people or the Catholic Church. Finally, non-Jewish, non-Polish college teachers had composite

scores on all three measures that were much closer to Jewish than to Polish teachers.

STATISTICAL ANALYSIS Rather than focusing on each of the individual statements to explain variation among respondents, we returned to using a number of grouped statements. To construct composite scores on each of the statement groupings, on all statements a

higher score should indicate a more favourable view of the Polish people, the

334 Robert Cherry Table 3 Percentage of respondents who agreed with the statement

Questions Dialogue Fraternal Teachers Poles Jews Poles Jews Poles Jews Others (N = 23) (N=31) (N=59) (N=58) (N=26) (N=51) (N=33) 1. Catholic Poles rarely participated in the organized killing

of Jews 91 63 96 1] 78 35 34

2. Desire for Jewish property explains

Polish indifference 43 64 29 96 56 92 87

3. Christian teaching generated antisemitic

attitudes 72 97 46 98 60 100 91

4. Church supported their members’

efforts to aid Jews 67 41 92 13 75 21 30

5. Karski’s efforts to aid Jews

reflected the

Home Army 82 34 88 18 87 8 33 6. Home Army desired full

in Poland 85 39 97 18 91 16 32 Average difference 35 72 56 1] rights for Jews

Catholic Church, and the Home Army. To accomplish this, all statements that presented a negative characterization of Polish, Catholic Church, or Home Army attitudes and behaviour were retabulated so that a higher score indicated a more favourable assessment. For example, the following statement presented a negative characterization: “Christian teachings conditioned the majority of Poles to have negative attitudes towards Jews.’ In this case, a response of ‘strongly agree’ was coded 1 instead of 6 while ‘agree’ was coded 2 instead of 5, and so on. Composite measures for each respondent concerning their assessment of the Polish people, the Catholic Church, and the Home Army were calculated by taking a simple average of the retabulated scores across the grouped statements. A lower score reflected a more negative assessment of Polish behaviour while a higher score reflected a more positive assessment. Respondents would have a score of 5 if they answered ‘agree’ to all positive statements in the grouped statements and answered ‘disagree’ to all the negative statements. By contrast, respondents

Survey on Polish—fewish Relations 335 would have a score of 2 if they answered ‘disagree’ to all positive statements and answered ‘agree’ to all the negative statements. As a first method of comparison, composite scores on each of these measures were estimated for the various groups. Consistent with Table 3, Table 4 indicates that differences between Polish and Jewish respondents were substantially larger for the Home Army than for the other two composites. Within the Jewish sample,

dialogue respondents had much more favourable views than fraternal group respondents on all three measures. By contrast, college teachers gave virtually the

same assessments as fraternal group respondents on all three measures. This begins to document the pervasive anti-Catholic and anti-Polish sentiment within the Jewish community.

Within the Polish sample, college teachers gave significantly less favourable assessments than fraternal organization respondents on all three measures, suggesting that they were more willing to criticize the behaviour of the Polish people and Catholic Church than fraternal group respondents. Somewhat surprisingly, however, being a member of a dialogue group did not necessarily result in a more critical stance. In particular, Polish NPAJAC respondents gave virtually the same assessments as fraternal group respondents on all three measures. It is only when

respondents from the California group were included that membership in a dialogue group gave the expected results: they were more critical on all three measures than fraternal group respondents. One of the problems with simply looking at group averages is that we must make sure that other factors, such as age and gender, are not driving these group differences. For example, 86 per cent of Polish California group respondents but only 39 per cent of Polish NPAJAC respondents were less than 60 years old. ‘This age difference might explain why, on average, Polish California respondents gave

somewhat more critical assessments than Polish NPAJAC respondents. Thus, regression analysis was used to determine more rigorously what factors explained variation in composite scores among Polish and Jewish respondents. The respondents were overwhelmingly older men. Among Polish respondents, 77 per cent were male, 57 per cent were at least 60 years old, while only 6 per cent Table 4 Composite scores

Group Polish Catholics Catholic Church Home Army Jewish Polish Jewish Polish Jewish Polish

NPAJAC 3.28 4.17 4.74 2.13 2.92 3.76 4.06 2.34 2.7/ 4.69 Teachers 2.32 Fraternal 2.22 4.80 2.12 4.47 2.43 4.19 4.64 Non-Polish, non-Jewish 2.91 2.62 2.82

336 Robert Cherry were younger than 4o years old. Among Jewish respondents, 65 per cent were male, 52 per cent were at least 60 years old, while only 13 per cent were younger than 40 years old. Not surprisingly, with so few respondents less than 40 years old,

the power of analysis was not improved by separating them out. As a result, respondents were simply divided into two groups: those who were at least 60 years old and those who were less than 60 years old. The impact of all variables reflects differences from a reference group: older male non-academic members of fraternal organizations. The regression results are found in Table Ar. Younger Polish Americans were statistically significantly more critical of the attitudes and behaviour of the Polish people, the Catholic Church, and the Home Army than their older counterparts. Polish historians, Polish non-historians, and Polish members of dialogue groups were statistically significantly more critical of the behaviour and attitudes of the Polish people and the Catholic Church than the reference group, but did not havea statistically significantly different composite score with respect to their evaluation

of the Home Army. Gender had no statistically significant effect on the assess- ments of any of the three composites among Polish respondents. Among Jewish respondents, only dialogue group respondents and participants on the Holocaust listserver had a statistically significantly more favourable view of the Polish people and the Catholic Church than the reference group. That dialogue

and listserver respondents had similar views should not be surprising since in many ways the listserver has characteristics similar to a dialogue group. Younger Jewish respondents had a statistically more favourable view of the Polish people than older respondents, but no statistically significant differences with respect to the Catholic Church or Home Army. Neither being on the staff at a Holocaust museum nor being a woman had any statistical significance in the three composite measures.

SUPPLEMENTAL MEASURES The survey also quantified three supplemental measures, and these regression results are found in Table Az. Statement 19 asked respondents whether or not we should judge the relative victimization of Polish Catholics and Jews during the Second World War. Jewish women were statistically significantly Jess willing to ignore the degree of victimization than men. By contrast, Jewish dialogue group and museum group respondents were much more willing to ignore differences in victimization than Jewish respondents from the fraternal group. Within the Polish

sample, dialogue group respondents and academics were much /ess willing to ignore victimization differences than respondents from the fraternal group. Statements 20 and 21 asked respondents to judge the bias of Jewish Holocaust

survivors and the contemporary Polish American community, respectively. Subtracting the response to statement 21 from the response to statement 20 yields

Survey on Polish—femish Relations 337 a relative bias measure. A positive value indicates that the respondent believed that Holocaust survivors are more biased than the contemporary Polish community,

while a negative score indicates the opposite. According to Table 1, Polish NPAJAC respondents had a relative bias score of 0.83 (5.18—4.35) while regression analysis estimated a relative bias score of 1.32 for older male Jewish fraternal group

respondents. Similarly, Jewish NPAJAC respondents had a relative bias score of —0.70 (4.50—5.20), while regression analysis estimated a relative bias score of

—1.22 for older male Jewish fraternal group respondents. These differences between dialogue group and fraternal group respondents were not, however, statistically significant.

Finally, two statements asked respondents to assess the behaviour of Jews in Poland during the Second World War: their commitment to the Polish state and their actions during the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland. Since the first statement was added after the NPAJAC was surveyed, dialogue group respondents are not included in this analysis. Within the Polish sample, younger respondents are

much less critical of Jewish attitudes and behaviour than older respondents. Within the Jewish sample, women, and museum personnel are much less critical of Jewish attitudes and behaviour than older male fraternal group respondents.

JEWISH HOLOCAUST TEACHERS Probably the most important way in which the perceptions measured in this chap-

ter affect a broader population is through the teaching of college Holocaustrelated courses. Table 5 presents the composite scores on the three major measures Table 5 Actual scores for academic groups and NPAJAC members

Group Poles Church Home Army Polish academics 4.24 3.86 4.34

Historians (N = 14) 4.31 3.85 4.30

Non-historians (N = 23) 4.20 3.86 4.36 Non-Polish, non-Jewish academics 2.9] 2.62 2.82

Historians (N = 13) 2.96 2.77 2.93

Non-historians (N = 20) 2.87 2.52 2.82

Jewish museum researchers 2.69 2.59 2.62

Yad Vashem (N = 24) 2.74 2.70 2.67 US Holocaust Museum (N = 13) 2.60 2.38 2.53

Jewish teachers 2.32 2.13 2.34

Historians (N = 21) 2.73 2.33 2.30

Non-historians (N = 30) 2.03 1.99 2.36 NPAJAC members

Jewish (N = 24) 3.28 2.92 2.77 Polish (N = 16) 4.74 4.06 4.69

338 Robert Cherry for 37 Polish academics, 33 non-Polish, non-Jewish academics, and the 51 Jewish college teachers of Holocaust-related courses. It divides each of these three groups between those who are historians and those who are not. In addition, results are included for 37 Jewish research respondents employed at Holocaust museums in the United States and Israel, and the NPAJAC results are presented to facilitate comparisons. Just as Table 5 suggested, non-Polish, non-Jewish academics gave assessments that are clearly closer to their Jewish than their Polish colleagues. Other survey results suggest that non-Polish, non-Jewish academics are particularly deferential to Jewish Holocaust survivors. On the two-statement composite on the attitudes and behaviour of Jews in Poland, these academics had the most favourable assessments of any group surveyed. Similarly, they judged Jewish survivors to be more objective in evaluating the Holocaust than any other group surveyed. Jewish teachers gave the most negative assessments of any group. Most striking were the assessments made by Jewish non-historians on the attitudes and behaviour of the Polish people and the Catholic Church. Recall that a score of 2.00 is obtained if the typical respondent would have answered ‘disagree’ to all the positive statements and answered ‘agree’ to all the negative statements in the composite. Thus, scores of 2.03 and 1.99 suggest that the typical Jewish non-historian respondent gave an extremely negative evaluation of the Polish people and the Catholic Church, respectively. The assessments of Jewish teachers were substan-

tially at odds with the views of Jewish NPAJAC members, Jewish Holocaust museum researchers, and non-Polish, non-Jewish academics. This strongly suggests that Jewish teachers, especially non-historians, embrace negative stereotypes to a degree not held by other informed academics. Polish NPAJAC respondents gave the most favourable assessments on all three measures. Indeed, the score of 4.74 indicates that they had virtually no criticism of the behaviour of the Polish people. Given the strong biases within the Jewish community, it is not surprising that Polish members are disinclined to voice negative assessments. As organizational leaders, they might also feel that they should present the views of the Polish American community. This might explain why they are more positive in their assessments than Polish academics.

CONCLUSIONS Younger Jewish respondents gave pretty much the same assessments as older Jewish respondents on virtually all of the measures. By contrast, younger Polish

respondents were much more critical of the attitude and behaviour of the Polish people, the Catholic Church, and the Home Army during the Second World War than older Polish respondents. While this might reflect a greater willingness among younger Poles to have a less romantic view than their elders, some older Polish Americans had a different explanation. When I pointed out that a sig-

Survey on Polish—fewish Relations 339 nificant percentage of Polish respondents agreed with a particular negative statement of Polish behaviour, they retorted, “That reflects the younger generation, who have no knowledge.’ Thus, this more cynical view suggests that the age variable judges the intergenerational transmission of perceptions: Jewish survivors have been effective while Polish survivors have not.

We would expect that dialogue group (or Holocaust listserver) respondents would have moderated views: Polish respondents would be more critical and Jewish respondents less critical than their fraternal group counterparts. This was certainly the case for Jewish dialogue group respondents. At a meeting of the NPAJAC in 2003 its co-chair Martin Bressler described the organization’s impact on his perceptions. When he joined the NPAJAC, he believed that his main aim

should be to increase the sensitivity of Polish Americans to the suffering of European Jews during the Second World War. Bressler indicated, however, that instead it was he who gained sensitivity: sensitivity to the suffering of Polish Catholics. Consistent with Bressler’s comments, Jewish NPAJAC respondents had a less harsh assessment of the Polish people, the Catholic Church, and the Home Army than fraternal respondents. By contrast, Polish NPAJAC respondents did not differ from fraternal group members in their assessment of the Polish people or the Home Army. Probably the most important findings concern the views of Jewish teachers. In general, their views are statistically indistinguishable from those of fraternal group respondents. With respect to the Polish people and Catholic Church composites, Jewish teachers, especially non-historians, gave assessments that were more negative than those of any other academic or research group. While more moderated, non-Polish, non-Jewish teachers have views that are much closer to their Jewish than their Polish colleagues. These findings strongly suggest that the Polish American community has been correct in its complaints about the anti-Polish bias found among non-Polish teachers of Holocaust-related courses. Even if there are no formal class discussions, these anti-Polish (and anti-Catholic) views are likely to come through in informal and spontaneous ways. The evidence also indicates that the Polish NPAJAC members have even more favourable views of the Polish people and the Home Army than Polish American academics. This finding casts doubt on any claims that these members’ views are not representative of the Polish American community. With respect to the three major measures, the composite scores of Jewish NPAJAC respondents were midway between the scores of Jewish teachers and Polish academics. This might suggest that Jewish NPAJAC members should be equally opposed to the less critical stance of Polish academics and the overly critical stance of Jewish teachers. I believe that this would be incorrect for two reasons. In virtually every area in which bias exists, we focus almost exclusively on the negative stereotypes presented, because of their damaging effects. By contrast, when positive stereotypes of victimized groups are presented, we often see them as

340 Robert Cherry corrective antidotes to the negative images that are pervasive. For example, in the

Ig50S certain positive stereotypes of turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants developed, which saw them as hard-working, family-oriented, and emphasizing education. The AJC did not condemn these positive images as being too uncritical; it did not publish papers or fund studies to demonstrate that these Jewish immigrants showed dysfunctional behaviour similar to that of other immigrants, nor did it publicize the fact that the first major application of the ‘culture of poverty’ thesis was Louis Wirth’s study at the University of Chicago of east European Jewish immigrants." Thus, even if the general assessments made by Polish academics are too uncritical, their excesses should not be considered to be as injurious _ as the anti-Polish biases of Jewish college teachers. In addition, the impact of the views of Polish academics and Jewish faculty members is unequal. Jewish teachers teach Holocaust courses throughout the country, courses on which tens of thousands of students enrol annually. They organize conferences and influence museum presentations of historical events. Because of public sympathy for Jewish victims, the views of Jewish teachers and survivors are too often accepted uncritically. By contrast, Polish academics do not have a significant forum to promote their views to the general public. Numerically, they are a much smaller group, which

limits their influence; and there are few Polish studies programmes through which they could circulate their opinions. It is only within Polish American communities that their views dominate. For these reasons I believe that the NPAJAC should be more active in their response to the excessively anti-Polish bias that is consistently found in presentations of the Holocaust, especially at colleges when courses and lectures are given by non-Poles who are not historians. The survey results seem to be consistent with my own preconceptions. Namely, I believe that both Polish and Jewish respondents do not sufficiently distinguish between antisemitic attitudes and anti-Jewish actions. On the one hand, Polish respondents are generally unwilling to support contentions that antisemitic attitudes were embraced by a clear majority of Polish Catholics on the eve of the Second World War. On the other hand, Jewish respondents too easily believe that Catholic Poles engaged in anti-Jewish actions, given the pervasiveness of their antisemitic attitudes. As stated at the beginning of this chapter, the Germans did not give Catholic Poles the opportunity to engage in anti-Jewish actions, except in isolated instances. Unlike many other occupied countries, Polish police and paramilitary organizations were not involved in rounding up Jews to be placed in ghettos or on trains headed for extermination camps. Catholic Poles were virtually never guards in concentration or labour camps. Thus, the idea that the Poles were active accomplices in the destruction of Polish Jewry is unfounded. ™ R. Cherry, ‘The Culture of Poverty Thesis and African Americans: The Views of Gunnar Myrdal and Other Institutionalists’, Journal of Economic Issues, 29 (Dec. 1995), I-14.

Survey on Polish—fewish Relations 341 There is another reason why it is important to separate antisemitic attitudes from anti-Jewish actions. Before the extent of the German policies became clear, the Catholic Church condoned anti-Jewish policies in both Poland and Germany. One only has to read Cardinal Hlond’s 1936 pastoral letter read to millions of Poles. He encouraged and justified Polish antisemitism in no uncertain terms: It is a fact that Jews are waging war against the Catholic church, that they are steeped in

free-thinking, and constitute the vanguard of atheism, the Bolshevik movement, and revolutionary activity . . . It is true that Jews are perpetrating fraud, practicing usury, and dealing in prostitution. It is true that, from a religious and ethical point of view, Jewish youth are having a negative influence on the Catholic youth in our schools . . . It is good to prefer your own kind when shopping, to avoid Jewish stores and Jewish stalls in the market-

place...” The Catholic Church, however, qualified its hostility towards Jews. In the same pastoral letter Cardinal Hlond made clear that ‘it is forbidden to demolish a Jewish store, damage their merchandise, break windows, or throw things at their homes ... 1t 1s forbidden to assault, beat up, maim, or slander Jews’.'° Once the magni-

tude of the exterminationist policies unfolded, many Catholic Poles did not change their antisemitic attitudes, but still aided Jews out of a sense of Christian love and humanitarian instincts. One would not be surprised if the majority of the Polish righteous gentiles who have so rightly been honoured by Yad Vashem and other Holocaust memorials held antisemitic views while at the same time risking their lives to save Jewish men, women, and children. At the beginning of an address a famous Holocaust survivor told this story: During the Nazi occupation, a Jewish child enters the house where the Polish woman says, ‘If anyone comes, immediately hide in the closet and remain silent.’ Sure enough there is a knock at the door and the child runs into the closet. After a few minutes, the child notices that there is also a chicken in the closet. The chicken begins to peck the child, first on the legs and then on the arms, making it very difficult for the child to remain silent.

The speaker concluded, ‘And what do you think the moral of this story is: In Poland, even the chickens are antisemites.’ This incident was related to me by a Polish American who thought it demonstrated the anti-Polish bias that is deeply held by Jewish survivors and others who are influenced by their views. While I generally agree with this position, there is another interpretation of this story. The Polish woman was willing to take risks on behalf of this Jewish child. Thus, even if she was an antisemite, she could also have been a righteous gentile. !4

346. 13 Tbid. 2 Quoted in R. Modras, The Catholic Church and Antisemitism in Poland, 1933-1939 (Chur, 1994),

‘* For one example of such a woman, Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, see A. Polonsky, ‘Introduction’,

Polin, 13 (2000), 20-1.

342 Robert Cherry APPENDIX I SURVEY QUESTIONS Polish people 1. Jewish groups underestimate Polish Christian efforts to save Jewish lives during the Second World War.

2. Even the most anti-Jewish Polish groups moderated their anti-Jewish behaviour during the Nazis’ occupation of Poland. 3. Given the Nazi oppression Polish Christians faced, it was surprising how much aid they gave to Jews.

4. Polish Christians rarely played an active role in the mass killing of Jews. 5. Western media accounts tend to overstate the anti-Jewish behaviour among Polish people. 6. Polish patriots had less contempt for Poles who aided the Nazis, than for Jews who sided with the Soviet Union.

7. Desire to gain Jewish property and eliminate Jewish influence helps explain widespread Polish indifference to the plight of Jews.

The Catholic Church 8. Christian teachings conditioned the majority of Poles to have negative attitudes towards Jews.

g. The Vatican gave substantial aid to Jews through clandestine actions. to. A significant share of high-ranking Catholic officials in Poland embraced many anti-Jewish stereotypes prior to the Second World War. 11. The Polish Catholic Church has been unfairly criticized for its limited efforts on behalf of Jews during the Second World War. 12. The Catholic hierarchy in Poland did support those members who wished to aid Jews. 13. Recent Vatican publications and public statements reflect a genuine effort to give a complete account of its behaviour towards Jews during the Nazi era.

Home Army 14. The Home Army’s limited support for Jewish ghetto resistance was based primarily on sound military principles rather than antisemitism. 15. Home Army policies adversely affected Jewish partisan groups and ghetto escapees. 16. Jan Karski’s efforts to generate more concern for the plight of Jews in Poland reflected the attitude of the Home Army leadership.

17. Because of the importance of the struggle against the Soviet Union, the Home Army ignored the anti-Jewish behaviour of anti-Soviet Polish organizations. 18. The Home Army was committed to an independent Poland in which Jews and Christians would have equal rights.

Supplemental measures 1g. Both Jews and Christians in Poland experienced unprecedented hardships during WWII, and we should not try to judge which group suffered more. 20. Most Jewish Holocaust survivors base their assessment of Polish Christians too much on personal memories rather than broader historical evidence. 21. Most Polish Christians today minimize any adverse effects of Polish Christian behavior on the fate of Jews during WWIL.

Survey on Polish—fewish Relations 343 22. Jewish support for the Soviet Russians during their occupation of eastern Poland (1939-41) 1s an important reason for the hostility many Polish Christians had for their Jewish compatriots. 23. By choosing to have little interaction with the Polish community outside of business transactions, most Jews seemed to be less than fully committed to the Polish state.

APPENDIX 2 REGRESSION RESULTS The regression results reported in Table Ar included age and gender as explanatory variables. The respondents were overwhelmingly older men. Among Polish respondents, 77 per cent were male, 57 per cent were at least 60 years old, while only 6 per cent were younger than 4o years old. Among Jewish respondents, 65 per cent were male, 52 per cent were at least 60 years old, while only 13 per cent were younger than 40 years old. Given the small number of very young respondents, separating those who were less than 40 years olds from those between 40 and 60 years old did not improve the power of analysis. As a result, the age variable equalled o for respondents who were at least 60 years old and 1 for those less than 60 years old. The gender variable was o if male and 1 if female. The group affiliation variables were o if respondents were not a group member and 1 if they were. Table Al Predicted impact of explanatory variables on Jewish and Polish composite scores (t-scores in parentheses)

Explanatory Polish Catholics Catholic Church Home Army

variable Jewish Polish Jewish Polish Jewish Polish

Intercept* 2.24 4.97 — 2.16 4.66 2.41 4.75

Dialogue 1.06 —(0.08 0.65 —0).47 0.32 —Q.15 (6.84) (0.41) (4.74) (2.44) (2.57) (0.99) Academics 0.02 —0.48 —0.04 —0).44 —(0.05 —0.21 (0.18) (2.87) (0.36) (2.65)° (0.51) (1.58)

Age 0.25 (2.07)° —0.37 0.07 —0.37 0.05 —0.25 (2.49)° (0.63) (2.49)? (0.53) (2.05)° Female —0.10 —0.13 0.02 —0.10 0.02 —0.09 (0.36) (0.70) (0.21) (0.56) (0.24) (0.63)

Museum(0.47) 0.11 — 0.04 — 0.09 — (0.22) (0.49) Holocaust(2.58)" List 0.51(2.37) wos 0.42 — 0.36 — (2.21)? * Value for reference group: older male non-academic members of fraternal organizations. @ Significant at 0.01 level. > Significant at 0.05 level.

344 Robert Cherry The fraternal group was chosen as the reference group. Thus, the intercept rep-

resented the predicted value for male non-academic members of the fraternal group who were at least 60 years old. For example, the predicted composite score with respect to the Polish people equalled 2.24 and 4.97 for older non-academic male Jewish and Polish fraternal organization respondents, respectively. Since each of the explanatory variables has a value of 1, the coefficient represents the predicted impact of belonging to a particular subgroup on the composite score. For example, being a Polish academic lowered the Polish Catholic composite by 0.48 scale points, while being a Jewish dialogue group respondent raised the composite by 1.06 scale points. Table A2 Predicted impact of explanatory variables on Jewish and Polish composite scores (t-scores in parentheses)

Explanatory Comparison of Jewish Relative variable victimization behaviour bias Jewish Polish Jewish Polish Jewish Polish

Intercept* 2.91 5.39 3.59 4.52 —1.22 1.31

Dialogue(2.52) 0.82 —0.82 0.34 —0.36 (2.75)a — (0.97) (0.89)

Academics 0.04 0.58 —0.21 0.02 0.16 —0.18

(0.17) (2.27) (1.23) (0.09) (0.55) (0.54) Age 0.24 —0).23 —().07 —0).34 0.18 —0Q).34 (0.96) (0.96) (0.44) (1.93)¢ (0.68) (1.07) Female —0.79 0.37 —(0.31 0.08 —0.10 0.27 (3.07) (1.32) (1.92)° (0.39) (0.37) (0.73)

Museum 0.75 —— —0.48 —- —().33 —

(1.65)° (1.67)° (0.66)

Holocaust List —0.30 — —().33 — 0.95 —

(0.73) (1.25) (2.10)

* Value for reference group: older male non-academic members of fraternal organizations. * Significant at 0.01 level. > Significant at 0.05 level. © Significant at 0.10 level.

A Question of Identity Polish fewish Composers in

California MAJA TROCHIMCZYK THIS chapter discusses national and ethnic identity in the lives of several composers of Polish Jewish descent who left Poland in the first half of the twentieth century to find a temporary or permanent haven in California. The activities of four composers in particular—Henry Vars, Bronislaw Kaper, Roman Ryterband, and Aleksander ‘Tansman—-will be looked at more closely. The lives of these com-

posers all involved struggles over personal identity and the choices related to multiple citizenship, and whether or not to remain in the United States or return to Europe. These displaced persons were faced with one of the most difficult tasks—that of redefining themselves personally and in terms of nationality, as expressed in their private and public lives as well as in their music. In the search for answers to the question of identity, the following issues will be considered: Did the emigre composers consider themselves Polish after leaving Poland? Did they assert

their Jewishness or Polishness in words or music? What external markers of national or ethnic identity did they use? Did they join the Jewish American or Polish American communities upon arrival in the United States? While externalizing their sense of self, composers may express their ethnic or national affiliation in their musical works—by the selection of their themes, titles, language, and formal and melodic models. They may also make explicit declarations of ethnicity, or manifest their sense of ethnic or national belonging in their The first version of this chapter was read at the international conference Polish/Jewish/ Music! organized by the Polish Music Center at the Thornton School of Music, University of Southern California, on 16 November 1998. A revised version was presented at the annual meeting of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America, held at the Jagiellonian University, Krakow, in June 2000. I thank Dr Irene Heskes and Dr Stanislaus Blejwas (both posthumously), Dr Marian Fuks, Dr Halina

Goldbert, Dr Anna Granat-Janki, Ms Clarissa Ryterband, Dr Linda Schubert, Professor Bryan Simms, Ms Elizabeth Vars, Dr Bret Werb, and Mr Art Zygmont for research assistance, advice, and comments that helped to improve this text and correct the errors. I am particularly grateful for the moral support of Irene Heskes and Stanislaus Blejwas, who believed in this project and encouraged me to expand a brief conference paper into this chapter. This work is dedicated to their memory.

346 Maja Trochimczyk Table 1 Identity criteria of Polish emigré composers

Category Criterion

Music Texts Subjects Genres (e.g. mazurka) Quotations (e.g. Chopin, folklore, anthems) Melodic and rhythmic elements, esp. from dances Performance and programming context

Life Name

Language Citizenship Presence in Polish American community Charitable activities for Polish causes Seeking contacts with Poland

Reception Entries in the New Grove Dictionary and international sources Entries in Polish American directories Monographs published, especially in Poland Attribution in the press

daily lives, including the language they use at home, the forms of the names they use professionally, and their choice of social circles and community activities. Additional indirect proof of ethnic sympathies and allegiances is provided by such factors as whether they sought contact with Poland and travelled there, or made charitable donations to Polish causes. Finally, their reception history provides general understanding of a composer’s ethnicity and national identity: whether they are thought of as Polish, or Jewish, or of a multi-national background may be disclosed by references in international directories, books, dictionaries, and other sources. It is important to clarify in advance that expression of national identity in music will not be considered in the light of some elusive ‘national spirit’ or ‘national

character trait-—such as French ‘clarity’, German ‘order’, Russian ‘brooding displays of emotion’, or the Polish ‘heroic and noble spirit’—as these traits were defined in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, especially by writers active in the United States.* Instead of engaging in such specula-

tive and old-fashioned national soul-searching, I will base my review of the identity question on a number of criteria listed in Table 1 in three categories, pertaining to music, life, and the reception of émigré composers. 1 See, for instance, general statements about the Polish soul in M. J. Piduch, “The Soul of Poland in Music’, Etude Magazine, 39/3 (Mar. 1921), 39, and A. Szumowska~-Adamowska, “The Appreciation of Chopin’, Etude Magazine, 28/8 (Aug. 1910), both repr. in the online Polish Music Journal, 5/2 (2002),

, accessed Apr. 2003.

Polish Jewish Composers in California 347 FROM HENRYK WARSZAWSKI TO HENRY VARS During his inter-war career Poland’s foremost film composer, Henryk Warszawski (b. 1902, Warsaw; d. 1977, Beverly Hills) shortened his surname to Wars.” After

emigrating to the United States in 1947, he again renamed himself, to become Henry Vars: this variant preserves the Polish sound of the last name. These name changes may be explained by the demands of Vars’s career as a successful composer of music for films, television, and popular songs. Show business favours

short, easily remembered names, and the practice of assuming pseudonyms is commonplace in Hollywood and beyond. Nonetheless, Vars’s metamorphosis is indicative of the shift in his national identity, from Polish to American. Vars’s biographical outline in Polish Americans in California 1827-1977 and Who’s Who lists his residences and adventures, but, like another biographical note about Roman Ryterband (see below), ignores his Jewish background.? This omission 1s indicative of the identity problem of Polish Jews in post-war America. Being Jewish was not an obstacle for Vars’s career in pre-war Poland. While active in the popular music world in Poland, Vars quickly established himself as the author of the country’s perennial favourites, such hit songs as ‘Umowilem sie z niq na dziewiata’, ‘Milos¢ ci wszystko wybaczy’, ‘Ach jak przyjemnie’, and ‘Zimny drari’.* These songs were all composed for films, or, to be precise, musicals. As a

pillar of the Polish film music industry, Vars wrote the scores for films such as Bezimienni bohaterowie, Sportowiec mimo woli, and Manewry mitosne.° All these films and songs were in Polish and were addressed to a Polish audience, but their musical style was not ‘Polish’: Vars preferred jazz and was the first to introduce

American influences to the Polish popular music world, in such songs as ‘New York Times’ (1928). Some of his hits were tangos or foxtrots, but none were polkas, a genre he had no interest in, either in Poland or during the American period of his career. Vars’s thriving career as one of Poland’s most important creators of musicals and popular songs was cut short by the outbreak of the Second World War. His wartime experience as a soldier in the Polish army included escaping from German captivity and performing in music theatre in the Soviet Union. As an army musician, he played for the Polish army of General Anders, which left the Soviet Union 2 Biographical information based on interviews with Elizabeth Vars conducted by Dr Linda Schubert for her paper ‘Film Scores of Henry Vars in the United States: An Overview’, Polish Music

Journal, 4/1 (2001), , accessed Apr. 2003. I thank Dr Schubert for her assistance in this research project. 3 M. Kaye, ‘Henry Vars’, in J. Przygoda (ed.), Polish Americans in California 1827-1977 and Who’s Who (Los Angeles, 1978). * ‘T Had a Date with Her at Nine’, ‘Love Will Forgive You Everything’, ‘Ah, How Nice It Is’, ‘Cold-

Blooded Scoundrel’. > ‘Nameless Heroes’ (1931), ‘An Unwilling Sportsman’ (1939), ‘Exercises in Love’ (1935).

348 Maja Trochimczyk to join British forces and fight in Irag and the Mediterranean (between 1941 and 1947 he was stationed successively in Iraq, Palestine, Egypt, and Italy). After the war ended, Vars chose to emigrate to the United States; he settled in California in 1947 and established himself in the film business. During his long and fruitful career he scored the music for B movies and television shows; Flipper (a television series about the adventures of a friendly dolphin, NBC, 1964-8) and Daktari (a family television series with a jungle theme, CBS, 1966—9) were his best-known contributions to the genre.°® Over the years Vars remained in touch with Polish musicians and provided them

with friendship and assistance. His personal Polish music circle included the Polish jazz pianist Krzysztof Komeda, who scored several of Roman Polanski’s films before his death in 1969. On this occasion, Vars and his wife wrote a warm and supportive note of condolence to Komeda’s widow, Zofia, expressing ‘deep sorrow caused by the untimely death of this talented young man’ and describing themselves as their ‘sincere friends . . . always ready to give . . . a helping hand’.’ The letter, written in perfect Polish, refers to Komeda as ‘Swlietej] P[amieci] Krzysztof’, using the traditional Catholic abbreviation for the deceased, which may be translated as ‘Of Blessed Memory’. After Vars’s death in 1977 his wife remained active in the Polish American community in California, participating in community functions and supporting its organizations, including the Roman Catholic Church. The composer’s children, however, and other family members shifted their allegiance to the Jewish American community and left their Polish background behind. This shift found its final expression on Vars’s tombstone at the Hillside Memorial Park in Culver City, California. It is decorated with a stylized menorah and the inscription ‘You, your talents, and your music will live forever in the lives you touched’. There is only one Polish element on the tombstone: Vars’s first name is spelled the Polish way, as

‘Henryk’. ,

Vars’s national and ethnic identity was not clearly delineated and changed over

time, with a rift separating his Polish years from his American ones. While in Poland, he was more of a Jewish Pole than a Polish Jew. Although his name appears in books on Jewish culture in Poland,°® his music belongs to Polish popular culture and remains one of its pillars. In a survey conducted in 1998 by the Polish weekly newspaper Wprost, Vars’s romantic song ‘Mitos¢ ci wszystko wybaczy’ (“Love Will Forgive You Everything’) was ranked top among Polish popular songs of the past

fifty years. The composer’s way to Hollywood was through Polish music, not © For more on the American films of Henry Vars, see Schubert, ‘Film Scores of Henry Vars’. -” Letter of 25 Apr. 1969, published at , accessed 18 Apr. 2003, as facsimile in Polish and in English translation.

8 eg. M. Fuks, Muzyka ocalona (Warsaw, 1989), 99. Ms Elizabeth Vars, the composer’s widow, repeatedly protested against my wish to discuss the Jewish background of her husband in this chapter. In Nov. 2005 she donated Vars’s manuscripts and papers to the Polish Music Center at USC.

Polish Jewish Composers in California 349 through the Yiddish culture that had flourished in the country of his birth. While the Polish cultural identity of his music is beyond doubt, his emigration to the

United States had consequences for the personal identity of his, now Jewish American, family, without any particular links to American Polonia. As an emigrant, Vars himself maintained a balance of identities as an American of mixed heritage, with both Polish and Jewish roots. Despite this personal equilibrium, Polish American publications have usually described Vars as a Polish American without mentioning his Jewish background. For example, Roman Ryterband’s article about Vars, Jakub Gimpel, and Bronislaw Kaper, published in Zgoda in 1966, did not identify their Jewish background.” Such omissions are important because they reflect the skewed sense of the relieious—national identity of Polish Americans. Similarly, in Poland until the fall of communism the majority of music historians and journalists who continued to admire and praise Vars’s ever-popular tunes ignored the Jewish dimension of his life. Only after 1989 was it publicly acknowledged.

AN AMERICAN FROM POLAND: BRONISLAW KAPER It is interesting to compare the personal and musical history of Henry Vars with that of his Polish-born colleague Bronistaw Kaper (b. 5 February 1902, d. 26 April 1983). Like Vars, Kaper came from Warsaw, where he studied law and music.'° However, he left Poland before Vars, moving to Berlin in search of professional advancement in the mid-1920s, where he enjoyed the stimulating atmosphere of the Weimar Republic and wrote songs for cabaret and the music for German and French films. In 1933, after the Nazi rise to power, he moved to Paris, where he spent two years composing film scores. According to Tony Thomas, after Louis Mayer heard a song of his on the radio during a holiday in Europe, Kaper was hired by MGM, becoming one of the leading film score composers associated with the Mittel-Europe school in Hollywood.'! He marked his emigration to America by appearing in a cameo role in San Francisco (1936), and in a history of American 9 R. Ryterband, ‘Co zycie niesie’, Dziennik Zwigzkowy Zgoda (Chicago), 1 Nov. 1966, 1.

10 Biographical information about Kaper is available from the entry in L. Macy (ed.), New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians Online, , and from varied sources such as T. Thomas, Music for the Movies (New York, 1973); W. FE Krasnoborski, ‘Interview with B. Kaper’, Soundtrack Collector’s Newsletter, 12/2 (1975); 13/3 (1976), 3; T. Thomas, Film Score: The View from the Podium (New York, 1979), 115-25; V. J. Francillon (ed.), Film Composers Guide (Los Angeles, 1990), 223-4. Mindy Kaye wrote an entry for Przygoda (ed.), Polish Americans in California and Who’s Who, 1. 122.

11 Thomas, Music for the Movies, 87. Composers from this group also included Herbert Stothart, Franz Waxman, Miklos Rozsa, André Previn, Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Newman, and David Raksin. For Kaper’s recollection of his work for Hollywood, see ‘Scoring Hollywood Movies’, inter-

views conducted in 1975, American Film Institute/Louis B. Mayer Oral History Collection in Los Angeles, pt. 1/13; the microfilm of a portion of the typescript is available from Glen Rock, NJ: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1977.

350 Maja Trochimczyk film music (1942). During twenty-eight years of work for MGM, Kaper composed the scores for over 150 films, including such classics as A Night at the Opera (1935,

with the Marx brothers), San Francisco (with Clark Gable and Jeanette MacDonald), The Brothers Karamazov (1958), Mutiny on the Bounty (1962, with Marlon Brando), and Lord Jim (1965). According to ‘Thomas, most of Kaper’s scores were composed for ‘run-of-the-mill products, the glossy film entertainments for which the studio became famous and wealthy’.’* Nonetheless, his contributions to Hollywood film music history included receiving an Oscar for the hit song from Lili (with Leslie Caron), ‘Hi Lili, Hi Lo’ (1953). Kaper used three names on his film credits: Bronistaw Kaper, Bronislau Kaper, and Edward Kane. The Polish form of his first name, Bronistaw, appeared most frequently in the 1930s, in German and French films.’* The first name used most often, Bronislau, is a German form of the Polish Bronislaw. After the war he returned to the Polish spelling in two dramas, The Stranger (1946, dir. Orson Welles, with Edward G. Robinson and Loretta Young; about a search for Nazi criminals in Connecticut), and Tobruk (1967, dir. Arthur Hiller; about British troops fighting the Germans in Africa). The focus on the Second World War in both films brought out his Polish identity, manifested in the form of his first name.

Kaper’s links to the Polish American community in the United States are revealed in an entry about him in Polish Americans in California and Who’s Who. The entry, by a celebrity reporter, Mindy Kaye, documents his elevated position in the movie world of Hollywood by mentioning his musical achievements as well as his service on the board of governors of the Motion Picture Academy,

the board of directors of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and other honours. While emphasizing his presence in the American music world, Kaye also pointed out: Mr Kaper maintains a close relationship with Polish writers, sports figures, and musicians, especially his closest friend, Artur Rubinstein, and considers himself an unpaid ‘Polish ambassador’ of the United States. He was a close friend of Julian Tuwim, the Polish poet,

and donated a collection of unpublished letters and verses from Tuwim to the Polish Museum of Literature in Warsaw.‘

While both Rubinstein and Tuwim were Polish Jews with very close links to Poland and a profound attachment to Polish culture, their Jewish background was not mentioned in Kaye’s biographical note on Kaper. A similar omission occurs in a short entry on Kaper in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980) 12 Thomas, Music for the Movies, 87.

13 Kaper’s Oscar-winning song, with words by Helen Deutsch, was published in 1952 in New York by Robbins Music Corporation. It is available in a solo piano version played by the composer on The Film Music of Bronislaw Kaper,a DELOS CD (Facet 8101, 1987). Print versions of his music were

usually credited to Bronislaw Kaper; the WorldCat catalogue lists forty-one entries for Bronislaw Kaper and two for Bronislau Kaper, OCLC web site, ,

21 Apr. 2003. 14 See n. 10.

Polish Jewish Composers in California 351 and in the new edition of Grove published in 2000 (online in 2001). In the 1980 entry Christopher Palmer described Kaper as an ‘American composer of Polish birth’ who excelled in musical depictions ‘of the sea and of tropical landscapes’. The 2001 entry, revised by Randall D. Larson, retains that national designation, though it is somewhat more positive towards Kaper’s music, praising him for ‘fluency, melodic charm and fine, elegant craftsmanship’ and for forging links between the popular and the symphonic styles, with a heavy influence of late European Romanticism.'° Clearly, Kaper’s songs and film scores belong to the history of American film music and jazz, not to the history of Polish music. His main theme from On Green Dolphin Street (1947), picked up by Miles Davis, became a jazz standard.*® He also wrote another great jazz standard, ‘Invitation’, a song from the film of the same title (1952). A Polish American jazz bassist, Darek Oleszkiewicz, stated that he ‘would not associate these tunes with Polish or Jewish ethnic songs in any way’, even though the songs were written by someone of Polish Jewish backeround. +! Kaper’s musical interests were diverse and included a fondness for Polish songs;

this eclecticism was reflected in his own work. Thomas said of his encounter with the composer: To visit Kaper in his home is to share his delight in listening to anything from a Polish song to Berg’s Wozzeck, or better still, to hear him play the piano. What the listener is most likely to hear is a stream of beautiful melodies from a middle European of the Old School who readily admits to an occasional tear while watching heart-rending scenes in some of his

films.*®

The composer’s creative links with Polish themes in music found the most vivid expression in a Broadway musical, Polonaise (1945), based on Chopin’s works and featuring the Polish tenor Jan Kiepura and his wife, the soprano Martha Eggerth. The cast of characters in this musical included General ‘Tadeusz Kosciuszko (Jan Kiepura), a young girl, Marysia (Marta Eggerth), as well as General Washington (Walter Munroe), and assorted Polish and American soldiers. The patriotic Polish American subject matter must have been quite appealing to Poles in America just after the war. The use of Chopin’s music, which had been banned by the Nazis

in occupied Poland, was also a gesture of solidarity with the Polish cause. Chopin’s music had served as a national symbol for Poles throughout the nine19 C. Palmer, ‘Bronislau Kaper’, in S. Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians

(London, 1980), ix. 798; C. Palmer and R. D. Larson, ‘Bronislaw Kaper’, in Macy (ed.), New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians Online, accessed 21 Apr. 2003.

16 Miles Davis liked On Green Dolphin Street and played it with various musicians; an excellent recording with Miles, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb is the Miles ’5& album issued in 1958 as Columbia CK 47835 (USA)/ 467918 2 (Europe), reissued on CD by Sony in 1991. 17 Email message from Darek Oleszkiewicz to Maja Trochimezyk, Oct. 1998.

, 18 Thomas, Music for the Movies, 84.

352 Maja Trochimczyk teenth century, but its wartime ban raised it to the highest level in the national artistic pantheon.!? Finally, the polonaise, which gave the musical its title, had a long-standing patriotic dimension as the principal national dance form, associated by various writers with the noble and heroic ‘national character’ of Poles. The significance of the musical’s title, in the context of its plot line and the national symbolism associated with the polonaise, which thus transcended its dance status, cannot be underestimated, especially if the musical is placed in its historical post-war context. However, apart from Polonaise, an isolated case of musical and thematic ‘Polishness’ in Kaper’s ceuvre, the majority of his compositions belong to the history of American music.”° Kaper’s acceptance as a Polish composer was possible only when popular music lost 1ts stigma as non-artistic and when his Jewish roots were not mentioned. Thus, the entries in the 1995 edition of the Encyklopedia muzyki and in the Encyklopedia

muzyczna PWM (1997) refer neither to Kaper’s Jewish background nor to his American citizenship, designating him instead as a ‘Polish composer’ of popular film music active in the United States.*! Polish American sources are as inaccurate in this respect as the Polish ones. His entry in Polish Americans and Who’s Who (1978), like the 1966 newspaper article by Roman Ryterband mentioned above, emphasizes Kaper’s presence in Hollywood and his various achievements without pointing out his Jewish religious affiliation. Since his death in 1983 his Polish legacy continues to be highlighted by the Polish American community, and he remains an example of an accomplished Polish American who overcame the obstacles encountered by every immigrant to the United States. But, as in the case of Vars, his Jewish roots are not mentioned. In contrast to Vars, who remained an enormously popular composer of ‘golden oldies’ in Poland, Kaper’s American film scores and jazz standards are not recognized as particularly Polish in style or cultural location. His music is not a focus of national pride in his country of origin: he left Poland too early and had not estab19 The musical Polonaise, with music by Chopin arranged by Kaper, played on Broadway from 6 October 1945 to 12 January 1946 at the Alvin and Adelphi theatres. There were 113 performances of

this work, produced by W. Horace Schmidlapp in association with Harry Bloomfield; text by Gottfried Reinhardt and Anthony Veiller and song texts by John La Touche. 20 The composer’s name does not appear in the two-volume Slownik muzykéw polskich, the main

music biography reference source (Krakow: PWM, 1964-7). There could be three reasons for this omission: he composed popular music and the dictionary focused on classical composers; he emigrated to the United States and the names of some émigrés were excluded (though there were entries on Laks, Kassern, Rathaus, Panufnik, Spisak, and Tansman); or he was excluded because of his Jewish background. The Dictionary of Polish Musicians was censored, and the apparent number of Jewish musicians participating in Polish culture was reduced by an arbitrary rejection of numerous entries. The absence of Kaper was probably due to his activity in the lower-ranked ‘popular music’ area, and not to his Jewish background. 21 W. Panek, ‘Bronislaw Kaper’, in Encyklopedia muzyczna PWM (Krakéw, 1997), 24, and in Encyklopedia muzykt (Warsaw, 1995).

Polish Jewish Composers in California 353 lished himself as a composer of Polish popular music before his departure. This is perhaps one reason why his posthumous Polish existence is so precarious, while his American identity is beyond doubt. Classic Hollywood film music was created by immigrants from various European countries, and it was their choice to become American after settling in their new homeland. Kaper is buried among the film industry ‘royalty’ at the Hollywood Forever

cemetery, and his name is remembered in California through the Bronislaw Kaper Awards for Young Artists, an annual competition organized by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.** An additional circumstantial indication of his American identity stems from the fact that his papers and manuscripts have been

deposited at the American Heritage Center of the University of Wyoming.?° Kaper thus defined himself as an American in his professional life and charitable activities. Although he expressed an attachment to Polish culture in his private life and friendships, his allegiance is best defined as American, not Polish.

A CITIZEN OF THE WORLD: ROMAN RYTERBAND A different and more complex ‘identity story’ may be written for Roman Ryterband, the author of the article mentioned above, in which he identified Vars and Kaper as American Poles without referring to their Jewishness. One might suspect that the motivation for such an omission could stem from the author’s antisemitism, but closer scrutiny of his own biography will lead to a different conclusion. For now, suffice it to say that Ryterband was of Jewish descent himself and that he participated in Jewish community life in all the countries he lived in. He also attempted to fit in with the life and world-view of other ethnic communities, especially American Polonia. Ryterband’s name is hard to find in Polish biographical sources. Like Vars and Kaper, he emigrated to the United States, where he attempted to build a new life. Born in 1914 in L.6dz, he came from a musical family, but financial struggles persuaded his father that the future composer should study law, not music.** After receiving the degree of Bachelor of Music (Piano) from the State Music Academy 22 ‘This information was available on the competition page of the Los Angeles Philharmonic web site, , accessed 21 Apr. 2003. 23 ‘The Bronislaw Kaper Papers, dated 1923-65, consist of 0.9 cubic feet of documents (two boxes), mostly in English, with two letters from 1965 and scores for orchestral music and several motion pictures, including Bataan, The Glass Shipper, Lih, Lord Fim, The Mutiny on the Bounty, Them!, and The Brothers Karamazov. 24 Biographical information about Ryterband is based on the Ryterband Papers donated by Clarissa

Ryterband, at the Polish Music Center, University of Southern California, including typewritten biography, list of works, and an assortment of press clippings and copies. My account starts by mirroring the career landmarks listed by A. Zygmont, ‘Roman Ryterband’, in H. Simons (ed.), Polish Amenicans in California, 1 (Los Angeles, 1995), 91-2.

354 Maja Trochimczyk in L6dz in 1932, Ryterband earned a master’s degree in law from the University of Warsaw in 1937. Music must have been attractive to the young lawyer, since he continued to perform as a pianist during his sojourn at law school. When the Second World War broke out, he happened to be in France. He subsequently sought refuge in Switzerland, where he began to compose while studying for his master’s degree in musicology at the University of Berne. His professors there included Ernst Kurth and Jacques Handschin; he received his degree in 1944. The young musician began his career as a conductor during his Swiss period. After the tragedy of the Holocaust blocked his return to Poland, Ryterband did not want to stay in Europe. With his Italian-born wife, Clarissa, and two children he left Switzerland for Montreal barely a year after becoming a Swiss citizen in 1954—a Job offer from CBC was a big incentive. For several years he worked for Canadian radio, lectured at McGill University, and directed a Polish chorus. Five years later the family moved to Chicago, where Ryterband joined the faculty of the Chicago Conservatory College. Here he continued to compose and to participate in the musical life of his third new country. In 1964 he received American citizenship; the following year he was recognized by the Citizen Council of Chicago as the Outstanding New Citizen of the Year. While living in Illinois, he was involved

with the International Society for Contemporary Music and various Polish American organizations. He conducted Polish choruses and the Southside Symphony Orchestra. Ryterband’s final move, to Palm Springs, California, took place in 1967; he spent the rest of his life in the desert climate and died in Palm Springs in 1979.

During this last phase of his life he received a commission from the US Bicentennial Celebration, resulting in the orchestral work Tunes of America. He was active as a teacher and an organizer of musical events: he was the founder of

the Palm Springs Festival of Music and Art. He also taught music theory at California State University in Los Angeles and performed new music as a soloist and chamber music artist. Ryterband’s two-page biography written by Art Zygmont in Polish Americans in California (the companion volume to the book edited by Jacek Przygoda seventeen years earlier which included biographies of Vars and Kaper) does not include the word ‘Jewish’ and no mention is made of any of Ryterband’s ‘Jewish-themed’ compositions.*° A similar biographical outline, depicting Ryterband as a patriotic Pole, may be found in a short notice in a 1976 issue of Ruch Muzyczny. In this brief

_ outline, entitled ‘Composer and Promoter of Polish Music’, we read that, even though Ryterband left Poland during the war, he ‘continues to feel attached to the culture of his homeland’.”°

Other biographical material in the Roman Ryterband papers donated to the 25 Zygmont, ‘Roman Ryterband’. 26 “Kompozytor i propagator muzyki polskiej’, Ruch Muzyczny (1976) (no vol. or page number), press clipping, Polish Music Center, Roman Ryterband Papers (RRP).

Polish Jewish Composers in California 355 Polish Music Center by the composer’s widow give a different picture of his identity. One untitled, undated, and typewritten page (probably prepared for a Jewish

organization or dictionary) contains the information that Ryterband’s cousin Mordechai Ben-Tov was the minister of labour in Israel and that Ryterband passed exams in Hebrew when graduating from high school in his home city of L6dz. We also learn that he was always ‘close to Jewish culture and heritage’ and that he composed a number of works ‘in the Jewish idiom’, including: song settings of poems by Bialik and Tchernichowsky; ‘Twenty-Four Piano Variations on the melody of ‘Az der rebe elimelekh’; Two Israel Images for harp; Psalm 97 for baritone, boys’ chorus, and organ; and Three Hebrew Ballades for violin and piano.

These short biographies are corroborated by further documentary evidence about the breadth of Ryterband’s involvement in Jewish musical life. A concert programme from Zurich reveals that his Swiss years featured close contacts with the Jewish émigré community there. The concert was organized by the Omanut Verein zur Forderung jiidischer Kunst in der Schweiz (Omanut Association for Promoting Jewish Art in Switzerland). It was held on 27 May 1943 and featured the premiere of Ryterband’s Variationen tiber ein Thema eines Volkshedes in B flat

minor, along with renditions of several Sephardic and hasidic folk songs, and music by Achad Ha’am, Marko Rothmuller, and Joachim Stutschewsky.”’ The source of the folk melody is not revealed in the title of Ryterband’s Variationen, but it is clearly Jewish.

It is interesting to observe that at this time, as well as during the remainder of his life, Ryterband did not make a choice between his Jewish and Polish identities and participated in cultural activities of both groups. During his Swiss years, when he composed music for Jewish concerts, he was also actively contributing to the Polish émigré community. He delivered lectures on Chopin and played Polish

music at piano recitals at the Berne Conservatoire in 1949, 1950, and 1952. Moreover, in 1945 he wrote Jasetka bernenskie (‘Berne Christmas Pageant’), a musical comedy presented by the Polish consulate during the Christmas season that year. This comic musical entertainment featured arrangements of popular Polish Christmas carols accompanied by humorous Polish texts, mocking the dilemmas of emigrants who faced the choice of returning to Poland after the war

or continuing their life in exile. The main characters in the Jasefka were the Musician (Grajek), the Old Man (Dziad), the Devil, and the Donkey, with the last character well known to all Poles from Aleksander Fredro’s satirical poem about a hapless animal who died of hunger while being unable to choose between two

kinds of food. (This dilemma is probably better known outside Poland as the medieval logic problem of Buridan’s ass.) Like the hungry donkey, the emigrants had to choose between ‘Swiss cheese and Polish bread’. Unable to make up their minds, they kept postponing their flight back home to ‘maybe later, another time 27 All documents reproduced from copies and originals in RRP.

356 Maja Trochimczyk ... maybe in January, maybe in December . . .’.2° Their hesitation had a reason:

as the Musician explained, it was hard to return since the country had been completely transformed by the war. In the old country there used to be ‘kings and Jews, angels and nobility’, but they had all disappeared. The loss of this colourful past, including religious minorities, had to be regretted in its entirety, for ‘how can you live without a Jew? Even antisemites need Jews.’ This was the only ‘Jewish’ allusion in the whole text of Jasetka. The conclusion of the spectacle satirized the

atomic bomb. | greatest fear of the Cold War, that of nuclear war. The general confusion was resolved by the total annihilation of all the characters by the explosion of an

As his Polish American biography indicates, during the years spent in Canada, Ryterband was active in the Polish Canadian community. Simultaneously, he participated in Jewish musical life, as may be observed in the programme of a concert given in 1957 in which his music was performed alongside other Jewish-themed compositions by Alexander Brott (the cantata Vision of the Dry Bones), Israel Alter (the Hebrew prayer ‘Modim Anachnu Lach’, ‘We are Grateful to You’, sung by the cantor Solomon Gisser, with Charles Reiner, piano), Joachim Stutschewsky (Three Hebrew Dances), Samuel Levitan (Vig Lied), and Felix Mendelssohn (Trio in D minor). The concert also featured greetings by Rabbi Paul Liner, so it is safe to assume that it was set in the context of a Jewish community.” Ryterband’s contribution to this programme consisted in six excerpts from Twenty-Four Variations on a Theme of a Folksong in B flat minor (1942), most likely the same work that was premiered in Zurich in 1943 and based on the song ‘Az der rebe elimelekh’. The Jewish dimension of Ryterband’s life was, for Polish Americans, his bestkept secret. After he moved to Chicago, his presence in the Jewish community diminished. He joined an American college as a professor, teaching music theory and composition; at the same time he became active in the new music world of Chicago, and rose to a prominent position within Chicago Polonia. He performed at many concerts for the Society of Polish Arts and Letters and composed choral music to Catholic texts. His setting of Pater Noster was premiered by the St Patrick Boys’ Choir on 12 May 1963 at the DePaul Center in Chicago. It is a rarity in his oeuvre in its use of the twelve-tone compositional technique. Another large-scale choral composition, Jubilate Deo, was performed on 6 May in the 1960s (the concert programme in the archives does not include the year) by the Chancel Choir at 28 The poem ‘Osiotkowi w zlobie dano’ (‘Donkey at the Trough’) was written by Aleksander Fredro (1793-1876), Poland’s foremost writer of comedies and humorous poems. The title phrase entered the Polish vernacular, in reference to those who are ‘harmfully undecided’. Excerpts from Ryterband’s text were translated by me. From page 8: ‘Jak tu zyé bez zyda? Przecie i antysemicie zyd zawsze sie przyda’ (“How could you live without a Jew? Even an antisemite always needs a Jew’). Photocopy of a manuscript notebook, twelve pages of eight-stave notebook with spiral binding, black ink, dated 1945, RRP.

29 One page (insert with programme) from this programme is preserved in RRP. There is no information about the exact date or location of this concert, apart from that it took place in Montreal.

Polish Fewish Composers in California 357 the North Shore Baptist Church in Chicago. According to a biographical note written by Ryterband in 1976 while applying for a Kosciuszko Foundation grant, over the years he had participated in ‘recitals and theatrical productions sponsored by Polish organizations, in commemorative national manifestations (Kosciuszko, Paderewski, Independence, Constitution) and other events of [a] cultural nature, geared to rekindling the Polish spirit abroad and bringing our national tradition to others’.°°

An overview of Ryterband’s biography reveals that as a citizen of Poland, Switzerland, Canada, and the United States, he embraced cultural values shared by all the countries that he collected in his ‘citizenship portfolio’; these values tran-

scended ethnic, linguistic, and denominational differences. His attachment to humanism manifested itself quite early, when he founded a Humanist Club in high school in Poland. Later on he was a co-founder of the Polish Arts Society in Berne (1940), and a member of the Swiss National Societies in Montreal (1955-9) and Chicago (1961), as well as various music societies throughout the United States. His open-minded attitude and far-ranging interests grew through his exposure to

various national traditions after his emigration: he travelled through more than twenty countries, knew six languages, and, according to his wife, had a ‘love for people of all walks of life and of any territorial provenance’.** Ryterband’s evolving national status—with multiple allegiances, Polish, Jewish, Swiss, Canadian, and American—is complex. Having survived the war, and having lived, by choice or circumstance, in a number of different countries, he regretted

the suffering and discord caused by differences among people. In his compositional and existential credo, he described music as ‘the most sublime international language’, which should be used to advocate understanding between people. Though differences ‘make our world colourful and sparkling . . . overplayed they produce discord, unrest, and suffering’. In this mission statement of musical reconciliation, Ryterband praised his adopted, fourth homeland, claiming that the ‘ideals of harmony, happiness, and mutual respect’ that had been pursued by the citizens of the United States since its inception provide the basis for international peace and culture.*”

Ryterband’s plurality of interests and shifts of national identity may also be seen in his music. His folk song settings resemble stylistically the folk arrangements of Béla Bartok:*° original melodies are provided with non-tonal 30 Statements cited from a typewritten page, ‘Addenda’ to ‘Application. Roman Ryterband’, written for a grant from the Kosciuszko Foundation in the 1970s, n.d., RRP. 31 Clarissa Ryterband, private conversation with the author, Nov. 1998. Quotation about ‘the love for people’ from Ryterband, ‘Folk Music and the Harp’, Folk Harp fournal, 13 (June 1976), 11-18. 32 One-page statement printed in ‘antique’ font on coloured paper with red ink, original at Harvard University’s Houghton Library, Hans Moldenhauer Archives; printout in RRP.

, 33 Ryterband’s interest in Bart6k’s ‘international’ brand of folk music studies is corroborated by the fact that he quoted the Hungarian composer in ‘Folk Music and the Harp’.

358 Maja Trochimczyk accompaniments derived from their motivic and scalar characteristics, without resorting to banal tonic—dominant patterns and tonal simplifications. Like Bartok, who drew inspiration from the folklore of many countries, Ryterband stylized and arranged melodies of Polish, Jewish, Swiss, Russian, Italian, African American, and Amerindian provenance.** His ceuvre includes Rhapsodia helvetica for trombone and piano, /talian Fantasy for women’s choir, Kol nidre for voices, Trois bal-

lades hébraiques for violin and piano, Russian Rhapsody for orchestra, Negro Spirituals dedicated to Marian Anderson, and a Suite polonaise for orchestra or piano. Stylistically, his music may be characterized as oscillating between neoclassicism, neo-romanticism, and mild avant-garde. He was an untiring advocate of new music, encouraging the public to ‘seek and discern the beautiful’ in new and experimental compositions, but warning that ‘we, today, are deprived of the right

to judge and the privilege to know who will be accepted by the coming generations’.*° Posterity seems to have been kindest towards his music for harp and flute

or violin: his works for these instruments may still be found in concert programmes. Ryterband’s output contains pieces of unmistakably Polish or Jewish character, discernible by their use of folk melodies and rhythms originating 1n the folklore of each tradition and by their explicitly ethnic titles. The Jewish-themed works, in addition to those mentioned earlier, include Three Hebrew Songs, Cantata (Psalm 1922) in Hebrew, Jubilate Deo (Hallelujah) with Latin text replaced by Hebrew,

and Hebrew versions of his psalm settings: Psalm 97, originally written in German, and Psalm 27, originally written in English. Similarly, Polish themes are explored in a series of works, including ‘Song of the Plains of Poland’ for saxophone and piano, Fantasy on Polish Folk Melodies for three violins, and song settings of Polish texts, for example W modrzewiowym dworku, a mazur for soprano, tenor, mixed choir, and piano, and Roze 1 sen for voice and piano.

Ryterband’s most ambitious Polish project was the Swite polonaise of ten regional dances written for piano and arranged for full orchestra by Tadeusz Dobrzanski in Krakow. The suite, originally composed in 1950, was dedicated to His Holiness Pope John Paul II in 1978 and rewarded with the papal blessing in the same year.°° The work consists of the following dances: Polonaise, Drobny, Kuwawmiak, Kotomyjka, Zbojnicki, Mazur, Krakomiak, Krzesany, Trojak, and Oberek.

The original piano version was composed before Ryterband left Switzerland 34 Ryterband’s fascination with the music of Native Americans started after he settled in Palm Springs. In addition to composing Two Desert Scenes for flute and harp, with an Indian rattle in the second movement, he wrote an article about ‘Agua Caliente and their Music’ for the Indian Historian, 12/4 (1979), 2-9. Ryterband’s letters to Marian Anderson about this dedication are located in her papers at the University of Pennsylvania Library, Special Collections. 8° Ryterband, ‘Contemporary Music—Yes or No’, Baton of Phi Beta, 42/3 (Spring 1963), 19. 36 This dedication earned the composer a letter of thanks from the papal secretary, with the Pope’s ‘apostolic blessing’ and assurances of prayer on the composer’s behalf. The letter is written in Polish and dated 6 February 1979. Copy in RRP.

Polish Jewish Composers in California 359 for Canada and provided yet more proof of his Polish Jewish identity as a composer. In the suite the dances, originating from various ethnographic areas, do not appear in order, but are mixed up to provide contrast between the movements. In Drobny, Zbojnicki, and Krzesany, Ryterband uses the style of the music of

the Tatra Mountains, with its characteristic strong accents, pedal points, Lydian modes, and dissonances. One of the pieces is so close to the original folk material that it almost appears like a transcription of a gorale string ensemble (kapela). By quoting and using the style of gorale music, Ryterband placed himself within the tradition, associated with Szymanowski and Paderewski, of identifying ‘Polish’

music with the melodies from the southern, mountainous area bordering on Slovakia. The earlier ‘Chopin tradition’ of identifying ‘Polish’ music with the folk-

lore of the central area of Mazovia is reflected in the choice of three dances belonging to the mazur family, Kujawiak, Mazur, and Oberek. The suite is rounded off by two national dances, the Polonaise, the traditional Polish dance of the nobility, and the Krakowiak, originating in the south-central area, but popular across the whole country, especially in the south. One dance, 7rojak, belongs to the folklore of Silesia. Interestingly, the majority of the dances come from the southern part of the country—the origin of most American immigrants from Poland. Thus, the design of the Suite polonaise serves in part to articulate the ethnic and national concerns of American Polonia. In this context, the suite’s dedication to the Polish Pope is as important in Ryterband’s attempted assimilation to Polonia as his use of stylized regional and national dances.

Other Catholic elements in Ryterband’s ceuvre include a setting of ‘Bogurodzica’, a Marian hymn and the most ancient Polish national anthem, dating back to the thirteenth century. In Ryterband’s version it 1s written for high voice and piano, with the unchanged melody supported by ‘a stylistically appropriate accompaniment’ (according to the composer’s own words in the piece’s extensive programme notes).°’ Ryterband’s notes for his arrangement of the Marian chant have a clearly educational purpose designated for a Polish American audience: he recounts a short history of Polish statehood, inseparably connected to its conversion to Christianity, and explains the rationale for his setting of the song as ‘making the beautiful hymn accessible to international concert audiences’.°® Ryterband’s use of the Polish language continued throughout his career. His correspondence with Polish organizations, such as the music publisher Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne (PWM) and the performing rights organization Zwiazek Autorow 1 Kompozytorow Scenicznych (ZAIKS), was conducted in Polish. His

letters to Artur Rubinstein, a fellow Polish Jew, were in Polish; though the response that has been preserved, the pianist’s note to his agent Sal Hurok, was in 37 R. Ryterband, Programme Notes for Bogurodzica, typescript, RRP. 38 According to correspondence preserved in his archives, Ryterband submitted Bogurodzica for publication by PWM in Krakow, but it was not accepted.

360 Maja Trochimczyk English.°? While Ryterband changed the language of his daily life from Polish to French and German (when he was in Switzerland), to French and English (when

he was in Canada), and finally to American English, the shift from Poland to California did not entail a change of name since its form was easily international-

ized. After his death Ryterband’s music manuscripts were deposited in the Americana Collection in the Houghton Library of Harvard University as part of the Hans Moldenhauer Archives, which document the lives and works of contemporary composers.*° As a result, Ryterband’s struggle to balance his complex Polish Jewish immigrant identity ended with the Americanization of his ceuvre. Today his music 1s rarely performed.

BETWEEN POLAND AND FRANCE: ALEKSANDER TANSMAN While Vars, Kaper, and Ryterband blended into the cultural mosaic of American life, Aleksander Tansman failed to become American and returned to Europe after spending five years in Los Angeles. Tansman’s assimilation to French culture was stronger than his Polish sympathies and overrode the promise of a new life in California. The question of his identity was resolved posthumously as that of ‘a French composer of Polish descent’.*! Aleksander (or Alexandre, as he became known) Tansman was born in 1897 in L0dz.** His childhood was characterized by assimilation to Polish culture in an affluent Jewish family. Polish was his first language, but he also received an education in foreign languages through daily conversations with two foreign nannies, one German and one French. Like Ryterband, he studied law at the University of Warsaw and took private lessons in music, starting in 1915 with counterpoint classes with Piotr Rytel, a conservative but influential composer, teacher, and critic.

Tansman’s next mentor, Henryk Melcer-Szczawitiski, supported his compositional efforts in 1916—18 and remained among his friends for many years. With no traditional music education, it was surprising that the young composer won three

top prizes at a competition organized in 1919 by Polski Klub Artystyczny in Warsaw.*°

By the end of that year ‘Tansman had decided to embark on a career as a musi39 Ryterband’s typed letter to Rubinstein requesting a job reference is dated 12 January 1960 and addressed c/o Rubinstein’s agent, Sal Hurok. Rubinstein’s earlier ‘introduction’ of Ryterband to Hurok is not dated, but it was written on the letterhead of a Basel hotel and could have originated in 1954 or 1955. Copies of both documents in RRP. 40 ‘Library Gets Major Music Collection’, Harvard University Gazette, 80/16 (21 Dec. 1984); copy

in RRP. 41 Entries in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, 1980, 2001). 42 See J. Cegiella, Dztecko szczescia: Aleksander Tansman i jego czasy (L6dzZ, 1996); A. Granat-Janki, Forma w twoérczosct instrumentalne] Aleksandra Tansmana (Wroclaw, 1995). According to Tansman’s

biography by Cegiella, he was born on 12 June or 30 May 1897 (vol. i, p. 24). On the web site of the

Tansman Competition in Lodz the date is corrected to 11 June 1897; see , accessed 5 May 2003. 43 The prizewinning compositions were Romans for violin and piano (first prize), Impressions, and

Polish fewish Composers in California 361 cian and left Warsaw for Paris. He settled in France and seldom returned to his native country until just before his death in 1986. During this stage of his life, Tansman frequently described himself as ‘un compositeur polonais’, but he was primarily a member of the international avant-garde active in Paris. A protége of Maurice Ravel, he gave piano recitals, had his works performed in a variety of concerts, and was acritic for La Revue Musicale. In this capacity he supported the early work in Paris of Karol Szymanowski: in 1922 he introduced Szymanowski’s music to French audiences in a thirteen-page article accompanied by reprints of selected piano compositions.** His support for Szymanowski was not limited to his articles: Szymanowski’s first concert in Paris was organized by La Revue Musicale in May

of the same year, and the younger composer introduced Szymanowski to many influential Parisians. It is worth noting how their standing in the music world became completely reversed. In the 1920s Tansman was a famous piano virtuoso and innovative composer of polytonal music, well established in France, while Szymanowski sought recognition as an outsider. Now Szymanowski’s name defines Polish music in the first half of the twentieth century while Tansman is a member of that group of obscure and neglected composers whose achievements are all but forgotten. In Poland, Tansman and Szymanowski belonged to the group of ‘modernist’ or ‘futurist? composers whose works were viciously attacked by conservative music

critics, led by Tansman’s former teacher of counterpoint, Piotr Rytel, and Stanistaw Niewiadomski.*° In 1924 Szymanowski and Tansman headed the list of most frequently performed Polish composers in Paris and were recognized as the ‘true leaders of the new Polish school, which has entered a distinguished period in its existence’.4° Nonetheless, in the 1920s Tansman’s place in Polish culture was uncertain and he received little support from his home country. Polish performances of his compositions were usually condemned by the critics, who were hostile

to all traces of modernism or experimentation. After the Warsaw premiere of Tansman’s Scherzo sinfonico, Karol Stromenger described the work as a ‘caricature

Prelude in B minor (two honourable mentions). Piotr Rytel served as a president of the jury, but the submissions featured the pseudonyms, not the real names, of the composers; thus Rytel’s dislike of his Jewish student could not harm Tansman’s chances. However, his displeasure became obvious in a highly critical review of Tansman’s compositional concert given in February 1919 (Gazeta Polska, 79 (19 Feb. 1919), 7).

44 A. Tansman, ‘Karol Szymanowski’, La Revue Musicale, 7 (1 May 1922), 97-110. Szymanowski’s concert took place on 20 May 1922. “© For instance, Rytel’s review of Tansman’s compositional concerts in 1919 and the highly critical review of a 1922 performance of ‘Tansman’s /mpressions by Stanislaw Niewiadomski in Rzeczpospolita, 18 Mar. 1922.

46 A. Coeuroy, ‘Korespondencja z Paryza’, Muzyka, 1 (1925), 31. The quotation comes from a report by Eduard Ganche in La Pologne Littéraire, published in French in Warsaw and excerpted in Muzyka.

362 Maja Trochimczyk of musical modernism’, and Stanislaw Niewiadomski dismissed it as ‘musical

impertinence, brutally offending the hearing of the listeners’.4’ Tansman responded to his critics by publishing in Muzyka a compositional credo, ‘O mej tw6rczosci muzycznej’ (‘About my Musical Output’). It included a lengthy complaint about the neglect of his works by Polish musicians: My homeland is the one country in which my works have been played less frequently than anywhere else: my compositions, performed on European and American concert platforms, have for years remained unperformed by the [Warsaw] Philharmonic; all of my works have been published abroad and none within the country; Polish correspondents consciously bypass everything that relates to my position in the contemporary movement ... When the ISCM [International Society for Contemporary Music] included Polish music in its international festival by organizing a performance of one of my compositions, Polish musicians staged rival concerts in Paris without my participation, to the general bewilderment, and not just bewilderment, of the local music world. It is therefore not surprising that my e@uvre is completely misunderstood in my home country! Surrounded on all sides by ill will, performed every two years, with no understanding of its true place in the West, my music cannot receive a friendly welcome from the general public.*®

Tansman’s name was absent from the list of Poland’s best composers presented at the 1925 Grand Festival de la Musique Polonaise held in Paris under the patron-

age of the Polish ambassador, Alfred Chlapowski.*? The programme featured works by Mieczyslaw Karlowicz, Karol Szymanowski, Henryk Melcer, Emil Mbynarski, Felicjan Szopski, Stanistaw Niewiadomski, Henryk Opienski, and Ludomir Rozycki, but there was no room for Tansman, who was ironically the best-known Polish composer in Paris at the time. Nonetheless, he became one of the principal supporters and an honorary member of the Stowarszyszenie Mlodych Muzykéw Polakéw w Paryzu (Association of Young Polish Musicians in

Paris), founded by Piotr Perkowski in 1926. In this position Tansman joined Paderewski, the association’s honorary president, and Szymanowski. In the same year, however, he decided to switch from the Polish to the French section of the ISCM.°° In addition to the hostility of the conservative press, ‘Tansman’s position in the 47 K. Stromenger, ‘Koncert symfoniczny w Filharmonii’, Kurier Poranny, 119 (1 May 1925); S. Niewiadomski, review in Warszawianka (8 May 1925), cited in Cegiella, Dziecko szczeScia, i. 157.

48 A. Tansman, ‘O mej tworczosci muzycznej (Z okazji wykonania “Scherza”)’, Muzyka, 2/2 (1925), 107.

49 The concert was held on 11 June at the Paris Opéra and the messy programme angered at least two eminent performers who participated in it, Artur Rubinstein and Pawel Kochariski—according to a report by Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz to his wife, dated 27 June 1925, cited in S. Golachowski, “Tablice chronologiczne do zycia i tworczosci Karola Szymanowskiego’, in J. Chomiriski (ed.), Z zycta 1 tworczo0sci Karola Szymanowskiego (Krakow, 1960), 276.

°° The International Society for Contemporary Music/Société internationale pour musique contemporaine (ISCM) was founded in 1923; the Polish section was created in 1924, with Karol Szymanowski as its president. According to Szymanowski, as quoted by Janusz Cegiella, the reason for

Polish Jewish Composers in California 363 Polish music world was undermined by supporters of Szymanowski, who sought to raise his status by diminishing that of his competitors. In this area the key opinion-maker was the influential musicologist and music critic Zdzistaw Jachimecki.°* Jachimecki’s writings revealed antisemitic attitudes towards Polish composers of Jewish descent. The exclusion of Jewish musicians from the realm of ‘Polishness’ found expression in such insidious forms as the placing of all Jewish musicians 1n a distinct group in Jachimecki’s monograph Muzyka polska.°” In this text stylistic

differences between the music of Karol Rathaus, Aleksander Tansman, Paul Kletzky, Alfred Gradstein, Jerzy Fitelberg, and Jozef Koffler were overlooked—all were labelled as ‘modernists’ indebted to ‘foreign’ influences. In spite of this exclusion from the domain of ‘musical Polishness’, the Western perception of Tansman’s clearly belonging to Polish music history was confirmed by the first monograph dedicated to his music. In 1931 the American music critic Irving Schwerke published a work in French and English on Tansman’s life and work in Paris and New York, Alexandre Tansman, compositeur polonais, or Alexandre Tansman, Polish Composer. Being publicly defined as a Pole outside France and

criticized within, Tansman considered himself a Polish composer and used the introduction from Schwerke’s title as his ‘visiting card’ within the context of the

international group of composers called the école de Paris, which included Bohuslav Martini (Czech), Alexander Tcherepnin (Russian), Conrad Beck (Swiss), Marcel Mihalovici (Romanian), and Tibor Harsanyi (Hungarian). Tansman was Polish for the Russian, French, and German composers, writers, and painters with whom he socialized in Paris. While living in France, he did partici-

pate in the Polish community, but most of all he enjoyed being a member of Europe’s cultural elite and the international musical establishment. Moreover, he was French in daily life: Tansman’s first and second wives were French (Anna : Eleonora Broiner, whom he had married in 1924 and had divorced by 1934; and the pianist Colette Cras, whom he married in 1937). He spoke French at home with his second wife and two daughters, and would have stayed in Paris permanently if it were not for the German invasion that shattered his comfortable existence and resulted in his exile to California.

One of the early setbacks occurred when Tansman was denied the Legion Tansman’s switching to the French section was the influential role of Grzegorz Fitelberg in the Polish section of ISCM: Fitelberg had offended Tansman (despite being recommended by him) during the Zurich festival of ISCM. Cegielta discusses this incident in Dziecko szczescia, 1. 160—2, citing the composer as his source (undated). 51 T discuss the role of Jachimecki in dethroning Paderewski from the position of Poland’s best-known

and most highly respected composer in a paper, ‘Poland’s National Composer: Szymanowski or Paderewski?’, presented at the meeting of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America, Montreal, 2003, and at the Third Conference on Twentieth Century Music, Nottingham the same year. 52 7. Jachimecki, Muzyka polska od czaséw najdawnieszych do roku 1930 (Warsaw, 1931), vol. iv of A. Brickner (ed.), Polska, jej dzieje 1 kultura (1927— ). He earlier wrote Historja muzyki polskie; (w zaryste) (Warsaw, 1920).

364 Maja Trochimczyk d’honneur, for which he was nominated in 1932 by a French mathematician, Paul Painlevé. Foreigners could receive this distinction only with the support of their country’s government. Unfortunately for Tansman, Ambassador Chlapowsk1 refused to back the composer, who, in his opinion, was clearly too young to receive such a great honour.®*® This rejection, accompanied by the series of slights from the Polish music critics and historians mentioned earlier, resulted in Tansman’s reappraisal of his national and ethnic roots. After touring Europe and the United States (1927—8, 1929-30), as well as travelling around the world in 1932-3, a journey immortalized in a cycle of piano miniatures, La Tour de monde en miniature, 15 feuillets de voyage (1933), Tansman finally revisited his Jewish background. ‘The result was his first composition based on Israeli folklore, a cycle of arrangements of twelve ancient Jewish songs from Yemen that he had heard in performance by a young singer who was heir to an oral tradition; he transformed these songs into Chants hébraiques for voice and piano (1933). Soon after, he completed a more elab-

orate composition based on the same melodic material, Rhapsodie hébraique (1935-8). The solo piano version was dedicated to the memory of his mother; the orchestral version was premiered in 1939 in Paris and later performed in 1958 in Tel Aviv during a festival celebrating the tenth anniversary of the state of Israel. Rhapsodie hébraique marks the awakening of ‘Tansman as a Jew. He was propelled on his course to self-recognition by external events: his tour of Poland in

1936 and the infamous Nazi exhibition of Entartete Musik held in Dusseldorf in 1938. In a gesture of protest against the co-operation of the Polish government with Hitler’s Germany and against the rise of antisemitism and Nazi sympathy within his home country, he renounced his Polish citizenship and on 1 June 1938 became a citizen of France. The inclusion of his name in Entartete Musik could be seen as a badge of honour since he found himself in the company of the world’s

greatest composers and musicians: Schoenberg, Webern, and Bartok (who requested to be added to the list), the pianists and fellow Polish Jews Leopold Godowski and Artur Rubinstein, the violinists Bronistaw Huberman and Pawel Kocharski, the composers and conductors Artur Rodzinski and Karol Rathaus, and many others.°*

Tansman’s estrangement from his Polish heritage was not permanent and he remained attached to the country and continued to express his Polish sympathies

53 Incident described by Janusz Cegiella in his biography of Tansman (Deziecko szczescta, 1. 312-13). 54 According to Cegiella, these musicians were associated with the Entartete Art exhibition held in Munich in 1937 (see Cegiella, Dziecko szczescia, 1. 348). However, in fact, the musicians were presented in a separate exhibition held a year after the one denouncing the artists. The Entartete Musik

exhibition has been documented by Albrecht Diimling and Peter Girth, Entartete Musik. Dokumentation und Kommentar (Diisseldorf, 1988).

Polish Jewish Composers in California 365 in music. However, his identity crisis of the 1930s resulted in the emergence of a

new strand in his ceuvre, compositions that were ostensibly Jewish in subject matter, title, and musical material. The list of these works includes: Deux images de la Bible for orchestra (1935); Adam and Eve, the second part of the Genesis Suste

for narrator and orchestra (1944); Suite hébraique for orchestra (1944); R’hitia Jewish Dance for piano (1944); Priere hébraique for tenor, mixed choir, and piano or organ (1945); Kol-nidrei for tenor, mixed choir, and organ (1945); Ma Tovu—How fair are thy tents for tenor or baritone, mixed choir and organ (1946); Le Cantique

des cantiques for chamber orchestra (1946); La Sulamite for chamber orchestra (1946); the oratorio Isaie le prophéte (1950), dedicated to the memory of 6 million Jews kilied in the Holocaust and celebrating the new hope embodied in the creation of the state of Israel;°°? Quatre priéres pour cheur mixte sur des Psaumes de David (1951); Deux piéces hébraiques for organ or piano (1954-5); Album d’Israel for

chamber orchestra (1958); Visit to Israel for piano (1958); Prologue et cantate for female choir and chamber orchestra (1957); Psaumes for tenor, mixed choir, and orchestra (1960-1); Eli, Eli, Lamma Sabatchani in memoriam d’Auschwitz for voice and piano (1966); L’Apostrophe a Zion for chorus and orchestra (1976—7); and Les Dix Commandements for orchestra (1978-9). Tansman’s need to reaffirm his personal roots, which were earlier overshadowed by an allegiance to Polish culture and the cosmopolitan music world, also resulted in the creation of what the composer considered one of his best works, the opera Sabbatai Zév1, le faux messte (1957-8). The choice of Jewish cultural references for major works from this period speaks for itself.

His compositions on Polish themes are not limited to works with ‘Poland’ or ‘Polish’ in their titles. Polish musical traits appear in a number of neoclassically titled symphonies (no. 2, 1926), sinfoniettas (no. 1, 1924; no. 2, 1978), suites (for two pianos and orchestra, 1928; for a piano quartet, 1929; Suite /égere for orchestra, 1955), sonatas (no. 2 for piano, 1928), concertos (for clarinet and orchestra, 1957),

and fantasies (for cello and orchestra, 1936). ‘Tansman was one of the foremost composers of mazurkas (four books for piano, 1918—28, 1932, 1941; Mazurka for guitar, dedicated to Lech Walesa, 1982). The latter work, subtitled Hommage a Lech Walesa, belongs among the obvious manifestations of musical Polishness in Tansman’s ceuvre, which also includes: Quatre danses polonaises for orchestra or piano (1931), Rapsodie polonaise for orchestra or piano (1940), Deux chants religieux anciens polonats for mixed chorus and piano or organ (1945), Tombeau de Chopin for orchestra or string quartet (1949), Suite in modo polonico (1962), and Alla Polacca for viola and piano (1985). The recurrence of such themes and titles in ‘Tansman’s

ceuvre suggests that, while returning to his Jewish roots, he continued to see himself as a Polish composer. He expressed his Polishness in music by composing °° The oratorio was performed to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, at Royce Hall, University of California, Los Angeles, in 1958.

366 Maja Trochimczyk more mazurkas, polonaises, and obereks than almost any other composer after Chopin. According to Barbara Milewski, his works created a new link in the history of this genre.°© As an example of his folk dance settings one may mention Quatre danses polonaises of 1931, version for piano. The last fragment of this cycle could be said to epitomize Tansman as a Polish neoclassical composer. With over twenty compositions dedicated to Jewish subjects, ‘Tansman could hardly be called an exclusively Polish composer. Yet a persuasive case could be made for his enduring Polish patriotism by such works as the Rapsodie polonaise for orchestra and piano (1940), an hommage to the defenders of Warsaw struggling against the German invaders in September 1939. This work contained a poignant musical expression of the vain hope among Poles that Britain would come to their

aid: in the climax, the national anthems of Poland (“Dabrowski Mazurka’) and Britain (“God Save the Queen’) were intertwined in a musical counterpoint that portrayed the hope of Polish resistance fighters. Numerous American performances of the Polish Rhapsody stimulated empathy with the Polish cause in the 1940S.

It is also clear that the composer’s exile to California (1941-6) was a consequence of these Jewish roots. In August 1940, after the fall of France, Tansman and his family left their home in Paris, moving south to Nice, where they remained for a year. He later portrayed the feelings of confinement and danger this gave him

through the selection of texts for his monumental neoclassical oratorio Isaie le prophete. An American visa was finally granted to him thanks to the efforts of influ-

ential friends like Charlie Chaplin, Serge Koussevitzky, Eugene Ormandy, and Arturo Toscanini.°’ The wartime compositions (Symphony No. 5 and Fifth String Quartet, both 1942; Symphony No. 6 ‘In Memoriam’, 1944) reflected the turmoil and darkness of the times. Nonetheless, ‘Tansman’s fate in his new country was far better than that of many of his contemporaries. Like Bartok, who went to the United States as a refugee by choice only to feel alien and unwelcome, Tansman observed the follies and vagaries of his host nation with a certain dislike.°® The two composers’ comments about ridiculous American customs, aesthetic blandness, and materialism revealed traces of a European air of superiority accompanied by an artistic contempt for these brazen and uncultured 56 Barbara Milewski discussed Tansman’s mazurkas in ‘National Identity and “Authenticity” in Aleksander Tansman’s Mazurkas’, paper presented at the international conference Polish/Jewish/ Music!

57 Tansman befriended Chaplin during his first American tour in 1928; Serge Koussevitzky (1874-1951) had been a friend and supporter since conducting Tansman’s music at the Paris Opéra in

1923; he gave the American premiere of Tansman’s music in 1924, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. 58 For Tansman’s views, see his interviews in ‘Alexandre Tansman: Diary of a Twentieth-Century Composer’, ed., trans. from French, and introd. J. Timmons and S. Frémaux, pt. ul, Polish Music

Journal, 1/1 (1998), .

Polish Jewish Composers in California 367 businesspeople. Yet, the sociable Tansman thoroughly enjoyed his life in Hollywood, as part of what he described as an ideal community of artists: We lived in Hollywood for almost five years—from 1941 to 1946. In those days, Hollywood was a kind of contemporary Weimar. All the European elite were in Hollywood or somewhere on the California Coast. As a result, I was surrounded by a most inspiring cadre of

colleagues. We lived in a kind of European ghetto. It was there that I became intimate friends with Stravinsky, whom I already knew quite well. We even saw each other twice a day sometimes. We were truly inseparable. ‘There was also Schoenberg, whom I already knew quite well, and the Milhauds, who had always been our friends. In Hollywood, however, we would often pay two-week visits to one another. My wife, our children and I would spend the holidays at the Milhauds’. Later, they would visit us for two weeks. When the Milhauds visited, we always invited a bunch of friends—the Stravinskys, Alma Mahler and her husband, and Thomas Mann. If it had not been for the War and our forced exile, life in Hollywood could have been culturally rewarding and enriching.*®

In California, Tansman participated in the social activities of this international ‘little Weimar’ of refugee artists. Like Kaper and Vars, he became a successful composer for films. His music was used in about ten films, mostly uncredited, and his score for Paris Underground was nominated for an Oscar in 1945.°° In 1944 Tansman was invited to contribute to a collective composition entitled

The Genesis, planned for a recording of the Bible. The work’s creators also included the famous European émigrés Schoenberg, Milhaud, Toch, and Stravinsky.®! Despite this success, Tansman was not able to adjust to the American way of life, and in 1946 the family returned to Paris. His impression of Hollywood was not favourable: he complained about the conventions of film music that limited his creativity, and he felt out of place. He believed that ‘the film studio atmos-

phere was not terribly artistic’ and ‘producers were rather uncultured people’ .® Thus, he was happy to return to France, the homeland of his choice. However, the decision to go home to France may have been an ill-fated one for Tansman’s career. The post-war years were marked by growing artistic isolation since he distrusted avant-garde trends, preferring to remain faithful to the aesthetics of neoclassicism, which gradually went out of fashion. Nationalism and 59 Tid. 6° Paris Underground is considered to be the best film for which Tansman composed music; this wartime drama depicts the efforts of women to form a resistance network in France to smuggle Allied soldiers from behind enemy lines. 61 The work was planned by the composer and conductor Nathaniel Shilkret, who wrote the movement for the Creation; other movements were by Schoenberg (Prelude), Tansman (Adam and Eve), Darius Milhaud (Cain and Abel), Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (The Ark of Noah), Ernst Toch (The Flood), and Igor Stravinsky (Babel). The first performance took place in Los Angeles on 18 November 1945.

62 Tansman’s diary, in ‘Alexandre Tansman: Diary of a Twentieth-Century Composer’, ed. Timmons and Frémaux.

368 Maja Trochimczyk avant-garde triumphs in France, coupled with cultural rejection in Poland, where, as an emigrant who had remained in the West, he was not performed and had not been well known for years, caused the gradual disappearance of his music from the spotlight. Tansman’s reconciliation with Poland began in 1967, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, celebrated 1n a series of concerts. After that, his contacts with the Polish music world were more frequent and he was close to a small group of friends and supporters, including the musicologist Tadeusz Kaczyfski. The two men corresponded for many years, and their letters, in Polish, testify to Tansman’s continuing attachment to the Polish language and culture. The Polish revival of TTansman’s music accelerated after 1977, when émigré

composers such as Tansman, Andrzej Panufnik, and Roman Palester were removed from the blacklist of those whose works could not be performed and their names started to be reintegrated into Polish music history. ‘Two major Polish festivals of Tansman’s music took place in 1978 and 1980. He was awarded the Cross of Merit by the government, and in 1983, owing to the efforts of ‘Tadeusz Kaczyrisk1, the Polish Composers’ Union gave him honorary membership. Finally, the Music Academy in 0dz, his home town, awarded him posthumously a doctorate honoris causa. In 1996—7 the hundredth anniversary of his birth was celebrated in Poland as Tansman Year. Interestingly, a biography of Tansman published online® by the

Polish Music Information Centre and the Institute of Adam Mickiewicz in Warsaw emphasizes that while ‘Tansman’s international career began in Paris, ‘he

never ceased to think of himself as a Polish composer’. The Jewish part of Tansman’s complex identity is not even mentioned (though the list of works includes his Rhapsodie hébraique and other pieces on Jewish themes).

Furthermore, the predominance of French titles in his ceuvre and his French citizenship could have been seen as transforming him into a French composer. Indeed, if you look up Aleksander Tansman in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, there is a very brief entry describing him as a ‘French composer of Polish descent’.® Like the Polish and French articles mentioned above, this defini-

tion completely overlooks his Jewishness and ignores the complexity of his national self-awareness and his struggles with belonging. Of the four composers mentioned here, he is the best known in Poland, where he is the subject of two monographs, where a Tansman Foundation has been established, and where he is celebrated in a competition at which his works are performed.

CONCLUSION: WHO’S WHO, ETHNIC IDENTITY, 63 . 64 For the French reception of Tansman as a French composer, see e.g. the biographical essay by Gerald Hugon (1998), , accessed 5 May

2003. 6° London, 1980.

Polish Fewmtsh Composers in California 369 AND RESEARCH ISSUES All four composers—Vars, Kaper, Ryterband, and Tansman—were entangled in a web of national and cultural loyalties and divisions, and felt compelled to draw on

all of them and to join several cultural communities in turn. Vars and Kaper became Americans originating from Europe; Ryterband and Tansman were truly multicultural citizens of the world. It is too simplistic to reduce their complex identities to one key feature—Polish or Jewish, French or American. Vars, as one of the most popular contributors to the entertainment industry, remains in the spotlight in Poland. Tansman’s music has earned recognition from performers and scholars, though the lack of a clear national definition continues to haunt the reception of his musical heritage, which is celebrated by two societies, one in Poland and one in France. In contrast, Ryterband’s obscurity both in performance circles and among music historians may be due to the quality of his music; it is significant that he persistently failed to find favour with publishers while he was alive, even though he wrote music with Jewish, Polish, and other themes. While shifting from one national community to another, he tried to adjust and to assimilate to their peculiarities. He managed to balance a presence simultaneously in the Polish and Jewish émigré music worlds while in Switzerland, but being a Pole in America required not being a Jew. Thus, his own Jewish identity and that of his subjects—Vars, Kaper, and Gimpel—while he was writing for the Chicago daily Zgoda (1966) had

to be hidden. It was not revealed in the promotional material sent to Ruch Muzyczny in Warsaw (1975), or in his life story for a biographical entry in The Polish Americans in California (1995).

The complexity of Polish Jewish identity 1s clarified in an embittered response to the defiant declaration of the Polish Jewish poet Julian Tuwim from his wartime manifesto We, Polish Jews: ‘I am a Pole because I like it that way.’°° Rafael Scharf transformed Tuwim’s phrase into ‘I am a Pole even though I don’t like it’ or ‘lama Pole even though they don’t like it’ or ‘I am a Pole because I don’t know how to cease to be one.’ Tuwim was one of the greatest Polish poets; but, like Tansman, he experienced the bitterness of being rejected by Poles. He belonged to ‘Poles of the Mosaic persuasion’ who suffered ‘the trauma of unrequited love’ of Polish culture, language, poetry, and the land.®’ The Polish identity of Jews from Poland was problematic for many reasons, stemming from historical definitions of identity of people of Polish heritage in 86 J. Tuwim, ‘My, Zydzi polscy’ (written in New York, 1944), in A. K. Kunert (ed.), Polacy— Zydzi/ Polen—Juden/ Poles—Jews 1939-1945: Wybér zrédet/ Quellenauswahl/ Selection of Documents (Warsaw, 2001), 452-5.

87 See A. J. Peck, ‘““The Two Saddest Nations on Earth”: Poles, Jews and Memory’, Sarmatian Review (Jan. 1999), , accessed 11 Apr. 2003.

370 Maya Trochimczyk Poland and in diaspora, and from the complexities of the Jewish identity as such. As John J. Bukowczyk has observed, the historical multi-ethnicity of the Polish state has not been reflected in the construction of a fictional, timeless, and ethnically unified Polish nation which American Polonia saw as its idealized ‘Old World homeland’.®® Moreover, this ‘grand, formative synthesis’ defined ‘the core of immigrant ethnic identity as co-equally Polish and Roman Catholic’ and presented an obstacle to inclusion for other emigrants from Poland, primarily Jewish Poles in the community of Polonia. This non-inclusive ethnic self-definition was among the reasons why the ‘relationship between Polish Catholics and Polish Jews (or as it is more commonly and revealingly rendered, Catholic Poles and Jewish Poles)’ has been extremely complicated, both in Poland and in Polish America.® American Polonia’s collective memory has disregarded the history of multiculturalism in their home country. Recent demographic research has revealed a fundamental difference between inter-war Poland and the country that rose from ruins within new borders after 1945. Religious and ethnic minorities, often with

minority languages, constituted about 36 per cent of the population of Poland before the Second World War. At that time Jewish people were estimated at about

g per cent of the population, and are now about 0.0002 per cent.’? Between 1945 and 1989 Jewish subjects largely disappeared from public life, literature, ducational curricula, news reports, and the broadcast media, with only token recognition given to such institutions as the Jewish Theatre in Warsaw. As a result, the Jewish presence in Polish culture has been forgotten. Cultural amnesia (or wilful ignorance) has predominated among Polish Americans and in Poland itself. In the words of a review of the Polish edition of Issachar Fater’s book about Jewish music in inter-war Poland, “The picture that emerges from this material must be

greeted with surprise: we rarely think about Warsaw as “a great Jewish metropolis”.’” When Polish Jews arrived in the United States, they usually chose to leave their Polish affiliation behind. They often could not do otherwise, for the new country’s Polonia usually would not allow them to join the ‘Polish nation’ since they were not Catholic. According to Mary Patrice Erdmans, among Polish community organizations only the Polish National Alliance allowed some degree of secular definition

of nationality, based on citizenship, not narrowly understood ethnicity. In contrast, she writes, the Polish Roman Catholic Union ‘divorced statehood from nationhood, declaring that a nation of Poles existed wherever Poles maintained

299-313. 69 Ibid. 302, 307. 68 J. J. Bukowczyk, ‘Polish Americans, Ethnicity and Otherness’, Polish Review, 43/3 (1908), 7 P. Eberhardt, Przemieszczenia ludnosci na terytorium Polski spowodowane II wojng Swiatowg

(Warsaw, 2000).

™. R, Praglowska-Woydtowa, ‘Ile zostalo w pamieci.. .”, Ruch Muzyczny, 42/19 (20 Sept. 1998), 38-0, review of I. Fater, Muzyka zydowska w Polsce w okresie miedzywojennym, trans. from Hebrew E. Swiderska (Warsaw, 1997); quotation from p. 38 of the review, p. 41 of the book.

Polish Jewish Composers in California 371 their linguistic and religious ties’. However, the difficulty of assimilating Polish Jews into American Polonia had another cause besides the religious nationalism of Polish emigrants: the multi-level definition of ‘Jews’ and ‘Jewishness’ as an ethnic, religious, and/or national phenomenon. This plurality of meanings contributed to the identity question and to the complexity of the identity issue for Polish Jews who left their country of origin.

Immigrants of Jewish descent who left Poland and settled in the United States could follow several paths: they could become completely Americanized and forget about their roots; they could maintain close ties with the Jewish American community and Jewish religion, thus becoming Jewish Americans; or they could join the Polish American community as part of either a secular or a religious group (with or

without membership of the Roman Catholic Church, by becoming the rare and complex ‘Polish Jewish Americans’, or abandoning their Jewish roots altogether to be assimilated into the majority of Polonia). Bearing that in mind, it is small wonder that ‘Jews from Poland’ or ‘Jewish Poles’ or ‘Polish Jews’ or ‘Poles of Jewish descent’ have adjusted to their societies by redefining their identities and making

new choices. The composers Vars, Kaper, Ryterband, and Tansman are cases in | point.

” Polish Americans were by no means unified, with each group of immigrants creating their own institutions and defining their ‘national selves’ in a different way. Mary Patrice Erdmans traced these distinctions in Opposite Poles: Immigrants and Ethnics in Polish Chicago, 1976-1990 (University Park, Pa., 1990), 25.

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‘Three American Jewish Writers Imagine Eastern Europe ANNA P. RONELL CONTEMPORARY American Jewish authors have produced surprisingly diverse literary re-creations of the east European past. It is intriguing that the authors who incorporate east European imagery into their texts write as if they ‘remember’ what they had never seen, treating the collective memory of the past as a reservoir that can provide a framework to almost any story. The story in turn nourishes and sustains identity. Without having lived the east European experience, American Jewish writers imagine Jewish eastern Europe and the ways their lives could have been if they had been born there rather than in the United States. Literary works that emerge from this interest in Jewish eastern Europe not only include some of the most interesting and innovative voices in contemporary Jewish fiction but are also representative of a worldwide literary phenomenon. They share

a surprising number of themes, images, narrative techniques, and intertextual allusions with one another and with the works of Yiddish classics, even though there is often no evidence that the writers are familiar with each other’s works. This intertextuality results from a new literary climate that encourages younger and older authors alike to draw on the resources of collective memory and the works of their literary predecessors. In a spirit of postmodern absorption and reuse of literary elements, contemporary Jewish authors share the linguistic technique of incorporating Yiddish words, phrases, and literary allusions into their narratives to draw the boundaries of an imagined eastern Europe and to map this fictional realm. Along with what David Roskies calls the ‘covenantal landscape’,! Yiddish linguistic elements embody the old country’s Yiddishkeit as they symbolize the lost world’s disappeared culture.

The fictional territory of eastern Europe includes, but is not limited to, the shtetl, the metropolis, the countryside, and the hasidic milieu. The shtetl is a vital element of the fictional territory imagined by contemporary Jewish authors. Large cities, especially Warsaw and Vilna, are depicted alongside it to create the fictional 1 Asa kehilah kedoshah, a holy community, every real as well as imaginary shtetl had a number of essential institutions such as the shul (synagogue), besmedresh (house of study), shtiblekh (hasidic houses of prayer), khadorim (elementary schools), mikve (ritual bath), and besoylem (sanctified burial ground); D. Roskies, The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (Bloomington, Ind., 1999), 44.

374 Anna P. Ronell geography of Jewish eastern Europe as a whole. The main action of a plot is also often informed by this geography, focusing on the protagonist’s voyage to eastern Europe to retrace the journey his family made generations ago. This movement also shapes the textual fabric of the narrative as the language is constructed to reflect the changing geography of the Jewish world, as well as the changing inner _ world of the characters. A focus on movement in contemporary American Jewish fiction results in what Gabriel Tzoran calls ‘space oriented’ plot lines that include ‘routes, movement, directions, volume, simultaneity’* and experiment with spatio-temporal displacement. In addition to multidimensional literary space, the complex relationships between history and memory are central to our understanding of renewed literary

interest in Jewish eastern Europe. As David Myers points out, ‘History and memory have often been cast in dialectical opposition to one another, the former connoting the quest for objective knowledge of what actually happened in the past and the latter marking the subjective use of the past to sustain a vision of individual or collective identity.’®

Nowhere is this tension more palpable than in contemporary Jewish fiction. Situated at the very heart of the dichotomy between history and memory, fiction incorporates various elements of the historic past as well as the imagery produced

by older generations of Jewish writers to create a fictional territory for east European Jewish civilization. In his exploration of the interplay between history, memory, literature, and myth, Roman Struc suggests that ‘the mythic perception, even though it might originate about certain specific natural or historic phenom-

ena, ultimately cuts through the ephemera and penetrates to the core, to the essence’.* At first glance, the revelation concealed within myth may appear as ‘paradox, contradiction, and ambiguity’, containing ‘the dialectical elements of its composition, its thesis and antithesis’, as Struc further points out. Contemporary literary representations of the east European Jewish past contain both: a portrayal of a holistic world where people were a part of an organic community and of the natural environment as well as a portrayal of anti-Jewish violence and a profoundly hostile environment. How then did Jewish eastern Europe become the territory of

literary myth? The process of sacralization is central in this respect. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi eloquently describes this situation: With the extermination of Jewish life in Europe and the constitution of Jewish sovereignty

in Israel, the relationship between negotiable and original places, between the map of Israel’s wandering, its object of desire, and its burial sites, shifted radically. Over the last fifty years, what was destroyed has become an authentic original that can be represented but 2 G. Tzoran, ‘Towards a Theory of Space in Narrative’, Poetics Today, 5/2 (1984), 314. 3 E. Carlebach, J. M. Efron, and D. N. Myers (eds.), Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalni (Hanover, NH, 1998), p. xi11.

4 R. S. Struc, ‘St. Petersburg: The Phases of a Literary Myth’, Research Studies, 43/2 (1975), 88-102.

US fewish Writers and Eastern Europe 375 not recovered. In its poetic and empirical forms, it reminds us of the process of disengagement and separation from the holy sites, and then of substitution, reinvention, and mimesis, that evolved in the centuries following the destruction of ancient Jerusalem. Although the streets of Lodz are not sanctified in collective memory as were the hills of Zion, they become accessible to pilgrimages real and imagined, ritual and literary, as an unredeemable and indestructible ruin.°

For many contemporary writers, Jewish eastern Europe belongs to the realm of the past. Since the 1980s it has become an object of sacralization, memorializing,

and reimagining of singular importance, existing at a curious intersection of memoir—autobiography and historical fiction. Various places and periods are integrated into the fiction, combining disparate elements into a larger, allencompassing picture of the Jewish world destroyed by the Holocaust. This world functions, in turn, both as the homeland and as the Diaspora, an ambiguity and liminality that is not lost on contemporary creative artists. The idea of reconceptualization of the sacred is central to our understanding of the consistent interest among contemporary authors in east European Jewish civilization. Although not all of their fictional characters travel to their ancestral lands,

the particular focus of these authors on eastern Europe elevates its status as a sacred realm. The principal triangle of contemporary Jewish literary imagination—the United States, eastern Europe, Israel—endures from the classics of Yiddish fiction to contemporary authors. Occasionally the emphasis shifts from one side of the triangle to another. Over the last two decades of the twentieth cen-

tury and the early years of the twenty-first century, we have witnessed a shift towards the east European side. One of the reasons for this shift is competition for the status of the sacred realm of Jewish literary creativity between the ruins of eastern Europe, which are open to flights of imagination, and the modern state of Israel. What makes a place sacred? Two criteria are, of course, most important: death and antiquity. Both the Holy Land and eastern Europe fit this profile; however, the importance of Jewish memorial sentiment has risen sharply since the Holocaust.

The Holocaust, an unprecedented mass murder of east European Jews that engulfed the entire region, made eastern Europe the paramount Jewish sacred burial ground. The scarcity of Jewish material remains in this vanished world only contributes to the imaginative potential of this space. The same cannot be said of the landscape, much of which survived the war and the Soviets unchanged; this is why travelling to eastern Europe holds such an incomparable grip on the Jewish imagination. Furthermore, exploring the shtetls of Ukraine leaves one with an eerie feeling as one walks along the streets lined with synagogues that are now philharmonic halls and teachers’ colleges, with Jewish houses that are now lodging houses © Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Fewish Imagination (Berkeley, 2000), 138-9.

376 Anna P. Ronell and cafeterias. The Jewish spirit emanates from the place although there are no Jews.

In the 1980s and 1990s literary reimagining of Jewish life in eastern Europe— pioneered by children of Holocaust survivors, the second-generation writers—

became an integral feature of American Jewish fiction. Often expressed in experimental fictional modes, perceptions of the events narrated by the second generation, who never personally experienced the Holocaust or pre-war life in eastern Europe, enrich our understanding of the Holocaust and mark a significant

development in contemporary Jewish fiction. | THANE ROSENBAUM Coming from this tradition of particular closeness to the legacy of the Holocaust that is characteristic of the children of Holocaust survivors, Thane Rosenbaum’s novel Second Hand Smoke (1999) is premised on the encounter between its protagonist, Duncan Katz, and contemporary Poland.° Brought up to be a Jewish athlete, a tough Jewish fighter who can survive in the face of adversity, Duncan learns after the death of his mother, Mila Katz, a survivor of Auschwitz, that somewhere in Poland lives his half-brother, whom she abandoned after the war in order to start a new life in America. This surprising revelation prompts Duncan to undertake a trip to Poland in search of his brother and his family roots as well as in search of redemption and self-understanding. Duncan goes to Poland at a critical juncture 1n his life: he is on leave from his job

as a Nazi-hunter at the US Justice Department Office of Special Investigations; separated from his wife and daughter; consumed by anger and desire for revenge, and haunted by the ghosts of the Holocaust. Thus, in order to learn more about the family history, to gain first-hand experience of Poland, and ultimately to deal with his deep psychological problems, Duncan flies into former East Germany and from there drives to his destination. Another reason for his visiting Poland is to set

things straight, to reclaim his property, to rekindle Jewish life, and to wreak vengeance on the place, which he perceives as forever cursed by murder and complacency. But in the post-Holocaust world nothing can be set straight, recaptured, or regained. Only through mourning and working through his pain 1s he able to deal with the ‘toxic’ legacy of the Holocaust. In his book Writing History, Writing Trauma, Dominick LaCapra uses psychoanalytic concepts to explain the terms ‘acting out’ and ‘working through’, which are central to his theory of Holocaust trauma. ‘Acting out’ occurs in a situation where ‘one is haunted or possessed by the past and performatively caught up in the

compulsive repetition of traumatic scenes’.’ ‘Working through’, on the other hand, is defined as an articulatory practice that allows one ‘to distinguish between 6 'T. Rosenbaum, Second Hand Smoke (New York, 1999). ’ D. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, 2001), 21.

US Fewish Writers and Eastern Europe 377 past and present and to recall in memory that something happened to one (or one’s people) back then while realizing that one is living here and now with openings to

the future’.® ,

The tension between ‘acting out’ and ‘working through’ is evident in Second Hand Smoke. It is even arguable that in the case of Duncan Katz both mechanisms—in such forms as travelling to the sites of destruction, researching and reading about the events, and writing fiction—can be viewed simultaneously as acting out and working through the traumatic memory of the Holocaust. As he examines in great detail the Holocaust trauma and post-traumatic acts of reliving and re-enactment, LaCapra connects ‘working through’ to writing, which is the mechanism of articulation par excellence. While investigating the limits of “work-

ing through’, often associated with loyalty to the dead and with the bond that demands re-enactment, LaCapra points out that ‘some of the most powerful forms of modern art and writing . . . often seem to be traumatic writing or post-traumatic

writing in closest proximity to trauma’.? The very limitations of ‘working through’, and writers’ resistance to the process, often comprise the subject of their

writing; in the case of Second Hand Smoke, the novel itself becomes the battleground between the demands of memory and the need for healing. Thane Rosenbaum plays with literary conventions when he describes the Polish landscape in a way that clearly reflects his protagonist’s attitudes towards and perceptions of Poland’s past and present. His surroundings are invariably grey, bleak, and often decrepit. While his clouds are the Jewish souls that went up in smoke, the sky is depicted as ‘gun-metal gray’,’° foregrounding the imagery of death and violence. The novel presents two types of landscape: that of the countryside and that of the urban milieu, particularly Warsaw. Both are characterized by starkly ominous overtones, by the feeling of menace that is waiting in hiding, as well as by the feelings of irrecoverable loss that weigh heavily on Duncan’s psyche. Reflecting the persistent desire to imagine the Jewish past in eastern Europe, Rosenbaum’s narrative makes multiple attempts to write the Jews back into the landscape from which they were forcibly excised. As Duncan meets his highly spiritual and even mystical brother Isaac, he is introduced to a magical place at the heart of the formerly Jewish neighbourhood of Warsaw. In the old Jewish District near Isaac’s studio, they entered a park off Grzybowska Street . . .

Near the edge of the park was a fenced-in section that housed the long tilted poles of a swing set. The chains were unworkably rusted, yet Duncan noticed that each basket was moving forward and backward—noisily, unrhythmically, and unoccupied. Twelve empty swings rocking all by themselves.

‘Something amazing, no? It happens this way every day, no matter the season,’ Isaac said, pointing at the phenomenon. ‘But only in this park. This is where all the Jewish children used to live and play.’™

8 Ibid. 22. 9 bid. 23.

10 Rosenbaum, Second Hand Smoke, 106. 11 Tbid. 216.

378 Anna P. Ronell Rosenbaum describes the disquieting experience of visiting post-Holocaust Poland, and in particular the rarefied atmosphere of present-day Warsaw, a city without its Jews. The sound of the rusty swings in a playground that is otherwise silent stands for the Jewish presence: if the children’s laughter is no longer heard, the city loses much of its personality. While walking the streets whose names he heard in his childhood, Duncan is mindful of the profound change that occurred

in the city as a result of the Holocaust. The inexplicable rocking of the empty swings makes him especially attuned to the presence of Jewish ghosts, which is almost palpable throughout Poland. Jewish children murdered in the Holocaust magically come to rock the swings, reminding onlookers of the void they left behind. This void is evident everywhere in Warsaw: in the old Jewish neighbourhoods, the empty synagogues, the coffee houses, and the shops. In Second Hand Smoke, Poland is never viewed apart from the Holocaust; thus, even in his friendliest moments Duncan is extremely guarded, always aware of the tiny remnants of the past beneath the thin veneer of the present. Even though working hard to begin the healing process with the help of his brother, Duncan becomes enraged when Isaac takes him to a small Polish gift shop to buy a carved wooden doll. “They were carvings indigenous to Poland, shtet/ life sculpted out of wood. The faces were of Jews. Pious rabbis. A bride and groom trembling underneath a huppa [bridal canopy]. Hasidic fiddlers dancing with barn animals. A three-dimensional world that would have impressed even Chagall.’ Duncan, however, is not impressed. Instead, he is profoundly offended by what he

perceives as the desecration of the memory of Jewish martyrdom. ‘This is a disgrace! How dare they make and sell this Jewish kitsch? These things are false idols. There’s no remorse here, just cheap, commercial tourist schlock. They’re mocking all that they helped to destroy. Why don’t they just put the faces of dead Jews on T-Shirts?!” Poland thus emerges as the land driven by profiteering, the same now as during the Holocaust, and the road to reconciliation seems longer than ever.

Despite some setbacks, finding his half-brother sets Duncan in a redemptive direction. As Alan Berger points out, upon his arrival home in America and ‘seeking to achieve inner peace (t#kkun atzmi), Duncan abandons—at least temporarily—his attempt to physically overcome the Holocaust’.'® After his journey to Poland, Duncan starts a new arduous journey to come to terms with his legacy, his

mother’s death, and with the Holocaust, a journey to self-acceptance, selfforgiveness, mourning, and healing. In Berger’s words, ‘The redemptive stage bears the additional weight of striving for at least a partial repair of the world (takkun olam), in so far as this is possible in a world that produced death camps and massive indifference to systematic murder. . . . Representing the Holocaust also 12 Rosenbaum, Second Hand Smoke, 235.

13 A. Berger, ‘Mourning, Rage and Redemption: Representing the Holocaust: The Work of Thane Rosenbaum’, Studies in American Jewish Literature, 19 (2000), 12.

US fewish Writers and Eastern Europe 379 implies seeking the content of Jewish identity that includes, but also goes beyond, the Shoah.’'*

For Duncan, Poland is a place that exists simultaneously on two temporal planes: that of the past before the Holocaust, in which Duncan’s mother, Mila, lived a rather privileged life in the family of the famous Rabbi Lewinstein; and that of the present, where the traces of Jewish life are everywhere but the Jews them-

selves have disappeared. What is most offensive to Duncan is that the dead Jews have become part of the Polish tourist industry. When democracy came to Poland, so did the seductions of foreign currency. ‘Tourism was the first and most obvious choice of a hook to reel them in. The bait of course was landmarks; those that had survived the war and the shameful neglects of communism. A nation poor in Jews, but rich in Jewish ruins. And the fish in this case were the Jews themselves— particularly the sentimental and affluent American Jews, tearfully seeking every opportu-

nity to retrace their family origins. All sorts of package tours had been created, which included the major sites: the concentration camps, the ghettos, the markets, the monuments, the synagogues (some now being used as movie theaters), the cemeteries—even the location shots for Schindler’s List. Suddenly, Poles who hated Jews found a way to cash in on the absence of Jewish life. A cottage industry of shtetl revivalism.°

Rosenbaum carefully crafts the complex workings of Duncan’s psyche, presenting his protagonist as trapped in an internal dilemma: on the one hand, he came to Poland to find his half-brother, to reconnect with his family history, and to imbibe

the air of Jewish martyrdom; on the other hand, he resents the Poles who stood by as their Jewish neighbours were being murdered and who now exploit Jewish nostalgia and the impulse for memorialization and sacralization. Poland thus functions in Second Hand Smoke both as a place with the irresistible

allure of the disappeared Jewish past and as a purgatory where Duncan goes through his worst nightmares in order to emerge with a measure of peace. Second Hand Smoke epitomizes the second-generation narrative in that it is a work of personal quest and soul-searching as well as of building a new relationship with Poland, which is both a continuation of the struggles with the past that is charac-

teristic of Holocaust survivors and also an independent connection with their homeland.

Seen within the larger framework of the complex formative processes of the Jewish collective memory, literary re-creations of the east European past provide a fresh perspective on what it means for Ashkenazi American Jews to imagine their ancestral home in the ‘old country’. For Italian Americans, the old country 1s Italy, for Chinese Americans, it is China. Where is the home country of the Ashkenazi American Jews? In this context, the perception of Israel as the home of all Jews

competes with memories of the east European past, which have on their side the tangible immediacy of family connections and of stories transmitted from 14 Thid. 8. 15 Rosenbaum, Second Hand Smoke, 107.

380 Anna P. Ronell generation to generation. All through the twentieth century eastern Europe functioned in American Jewish literature as a constant of collective memory, a point of reference, and ‘the focus of pedigree’.’® Less than six decades after the founding of the state of Israel, American Jewish authors exhibit less of a tendency to connect with the heroism of Masada and more attachment to an east European past bequeathed to them by the immigrant generation or by Holocaust survivors. Any historical continuum can be imagined in a variety of ways: as expansion and progress, as regression and disintegration, as a spiral development, or as a multiplicity of alternative time lines. The last is the predominant perception of history in Second Hand Smoke. Duncan’s ‘unlived life’ in eastern Europe remains just a potentiality, but one that demands his attention. On many occasions he talks about Poland as the home he might have had: Now sitting uncomfortably in his plush Opel, waiting in a long, unmoving lineup of cars at the border, he realized that across the other side loomed the forbidden motherland. The place where his family roots slipped out of the earth. The land of Jewish death and detour. If not for the Nazis, Duncan, like his brother Isaac, might have been born right there in Poland.*’

But if not for the accident of Auschwitz and yet another detour in the Diaspora road map, he might have been born right here, in Warsaw, with these people as his neighbours. *®

History provides the almost unbounded fictional space of the novel, compounding imaginative possibilities with historical background. Not only are the protagonists of the novels we discuss able to write themselves back into the landscape and to explore their alternative time lines, they are also allowed unprece-

dented access to the sources of artistic inspiration, as morbid as they may appear. The diverse and all-encompassing history of east European Jewry makes the space irreplaceable in characters’ individual lives as well as in Jewish collective consciousness.

REBECCA GOLDSTEIN The east European diaspora in the United States produced kaleidoscopic treatments of east European Jewish experience by using shared memory and imagery as well as by experimenting on generic, linguistic, and ideational levels. In addition to a creative usage of Yiddish linguistic elements, a salient feature of the literature in question is spatial and temporal multidimensionality. Rebecca Goldstein’s Mazel (1995) is structured around the continuity of memory of the east European Jewish experience, which functions as a point of departure for all the characters, the core of their family memories, and the foundation of their identity.‘? Mazel is not only 16 S. Zipperstein, Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity (Seattle, 1999), 20—3.

17 Rosenbaum, Second Hand Smoke, 179. 18 Tbid. 284. 19 R. Goldstein, Mazel (New York, 1995).

US Fewish Writers and Eastern Europe 381 a portrayal of three generations of intellectual and artistic Jewish women who struggle with their ethnic heritage, religious ambivalence, and quests for spirituality and self-fulfilment, it is also a saga about a recurrent re-engagement with the east European past.

The novel has a scrambled chronology, as well as intertwining parallel plots involving two fictional shtetls: Shluftchev-on-the-Puddle in Galicia, and Lipton in

America. The novel’s framing narrative—a Yiddish folk tale about a contest between Seichel (Brains) and Mazel (Luck)—echoes the characters’ life stories, amplifying the importance of luck, destiny, and uncanny coincidence in a person’s life. Through the juxtaposition of descriptions of Lipton (an allusion to Teaneck, New Jersey) and flashbacks to the tiny backwater sleepy shtetl of Shluftchev (the Yiddish sh/uf means ‘to sleep’), Goldstein introduces us to Mazel’s protagonist, an energetic, clever, and feisty girl, Sasha (née Sorel”°), along with her hard-working

mother, Leiba, the wife of a scholar, and her sensitive and imaginative sister Fraydel. The story of Fraydel forms a link in the chain of Goldstein’s portrayals of

tragically misunderstood artistic women. It seems that she is destined to be rejected by society, her creativity and imagination enjoying no appreciation or acknowledgement. Mazel continues the theme of intellectual Jewish women, but it is, more notably, the first of Goldstein’s novels to develop in great detail the theme of east European

Jewish civilization. There is no critical consensus on the extent of Goldstein’s achievement in engaging the east European theme. While some critics (myself included) consider her treatment of east European Jewish life to be a very significant development in contemporary American Jewish fiction, others see her por-

trayal of that world as overly nostalgic, superficial, and greatly dependent on Yiddish classics. The New York Times book reviewer Lore Dickstein states: Shifting to the 1920s and Sasha’s shtetl of Shluftchev, Galicia, the novel abruptly adopts the tone and style of Yiddish fabulist folk tale. Narrated in a tedious singsong cadence and dosed with saccharine nostalgia, this section introduces Sasha’s saintly and pious parents, wallows in the mud of quaint rural poverty and subjects the reader to didactic lessons in

ritual Judaism. It 1s overly familiar and written, perversely it seems, like a pastiche of Sholem Aleichem and I. B. Singer.*?

It is worth pointing out that while Goldstein shares the nostalgia for the vanished east European shtetl with Sholem Aleichem and I. B. Singer, like them, she portrays its weaknesses as well as its strengths. Furthermore, the literary devices that

she employs in order to re-create the atmosphere of a world she has only read about are indicative of the ambivalence she feels towards her Jewishness. On the one hand, she presents a vibrant feminist critique of the shtetl, creating a number of female characters who range in their attitudes from complete acceptance of 20 Sorel changed her name to Sasha when she became an actress in Warsaw Yiddish theatre. 21 L. Dickstein, ‘World of our Mothers’, New York Times Book Review, 29 Oct. 1995, 54.

382 Anna P. Ronell male intellectual and religious supremacy to insistence on social change. On the other, she embraces the shtetl culture, its lore, its traditions, and its mythology. Her choice of literary precursors shows her erudition as well as her love of Jewish literature. Yet in spite of all the warmth she reserves for the almost magical world of the shtetl, her protagonist, Sasha Saunders, breaks off and escapes her native shtetl, ‘made unbreathable by piety and ritual’.2* Goldstein does not seem to make an effort to reconcile her feminism with her Jewishness. Instead, she includes them in her fiction as two equally important forces. The dynamics of the relationship between Judaism and feminism against the backdrop of a reimagined world of east European Jewish civilization give her narrative its unique quality of unresolved tension, ambivalence, and negotiation with the past, while in a playful dialogue with Sholem Aleichem’s Kasrilevke. As Dan Miron points out, modern readers should be aware ‘of the aesthetic— fictional status of Sholem Aleichem’s Kasrilevke and of the selectivity involved in its creation as an artistic, imaginary locus’.2° Readers should not confuse the historical shtetls of Ukraine, Poland, and Galicia with the literary shtetls produced

by a great number of writers, ranging from Sholem Aleichem and Sholem Abramovitz (Mendele Mocher Sefarim) to such Hebrew masters as S. Y. Agnon and contemporary American authors like Rebecca Goldstein. To read Mazel with the assumption that the novel attempts to re-create the east European Jewish past ‘truthfully’ is like suggesting that the literary shtetls of the Yiddish masters ‘corresponded directly to historical reality and that as works of art they followed strictly mimetic poetics’, covering the entire spectrum of traditional Jewish life and telling only ‘the truth’.2* Knowing that there is no longer a perception that literature can tell ‘the truth’, Goldstein self-consciously portrays her shtetl as an imaginary

place, a fantasy inspired by east European Jewish culture. Shluftchev-on-the-Puddle (humorously so-called because in the middle of Shluftchev there was a large puddle) has all the attributes of a literary shtetl: a pious, closely knit Jewish community, a wise and studious rabbi, his hard-working __ eshet hayil (paragon) of a wife, and, of course, a familiar landscape. In Mazel the shtetl has a number of muddy streets, low wooden houses, forests and meadows that surround the town, and the eponymous puddle. Shluftchev was a little place, a shtetl, or village, like many others, in the eastern part of Galicia. It had fewer than a hundred families, almost all of them Jewish, although there were plenty of Gentiles living in the surrounding countryside. It had laborers, scholars, a ritual slaughterer, a cheder teacher. It had a cemetery, a studyhouse, a prayerhouse, a post office with a telegraph. It had a few better-off people, many paupers . . . and a puddle. Its buildings were wooden, largely unwhitewashed, largely dilapidated. All of them 22 Goldstein, Mazel, 19. 23 TD. Miron, The Image of the Shtetl and Other Studies of Modern Jewish Literary Imagination

(Syracuse, NY, 2000), 4. 24 Ibid. 6.

US Jewish Writers and Eastern Europe 383 stared out with blind empty eyes, so that, for a stranger, it would be hard to tell one from another. At least from the outside, the houses of the very poor didn’t differ noticeably from the houses of those who were considered better off. Shluftchev had just one road, and that one was unpaved, a river of mud in the autumn rains.”°

The images are clustered around familiar concepts: Jewish communal institutions, poverty, the Jewish town versus the non-Jewish countryside, and the one muddy road. These clustered images are easily recognizable from the scores of descriptions inundating Yiddish and Hebrew fiction as well as post-war yizkor bikher (memorial books). Except for the post and telegraph office, modernity seems to have made no encroachment on the traditional lifestyle of the shtetl, portrayed as a timeless, insular world. This literary model is borrowed from the earlier fiction in an attempt to make Shluftchev a member of the celebrated group of other literary shtetls, rather than an anthropological study of the shtetl phenomenon. Although, unlike other authors, Goldstein does not take her characters and her readers to the realm of the concentration camps, the Holocaust remains a significant presence throughout Mazel. In a different novel, The Mind—Body Problem, Goldstein uses a literary device employed by many authors under discussion: she sends her protagonist on a trip to Europe. In Hungary her protagonist, a Princeton philosophy student named Renee, wanders through Budapest until she encounters

a building decorated with Jewish stars. There she meets two survivors of the camps—a dwarf, the subject of medical experiments, and an old woman with a disfigured face.2° Renee’s experiences in Budapest are tied to the ever-present issue of the mind—body problem. As Susanne Klingenstein observes, What the museum, the cemetery, the encounter with the two survivors signify is the irreplaceability of those murdered in the Shoah. With their bodies disappeared their culture. The murdered were not just bodies—they were persons, unique selves located in particular time and place. What made them unique does not migrate from body to body, from culture to culture. Personal identity is tied to a specific body, just as consciousness is shaped (made specific) by historical circumstances.?’

In this instance, Goldstein approaches the Holocaust from a philosophical perspective. The mind—body problem plays itself out through the presence of a cultural and mental void that results from the physical annihilation of human bodies. Unlike another character, Noam, who believes in the independent existence of the soul and disregards the historical here and now, Renee 1s particularly attuned to the void left by the murdered Hungarian Jews, and her own self is changed as a result of her encounter with the void. 25 Goldstein, Mazel, 66-7. 26 R. Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem (New York, 1993). 27 S. Klingenstein, ‘Visits to Germany in Recent Jewish-American Writing’, Contemporary Literature, 34/3 (1993), 558.

384 Anna P. Ronell The female characters in Mazel are also attuned to the void left by the murdered east European Jewry. However, Sasha, for example, does not need to travel back to Vilna or Warsaw to feel the void left by the loss of her family. Instead, on a random day in June she lights a yzzkor candle, meditating on her youth in a civiliza-

tion that has disappeared for ever. Thus the chapters that are designed as her memoirs, despite the third-person narration, are permeated with a sense of foreboding, since the Sasha of New York is retrospectively interjecting her post-war consciousness into the years of her youth in Warsaw. Part III of Mazel opens with a surprising change: following Fraydel’s death, as well as the general drift to the cities, Sasha’s family moves to Warsaw. There they are exposed to a new intellectual and artistic environment, as well as a new landscape. Watching the dawn in Warsaw, Sorel observes: The great gray presence of the building rose up silently, reducing God’s own heaven to that poor excuse for a sky, smeared now with dawn. ... No crookedly leaning homes of unwhitewashed wood sinking half buried in the mud. Where was there a patch of naked earth to be turned into mud? Not a tree, not a blade of grass dared to show itself here. Everything was forged of massive pale stone and great slabs of concrete.?°

The aesthetics of Goldstein’s prose are based, to a great extent, on her ability to contrast diverse environments, making them reflect the emotional and intellectual

states of a variety of characters. The juxtaposition between the shtetl of Shluftchev and the capital city of Warsaw is symbolic of the contrast not only between rural and urban landscapes, but also between their different lifestyles and different philosophies of living. Urban life in Warsaw is characterized by a variety of aspects, the most impor-

tant of which is sound. The city noise can overwhelm a newcomer; its constant racket is deafening. Sorel, however, feels entirely at home in the big city; she loves the yelling of street vendors and the screeching of trams, as well as the classical music concerts. In fact, to her the city is ‘making a racket that was carried up to her window like music, like a galloping polonaise of Chopin’.*? The bustling life of the city is not lost on the other members of the family. Goldstein uses indirect focalization to portray the same fictional space from a variety of different perspectives. The third-person narrator seamlessly merges into the characters’ minds, allowing us to see the city through their eyes. For example, Goldstein provides the view of

the city not only through Sasha’s eyes, but also through the eyes of her father. Despite his lifelong pursuit of sacred study, when Nachum Sonnenberg ‘began to pay very close attention to the people around him, he saw, with great astonishment, how different a world it was, depending on who was looking at it, and when’.°° This is a crucial point in the narrative structure as we follow several intertwining and overlapping perspectives. 28 Goldstein, Mazel, 160. 29 Tbid. 161. 30 Tbid. 166.

US Fewish Writers and Eastern Europe 385 The first years in Warsaw, spent mostly under the tutelage of her aunt, brought Sorel closer to the world of her fantasies, the world of young debutantes in Russian novels. Unlike Nachum, whose analytical mind is absorbed by contemplation of the human condition and the application of talmudic precepts to his new life, Sorel is entirely consumed by her passion for theatre and music. Thus her view of the Warsaw landscape and atmosphere is drastically different from his: Riding in such a sleigh, leaning up against the deep fur coat of her aunt, and breathing in her perfume, Sorel looked out on the wonderfully stilled body of Warsaw. Few people were

out on the streets in the frigid air, though the restaurants and cafés they passed were brightly lit, no doubt crowded, and there were short lines of people before the movie houses. The glowing windows of the great fine residential buildings they passed provoked something sharp with the ache of longing in Sorel, as she imagined to herself the cultivated exis-

tence that must go on in such places: book-lined walls, artful talk, refined tastes and pleasures.*!

Sorel sees the city as a body, and her perceptions of it are exceptionally sensory. She enjoys the cold air of Warsaw in winter, the bright lights of the city, the sounds of music and talk, and the taste of the food in the restaurants. The fictional space of the city becomes a parallel to her own body and it seems that the character celebrates synchronizing her heartbeat with the beat of the city.

Goldstein adopts the ironic mode characteristic of many Yiddish authors in order to describe the Warsaw literary scene in the decade before the war. As she portrays the life of her fictional characters, she introduces historical people known to have lived in Warsaw at the time. Among them is I. B. Singer, the bad boy of Warsaw Yiddish bohemia. Going down Leszno Street, not far from the Yiddish Writers’ Club, Sasha notices a ‘redhead with a yeshiva boy’s gait, looking as if he had only that morning snipped off his ear-locks’. Later that evening her aunt has the following to say about him: ‘Oy,’ Aunt Frieda said, laughing, ‘I’d bet my last zloty I know who that yeshiva bocher was.

Itzkele Singer. His brother is the writer Singer. And, by the way, that man is a yeshiva bocher like I’m a yeshiva bocher. I’ve heard he’s keeping at least three women, one of them old enough to be his mother. ‘Someone told me he scribbles, too, though how he can find either the time or the energy, I ask you. So, maybe let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say he’s acquiring experience for his future masterpieces.’*”

This description of young Singer underscores the vitality of the rumourmongering milieu of the Warsaw cultural scene as well as the self-conscious fictionality of Goldstein’s treatment of the east European Jewish past. In Mazel, I. B. Singer 1s depicted with clear authorial knowledge of what would become of the red-headed yeshiva bokher. Goldstein also simulates Yiddish speech by incorporat31 Tbid. 186. 32 Tbid. 207.

386 Anna P. Ronell ing frequently used comparative structures designed to expose the comparison as ridiculous. By introducing a well-known historical figure into her narrative, she achieves both the illusion of historicity and a subversive play on the retrospective point of view. Goldstein’s Warsaw is full of significant Jewish places: the Yiddish Writers’

Club, the Nowosci Theatre, the Tlomackie Synagogue, and the Krasinski Gardens, among others. It is also a city of vibrant culture and clashing political ideologies. Jewish Warsaw ‘was a city of rabbis and swindlers, capitalists and poets;

but, most of all, it was a city of talkers. There were so many ideas in the air you could get an education simply by breathing deeply.’** Goldstein describes Warsaw as a city in the throes of creative fever. From her descriptions emerges a panorama of rich Jewish life, a city of artists and writers, Jewish businessmen and professionals, politicians and visionaries, and a true capital of Jewish eastern Europe.

JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER Seven years separate Rebecca Goldstein’s Mazel from the most recent work addressed in this chapter, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated (2003).

Nonetheless, both echo some of the same cultural tendencies and literary techniques, such as borrowing literary devices from Yiddish fiction, experimenting with the memory of the Holocaust, and using the trope of journey, among others, to structure the narrative.** In Everything 1s Illuminated, Foer recounts a voyage of discovery undertaken by

| an American Jewish college student in search of his grandfather’s past in Ukraine. More than Mazel, Foer’s novel is a highly imaginative, even fantastic, literary recreation of the east European shtetl and the lost culture of east European Jewry. His literary style is also more postmodernist in its experimentation with time and space and the creative possibilities of language. Foer’s novel responds to a literary climate that encourages imaginative treatments of the east European Jewish past, partly because of a perceived urgent need to capture the vanished world of Ashkenazi Jewry. Foer wants to touch the mysterious world of the Jewish past and to imagine himself ‘written back’ into that world. His protagonist, the writer’s fictional double, also called Jonathan Safran Foer, hopes to recapture his family’s history by learning the story of his grandfather’s childhood and escape from the Holocaust, a story lost to history; it is only

through the imagination, if at all, that it can be recovered, by finding the old woman who figures as a young girl on the sole remaining photograph. The trip back to Ukraine becomes a quest for family history, for a sense of identity and a sense of belonging as well as for self-discovery. Like other American and Israeli authors who make their protagonists travel to eastern Europe and to witness physically the different landscape, Foer makes Jonathan travel across the world to 33 Goldstein, Mazel, 206. 34 J. S. Foer, Everything is Illuminated (New York, 2003).

US Jewish Writers and Eastern Europe 387 acquire a first-hand experience of eastern Europe and to fuel his imagination in order to write about that world. Foer is guided by the same vision of history as many other contemporary Jewish writers. Like Thane Rosenbaum, he envisions his protagonist as a person in pursuit of an alternative time line, an ‘unlived’ possibility. Thus, when asked by his Ukrainian guide and translator, Alex, how anyone in their right mind can possibly consider travelling from the noble and incomparable America to the humble and poor Ukraine, Jonathan answers in a way we find in many works: ‘I want to see Trachimbrod . . . To see what it’s like, how my grandfather grew up, where I would be now if it weren’t for the war.’®? An awareness of split historical time is a primary feature of Foer’s novel. Jonathan is profoundly cognizant of the fact that if it were not for various historic upheavals, he might be living in the Jewish shtetls or cities he now wishes to explore.

However, in order to explore the past, especially the Holocaust and the east European Jewish culture destroyed by it, the character needs at least two important abilities: to travel and endure the present and to imagine the past by filling in the gaps. Various literary techniques are employed to this end. In the spirit of Yiddish classics, some authors make their protagonists travel by train, observing the vanished shtetls of Ukraine. Foer’s Jonathan travels by car, accompanied by two Ukrainians and a dog. His guide, Alex, is the first-person narrator through whose eyes we see the young American traveller.

Movement through the heartland of Ukraine is fascinating for Jonathan, and yet Foer’s description of the trip borders on the absurd because of the cognitive and cultural gaps between Jonathan and his companions, which parallel the gaps between him and the painful legacy of the Holocaust, which is sometimes elusive and inaccessible. This quest to understand the past, as well as the ambiguity and often impossibility of constructing any meaningful relationships with the

past, underlie Everything 1s Illuminated. The preponderance of pilgrimages to , Holocaust memory-sites, museums, and memorials (conceived as collections of material artefacts that embody memory) sometimes results in a counter-narrative of nothingness where a memory-site is an uncertain location and all material evidence of Jewish presence is missing. This emptiness 1s portrayed by Foer as an alternative mode of memorialization open to multiple interpretations as well as to opportunities for working through and acting out. The absence of material artefacts, Foer’s nothingness, opens up the possibility of a memory-site that is a direct continuation of the large-scale memorial enterprise of the yizkor bikher. In the words of James Young, In keeping with the bookish, iconoclastic side of Jewish tradition, the first ‘memorials’ to the Holocaust period came not in stone, glass, or steel—but in narrative. The yizkor bikher (memorial books) remembered both the lives and destruction of European Jewish commu35 Ibid. 59.

388 Anna P. Ronell nities according to the most ancient of Jewish memorial media: words on paper. “The scribes hoped that, when read, the yizkor bikher would turn the site of reading into memorial space.’°°

Text as a memory-site is one of the most important notions adapted by contemporary writers for their own post-Holocaust, postmodern projects. In Foer’s work, for example, memorial writing functions on two levels: the text itself is a memorial to the protagonist’s family past in eastern Europe; however, there is also a text within a text, the memorial chronicles of Trachimbrod incorporated into Foer’s narrative. The correlation between the memorialization in a physical space and that in a text is helpful for elucidating some of the aspects of contemporary fiction dealing with the east European Jewish past. The landscape of eastern Europe enters the novel through the windows of the car as well as through the author’s imagination. Alex, who describes the trip in his mangled but colourful English, notices the hero’s preoccupation with the landscape. He is also aware that the war is an ever-present issue embedded in people’s memory as well as in the material world around them. Both Alex and Jonathan are curious about the grandfather, the eyewitness and the only person they know who lived through those times. While Jonathan keeps jotting notes in his diary, he 1s also trying to absorb the natural beauty of the place and to bridge the gap between this beauty and the atrocities that took place right in its midst. The desire to introduce together the tragic and the humorous, the magical preHolocaust Jewish past and the bleak post-Soviet present, is reflected in Foer’s language. Alex’s often distorted and reinvented English is not a language that can be ‘translated back’ into Russian; rather, it is a language that comes straight from the dictionary, providing much humour in the novel. He uses the verb ‘to repose’ when he means ‘to sleep’, ‘rigid’ means ‘difficult’, ‘premium’ means ‘good’, ‘proximal’ means ‘close’, and ‘currency’ means both ‘money’ and ‘salary’. The humour also comes from the divergence between American and Ukrainian lifestyles as well as from the different perceptions Jonathan and Alex have of this formerly Jewish realm. Like the celebrated Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, Foer employs the trope of

journey to structure his movement through the Ukraine. However, even more importantly, Jonathan’s perceptions of reality are mediated by his Ukrainian translator through his knowledge of the land and his linguistic skills. Foer’s pseudoautobiographical protagonist has never had much contact with Ukrainians and has learned much of what he knows about the animosity between Ukrainians and Jews from books, never experiencing Ukrainian antisemitism at first hand. That is why

it is intriguing that Foer does not use a first-person narrative characteristic of memoirs and autobiographies, but rather chooses to portray Jonathan’s journey through the eyes of his Ukrainian guide, whose consciousness and sensibilities are clearly non-American and non-Jewish. 36 J. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, 1993), 7.

US Jewish Writers and Eastern Europe 389 Two elements are important in this context: first, Jonathan, who feigns ignorance of the Jewish past, is nonetheless aware of the role the Ukrainians played during the Holocaust. This brings him into direct conflict with his Ukrainian translator, who—after many years of Soviet amnesia and a total lack of Holocaust education—trefuses to accept Jonathan’s claims about the Ukrainians during the war. When Jonathan says that he hasn’t told his grandmother about his trip to Ukraine because her entire family was killed in the Holocaust and she has bad memories of the country, Alex registers surprise: ‘Did a Ukrainian save her?’ ‘No, she fled before the war. She was young and left her family behind.’ She left her family behind, I wrote this on my brain. ‘It surprises me that no one saved her family,’ I said. ‘It shouldn’t be surprising. The Ukrainians, back then, were terrible to the Jews. They were almost as bad as the Nazis. It was a different world. At the begin-

ning of the war, a lot of Jews wanted to go to the Nazis to be protected from the Ukrainians.’ “This is not true.’ ‘It is.’ ‘I cannot believe what you are saying.’ ‘Look it up in the history books.’ ‘It does not say this in the history books.’ ‘Well, that’s the way it was. Ukrainians were known for being terrible to the Jews. So were the Poles. Listen, I don’t mean to offend you. It’s got nothing to do with you. We’re talking about fifty years ago.’ ‘I think you are mistaken,’ I told the hero. ‘I don’t know what to say.’ ‘Say you are mistaken.’ “I can’t.’ ‘You must.’?”

This passage is remarkable for a number of reasons. Throughout the narrative the Ukrainian translator is generally more knowledgeable about Ukraine than the

visiting American Jew. However, here is an instance when the Jew is more know- , ledgeable than the Ukrainian. Alex does tell the truth: Soviet history books do not mention the Holocaust or any of the German atrocities against the Jews of eastern

Europe. He is not really a Holocaust-denier; rather, he is a product of Soviet ideology, which treated the history of the war highly selectively. Jonathan sounds

conciliatory as he implies that, although the Ukrainians actively participated in the mass murder of the Jews, he, the descendant of these very Jews, does not want to offend his Ukrainian guides by insisting on historical truth. By the end of the novel Alex is proven wrong as he learns that his grandfather did witness the murder of the Jews and consciously did not save his best friend Hershele. The second element of Ukrainian—Jewish relations that Foer develops has to do

with the notion of national identity. When Jonathan mentions that he wants to visit the shtetl of Trachimbrod in order to imagine what his life might have been if he had been born in Ukraine, Alex replies that Jonathan would be a Ukrainian just like him, but more provincial. This remark elicits only a lukewarm response from Jonathan. While being an American feels good to him, it is hard for him to

imagine being a Ukrainian. Unlike Alex, whose historical memory has been severely manipulated, Jonathan knows that a Jew does not become a Ukrainian simply in virtue of being born in Ukraine. There is an unresolved contradiction in 37 Foer, Everything is Illuminated, 62.

390 Anna P. Ronell this line of thought: being born and bred in Germany before the war did not make German Jews into Germans; likewise being born in Ukraine did not save the Jews from the hatred the Ukrainians had developed for them over the centuries. On the other hand, at present, being born in the United States seems to make a Jew into an American. Foer does not ask the direct question, what in fact is a national identity?

The notion is too vague to articulate, yet the unresolved tension remains just beneath the surface.

Identity is at play throughout this semi-autobiographical fiction: like Rosenbaum’s Duncan, whose identity stems from his special link to Holocaust survivors, Jonathan seeks to understand himself in relation to his grandfather and his life in Trachimbrod, as well as to the legacy of the east European Jewish past. Foer evokes individual and collective memory, providing a folk memory to explain his grandfather’s birthplace, a point of origin that ultimately cannot be found, a place that is distant in both space and time, that figures not on any cartographic product,

but rather on a mental map. From within the story of Foer’s voyage through Ukraine emerges a pseudo-historical novel about Trachimbrod, which is not a historical Jewish townlet but the mythic shtetl. The story of a Jewish community born on the banks of the river Brod echoes

the fictional histories that Yiddish writers have developed for their imaginary towns. The story of the shtetl of ‘Trachimbrod runs parallel to and somewhat independently of the story of Jonathan’s travels in present-day Ukraine. Inspired by

I. B. Singer, Foer writes the pre-Holocaust history of Trachimbrod in a highly imaginative way without shunning graphic sexuality or bizarre and even supernatural elements. He does not attempt any quasi-anthropological approach, but instead imagines his literary shtetl in a dimension beyond space and time. The text itself becomes the shtetl’s new reality as well as its memorial. Within this text Foer

traces the history of his family, from the magical girl named Brod, through his grandfather, and to himself. The problem is that he knows little, if anything, about that world. Thus, in an openly postmodernist move Foer reminds his readers that he 1s engaged in a literary enterprise, that he is writing fiction, that everything we read about is the product of his imagination. So strong is his desire to write a history for his family that the only way to do so is to give free rein to his imagination.

Even though this history sometimes appears a bit thin and contrived, it is an honest, introspective attempt to write a personal story, accompanied by a deep awareness of its fictionality. What accounts for this desperate desire of younger American Jewish authors to

reimagine the world of east European Jewry? It is possibly a combination of factors. First of all, the generation of people who personally experienced east European Jewish life before the Holocaust is rapidly disappearing. Even people who caught its final moments are the ageing last generation of Jews who came from the shtetls. The urgency with which many writers seek to capture this world for posterity in their works is primarily informed by a recognition that, with the last

US Fewish Writers and Eastern Europe 391 generation of Holocaust survivors passing away, the human link to that world will soon be severed for ever. The influence of writers who are the children of Holocaust survivors should not be discounted as they were among the first to respond to the novelistic impulse to go back to the places they had never visited, to reclaim the past and to recapture some of its spirit. In the words of Thane Rosenbaum, artists who are the children

of Holocaust survivors also experienced the so-called ‘Medusa metaphor’: an impulse to stare into the grotesque visage of the Holocaust, a tantalizing image that can petrify, yet is hypnotic. All these factors collaborate in creating a new cultural ecosystem, a world where different elements nourish each other. This proliferation of imaginative treatments of the east European Jewish past points to an atmosphere conducive to experiencing and preserving the past through the literary imagination. In the works of contemporary Jewish writers, portrayals of east European life oscillate between bitter descriptions of its backwardness to heart-warming evocations of the intimacy and cohesiveness of the shtetl. This separate, almost mythical, world of east European Jewish life, curiously enough, still animates Jewish

literary imagination at the turn of the twenty-first century. By examining these developments we discover a new perspective on current literary trends and provide an up-to-date analysis of the east European theme in contemporary Jewish fiction.

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‘The Jedwabne Debate in America ANTONY POLONSKY We express our pain and shame, we give expression to our determination in seeking to learn the truth, our courage in overcoming an evil past, our unbending will for understanding and harmony. Because of this crime we should beg the shadows of the dead and their families for forgiveness. Therefore, today, as a citizen and as the President of the Polish Republic, I apologize. I apologize in the name of those Poles whose conscience is moved by that crime. PRESIDENT ALEXANDER KWASNIEWSKI at the Jedwabne Commemoration Service, 10 July 2001

THE publication of Jan Gross’s Sgsiedzi: Historia zaglady zydowskiego miasteczka in the summer of 2000," which described how Poles in the small town of Jedwabne in the north-east of today’s Poland, with some German incitement but little actual German participation, massacred the local Jewish population, led to the most prolonged and far-reaching discussion of the Jewish issue in Poland since the Second World War. Among those who participated in this debate, a number expressed the fear that the publication of the book in English (which took place in June 20017) would provoke an anti-Polish reaction among American Jews, which in turn would intensify antisemitism in Poland. One of those who expressed such fears was Jan

Nowak-Jezioranski, who had played a distinguished part in the Polish underground and who after the war had been the director of the Polish Service of Radio Free Europe. After stressing that Poles could not evade responsibility for the crime of Jedwabne and that ‘Since we share a national pride in our victories, in our laudable actions and in the contributions made by Polish artists to the common treas-

ury of human values, we must also bring ourselves to feel national shame for shameful actions,’ he observed that to hold all Poles collectively responsible or to claim that ‘the Holocaust was the common work of Poles and Germans’ would be a defamation of Poland. He went on: Adam Michnik correctly, and in my presence, warned Jews gathered at a New York synagogue that the defamation of Poland could provoke a secondary wave of antisemitism among people who had spent their entire lives fighting racial prejudice. Sejny, 2000. 2 J. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne (Princeton, 2001).

304 Antony Polonsky It is worth adding that any eruption of neo-antisemitism in Poland would cause terrible harm not to Jews—there are barely a few thousand of them in Poland—but to the position and the good name of Poland in the world. Certainly this was not Gross’s intention when he revealed the crimes committed by the Poles of Jedwabne. In order to avert this secondary antisemitism, it is necessary to place the tragedy of the Jews of Jedwabne on the agenda of the Polish—Jewish dialogue now, especially in the United States. Jan T. Gross ought to be involved on the Polish side, for a great deal depends on how he himself presents Neighbors to Western readers.°

Cardinal Jozef Glemp, the primate of Poland, was more equivocal in his condemnation of the Jedwabne massacre. Although he recognized that ‘Jedwabne will

remain a certain kind of symbol’ and that ‘Poles took part in the destruction of Jews in other localities as well, acting as mobs without conscience’, he also argued that the Jews should apologize for their role in imposing communism on the Poles and that antisemitism in Poland had been exaggerated. In his words, ‘I also cannot understand why Poles are unceasingly slandered, especially in the American press, and why we are constantly accused of antisemitism, as though it were somehow

different in form than it is in other countries.’ But he too expressed alarm lest ‘divulging the truth to Americans will lead to sharp attacks on Poles by the Jewish community’.*

In the event, the debate in America did not fulfil these alarmist predictions. There was in fact no real debate between Poles and Jews in North America similar to that which was occurring in Poland. Rather, four separate phenomena could be observed. There were, first, the responses of Polish Americans and American Jews to the publication of Gross’s book and to its English translation. ‘Then there were the attempts by those involved in the Polish—Jewish dialogue, whose history 1s described in Stanislaus Blejwas’s chapter, to defuse the situation. Thirdly, there was the wider resonance of the debate. And finally there was the scholarly reaction, in which many, though not all, of those who participated were Polish or Jewish. In an article that appeared on 24 April 2001 in the newspaper Rzeczpospolita the

historian Andrzej Paczkowski set out a tentative typology of the discussion in Poland over Jedwabne, which, as he rightly observed, was concerned less with the

massacre as such than with the ‘range, intensity and nature of Polish antisemitism’.° He identified four categories: first, the ‘affirmative’, which upholds Gross’s basic premisses and is particularly concerned about their moral ramifications; secondly, the ‘defensive open’ genre, which accepts some of Gross’s conclusions, but raises questions about his research priorities and methods and stresses, in particular, the issue of German participation in the atrocity; thirdly, the ‘defensive closed’ position, which argues that the murder was the work of, at the worst, a 3 J. Nowak-Jeziorariski, ‘Potrzeba ekspiacji’, Rzeczpospolita, 26 Jan. 2001. * Radio broadcast, 4 Mar. 2001, Radio Jozef. © See A. Paczkowski, ‘Debata wok6l “Sasiadow”: Proba wstepnej typologii’, Rzeczpospolita, 24 Mar. 2001.

The fedwabne Debate in America 395 small number of the Polish inhabitants of Jedwabne who were unwitting dupes of the Nazis and who were largely motivated by a desire to retaliate for the wrongs

perpetrated against them by the Jews who worked for the Soviet authorities between 1939—41; finally, there are those who reject the arguments of Gross’s book

outright, in the process often resorting to stereotypical and antisemitic accusations. This is a helpful analysis, although the terms ‘self-critical’ for the first category,

‘constructively critical’ for the second, and ‘radical apologetic’ for the third and fourth might be preferable. It should also be stressed that there are legitimate points of debate raised by Gross’s book and that to air these in a scholarly context is clearly a part of academic discourse. Within the Polish American community, cleavages similar to those in Poland could be perceived. The ‘self-critical’ position was well represented by Jaroslaw Anders in an article in the New Republic on g April 2001. He described how the ‘Jewish issue’ was never discussed, either publicly or privately, while he was growing up in Poland, and how he first became aware of it during the ‘anti-Zionist’ campaign of 1968, which also revealed that ‘some of my best friends were, indeed, Jews’. Although since that time there had been a major change in ‘Poland’s approach to its Jewish past’, there were ‘still precincts of Polish collective memory in which facts are distorted, hushed up, or simply repressed’. Gross’s book has broken this taboo and made it obvious that ‘the whole sphere of Polish—Jewish relations simply did not fit into the established Polish narrative of innocent, heroic suffering’. He concluded: But now the time of maturity has truly come. We are three generations away from the war, and the Polish nation really has survived. Political freedom begets the moral obligation of intellectual freedom. Today’s Poles have no need to feel that they are guilty of the sins of

their grandfathers. And collective apologies, which some have suggested, seem rather meaningless. We know that Polish history was not only about anti-Semitism, and that even the history of Polish—Jewish cohabitation in Poland cannot be reduced to a onedimensional chronicle of unhappiness. But the obstacle has to be surmounted, somehow. Gross’s book has proved, among other things, that the existence of the silent zone is more troubling to Poles than to anyone else. It is a constant moral and social irritant, a cause of pointless recriminations and irrational fears. As Gross writes at the end of his book, the history of a nation is a biography in which everything connects with everything else. And if at some point in this collective biography a big lie is situated, then everything that comes afterward will be devoid of authenticity and laced with fear of discovery. And instead of living their own lives, members of such a community will be suspiciously glancing over

their shoulders, trying to guess what others think about what they are doing. They will keep diverting attention from shameful episodes buried in the past and go on ‘defending Poland’s good name’, no matter what. They will take all setbacks and difficulties to be a consequence of deliberate enemy conspiracies. Poland is not an exception in this respect among European countries. And like several other nations, in order to reclaim its own past, Poland will have to tell its past to itself anew. With the appearance of this extraordinary book, the telling has finally begun.

396 Antony Polonsky Similar views were expressed by the late Stanislaus Bleywas and by Andrzej Tymowski of the American Council of Learned Societies. In his opening address at the plenary session on the Jedwabne massacre held at the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences Annual Conference on 16 June 2001, in which he took the chair, Blejwas reminded his audience of the parable of the good Samaritan, in which the lawyer, after being told that in order to inherit eternal life he should ‘love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself’, asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbour?’ This, he argued, was the ‘the question that Jan Gross poses two millennia later’. He pointed out that the massacre would not have happened had there not been a war and had Jedwabne not been occupied by the Germans. However, the massacre did happen and Poles participated in the beating and killing of their neighbours. Moreover, Jedwabne was not the only instance of such violence. In his view, The events at Jedwabne cut to the heart of Polish national identity, to what Agnieszka Magdziak-Miszewska, the Consul General of the Republic of Poland in New York, described as an affirmative and deeply emotional relationship ‘to our own history’.® Jedwabne challenges Polish innocence, the Poland that thinks of itself as ‘the Christ of Nations’, of romantic, altruistic freedom-loving Poles, heroic in war, never a perpetrator or collaborator. The discussion in Poland is open, frank, and responsible, but painfully difficult and necessary. ’

Even though there was disagreement about ‘the degree and extent of spontaneous Polish participation in the massacre’ and about ‘the Germans’ role in organizing the murders and the degree of Nazi compulsion upon the Polish participants’, nevertheless, as Pawel Machcewicz, a historian at the Institute of National Memory, said, ‘the details don’t change the moral meaning’.® He called for further research and for the continuation of the debate in America. ‘It is important that the Polish and Jewish diasporas in America address Jedwabne. Most of us in the room today belong to those diasporas and what happened sixty years ago at Jedwabne is why we are here today.”?

A similar point of view was represented by Andrzej Tymowski. In an article in Aufbau in April 2001, he expressed his conviction that the debate over the book could help to lessen the Polish—Jewish divide: Painful as it is to read Jan Gross’s book, Neighbors, which tells in excruciating detail the story of the public humiliation, torture, and murder of 1,600 Jewish residents of the town of Jedwabne in 1941 by their Polish neighbors, I believe the discussion it prompted has been in many respects very beneficial. And long overdue. 6 A. Magdziak~Miszewska, ‘The Most Serious Test’, in Magdziak-Miszewska, Thou Shalt Not Kill: Poles on Jedwabne (Warsaw, 2001), 308. This article appeared in Wigz, 20 Apr. 2001, 46-9. ’ §S. Blejwas, ‘Plenary Session of the Jedwabne Massacre: Introduction’, Polish Review (New York),

46/4 (2001), 387-8. 8 P. Machcewicz, ‘W cieniu Jedwabnego’, Rzeczpospolita, 26 Dec. 2000. 9 S. Blejwas, ‘Introduction’, Polish Review, 46/4 (2001), 387-90.

The Fedwabne Debate in America 307 -Many responses to the book have sensationalized its revelations, driven by their own personal, political, or national—patriotic agendas. But many others have moved beyond stereotypes toward a better understanding of the past and reconciliation in the present. We

can only hope that the discussion just beginning in the United States of the events recounted in Neighbors can contribute to a new understanding among people, and in particular among the peoples who once lived together in Poland, sharing a land and a history but who have remained, to this day, fundamentally estranged from one another.'°

Views more critical of Gross were expressed by Anna Cienciala of the Unrversity of Kansas and Piotr Wrobel of the University of Toronto. In an article in the Polish Review, Professor Cienciala gave a nuanced and detailed account of the situation of both Poles and Jews under Nazi and Soviet occupation. Discussing the vexed question of Jewish collaboration with the Soviets, she observed: Polish opinion in German-occupied Poland was unaware of the real Jewish situation in Soviet-occupied Poland, and many Poles are still unaware of it today . . . contrary to the general Polish perception of massive Jewish collaboration with the Soviet authorities, historians of this problem know that Jews made up only a small minority of collaborators with the Soviet administration . . . There is no doubt that Jews stood out as Soviet collaborators

in Polish eyes because the young left-wingers among them were very active in tracking down, arresting Poles and bringing others to railway stations for deportation to Soviet labor camps. However, not only is it clear that these Jews were a small minority of the whole Jewish population of former eastern Poland, but as NK VD documents show, Polish collaborators (presumably informers) in Jedwabne—as in the whole Bialystok region—were more numerous than the Jews, although the latter made up a higher percentage of careerist, or open collaborators."

She concluded her article as follows: The Germans began to come to terms with the Nazi genocide of the Jews in the late 1970s. The French began the process of acknowledging their participation in the Holocaust of French Jews in the late 1980s. It is now the turn of the Poles, most of whom, given the German terror directed at the Polish population and its horrendous losses in the war, have up till now seen themselves as the primary victims of German war crimes on Polish territory. This attitude was encouraged and strengthened over decades of communist govern-

ments, which refused to differentiate between Polish and Jewish victims and imposed censorship on history, as on all other domains of study and the arts. However, some Polish voices made themselves heard beginning with the 1980s, and the discussion of Jedwabne, sparked by Jan T. Gross’s book, has finally broken a long silence. There is no doubt that Poles did participate in the Jewish Holocaust in eastern Poland, but they were not typical of the majority of Poles in the Second World War. This majority

was, for various reasons, including German terror, largely passive in the face of the Holocaust; some did denounce hidden Jews to the Germans, but others risked their lives to 10 A. Tymowski, ‘How to Talk about Neighbors: The Storm over Jedwabne Reaches the U.S.’, Aufbau (Apr. 2001).

"A. Cienciala, ‘Poles and Jews under German and Soviet Occupation, Sept. 1, 1939—June 22, 1941’, Polish Review, 46/4 (2001), 400.

398 Antony Polonsky save them. It is also true that some Jews collaborated with the Soviets against the Poles in 1939-41, but they were only a small minority of the Jewish people living in former eastern Poland. In the present, new climate of searching for the truth, it is to be hoped that the old, negative Polish and Jewish stereotypes of each other will gradually fade away. Thus, the Polish perception of most Jews as communists before, during and after the Second World War, and especially as collaborators with Soviet authorities against Poles in 1939-1941, should be abandoned. Poles should recognize the enormity of the Jewish Holocaust in Polish lands during the war, as well as the lack of concern and help on the part of the vast majority of the Polish population. At the same time, the general Jewish perception of the vast majority of Poles as vicious antisemites who willingly aided the Germans in murdering

Jews, should be abandoned. It will hopefully be replaced by an understanding of the extreme conditions that Poles lived under during the German occupation—though nothing can compare with the scale and horror of the Jewish Holocaust. !?

Piotr Wrobel started by quoting an earlier review of his in which he had written: As for me, I am distressed and overwhelmed. As a human being, | am numbed and outraged that the Polish people of Jedwabne behaved like vicious beasts. I am also frustrated that the issue has been waiting almost sixty years to be acknowledged, and I believe that this silence constitutes a part of the crime. People responsible for it should be punished if they are still alive. As a Pole, I am ashamed that this heinous crime happened in my country and I feel

personally tainted by it.°

He went on to criticize Gross for privileging the testimony of survivors and for being too uncritical of his sources. He also felt that Gross fell prey to rhetoric, as in

his claim that in Jedwabne ‘the Polish half of a town’s population murders its Jewish half’.‘¢ In his words: Leaving aside the controversial issue of German participation, it appears that, indeed, a large group of local Poles and numerous peasants from the nearby villages, altogether definitely well over one hundred persons, took part in the pogrom and terrorized the town so efficiently that nobody dared protest or oppose them. This is shameful enough, but it is not identical with ‘the Polish half of a town’s population murders its Jewish half.’'°

He also felt that, in comparison to the way he had treated the issue 1n his earlier book Revolution from Abroad, Gross had downplayed excessively the effect of the two years of Soviet occupation in exacerbating Polish—Jewish relations and that he had not done sufficient work in the German archives to elucidate the vexed question of the degree of German involvement in the murder. He concluded: 12 Cienciala, ‘Poles and Jews under German and Soviet Occupation’, 401-2. 13 P. Wrobel, ‘Neighbors?’, 7he Gazette (Montreal), 3 Apr. 2001. 14 Gross, Neighbors, 9. ‘Half of the population of a small East European town murdered the other

half’ (p. 7). 15 P Wrobel, ‘Neighbors Reconsidered’, Polish Review, 46/4 (2001), 422-3.

The Ffedwabne Debate in America 399 I hope that the Jedwabne debate will help to change a scandalous situation, in which Poland, so important to the history of the Holocaust and so distinctly shaped by it, has not a single scholarly center which specializes in Holocaust studies, and not a single scholar

focusing his or her research mostly on this issue. The Jedwabne debate has already improved the Poles’ and Westerners’ general knowledge about Polish Jews. There is also hope that Polish educational programs, not satisfactory in this respect, will be changed. Neighbors has reopened the discussion on Polish-Jewish relations, especially during World War II. As a byproduct, the Jedwabne debate has demonstrated clearly a conflict between collective memory and history in Poland. Should historians serve as myth destroyers? How dangerous can bad history be? Can a suppressed history ‘explode’? Is Jan Gross’ book such an ‘explosion’? What can replace a discredited history? How can historians contribute to the shaping of historical conscience? How can historians disassociate themselves from the deformations of collective memory and, at the same time, preserve respect for

their discipline and support of their audience? These and similar questions asked by theoreticians have become practical problems in contemporary Poland.*®

Still more critical was Marek Jan Chodakiewicz. He began by asserting: As someone who admired his scholarly work for quite some time now, I was delighted that Gross focused on regional history. I had expected a trailblazing case study that would again dazzle me with its methodology and analysis. I still admire Gross as a brilliant polemicist and journalist. Alas, from the professional point of view of a historian, I was sorely disap-

pointed. I can therefore relate to the opinion expressed by the liberal scholar Pawel Machcewicz, who wrote that ‘Gross’s book is very necessary. It shocks our conscience,’ but who also concluded that now ‘we need true scholarly research’ to discover what really happened in Jedwabne. Gross’s cri de coeur is an inadequate methodological tool for a historian. And it certainly does not prove his thesis about the spontaneous and mass participation of the ‘Polish society’ in the Holocaust in the case of Jedwabne.?’

Like Wrobel, Chodakiewicz criticized Gross for what he regarded as his uncrit-

ical use of survivor material and his inadequate source base. He had failed to recount in detail the pre-war history of Jedwabne and had underestimated the impact of the period of Soviet occupation. He had also not investigated seriously the question of German involvement. He concluded that the defects of the book were the consequence of Gross’s desire to apply ‘shock therapy’ in the face of what he perceived was the unwillingness of the Poles to confront the dark side of their national past. It seems that by hurrying to publish Neighbors (first in Polish, then in English) Gross wanted to accelerate history. Because it is impossible to believe that a scholar of his stature did not know what he was doing, we must suspect that his aim was to undertake a shock therapy in Polish scholarship. He certainly has reason to be annoyed by the fact that the scholarship too often still pays tribute to Communist stereotypes and avoids controversial 6 Tbid. 428-9. 17 Polish version: Rzeczpospolita, 27 Feb. 2001; English version: ‘We Refuse to Accept the Propaganda of Hatred and Lies... .’, .

400 Antony Polonsky topics which challenge the stereotypes and myths, both Communist and nationalist, formed during fifty years of Communist dictatorship. The prevailing status quo must have pained him so much that, despite his excellent academic reputation and tradition of being a solid researcher, Gross decided to swap his scholarly credentials for an editorial pen. If the shock caused by the publication of Professor Gross’s book results in real and solid regional case studies, it will be a great benefit to the study of history. However, if it only results in more empty babbling and furious foaming by nationalist journalists and equally silly confessing of sins and chest thumping by leftist pundits, Neighbors will have helped to solidify already existing prejudices. Similarly, not much will be done to further Jewish— Polish dialogue if scholars continue to ignore other controversial issues in the history of

both nations. We might mention here, for instance, the well-documented cases of the slaughter by Soviet and Jewish partisans of the Polish population of the towns of Naliboki and Koniuchy in the Eastern Borderlands. The lack of academic freedom in Poland for fifty years wreaked incredible havoc on scholarship. Only thorough and conscientious work, including in-depth research, will allow us to overcome that legacy. ®

Outright rejection of Gross’s views was also widely expressed within American Polonia. ‘They were endorsed by the late Edward Moskal, then president of the Polish American Congress, the leading Polish American organization. In an interview in the Chicago Dziennik Zwigzkowy on 24 February 2001, he claimed that ‘the Jews have decided that Poland should not be Poland, but should be a suburb of Israel’. In his view, rather than ‘promoting accusations against Poland’ about Jedwabne, Jews ought to ‘behave properly towards Palestinians, instead of killing their children’. Gross’s book was part of an anti-Polish campaign by Jews whose

goal was to minimize ‘their own cruelty and violation of law... making use of Polish quislings for this purpose’. According to him, the director of the Institute of National Remembrance, Leon Kieres, 1s one of many Polish ‘lackeys, who have an incomprehensible sympathy for Jewish demands and whose only goal is to satisfy their insatiable appetite’. He saw little chance that the investigation being conducted by the Institute would provide a true picture of what occurred in Jedwabne. His views were echoed by Richard Lukas, formerly a professor of history at the University of South Florida, in an article characteristically entitled ‘Jedwabne and the Selling of the Holocaust’, published in the Polish American Fournal in May 2001. He started by asserting bluntly that Selling the Holocaust is a gigantic enterprise that has less to do with preserving the memory

of Jewish victims than with exploiting the Holocaust for political, ideological, and economic purposes. The consequence is that history has become a major casualty. In the absence of any quality control on the type of books that are published, Holocaust historiography is subject to a kind of Gresham’s Law according to which bad history drives out good history, making it difficult for even professional historians to determine where sensationalism, propaganda, and martyrology end and history begins. 18 Polish version: Rzeczpospolita, 27 Feb. 2001; English version: ‘We Refuse to Accept the Propaganda of Hatred and Lies... .’, .

The Fedwabne Debate in America 401 To have a book on the Holocaust published by a major publisher, the author must meet only a few criteria: Does the book depict Jewish victimization in pristine terms (1.e., nothing negative or compromising about Jewish behavior)? If the book deals tangentially with Christian victims of the Nazis, does the author drown these Christians sufficiently in antiSemitism to compromise their victimhood and emphasize their role as victimizers in order to maintain the sovereignty of the wartime experience of the Jews? Better yet, does the author depict non-Jewish groups, especially Catholic Poles, as either Nazi collaborators or accomplices in or perpetrators of atrocities? If these criteria are met, then it is extraordinarily easy for an author to garner notoriety for his book in leading American newspapers and news magazines, which are notoriously unsympathetic to the Polish dimension of Polish—Jewish relations.'®

This, in his view, is what had happened in the case of Neighbors. Gross, ‘a Jew who emigrated to the West from Poland in 1968’, was not a historian but a sociologist. He had exaggerated the level of antisemitism in pre-war Poland and downplayed the widespread Jewish collaboration with the Soviets after 1939 that had resulted

in the ‘arrest, deportation, and death of thousands of Poles’. This pattern had been repeated after 1944 and the ‘process of Jewish involvement in the persecution, imprisonment, and execution of Poles continued throughout the Stalinist era ... Cast in the light of Jewish collaboration with the Soviets, it should not be too surprising that some Poles may have sought out Jewish traitors and tried to kill them.’2°

Gross had also underestimated the role of the Germans. ‘Since the publication of Gross’s controversial book, new documentary evidence has come to light which suggests that the Germans, not the Poles, were primarily responsible for the massacre.’ Gross’s use of sources was also flawed. Lukas concluded: It is testimony to the power of the ‘Holocaust Industry’, to borrow Professor Norman Finkelstein’s apt phrase, that an obscure event that occurred in eastern Poland sixty years ago should be dredged up in this slim volume, which is long on sensationalism and short on acceptable historical evidence, and that it should receive the hysterical media acclaim that it has received. We are a long way from the quality control that Holocaust historiography desperately requires. Now more than ever we need fair and balanced investigations of the Holocaust and the related genocides of eastern Europeans by the Nazis. The highly sensitive subject of Polish—Jewish relations can no longer be painted with the broad brush of anti-Semitism. The subject needs trained professional historians to present all the facts, refusing to apply one standard of moral behavior to Jews and a more severe one to Poles. Let us hope that the research currently being conducted by the Polish Institute for National 19 To be found at . 20 He went on to say that ‘It worked the other way too. Several hundred Poles, including women and children, were murdered by a Jewish—Soviet partisan unit in Koniuchy in 1944,’ a reference to an incident about which there is still considerable dispute in terms of both the number of casualties and the degree of involvement of Jews.

402 Antony Polonsky Remembrance will give us the answers to Jedwabne that Professor Gross has failed to provide us.*1

Similar views were expressed by the independent scholar Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski. In an article posted on a web site dedicated to defending the ‘good name’ of Poland in the United States, he claimed that Gross, ‘frustrated by his obscurity’, had written the ‘propaganda booklet Neighdors . . . to finally attract attention. In the process he demonstrated an extraordinary hatred for the Polish people.’ According to Pogonowski, “The booklet about events of 60 years ago is based on selected and anecdotal reports manipulated to make it a thrilling horror tale—a fiction passing for a documentary.’ Jews, in his view, had failed to express contrition for the collaboration between the ‘Jewish committees’ and the NK VD in Soviet occupied Poland. Then, the last memory of Poland by many a Polish citizen before the door was slammed shut on a boxcar bound for Siberia was that of a Jewish communist militiaman slamming the door. (There was no similar collaboration between Polish Catholics and the Nazis for example.)

In addition, Jews, like the members of the Jewish police in the ghettos, had collaborated with Nazis. He concluded: Today full reconciliation requires each ethnic and religious group in Poland to adhere to the principle: We forgive and we ask for forgiveness. (As Polish bishops wrote to German bishops.) That goes equally for Poles, Ukrainians, Germans, Belorussians, Catholics, Protestants, Greco-Catholics, and Jews. Jewish refusal to share fully and sincerely in this commitment will result in protracted antagonism and an opportunity for those who exploit the suffering inflicted by the Nazi Germans and the Soviets and turn this suffering into a profitable business and an opportu-

nity for cynical ego trips.77 The response among Jews to the publication of Neighbors was more muted. The Jewish world was certainly preoccupied with issues other than Jedwabne, in particular the worldwide rise of antisemitism after 11 September 2001 and the break-

down of the peace process in the Middle East. There was also considerable understanding of the dilemmas created for Polish society by the revelation of the Jedwabne massacre, and some admiration for the way the issue was being dealt with. There were those who took a strongly critical view of Polish behaviour dur-

ing the war. Among these was the veteran journalist and scholar Abraham Brumberg. In a review in the 7imes Literary Supplement on 3 March 2001, entitled ‘Murder Most Foul’,”? he gave a detailed and horrifying account based on Gross of 21 ‘This article can be found at . 22 T. C. Pogonowski, ‘The Exploitation of the Tragedy in Jedwabne is Definitely Enough’ (20 Apr. 2001), . 23 An updated version of this article was published in Foreign Affairs (Sept.—Oct. 2002) under the title ‘Poles and Jews’.

The Jedwabne Debate in America 403 the murder of the Jews of Jedwabne. He then went on to ask why ‘the story of a massacre so monstrous, and of such historic significance, should surface only now, half a century after the fact’. He saw this as the result of a taboo in dealing with antisemitism in the history of Poland ‘so powerful that no one, neither Jew nor Pole, whether pro, semi or anti-Communist, felt safe enough to break it’. This taboo had now been broken and the ensuing debate, which he described emphasizing the views of those who criticized or rejected Gross’s views, demonstrated ‘the colossal difficulties faced by Poles, even the most enlightened of them, in coming to terms with disagreeable pages from their collective past’. This was because the book assailed central elements in the Polish collective memory, the belief that Poland was the ‘Christ among nations’—a chosen people, singularly virtuous and ready to redeem the world in the name of ‘your and our freedom’ and the belief in the ‘noble attempts of most Poles to save Jews’. He stressed the pervasive nature of antisemitism in Poland before and during the war and the difficulties this created for Jews and for those trying to help them. He concluded on a somewhat optimistic note: Still, things are changing. The more strident the falsehoods and apologias, the more contemptuous and the more devastating are some of the reactions to them. One of the most powerful, and surely definitive, statements on the subject has recently come from Jan Nowak-Jezioranski, for many years head of the Polish Division of Radio Free Europe and a prominent leader of the Polish community in the United States. The evidence presented by Jan Gross, he wrote is ‘undisputable. It was Poles who committed this incredibly cruel murder, not the Germans. To dispute this . . . amounts to a simple flight into untruth (zwykta ucieczka w nieprawde).’**

Not surprisingly this article aroused a strong response (as, perhaps, the editor of the Times Literary Supplement had hoped), which produced more heat than light.

Jan Nowak-Jeziorafiski wrote to the paper to protest at what he regarded as Brumberg’s taking his remarks out of context. He conceded that Jedwabne was not an ‘isolated incident’, but went on to express concern that ‘voices such as Abraham Brumberg’s, by offending people who abhor anti-Semitism and have been fighting

it all their lives, unfortunately play into the hands of the worst chauvinistic elements and may help to generate what Adam Michnik, the prominent Polish writer of Jewish background, has called “secondary anti-Semitism” ’.*°

Norman Davies, an old antagonist of Brumberg’s, engaged in an extended attack on the latter’s views on the whole area of Polish—Jewish relations. In one letter he remarked bitterly that Jedwabne raises the sensitive moral question of those nations, like the Poles, who have every reason to regard themselves as victims, yet who discover individuals in their midst who can only be described as criminals. If Mr. Nowak-Jeziorariski’s letter is a guide, the Poles would 24 Quotation from Nowak-Jeziorariski, “The Need for Atonement’. 29 Times Literary Supplement, 16 Mar. 2001.

404 Antony Polonsky appear to be responding to their dilemma with thoughtfulness and humility. Which is more than can be said for some.”°

He also observed in another letter that [in] Poland, where they tend to know more about Polish history than they do in Brooklyn,” the debate about Jedwabne is being conducted very thoroughly. The latest twist came when

both the Director of the Institute of National Memory and the Director of the State Archives produced previously unexamined files which appear to throw doubt both on the scale and the authorship of the massacre. The new documentation, which is still being evaluated, may or may not invalidate Jan T. Gross’s conclusions. But it certainly underlines the very narrow range of sources which he used.”®

In his final contribution to the exchange, he wrote: Gross’s book on Jedwabne has rendered a service by shaking up the more complacent circles of Polish opinion. This week, the Polish Catholic bishops expressed their collective condolences and added Jedwabne to the long list of wartime atrocities which they regularly mourn. But the story is not yet closed. Untouched archival files are being investigated; and the Ministry of Justice has called for exhumation of the mass grave. The TLS should perhaps return to the topic when more conclusive information is available.”°

Most Jewish responses were more moderate than that of Brumberg. In Israel the tone was set by the introductions written by Israel Gutman and David Engel to the Hebrew edition of Neighbors. Gutman stressed the importance of coming to terms with the past and that it was not possible to hold all Poles responsible for the massacre. Engel, for his part, compared the debate to that provoked by the ‘new historians’ in Israel.°° In America the responses were similar. Samuel Kassow, writing in Forward on 20 April 2001, asserted: In fairness, Jedwabne was more the exception than the rule. Indifference rather than murder best characterized Polish attitudes, and Poland still furnished more ‘righteous gentiles’ than any other occupied country. But the murder of Jews certainly created new and unforeseen opportunities for neighbors who were otherwise decent people.

He further observed: The Jedwabne incident was one part of a complex mosaic of Polish Jewish relations. But there were many other stories and themes deeply embedded in the complicated web of everyday life. During good times and bad, Poles and Jews dealt with each other face to face as neighbors, as business partners, even as friends. On the eve of destruction, more Jews spoke Polish than ever before—and they loved Polish culture no less than the Poles. 26 Times Literary Supplement, 30 Mar. 2001.

27 A reference to another correspondent, Werner Cohn.

28 Times Literary Supplement, 13 Apr. 2001. 29 Times Literary Supplement, 1 June 2001. 30 For English translations of these two articles, see A. Polonsky and J. Michlic (eds.), The Neigbors Respond: The Controversy over the fedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton, 2003), 408-20.

The Ffedwabne Debate in America 405 That the debate in North America was not more acrimonious was partly the result of the efforts undertaken by the bodies committed to the maintenance of dialogue and improving Polish—Jewish relations. The Polish embassy in Washing-

ton and the consulate general in New York took great pains to make known the

actions of the government in removing the monument which attributed the massacre to the Germans and replacing it with a more appropriate one, accompa-

nied by a suitable ceremony. They also publicized the apologies of the Polish President, Alexander Kwasniewski, and the then Prime Minister, Jerzy Buzek, and

the explanation by the then Foreign Minister, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, at the Holocaust Museum in Washington of the steps that were being taken to investigate the massacre in Jedwabne and commemorate it. In addition, they gave wide distribution to the important volume published in English by the liberal Catholic publishing house entitled Thou Shalt Not Kill: Poles on fedwabne which reproduced many of the most important contributions to the debate in Poland.*? The Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America (PIASA) also attempted to defuse the impact of the publication of the English edition of Gross’s book by organizing a plenary session on Jedwabne at its annual meeting in New York in June 2001. As noted, the session was chaired by Stanislaus Blejwas and the participants were Anna Cienciala, Antony Polonsky, and Piotr Wrobel. ‘The discussion was serious and thoughtful and the presentations (some of which are quoted in this chapter) were subsequently published in the Institute’s quarterly Polish Review.*”

The format of this discussion seems to have aroused some dissatisfaction among members of PIASA, and at the next annual meeting in Georgetown in June

2002 there was another round table, which was addressed by Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, Iwo Pogonowski, and Jan Moor-Jankowski. Chodakiewicz and Pogonowski spoke in terms similar to those outlined in this chapter, and MoorJankowski attempted to use the failure to carry out a full exhumation at Jedwabne to cast doubt on the seriousness of the Instytut Pamieci Narodowej (Institute of National Memory, IPN) investigation. Significantly, none of these pieces were printed in the Polish Review, and the interested reader has to find them on the internet.®°

The American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the National Polish American— Jewish American Council (NPAJAC), which is sponsored by the AJC and on which representatives of important Polish American organizations sit, also exerted

a considerable effort to direct the discussion into constructive channels. The NPAJAC issued a series of statements attempting to calm the situation. On 26 March 2001 it condemned what Edward Moskal had said in his interview with Dztennik Zwiazkowy, ‘which damage[s]| Polish—Jewish relations in America, where there has been considerable and encouraging progress in the last two decades. His

31 ‘Warsaw, 2001. 82 46/4 (2001).

33 ‘Delegation from the National Polish American—Jewish American Council Will Attend the Memorial Ceremony in Jedwabne’, .

406 Antony Polonsky remarks do not represent Polish American values and distort the good name of Polish-Americans and the Polonia that he claims to represent.’ On the same day it issued a statement calling on ‘the Polish and Jewish communities in the United States and around the world to carefully read and assess the results of the ongoing investigation to examine the historical facts surrounding the [ Jedwabne] tragedy, and engage in an honest and constructive public discussion about the events that occurred in Jedwabne’. It also commended the work of Poland’s National Institute of Remembrance, and President Aleksander Kwasniewski, Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek, Archbishop Jozef Zycitiski, the rabbi of Warsaw, Michael Schudrich, and Cardinal Jozef Glemp for their recent remarks expressing regret for the tragedy, calling for the pursuit of the facts, and mourning the victims of Jedwabne. A statement was also issued on 23 September 2002 criticizing Abraham Brumberg’s essay ‘Poles and Jews’, published in the September—October issue of Foreign Affairs, in which Brumberg was criticized for giving ‘only passing and lukewarm reference to the considerable progress that has been made in Polish—Jewish relations in the years since Poland regained its independence’. The AJC organized a delegation of Polish and Jewish Americans to attend the dedication of the monument in Jedwabne in July 2001. Describing the aim of the visit, Len Grossman, co-chair of the NPAJAC, said: We are going to Jedwabne to support those in Poland who are deeply involved in promoting Polish—Jewish understanding. Facing difficult events in a country’s past is a painful process, and, if done responsibly, the fruits of such an internal examination can lead to a more concerned and healthy society. The mission of the Council is to support such a process.**

In the introduction to a book written by a member of this group, Professor Alvin Rosenfeld of Indiana University, David Harris, the executive director of the AJC, wrote: The need to heal the wounds stretches from President Kwasniewski to the townspeople of Jedwabne and the surrounding villages and reaches around the world, where Polish and Jewish descendants seek paths to reconciliation. . . . Today, while Jedwabne is judenrein, remarkably Jewish life in other parts of Poland is beginning to stir. If the ghosts of the past are properly exhumed and courageously confronted—and, fortunately, there are a number of Poles dedicated to this goal, with whom we collaborate closely—who knows if there will not be another glorious chapter in Jewish-Polish history ahead?*°

The book appeared in the United States shortly before 11 September, and the public debate was surprisingly muted. It certainly provoked less response than Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners.°® Articles on the topic did, however, appear in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Newsweek, the Washington

Post, and the New Republic. Thus, in its issue of g March 2001 the New Yorker 34 For this, see and .

35 ‘Introduction’, in A. Rosenfeld, Facing Jewabne (New York, 2002). 36 New York, 1997.

The Jedwabne Debate in America 407 published extensive excerpts from Gross’s book, promising in the table of contents

that the text would explain how people could do such appalling things to their neighbours. The extracts were mostly of those sections of the book that described the brutal nature of the massacre, and those wanting information on its deeper implications were obliged to go to the New Yorker’s web site, where there was a long interview with Gross in which he discussed in a much more analytical way the implications of his work. Given the journal’s penchant for inordinately long articles, one might ask why this was not included in the issue. The New York Times took its responsibilities more seriously. On 17 March 2000 it printed an article by Adam Michnik, the former dissident and now editor of the largest daily newspaper in Poland, Gazeta Wyborcza, entitled ‘Poles and the Jews: How Deep the Guilt?’ This provoked an important debate with Leon Wieseltier, the editor of the New Republic, which was a model of seriousness and openness.

Michnik denied that Poles ‘along with Germans bear guilt for the Holocaust’, stressing the suffering of the Poles at Nazi and Soviet hands during the Second World War and the country’s betrayal by the West at the end of the conflict. This

had strengthened ‘Poland’s image of itself as an innocent and noble victim of foreign violence and intrigue’ and had inhibited attempts to come to terms with antisemitic traditions, which ‘were deeply rooted in Poland’. During the Nazi occupation ‘the Polish nationalistic and anti-Semitic right didn’t collaborate with the Nazis, as the right wing did elsewhere in Europe, but actively participated in the anti-Hitler underground. . . . Thus we have a singularly Polish paradox: on occupied Polish soil, a person could be an anti-Semite, a hero of the resistance, and a savior of Jews.’ This was the product of a deeper paradox: “The antisemitic tradition compels the Poles to perceive the Jews as aliens while the Polish heroic tradition compels them to save them.’ In his view, The lives of those Poles who felt the guilt of being helpless witnesses to atrocity were marked by a deep trauma, which surfaces with each new debate about anti-Semitism, Polish—Jewish relations, and the Holocaust. After all, people in Poland know deep inside that they were the ones who moved into the houses vacated by Jews herded into the ghetto. And there were other reasons for guilt. There were some Poles who turned Jews in and others who hid Jews for money. Polish public opinion is rarely united, but almost all Poles react very sharply when confronted with the charge that Poles get their anti-Semitism with their mothers’ milk and with accusations of their complicity in the Shoah. For the anti-Semites, who are plentiful on the margins of Poland’s political life, those attacks are proof of the international antiPolish Jewish conspiracy. To normal people who came of age in the years of falsifications and silence about the Holocaust, these allegations seem unjust.

This is why the revelations contained in Gross’s book caused such ‘a terrible shock’. Michnik rejected the concept of collective guilt or collective responsibility or any other responsibility except the moral one

... When I hear a call to admit my Polish guilt, I feel hurt the same way the citizens of

408 Antony Polonsky today’s Jedwabne feel when they are interrogated by reporters from around the world. .. . But when I hear that Mr. Gross’s book, which revealed the truth about the crime, is a lie that was concocted by the international Jewish conspiracy against Poland, that is when I feel guilty. Because these false excuses are in fact nothing else but a rationalization of that crime... I do not feel guilty for those murdered, but I do feel responsible. Not that they were murdered—I could not have stopped that. I feel guilty that after they died they were murdered again, denied a decent burial, denied tears, denied truth about this hideous crime, and that for decades a lie was repeated.

He then reflected on his own personal situation: Writing these words, I feel a specific schizophrenia: I am a Pole, and my shame about the Jedwabne murder is a Polish shame. At the same time, I know that if I had been there in Jedwabne, I would have been killed as a Jew. Who then am I, as I write these words? Thanks to nature, I am a man, and I am responsible to other people for what I do and what I do not do. Thanks to my choice, I am a Pole, and J am responsible to the world for the evil inflicted by my countrymen. I take this responsibility of my free will, by my own choice, and by the deep urging of my conscience. But I am also a Jew who feels a deep brotherhood with those who were murdered as Jews. From this perspective, I assert that whoever tries to remove the crime in Jedwabne from the context of its epoch, whoever uses this example to generalize that this is how only the Poles

and all the Poles behaved, is lying. And this lie is as repulsive as the lie that was told for many years about the crime in Jedwabne.

A Polish neighbour might have saved one of my relatives from the hands of the executioners who pushed him into the barn. And indeed, there were many such Polish neighbours—the forest of Polish trees in the Avenue of the Righteous in Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, is dense. For these people who lost their lives saving Jews, I feel responsible, too. I feel guilty when I read so often in Polish and foreign newspapers about the murderers who killed Jews, and note the deep silence about those who rescued Jews. Do the murderers deserve more recognition than the righteous?

The Polish primate, the Polish president, and the rabbi of Warsaw said almost in one voice that a tribute to the Jedwabne victims should serve the cause of reconciling Poles and Jews in the truth. I desire nothing more. If it doesn’t happen, it will be also my fault.

Leon Wieseltier responded in his column ‘Washington Diarist’ in the New Republic on 9 April 2001. He expressed his belief that his friend Adam Michnik had been guilty of the ‘pitfall of moral exquisiteness’. ‘By moral exquisiteness, | mean the sort of moral reasoning that has become so refined, so attentive to every aspect of every case, so sensitive to every standpoint in every situation, that all moral friction is dispelled, and every moral question is settled, and the individual is left with a pleasing sensation of his own clarity, his own rectitude.’ In his view, the issue of Jedwabne was much simpler than Michnik had claimed. What the latter had produced was ‘a contorted moral calculation that is more a document of the problem than a discussion of the problem’. In Wieseltier’s opinion, much of his article took the form of the ‘usual Polish apologetics’. In response to Michnik’s

The fedwabne Debate in America 409 question “Do the murderers deserve more recognition than the righteous?’ he asserted that “The mention of the righteous is a way of changing the subject, if the subject is the unrighteous. It is designed to leave no guilt uncomplicated, no shame unqualified, no sorrow unalloyed.’ He accepted Michnik’s rejection of collective guilt, but argued that one had to consider the collective: It is not true that the moral life is lived only individually, even if acts of good or evil are the work of individuals acting together or alone. Individuals belong to groups, and it is a cost or a benefit of their belonging that they are morally implicated by their groups, which are moral agents, too. One can oppose the misdeeds of one’s group, but one cannot secede from it, I mean not neatly after the fact. For this reason, I am not hurt when I am interrogated about the misdeeds of Jews or the misdeeds of Americans, because I have chosen to be known as a Jew and as an American.

He concluded: I do not believe that Michnik would disagree with what I have just written. And so I am puzzled by the haggling tone of his reckoning with Jedwabne. He appears to have experienced a contradiction, to have needed to experience a contradiction, where there should be no contradiction. ‘Writing these words, I feel a specific schizophrenia: I am a Pole and my shame about the Jedwabne murder is a Polish shame. At the same time, I know that if I had been there in Jedwabne, I would have been killed as a Jew.’ But this is not a schizophrenia at all. Hybridity, a common fate, is not always morally rending. The multiple identity that Michnik describes means only that he has multiple reasons for anger, for tears, for the repudiation of every excuse and every extenuation. As a Pole and as a Jew, he should have come to the same obvious conclusion: that Poland has many glories, but its history with the Jews is not one of them; and that the interest in innocence always stands in the way of the interest in goodness.

Michnik responded in the New Republic on 17 April 2001. He felt that Wieseltier had missed his point. Gross’s book had caused ‘moral shock among Poles and a huge public debate that is still going on. It was a murder inspired by Nazi encouragement and acquiescence, but committed by Poles. No sensible person in Poland tries to justify this horrible crime. On the contrary: brought face to face with it, Poles now feel a sense of lost innocence.’ He had attempted in his article to deal with ‘the dark side of the Polish collective memory’, and had expected that Wieseltier would ‘react in a similar way, with a contemplation on the darker

aspects of Jewish memory’. This he had not done. In addition, he rejected the accusation that he was engaging in ‘the usual Polish apologetics’. It is ‘a simple Polish fact’ that ‘there is no Polish family that was not wounded by the war’. At the same time, he believed that there has prevailed among Jews—as Rabbi Klenicki put it—a triumphalism of pain, as though Jews decided that only the Jewish tragedy was worthy of preservation in the consciousness . . . | am sorry, Leon, that you have written as though you are still in the

410 Antony Polonsky comfortable grip of Jewish stereotypes, like someone with neither the will nor the courage to enter into a difficult dialogue with the Poles.

He affirmed: Poles also have a right to the memory of their own pain. And they have a right to expect that

Jews will be aware of it as well. Try to transcend the Jewish stereotype and look at the wartime reality with a Polish eye. I think that every Pole has an obligation to look with a Jewish eye in order to understand the suffering of the Jews. And you should also try to see in your Polish interlocutor a friend who is grappling with a difficult history, not an antisemite and prevaricator who wants ‘to leave no guilt uncomplicated’.

Wieseltier responded on 24 April 2001. He asked why Michnik had expected him to react to his article ‘with a contemplation on the darker aspects of Jewish memory’. The Jews at Jedwabne in the summer of 1941 did nothing but die. I do not accept that the events at Jedwabne deserve to provoke any special Jewish self-examination. This, I assure you, is not because Jews have nothing in the world with which to reproach themselves. It is not solidarity with my brethren that prevents me from agreeing with you. Quite the contrary. I believe that solidarity is sometimes an impediment to an honest life and a decent life. No, I insist upon the onesidedness of this reckoning because of my general understanding of prejudice and oppression. If you wish to understand antisemitism, do not study Jews. Study non-Jews, because the fantasies and the atrocities are theirs. If you wish to understand racism, do not study blacks. Study whites, for the same reason. The notion that in some significant sense there are two sides to such questions, that prejudice has a basis in reality and oppression has a cause in the behavior of the oppressed, is itself a concession to the injustice that we both despise.

He was certainly in favour of dialogue, but this required the assumption of a perfect symmetry between the individuals who take part in it...Ina discussion between Poles and Jews about Jedwabne, I do not see that there 1s a dialogical - symmetry between the interlocutors. One has suffered at the hands of the other. This absence of symmetry does not mean that one is superior to the other: there is no moral superiority in suffering. It means only that history is asymmetrical.

He went on: When you write that as a consequence of Gross’s book ‘Poles now feel a sense of lost innocence,’ I am startled. What nation ever had innocence to lose? I find it hard to dignify the disillusion that you describe, because this would obscure or even obliterate the precious distinction between history and memory. Memory nourishes not least because it lies, and collective memory lies most gorgeously of all. But memory is not our only source of knowledge about the past, or our most reliable source. Surely it is the task of the intellectual to rectify memory with history. Historically speaking, there were times when Poles were

victims and there were times when Poles were victimizers. (The same is true of Jews, though the times when Jews were victims, when they lacked power to use or to abuse, were desperately long, and included the centuries of the Jewish sojourn in Poland.) And there

The Ffedwabne Debate in America 4Il were times when Poles were both victims and victimizers. But none of this has anything to do with ‘innocence,’ which is not so much a collective memory as a collective deception.

He also rejected the idea that the Jews were in the grip of ‘a triumphalism of pain’: That, too, is a stereotype about the Jews, Rabbi Klenicki or no Rabbi Klenicki. It is these days the ‘advanced’ stereotype, the preferred stereotype of certain critics of contemporary Jewish culture. I used to entertain it myself. For the salience of the Holocaust in Jewish identity is plain, and it is unfortunate. Yet it is also understandable: how could a catastrophe of such magnitude not overwhelm a community, not stupefy it, not break its heart, not embitter its expectations of life, not fix it for at least a generation in grief and anger and fear? I, too, deplore that Jewish culture has become increasingly a culture of commemora-~ tion—but I, too, have what to commemorate. (Remember, I am a son of Drohobycz and Stryj.°’) .. . In the aftermath of the almost complete annihilation of European Jewry, it is not the specter of triumphalism that Jews have to banish from their midst, it is the specter of defeatism. They must devise a way to honor what they know about the world without being undone by what they know about the world. Should they forget what they know about the world, so as to be acquitted of a ‘triumphalism of pain’?

The scholarly debate took its cue from Poland. Pawel Machcewicz of the IPN and Andrzej Paczkowski of the Polish Academy of Sciences took part in the discussion at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in April 2001, and Paczkowski and Dariusz Stola, also of the Polish Academy of Sciences, participated in a similar discussion organized at New York University in 2002. Round-table discussions also took place at the conferences of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) in 2001, 2002, and 2003, and at the Association for Jewish

Studies (AJS) in the same years. There was also a round-table discussion at the Conference of the American Historical Association(AHA) in 2001. Among those who participated in the discussions at the AAASS were Abraham Brumberg, Halina Filipowicz, Regina Krol, Madeline Levine, Leonid Livak, Jadwiga Maurer, Antony Polonsky, Brian Porter, Gary Rosenshiel, and Michael Steinlauf. The AJS discussants included Robert Cherry, David Engel, Joanna Michlic, Antony Polonsky, John Radzilowski, Helene Sinnreich, Piotr Wrobel, and Gwido Zlatkes. The discussion at the AHA was chaired by John Bukowczyk, and those who participated included Stanislaus Bleywas, Marek Chodakiewicz, Jonathan Huener, Fr. John Pawlikowski, Thaddeus Radzilowski, and Daniel Stone.

Of the scholarly analyses, one of the most notable was published in the New York Review of Books on 31 May 2001, where Istvan Deak, who has written extensively on Holocaust issues, reviewed Neighbors along with a book on the Bulgarian

rescue and one on the Nazi persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Deak praised Gross’s ‘horrifying and thoughtful’ book, but criticized it for devoting too little attention to the devastating impact that the two years of Soviet occupation in 37 ‘Towns in Galicia (now in Ukraine) from which Wieseltier’s family came.

412 Antony Polonsky former eastern Poland had on Polish—Jewish relations. He also felt that Gross’s use of the term ‘willing executioners’ to describe the Polish perpetrators of the Jedwabne massacre, derived as it was from Daniel Goldhagen’s well-known col-

lective indictment of the German people, was misplaced. He concluded: | Jan Gross cannot be praised enough for having awakened the Polish public to the need to address the dark episodes in their national history. A sure sign of his success is the sudden and unprecedented soul-searching that has swept Poland .. . And yet I believe that had Gross been a little less rigid in some of his generalizations, his argument would have been even more persuasive. What is needed now is much good will among those trying to interpret history. Not until we understand that every ethnic group harbors its share of potential murderers who can be

readily mobilized to commit violence will the cause of peace truly be furthered. Meanwhile, we ought to celebrate, more than ever, such heroes, whether Polish saviors of Jews, Jewish ghetto fighters, Bulgarian bishops and politicians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or Polish guerrillas, who stood up for their beliefs and died fighting the worst tyrannies in modern history.

A discussion of the subject took place in the pages of the Slavic Review in autumn 2002. This included useful articles by Janine Holc, Wojciech Roszkowski, William Hagen, and Norman Naimark, with a response by Jan Gross.

At least two books have been published on the topic, one by Marek Chodakiewicz, in which he expanded on the arguments in the article discussed above,®® and one edited by Joanna Michlic and myself, entitled The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy about the fedwabne Massacre in Poland, an anthology of the principal texts in the debate. In our preface we wrote: We believe that the debate, acrimonious and bad-tempered as it has sometimes been, 1s a necessary stage in the creation of the democratic and pluralistic Poland. It is part of a reckoning with the past long delayed by the negative impact of communist censorship and taboos. It is our hope that this volume will be a part of this process and will also make it more widely known and understood outside Poland.*?

This view was echoed by Rabbi Jacob Baker, who left Jedwabne shortly before the war and who spoke movingly at the commemoration service of the long history of the Jews in the area. In his interview with Krzysztof Darewicz of Rzeczpospolita on 10 March 2001 he remarked: The most important [thing] is that the silence has been interrupted: that you have begun to tell the truth about Jedwabne, for it was not possible to wait any longer. Of those Jews born in Jedwabne only a handful remain. But their families number in the thousands, maybe tens of thousands. They deserve that truth above all. But so do all Jews and all Poles. For only on its basis is it possible to build anew the friendship between us. 38 M. J. Chodakiewicz, The Massacre in fedwabne, fuly 10, 1941: Before, During and After (Boulder, Colo., 2005). This appeared too late for detailed comment. 39 A. Polonsky and J. Michlic (eds.), The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Fedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton, 2004), p. xi11.

The fedwabne Debate in America A13 It was the eighteenth-century French writer Alain-René Le Sage who remarked

that ‘facts are stubborn things’, and it would seem that it is the debate among historians, both in Poland and in North America, that offers the best chance to move forward. Certainly, the temperature of the debate does seem to have cooled somewhat. One reason for its more sober nature is the mass of information that has been collected by investigative journalists and the more detailed investigations that

have been undertaken by many historians. The Institute of National Memory issued its report in October 2003. It consisted of two volumes, one of documents and a second of academic studies, which largely confirmed Gross’s account and showed that there were about sixty localities in the area of Bialystok, Lomza, and Suwatki in which antisemitic violence led to fatalities in the summer of 1941.

The publication in the summer of 2004 of Anna Bikont’s magisterial My z Jedwabnego* further extended our knowledge on the basis of detailed and instructive interviews with the inhabitants of the town of Jedwabne and its surroundings. The debate in North America has also revealed some less encouraging phenomena—in particular the extreme defensiveness of sections of American Polonia— which also expose the persistence on anti-Jewish stereotypes. Adam Michnik made an eloquent call for Jews to acknowledge the depth of Polish suffering during the war. He is clearly correct that there has been too little recognition of how much Poland endured at the hands of both the Soviets and the Nazis. On the Polish side in North America there is a major and as yet unresolved conflict between those who adhere to a pluralistic and tolerant view of the world and unreconstructed ethno-nationalists. The latter group feeds off similar groups in Poland and provides it with material. Richard Lukas’s advocacy of the flawed and strident work of Norman Finkelstein has been taken up in Poland, where his work has been trans-

lated and distributed. Yet, in the last analysis, one must be optimistic that the ongoing confrontation with the difficult past that is proceeding in Poland, 1n spite of all difficulties, will also have its impact on Polish—Jewish relations in North America. 40 ‘Warsaw, 2004.

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The Holocaust A Continuing Challenge for Polish—fewish Relations JOHN T. PAWLIKOWSKI IN this chapter I should like to address the challenge the Holocaust has posed for Polish-Jewish relations in Poland and in the United States, but with a special focus on the latter through the lens of my personal experience with the discussion. My involvement with the study of the Holocaust began in the early 1970s, when

I was invited to speak at the first major conference on the topic held at the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York. Soon after, I became involved as a travelling speaker for a series of Holocaust conferences around the United States in which Professor Franklin Littell played a major organizing role. Though I had been involved in Christian—Jewish relations since 1966, the issue of the Holocaust had not really been on the dialogue agenda in those initial years, nor was it a major topic within the Jewish community. A clear illustration of this is the great difficulty Elie Wiesel had in finding a publisher for his first book, Night (1958). But even after I had become involved in presentations of the Holocaust, I heard little if anything about the Nazis’ other victims. Though I grew up in a home with a considerable amount of Polish consciousness, the subject never arose in family conversations. I witnessed no special sense of mourning for the Poles who died in Nazi-occupied Poland in my immediate family circle, nor within Polish organizational life, with which part of my family had considerable ties. The reality of continuing oppression under the Communist dictatorship dominated both familial and community consciousness as I was growing up. It was only during my first visit to Poland in 1970 that I became acquainted with the reality of Polish suffering during the Second World War, as I passed various execution spots in Warsaw where people continued to lay flowers. Sometime during the mid-1970s I was drawn into my first formal involvement in Holocaust study and education on a regular basis. I was asked by Rabbi Irving Greenberg, who had recently founded a new national Jewish organization then named the National Jewish Conference Center in New York (now called CLAL), to become a member of a project on the Holocaust at the Center entitled Zakhor. It

was here that I began to meet for the first time Polish Jewish survivors of the

416 John T: Pawhkowski Holocaust, whose attitude towards Poles and Poland ranged from the very positive to one in which Poland was seen as even lower than Germany in its hatred of Jews. I remember one person remarking to me that he was quite surprised to see a Polish American priest associated with the project, given the renowned antisemitism of my people. At this point a bit of personal biography might be appropriate. I grew up in a very mixed neighbourhood on the north-west side of Chicago, in the shadow of a large Orthodox Jewish synagogue whose membership came largely from Poland and what was then Czechoslovakia. I often joke, when people ask me how I| got involved in Catholic—Jewish relations, that my first encounter was through the stomach. Virtually all the food stores in my neighbourhood were Jewish-owned. Ordinary commerce made Polish—Jewish encounter an everyday reality. [ remem-

ber my grandmother spending hours on a park bench during the summer in animated conversation about the old days in Europe with Czech and Slovak Jewish

ladies of her generation. I recall a particular boy my own age whom I used to encounter in the local grocery store who was quite friendly until we stepped outside, when he seemed not to know me. I always found that strange until I came to realize in later years that he was no doubt afraid to be seen speaking with a goy on

the street. I also remember that my grandmother used to tell us that it always rained in September because this was the Jewish holiday season and God was crying over the Jews. But this anti-Judaic theology never seemed to have a particularly hostile ring to it, and it certainly did not prevent my grandmother from ordinary human interchange with her Jewish lady friends on a regular basis. But again, later

on, I could recognize the seeds of potential hostility in the event of a crisis in society in such a remark.

I offer this brief biographical sketch to indicate that I did not bring a background of overt antisemitic feeling from my childhood years. No doubt I was taught theological anti-Judaism in my Catholic primary school, because it was certainly in the basic texts used in such schools, as my book Catechetics and Prejudice’ has shown. And during my own seminary education I was blessed with several professors who had a keen interest in the revision of Catholic teaching on Jews and Judaism then under way at the Second Vatican Council. So it was rather a shock to be confronted with strong hostility towards myself as a Pole by certain Polish Jewish survivors when I joined the Zakhor project. But this experience had a positive side to it. It forced me to examine more systematically the issue of Polish antisemitism and ultimately the question of Polish victimization alongside Jewish victimization under the Nazis. Another impetus to learn more about Polish-Jewish relations past and present came when I was invited to a meeting in New York organized by the late Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum and George 1 Catechetics and Prejudice: How Catholic Teaching Materials View Jews, Protestants and Racial Minorities (New York and Toronto, 1973).

The Holocaust: A Continuing Challenge 417 Szabad to discuss establishment of the National Polish American—Jewish American Council (NPAJAC), whose history is related elsewhere in this volume. While the original focus of the Council was to be on contemporary issues affecting

Polish and Jewish Americans, it very quickly turned to the question of the Holocaust. As one who came to play a central role in the Council, serving twice as its co-chair, I was naturally drawn into the discussion of Holocaust-related issues. It was also in this context that I met George Szabad, a man who had a tremendous positive impact on me on the subject of constructive Polish—Jewish relations and in understanding how to relate Polish and Jewish suffering during the Nazi era. As I began to study more deeply the relations between Polish and Jewish victimization under the Nazis and to immerse myself more significantly in Polish— Jewish relations today, I started to understand the complex nature of Jewish reactions to Poland, Poles, and Polish Americans. I began to see a considerable gulf in Jewish attitudes, from deep-seated hostility because of twentieth-century Polish antisemitism and the alleged abandonment of their Jewish neighbours during the

Second World War by Polish citizens, to a profound love and regard for things Polish, which translated itself into support for the Solidarity Movement in the later days of Communist post-war rule. The massacres of Jews immediately after the end of the war further intensified the feelings of some Polish-born Jews whom I have encountered since my involvement in the Polish—Jewish conversation. In part, I began to detect some difference of perspective between Jews from outside Poland who were incarcerated in camps in Nazi-occupied Poland but had no other experience of the country, and native-born Polish Jews, who often held more moderate views of Poland. But this is a generalization that does not obtain in all cases. Another point of difference in my experience—again something of a generalization—1s based in regional particularities. Jews who lived in western Poland, which had a somewhat more democratic, cosmopolitan ethos, frequently held a more positive view of the country than those who grew up in the eastern regions or in more rural areas. All this is to underline the complex reality of Polish—Jewish relations as they emerged during the period of Nazi occupation. Another important source of com-

plexity regarding the Jewish experience in Poland has to do with the very wide diversity of identity and expression among Jews in Poland immediately before the war and into the Nazi era. This is something I find Jewish Americans generally fail to understand. Polish Jewry ran the gamut from socialists and some outright communists, who often were hostile to any form of religion (Jewish or Christian), to those who practised an extreme form of ultra-Orthodoxy which one can find today in places such as Me’ah She’arim in Jerusalem and parts of Brooklyn. Depending on where a Pole stood on the general political and cultural spectrum, certain Jews could be seen as opponents or even enemies. Some strongly antisemitic (or at least anti-Judaic) Catholic Poles sometimes saw ultra-Orthodox Jews as less threatening,

418 John T: Pawhkowski as Ronald Modras has shown,” because they were regarded as potential partners

against those, including some Jews, who espoused a strong secularist, antireligious perspective on Polish society. And Polish nationalists whose strength was

on the rise during this period, while they shared a spirit of nationalism with the strong Zionist movement 1n Poland, ultimately saw anyone not in outright support of Polish nationalism as a threat. And since for many Poles nationalism was identified with the Catholic religion, even some Poles who denounced the treatment of

Jews by the Nazis and tried to save them sought to raise money for the Zionist movement so that Poland could be free of the Jews, whom these nationalists regarded as an unhealthy foreign element. It is this background that I brought to what would become the most important framework for my personal involvement in the discussion of Polish-Jewish relations in the context of the Holocaust—my appointment by President Carter to the

initial membership group on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council in 1980. My appointment to the Council had everything to do with my involvement in the Zakhor project mentioned earlier. President Carter first proposed the idea of a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust at a dinner for a visiting Israeli prime minister. It took some time for the project to mature since Carter laid out no concrete proposals other than the injunction that the memorial needed to remember the Jews and all other victims of the Nazis; obviously Poles were to be included. Whether Carter ever envisioned a museum is debatable: many think he had no more than a statue in mind. It is rather ironic that he has never visited the Museum in Washington despite several invitations, including one to the official opening by President Clinton. But his staff eventually developed more elaborate plans, and

the US Congress approved unanimously the bill that set up the official government agency within the framework of the Department of the Interior. The Nobel prizewinner Elie Wiesel was appointed the Council’s first chair and Rabbi Irving Greenberg its vice-chair. Greenberg played a crucial role in the selection of the original membership of the Council. Because of my previous acquaintance with him, Greenberg proposed my name for presidential appointment, but before going to the president’s desk my appointment had to be approved by Elie Wiesel. After being informed of my proposed appointment I was asked to write a letter to Wiesel outlining my views on the Holocaust. At the time I was unaware of

the full dynamics behind this request. Only after the publication of Professor Edward Linenthal’s book on the initial history of the Council and the Museum? did I come to know the full reason behind this request. Clearly there was some uneasiness on the part of Wiesel regarding my Polish American heritage, despite the fact that we had had some contact as speakers at early Holocaust conferences, including the one at the Cathedral of St John the Divine. My letter passed the test, but I must 2 R. Modras, The Catholic Church and Antisemitism: Poland, 1933-1939 (Chur, 1994). 3 E. T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum (New York, 1995).

The Holocaust: A Continuing Challenge 419 say candidly that I felt somewhat put upon by the request. Had I known fully the reason for the letter, I would no doubt have felt greater concern at the time. My appointment also elicited some interesting, somewhat hostile, letters from several Polish American organizations who wanted to know by what right would I represent Polonia on the Council. My response was simple and to the point. I considered myself not as being selected to represent Polonia but rather as a Catholic scholar who had already published and lectured in the field of Holocaust studies with an exclusive emphasis on Jewish victimization as part of my general interest in Christian—Jewish relations.

In fact President Carter appointed Aloystus Mazewski, the president of the Polish American Congress, to the original Council. Iam not in the habit of criticizing the dead, but honesty compels me to say that Mazewski made little substantive

contribution to the early discussions of the Council regarding the proposed Museum’s thematic orientation, particularly with respect to the Poles and other non-Jewish victims, and at times he was rather embarrassingly uninformed. In light of this situation I found myself in the position of having to speak increasingly for the inclusion of the story of Polish victimization as well as Polish rescue efforts

as the discussions regarding the nature of the permanent exhibition were progressing. From the outset I lobbied strongly for the inclusion of these stories in the main part of the permanent exhibition, rather than in a side room, which seemed to be favoured by Mazewski.

With good fortune I found myself appointed to several key committees in the Museum’s planning stages. The most important of these was the Museum’s Content Committee. It was here that I was able to mount an argument for the inclusion of the Polish story in the Museum’s central exhibition space. This role also forced me to deepen my personal understanding of Polish victimization and rescue, particularly as the Council planned an international conference on the other victims of the Nazis several years prior to the opening of the Museum itself. In this regard I shall always be grateful to Ronald Modras, who, as a fellow Polish American, nudged me into a more thorough investigation of the situation of Poles under Nazi occupation, which would complement his own fine research into Polish antisemitism in the period leading up to the Second World War. A word or two about the general atmosphere surrounding the presentation of the story of Polish victimization at the Museum in the initial stages of planning. President Carter’s original mandate to honour all the victims of the Holocaust was never seriously questioned by the Council leadership. Perhaps the only anxious moment came when a Jewish survivor from Hungary offered the Council its first million-dollar gift for the Museum on condition that it restrict its exhibition to the story of the Jewish victims. Clearly there was some temptation here for the Council leadership, who were struggling to find initial funding for the Museum with Congressional pressure to get the job done quickly. Nonetheless, the chairman, Wiesel, refused to accept the potential donor’s condition and soon after its

420 John T: Pawhkowski establishment Wiesel led the full Council to reaffirm President Carter’s mandate to include all the victims. The vote was unanimous and there has never emerged any significant threat to this basic policy since then.

The Council’s Content Committee followed up on this decision of the full Council by including in video and graphic pictures the story of the Nazi invasion of Poland with all its brutal features, including photographs of Polish religious,

political, and intellectual leaders being rounded up and taken to internment camps. This story would become part of the Museum visitor’s early introduction to the Holocaust. In the section dealing with rescuers towards the end of the permanent exhibition the story of the Polish underground movement Zegota was told respectfully, and, if one examined the Wall of Names of Rescuers, it would quickly became evident that Poles were numerically in the lead among rescuers formally honoured by Yad Vashem in Israel, the basis for the names listed in the Museum. Both of these exhibition areas dealing with Poles represent virtually the only such exhibitions on Polish victimization and rescue in a prominent institution in the United States. The only close parallel I know internationally (outside the actual concentration camp sites) is the Ghetto Fighters’ Museum in northern Galilee, which was established by Polish Jews who violently challenged Nazi occupation from within the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. Some in the Polish American community have argued that the Museum’s pres-

entation of the Polish victimization and rescue is inadequate. To some extent I agree; it could present more on both counts. But compromises had to be made throughout the permanent exhibition, and Polish Americans may be surprised to learn that some Jews feel the Museum inadequately presents aspects of the Jewish story as well. For example, Jewish partisans headed by the Council chairman, Miles Lerman, fought hard to add a section dealing with Jewish resistance, which in their mind had not received sufficient attention in the original design of the permanent exhibition. But when all is said and done, nowhere else in America is the story of Polish victimization and rescue told any better in a public institution. Let me relate a brief story. Shortly after my appointment to the Council I sent letters to the heads of several major Polish American organizations suggesting that they hold an annual commemoration of Polish victimization and rescue during the Holocaust, either during the official national week of Holocaust commemoration or on some other date appropriate to the Polish story. No organization took up my

challenge. Either I received no response, or a letter came suggesting that some other Polish American body undertake the work. So when Polish Americans complain that Jewish Holocaust commemorations do not mention them, I have to smile, because the fact is that Polish Americans have done little to foster a permanent understanding within the wider American community of Polish victimization and rescue. One can certainly make a case for greater inclusion of Polish victimization and the victimization of other non-Jews in the official annual national obser-

vance in Washington, but Polish Americans cannot continually complain about

The Holocaust: A Continuing Challenge 421 Jewish commemorations not including the Polish story when they remain reluctant to take any initiative of their own in this regard. I realize that Polish rescue was a somewhat taboo subject during the years of Communist rule in Poland because so much of this story of rescue was directly connected with the Zegota movement, which remained controversial because of some of its members’ support after the war for the new socialist state. But this 1s not an acceptable excuse in my judgement. Fortunately Bozena UrbanowiczGilbride led an effort to construct a small memorial to Zegota in Warsaw where the Jewish victims are remembered, an effort I personally supported. The Holocaust Museum has also included other items that bear on the Polish story. In the important section on the Auschwitz camp its origins as a place of Polish incarceration as part of the Nazi plan for Polish subjugation is clearly acknowledged. And some Polish camp survivors have been interviewed for the video archives, portions of which are screened in the permanent exhibition on a rotating basis. The Museum has also published a monograph on Polish victimization, material from which is now in the process of being incorporated into the Museum’s educational programmes under the leadership of the Museum’s current director, Sara Bloomfield. As already mentioned, Polish victimization was treated in a major international conference sponsored by the Council before the Museum’s formal opening. The noted Polish American historian Richard Lukas was invited to speak on the Polish story, although, because of his illness at the time of the conference, his paper was read by Thaddeus Gromada, the director of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences. It must be noted that Gromada insisted on some changes in Lukas’s paper because of what he regarded as antisemitic undertones in the original version. Finally, during the tenure of Miles Lerman, a Jewish partisan from Poland who has a very balanced perspective on the overall situation in Poland during the Nazi period, the Museum staged several commemorative ceremonies at the Museum honouring Zegota and the brave Polish carrier for the Home Army, Jan Karski. A week of commemoration of Poland’s suffering under the Nazis took place several years ago, which included musical interpretations of the Holocaust by a noted Polish American choral group from Chicago, the Lira Singers, an in-depth public interview with Jan Nowak-Jezioranski, and a major academic presentation by Piotr Wrobel from the University of Toronto. I might also add that the Museum has generally shied away from issues connected with Polish antisemitism. The only exception is a section on the Kielce massacre, which Museum curators believe, with some justification, is central to understanding the immediate post-war Jewish experience in Europe. The more recent Jedwabne controversy was treated with considerable sensitivity at the Museum. An important conference was organized with the assistance of the late Stanislaus Bleywas, then a member of the Council, which received considerable praise for its balance and in-depth exploration of the key issues surrounding the controversy.

422 John T: Pawhkowski Since I have made mention of the work of Richard Lukas’s work, let me digress a bit to say a few things about his overall role in the discussion of the Holocaust in the context of Polish-Jewish relations. I applaud him for taking up this issue when

virtually no other Polish American scholar has done so. His book Forgotten Holocaust, with some qualifications, 1s still the best single comprehensive volume on the Polish story under the Nazis.* His other books on Polish survivors, including his most recent work, Forgotten Survivors, is an important contribution to the

body of literature on the subject.° My problem with his books is that the Polish American community has virtually canonized them. I would not canonize any existing Jewish analysis of the Holocaust: many have serious flaws. Neither do I believe that Lukas’s Forgotten Holocaust should be treated as the definitive study of Polish victimization. Its basic flaw, so commonplace in Polish American discussions of the Holocaust, is the assimilation of Jews and Poles as equal victims of the Nazis. This view, which was not shared by Jan Nowak-Jeziorafiski, is fundamentally misleading, as a number of Polish and Jewish scholars have persuasively argued.

Let me return to my narrative of Polish—Jewish relations at the Holocaust Museum. A key moment occurred when Miles Lerman became chairman. While previous chairs had all supported the implementation of the full mandate of President Carter and the US Congress, Lerman, with his Polish background, took

a special interest in the Polish issues. With the coming to the Council of two respected Polish Americans, Ambassador John Kordek of DePaul University and

Stanislaus Blejwas of Central Connecticut State University, a process was launched to begin a dialogue with Polish American leaders about the Museum and its permanent exhibition. Two major consultations were organized, which produced a memorandum developed by Blejwas in which it was proposed that the Museum might enhance its presentation of Polish victimization and rescue. Many of the memorandum’s recommendations have been implemented. All in all, despite often unwarranted and uninformed criticism by some Polish American leaders, I remain convinced that the Museum has made a credible and significant contribution to American understanding of Polish victimization and rescue. More can and should be done, but I am proud of the accomplishments my Polish American colleagues on the Council and I have been able to achieve during my twenty-four years of service on the Council. There is still room for improvement in the Museum’s presentation. The electronic presentation has generally been inferior, and the Polish story needs to become more central to the Museum’s ongoing educational programmes for teachers. Unfortunately it is still too common to see no inclusion of Polish victims when, as is increasingly the case, other victims of the Nazis are mentioned. As a central institution for defining the field of Holocaust studies in the United States, the Museum bears a special responsibility 4 R. C. Lukas, Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles under German Occupation, 1939-1944 (Lexington, Ky.,

1986). ® R.C. Lukas, Forgotten Survivors (Lawrence, Kan., 2004).

The Holocaust: A Continuing Challenge 423 for making teachers, both Jewish and non-Jewish, more fully aware of the story of Polish victimization and rescue. The Museum has recently launched a programme of travelling exhibitions on the non-Jewish victims to extend over several years. The Polish story is to be the final one, and every effort must be made to keep this programme on track. Let me now turn to some personal experiences regarding the Polish—Jewish relationship from my work with the NPAJAC. I address two issues in particular. The first is the March of the Living programme created several years ago, during

the Begin administration, to bring Jewish students from diaspora countries to Poland and Israel. As originally conceived, the March of the Living programme focused on Jewish death in Poland and Jewish life in Israel. At first students were not exposed to the positive aspects of Jewish life in Poland, where an extremely rich cultural and religious tradition had developed, along with new social philosophies, both of which strongly influenced the creation of Israeli society. Nor did they have contact with Polish students or learn about Polish victimization and rescue during the Holocaust. My attention was initially drawn to this reality by a letter I received from a teacher in Haifa with whom I was acquainted and who accompanied a group of students from her school on one of the early March of the Living trips. She shared with me what she had written to the Israeli Ministry of Education regarding the severe deficiencies in the original conception of the programme. I decided to put this concern on the agenda of a meeting of the NPAJAC. A Canadian representative of the March of the Living was invited to a meeting with the Council. After thorough discussion he committed himself to improving

the preparation of students from Canada for their experience in Poland. The Council then continued to maintain contact with people in the March of the Living programme. In addition, the Polish Council of Christians and Jews took a lead on the Polish side in working with the organizers of the March of the Living programme. While things may not yet have reached an ideal stage in terms of what Jewish students learn while in Poland, there has been considerable improvement, including increased contacts between Polish students and their Jewish counterparts from abroad. The Union of Jewish Students in Poland has also played a constructive role. This illustrates what can occur when people commit themselves to constructive dialogue rather than merely posturing for their point of view. The second issue arising within the discussions of the NPAJAC has to do with the use of the term ‘Holocaust’. Underlying this discussion is the more basic question whether Jewish and Poles were equal victims of the Nazis, a point I raised earlier. While this issue has been simmering over the years within the Council, it came to head a couple of years ago. At the end of a Council meeting in late 2003 Bozena Urbanowicz-Gilbride, a member of the Council, announced her resignation. Her argument was that the Council was dishonouring the memory of Polish victims of ,

the Holocaust and was not even being faithful to the understanding of the Holocaust maintained by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. This

424 John T. Pawhkowski statement came without any advance warning, so it was not possible to prepare any —

formal response. But I felt as a founding member of the NPAJAC that some response had to be given immediately to Urbanowicz-Gilbride’s charges. I thus rose to challenge her on both counts. In my response I made two basic points. First of all, the NPAJAC had from its outset affirmed the importance of understanding Polish victimization and rescue during the Nazi period. There has been continuing discussion within the Council about whether the term ‘Holocaust’ should be used indiscriminately to cover both

Jewish and Polish victimization (as well as the victimization of other groups attacked by the Nazis as part of their racial cleansing programme). Many in the Council, particularly Jewish members, do not think so. This is a legitimate disagreement. But the fact that some do not wish to use the term ‘Holocaust’ with reference to Polish victims does not mean that they discount the sufferings of Poles

under the Nazis. Promoting understanding of Polish victimization has been an important goal of the Council from day one of its existence. Secondly, Urbanowicz-Gilbride’s claim that the NPAJAC was not in agreement with the Holocaust Museum in Washington on the question of relating Jewish and

Polish victimization is without basis. Having been integral to that discussion within the Holocaust Council and Museum for many years, I know very well that neither has any formal policy on the issue. ‘They have never completely equated Jewish and non-Jewish victimization, and on the contrary, they have always maintained a clear distinction between the two, even though they have never formulated the words to express the relationship. As part of the planning team for the international conference sponsored by the Council on the victimization of non-Jews under the Nazis, I know how very hard it was devise a name for that conference. In the end we came up with a rather generic formulation of ‘other victims’ without using the term ‘Holocaust’ in the conference’s title. So Urbanowicz-Gilbride is completely wrong in her claim that the NPAJAC had rejected the policy of the Holocaust Museum. After the meeting in which Urbanowicz-Gilbride tendered her resignation from the NPAJAC, she circulated a press release nationally, which was picked up in particular by some very biased publications associated with the Polish extreme restating her claims and accusing me personally of not respecting the suffering of the Polish victims. As a result, a number of rather harsh letters came my way charging

me of abandoning my Polish heritage. However, Urbanowicz-Gilbride’s total misrepresentations have accomplished nothing positive in terms of helping people to understand Polish victimization. On the contrary, they have only made the situation worse. This is most unfortunate because, as indicated earlier, I greatly admire her efforts in creating the first memorial to Zegota. As a response to the controversy created by Urbanowicz-Gilbride, the leadership of the NPAJAC organized a day’s discussion on the issue in Washington on 21 April 2004. The attendance was unfortunately lower than anticipated. Some

The Holocaust: A Continuing Challenge 425 very good papers were presented by an important Polish American historian Thaddeus Radzilowski and several younger scholars from Poland. UrbanowiczGilbride came to the consultation with several younger Poles, who made impas-

sioned pleas for the Council to begin to remember Polish victimization. Regrettably Urbanowicz-Gilbride had influenced the minds of these students, obviously persuading them that the Council did not care about Polish suffering during the Nazi era. Despite the worthwhile presentations delivered at the consultation, no resolution was reached and I am sure that Urbanowicz-Gilbride and her friends left feeling much the same as they had when they arrived. The point that she and others who support her in this controversy fail to acknowledge is that there was in fact a difference between the way the Nazis treated Jews and the way they treated Poles

and other non-Jewish victims. Historical fact and genuine study of Nazism demand that a distinction be drawn, and will never support a complete equation between the Nazi treatment of the two peoples. Respected Polish and Jewish schol-

ars such as Israel Gutman, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, Piotr Wrobel, Michael Steinlauf, Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, and Michael Berenbaum have maintained the importance of drawing this distinction in terms of grasping Nazi policy, as have respected activists such as Jan Nowak-Jezioranski. However, while insisting on the distinction, all have argued persuasively for greater appreciation of Polish victimization. In no sense have they—or I—ever underestimated the imperative to remember and to retell the story of the brutal attack on the Polish nation during the Nazi occupation. And while Urbanowicz-Gilbride, Lukas, and the several Polish survivors of concentration camps tell a story that very much needs to be heard, their failure to make proper distinctions weakens their ability to get a hearing for their story. Saying this in no way undercuts the continued need to make the story of Nazi brutality against the Polish people as part of its racial ideology better known. We must mourn the Polish victims; we must make their story important components of Holocaust educational programmes. But we cannot efface the special nature of the attack on the Jewish community within the Nazi programme of racial cleansing. And until people interested in achieving this fully appreciate the distinction, we will never be successful in making the Polish story better understood. My own perspective on Polish victimization and how it relates to Jewish victimization, as well as on Polish rescue efforts during the war and collaboration by Poles, has been presented in two articles. The first, entitled “The Nazi Attack on the Polish Nation: Towards a New Understanding’, originally appeared as a paper

presented at a Holocaust and Genocide Conference at the University of Washington.® The second, developed for a conference at Yeshiva University, bears ® J. T. Pawlikowski, ‘The Nazi Attack on the Polish Nation: Towards a New Understanding’, in H. G. Locke and M. S. Littell (eds.), Holocaust and Church Struggle: Religion, Power, and the Politics of Resistance, Studies in the Shoah, 16 (Lanham, Md., 1996).

426 Fohn T: Pawhkowski the title ‘Polish Catholics and the Jews during the Holocaust: Heroism, Timidity, and Collaboration’.’ In both of these essays I lay out my views regarding the general thrust of Nazi ideology. Generally speaking, I share the outlook of Jewish scholars such as Henry Friedlander and the late Sybille Milton that racial purification was the overarching framework of the Nazis rather than merely antisemitism. This would account for the attacks on the mentally and physically disabled, for example, and on the Poles prior to the start of the all-encompassing attack on the Jewish people. In saying this, neither I nor Friedlander and Milton want to downgrade the central importance of antisemitism both in its classical religious dimensions as well as in its more modern biological forms. There 1s no question in my mind that antisemitism had everything to do with the eventual designation of the Jews as the primary victims and the popular acceptance and even collaboration in the Nazi programme of so many Christians. Affirming racial purification as the ultimate engine of Nazi ideology does place the Polish—Jewish relationship in terms of the Holocaust in a somewhat different light. The two peoples were joint victims of the Nazi attempt to raise humanity to

supposedly new heights, even though there was a significant difference in the nature of the attack against each community. At the NPAJAC consultation in Washington 21 April 2004 Professor Ronald Modras defended the use of the term

‘Holocaust’ to refer to Polish victimization, arguing that, especially for the survivor generation, any other term seems to signal a diminution of their brutal experience. For myself, I do accept the possibility of using ‘Holocaust’ as an over-

arching term for the entirety of victimization under the Nazis, but only if the proper distinction mentioned above is clearly maintained. My general interpretation of Nazism in terms of biological purification renders this a possibility in my mind, but not a necessity, even though I can appreciate the feelings of Poles with Holocaust experience. It would be somewhat easier to use the term ‘Holocaust’

more broadly if ‘Shoah’ were to become the predominant term for the Jewish experience under the Nazis. But in the end what matters to me is that the Polish story be told fully and accurately, whether the term ‘Holocaust’ 1s used or not. Overall, my twenty-five years of grappling with the issue of Jewish and Polish

victimization under the Nazis have revealed some slow improvement in understanding. There is now a greater willingness within the Jewish community to acknowledge Polish victimization and to include it in educational programmes. The situation is far from perfect, but we have seen positive advances that should not be minimized. A major video on Zegota was produced under essentially Jewish auspices. A teacher training programme on the Holocaust on which I have lectured for many years in the Chicago area has begun to include sections on Polish victimization. These are just two examples of progress. And Professor Modras’s book on ’ J. T. Pawlikowski, ‘Polish Catholics and the Jews during the Holocaust: Heroism, ‘Timidity, and Collaboration’, in J. D. Zimmerman (ed.), Contested Memories: Poles and Jews during the Holocaust and its Aftermath (New Brunswick, NJ, 2003).

The Holocaust: A Continuing Challenge 427 Polish antisemitism as well as the Jedwabne debate have led thinking Poles and Polish Americans to confront the dark side of the Polish encounter with Jews. On the whole, I sense a growing willingness within Poland and the Polish community to insist on the distinction between Polish and Jewish victimization in narrating the Polish story. Again, just as with Jewish incorporation of the Polish story, we still have some way to go in this regard.

The leading Polish American scholar at Columbia University, John Micgiel, remarked to me a short time ago after reading a newspaper article describing my work in Christian—Jewish relations, ‘there was no mention of Polish-Jewish relations—we must be making progress on that score’. I think he has it right. I fully expect that there will continue to be tensions and controversies on the subject of Poles and Jews during the Holocaust in the years ahead. But a growing number of scholars and leaders are committed to honest reconciliation on this issue, rather than the hostility that often marked discussion in the past and which a few have chosen to revive.

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PART II

New Views

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‘In the Land of their Enemies’? The Duality of Jewish Life in Eighteenth-Century Poland ADAM TELLER WHEN Polish Jews gave expression to the nature of their status in early modern Poland—Lithuania, they often used the verse of God’s promise to the Children of Israel from Leviticus 26: 44, “Yet even when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them or spurn them to destroy them and annul my covenant with them, for I am the Lord their God.’! The verse was particularly apt because it allowed the Jews to explain the duality of their situation: on the one hand they were a despised minority within the Christian world where they lived (‘in the land of their enemies’), and on the other they formed a secure and self-confident group enjoying what they felt was God’s grace (‘I will not reject them or spurn them’), and forming an integral part of Polish—Lithuanian society particularly on the basis of their economic activity.” Very often the two phenomena (Jewish economic success and anti-Jewish sentiment) were felt to be connected. For example, in 1580 the Council of Four Lands issued regulations attempting to restrain the Jews’ burgeoning economic activity in order to decrease hostility on the part of the Jews’ competitors.? Moreover, when the chronicler Nathan Neta Hannover analysed the causes of the Khmelnytsky uprising and the attacks on the Jews it brought in its wake, he emphasized the Jews’ economic success as a cause of the hatred the local population felt towards them.*

1922), 144. ,

1 See e.g. The Memoirs of Ber of Bolechow (1723-1805), ed. and trans. M. Vishnitzer (London,

2 For discussion of the Jews’ legal status as one of the estates of Polish-Lithuanian society, see

W. Smolersiski, ‘Stan i sprawa Zyd6éw polskich w XVIII wieku’, in Smoleriski, Pisma historyczne, ii (Krakow, 1901), 225-6; S. Grodziski, ‘Z dziejow krakowskiego sadownictwa wojewodziriskiego nad Zydami’, in A. Link-Lenczowski and T. Polariski (eds.), Zydzi w dawnej Rzeczypospolite; (Wroclaw,

1991), esp. 102-3; A. Teller, “The Legal Status of the Jews on the Magnate Estates of Poland—Lithuanzia in the Eighteenth Century’, Ga/-Ed, 15—16 (1997), 41-63.

3 I. Halperin (ed.), Acta congressus generalis Judaeorum regni Poloniae (1580-1764) (Jerusalem, 1945), p. 1, no. 1. Cf. S. Cygielman, ‘Iskei hakhirot shel yehudei polin vikishram lehitavuk va’ad arba aratsot’, 7ston, 47 (1982), 112-44. 4 N.N. Hannover, Yeven metsulah (Tel Aviv, 1966), 19-20.

432 Adam Teller The duality of the Jews’ situation was by no means lost on their non-Jewish neighbours. Polish—Lithuanian society largely adopted the traditional view of the Jew as the enemy of Christian life, while at the same time permitting the Jews to enjoy a position of strength in society based on the economic benefits they brought to the nobility in particular.° This enraged antisemitic authors such as Sebastian

Miczynski of the Academy in Krakow, who attempted to prove to the nobles assembled in the Seym of 1618 that the Jews’ economic activity was actually harmful and thus that the Jews should not enjoy their protection.® It is also noteworthy that the decisions of the sejmzki (dietines) on Jewish issues were marked both by a deep hostility towards the Jews as a religious-ethnic group and by determined

support of the Jews’ economic activity and the benefits it brought to the noble economy. ’

However, the historiography of Polish Jewry has largely failed to come to terms fully with the duality of the Jews’ situation in Poland—Lithuania. The older school of historians tended to portray the Jews simply as helpless victims of hostility and persecutions inflicted upon them by all strata of Polish society, whose attitude was

determined almost entirely by vicious antisemitic feeling. On the other hand, despite Jacob Goldberg’s path-breaking study entitled ‘Poles and Jews in the _ Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Rejection or Acceptance’, which emphasized the duality of Polish—Jewish relations,? more modern research has preferred to emphasize the Jews’ strength and downplay their weakness.'° At the base of this

view is the argument that the large number of Jews in the Commonwealth and > On the image of the Jew in early modern Polish society, see J. Tazbir, ‘Zydzi w opinii staropolskiej’, in Tazbir, Swiat panéw Paskéw (L6dz, 1986). © S. Miczytiski, Zwierciadto Korony Polskie], urazy ciezkie y utrapienia wielkie, ktére ponosi od Zydéw

wyrazajqce (Krakow, 1618). Cf. A. Teller, ‘Ha’aspaklariyah shel malkhut polin me’et sebastiyan mitsinski—he’arot makdimot’, in E. Reiner (ed.), Kroke—Kazimierz—Krakow: Mehkarim betoledot yehudei krakov (‘Tel Aviv, 2001); K. Bartoszewicz, Antisemityzm w literaturze polskie XV-XVII w. (Warsaw, 1914). ” A. Kazmierczyk, Sejmy i sejmiki szlacheckie wobec Zydéw w drugiej potowie XVII wieku (Warsaw,

1994), 67-102; J. Kalik, ‘Hekenisiyah hakatolit vehayehudim bemamlekhet polin-lita’, in I. Bartal and I. Gutman (eds.), Kiyum veshever: yehudet polin ledorotethem (Jerusalem, 1997), 1. 193-208. ° S. Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, i (Philadelphia, 1916), 167-87; M. Balaban,

Astoria literatura zydowska, i (Lwow, 1925), 314-28.

2 J. Goldberg, ‘Poles and Jews in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Rejection or Acceptance’, fahrbiicher fiir Geschichte Osteuropas, 22 (1974), 248-82; an extended Hebrew version of this paper appears in J. Goldberg, Hahevrah hayehudit bemamlekhet polin-hta (Jerusalem, 1999). Cf.

also M. J. Rosman, ‘Jewish Perceptions of Insecurity and Powerlessness in Sixteenth to EighteenthCentury Poland’, Polin, 1 (1986), 19-27. Gershon Hundert’s doctoral dissertation, written in the late 1970s, characteristically framed this duality in a much more positive light: G. Hundert, ‘Security and Dependence: Perspectives on Seventeenth Century Polish—Jewish Society Gained through a Study of Jewish Merchants in Little Poland’, Ph.D. diss. (Columbia University, 1978). 10M. Rosman, The Lords’ Jews: Magnate—Jewish Relations in the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth during the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990); G. Hundert, The Jews in a Polish Private Town: The Case of Opatow in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 1992).

‘In the Land of their Enemies’? 433 the importance of their economic activity made it virtually impossible for hostile

elements to harm them in any significant way.'! Following this trend, much research has been done on the functioning of the Jews within the structures of the great magnate estates. There the Jews enjoyed significant support from the estate owners, which enabled them to overcome any hostility and create income for themselves and their noble lords.'? As Gershon Hundert put it, “The alliance of interests [between the magnate and the Jews| was stronger than prejudice and religious intolerance.’!° Modern research has not totally ignored the issues of religious hostility and antisemitism in early modern Poland—especially the history of the blood libel.’*

However, the one full study of the economic relations between the Catholic Church and the Jews in the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth, Judith Kalik’s doctoral dissertation,’’ has also adopted the ‘structural’ approach. She argues that the Jews’ economic strength, and particularly their economic ties with Church institutions, seriously weakened the Catholic Church’s ability to implement any restrictions on Jewish life. Thus, even what has traditionally been recognized as the Jews’ bitterest enemy and a major force in Polish life now seems to have been relatively neutral in face of the integral role played by the Jews in the Polish economy.

I should like to re-examine here the issue of the Jews’ relative strength and weakness in Poland—Lithuania by changing the focus of inquiry. Instead of discussing Polish—Jewish relations in terms of the Jews’ role in the deep structures of society, I shall examine the ways in which Jewish and non-Jewish society interacted " T. Halpern, Yehudim veyahadut bemizrah eiropah: Mehkarim betoldoteihem (Jerusalem, 1968), 266-76; S. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, xvi (New York, 1976), 161-3, 211-13; B. Weinryb, The Jews of Poland (Philadelphia, 1982), 160-5. 12 Tn addition to the studies of Rosman (The Lords’ Jews) and Hundert (The Jews in a Polish Private Town), see A. Teller, Kesef, koah vehashpa’ah: hayehudim beahuzot beit radzivil belita beme’ah ha-18 (Jerusalem, 2006). For a survey of the conclusions of this monograph, see A. Teller, ‘Radziwitlowie a Zydzi w czasach saskich’, in A. Link-Lenczowski and M. Markiewicz (eds.), Rzeczpospolita wielu narodow 1 je tradycje (Krakow, 1999). In his study (pp. 162-79) Teller does pay some attention to the limits of the Jews’ power on the Radziwili estates. 18 Hundert, The Jews in a Polish Private Town, 157.

14H. Wegrzynek, ‘Czarna legenda Zydéw’: Procesy 0 rzekome mordy rytualne w dawnej Polsce (Warsaw, 1995); Z. Guldon and J. Wijaczka, Procesy 0 mordy rytualne w Polsce w XVI-XVITI wp. (Kielce, 1995); B. Rok, ‘Stosunek polskiego Koésciola katolickiego do sprawy zydowskiej w pierwsze}

polowie XVIII wieku’, in K. Matwijowski (ed.), Z historii ludnosci zydowskiej w Polsce i na Slqsku (Wroclaw, 1994); id., ‘Problematyka zydowska w polskim pismiennictwie czasow saskich’, in Link-

Lenczowski and Markiewicz (eds.), Rzeczpospolta wielu narodéw 1 jej tradyce, W. Kowalski, ‘W obronie wiary: Ks. Stefan Zuchowski—miedzy wzniostoscia a okrucieristwem’, in W. Kowalski and J. Muszyrniska (eds.), Zydzi wsréd Chrzescijan w dobie szlacheckiej Rzeczypospolite; (Kielce, 1996). 15 J. Kalik, ‘Hakenesiyah hakatolit vehayehudim bemamlekhet polin-lita beme’ot ha-17—18’, Ph.D.

diss. (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1998). For a study of the Polish Church’s ideology concerning the Jews and its implications for both Polish and Polish Jewish history, see M. Teter, Jems and Heretics in Catholic Poland: A Beleaguered Church in the Post-Reformation Era (Cambridge, 2006).

434 Adam Teller in the course of daily life. In this way it should be possible to see just how much the Jews’ economic strength and connections were able to smooth their path in practice and help them to prevent or overcome expressions of hostility and violence.

Thus, while not ignoring deep structural causes, it should be possible to weigh their consequences against those of other social and cultural factors in order to come to a fuller understanding of the Jews’ standing in society.

The sources for this study are provided by the Lublin Castle records, Ksiegi Grodzkie Lubelskie, from the period of the first Saxon king of Poland, August II (1697-1733). These records include hundreds of documents that refer to Jews and form a rich source base for studying their daily life and interactions with their surroundings.'° Of particular importance is the fact that the documentation is not drawn from a magnate estate. Because legal cases and other matters from Lublin and its surroundings are dealt with in these sources, they reflect the full range of the Jews’ relations with all groups within Polish society in their various settings: magnate, noble, and royal estates, royal towns, private towns, and jurydyki (noble enclaves exempt from municipal jurisdiction). They should thus enable a broad evaluation of the Jews’ interactions with their neighbours on a daily basis.‘’

It is important to bear in mind, however, that, by their nature, court records tend to emphasize social conflicts rather than cases of co-operation. It would therefore be wrong simply to summarize the material and present it as a full reflection of social reality. The conflicts should be viewed as far as possible in their social

context in order to assess their relative importance in the full range of contacts between Jews and Poles. In addition, analysis of the causes of the various problems dealt with by the courts can shed light on the normative aspects of Polish—Jewish relations which are of interest here. 16 The material in the Lublin Castle (CL) records, Ksiegi Grodzkie Lubelskie, is divided into four main categories: kstegi relacyt, manifestacjt 1 oblat (CLRMO), ksiegi zapiséw (CLI), ksiegi dekretéw (CLD), and ksiegi plenipotencjt (CLP). The first of these, which are by far the most numerous, contains various statements, complaints, and accusations, sometimes accompanied by summonses to appear in court. They also contain copies of privileges, decrees, agreements, and contracts which were archived for later reference. The second contains short notations of various documents, often of an economic nature, such as loan agreements. The third contains verdicts reached by the various courts that sat in the castle; and the fourth includes the names of legal representatives appointed by various individuals and bodies called upon to appear before the castle authorities. These documents have now appeared in regesta form in H. Gmiterek (ed.), Materiaty zrodlowe do dziejow Zydow w ksiegach grodzkich lubelskich

z doby panowania Augusta IT Sasa (1697-1733) (Lublin, 2001). For an introduction to the material, see ibid., “‘Wstep’, pp. 2-14. Cf. M. Trojanowska, ‘Zrédla do dziejow Zydow lubelskich w XVI-XVIII wieku w zasobie Archiwum Paristwowego w Lublinie’, in T. Radzik (ed.), Zydzi w Lublinie (Lublin, 1995), 7-11. Balaban did not make use of these sources in his monograph on the Jews of Lublin, Die Judenstadt von Lublin (Berlin, 1919). 17 It is the wide range of social relations reflected in the sources that enables broad conclusions to be drawn from a largely local source base. For what is basically a statistical study of all the Jewish communities in the Lublin region, see J. Muszyriska, Zydzi w miastach wojewodztwa sandomerskiego 1 lubelskiego w XVITI mieku: Studium osadnicze (Kielce, 1998), 105-38.

‘In the Land of their Enemies’? 435 An additional problem posed by the sources is the question to what extent they are a faithful record of the social reality of the time. Thus, in 1699 priests in Lublin accused the Jews of holding festivities to greet ‘Rebejuda’ (presumably, Rabbi

Judah) on the feast of Corpus Christi, of refusing to move them to the synagogue when asked, and finally of inciting a riot.'® In examining the matter, it is not clear whether this is a case of Jewish self-confidence in the face of attempted religious persecution or simply a trumped-up charge pressed by churchmen against their hated Jewish neighbours.'? On a more mundane level, when a Lublin merchant accused various Jews of attacking and beating him on the way to church, is this to be viewed as religious persecution by Jews against Christians as claimed by the merchant, an attack perhaps motivated by economic competition, or a straight

invention?“° Since, in the majority of cases, we do not have the complete court records, but simply the charges pressed by one side or the other, various possible interpretations should be weighed carefully.*?

The first aspect of the Jews’ daily interaction with their surroundings that arises from the sources is the use the Jews made of the Polish court system. In principle, the Jews had their own legal system (the rabbinic courts and, in the royal towns, the podwojewoda’s courts) and only had to appear before the castle courts when prosecuting a nobleman or in some criminal cases.?? In practice, however, Jews made extensive use of the castle courts, even in cases between themselves.?? This was not entirely to the liking of the Polish legal authorities: the Lublin starosta 18 CLRMO 175, pp. 504—5, 13 July 1699. Jews were regularly forbidden to walk the streets or even

to open their windows during the Corpus Christi procession. The material here seems to shed new light on the Jews’ reaction to this prohibition. 19 Tf credence is to be given to this story, it might refer to the Shabatean Judah the Hasid, who travelled around Poland gathering a group of followers on his way to the Holy Land in the last years of the 17th century. Though some reports place Judah the Hasid in Moravia in the spring of 1699, the evidence does not seem conclusive enough to rule out the possibility that he passed through Lublin in the early summer of 1699. See M. Benayahu, ‘Hahevrah hakedoshah shel rabi yehudah hehasid ve’aliyatah le’erets yisra’el’, Sefunot, 3-4 (1959-60), 133-82, esp. 147, 153. 20 CLRMO 176, p. 349, 19 Oct. 1699.

21 Another possible confusion arising from the sources is connected with the low degree of knowledge of the internal affairs of the Jewish community displayed by the non-Jewish authorities. Thus, in

June 1700 two different groups of Jews were registered as elders of the Lublin community. This is presumably owing to the court’s not knowing (or not caring) which of them was the official Jewish leadership and which a representation of Jewish notables (CLRMO 179, pp. 175, 179). 22 7. Kaczmarczyk and B. Lesnodorski, Historia panstwa 1 prawa Polski, ii (Warsaw, 1966), 149-60.

23 This flew in the face of the Jewish custom not to have recourse to non-Jewish courts; see Hannover, Yeven metsulah, 91. This was not the only court run by non-Jews that the Jews used to settle their internal disputes, for on the royal estates they also had recourse to the court of the Jews’ judge (tudex Iudaeorum) set up by the wojewoda; see Z. Pazdro, Organizacja 1 praktyka zydowskich sqadow pod-

wojewodzinskich, 1740-1772 (Lwoéw, 1903). See also B. Cohen, ‘Hareshut havo’evodit vehakehilah ha’ivrit beme’ot ha-16—18’, Gal-Ed, 3 (1976), 9-32. Cf. also J. Goldberg, ‘Introduction’, in Goldberg (ed.), Jewish Privileges in the Polish Commonwealth, 1 (Jerusalem, 1985), 22-5.

436 Adam Teller went so far as to issue a ruling that the castle courts should not interfere in cases between Jews, which should be tried in the Jewish courts.** Wealthy and influential

Jews, too, sometimes preferred to be tried before the Jewish courts, where they may have felt surer of receiving a favourable verdict.2? Nonetheless, many Jews continued to appear before the castle courts, presumably because their own courts were unable to enforce their rulings.2° In some cases the rabbinic courts even entered their own decrees into the castle records to give them greater force.”’ In addition the Jews would enter into the court records documents issued elsewhere that were of particular importance for them, such as the 1702 declaration of the grand crown hetman that the Jews were not guilty of supplying or spying for the Swedish army then fighting on Polish soil.?° One realm in which the castle courts seem to have played a particularly important role in Jewish life was in cases concerning Jewish autonomous bodies, such as

the communities or the regional councils.*? Since the internal Jewish rabbinic courts formed part of these institutions, cases concerning the institutions themselves often proved difficult to resolve, leading those involved to turn to external courts—sometimes to the specifically Jewish podwojewoda’s court and sometimes to the castle courts.°° A common complaint made by individual Jews against communities was that of over-taxation and corruption.*! In other cases wealthy Jewish individuals sued their regional councils over money that they had lent them but that had not been returned.*” On one occasion, the regional council of the Zamos¢ 24 CLRMO 189, p. 27, 20 Dec. 1703. Cf. the ruling of 1709 that gave two Jewish litigants two weeks to come to an understanding about bringing their case before a Jewish court (CLD 127, pp. 13-14, 14

May 1709). , 22 CLRMO 258, p. 125, 31 Mar. 1735. 26 CLRMO 204, p. 294, 27 Mar. 1713; CLRMO 195, p. 939, 28 Dec. 1708; CLRMO 191, p. 552, 15 July 1705; CLRMO 182, p. 245, 9 Mar. 1701. In one case, the castle court settled a case that had first

been tried before the rabbinic court and then gone before the podwojewoda’s court without result: CLRMO 1909, pp. 530-1, 3 July 1704; CLRMO 223, pp. 601-2, 5 May 1721. 27 CLRMO 186, p. 301, 16 June 1704; CLRMO 199, p. 378, 16 June 1704; CLRMO 223, p. 879, 9 June 1721; CLRMO 245, p. 126, 18 July 1729. 28 CLRMO 186, p. 261, 129 Aug. 1702. On a more mundane level Jews would also enter community

privileges and other documents which they received: CLRMO 170, pp. 515-16, 7 Aug. 1698; CLRMO 173, pp. 55-6, 7 Aug. 1698; J. Goldberg, ‘The Privileges Granted to Jewish Communities of the Polish Commonwealth as a Stabilizing Factor in Jewish Support’, in C. Abramsky, M. Jachimczyk, and A. Polonsky (eds.), The Jews in Poland (Oxford, 1986), 31-54. 29 H. H. Ben Sasson, ‘Va’adei ha’aratsot shebemizrah eiropah’, in I. Bartal and I. Gutman (eds.), Kiyum veshever: yehudei polin vedoroteihem (Jerusalem, 1997), 145-60; J. Goldberg, ‘Zydowski Sejm Czterech Ziem w spolecznym i politycznym ustroju dawnej Rzeczypospolitej’, in Link-Lenczowski and Polariski (eds.), Zydzi w dawnej Rzeczypospolite), 44-58. 30 See above, nn. 23, 29.

31 CLRMO 185, p. 570, 27 May 1702; CLRMO 238, p. 926, 3 Dec. 1726; CLRMO 244, p. 315, 21 Apr. 1729. Cf. CLRMO 234, p. 646, 25 Oct. 1724; CLRMO 234, p. 733, 27 Nov. 1724. These are documents in a case brought by Izaak Fortis, elder of the Council of Four Lands, against his predecessor, whom he accused of corruption. On Fortis, see Rosman, The Lords’ Fews, 148 n. 20 and the literature

quoted there. 32 CLRMO 170, pp. 208-9, 15 Apr. 1798; CLRMO 180, p. 452, 1 Dec. 1700.

‘In the Land of their Enemies’? 437 ordynacja (entail) actually brought the Bitgoraj community council before the castle court charged with failing to obey council regulations.** Jews did not make use of the castle courts just in cases involving other Jews. They were to be found as both plaintiffs and defendants in cases involving noblemen, burghers, peasants, and even clerics, and would resort to these courts even

when they might have chosen to appear before a Jewish court. The courts were well used to dealing with Jews, and when necessary, the wozny (beadle) would even

visit the synagogue to witness them taking their oath before the Holy Ark.** It would seem that the Jews’ use of, and integration into, the Polish court system is a clear sign of the confidence the Jews felt in the system as a place where they would receive a reasonably equitable (and enforceable) resolution to their disputes with

their neighbours, both Jewish and non-Jewish.*? One of the most prominent aspects of Jewish life in the period under discussion was the Jews’ relations with the nobility. As mentioned above, modern research has tended to argue that the economic services provided by the Jews to the magnates provided them with a source of protection against potential enemies in society.*° It should be borne in mind, however, that the magnates formed only a small proportion of the Polish nobility. The vast majority of the nobles did not own huge latifundia and did not hold seats in the Senate, but owned small estates (if anything) and served as officials in the service of either the king or a magnate.°’ They therefore benefited from the Jews considerably less than the magnates, since, unlike the latter, they did not directly derive much of their income from Jewish economic activity. One of the most common forms of contact between Jews and nobles was that of nobles lending money to Jews.*? On some occasions these were loans to Jewish 83 CLRMO 2502, p. 4, 16 May 1732. In another case the Lublin community sued the regional council for failing to provide the etrogim (citrons) necessary for the Sukkot festival; CLRMO 257, p. 863, 14 Oct. 1734.

34 CLRMO 183, p. 316, 12 Aug. 1701; CLRMO 197, p. 45, 30 Jan. 1710; CLRMO 1097, p. 678, 15 Sept. 1710. Cf. CLD 127, p. 103, 23 Dec. 1732. 35 The wojt (chief officer) of the Podzamcze jurydyka in Lublin went so far as to accuse the Jews of being a very litigious people who were unwilling to settle matters outside court (CLRMO 196, p. 96, 5

Apr. 1709). 36 See above, nn. 10, 12. 37 W. Czapliski, ‘Rzady oligarchii w Polsce nowozytnej’, in Czaplinski, O Polsce siedemnas-

tomiecznej: Problemy 1 sprawy (Warsaw, 1966), 130-63; H. Litwin, “The Polish Magnates, 1454-1648: The Shaping of an Estate’, Acta Poloniae Historica, 53 (1986), 63-92; T. Zielinska, Magnateria polska epoki saskiey (Wroclaw, 1977); Z. Zielifiska, ‘Mechanizm sejmikowy 1 klientela radziwiltlowska za Sasow’, Przeglad historyczny, 152 (1971), 397-419. It is, of course, important to remember that the sheer size of the magnate estates meant that even though they were few in number, vast numbers of Jews lived on them. In the second half of the 18th century the Radziwitt estates in Lithuania alone had over 20,000 Jewish inhabitants, while the Czartoryski estates had over 30,000. See Teller, Kesef, koah vehashpa’ah, 40-3; Rosman, The Lords’ Fews, 213-14. 38 See Teller, Kesef, koah vehashpa’ah, 19-20, 170-1; Kalik, ‘Hakenesiyah hakatolit vehayehudim

bemamlekhet polin-lita beme’ot ha-17—18’, 37—46. , 39 CLI 145, 245-6, 31 Aug. 1705; CLI 140, p. 10, 16 Jan. 1698; CLRMO 232, pp. 100-1, 7 Oct. 1723. There are considerably fewer cases of Jews lending money to noblemen; CLRMO 196, p. 732, 16 Sept. 1709.

| 438 Adam Teller bodies of various sorts, on others loans to individuals.*° Though these loans seem to have been in the nature of investments by nobles in Jewish economic activity outside the framework of their private estates and were presumably welcomed by the Jews, they could sometimes have unfortunate consequences.*! The security for the loans was very often in the form of real estate, and so if a Jewish debtor from Lublin, for example, was unable for any reason to repay his debt to a nobleman, his

house in the Jewish quarter of town could pass into non-Jewish ownership.* There were even occasions when the nobles involved actually wanted to move into

the property themselves.42 When communities took loans, they secured them either against real estate (the synagogue building) or against communal income (in the form of taxes). However, if the community defaulted on the loans, they could

either find the synagogue sealed until payment was made, or, as happened in Lublin in 1718, be forced to allow the noble to collect the Jewish taxes himself.*4 On the other hand, cases of nobles protecting the Jews settled on their estates were also very common. A frequent goal for noble intervention on behalf of Jews was to reduce the level of taxes paid to the state by his Jewish subjects; this he did in order to

leave more income for himself. He achieved his goal either by complaining to the courts about overcharging, or by illegally preventing payment in the first place.*° If their arendators (leaseholders) were unfairly exploited, estate owners would also sue those responsible and ensure that ‘their’ Jews were released from prison.*° In some cases, the protection was extended to all the Jews living in a certain region: in 1720 the wojewodas of the Kiev, Podolia, and Belz regions, together with a number of lesser officials (prominent among them, members of the Potocki family of magnates), in the name of all the Podolian nobility came out against the royal treasurer’s plan to tax 40 CLI 143, p. 126, 3 July 1700 (loan to the Kragnik community to build a synagogue); CLI 140, p. 10, 16 Jan. 1698 (loan to the Lublin Jewish butchers’ guild). 41 See G. Hundert, “The Implications of Jewish Economic Activities for Christian—Jewish Relations in the Polish Commonwealth’, in Abramsky et al. (eds.), The Jews in Poland, 55-63, 226—31. Cf. also G. Hundert, ‘Jews, Money and Society in the Seventeenth Century Polish Commonwealth: The Case of Krakow’, Jewish Social Studies, 43 (1981), 25-34. 42 CLRMO 192, p. 372, 27 May 1706; CLRMO 220, 797, 19 June 1720; CLRMO 232, pp. 100-1,

7 Oct. 1723. 43 CLRMO 208, p. 634; CLRMO 209, pp. 569-70, 29 May 1715. 44 CLRMO 216, p. 72, 25 June 1718. For the problems this situation caused the Jewish community, see CLRMO 207, pp. 176-7, 8 Aug. 1714. On the question of communal loans, see J. Kalik, ‘Patterns of Contact between the Catholic Church and the Jews in the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth: The Jewish Debts’, and M. Rosman, “The Indebtedness of the Lublin Kahal in the Eighteenth Century’, both in Scripta Hierosolomitana, 38 (1998), 102—22, 166-83.

45 Complaints: CLRMO 231, p. 258, 16 Aug.[?] 1723; CLRMO 242, pp. 466, 474, 30 Apr. 1728. Illegal non-payment: CLRMO 189, p. 225, 25 Oct. 1703; CLRMO 254, p. 369, 21 Nov. 1732. This last is a case where, with the estate owner’s help, local Jews refused to pay the Azberna tax to the army. According to the complaint, even twenty armed soldiers were unable to enforce payment. 46 CLRMO 171, p. 76, 18 Jan. 1698; CLRMO 219, pp. 1094-6, 1 Dec. 1719; CLRMO 220, p. gg, 23 Feb. 1720; CLRMO 224, p. 885, 18 Oct. 1721.

‘In the Land of their Enemies’? 439 wine imports from Hungary, claiming that it would bring total ruin on the local Jews.*"

The basis for the protection enjoyed by the Jews is revealed in the payments the Jews had to make to their lord—in the case of Lublin, payments to the jurydyk: for rights to exploit the propinacja monopoly on the manufacture and sale of alcohol.*® Another, perhaps less significant, source of income for estate owners from their Jewish subjects was the payments they took for granting rabbinical licences to the communities on their estates.*° However, whatever protection they may have enjoyed, the Jews’ status in relation to the estate owners does not seem to have been much better than that of most other groups in the estate population. When a Jew left one estate for another without the owner’s permission, he was, like a peasant, treated as a ‘zbiegly poddany’ (runaway serf) and the owner would take the Jew’s new lord to court to extradite

his subject.°° In addition, the estate owners tended to limit the autonomy of the Jewish communal institutions on his lands in the name of more centralized control of his estates.°* Moreover, both the Jews’ status as subject to their lords and the protection they enjoyed as a result of their economic activity were unable to prevent them from suffering attacks and persecution at the hands of various noblemen.” Antagonism between nobles and Jews is revealed in noble complaints to the courts that various Jews had insulted their honour, though it is not clear whether these are cases of Jewish insolence or (perhaps more likely) sensitivity and hatred of the Jews on the 47 Among the signatories to the document were Jozef Potocki, mojewoda of Kiev, Stefan Humiecki, wojewoda of Podolia, and Stefan Potocki, wojewoda of Belz; CLRMO 221, p. 158, 12 July 1720. Cf. J. Bieniarzowna, “The Role of Jews in the Polish Foreign Trade’, in A. Paluch (ed.), The Jews in Poland, 1 (Krak6éw, 1992), 101-10. Bieniarzowna relies heavily on the memoirs of Dov Ber of Bolechow, who was extremely active in this trade (Memoirs of Ber of Bolechow). See also I. Bartal, ‘Dow m’Bolechow:

Pamietnikarz czasOw kryzysu Sejmu Czterech Ziem w XVIII stuleciu’, in Link-Lenczowski and Polariski (eds.), Zydzi w dawne Rzeczypospolite;, 81-4. 48 CLD 127, p. 17, 12 Feb. 1720; CLRMO 203, p. 251, 29 Nov. 1713: CLRMO 234, p. 765, 2 Dec. 1724. On the many jurydyki in Lublin, see J. Mazurkiewicz, Jurydyk1 lubelskie (Wroclaw, 1956). 49 CLRMO 249, p. 1; CLRMO 252, pp. 101-2, 27 May 1732. Cf. A. Teller, ‘Radziwill, Rabinowicz,

and the Rabbi of Swierz: The Magnates’ Attitude towards Jewish Regional Autonomy in Eighteenth Century Poland-Lithuania’, Scripta Hierosolomitana, 38 (1998), 248-78. 5° CLP 7, p. 170, 13 May 1698; CLRMO 213, p. 71, 3 July 1717; CLRMO 220, p. 915, 28 June 1720. Cf. Teller, ‘Legal Status of the Jews on the Magnate Estates of Poland—Lithuania’, 46—7. On fleeing peasants, see S. Sreniowski, Zhiegostwo chlopéw w dawnej Polsce jako zagadnienie ustroju spotecznego (Warsaw, 1948); J. Topolski, ‘Zbiegostwo chlopow w dobrach kapituly gnieZniefiskiej w pierwsze] polowie XVIII wieku’, Roczmki Dziejéw Spotecznych 1 Gospodarczych, 16 (1954).

51 CL Capturalia 2, p. 22, 14 May 1734; CLRMO 234, p. 765, 2 Dec. 1724. Cf. Teller, Kesef, koah vehashpa’ah, 66-75. 52 Cf. S. Maimon, The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon, trans. S. Clark Murray (London, 1888),

6-18.

440 Adam Teller part of the nobles.°? Complaints of violence perpetrated by nobles on Jews are also very common in these sources.°* The many cases of robbery and murder, often for no apparent reason, are a clear indication of the Jews’ position in society. Against those who argue that they are a sign of weakness, it might be claimed that since such attacks by noblemen were nothing out of the ordinary in the period and that all social groups suffered from them, they are a result not of the Jews’ weakness but rather of their integration into society.°° It might also be added that the Jews were at least in a position to have prosecuted those who committed the crimes against them (though, in fairness, this hardly seems a sign of strength). Nonetheless, these attacks do seem to indicate quite clearly that there were significant limits to the protection the Jews enjoyed from the magnates 1n their daily lives. Another form of relations in which it seems that the Jews’ economic activity did not bring them significant protection was their daily contacts with members of the clergy.°© This was not from a lack of economic connections between Jews and clergymen, for these were many—most commonly debts owed by Jews.°’ Some of these were the result of loans given directly by clergymen to Jewish individuals and

institutions, while others were Jewish debts ceded by noblemen to the Church either as votive offerings or as part of their wills.°® As in the case of the debts owed to nobles, the security on these debts was generally in the form of either property or other sources of income (in the case of communities, communal taxes), so if, as

happened quite frequently, the debtor defaulted, the Church would assume control of Jewish assets, which could mount up to substantial sums.°® 53 CLRMO 1097, p. 596, 6 Sept. 1710; CLRMO 208, p. 21, 2 May 1715; CLRMO 244, p. 67, 7 Feb. 1729.

51 CLRMO 167, pp. 10-11, 4 Jan. 1697; CLRMO 170, p. 556, 24 Sept. 1698; CLRMO 180, p. 499, 14 Dec. 1700; CLRMO 184, p. 117, 30 May 1702; CLRMO 194, p. 212, 28 Apr. 1707; CLRMO 1909, p.

191, 14 Mar. 1704 (attack on the Lublin Jewish regional council); CLRMO 232, pp. 1124-5, 16 Oct. 1723.

55 On lawlessness in Polish society in general, see W. Loziriski, Prawem 1 lewem: Obyczaje na Czerwonej Rusi w pierwszej potowie XVII wieku, 2 vols. (Krakow, 1960).

56 Clergymen would even attack those magnates who tried to protect Jews: the archdeacon and provost of Sandomierz, Stefan Zuchowski, accused the starosta of Sandomierz, Lubomirski, of failing to curb Jewish insolence and encouraging them to litigate and harass Christians (it seems that he himself had been brought to court by some Jews); CLRMO 197, p. 822, 22 Oct. 1710. On Zuchowski, see D. Tollet, ‘Le Goupillon, le prétoire et la plume: Stefan Zuchowski et l’accusation de crimes rituels en Pologne a la fin du xvi siécle et au début du xvitt siécle’, and W. Kowalski, ‘W obronie wiary: Ks. Stefan Zuchowski—miedzy wzniostoscig a okrucierfistwem’, in Kowalski and Muszyriska (eds.), Lydzi wsréd Chrzescijan w dobie szlacheckiej Rzeczypospolite;. In another case a noble village owner was accused of giving refuge to Jewish criminals and of having said, ‘I’d rather have a Jew than a priest’ (‘lepszy u mnie Zyd, niz Ksiqdz’); CLRMO 215, pp. 148-9, 18 Feb. 1718. °7 Kalik, ‘Patterns of Contact between the Catholic Church and the Jews’. 58 Rosman, “The Indebtedness of the Lublin Kahal’.

59 CLI 153, p. 404, 10 May 1717; CLI 144, pp. 163-4, 14 July 1701; CLRMO 194, pp. 43-4, 26 Jan. 1707; CLRMO 207, pp. 176-7, 8 Aug. 1714; CLRMO 216, p. 159, 1 July 1718; CLRMO 249, p. 220, 13 Feb. 1731; CLRMO 244, p. 19, 4 Jan. 1729.

‘In the Land of their Enemies’? AAI These transfers of assets could cause Jewish society significant problems: in 1708 the Dominican order took partial control of one of the Lublin synagogues in lieu of unpaid debt,°° and in 1714 the Lublin community was unable to change its arendator of the krobka tax (tax on the sale of kosher meat) under pressure from the Jesuits, to whom they owed a huge amount, which was to be paid off by the receipts from the tax.°! On their part, the Jews would sometimes try to ensure that property belonging to Jews did not pass into Church ownership; the sources mention two cases where the Jews successfully prevented priests from deriving income from ‘Jewish’ houses that had fallen into their possession.®° Day-to-day relations between the clergy and the Jews could be far from harmonious. Clergymen would bring ‘traditional’ complaints against Jews, such as the building of a synagogue too close to the church so that the Jews’ prayers disturbed the Christian services,°’ or that Jews had positions of power over Christians and

even had sexual relations with Christian women. In order to harm the Jews’ income, clergymen would accuse them of brewing and distilling liquor on Sundays

and do everything in their power to stop them.® Jewish debts could also be an excuse for harassment—Jews could sometimes be arrested, and on at least one occasion a debtor’s son was imprisoned for his mother’s debt. A more common accusation was that of robbery. A priest of the Carmelite order who was the victim of a robbery while staying at an inn run by a Jew accused not

only the arendator but all the elders of the local community of committing the crime.°’ The Jewish community of Parczew was accused of organizing an attack on a church at Wohyn, and Jews were accused of assaulting clergymen in various villages.°° Particularly frequent was the accusation of stealing silver implements from church buildings: Jews were regularly arrested on these charges, and were 6° CLRMO 195, pp. 425—7, 30 May 1708. 61 CLRMO 207, pp. 176—7, 8 Aug. 1714. 62 CLRMO 217, pp. 343-5, 18 Oct. 1718; CLRMO 258, p. 94, 14 Mar. 1735. 63 CLRMO 10909, p. 54. There may be an interesting parallel here to the case of one Jew who refused to allow his neighbour to open a shop selling alcohol under the pretext that it was too close to the synagogue; CLRMO 183, p. 233, 3 Aug. 1701; CLRMO 183, p. 338, 18 Aug. 1701. Cf. Goldberg, ‘Poles and Jews: Acceptance or Rejection’, 252-7. 64 CLRMO 1091, pp. 887-8, 26 Nov. 1705. Cf. also CLRMO 230, p. 183, 23 May 1723. Here com-

plaints about the protection of Jews are combined with similar complaints about the protection of Calvinists.

6° CLRMO 211, p. 103, 3 Feb. 1717; CLRMO 2109, pp. 262-3, 10 July 1719. Cf. the case of the provost of Urzedow who charged the local Jews with inflicting material and moral damage on the burghers by selling them alcohol, and even summoned the mayor and other dignitaries on charges of illegally permitting Jewish settlement; CLRMO 1092, p. 331, 17 May 1706; CLRMO 1092, p. 317, 21 May 1706.

66 CLRMO 197, p. 233, 23 Apr. 1710; CLRMO 197, p. 269, 2 May 1710; CLRMO 178, p. 67, 16 Jan. 1700; CLRMO 248, p. 248, 19 Feb. 1700. The imprisonment of debtors’ children was sometimes a prelude to converting them against their parents’ wishes. 6&7 CLRMO 218b, pp. 398, 404—-5, 1 Apr. 1719.

68 CLRMO 189, p. 22, 20 Dec. 1709; CLRMO 215, p. 147, 18 Dec. 1718.

442 Adam Teller either forced to pay some recompense or be tortured and even sentenced to having their hands cut off.°? A particular source of conflict between Jews and clergymen were converts: Jews were accused of attempting to prevent conversions and of insulting the prior who was in charge of the process;’° Jews living on Church lands refused to pay dues to

a convert as requested by the estate authorities;’! and on one occasion the Jews were accused of murdering a convert.’? In the famous case of the convert Jan Serafinowicz, who tried to engage the Jewish community in a religious disputation, Jews were brought to trial for their part in trying to thwart his plans.” As we have seen, the Jews were not always passive partners in these difficult relations. The castle courts heard cases of clergymen who tried to impose their will on the Jewish population and claimed that they found themselves at the receiving

end of a string of insults.“ If things got out of hand, it was not unknown for the Jew to be accused of physically assaulting a priest.’° In really extreme cases, the local community might even be charged with fomenting a riot to give vent to their

feelings.” |

The question arises to what extent all the charges against the Jews brought by the clergy described here were based on reality. It seems unlikely (though perhaps not entirely impossible) that Jews would mount an armed attack on a church, as was Claimed at Wohyf, or that all the elders of a given community might conspire to rob a passing clergymen at an inn.’ On the other hand, it seems not unreasonable to assume that the Jews would be unwilling to co-operate with converts, or that they might argue and even fight with priests who came to harass them in 69 CLI 145, p. 129, 12 Mar. 1704; CLRMO 108, p. 232, 2 May 1711; CLRMO 108, p. 250, 9 May 1711; CLD 127, p. 115, 3 July 1734; CLD 127, pp. 115-16, 27 July 1734. On one occasion the Jews were freed from arrest without any record of payment being made; CLI 147, p. 173, 11 June 1708. 70 CLRMO 228, p. 234, 10 Dec. 1722. 71 CLRMO 218a, pp. 39-40; CLRMO 218b, p. 39, 13 Jan. 1719. ” CLRMO 174, p. 530, 15 Apr. 1699. Cf. CLRMO 175, pp. 307, 311, 17 June 1699. On the question of Jewish converts in Poland, see J. Goldberg, ‘Zydowscy konwertyci w spoleczeristwie staropolskim’, Spoleczenstwo Staropolskie, 4 (1986), 195-248; id., ‘Die getauften Juden in Polen—Litauen im 16.—18. Jahrhundert. Taufe, soziale Umschichtung und Integration’, Jahrbiicher fiir Geschichte Osteuropas, 30

(1982), 54-99; M. Teter, ‘Jewish Conversions to Catholicism in the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Jewish History, 17 (2003), 257-83. 73 CLRMO 211, p. 256, 4 Mar. 1717. This document provides important information about Serafinowicz’s activity in 1716. Cf. M. Balaban, Letoledot hatenuah hafrankit (Tel Aviv, 1934), 5, 59. 74 CLRMO 179, p. 681, 21 Aug. 1700; CLRMO 228, p. 234, 10 Dec. 1722.

7 CLRMO 1091, pp. 887-8, 26 Nov. 1705; CLRMO 211, p. 103, 3 Dec. 1717; CLRMO 220, . 715.

° i CLRMO 190, pp. 8-9, 5 Jan. 1704; CLRMO 198, p. 432, 18 May 1711; CLRMO 199, pp. 341-3, 26 Jan. 1711; CLRMO 1699, p. 128, 10 June 1711.

“7 CLRMO 189, p. 22, 20 Dec. 1709; CLRMO 215, p. 147, 18 Dec. 1718; CLRMO 218b, pp. 398, 404-5, 1 Apr. 1719.

‘In the Land of their Enemies’? 443 the pursuit of their livelihood. Jewish riots, too, were by no means unknown.” However, in the context of the discussion here, the question of the Jews’ guilt or otherwise is perhaps of secondary importance to the zeal demonstrated by the clergy in prosecuting the Jews. This is evidence that despite the economic connections between the Jews and Church institutions, the local clergy felt no compunction about doing its best to make life as difficult as possible for the hated Jewish

population. Whether the charges were genuine or invented may well have been subordinate to the priest’s real desire to humiliate and harm the Jews. Thus, while for structural reasons the Church may not have been able to bring about the imposition of serious restrictions on Jewish social and economic life, churchmen were able to hinder and harm the Jews in the course of their daily lives and often had no qualms about doing so.

In addition to this clerical harassment, the Jews were the victims of violence from all strata of society; the Lublin Castle records give evidence of a very high level of violence in general. In addition to nobles and priests, peasants, burghers, and soldiers were all brought to court charged with physically assaulting Jews.”° The reasons given could be disputes over money, religious hatred, or simply senseless violence.®° On more than one occasion these attacks led to the death of the Jewish victim, whose relatives were left with the task of taking the murderers to court.®! This was not always easy, and the Jews were sometimes forced to compromise before they were able to bring the guilty party to justice.*? It should be noted that the Jews were not only the victims of violence, they were also its perpetrators: the castle courts tried a number of cases of physical assault by one Jew on another.®° Jews were also charged with attacking non-Jews: the Jewish administrator of part of the Sieniawski estates, Izrael Rubinowicz, was accused of using violence to prevent the wife of a Lublin merchant from trading against his will, though this may be regarded as a case of an attack perpetrated in the name of *® G. Hundert, ‘Shekiat yirat hakavod bekehilot beit yisra’el bepolin-lita’, Annual of Bar-Ilan University, Studies in Judaica and the Humanities, 24—5 (Ramat Gan, 1989), 41—50; id., ‘Population and

Society in Eighteenth-Century Poland’, in J. Michalski, Lud zydowski w narodzie polskim (Warsaw, 1994), 12-19. 9 A. and R. Kuwalkowie, ‘Zydzi i chrzescijanie w Lublinie w XVI i XVII wieku: Przyczynek do dziejw Zydéw w Lublinie w okresie staropolskim’, in T. Radzik (ed.), Zydzi w Lublinie, ii (Lublin, 1998), 9-31. 5° CLRMO 167, pp. 388-9, 4 June 1697; CLRMO 179, p. 452, 17 July 1700; CLRMO 179, p. 546, 27 July 1700; CLRMO 189, p. 5, 2 Jan. 1703; CLRMO 236, p. 871, 21 Nov. 1725. 31M. Nadav, ‘Ma’asei alimut hadadim bein yehudim lelo-yehudim belita lifnei 1648’, Gal-Ed, 7-8 (1985), 41-56. 82 CLI 145, pp. 185-6, 10 Feb. 1705; CLI 153, pp. 266-7, 13 Apr. 1718. °° CLRMO 174, pp. 798-9, 17 May 1707; CLRMO 194, p. 98, 23 Feb. 1707; CLRMO 227, p. 712, 12 Sept. 1722. Cf. a case in which a Jewish creditor who was using a soldier to collect a debt asked him to beat up the Jewish debtor; CLRMO 167, p. 617, 14 Aug. 1797.

444 Adam Teller a magnate rather than Jewish violence.** In other cases, Jews were charged with brawling with Armenians (presumably a conflict between merchants),®° beating a pregnant woman and causing her to miscarry,°° attacking the castle official responsible for burying the dead during a plague,®’ and even assaulting a priest who tried to stop them making vodka on a Sunday.®° Another form of Jewish violence, mentioned above, was the riot. Jews were accused of rioting in Lublin when Dominican monks tried to collect their debts from them, and in Zotkiew when a company of soldiers tried to collect poll tax from them.®? When the Franciscan order tried to interfere in Jewish burials during the plague of 1711, the Jews rioted and attacked the monks.?°

Another form of contact between Jews and their neighbours, often involving violence, was criminal activity. Here, too, the Jews were not only the victims but also the perpetrators. One of the most common charges brought against Jews was robbery: Jews were accused of robbing from nobles, priests, peasants, burghers, and even other Jews.?! On one occasion a Jewish arendator was accused of using the dragoons which the estate owner had put at his disposal to collect debts in order to attack and rob a nobleman and his wife passing on the road.** A branch of crime often thought to have been dominated by Jews, horse-stealing, is surprisingly under-represented in the sources examined here.?? More common were cases involving bands of Jewish thieves who acted together in order to rob passers-by.”* 84 CLRMO 101, p. 783, 30 June 1705. On Rubinowicz, see Rosman, The Lords’ Fews, 154-84. Cf. a similar case when a tax-collector working for the royal factor, Becal, was accused of attacking a nobleman; CLRMO 172, p. 213, 5 June 1698. See A. Kazmierczyk, ‘Sprawa Jakuba Becala, zydowskiego faktora Jana ITT Sobieskiego w koricu XVII wieku’, Studia Historyczne, 35/2 (1992), 155-71.

85 CLRMO 167, p. 289, 5 Apr. 1697; K. Matwijowski, ‘Zydzi i Ormianie w Rzeczypospolitej Obojga Narodéw (wiek XVI do XVIII)’, in Link-Lenczowski and Polariski (eds.), Zydzi w dawnej

Rzeczypospolitej, 162-9. 86 CLRMO 229, p. 397, 10 Apr. 1723. 87 CLRMO 108, pp. 9-10, 17 Jan. 1711. 88 CLRMO 211, p. 103, 3 Feb. 1717. 89 CLRMO 1909, pp. 8-9, 5 Nov. 1704; CLRMO 197, p. 51, 12 Feb. 1710. 9° CLRMO 1099, pp. 341-3, 26 Jan. 1711; CLRMO 108, pp. 432, 583, 18 May 1711; CLRMO 1499, p. 128, 10 June 1711; CLRMO 108, pp. 9-10, 17 Jan. 1711.

91 CLI 145, p. 129, 12 Mar. 1704; CLRMO 226, p. 129, 4 Feb. 1722; CLRMO 229, pp. 321-2, 11 Mar. 1723; CLD 120, pp. 263-5, 16 Mar. 1702; CLD 127, pp. 95-6, 13 Mar. 1732. Cf. A. Teller, ‘Jidische Unterschichten in polnisch-litauischen Stadtgesellschaften des 18. Jahrhunderts’, in S. Jersch-Wensel et al. (eds.), Juden und Armut im Muittel- und Osteuropa (Cologne, 2000), 110-21; E. Ringelblum, ‘Der yidisher opshoys in 18-ten yarhundert’, in Ringelblum, Kapitlen geshikhte fun amolikn yidishn lebn in poyln (Buenos Aires, 1953), 153—67. On the role of the Jews in the Polish under-

world of the 16th and 17th centuries, see M. Kamler, Swiat przestepczy w Polsce XVI i XVII stulecia (Warsaw, 1991), 46-7. 92 CLRMO 226, p. 129, 4 Feb. 1722; CLRMO 226, p. 172, 19 Feb. 1722. There is more than a little room to doubt the veracity of this charge. 93 CLRMO 169, p. 195, 30 July 1697; cf. CLRMO 195, p. 221, 3 Apr. 1708. 94 CLRMO 179, p. 500, 29 July 1700; CLRMO 195, p. 221, 3 Apr. 1708; CLD 127, p. 107, 5 May 1734; CLD 127, p. 113, 19 May 1733.

‘In the Land of their Enemies’? 445 Cases of murder committed by Jews seem to have been quite rare and were limited to accusations of killing converts.?° An interesting aspect of Jewish criminal activity was that it often involved co-

operation between Jews and Christians. The simplest form of this co-operation was when Jewish merchants acted as fences, selling property stolen by Christians.°° However, Jews could also be active participants in criminal activity together with Christians: merchants of both faiths would co-operate in smuggling goods to avoid tax payments, and mixed bands of robbers would prey on peasants bringing produce to market.?’ There was even a case where a band of Jews and peasants were accused of co-operating in a robbery from a church in Kraénik.?® Thus it would seem that violence and crime did form a part of the daily life and social relations of the Jews in eighteenth-century Poland.®? However, the interactions between Jews and Poles in this field were by no means one-sided. It is perhaps true that, as victims, Jews might not always have been able to defend themselves against outside hostility, though the cases examined here are testimony that they did bring at least some of the criminals before the courts. However, the Jews also

appear alongside their neighbours as perpetrators of crime, and this should be interpreted as meaning that their place in Polish society was not significantly different—mutatis mutandis—from the other groups that made it up. This conclusion is perhaps strengthened by the cases of co-operation between Christians and Jews in the perpetration of crimes. In these cases the Jews were neither helpless victims of religious persecution nor privileged agents of the nobility: they were simply an integral part of Polish society, with all the strengths and weaknesses that such a status brought with it.!°° x

The various aspects of Polish—Jewish relations in the daily life of early eighteenthcentury Poland examined here demonstrate the problems involved in a one-sided approach to the issue. The Jews’ relations with the clergy, and to a certain extent other groups, were undoubtedly the result of religious persecution, to which the Jews were particularly vulnerable. On the other hand, they did enjoy significant support and protection from the magnates, which meant not only that they were not entirely powerless in the face of persecution, but that they could sometimes repay their persecutors in kind. 9° See above, n. 72. °6 CLD 127, pp. 30-1, 11 Mar. 1717; CLD 127, p. 32, 18 Mar. 1717.

7 CLRMO 214, p. 45, 6 Sept. 1717; CLRMO 215, p. 835, 13 June 1718; CLRMO 229, pp. 321-2,

tr Mar. 1723. 98 CLRMO 108, p. 232, 2 May 1711; CLRMO 108, p. 250, 9 May 1711. °° This was, of course, a common phenomenon in Jewish history, which deserves much more attention than has hitherto been devoted to it. See H. Glanz, Geschichte des niederen jtidischen Volkes in Deutschland. Eine Studie tiber historisches Gaunertum, Bettelwesen und Vagantentum (New York, 1968). 100 See above, n. 2.

A46 Adam Teller However, examining Polish—Jewish relations solely in terms of the Jews’ relative

strength and weakness seems to reveal only part of the story. The cases of crime and violence discussed above do not easily fit into these categories, for it 1s not at all clear that the fact that Jewish criminals were prepared to prey upon non-Jews 1s a

sign of their strength. Rather, it seems to be a sign of the Jews’ integration into society—they robbed and were robbed just like burghers and even noblemen. In addition, the violence they suffered at the hands of the nobles was not special to them, but rather part of a phenomenon general to Polish society in that period. Moreover, the use the Jews made of the castle courts and their recognition by that legal system are also evidence of their integration into Polish society rather than of any relative strength or weakness. Since the Jews’ penetration of the Polish economy does seem to be at the base of their integration into Polish society, their relations with the magnates were obviously an important factor in this phenomenon.’°' However, neither these relations nor the Jews’ economic strength were able to negate the essential duality that, as both Jewish and Polish society of the day recognized, lay at the heart of Polish— Jewish relations in the early modern age. 101 Hundert also emphasizes the importance of the Jews’ demographic growth in this process. See Hundert, ‘Population and Society in Eighteenth Century Poland’.

The Controversy over Mickiewicz’s Jewish Origins LAURA QUERCIOLI MINCER All goodness, all beauty, all decorum is found in Poland. JAKOB BEN JEHUDA CALLED FRANK THE MESSIAH?*

Mucu has been written about what Adam Mickiewicz, ‘the first poet of Poland’, wrote, did, and said. But much has also been left unanalysed; some prominent themes, such as Mickiewicz’s perception of some key concepts of Hebraism, and above all messianism, have yet to be studied in depth. From the point of view of this Polish—Jewish crossing of cultures, an unbiased study of what Gershom Scholem has defined as ‘the profound, dangerous and destructive nature of the dialectic of the messianic idea” could yield interesting new results. Yet Mickiewicz’s view that Polish messianism is in large part indebted to Jewish messianism seems to have had very little resonance (as did his statement about

the possibility of having different literary schools in Poland, among them a Jewish one—or rather an ‘Israelite’ one—equal in value to the others).? The study of the Frankist elements that reached Mickiewicz through the Lithuanian tradition, and, undoubtedly, through the teachings of Andrzej Towiariski, should be deepened as well, in order to bring to light his original and often amazing commentaries. To my teacher and friend Professor Andrzej Litwornia, who showed me the passage to the Carpathian mountains. ' Quoted in ‘Niektore fragmenty z Ksiegi stow’, in A. Kraushar, Frank 1 frankisct polscy, 1726-18106: Monografia historyczna osnuta na Zréodtach archiwalnych 1 rekopismiennych (Krakow, 1895), n. 1813.

Frank reiterates the idea several times. Later he repeats: ‘It is in Poland that all the goodness of the world is hidden. I tell you, 999 parts of the goodness of the world are in Poland, and in the rest of the

world you can find a thousandth part’ (ibid., n. 1828). (Jan Doktor published all Frank’s scripts: Ksiega Stow Panskich: Egzoteryczne wyktady FJakuba Franka, 2 vols. (Warsaw, 1997).)

2 G. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah (1957; Eng. trans., Princeton, 1975), 14. 3 A. Mickiewicz, ‘Literatura stowiariska: Cours de la littérature slave’, lecture, 1 July 1842 (one of the so-called prelekcje paryskie), pub. in Les Slaves: Cours professé au College de France (Paris, 1849). * The description is that of Arthur Mandel: Militant Messiah; or, The Flight from the Ghetto: The Story of Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement (Atlantic Heights, NJ, 1979).

448 Laura Querciolt Mincer Frank’s ‘messianic militarism’,* for instance, probably played a role in the formation of the Jewish Legion in Constantinople, and parallels could be drawn between the role of women in Frank’s entourage and the importance of women in Towianist circles. (It is common knowledge that Frank had twelve female apostles with him, and that he enjoyed a daring sexual freedom with his entourage.) Frank’s Polonophile statements may have been known to Mickiewicz; he may thus have found confirmation for his idea that the Jews, or a certain kind of Jew, could contribute decisively to the liberation of Poland. Maria Janion represents a shining exception in the study of Mickiewicz. She was among the first scholars in Poland to approach these topics, and she has done so with great skill and courage in two recent works.° It is extraordinary that the study of such important aspects of the poet’s work have been passed over in silence by so many of her colleagues. Furthermore, where there has been discussion, it has centred almost exclusively on the possibility of Mickiewicz’s mother, or another close relative, being a converted Jew (Frankist or otherwise). Also extraordinary is the effect of the vision of Father Piotr, one of the crucial moments in Mickiewicz’s ceuvre, with its two enigmatic elements: the ‘foreign mother’ and the number forty-four. Some scholars, such as Zdzistaw Kepinski in his Mickiewicz hermetyczny (1980),° appear to have been hypnotized by it, and have devoted themselves to convoluted and often far-fetched interpretations; others have left these mysteries unremarked as if they did not exist. The ‘classical’ Jewish interpretation is well known. According to gemairiyah, each letter of the Hebrew alphabet corresponds to a number. The value of dalet is four and the value of mem is forty. What would be important, though, would be to establish how Mickiewicz came to know gematriyah—whether through SaintMartin’s pamphlet Des nombres, handwritten copies of which were available in masonic circles, or through his mother or other direct family connections; 1t would also be valuable to learn why he chose a Jewish science to define himself (or, in any case, the new ‘redeemer’). I do not believe that it is vital for us to discover what percentage of Catholic convert or Frankist blood flowed through Mickiewicz’s veins. At this point it is impossible to ascertain whether he had any Jewish forebears. ‘The few documents that might have been useful were destroyed during the war, and the possibility of tracing an oral tradition has been lost for ever. In any case, the story of how this uparta plotka’ (persistent rumour) has been handed down through decades can shed light on some dark corners of the history of literature and culture in Poland. > M. Janion, “Tematy zydowskie u Mickiewicza’, in B. Zielifiska and M. Zieliiska (eds.), Tajemnice Mickiewicza (Warsaw, 1998); id., ‘Legion zydowski Mickiewicza’, in Do Europy tak, ale razem z naszymti umartymi (Warsaw, 2000).

6 Quoted in J. Rostropowicz Clark, ‘Adam Mickiewicz’s “Forty and Four”, or the Dangers of Playing with Kabbalahs’, Polin, 7 (1992), 57—62.The numerical interpretation offered by Kepinski is so complex that I will not even try to summarize it here. 7 This is the title of an article by Konrad Gorski, Zycie Literackie, 15 (1981).

Micktewicz’s fewish Origins AAQ A Jewish legend tells of a secret underground passage running from the Carpathian Mountains to Tsefat (Safed), the sacred city of kabbalists, in Israel. It was said that the founder of hasidism, the Ba’al Shem Tov, used the passage; at night he would pray with the kabbalists in Tsefat, and during the day he would be in Poland. Stanislaw Vincenz quotes this legend in reference to Mickiewicz and his ties to Israel and Hebraism.® But the secret passage by the river Czeremosz is also a metaphor for the ties that exist or could exist between Jews and Poles: flowing underground, mysterious, like a secret spring that should not be allowed to run dry.

Why has the passage between Czeremosz and Tsefat remained secret? Why has

the mystery about the Jewish origin and influences in Mickiewicz’s thinking remained unsolved? There seems to have been a silent agreement among scholars. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, it seems that there are some things that should not be discussed. For several decades it has been virtually impossible, at least 1n certain circles, to speak dispassionately about a topic as crucial to everyone who is interested in Polish literature as the ‘Jewish idea’ and its implications in Mickiewicz’s philosophy. The first to attempt to speak about Mickiewicz as ‘a man and not a political emblem’ was Tadeusz Boy-Zeleriski at the end of the 1920s. But his revolutionary book Brgzownicy (“The Monument-Makers’)’ did not generate a following in that line of study. A few years later the catastrophe of the Second World War destroyed many documents, as well as the remnants of that world in which Mickiewicz had lived as a young man: ‘Na Litwie, w lasach, karczmach, ze szlachta, z Zydami . . .’ (‘In Lithuania, in the woods, in the taverns, with the nobility, with the Jews . . .’)."°

In 1964 Samuel Scheps remarked that , there is a gap both in this work" and in all the other articles recently published: I am talking about the Jewish aspects of Adam Mickiewicz’s personality. They have been neglected for over half a century, and it seems to me that by evoking them we are filling a historical gap, adding at the same time essential elements to the knowledge of this great man.”

Jadwiga Maurer’s monograph ‘Z matki obce).. .’: Szkice 0 powigzaniach Mickie-

wicza ze Swiatem Zydéw (‘“Of a Foreign Mother”: Sketches on Mickiewicz’s

Ties with the Jewish World’), though written more as a pamphlet than as a scholarly study, is a stone thrown into the stagnant waters of Polish studies. ‘Now we shall deal with a category of dead and buried issues—buried in the 8S. Vincenz, ‘Mickiewicz i Zydzi’, in Vincenz, Tematy Zydowskie (London, 1977), 67—75. 9 'T: Boy-Zelenski, Brazownicy (Warsaw, 1930). Another article dealing with this delicate theme is E. Lopaczyiski, ‘Matka poety: Czy naprawde “z matki obcej”?’, Wiadomosc1 Literackie, 12 (20 Mar. 1932).

10 Letter from Mickiewicz to Odyniec, quoted in J. Maurer, ‘Z matki obcej .. .’, in Maurer, ‘Z matki obcey .. .’: Szkice 0 powigzaniach Mickiewicza ze $wiatem Zydéw (London, 1990; Krakow, 1996), 23. 11 The scholarly studies published on the occasion of the centenary of his death. 12S. Scheps, Adam Mickiewicz: Ses affinités juives (Paris, 1964), 22.

450 Laura Quercioli Mincer cemetery of studies on Mickiewicz,’ Maurer remarks early in the work. “The most important of these is the Jewish question, which has been removed relatively early, thoroughly, and one might say irreversibly. Thick strata of oblivion have covered it. he paths leading to it have been covered by weeds. Critics, as usual, only repeat what has already been said, without looking for new things.’!? In an article published in the same year in Polin, Maurer affirms: Jewish subjects are generally omitted from Mickiewicz scholarship. If they appear, sporadically, their treatment is, as a rule, laconic. Yet the ‘passages’ of the poet’s life—his birth ‘of an alien mother’, his sudden, puzzling decision to import a Frankist bride from Warsaw to Paris, and his untimely, mysterious death in Constantinople while organizing ‘The Hussars

of Israel’ (an early Zionistic venture before the word was invented), all carry a crucial Jewish component. +

Until now, an ‘inexplicable silence’ has surrounded the Jewish elements of Mickiewicz’s production, with few exceptions.’° ‘Let’s face it’, Maurer writes, ‘from the very beginning all the studies on Mickiewicz have been openly imbued with antisemitic feelings.’!© In particular, the work of Stanislaw Pigon (who for , decades was the leading expert on Mickiewicz) is characterized by a kind of antisemitism that foreshadows ‘the future science of the Nazi breed’. Maurer opines that Pigon’s ‘antisemitic convictions, even when modified or mollified, will hover over all scholarship on Mickiewicz’.*” In his short work Adam Mickiewicz: Ses affinités juives,‘® Scheps discusses the reasons for this ‘inexplicable silence’: Let’s not quote these details to complain about them. On the contrary. We realize that had he [Karel Krejéi, a scholar at the University of Prague] emphasized the Jewish origin of the above-mentioned poets [Tuwim, Stonimski, and Wittlin], he would have risked becoming subject to the kind of criticism opposed to ours, i.e. following the example of antisemitic critics. In the period between the wars they largely used such labels in order to discriminate against such poets and refuse their right of citizenship within Polish literature. In this cli13 Maurer, ‘Z matki obcej. . .”, 12-13. 14 J. Maurer, ‘The Omission of Jewish Topics in Mickiewicz Scholarship’, Polin, 5 (1990), 185. See also two replies to Maurer’s book: Z. Sudolski, ‘Mickiewicz i Zydzi: Na marginesie sporéw genealogicznych’, Przeglad Powszechny, 1 (1998); A. S. Buthak, Barbara znaczy obca: W odpowiedzi Jadwidze

Maurer (Zielona Gora, 1998). To my knowledge, one of the first articles devoted to Barbara Majewska’s Frankist origins is in T. Wierzbowski, Z badan nad Mickiewiczem i utworami jego (Warsaw, 1916), 23, where the author confirms Barbara’s Jewish descent. One of the most recently published is

S. Rybczonek, ‘Przodkowie Adama Mickiewicza po kadzieli’, Blok-Notes Muzeum Literatury im. Adama Mickiewtcza, nos. 12-13 (Warsaw, 1999), 177-92, where the Belarusian scholar defends the Opposing position. 19 Maurer, ‘The Omission of Jewish Topics in Mickiewicz Scholarship’, 189.

16 Maurer, ‘Z matki obcej . . .’, 22. 17 Thid. 58.

18 It is significant that Scheps felt the need to stamp his text with a ‘certificate of patriotism’ by dedicating it to ‘the memory of my elder brother Josef Scheps, medical doctor, officer of the Polish army, murdered at Katysi, with thousands of other Polish officers’.

Mickiewicz’s fewish Origins 451 mate poisoned by racist tendencies, attracting the reader’s attention to some Jewish aspects of Mickiewicz’s work—the greatest national poet—would have been equivalent to a sort of ‘vindication’, a sort of ‘reverse racism’. This is the reason why the Jewish aspects of his personality were passed over in silence, or nearly so, in Poland between the wars. The few studies that approach this topic—written by Polish scholars of Jewish descent—have not had the necessary following.'®

If Scheps’s words seem bold, it will suffice to remember that between the wars the Ob6z Narodowo-Radykalny (National Radical Camp) was spreading the slogan ‘Precz z pol-Zydem Mickiewiczem’ (‘Down with Mickiewicz, the half-Jew’). Had

Adam Mickiewicz been living at the time, he would have been relegated to the ghetto benches. In the period after the Second World War, Mieczyslaw Jastrun followed up on all of Boy-Zeleriski’s suggestions in his fine book on Mickiewicz’s life.2° Jerzy Borejsza’s biography of Armand Lévy, Mickiewicz’s secretary (‘a Jewish nationalist’, according to Gershom Scholem in the Jemish Encyclopedia), is also of funda-

mental importance.?' Adam Wazyk, in the 1979 collection of essays Cudowny kantorek (‘The Wonderful Little Singer’),?? reveals an amazing gap in the scientific

interpretations of the fourth part of his drama verse cycle Dziady (‘Forefathers’ Eve’): “This absentmindedness, if not wilful neglect, has become a rule of today’s academic knowledge, observed in commentaries and larger publications. It is hard to believe, but yet it is true.’*°

The great majority of published works on Mickiewicz seem to avoid carefully any reference to Jewish elements. They all seem to be driven by what Joanna Rostropowicz Clark calls the same bias, which prevented the authors of the most recent books about Mickiewicz in Towianski’s Kofo Boze (Konrad Gorski, Muickiewicz—Towianski, 1986; Krzysztof Rutkowski, Braterstwo albo Smieré, 1988; Alina Witkowska, Towiariczycy, 1989) from even uttering the word ‘Jew’ or ‘Judaism’ or (God forbid!) from quoting the poet’s line (in one of his Collége de France lectures of the period) that some of Polish poetry (his own!) belongs to ‘Israelian’ literature.?4

This otherwise dark horizon is brightened by two wonderful contributions by Maria Janion. Safe in her unquestionable prestige and in an age that does not fear passing fashions, Janion deals in depth with two ‘Jewish’ elements in the life and work of Mickiewicz: his connection with Frankism and his attempt, in the last 19 Scheps, Adam Mickiewicz, 24. 20 M. Jastrun, Mickiewicz (Warsaw, 1949).

1977). 22 Warsaw, 1979. 21 J. W. Borejsza, Sekretarz Adama Mickiewicza (Armand Lévy 1 jego czasy, 1827-1891 ) (Wroclaw,

23 Quoted in Rostropowicz Clark, ‘Adam Mickiewicz’s “Forty and Four”’, 58.

24 Tbid. 62. The theme of Celina Syzmanowska’s Frankist origins is extensively treated in A. Witkowska, Celina 1 Adam Micktewiczomie (Krakow, 2002), 160 (where she also reports on the many

antisemitic comments on Mickiewicz’s marriage), and is mentioned by Ewa K. Kossak (among others) in Rodzina M. (Warsaw, 1991).

452 Laura Querciol Mincer years of his life, to create a Jewish Legion in Constantinople.”° Times seem to have

changed; in the new democratic Poland, Janion’s contributions have not been received unfavourably, in contrast to what happened, for instance, to Jan Blofiski in 1987, when his article ‘Biedni Polacy patrza na getto’° provoked a highly critical response.

It is not possible to summarize in this brief chapter all that has been written recently about Mickiewicz’s ties with Hebraism; I shall thus limit my discussion to

a brief overview of some points that, so far, seem to have eluded the scholars’ attention. A figure that is beginning to emerge from the darkness to which it had been relegated is that of Xawera Deybel. Xawera could be the missing link in the chain of Mickiewicz’s ties to the Jewish world. It is, as usual, thanks to Boy-Zeleniski that Xawera was introduced to the scholarly community. She appears in an aura

of flames. In Brgzownicy, Boy describes his encounter with Jozef Albin Herbaczewski, the founder of Lithuanian expressionism, then a professor in Kovno. The older scholar tells Boy about a woman who had deeply upset his life:

‘A red-haired Salome—a Jewess—the same (he added) who had tempted Mickiewicz; she was Teufe/-—Deybel—djabet: the devil’. From this, Boy concludes, we can infer the existence of a tradition concerning Xawera’s Jewish descent and her influence on the life of the poet.?” Poor Xawera Deybel! As a girl, she was sensual and devilish, with fiery eyes, while in later pictures she was an austere, unattractive matron. Oddly, she is absent from

most monographs on Mickiewicz—even from Jadwiga Maurer’s book. Yet, as Krzysztof Rutkowski demonstrates in his long and interesting essay “Tajemnica Xawery (‘Xawera’s Secret’), she was probably the only woman Mickiewicz did not run away from, the only one he did not fear.° If only for this reason, we owe her respect. It 1s a pity that even Rutkowski does not find it worthwhile to consider the possibility that Xawera might have been a Frankist, though this could provide a simple

explanation to some mysteries: for instance, why, as a young woman, was she received so easily in Mickiewicz’s house.”° _ Jastrun mentions Xawera’s Jewishness only in a note: the label ‘Jewish Princess’ given to her by Towiariski ‘referred to one of [her] ancient personifications and did

not allude to her presumed Jewish origin’.*° But the same Xawera, Jastrun con2° Janion, ‘Legion zydowski Mickiewicza’. 26 Tygodnik Powszechny, 2 (1987). 27 Boy-Zeleriski, Brgzownicy, 149; it is well known that the devil and the Jew are closely related in the popular imagination.

28 K. Rutkowski, ‘Tajemnica Xawery’, Res Publica, 12/111 (Dec. 1997), 29-43. According to Rutkowski, Xawera was ‘the most interesting, the most mysterious and the most tragic figure of a woman in Polish xx century Emigration’ (‘Nagaduszka’, TwérczoSé, 7 (1998)). 29 Rutkowski deals with Mickiewicz’s possible Jewish origin disparagingly in ‘Kilka uwag z powodu

“Kailku szczegdlow”’, Tworczosé, t (1995), 65-83 (Rutkowski’s article is quoted by Janion, ‘Legion

zydowski Mickiewicza’). 30M. Jastrun, Mickiewicz, roth edn. (Warsaw, 1963), 359 Nn. I.

Mickiewicz’s Jewish Origins 453 tinues, would have been the model for Judyta in Kszgdz Marek (‘Father Marek’). Scheps does not beat about the bush: ‘We acknowledge that one of the more active women in Towianski’s circle was Miss Xawera Deybel, of Jewish origin, governess of Mickiewicz’s children, a sort of femme fatale.’** Not satisfied with disclosing to the world the poet’s indiscretion, Boy-Zeleriski

continued to wonder about the ethnic origin of the object of such illicit love: “There is another thing that I consider important. Xawera’s origin. Was she Jewish? ‘Towianski called her “the Jewish Princess”. Lenartowicz, surely well informed by his wife, mentions her in passing, when he writes to Teodora Moszczuska that “Adam got carried away in depravities with Jewesses” | grzat w nieprawosciach z Zydéwkami|. Had she been baptized, since she was Rom’s godmother? What was her role when Mickiewicz decided to break with the Maestro?’®* Later Boy continues: ‘Obviously, as the bronze for his statue was being melted, all this Hebraizing was kept silent. ‘Today, it would be interesting for us to

find out to what extent the personality of the “Jewish Princess” had left its mark on such themes. Will we ever know?’®° If at the end of the 1920s Boy could still

expect, somewhat legitimately, that future studies would shed light on these themes, today it all seems quite complex. It can be expected that even in Mickiewicz’s story some gaps and blank pages will soon be filled. ‘I do not care at all’, Boy writes at the end of his chapter on Xawera, ‘whether Mr Deybel . . . was circumcised. I have personally received reports on the fact that Xawera was not just called a Jew, but was actually a “Russian Jew”. We confidently wait for an explanation of such facts.’*4 The passages in which Mickiewicz writes about Hebraism, Jews, and Jewish matters more or less directly are innumerable. Among the many phrases he uses, one in particular deserves special attention, if for no better reason than that, now almost an idiom in Polish, it was heard on Pope John Paul II’s lips during his visit to the Jewish synagogue in Rome. I am referring to the formulation ‘Israel, elder brother’, which caused an outcry among Polish Jews in Israel®° and is still controversial. Mickiewicz uses it in List of Principles 10: ‘Izraelowi, bratu starszemu, uszanowanie, braterstwo.. .’ (“To Israel, our elder brother, respect, brotherhood ...).°° It is such an evocative expression that Elio Toaff, the chief rabbi of Rome, used it as the title of his memoirs: Perfidi giudei—fratelli maggiori (“Treacherous Jews—Elder Brothers’).?” This title shows the path taken by the Church in recent

33 Tbid. 116. 34 Tbid. 118. 31 Scheps, Adam Mickiewicz, 53. 32 Boy-Zeleriski, Brazownicy, 115.

35 See e.g. Norwid’s reaction, quoted by Janion, ‘Legion zydowski Mickiewicza’, 28. 36 The Pope’s observation as quoted by Ginzburg was: ‘You are our favourite brothers and in a way we might say our elder brothers’ (Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Un lapsus di papa Wojtyla’, in Occhiacci di legno: Nove riflessioni sulla distanza (Milan, 1998), 210-15). The visit to the synagogue in Rome took place on

14 April 1986. 37 Milan, 1987.

454 Laura Querciol Mincer decades to get closer to Hebraism and to reject the antisemitic prejudices that seem to have been intrinsically connected with Catholic teachings. An article by Carlo Ginzburg has cleared up these references. The controversy

over Mickiewicz hence moves from Poland to contemporary Italy. Ginzburg writes: I do not know if anyone paid attention (but I suppose they did) to the fact that those words ‘elder brothers’ echoed a passage of a letter of St Paul to the Romans (9: 12). Paul remembers the Lord’s prophecy for Rebecca, pregnant with twins (Gen. 25: 23): “The elder shall

serve the youngest’, 1.e. the Jews (Esau) will be subject to non-Jews converted to Christianity (Jacob) . . . Paul follows with another quote, the words that the prophet Malachi attributes to the Lord: ‘I have loved Jacob but hated Esau.’ For two millennia the Christian hatred of the Jews, considered to be the representatives of literalism against spirit and of the flesh against the spirit, has been legitimized by this page of the converted Jew Paul. If, indeed, there is a text at the basis of Christian antisemitism, this is it.°°

Though many people have been puzzled by the ominous sound that the term ‘elder brother’ has for anyone with a passing knowledge of either the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament, Ginzburg is the first and perhaps the only scholar who has written about it in a medium of mass communication and whose observations have

provoked controversy. One of the responses that is particularly relevant to this topic is that of Gian Franco Svidercoschi, who observed that the Pope was probably thinking not so much of Paul as of Mickiewicz. Ginzburg replies that even if that were true, it is obvious that the poet was himself referring to Paul, ‘because no one who has been even minimally touched by the Christian tradition could call the Jews “elder brothers” without referring, consciously or not, to Romans 9: 12— least of all Mickiewicz’.*° Many of Mickiewicz’s observations about Jews thus acquire a new perspective. It 1s odd to see how little the reference to Paul, evident as it 1s, has been used by the critics of the poet’s work. One might suppose that this is a wise political ‘oversight’ on the Jewish side, while explanations for this omission on the Polish side remain to be found.

But almost as striking is the odd interest shown by Jews contemporary to Mickiewicz in a text in which Israel is described using the worse stereotypes: Ksiegi narodut pielgrzymstwa polskiego (“The Books of the Nation and of the Polish Pilgrimage’).*° Not only did Wladyslaw Mickiewicz write that ‘Israelites found in it almost a breath of Exodus, the tone of Isaiah’,*+ but the story of his translations is the best evidence of how Mickiewicz was loved and respected by Jews—no matter what he did or wrote. Ksiggi narodu 1 pielgrzymstwa polskiego was translated into 38 Ginzburg, ‘Un lapsus di papa Wojtyla’, 211. Frank’s statement in ‘Niekt6ore fragmenty z Ksiegi

slow’, n. 1829 acquires a new meaning: ‘I state it clearly: my God is in Esau’ (‘Powiadam wam wyraznie: Moj Bog jest w Ezawie’). 39 Avvenire, 8 Oct. 1997, quoted in Ginzburg, ‘Un lapsus di papa Wojtyla’, 213-15.

40 Paris, 1832. 41 Quoted by Scheps, Adam Mickiewicz, 35.

Mickiewicz’s Jewish Origins 455 Hebrew in Italy, probably from a French version, by Mosé Jechiel Ascarelli, a

cultural activist and the founder of the Societa di fratellanza (Society of Brotherhood). Published in Paris in 1881 for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the poet’s death, the translation included a preface by: Rabbi Eliyahu Chazan, one of the major Sephardi religious authorities of the time. By the express wishes of both Ascarelli and Chazan, the profits from the sale of the book were donated to the construction of Mickiewicz’s monument in Krakow.** As Scheps notes, Jews have a strong feeling of gratitude towards one who ‘has embraced the people of Israel, who has deeply loved Israel, the elder brother, for whom he has claimed rights and justice’.*? It then goes almost without saying that Mickiewicz’s origin is often taken for granted by Jews. Perhaps it was so rare that a non-Jew would manage to express himself with such feeling towards Israel that whoever did so would come to be considered one of ‘ours’ within the Jewish community. For instance, in his beautiful book on Jacob Frank, Arthur Mandel writes: Maria’s daughter, Celina, was married to Poland’s great son, the poet Adam Mickiewicz, he

too of Frankist origin. In his Dziady, a mystical drama imbued with Frankist themes, Mickiewicz alludes to his being the messiah, the one who, at the head of Poland and its ‘elder brother’, the Jewish people, would have led human beings to freedom—an idea clearly echoing Frank.**

But how well did Mickiewicz really know the Jewish world? In his elegant essay ‘The Mystery of the Jews in Mickiewicz’s Towianist Lectures on Slav Literature’, Abraham Duker notes that Mickiewicz’s idea of the Jewish people marks ‘a radical departure from fundamentalist Christian theology’.*° At the same time the scholar also observes that ‘there is little actual material in his writings and conversations that would prove Mickiewicz’s intimate acquaintance with the contemporary situation of the Jews’; and, further: ‘The poet’s allusions to the real history of Jews in Poland are rare and of little relevance.’*° For instance, in speaking of the Vilna of his childhood, Mickiewicz remarked in 1844 that he saw Jews praying, kneeling

with their Polish compatriots, in front of the Madonna. Duker’s comment in a footnote is ‘Jews do not pray kneeling, let alone to the Madonna.’*’

On the other hand, it is worth noting that, among the many proofs found by Jadwiga Maurer (and not only by her) in support of the ‘Jewish thesis’, there are 42 FE Kupfer and S. Strelcyn, Mickiewicz w przekladach hebrajskich (Wroclaw, 1955), 10-13. Samuele

Alatri, for decades president of the Jewish Community in Rome and, after Italy was unified, town councillor and alderman of the Capitoline board, asked the Capitol in 1877 to install a plaque in Mickiewicz’s home in Rome; see ibid. 13 ff. and A. Milano, Storia degl ebret in Itaha (Turin, 1963),

360. 43 Scheps, Adam Mickiewicz, 39.

44 Mandel, Militant Messiah, 151-2. In the same chapter there is an account of Goethe’s infatuation with Maria Szymanowska and, subsequently, with her sister Kazimiera. An observation of Goethe’s on Frank is also quoted: ‘How easily do needy people let themselves be tricked by sly swindlers!’ 45 A. G. Duker, ‘The Mystery of the Jews in Mickiewicz’s Towianist Lectures on Slav Literature’,

Polish Review, 3 (1962), 46. 46 Tbid. 51-2. 47 Thid. 52.

456 Laura Querciol Mincer many purely antisemitic statements. Zygmunt Krasinski, for instance, is known for

such remarks. As one scholar observes, ‘Where does all of Mickiewicz’s prorevolutionary partiality come from, according to Krasinski? Mickiewicz 1s a Jew, Krasiriski accuses, and revolution is Judaism.’*® It is well known that Krasiriski

suffered from a persecution complex regarding Jews. This is revealed, among other places, in his letter to August Cieszkowski, in which he defines wallenrodism

(the practising of deceit in order to advance national or political objectives) as ‘Judaic’ (‘wallenrodyzm to zydowstwo’), and in which he also says, ‘Don’t you know that the instinct to overturn the Christian world is congenital to the Judaic spirit? Are you surprised about Klaczko? Today Jews do it everywhere.’*? As Maria

Janion notes, the contrast between Mickiewicz and Krasifski—in which the role that Orthodox Jews and converted Jews could have played in the future of Poland is paramount—‘is not at all limited to Romanticism, but . . . recurs [in Polish polemics] in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well. One cannot think of the Polish cultural model without taking into account the character and the extent of this controversy.’°°

An interesting debate that summarizes the most common views about Mickiewicz’s Hebraism was carried out in the pages of Zycie Literackie in 1981. The participants were Konrad Gorski, Artur Sandauer, and one Honortusz Kauza (no doubt a pseudonym).*! Gorski’s ‘Uparta plotka’ appeared in Zycie Literackie at the beginning of 1981. The author, who by then was already 86, was known as the ‘dean of experts on Polish literature’ and as the ‘greatest expert on Mickiewicz after Juliusz Kleiner’.

He devotes two whole columns of the magazine to trying to demonstrate that Mickiewicz was not particularly biased in favour of Jews. Kauza’s response appeared in the same issue; he concludes that ‘the mere reading of “A Persistent Rumour” raises doubts on (a) the Aryan origin of the poet; and (4) the objectivity of Polish scholars. Before this I had no such doubts.’ In his lengthy answer Gorski demonstrates that, in his opinion, Mickiewicz’s behaviour towards Jews was justified by politics and by Polish nationalism; any other expression of sympathy was suggested by Towiariski and mattered very little. The critic concludes the controversy somewhat arrogantly: ‘Mr Kauza complains that he has lost faith in the scientific objectivity of Polish scholars. I am very sorry about that, but I have to confess that at the moment I have much bigger problems—as does the whole of Polish society.’ In a further chapter of this discussion Sandauer suggests that Mickiewicz tried to re-Judaize Christianity through the figure of a future redeemer and through his 48M. Biericzyk, ‘Wileriski debiut Juliana Klaczki’, Zeszyty Literackie, 28 (1989), 86—92; 29 (1990),

54-60. 49 Ibid. 56. Klaczko wanted to be part of the editorial staff of the Tribune des Peuples. 50 M. Janion, “Tematy zydowskie u Mickiewicza’. 51 Gorski, ‘Wok6! “upartej plotki” o Mickiewiczu’; responses by Sandauer, Kauza, and Gorski himself in Zycie Literackie (1981), no. 21, p. 2.

Mickiewicz’s fewtsh Origins 457 idea of messianism.°” His Jewish descent on his mother’s side, which Mickiewicz could very well have ignored, would have been the reason, whether conscious or not, for his choices. And, perhaps unconsciously, Mickiewicz could have identified himself as one of the possible messiahs for whom the Jews are still waiting. This was suggested by Wilhelm Fallek, a Jewish scholar, in a pamphlet published in 1932 entitled ‘Biblical Motifs in Part Three of Mickiewicz’s Dziady’.°° It is important to recall here that

the idea of messianism created a revolution in the way we think of time and history. The already redeemed Christian world is radically different from the world of the Jews (and here the Poles as well), who are waiting for a messiah, and for whom messiahs are potentially multiple, though none of them is victorious. (Vladimir Jankelevich has written, “There are only false messiahs, just as there are

only false Dmitrys . . . ’.°*) |

The Jews, Fallek explains, know other messiahs along with the triumphant one, the son of David: suffering messiahs, messiahs sons of Joseph. The messiah son of Joseph, as opposed to the messiah son of David, is lacking universal characteristics, and he will try to take on the liberation of his own people alone. ‘The messiah son of Joseph will have to suffer martyrdom . . . Only after his death will the second messiah come, the son of David, who will build for ever and definitely the Jewish State’ (1.e. he will bring the end of violence and oppression for everyone, as in the talmudic tradition). It 1s in Isaiah (53: 10-12) that we see this messiah, human and anguished: Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain [to] make his life an offering for sin. ... The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he poured out himself to death, and he was numbered with the transgressors, yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.

Fallek concludes: ‘Perhaps Mickiewicz interpreted this phrase, as many others did,

as if God was testing his people, and had they persevered in their suffering, He would have rewarded them. This interpretation is at the core of Polish messianism.”°?

Maybe this is the point at which the mysterious passage between the Carpathian Mountains and the holy city of Tsefat can be reopened. The possibility of maintaining a bond between Poles and Jews lies ‘in mutual gratitude’, writes Stanislaw Vincenz; it also lies in mutual recognition, we can surely add. Translated from the Italian by Gloria Pastorino 52 A. Sandauer, ‘Nie czy, lecz po co “z matki obcej”’, Zycie Literackie (1981), no. 36, p. 3 (also in A. Sandauer, Pisma zebrane (Warsaw, 1985), iv. 357-63). 3 W. Fallek, Motywy biblijne w IIT cz. Dziadéw Mickiewicza (Warsaw, 1932). °4 La Conscience juive face a l'histoire: Le Pardon (Paris, 1965), 16-17. °> Fallek, Motywy biblijne.

BLANK PAGE

The Double Voice in Polish Jewish Women’s Autobiographies of the 1930s TOBY W. CLYMAN THE period between the two world wars in eastern Europe was a time of rapid acculturation and assimilation among young Polish Jews. Large numbers of young Jewish men and women were rejecting the traditional ways of their par-

ents and adopting the culture of the dominant ethnic group. The ideologies vying for the attention of young Jews were proliferating. These factors and the rapidly changing economic conditions profoundly affected their lives.* Trying to understand and record the impact of these factors on young Jews and the Jewish community at large, YIVO (the Institute for Jewish Research) in Vilna organized a contest of autobiographies of young Jews aged 16 to 22;” in flyers sent to Jewish youth organizations announcing the contest, the organizers explained the reason for this competition as follows: At no time have the circumstances of Jewish youth been more complicated than they are today. Their economic conditions are more difficult, their upbringing has lost its former meaning and impact, and their place in society is also different. Today’s youth has to find its own orientation. Their experiences are different from that of earlier generations. To understand it all, to determine what these differences are, we need to hear from the young people themselves.°

To encourage young people to submit their life stories, YIVO offered twenty prizes. The top six contestants, the flyer noted, would receive prizes ranging from 150 to 250 zlotys. The next fourteen would be awarded a volume of YIVO’s 1 See C. S. Heller, On the Edge of Destruction: The Jews of Poland between the Two World Wars (New York, 1977); E. Mendelsohn, The fews of East Central Europe between the World Wars (Bloomington, Ind., 1983); E. Hoffman, Shietl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Fews (New York, 1997).

* For the flyer announcing the contest, see Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland, YIVO Archives, New York, RG 4, no. 151019. YIVO (the Institute for Jewish Research) was founded in 1925

in Germany and established itself in Vilna. After the Second World War the Institute was re-

established in New York. 3 Ibid. The translation from Yiddish is mine.

460 Toby W. Clyman journal. Furthermore, contributors were guaranteed complete anonymity and assured that poor writing style would not count against them; they were given complete freedom in the choice and organization of material. However, for greater ease, the flyer stressed, contributors should consider structuring their life stories chronologically. Moreover, each essay should touch on given points: Write about your family and how its members interacted with one another; about your childhood years, schools you attended, your teachers and how they influenced you . . . write about youth organizations to which you belonged, their activities, and what they have given you; tell how you chose a given trade . . . what life event has influenced you most.*

The contest was held in 1934, 1936, and again 1939.° On the eve of the Second World War, YIVO had collected over g00 youth autobiographies, written mostly in Yiddish, with many in Polish, some in Hebrew, and a few in Spanish and German.°®

More than 300 of these autobiographical narratives were recovered after the war and taken to YIVO’s archives in New York City.’ Scholars have made considerable use of these valuable texts since they became available to the public.? However, no one, to my knowledge, has examined these autobiographies through the lens of gender. Yet, as Shulamit Magnus notes in her

study of Pauline Wengeroff’s autobiography: ‘All self-reflexive writing is gendered. Gender is too basic a component of identity for it to be otherwise.”° In eastern Europe, the last stronghold of traditional Jewish culture, gender divisions were clearly demarcated. Ideologies of gender shaped not only domestic and cultural life but a wide range of more specific issues, such as reading, writing, and

modes of self-representation. This chapter focuses on the recovered female autobiographies of the 1930s and shows the extent to which they are inflected by gender. About ninety of the retrieved autobiographies, ranging in length from nine to sixty handwritten pages, were written by women. These female autobiographers came from shtetls and larger cities: Bialystok, Kotomyja, Lodz, Lwow, Kovno, and Lublin. Most were from Orthodox families; they expressed their religious rebel4 YIVO Archives, RG 4, no. 151019. > For the background and history of the three contests, see M. Steinlauf, ‘Jewish Politics and Youth

Cultures in Interwar Poland: Preliminary Evidence from the YIVO Autobiographies’, paper presented at the International Conference on the Ashkenazi Nation in Poland, May 1998. ® In addition to the autobiographies young people submitted for the contest, the archives contained several older diaries and letters that YIVO itself had collected. 7 Tam much indebted to Professor Michael C. Steinlauf and Professor Regina Grol for sharing with me much valuable information on the Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland. 8 For one of the earlier studies of the Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland, see Studium o mtodziezy zydowskiej: Program 1 metody (Poznan, 1935), 8, first pub. in Przeglgd Soctologiczny, 3 (1935), 72-90. For a study of the Polish Jewish autobiographies written in Polish, see A. Cata, “The Social Consciousness of Young Jews in Interwar Poland’, Polin, 8 (1994), 42—65.

° S. Magnus, ‘Pauline Wengeroff and the Voice of Jewish Modernity’, in T: M. Rudovsky (ed.), Gender and Judaism: The Transformation of Tradition (New York, 1995), 81.

Autobiographies in the 1930s 461 lion primarily against their parents’ oppressive rules and a God who permitted the suffering that they had to endure.’° With few exceptions, all of these women spoke Yiddish at home and were taught to read and write Yiddish before the age of 6—by a private tutor, by their father, or at a Yiddish kindershul. By the age of 6 or 7 most enrolled in the pomszechna szkota (the Polish primary school), but not all completed the seven grades; some attended the Yiddish folk shul. It was at the powszechna szkota that they were first exposed to secular education and that some first encountered virulent antisemitism. A relatively small number of the young women, mainly those from larger cities, attended a gymnasium or a szkota handlowa (business school). In the context of the growing economic depression of the 1930s, few families could afford to keep their daughters at school, much less pay the school’s tuition. The impact of poverty on the lives of young people and their families is a recurrent motif in the youth autobiographies of the 1930s, both male and female. To help support themselves and their families, most of the girls learned to sew: ‘All

my girlfriends learned to sew and I too was sent to learn sewing,’ notes Pearl Rozenblatt.‘! Another autobiographer writes, ‘Like everyone else in Sanok, when the time came to choose a trade, I chose to be a seamstress.’!* A number of the women supported themselves by giving private lessons to children whose families could still afford a tutor. Some were employed as bookkeepers, a few worked in factories, and one was a compositor. All the female autobiographers at one time or another belonged to a Jewish organization. ‘It became fashionable to belong to an organization,’ Pearl Rozenblatt wrote.‘° For many, these organizations, like the schools they had attended, provided a respite from the grim and oppressive realities of home. The overriding dream of many of these young women was to have a chance to continue their schooling—‘to study and be somebody’, as one autobiographer wrote.'* They aspired to be writers, journalists, editors, physicians, and teachers. Some simply dreamed of leaving the confines of the shtetl for prospects other than the traditional marriage that awaited them. One of them merely dreamed of a time when she would be able to eat to her heart’s content. In composing their life stories, the women followed the suggestions and directives contained in the flyer. They recalled the events of their lives chronologically and wrote on the points that the YIVO organizers had specified. The emphasis they gave to each topic, and how they wrote about it, depended on their writing 10 Sima Petluk (pseud. Forget Me Not) recalls that on the sabbath her father would lecture the girls, ‘Don’t wash with soap, don’t comb your hair’, because it was forbidden. He would threaten the chil-

dren with God, who sees all, knows all, and will take vengeance. This, she notes, aroused in her a strong sense of vengeance against God. If, as her father said, ‘God sees all and knows all, then why does He let us suffer so much . . . ?? Sima was determined to get even with him. While her father prayed, she washed herself with soap more than she did during the entire week, and combed her hair on Saturdays more than she did during the week. See YIVO Archives, RG 4, no. 3539.

“4 Tbid., no. 3687. 12 Tbid., no. 3769. 13 Tbid., no. 3687. 4 Toid., no. 3558.

462 Toby W. Clyman skills, education, and experiences, as well as on the books they had read and the audience for whom they wrote.!° Autobiography is a form of self-representation and public display. The female autobiographer is acutely conscious of how she is being read as a woman. That is,

in the process of constructing the self, she sees herself reflected in the public mirror, and the engendered, negative self she sees reflected back competes with the culturally idealized image of self she wants to inscribe in her autobiography. The tension between these two competing self-presentations—how she sees herself and how she wants to be seen—marks and shapes the content and rhetoric of

her autobiography. ‘® |

To show how the Polish Jewish women autobiographers of the 1930s sustain the tension between these two competing images of self, I shall begin by examining the ideal of womanhood in the Ashkenazi culture, and how these females relate this ideal to themselves. I shall then show the extent to which these women are aware that their culture reads them in terms of their gender. Finally, I shall explore the dramatic strategies they employ to subvert the reader’s anticipated negative per-

ception of them and to convince the reader, as well as themselves, that they are reading an ideal woman.

Literature becomes a vehicle for inscribing cultural values. In the book of Proverbs the poem about the woman of valour offers a glowing tribute to the Jewish woman.'’ This poem is recited in the traditional Jewish home on every sab-

bath eve by the woman’s family. The poem, as the commentator A. Maclaren notes, is intended ‘as an exhibition to young men of what they should seek, and to young women of what they should aim at’.1° What then are the qualities of this valorous female that women should emulate? She is a skilful manager of the home, strong, energetic, selfless, and charitable towards the poor and needy. Her children stand up and call her blessed, pleasing her with evidence of their appreciation. The young female autobiographers of the 1930s, as if echoing the directives of this poem, appropriate these qualities both for themselves and for their mothers—as if

| these values were themselves the cultural capital that they inherit. They present themselves in the frame of this ideal, and in terms of specific qualities. Selflessness is one of the cardinal virtues of the woman of valour. Almost all of the young female autobiographers of the 1930s ascribe this quality to themselves. 15 The participants viewed YIVO as an organization attuned to young people’s needs and aspirations. ‘Your announcement’, writes one of the contestants, ‘conveyed such an intimate understanding of youth .. . I feel I can write openly and freely’ (YIVO Archives, RG 4, no. 3559). Another suggests that YIVO publish a journal that would provide young people with answers to questions they could not find elsewhere (RG 4, no. 3720). 16 For a discussion of writing strategies that the female autobiographer employs, and which are called forth by her awareness of how the public perceives her as woman, see S. Smith, 7he Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fiction of Self Representation (Bloomington, Ind., 1987), esp. 48-54. 17 The Soncino Books of the Bible, ed. the Revd Dr A Cohen (London, 1958), Prov. 31: 10-31. 18 Tbid. 215.

Autobiographies in the 1930s 463 Recalling her school experiences and the amateur theatricals in which she participated, Rozia Szpajer (pseudonym: Ester) notes, ‘I was never too bored to create roles . . . not so much for myself as for others.’ Then, as if to ensure that her readers remember her as the selfless woman she claims to be, she reiterates in the concluding paragraph, ‘I care little about my own life. The only thing that does not let me rest is the fate of my sisters.’’? Another contestant, Sima Petluk, notes: ‘I seldom thought about myself. I always lived for someone else rather than for myself.’ Further on in her memoir she observes: ‘I never laugh for my own sake but to make others happy.’2° This professed selflessness is an extreme instance of selflessness, because it implies that even joy is not an emotion that belongs to her, but is deployed for the sake of others. Charity, like selflessness, is a cardinal virtue attributed to the ideal woman. In her recollections Malka Szwarc ascribes this ideal not only to herself but also to her mother. She describes how her mother, while passing the entrance to a house, noticed a boy of 15 lying there, ill, filthy, and covered with sores. Her mother brought the boy home, washed him, handed him a new shirt, and gave him the children’s bed to sleep on while they slept on the floor. Szwarc then tells a parallel story about herself: as a young child she once shared her food with a soldier, and her mother praised the generosity of her act.*4 This account of generosity to a stranger links generations in terms of inherited values. The ideal Ashkenazi woman is also resolutely uncomplaining, no matter what trials await her. She is able to take what life deals her and she suffers in silence. Sima Petluk tells of her parents’ marriage as a series of struggles. But, she notes, her mother ‘never complained to anyone about her fate’; rather, she ‘suffered quietly’. She describes herself in the same terms: ‘I did not tell anyone, even my closest friends, about my misfortune, and told my sister my old philosophy not to share her suffering with anyone.’”? If joy is deployed for the sake of others, suffering is kept to oneself because this signals inner strength. When Anna Gura tells her mother that her father mistreated her but that she had not mentioned it to anyone, her mother responds, ‘You did well. Be strong. (To dobrze. Bgdz mezna.)’*? The strength that comes from suffering in silence is a matter of pride to many of , these women, and it indicates a certain perspective on life. No matter what the difficulty, notes Sima Petluk, ‘Life still hasn’t succeeded in breaking me—yjust the opposite. The more I have suffered the stronger I have become.’”* Understandably, these female autobiographers also describe themselves as excellent students, intellectually advanced, and eager learners. Intelligence and learning were highly valued in the traditional Jewish culture. Time and time again, in writing about their school experiences, the women speak of being exceptional students who are diligent and quick to learn. Genia Steiner boasts, “Intellectually I

19 YIVO Archives, RG 4, no. 3559. 20 Tbid., no. 3539. 21 Tbid., no. 3610. 22 Tbid., no. 3539. 23 The Polish, bgdz mezna, means literally ‘be manly’. 24 YIVO Archives, RG 4, no. 3539.

464 Toby W. Clyman was the most advanced among my peers. I stood out among them in terms of my intellect and abilities, I was an excellent student. ... My Polish compositions were read aloud in class as models of good writing.’*°? Another autobiographer, Rozia Szpajer, writes, ‘My teacher loved me for being a gifted student. I learned easily. I was extremely conscientious and devoted.’”° But these same women who boast about their intellectual abilities and cling to a scholarly selfhood privileged by their culture are aware of how their culture perceives them as women. In writing about her family, Genia Steiner recalls that her ‘arrival into the world was not a happy one’. Her parents had very much wanted a

son. When it turned out that Genia, their second child, was another girl, her mother developed an instant dislike for her. This, she writes, ‘I felt all my life... When a long-awaited son was born, my parents’ love was focused on him at once.’2” Another young woman, Anna Lopian, recalls, ‘When I was born, no one took notice of me. Why should they? I was a fifth girl.’2° Still another, Rachel Kac, writes, ‘My coming into the world did not bring joy. I was the eighth girl.’?° In the traditional Jewish home, where men thank God daily that they were not

born female and women are excused and excluded from studying the texts so valued in the Jewish tradition, the young girl soon learns that her position in the family and in the community is inferior to that of the male and that she is less valued. This sharp gender distinction extends to matters of education and determines which texts women are prohibited from reading. When she learned that

Jewish schools for women were opening in Poland, Rozia Szpajer looked forward eagerly to studying not only humesh (the five books of Moses) but also Rashi (the medieval commentator on the Torah) and Gemara (the Babylonian Talmud), as Jewish boys did. When she asked her father if she could study these books, he told her, ‘Girls don’t study Rashi and Gemara.’®° Rozia thus had to content herself with listening, and with delighting in hearing her father chant the haftarah on the sabbath. This exclusion from access to the books valued in the traditional Jewish culture could only reinforce the women’s sense of inferiority. Given this culturally engendered, negative female self-image, it is not surpris-

ing that many of these autobiographers assume a defensive, self-deprecating posture in their autobiographies—especially in the passages in which they speak

directly to the reader about the process of constructing their life story. Anticipating a negative response from the reader, they apologize for being poor writers, for not having expressed themselves clearly enough, or for writing an autobiography that lacks spice. But then, significantly, they immediately follow these

passages. |

apologies with a litany of excuses and explanations. I shall cite a few of these telling

Malka Szwarc, addressing the reader, asks for permission to begin with a brief explanation: ‘My writing is not good,’ she notes; ‘not only is the style bad, but the

2° YIVO Archives, RG 4, no. 3739. 26 Tbid., no. 35509. 27 Tbid., no. 3739.

28 Thid., no. 3536. 29 Thid., no. 3508. 30 Tbid., no. 3537.

Autobiographies in the 1930s 465 words are unclear.’ But, she hastens to add, ‘perhaps the poor conditions under which I wrote are to blame for that .. .’. She continues, ‘I don’t think my life has been extraordinary, but neither do I believe that there are very many stories like it. But, I doubt if anyone will be able to understand much of my story. I have left out much that is important. I do not know why I have done so . . . Perhaps’, she adds,

‘because I did not want to reveal Party secrets’ (she had joined the Communist Party youth organization in her town). ‘If anything is unclear,’ she tells the reader, ‘I am ready to give an explanation.’*! Anna Rauchwerger writes that she knows in advance that her writing is not good, and she asks the reader, who ‘(alas!)’ has the task of reading her autobiography, to forgive her. ‘I am not a poet or a writer,’ she

notes; ‘I am just an ordinary girl, no one special—a prosteh gut shabes [no one special ].’°?

In their flyer describing the contest, the organizers asked the autobiographers not to invent (shribt nisht vos est nisht geshtoigen und gefloigen). Pearl Rozenblatt thus promises to write a totally honest story of her life. She confesses that her Yiddish is not good, and that she does not have much talent, but because she wants to give a

true picture of her life, she tells her reader, she is not giving it to anyone to improve.*? Anna Lopian apologizes for the lack of spice in her autobiography, but adds that she did tell the truth: ‘What I have written and lived through is all there.’** These passages highlight several issues. First, they make it clear that women are seen as secondary in Jewish culture. Secondly, and because of this perception, they anticipate the response of the reader as necessarily a negative one. These female

autobiographers are highly conscious of the audience and of the way they are likely to be read. This self-consciousness manifests itself in a litany of apologies and excuses. Men’s autobiographies offer no such apologies, because they write from a position of cultural and intellectual authority.*°

Thirdly, the rhetoric of excuse becomes the vehicle for shifting the reader’s anticipated negative image of women. Malka Szwarc, as we have seen, forestalls the reader’s anticipated negative reaction to her writing by attributing her lack of clarity and poor writing style to the conditions under which she wrote. Her final excuse is that clarity may be lacking because she wanted to protect the secrecy of her organization. In this she ascribes to herself qualities such as loyalty and courage, which would have met with approbation. Even as she succumbs to the

culture’s ascription of values, she spins the argument on itself, and turns a 31 Tbid., no. 3610.

82 Tbid., no. 36824. Anna Rauchwerger won a prize for her autobiography in the 1934 competition.

33 Thid., no. 3687. 34 Thid., no. 3536.

35 There is, however, one exception in the YIVO autobiographies. Just as the female autobiographers are keenly conscious of how their culture perceives them in terms of their gender, so the work-

_ ing-class male autobiographers are acutely aware of how they are read in terms of their class. An examination of how this class-consciousness impacts on the content and rhetoric of the Jewish working-class male autobiographies might prove highly telling—especially when compared with the Jewish women’s recollections of the 1930s. But this is a topic for another paper.

466 Toby W. Clyman negative (poor writing style) into a positive (for the sake of protecting secrecy). She uses the same strategy at the conclusion of her autobiography. Addressing her reader again, she writes, referring to the sisters in her care, ‘I care little about my own life; all I care for is the life of my sisters.’°° Once again she counters the reader’s anticipated negative perception of her by presenting herself as selfless, a cardinal virtue of the ideal woman. This strategy is used in many of these texts. What we see here is a double voice,

as if these autobiographers were carrying on a dialogue with the reader, and through that dialogue negotiating a self. Sima, who apologizes for her poor Yiddish, tells the reader that the reason she had not given her work to anyone to improve was that she wanted to tell ‘the entire truth’. Her suspicion that her style is inadequate is overshadowed by her claim to obedience to YIVO directives to be truthful and not to invent. Her claim to truthfulness is a way of presenting herself in a manner that would be applauded by her culture. This double-voicedness operates in these narratives as text and subtext engaged in an interesting dance. Apologies and excuses mask a subtext by which the narrative empowers itself. The image these writers aim for in their representations is no less patriarchal than the image they run away from. Indeed, they invoke the cultural ideal of their time. But what is important to note is that, in terms of strategy, these writers are capable of directing the reader’s perceptions even as they deny that they are doing so. Thus, stylistically, there is a constant tension between what the text says and what it does. If these narratives have any claim to literariness, it resides in this movement between text and subtext, as if in the process of reading one overhears a ‘mute voice’. Finally, it is in their appeal to truth that one comes closest to understanding the literariness of these texts. When Pearl Rozenblatt states that she has not given her text to anybody to improve because she wanted to write a totally honest story, and

when Anna Lopian apologizes for the lack of spice in her text and adds that it is ‘the clear truth’, we see that these female memoirists are keenly aware of how they

will be read and indeed engage in negotiating that reading. At the same time they deny that they are using such strategies. The invocation of the rhetoric of truth makes the claim that their language, for all its deficiencies and lack of clarity, will have the clear advantage of transparency, that they are telling their stories ‘as

they were’. In short, the claim of these texts is that they are not literary. The authors’ desire is that the reader vot find ‘literature’ there. Yet the rhetoric of truth

is subtended by all the strategies of fiction that we have seen deployed. This double movement repeats itself at the level of style, in the very tensions we have seen between the autobiographer’s sense of how she is perceived culturally and her wish to present a more idealized image of herself. ‘The rhetoric of truth is nonetheless

fiction, and it is in the very subversion of this rhetoric that the text proclaims its own right to speak. 36 YTVO Archives, RG 4, no. 3610.

The Polish Plan for a Jewish Settlement in Madagascar 1936-1939 CARLA TONINI THE plan to deport all the European Jews to a settlement in the French colony of Madagascar, devised by the Nazis in 1940, has been studied by many historians. In 1953 Philip Friedman described it as an extension of the so-called ‘Lublin reservation’ in south-eastern Poland, to which thousands of Jews were exiled between October 1939 and March 1940.' Since the work of Friedman, historians have reconstructed the genesis of the Madagascar plan, tracing the history of the island’s attraction as a solution to

overpopulation for politicians and ideologists since the end of nineteenth century. As for the antisemites, they saw in Madagascar, an isolated, empty, Indian Ocean island with an inhospitable climate, an ideal place in which to segregate the Jews.

Among the countries interested in Madagascar, Poland had made efforts to obtain it as a concession from the French government in the 1920s. The island was envisaged by the Poles as an outlet for the overcrowded countryside, while in rightwing circles it promised to fulfil the dream of Poland as a colonial power. In 1936 the Polish government again considered the colonization of Madagascar, this time as a place to send the Jews, who, because of their ‘anomalous’ professional structure, were said to be ‘over-concentrated in trade’, thus preventing the development of a Polish middle class. The surplus Jewish population intended for emigration was calculated at about 1 million, roughly a third of the community, representing 10 per cent of the total population of Poland.

In their search for land for Jewish resettlement the Poles turned first to the British government, but met with a flat refusal. At the same time the Polish This chapter is part of wider research published under the title Operazione Madagascar: La questione ebraica in Polonia, 1915-1968 (Bologna, 1999).

1 P. Friedman, “The Lublin Reservation and the Madagascar Plan’, YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science, 8 (1953), 155-77. 2 Archiwum Akt Nowych, Warsaw (AAN), Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych (MSZ), vol. 2292, 1936; The National Archives, Kew (TNA), Foreign Office (FO), 371/20763.

468 Carla Tonim government approached the French minister of the colonies, Marius Moutet, who appeared to be more receptive. In May 1937 he and the French prime minister, Léon Blum, agreed to send a Polish commission to Madagascar to investigate its suitability as a settlement for Jewish colonists. It is the view of most historians that the Polish plan was abandoned after the return of the mission from the island in September 1937 because the mission’s findings had been unsatisfactory and the Jewish community in Poland and abroad was opposed to what they described as the ‘expulsion of Jews from Poland’. In fact, as shown by research I have carried out in archives in Warsaw, Aix-en-Provence, Paris, and London, the Polish plan continued to be developed until 1939. The first phase of the plan, from autumn 1936 to autumn 1937, consisted of the Franco-Polish project for a Jewish settlement in Madagascar. The second phase, which started in autumn 1937, saw the French reject the idea of a Jewish colony in favour of a Polish settlement, eventually to be supplemented by a small group of Polish Jews, as a prelude to the takeover of the island by Poland. Finally, after the French abandoned this phase of the project, the Polish Foreign Ministry adopted the plan as colonialist propaganda: Madagascar would become a territory open only to Poles, from which national minorities were to be excluded. How did the Poles envisage the plan for the mass emigration of Jews? After Marshal Pilsudski’s death in 1935 Jewish emigration became a central policy of the ruling group, the Sanacja. In the Sejm there were constant calls for the emigration of Jews at the beginning of debates on subjects of national importance; at the same time the idea functioned as a catalyst for all those Poles who saw it as a solution to their frustrations. As a result, antisemitism ceased to be limited to the agenda of _ the right and became fundamental to the government’s legislative activities: from February 1936 a series of laws marked the beginning of the so-called ‘Polonization’ of the economy. The notorious pronouncement in June by the prime minis-

ter, Felicjan Stawoj-Sktadkowski—‘violence against the Jews, no; economic struggle, certainly (omszem)’—sanctioned the economic boycott of the Jews. In 1937 mass emigration of the Jews from Poland was looked upon favourably by political parties on the right, but even among the left-wing and moderate parties there were some who considered it inevitable. The task of resolving the ‘Jewish question’ through emigration was taken on

by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, headed by Jozef Beck. After signing a nonaggression pact with the USSR in 1932 and with Germany in 1934, Beck claimed that Poland, given its size and potential rise in population, should be recognized among the international community as a power, with all concomitant privileges, starting with the allocation of a colony, which could be ceded by the British or the French. Beck was conscious of the difficulties that faced the realization of his foreign policy. At home his position within the ruling group was insecure, and his efforts to strike a balance between the two factions inside the Sanacja made him more vul-

A fewish Settlement in Madagascar 469 nerable. Abroad, he needed to obtain the support of the colonial powers and the Mandatory Commission of the League of Nations. Nonetheless, Beck saw in the ‘Jewish question’ an opportunity to realize his ambitions in foreign politics and to strengthen his own position in the Sanacja. At home his stand on the partial emigration of Jews would gain support for him, while abroad it would offer a solution to the problem of the Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in a period when the British government was reducing the Jewish immigration quotas into Palestine. From 1934 all matters concerning Jewish emigration from Poland were taken up by the Consular Department of the Foreign Ministry, headed by Wiktor Tomir Drymmer. Thus, Drymmer, assisted by his close colleagues Apolloniusz Zarychta and Jan Wagner, became responsible for the government’s Jewish policy.

These ‘faithful executors of Beck’s will’ were given the task of formulating the ideological and political basis of the new policy. They completely revised the earlier emigration policy, in which ‘the priority given to the fulfilment of social and

economic goals had produced undesirable effects in transforming the national structure of Poland’. The resettlement plans, they wrote, should be guided by considerations of internal policy: ‘In Poland, with its high proportion of minorities, each loss to the Polish population would cause an imbalance in the national makeup in favour of minorities, and should be avoided.’®

Consequently, they rejected the idea of emigration as ‘national expansion’, an

idea that, in the mid-1930s, had found increasing favour within the Foreign Ministry. Their decision did not mean that Polish colonial aspirations were to be abandoned; they were simply looking for a formula for compromise between the ‘resolution of the Jewish question’ and their colonial ambitions. Colonization of Madagascar by the Jews, they concluded, would not conflict with the premiss of the colonialist campaign: “The demographic expansion of Poland abroad is a matter not of the national but of the state allegiance of the emigrants.”*

In a meeting held in June 1936 Beck advised the officials of the Consular Department to avoid the word ‘colony’ in their international contacts and to use the expression ‘settlement concessions’ instead, to exploit the demographic argument in their colonialist propaganda, and to try to ‘persuade the Jews to promote in the international arena the proposal for a Jewish settlement in the Mandatory Territories and in the African colonies’.° Beck’s initiative had been approved by the government, as is confirmed by a document containing the ‘directives for the increase of Jewish emigration’ passed

by the Council of Ministers in March. This document, apart from describing the Jews’ ‘anomalous professional structure’, also named two other causes of the ‘Jewish question’ in Poland: the restrictions on immigration of Jews to Palestine

introduced by the British, and the question of Jewish refugees from Nazi 3 AAN, MSZ 98908, 29 Oct. 1937. * ‘Notatka MSW w sprawie polityki emigracyjnej’, ibid. > AAN, MSZ 9583, 21 June 1936.

470 Carla Tonini Germany—issues that exclusively involved the international Jewish community and the British government.®

To sum up, according to the ‘directives’, it would be necessary to secure the emigration of ‘at least one million Jews’, a task to be undertaken by the government itself, through the search for ‘territories outside Europe for the settlement of Jews and offering help for non-direct emigration to Palestine’. Particular support was to be offered for the emigration and resettlement of Jews in the Russian region

of Birobidzhan. The Foreign Ministry officials then began intensive diplomatic activity in the European capitals to obtain a territory for Jewish emigration, but talks between Polish ambassadors and government representatives in London and Paris resulted in failure. Not even the appeals of Beck and his colleagues, accompanied by strong publicity in favour of colonization within the relevant countries, were able to convince international organizations that Poland, ‘the sixth country in Europe in size and population’, deserved a colony in which to settle its Jews.

Unexpectedly, in autumn 1936 events turned in favour of Poland. The new French government of the Popular Front, led by Léon Blum, was considering the

possibility of settling Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in one of its own colonies. This was for several reasons: it was partly in response to pressure from the right, which was accusing the government of being too philosemitic; secondly, hostility was growing among the French population over the ever-increasing number of refugees; and finally, Blum believed that a plan for Jewish emigration could placate the French Zionists, who were urging the opening-up of southern Syria and Lebanon to Jewish emigration because of their proximity to Palestine. Blum knew that a part of the Jewish community would be against this plan. Chaim Weizmann, the president of the World Zionist Organization, called it ‘a clownish and impossible idea’. But other Jewish organizations did not share his

opinion; this ‘territorialist’ solution of the Jewish problem attracted some supporters. The Paris Comité pour la défense des droits des Israelites en Europe centrale et orientale (Committee for the Defence of the Rights of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe), for example, had presented a proposal for the settlement of Jews in Madagascar to Blum’s predecessor, Albert Serraut.® The Jewish Agency, on the other hand, which acted as a consultant to the British administration in Palestine, wanted to use the French emigration plan for political reasons.

Several other issues made France sensitive to the requests from Poland. After 1935 Beck had abandoned Poland’s traditional pro-French policy and strengthened relations with Germany, but the appointment of the pro-French Edward Rydz-Smigly as head of the armed forces had reopened the path to co-operation

6 ‘Wnioski na Radzie Ministréw’, AAN, MSZ 9903, Mar. 1936. T Tbid. 8 Ministére des affaires étrangéres, Paris (MAE), Série Afrique, Questions Générales, vol. 91, 4 Nov. 1936.

A Fewish Settlement in Madagascar 471 between the two countries. The Blum government believed that concessions to Poland in the colonial sphere would help to renew the alliance.

In September 1936 Nahum Goldman, the representative in Geneva of the Jewish Agency, had a meeting with Tadeusz Komarnicki, the Polish ambassador to the League of Nations, and asked for his support against the British intention to limit Jewish emigration to Palestine. Goldman offered in exchange to act as intermediary with the French government in a plan for Jewish settlement in a French colony, and suggested Madagascar.? Goldman contacted both Moutet and Blum, and at the end of October 1936 the latter met Beck in Paris, where they discussed the possibility of Jewish settlement

in Madagascar. On 16 January 1937 Moutet announced in the Petit Parisien the French government’s intention to settle ‘Israelites’ in the French colony, with the approval of the governor of Madagascar: The idea of a settlement of Israelites in the French colonies has all my sympathy because I

know that they are especially suited to agricultural work, which lies at the base of all colonization, and they have set a splendid example of this in Palestine. But we should have no illusions about a mass settlement. Palestine has shown that large amounts of capital are necessary. . . . Nevertheless, we must make an attempt, being careful to choose the right country and to carry out investigations. I will provide the explorers and technicians that they need. Investigations have already begun and I am in possession of reports from the authorities of the colonies. Some, such as those in Madagascar, are willing to consider the plan on condition that the necessary means are found. Besides this large island, it is possible to find regions in Guyana and New Caledonia. . . . | would be proud to be able to carry out colonization and also to help those people who are victims of political discrimination and racial prejudice.!°

In France, Moutet’s proposal was favourably received in both the French and the Jewish press. The government initiative was praised as ‘an effort to save human lives in danger’. The positive response of French public opinion was no doubt due to the fact that Moutet’s announcement mentioned that the plan envisaged only a small number of Jews, and that no hint was given of the Polish government’s involvement. The British and American press also commented favourably on the initiative, but they too made no mention of Poland. Meanwhile, in Poland the plan for a Jewish settlement in Madagascar was presented as a Polish initiative that had met with the financial and organizational backing of France. The press in Poland devoted ample space to the sentence with which the Petit Parisien had presented Moutet’s declaration, in such a way as to create the impression that the announcement had been preceded by negotiations between France and Poland: ‘Debates have taken place at the Ministry for the colonies with regard to a possible settlement of Israelites in our territories overseas. Following a 9 AAN, MSZ 2292, 1936. 10 “A propos d’un projet d’établissement d’Israélites dans les colonies francaises’, Petit Parisien, 16 Jan. 1937.

472 Carla Tonim - meeting which he has had with representatives of different Israeli groups, Marius Moutet wishes to make the following declaration .. .’.4 For many days the plan made the front page of the Jewish and Polish newspapers. Obviously, the Polish right enthusiastically welcomed the plan: “The Jews to

Madagascar’ became a slogan of nationalist youth. On the Jewish side, the Territorialists of the Freeland League claimed paternity, while the New Zionist Organization (revisionists) of Jabotinsky thanked the Polish government for its support of Jewish emigration; all of them, though, were against the idea that it was up to the Polish government to decide when and how they should leave. The wide coverage given by the Polish press to the Madagascar project alarmed the French Jews. Moutet had to reassure them that, ‘as the possibilities of migrating to the French colonies are few, the French government is not thinking of mass

emigration, that priority of choice would be given to the refugees from Nazi Germany, and, finally, that the Jews from eastern Europe were not included in the plan’.'? Moutet also had to face criticism from his colleague the foreign minister, Yvon Delbos, whom the French ambassador in Warsaw, Léon Noél, was wiring furiously, complaining about the ever-increasing colonial campaign launched by the Polish government. However, neither the reactions of the Jewish community nor the criticism of his colleague upset Moutet; he kept the matter from the Jewish French community, implying that the plan had been abandoned, but to Delbos he answered that ‘the project for a Jewish settkement in Madagascar has passed examination and that the different Jewish organizations are working to support the enterprise’. In fact, in May 1937 a Polish committee consisting of Major Lepecki, Leon Alter, and Salomon Dyk met Moutet in Paris while on their way to Madagascar, where they were to investigate the suitability of the island for Jewish settlement. Arkady Fiedler, a journalist working for Gazeta Polska, joined the expedition with the task of reporting on potential living conditions on the island.

There are only a few records in the French Overseas Archive at Aix-enProvence of the Polish mission to Madagascar. They demonstrate that the Poles were not given a warm welcome by the French authorities of the island, that the mission had to be carried out clandestinely, and that the few reports were not particularly favourable; the north-central part of the island could house white settlers, but only after extensive and costly building and hydraulic improvements. !° When the mission left Madagascar at the end of August 1937, the island authorities were convinced that the plan would be dropped. In fact, after Lepecki, Alter,

and Dyk returned to Poland, no official statement was issued and no articles appeared in the press. “Petit Parisien, 16 Jan. 1937, repr. in Polska Informacja Prasowa and Gazeta Polska, 17 Jan. 1937. 12 J.B. Schechtman, Iluzje teritorialistyczny (Warsaw, 1938), 20. 13 Centre des archives d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence, Madagascar, Gouvernement Général, 3B108, 1937, série Politique, 330/857, 1937.

A Jewish Settlement in Madagascar A73 The uncertainty in the Ministry was also due to the political crisis in Poland, which was a particular threat to Beck’s position. The Sanacja government had set

up an organization, the Oboz Zjednoczenia Narodowego (Camp of National Unity, OZON), to mobilize public opinion in support of its nationalist, populist, and antisemitic programme. OZON did not succeed in broadening the base of support for the group in power; nevertheless, its recurrent claim regarding the need to ‘Polonize’ every aspect of economic and social life in Poland led to radicalization of the nationalist right and to renewed calls for antisemitic legislation in the Sejm.

In the autumn there were rumours of a possible coup organized by the right with the support of Rydz-Smigly. The Zwigzek Miodziezy Polskiej (Polish Youth Movement, ZMP) was dominated by members of Piasecki’s Falanga, and the

Sanacja had begun to eliminate the moderates. During this crisis Beck was attacked by Rydz-Smigly’s followers, who criticized Beck’s pro-German policy and demanded his resignation.'* But it was not Beck’s intention to abandon the project. He had worked too hard for it and he meant to use it for both political and personal ends. He was aware that the emigration of thousands of Jews from Poland was physically and financially

impossible; moreover, this was not the main objective of the undertaking in Madagascar. The island should be presented to public opinion as the symbol of Poland’s strength and as proof of the efforts his Ministry was making to solve the ‘Jewish question’. Given the uncertainty of his position, keeping the idea alive also meant having a weapon against his political adversaries in the government. In this situation it was of vital importance for Beck to obtain even a partial victory on colonial policy and in the matter of Jewish emigration. For this reason, he went on weaving the web of the Madagascar plan in diplomatic circles. In October the British ambassador, Hugh Kennard, reported to the secretary of

state, Anthony Eden, that he had had talks with several ‘representatives from Poland’ and with the French ambassador, Noél, who had confirmed the willingness of the Polish government to carry forward the plan for settlement on the French island.!°

On 27 October Noél replied to Delbos, who had asked for confirmation of rumours reporting the abandonment of the Madagascar plan; Noél told him that the atmosphere in Poland was ‘totally favourable’ to the expedition. According to Noél, it was reasonable to expect that the Polish government, faced with growing antisemitism and prompted by the desire to make concessions to public opinion, would support the sending of colonists to Madagascar even if the experts who had explored the island reached unfavourable conclusions. *© 4 E. D. Wynot, ‘“A Necessary Cruelty”: The Emergence of Official Anti-Semitism in Poland, 1936-1939, American Mistorical Review, 4 (1971), 1046. 15 ‘TNA, FO 371/20816, 6 Oct. 1937. *®6 Noél to Delbos, MAE, Série Europe, Séries Pologne, 330, 26 Oct. 1937.

474 Carla Tonin Meanwhile, the Polish foreign minister began to stamp on rumours of possible differences of opinion among the experts. Alter, who had often expressed a conviction that the island’s climate rendered it unsuitable for settlement by the Jews, was refused permission to publish an article in the Polish press. He was able to illustrate his views, which were supported by the agronomist Dyk, but only in private meetings or in the Jewish press abroad. On 31 December 1937 Alter, who was responsible for the HICEM,"” took an even more resolute stand in the Judische Rundschau, denying ‘the existence of land in Madagascar which could become fertile, even with the deployment of huge sums of money’.?®

Instead, the public in Poland was informed of the beauties of the island by enthusiastic reports sent by Fiedler to the Gazeta Polska. His reports from Madagascar, which began in December 1937 and continued for almost a year, described the French island as a paradise, and from time to time put forward serious doubts concerning the capability of the French as colonizers.'? Morze, the Maritime and Colonial League journal, reported the exploits of Maurycy August Beniowski, the confederate of Bar who had escaped from Kamchatka at the end of the eighteenth century, where he had been deported by the Russians, and then sent to Madagascar under the French flag. On the island Beniowski was admired so greatly by the inhabitants that he was proclaimed king, but he was later killed in a skirmish against the French: ‘It is certain that, if Beniowski had had freedom of movement at that period, he would have conquered Madagascar for Poland and not for France.’”° In November the emigration of the Jews was at the top of the agenda in discussions held by the Consular Department of the Ministry. During an internal con-

ference attended by Drymmer, Zarychta, and Wagner, Beck reconfirmed the priorities of the emigration policy: ‘for the state, the Pole is of greater worth in the country than abroad. First of all, we must aim for the emigration of minority groups. ... Territories for Jewish emigration must be sought in Latin America, Palestine, and Madagascar.’*! When asked by his colleagues about the acquisition of land in the French colony, Beck replied that he was ‘still considering the financial issues’. Meanwhile, prompted by Beck, the Polish government had asked the under-secretary of the French merchant navy for permission to transport any em1grants to Madagascar according to the trade agreement that Poland and France had signed in May 1937.77

In order to assure the public that Madagascar was still on the cards, on 22 November the Polish newspapers reported that Moutet had met members of 17 HICEM was a fusion of HIAS (Hebrew Immigration Association), ICA (Jewish Colonization Association), and EMIGDIRECT (Emigration Directory). 18 TNA, FO 371/21749, 371/20763, 28 Dec. 1937; [/lustration, 9 Feb. 1938.

19 Gazeta Polska, Dec. 1937—Oct. 1938. 20 Morze, 5 (1937).

21 ‘Notatka z konferencji u Pana Ministra Becka’, AAN, MSZ 10004, 13 Nov. 1937.

22 Noél to Delbos, “Transport éventuel d’émigrants polonais 4 Madagascar’, MAE, Serie Europe, Series Pologne, 330, 26 Oct. 1937.

A Jewish Settlement in Madagascar 475 the expedition and had confirmed ‘the earlier position concerning the settlement plan’.*? The brevity of this announcement helped to conceal the truth. In fact, during that meeting Moutet had only maintained the position concerning the possibility of settlement; he had promised ‘land ownership for the Polish workers’ but not a colony for the Jews.” It appears that he had backed down as far as the settlement plan for the Jews was concerned, but he let it be understood that Madagascar was open to Polish colonization, a decision that was warmly approved by Minister Delbos.

As to the final decision made by France, Beck hoped to receive a reply from Delbos himself, as he was expected in Warsaw in the first week of December. Knowing the French minister’s point of view, Wagner and Zarychta advised Beck to make Delbos’s visit the occasion for ‘put[ting] Polish colonial interests back on the agenda’. Beck was advised to make three distinct requests: Ask the French to support Polish colonial policy in general, in case there should be a review of colonial mandates at the League of Nations, and in order to undertake direct economic co-operation between Poland and France’s colonial possessions. In this case it would be fundamental to obtain easy terms for economic benefit in three colonies: in Madagascar, French Guinea, and possibly in French West Africa.”°

Delbos arrived in Warsaw for a visit at the beginning of December 1937. He and

Beck had long interviews, but the press reports were scant and did not clarify Madagascar’s destiny. It may have been difficult for the press to know, but the instructions Beck gave the officials of the Consular Department were quite clear: upon the departure of the French minister, they were to draft the so-called ‘general listing of works relating to the colonization of Madagascar’.”° As stated in this sixty-six-page plan, Madagascar would become a Polish colony. Besides some general remarks on the nature of the colonization, the dossier contains the drafts of the ‘immigration agreement’ to be signed by the presidents of the republics of France and Poland. The agreement provided for a free concession of the land explored by the Lepecki mission to Polish settlers. A special Polish association for the colonization would choose the best members of the nation: ‘independent farmers, with high moral standards, to be engaged in a long-term and self-sufficient colonization’. In view of the creation of a ‘Franco-Polish condominium on the island’, the settlers were to be given special prerogatives, as stated in an appended ‘secret protocol’. The plan was to be carried out with the financial

help of the French government, which would see to the improvement of the regions of Madagascar to be colonized and would grant the settlers exemptions from the payment of taxes and import duties. 23 Noél to Delbos, MAE, Série Europe, Séries Pologne, 330, 26 Nov. 1937. 24 Tbid. 25 “Polski problem kolonialny: Na marginesie wizyty Pana Ministra Delbosa w Polsce’, AAN, MSZ 9593, 30 Nov. 1937. 26 ‘Zestawienie ogélne prac w sprawie osadnictwa na Madagaskarze’, AAN, MSZ 9826, 8 Jan. 1938.

476 Carla Tonin The document made clear that the decision to make Madagascar a Polish colony

did not mean giving up the idea of settling a limited group of Jews there, who, unlike the Poles, would not receive financial and organizational support, but would enter the enterprise of their own will, ‘in view of the possible gains to be had on

the island’. ‘They had to accept the terms and conditions dictated by the Polish Foreign Ministry, among them their settlement in a separate region of the island, chosen by the Towarzystwo Popierania Osadnictwa Polskiego na Madagaskarze (Association for the Support of Polish Colonization in Madagascar). The authors of the document did not specify the legal position of that nucleus of Jewish settlers: would they have the same rights as the Polish settlers or would they be under a special jurisdiction? This was not the only inconsistency of this absurd plan. The speed with which the dossier was written—Delbos left Warsaw on 7 December and on 11 January the text was ready—leads us to think that Beck was using it to demonstrate to his enemies within the government that the Foreign Ministry was making headway with the resolution of the ‘Jewish question’. One thing is sure: the document was never used and the Madagascar plan was never implemented.

In April 1938 the new French government, led by the Radical Edouard Daladier, began to dismantle the Madagascar venture. At the same time the Western powers were concentrating their efforts on the problem of Jewish refugees, which, after the Nazi annexation of Austria, was becoming immense. Even though Beck continued to use the Madagascar plan for propaganda pur-

poses until the very outbreak of war, by autumn 1938 his great plan had definitively collapsed. Yet it was to have important repercussions, both in Poland and abroad. The damage Beck’s policy did to his country was great. Between 1936 and 1939, while the international situation was becoming more and more threatening,

his Ministry was building up an image of Poland as a big power, thus diverting public attention from the real problems of the country. It also led to the radicalization of the political scene: at the end of 1937 the bureaucrats in the Foreign Ministry repudiated the earlier policy on the Jews, followed since 1936, and accepted the idea that the Jews should be forced by law to leave Poland.

In the international arena the Madagascar plan strengthened the idea that the settlement of Jews in some distant colony was the only solution to the ‘Jewish question’. In 1938 the British were urging the French to open up Madagascar, a ‘large, healthy and unpopulated island’,*’ to Jewish immigration. At a meeting held in Paris in November of the same year, Bonnet, Halifax, and Chamberlain listed the colonies that could host European Jews: the British offered Tanganyika and Guyana, the French Madagascar and New Caledonia. After the outbreak of war the Nazis saw in Madagascar an enormous ghetto for millions of Jews deported from all over Europe. All this was changed by the 27 L. Yahil, ‘Madagascar—Phantom of a Solution for the Jewish Question’, in B. Vago and E. Mendelsohn (eds.), Jews and Non-fews in Eastern Europe, 19185-1945 (New York, 1974), 315-34.

A Jewish Settlement in Madagascar 477 invasion of Russia and the beginning of the Final Solution, but the French island did not disappear from the international agenda. In the final stage of the war, after it had been taken over by the British army, the British government considered settling war refugees there: ‘small groups of Greeks and Poles, both Jews and nonJews’.”® The Polish government-in-exile in London rejected this proposal, stating that ‘the climate and the general conditions of the island are not suitable to the settlement of Poles’.?° This was the last time that official plans were mooted to settle Jews, colonists, or refugees in Madagascar. However, in 1968, during the anti-Zionist campaign launched by the Polish Communist Party then in power, the idea of forcing Jews to emigrate overseas reappeared: Onward brothers! sabre in hand Seize the Jew by his peyes And—you understand it well— Hurl him over the sea.°°

28 ‘TNA, FO 371/36708, 2 June 1943. 29 Tbid. 80 From a leaflet distributed among students in 1968. It was presumably drafted by Colonel Tadeusz Walichnowski, the ideological adviser to the Ministry of the Interior. See P. Raina, Polttical Opposition in Poland, 1954-1977 (London, 1978), 116, for the text of the leaflet.

BLANK PAGE

A Historian 1n Ideological Fetters JERZY TOMASZEWSKI IN his book Zydzi i Polacy 1918-1955: Wspolistnienie—zaglada—komunizm (‘Jews and Poles 1918-1955: Coexistence, Extermination, Communism’; Warsaw, 2000)

Marek Jan Chodakiewicz has set himself the ambitious task of presenting in a single volume the history of Polish and Jewish mutual stereotypes over nearly four decades, including such disparate periods as the twenty years of the independent Polish Republic, the years of the Nazi occupation and the Holocaust, and the first ten years of the Polish People’s Republic. He adds to this a comparison of the situation of the Jews in occupied Poland with that of Jews in other countries (although in this area his knowledge is very limited), and he also tacks on topics that are only loosely connected with the subject under consideration. His last chapter, in particular, gives the impression of considering anything and everything, without discrimination. Chodakiewicz explains that his purpose is to oppose two stereotypes: In the collective consciousness of many Poles, the stereotype of zydokomuna continues to operate. It makes false claims about ‘Jewish rule’ in Poland and identifies the Jews with

communism. The main argument in favour of this interpretation is the participation of Jews in the governments of the early period of Soviet occupation .. . At the same time, Western historians, in studying this period, concentrate on the question of Polish antisemitism, which they regard as almost universal. In extreme instances their works can be taken to uphold a view that the Nazis inspired those struggling for independence from the Soviets in Poland [at the end of the Second World War]. (p. 9)

This opposition to the two stereotypes is a worthy goal, but, for a work of scholarly

ambition, somewhat misplaced. Extreme anti-Jewish stereotypes do exist in Poland (and among Polish Americans), but they are essentially a marginal phenomenon and do not appear in the academic literature. These and other stereotypes of a similar kind should rather be the object of analysis as a social phenomenon: why they are so persistent among people. Despite the dates he addresses, according to the title of his book, Chodakiewicz focuses primarily on the period since 1939. He describes the twenty years between the two world wars in ninety-one pages, devotes 240 pages to the problem of the Second World War, and treats the years 1944—6 in 180 pages. Virtually nothing is said about the period between 1946 and 1955. These limitations have serious

480 Jerzy Tomaszewski consequences. The myth of zydokomuna dates from the turn of the twentieth century, and in Poland it was greatly strengthened by the violence that accompanied the establishment of the borders of the new Polish state after the First World War. Jewish belief in the universalism of antisemitism in Poland was also born at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1918 the leaders of local Jewish organizations in the United States became convinced by their discussions with Roman Dmowski that they were right to be suspicious of his views on Jewish issues (one may suppose that he was not the best diplomat, contrary to prevailing opinion), and the pogroms and other events in Poland in the years 1918—21 strengthened this view. All this is known from published and unpublished sources to which Chodakiewicz does not refer. His treatment of Polish—Jewish relations in the inter-war period also gives the impression of being based on only a small number of secondary works and few documents. Certainly, the absence of a list of references makes it difficult for the reader to orient himself on this question, and, in spite of their range, the chaotic and inflated bibliographical notes do not make it easier. Thus, for example, the section that describes Jewish society in Poland in 1918—39 is accompanied by references that are, for the most part, unrelated. Moreover, he sometimes seriously distorts the sources. His opinion that ‘Jews thus enjoyed de facto autonomy in Poland’, supported by the statement that ‘the majority of the people in this community conducted their lives separately from the general population’ (p. 16), is a misunderstanding. On this basis we could say that all the national minorities in

Poland ‘enjoyed autonomy’, and even that Poles ‘enjoyed autonomy’ under Russian rule, since they ‘conducted their lives separately’ from the Russians, even on occasion conspiring against them. The book’s next section describes the life of local Jewish religious communities and is little more than a random selection of ill-informed anecdotes. Chodakiewicz’s description of the rights of Jews to education ignores the fact that the Polish government’s obligation under the Minorities Treaty of 28 June 1919 to create Jewish-language state schools (there were similar schools for other minorities) was not fulfilled. It would take up too much space here to set straight the many errors contained in the book’s discussion of the features of Jewish political life. Happily, the author is at least acquainted with the names of the principal Jewish political parties. The section devoted to ‘assimilators’ also rests on some misapprehensions, and discusses people whose forebears converted at the end of the eighteenth century or at the beginning of the nineteenth, among others Baron Kronenberg, whom even Nazi legislation treated as a non-Jew (Kronenberg was arrested as a distinguished member of the Polish gentry, and was imprisoned for the same reason after 1945). Furthermore, one might debate whether Nasz Przeglad was a ‘liberal’ newspaper— a term Chodakiewicz uses rather freely and as a negative political epithet; however, the view that the journal was aimed at ‘Poles of Jewish origin’ is mistaken.

A Historian in Ideological Fetters 481 Let me mention a few further errors and misunderstandings. On page 28 we read that ‘Antisemitism gained enormous popularity only after the First World War.’ Chodakiewicz connects this to fear of the Bolshevik revolution, ignoring the

earlier emergence of antisemitism that began with the Damascus affair of 1840 and its echoes in Europe and included the wave of antisemitic literature at that time (especially in Germany), the Dreyfus affair and its reverberations in many countries, ‘ritual murder’ trials at the turn of the twentieth century in Russia and elsewhere, and populist Viennese antisemitism, of which Hitler was a disciple. Similarly misleading is the view that it was particularly ‘national socialists, fascists, and national radicals who believed in the reality of the world Jewish conspiracy without reservation. However, for conservatives, traditionalists, and monarchists, anti-Jewishness was primarily a matter of rhetoric’ (p. 29). There is a distinction to be made between moderate and radical antisemitism, but the former was closely linked with the latter, which could not have flourished without the acquiescence of conservatives and traditionalists.

There are also minor errors: Gabriele Simoncini is described as a woman (p. 32); Fanny Solomon-Loc, the memoirist and nurse, becomes a medical doctor (pp. 170-1); Teresa Prekerowa is described as a professor; Jan Karski 1s referred to as ‘Jerzy Kozielewski, otherwise known as Jan Karskv (p. 290); and authorship of Wladyslaw Bartoszewski son’s book 1s attributed to the professor himself (p. 400).

However, a record number of errors occur on the subject of Czechoslovakia (p. 351): ‘In March 1938 Czechoslovakia lost the Sudetenland to Germany and other pieces of its territory to Hungary and Poland’ (in March 1938 the Germans occupied Austria and the Sudetenland was occupied in October; the other losses occurred later); ‘in the Protectorate there was no real underground movement’; and in 1945 in Czechoslovakia ‘a liberal-communist coalition government was established. Not long afterwards the communists got rid of their partners and invited the Soviet Army to occupy the state once again’ (a communist government was indeed established in 1948, but Soviet occupation took place only twenty years later and the government did not invite the Soviets in either in 1948 or in 1968).

In addition to the many careless mistakes, Chodakiewicz seems to maintain a conscious silence where it would be uncomfortable for him to recognize the true state of affairs. He is of course entitled to emphasize the numerous occasions when papal statements condemned nationalism and antisemitism as incompatible with the principles of Christianity (pp. 29-33), but he carefully overlooks the virulently antisemitic articles, going far beyond traditional anti-Judaism, that were written by Catholic clergy and published, for example, in the respectable Przeglgd Powszechny (published by the Jesuits) in the 1930s, not to mention popular newspapers such as Maty Dztennik. The literature on this question is well known. Even now, although it is rare, one still comes across outright racist statements published under the aus-

pices of Catholic institutions, at least in Poland. He devotes several pages to the

482 Jerzy Tomaszewski ideas of Feliks Koneczny, but discreetly omits to mention that this historian believed that there are Jews who use Christian blood for ritual purposes. Although I did not check exhaustively all the information included in the book, I found myself constantly coming across errors. Thus, ‘It is known, for example,

that in June 1929 in Lwow a grammar-school girl uttered a profanity during Corpus Christi’ (p. 89); Chodakiewicz seems to be unaware that the probable cause

of this rumour was that the child cried out as she fell off her chair, which had nothing to do with desecrating a religious procession. On this there is a useful article by Antony Polonsky.' We also read that during the German occupation in Poland ‘teachers were required to read official decrees to elementary schoolchildren’ (p. 192). I was a pupil at the time and I do not recall this, although the teachers made sure that the children knew what the Germans allowed, and what had to be hidden in case of a possible inspection. Nor did I check the accuracy of all quotations, though I noted that those from Emanuel Ringelblum’s book had been retranslated from English, although the original was written and published in Polish. In another place Chodakiewicz quotes Ezra Mendelsohn as saying, ‘Soviet modernization and the departure from tradition was advantageous for the Jews’, but he leaves out the rest of the sentence, in which Mendelsohn writes, ‘Jews as individuals were able to prosper while Judaism as a religion, and indeed all forms of specifically Jewish creativity, withered away’ (p. 99). He ascribes to Bozena Szaynok the statement that a section of the German workers in the western territories in 1945 ‘undoubtedly supported Hitler’ (p. 509). But on the page cited Szaynok in fact writes that in certain localities German antisemites ‘held positions in the administration’. I do not suspect Chodakiewicz of consciously altering the facts or misquoting, but I conclude that his book was written exceptionally carelessly. By concentrating on Polish—Jewish stereotypes, Chodakiewicz treats the problem of the legal situation of the Jews in Poland only marginally. This is justifiable inasmuch as the state of our knowledge in this area is relatively good, although we

still know too little about how the laws were applied in practice (particularly in small provincial towns). Attitudes—the subject of his research—are reflected rather in accounts, memoirs, and press reports (particularly if they are sensational in character), but only rarely in official documents. This type of material is of a highly subjective nature, as Chodakiewicz recognizes, and he evaluates the accuracy of Holocaust memoirs particularly critically. However, it is my view that in other questions, and on more than one occasion, he places too much faith in various accounts that are sometimes unique and therefore difficult to verify but that support his opinion. In this he fails to recognize that individual reports, as well as documents that relate to events in a single village, cannot be treated as a basis for 1 ‘A Failed Pogrom: The Demonstrations Following the Corpus Christi Procession in Lwéw in June 1929’, in E. Mendelsohn, Y. Gutman, K. Shmeruk, and J. Reinharz (eds.), Jews in Interwar Poland (Hanover, NH, 1990).

A Historian in Ideological Fetters 483 generalization. As a result, significant sections of the book contain examples of the behaviour of individual Jews and Poles that allow us to conclude that the actions of people who make up society are varied and that it is difficult to categorize them. They hinge on many factors, including family and regional tradition, education, faith, and ultimately on character and even random circumstance. This is my own conclusion and not a particularly original one. Chodakiewicz correctly emphasizes that the influence of Christian principles on the decision to aid Jews in hiding extended even to some antisemitic activists

in Poland. However, he ignores the many dozens of journals and newspapers published in Poland before 1939 that appeared under the banner of Roman Catholicism and spread lies about, and hatred towards, ‘aliens’, particularly the Jewish ‘Christ-killers’. The classic examples are the publications of the Franciscans of Niepokalanow, and even the respectable Przeglgd Powszechny, which was published by the Jesuits. The average Catholic in Poland did not read the Bible (the Catholic Church did not recommend it), but many believed what was asserted in Rycerz Niepokalane, including its reports of ‘ritual murder’. Rarely did a clergyman refer to the words of St Paul: ‘there is no difference between Jew and Greek’ (Rom. 10: 12); more often they warned against ‘Jewish evil’, interpreting in a traditional way those verses of the Gospels (particularly the Gospel of St John) that hold all Jews responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. An essential weakness of Chodakiewicz’s book is the a priori nature of his political ideas. The basic premisses that underlie his comments and conclusions are an acceptance of ‘national egoism’ and a determination to defend the ‘good name’ of Poland, mitigated in certain circumstances by Christian principles and a categor-

ical condemnation of leftists of every stripe, leading to the denial of their ‘Polishness’, in blatant conflict with elementary history. Chodakiewicz writes, “The sentiments of the revolutionary parties at times resonated in the most unexpected places. Often these sentiments went hand in hand with patriotic feelings in relation

to Poland in spite of their diametrical opposition to national values’ (p. 51). He does not perceive that before 1918 in Russia participation in the revolutionary movement very often resulted from patriotic feelings and the desire to liberate

Poland (and not only Poland) from national oppression, while the Endecja (National Democrats), whom he so admires, sought opportunities to make compromises with Russia. Not only did Jozef Pilsudski begin his political career in the Polska Partia Socjalistyczna (Polish Socialist Party), but so did several right-wing Polish politicians known during the inter-war period. The later communist activist

Julian Marchlewski was the author of a work on national oppression in the Prussian partition that is still worthy of study.” In another section Chodakiewicz writes, ‘In studies of Polish society we will omit activists of the Communist Party as well as ambitious leftist intellectuals, for 2 J. Marchlewski, Stosunki spoteczno-ekonomiczne na ziemiach polskich zaboru pruskiego (Lwow, 1903); repr. in Marchlewski, Pisma wybrane, 1 (Warsaw, 1952).

484 Jerzy Tomaszewski they had little in common with Polishness in the traditional sense’ (p. 488). In this way, he arrogates to himself the right to divide society into ‘true Poles’ and all others, who must be regarded as ‘false’ Poles or even worse. Similarly, he has an obsession with identifying people of Jewish origin: ‘In the ranks of the AK [Armia

Krajowa, Home Army], the NSZ [Narodowe Silty Zbrojne, National Armed Forces], and other organizations there were many Poles of Jewish origin; the majority of them were Christian.” He mentions, among others, Aleksander Gieysztor, Aleksander Kaminski, Baron Kronenberg, and Stefan Kisielewski (p. 305). Baron Kronenberg’s family had converted in the early nineteenth cen-

tury; the others have no Jewish connection. | The true character of the book appears in its conclusions. Unfortunately, in this part of the book Chodakiewicz mixes different, even contemporary, topics, such as the controversy aroused by the failure of Stanford University to offer a permanent position to Norman Davies. I will omit these marginal questions and try to find the essence of his standpoint. Here Chodakiewicz, writing about Jews and Poles (he omits other ethnic communities, though it would be logical to treat them identically), sees them as almost completely separate: ‘It is our view, despite the great internal stratification and the ideological pluralism of the two communities, that their controlling bodies conducted a policy based on the principle of placing the interests of their own nation above that of others’ (p. 563). I have seen no evidence, in this book or elsewhere, that could demonstrate the existence of these mysterious ‘controlling bodies’. Certainly there were issues that could unite a significant portion of the Poles, Jews, and people of other nationalities in Poland, but only in exceptional circumstances. The criteria used by Chodakiewicz and similar writers (including such representatives of the pro-Soviet group in Poland as the former high official in the Ministry of Security, Tadeusz Walichnowski, who played an infamous role in Poland in 1968) to determine who is a Jew and who is a Pole ignore

the large grey area where the two communities overlapped. These criteria are dangerously close to those of the Nuremberg laws. To some of the most extreme exponents of this ethnocentrism even Pope John Paul II was a Jew by reason of his ecumenical ideas.

At the same time, there were other issues that united the citizens of Poland beyond ethnic or religious divisions. Proof of this can be found not only in parliamentary or municipal elections, but also in events that marked decisive moments for the state. Chodakiewicz does write about this at various points in his book (even on page 563, cited above), but he fails to draw any conclusion. He only notes the ethnic divisions, as if these cover everything, and expresses regret that the majority of Poles were (and remain) of a different opinion. He mentions the old call for workers of the world to unite: ‘Revolutionaries of both nations united in order to destroy the Old Order. Traditionalists, unfortunately, were not able jointly to

defeat the leftist enemy’ (p. 563). It is difficult to avoid pointing out that the unification of the revolutionaries (unless he means in this instance only the

A Historian in Ideological Fetters 485 communists) was a myth, to which Chodakiewicz in fact marginally refers in various chapters. As a result the book’s conclusion bears little relation to the earlier

discussion, and the historian disappears behind the purveyor of ideological and political myths.

I write these comments with regret. Before I read this book I believed that its author was a historian with whom one could disagree but whom it was worth reading and whose arguments and investigation of the sources were worth considering. Unhappily, I have come to the view that he is, above all, concerned to advance his narrow nationalist agenda. Translated from the Polish by Claire Rosenson

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Polish—Jewish Relations in Vilna and

the Region of Western Vilna under Soviet Occupation, 1939-1941 MAREK WIERZBICKI HISTORIANS know little about Polish—Jewish relations under the Soviet occupa-

tion during the Second World War in the areas that had been part of pre-war Poland’s eastern territories, or the Kresy. The subject arouses a great deal of controversy, partly because of the nature of the source materials, which are eyewitness testimonies and memoirs by both Poles and Jews. One soon discovers that an author’s nationality usually influenced the content of a particular testimony, and sometimes its reliability as well. This is natural in testimonies concerning east-central Europe during the period in question: a strong sense of ethnic solidarity, compounded by distrust of other nationalities, was often the deciding factor in how individuals regarded members of other ethnic groups at that time. As a result, the opinions of eyewitnesses are often subjective. Likewise, data on mass phenomena—such as the attitudes of social, professional, or ethnic groups over large areas—can be skewed. In order to avoid mistakes in assessing the reliability of specific sources, I have compared Polish, Soviet, and Jewish documents, working from the assumption that a report can be recognized as completely reliable only if it is confirmed in at least one document created by someone of a nationality different from that of the report’s author.

A comparative analysis of the sources created by the various ethnic groups inhabiting the Kresy in the inter-war period may help to correct misrepresentations and misinterpretations that are apparent even today. An analysis of Polish— Jewish relations at the local level in smaller communities—cities, small towns, and regions—is particularly valuable, as it enables us to draw accurate general conclusions about these relations in the vast areas of inter-war Poland occupied by the Soviet army, as well as in Lithuania in the period under investigation. For this reason it 1s worth taking a closer look at Polish—Jewish relations in Vilna and its environs.

488 Marek Wierzbicki THE FIRST SOVIET OCCUPATION, AUTUMN 1939 The Soviets occupied the city of Vilna twice in the period under investigation: first for six weeks in the autumn of 1939 (19 September—28 October), and then, after almost nine months of Lithuanian rule, from mid-June 1940 until war broke out between Germany and Russia on 22 June 1941. (See the map on pp. 518-19.) The first Soviet occupation is particularly interesting from the perspective of Polish—

Jewish relations: the attitudes of the Jewish population towards the Polish state and the Soviet authorities, as well as the impact of these attitudes on Polish—Jewish

relations during the Soviet occupation, are clearly discernible. In analysing the events that took place in Vilna during the six weeks of Soviet occupation in 1939 and immediately following Soviet withdrawal, changes leading to increased tensions can be observed in the relations between the Jewish and non-Jewish (in this case mostly Polish) communities. For geographical and historical reasons, the Polish authorities regarded the city of Vilna as of great importance, and during the period between the wars it served

as the administrative and cultural centre of north-eastern Poland. It was also a centre for the Belarusian, Polish, and Jewish communities, whose leaders founded political, social, and cultural organizations there. Out of a total population of approximately 200,000, Poles represented the largest group (65.9 per cent), followed by Jews (28 per cent), Russians (3.8 per cent), Lithuanians (1.4 per cent),

and Belarusians (0.5 per cent); taken together, other ethnic groups (Tatars, Karaites, and others) made up less than 1 per cent of the population. During the inter-war period relations between Vilna’s ethnic communities were rather good, except for the long-running dispute about whether Vilna belonged to Poland or to Lithuania (the Lithuanian state claimed the city as its capital, never acknowledging the fact that it had been annexed to Poland). Polish—Jewish relations were relatively good during this period, and were probably better than relations between the two groups within the boundaries of the former Kingdom of Poland (i.e. inter-war Poland’s central regions). There was little support for anti-Jewish activities, such as the economic boycott and attempts to restrict the number of Jewish students at Vilna’s Stefan Batory University.'

The everyday life of the city was not overly disrupted when war with the Germans broke out. The Luftwaffe conduct ed several bombing raids in the Vilna region, but they were not as intensive as in other areas of Poland. However, despite the relative calm in the city, the Jews feared potential looting and pogroms. ‘These 1 J. Zyndul, ‘Spoleczeristwo zydowskie Wilna i Wileriszczyzny w II Rzeczypospolitej’, in J. J. Milewski (ed.), Kresy potnocno-wschodnie Drugies rzeczypospolite; (stan badan) (Bialystok, 1993). On

the subject of antisemitism in pre-war Vilna, and specifically at Stefan Batory University, see also A. Niemezykowa, ‘Moje Wilno’, in K. Jasiewicz (ed.), Europa nieprowincjonalna: Przemiany na ziemiach wschodnich dawne] Rzeczypospolite; (Biatorus, Litwa, Lotwa, Ukraina, wschodnie pogranicze III Rzeczypospolite; Polskiej) w latach 1772-1999 (Warsaw, 1999).

Polish—Jewish Relations in Vilna 489 fears increased when criminals began to escape from Vilna’s prison after the city was bombed on 16 September 1939, and they began to barricade the entrances to buildings they owned in order to protect against the inevitable looting.”

Jewish accounts from those days leave the impression that no authorities responsible for public order were operating in the city. However, until 18 September the administration and police were functioning, and approximately 14,000 soldiers of the Polish army—still in regular Polish army units, not scattered

as was often the case elsewhere in Poland—vwere present. Security in the city undoubtedly deteriorated after the Soviet attack on Poland, most of the army and police having left the city during the night of 18—19 September. The Civil Militia fulfilled police functions thereafter, but, judging from the looting that occurred in various parts of the city, we can assume that it was not entirely successful in maintaining public order.® In this light, we can understand the Jews’ sense of danger.

Their insecurity was compounded by the impending German occupation of the city, which, as everyone knew, would be accompanied by violence against the Jewish population. The prospect of life under the Soviets, on the other hand, raised great hopes: antisemitism was banned in the Soviet Union, and the Jewish population could expect to participate fully in social and political life. Many Jews therefore greeted the Red Army’s occupation of Vilna with relief and sometimes even Joy.

A Jew from Vilna described the sentiments of the city’s Jewish residents in his diary: A great weight has been lifted from the population’s hearts . . . It is not easy to describe the emotions that overwhelmed me upon seeing a Russian tank in the street opposite our gate, manned by smiling young people with red stars on their caps. The crowd gathered round the stationary vehicles parked there; someone shouted, ‘Long live the Soviet regime’, and everyone cheered . . . Few non-Jews could be discerned in the crowd. It was mostly Jews who publicly displayed their enthusiasm. This aroused the anger of Poles somewhat . . . Jews were openly jubilant. The Russians were preferable to Germans. This opinion was also shared by those to whom the Russian saviour could bring no benefit .. . but at least they would not suffer as Jews. At the very worst they would get jobs . . . Many people did not stop to analyse the changes inherent in [the Russians’|] accession to power. Many of our brethren will have to forfeit lifelong habits and luxuries... But who engages in such analyses in these times? With the German threat hanging over our heads, everyone greeted the Russians as if they were the messiah.*

It was not only the communist Jews and their sympathizers who greeted the Red Army enthusiastically, but also members of Jewish organizations without any 2 [D. Levin, “The Jews of Vilna under Soviet Rule, 19 September—28 October 1939’, Polin, 9 (1996), I0og—IlI.

° L. Tomaszewski, Kronika wilenska 1939-1941 (Warsaw, 1989), 24; testimony of Corporal Wincenty Zawada, Polish Institute and Sikorsky Museum, London (IPMS), coll. 138/292, testimony

15767, p. 3. Zawada was a lawyer by profession. * Levin, ‘The Jews of Vilna’, 111.

AQO Marek Wierzbicki communist connections, as well as Jews not associated with any organization at all. The open expression of joy at the arrival of the Soviets on the part of these Jews

contrasted with the reserve or even animosity exhibited by the Poles. What for , Jews was salvation, or at least the lesser evil, was for Poles a national tragedy. The arrival of the Red Army divided Vilna’s Jews and Poles and built a wall of animosity between them. The solidarity that the two ethnic groups had demonstrated in the face of German aggression quickly dissipated. This account by a Polish eyewitness is illustrative of the mood of most Poles at the time: Amidst the crowd, I made it to Wielka Street, where the Red Army was being welcomed with a big display next to the town hall. I pinched myself from time to time to make sure I was really awake. I kept suspecting it might be a nightmare. I had never anywhere heard so many joyful shouts, so many cries of ‘Long live’ Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov, and the Red Army. Although I didn’t know exactly who the members of the various leftist Polish organizations were, I can state with confidence that I didn’t see any of them there, either. I suspect that they were there, though. But the Jews were the ones who had displayed all the spontaneous enthusiasm. All the Jewish organizations probably had their representatives welcoming [them]. The Bund had probably brought in Jews from all around just to show what a huge mass of them there are.° There was no end to the shouts and cries of ‘Long live’. The Jewish women couldn’t be beaten. Their ideas of who should ‘live’ were really astounding. Their slogans, not even just for a Pole, but for the average honest person, made one sick to the stomach.®

Another Pole told of a rich Jew’s welcome of the Red Army. The wealthy Jew, one of the largest fruit wholesalers in Vilna, enthusiastically tossed flowers from his window towards the approaching Soviet detachments. The Polish eyewitness’s reaction was at first surprise, and then outrage, and finally animosity towards this Jewish merchant.’ Another witness to the same event was the well-known and respected Jesuit priest Father Kazimierz Kucharski, who in 1939—41 was the driving force behind the underground movement in Vilna. He recalled that the enthusiasm with which the Jews welcomed the Soviets as they entered Vilna aroused disgust and hatred among Poles, who feared above all that the Jews would join the > The Bund (the General Jewish Workers’ Alliance) was a Jewish socialist party founded in Vilna in 1897. It was active from 1918 in Poland, where it strove to solve the ‘Jewish question’ through the socialist reconstruction of society and pursuit of cultural and ethnic autonomy for the Jews. Between the wars the Bund co-operated with the Polska Partia Socjalistyczna (Polish Socialist Party) and in 1933-5 it also co-operated with the communists. The Bund was one of the strongest Jewish parties in the north-eastern regions of Poland in the inter-war period. After the Red Army entered Polish territory, some of its members and activists supported the Soviet aggression. The Soviet authorities took advantage of their support, but decided that the Bund was a counter-revolutionary organization; its activities were therefore banned and its leaders repressed. © Testimony of Wincenty Zawada, pp. 3-4. ” Protokét (wyciag) zeznania Alfreda Urbariskiego, adwokata, zam. W Molodecznie ul. Sejmikowa 3, pracownika Delegatury M[inisterstwa] P[racy] 1 O[pieki] S[polecznej], Wilno’, Eastern Archives (Archiwum Wschodnie), Hoover Institution, Stanford University, California (AW, HI).

Polish—fewish Relations in Vilna AQI Soviets in ruling over them. That fear was compounded by the night-time searches, which, according to Father Kucharski, were carried out for the most part by Jews.®

It was not only the attitude towards the Soviet troops that divided the Polish and Jewish populations. On the night of 18/19 September a few Polish detachments had attempted to defend Vilna. The initial plan for the city’s defence was imposed by the Polish command, which, after much hesitation, ordered the army and police to retreat. Under these conditions, the city’s defence was left in the hands of weak volunteer groups and a few regular Polish army units, with no air or tank support. After twelve hours or so of battle the Soviet units gradually began to take control of specific neighbourhoods in the city. According to Jewish sources,

there were Jews among the Polish army detachments defending the city. The defenders retreated in the direction of the Polish—Lithuanian border, or hid their arms and returned home. Rumours spread among the Polish population that local communist supporters had shot at the retreating soldiers. One such incident took place on 19 September on Bultupski Lane. Three retreating Polish soldiers, one of whom was injured and being helped along, were shot at from a building that was

described in one Polish account as belonging to ‘Szmul’ and ‘Skierka’. The wounded soldier was killed, and the other two threw grenades into a window of the building.? Even before the Soviet troops arrived, young men with red armbands appeared on the city’s streets carrying Polish rifles. Polish eyewitnesses

recall that local supporters of the communists, mostly Jews, enthusiastically helped to ‘quash the weak Polish defence’ by arresting officers, policemen, and other refugees as they attempted to escape to Lithuania. How reliable is this information? To a large extent, it does seem to be true. From Jewish sources we learn that ‘Shortly prior to the Soviet occupation, Jewish youth comprised a significant proportion of the armed Civil Militia in various quarters of Vilna; the new regime’s Workers’ Militia continued and built on an already existing phenomenon.’’° This information is also confirmed by Polish sources. From them we learn that a Workers’ Militia was created in Vilna even before the Red Army arrived, and that it was made up of members of the class-based trade unions as well as communists, most of whom were ethnic Poles. Its leaders were the local communist activists Stefan Jedrychowski, Kazimierz Petrusewicz, and Bohdan Skarzynski, and its headquarters were at the Towarzystwo Uniwersytetu Robotniczego (Workers’ University Association) on Jakub Jasiriski Street. According to 8 Father Kazimierz Kucharski, Konspiracyjny ruch niepodleglosciowy w Wilnie w okresie od wrzesnia 1939 1. do 25 maja 1941 r. (Bydgoszcz, 1994), 7. 9 J. Wolkonowski, Okreg Wileriski Zwigzku Walki Zbrojne; Armiu Krajowej w latach 1939-1945, ed.

Grzegorz Lukomski (Warsaw, 1996), 12. See also M. Gnatowski, ‘Komunikat specjalny (wywiadu wojsk pogranicznych NK WD) o k{ontr]/r[ewolucyjnej] powstariczej organizacji w m. Nur’, in id. (ed.), Niepokorna Biatostocczyzna: Opor spoteczny 1 polskie podziemie niepodlegtosciowe w regionie Biatostockim w latach 1939-1941 w radzieckich Zrédtach (Bialystok, 2001), 100. 10 Levin, ‘The Jews of Vilna’, 114.

AQ2 Marek Wierzbicki the same source, a separate militia detachment was created by the Vilna Bund. Workers’ Militia began to patrol the city’s streets even before the Soviet detachments arrived.” These armed units were active on Vilna’s streets even as the defence of the city and the mass exodus by the police and defending army were under way; it is therefore likely that they were attacking the retreating defenders and otherwise assisting the Soviet troops. It must be pointed out that both Jewish and Polish members of

the militia were engaged in such activities. They undertook to disarm Polish soldiers who had not been able to leave the city before the Soviets arrived. Both Polish and Jewish witnesses agree that this occurred; they differ, however, in their descriptions of how the soldiers were disarmed. Dov Levin stresses that the local (mostly Jewish) militiamen and others who supported the new government took away the soldiers’ weapons ‘in such a friendly way that the defeated soldiers smiled despite their sadness’. !” Not everyone was treated in the same way. A 22-year-old Jew from Vilna recalls

that Jews disarmed Poles ‘in an ugly way with great satisfaction’. In some instances, militiamen spat in the faces of the soldiers whose rifles they were confiscating.'* In other cases, they ripped epaulets and eagle insignias from the uniforms

of arrested soldiers. Under the leadership of Lieutenant Budzewicz of the reserves, who took over leadership of the police during the transition period, local supporters of the Soviet government—Belarusians, Poles, and Jews—also disarmed Vilna’s Civil Militia. The Civil Militia had its own posts in each of the city’s

neighbourhoods, with its activities coordinated from its headquarters. Feliks Lubieniecki, a gardener and a member of the Civil Militia, remembers disarming soldiers: All night I could hear gunshots and explosions, convoys. The army went down Slomianka Street near my apartment. Before dawn everything went quiet. I fell asleep. At erght o’clock I got up and went straight to the [police] station, where I found the police chief and several citizens. There were Soviet tanks on the streets, They would stop, [the soldiers] would take a look around and then go on. At nine o’clock, several young Jews with rifles came into the station and began chasing us out, searching for something and demanding that we leave the station. We didn’t leave the station. The police chief immediately contacted the Soviet military commandant and we were supposed to serve alongside the communist armed units being organized, on the condition that we would take off the red-and-white armbands and put on red ones. This led to a misunderstanding, because the police chief ordered us to put on OPL [Obrona Przeciwlotnicza, air defence] armbands. The police chief was arrested, and we left.** 1. A. Jedrychowska, Zygzakiem 1 po prostu (Warsaw, 1965), 283-6. 12 Levin, “The Jews of Vilna’, 115.

18 An anonymous account by a 22-year-old man from Vilna, Zydowski Instytut Historyczny (Jewish Historical Institute), Warsaw, Ringelblum Archive (ZIH, Ring.), [/932. 14 Feliks Lubieniecki, gardener, city of Vilna, AW, HI, testimony 7169, Vilna.

Polish-femtsh Relations in Vilna 493 In the early days after the Soviet occupation of Vilna, the Soviet authorities began to organize a provisional civil administration and security apparatus. The administrative functions were assumed by the Provisional Board of the Vilna District, which in late September became the Provisional Board of Vilna. It was headed by a Soviet official by the name of I. Zhilyanin (and by Kraskov after 7 October), and ‘two local residents’, Belarusians, were appointed to it.1° The nomination of Belarusians stemmed from the plans of the Soviet authorities to annex Vilna to the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR). Rumours circulated that Vilna was to become the new capital of a united Soviet Belarus. Asa result of these plans, Belarusian (along with Russian) was made an official language, and the main publications of the Provisional Board of Vilna appeared in that language.

The pre-war police were replaced by the Workers’ Guard, and the Workers’ Militia was created to ‘flush out’ communism’s real or suspected enemies in the area. Jews seem to have played an important role in both organizations. Among the Jews

involved were communists from before the war, political and criminal prisoners, members of the Jewish underclass, and young leftists (who were not necessarily poor). Belarusians and Poles from similar groups were also active in the militia, although in smaller numbers. Jews made up the largest group, though it is impossible to determine exactly what percentage they constituted. The ethnic composition of Vilna’s Workers’ Guard was somewhat different. According to Dr Szlomo Katz, a Jewish communist who served in it in 1939, at least 80 per cent of the Guard was Jewish. In light of these figures, and of Polish and Jewish sources, one may surmise that the percentage of Jews in the Vilna militia may very well have been similar. The influence of Jews in the Workers’ Guard depended not only on their numbers, but also on the kinds of position they held in the organization. Jews held many middleand higher-level leadership positions; for example, the second-in-command Workers’ Guard was a pre-war Jewish communist named Jakub Ryvkind.'®

Many Jews also joined the newly created Soviet administration, replacing the Polish officials who had been dismissed. After a few weeks relatively few administrative positions were held by pre-war employees, and these were probably at the

lower levels; a rather large group of officials had already been recruited from among the ethnic minorities of pre-war Poland (Belarusians, Lithuanians, and Russians). It is difficult to say on what scale the ‘purges’ were carried out in the Vilna administration and the neighbouring districts during the six-week period of Soviet rule. In the Polish, Soviet, and Jewish sources that are available today, there

is no detailed information about them. On the basis of information in British sources, however, we can guess at the extent of the dismissal of the pre-war clerks. 15 "Tomaszewski, Kronika, 30-1; R. Zepkaité, ‘Okupacja Wilna przez Armie Czerwong (19 wrzesnia—27 pazdziernika 1939)’, in M. Gizejewska and T. Strzembosz (eds.), Spotfeczenstwo biatoruskte, litewskie 1 polskie na ziemiach potnocno-wschodnich II Rzeczypospolite;: Biatorus zachodnia i Litwa wschodnia w latach 1939-1941 (Warsaw, 1995), 302-3.

16 Levin, ‘The Jews of Vilna’, 114-15.

494 Marek Wierzbicki On 4 November, or approximately a week after Vilna had been occupied by the Lithuanians, a delegation representing 15,000 Polish civil servants who had been

dismissed asked a British diplomat to intervene on their behalf with the Lithuanian government; they wanted to be reappointed or given some kind of unemployment benefit.'’ If we consider that approximately 26,500 people were employed in the administration in 1938—that 1s, in ‘public service’ broadly conceived—as well as in education, the health service, and agriculture,‘® then the scale of purges carried out before 4 November 1939 must have been relatively large. There is no way of determining exactly how many of those who lost their jobs were dismissed under Soviet rule and how many during the seven days of Lithuanian rule. We also do not know how many Jewish clerks were employed in the administration from 19 September to 28 October 1939. From Jewish sources—that 1s, from Dr Katz’s account—we learn only that a ‘significant number’ of Jews were in the Soviet administration at that time.” During the governments of short-term occupation the Soviet authorities gladly entrusted Jews (and members of other ethnic minorities in Poland before the war) with administrative responsibilities. Jewish influence within the Soviet apparatus was therefore relatively large, as it was in occupied Vilna in general.”° In the neighbouring smaller towns and villages many Jews joined the newly created village and municipal committees. For example, in the town of Ejszyszki, several local Jewish communists were members of the municipal committee (which locals referred to

as the ‘revolutionary committee’, or ‘revkom’ for short). ‘he committee was headed by a pre-war communist by the name of Hayyim Shuster.** During the first Soviet occupation of Vilna the number of Soviet officials sent from the USSR was relatively small; the importance of the locals consequently increased. 17 W. Rojek, ‘Wielka Brytania wobec paristwowej przynaleznosci Wileriszczyzny (sierpie 1939— sierpien 1940)’, in K. Jasiewicz (ed.), Tygiel narodéw: Stosunki spoteczne 1 etniczne na dawnych ziemiach wschodnich Rzeczypospohte; 1939-1953 (Warsaw, 2002), 262.

18 According to statistics prepared by the pre-war Polish government, in late 1938 there were approximately 19,000 people employed in the (state and local) administration in the city of Vilna. Of these, 7,500 were employed in education, the health services, and agriculture. See S. Lewandowska, Zycte codzienne Wilna w latach II wojny Swiatowe; (Warsaw, 1997), 72.

19 Levin, ‘The Jews of Vilna’, 115. |

20 Ibid. 114-15; Stanislaw Matejko, guard on duty, Vilna, AW, HI, 33, Vilna; Zdzistaw Zochowski, pupil, Vilna, AW, HI, testimony 2066, Vilna; T-A.K., bureaucrat, Vilna, AW, HI, testimony 1975,

Vilna; A. Jalbrzykowski, ‘Sprawozdanie z pobytu w Wilnie i z podrozy przez Niemcy, Wlochy, Hiszpanie 1 Portugalie’, IPMS, sygn. A. 9. II. 2a (MSW D2ziat Spoteczny’); anonymous testimony of a 22-year-old man from Vilna, ZIH, Ring. I/932. 21 Y. Eliach, There Once Was a World (Boston, 1998), 565—6; S. Ben Shemesh (Sonenzon), “The Last

Days of Aishishok’, in “Translation of Memorial Book of Aishishuk’, trans. S. Gavish (1980), 57 (in my collection). Polish testimonies from Ejszyszki provide information about how the local communists took over the town in September 1939. See Antoni Bukiejko, member of the local government, Ejszyszki, AW, HI, testimony 10426, Lida; Ambrozy Walukiewicz, Ejszyszki, AW, HI, testimony 10587, Lida.

Polish—Jewish Relations in Vilna 495 From the first days of their occupation of Vilna, the Soviet authorities tried to gather support among the city’s residents—particularly the poorest. ‘The Soviets

got production at the local factories under way again, reopened the labour exchange, and organized public works projects for over 1,000 unemployed residents of Vilna. They also made many promises: for example, that they would provide heating fuel (70,000 cubic metres of firewood) for the winter.2? We can assume that policies of this kind helped to win the support of Vilna’s poor for the Soviets. In the absence of further information, however, it is difficult to say anything more specific, or to guess at the attitudes of the poorest levels of the Polish population towards the Soviet authorities. We know only that some members of the Polish left (among them members of both the working class and the intelligentsia) supported the construction of a new order.”? The attitude of Vilna’s Jews towards the Soviet authorities was clearly mixed. The Jewish communists were the greatest enthusiasts of the new order, and they eagerly joined in the creation of the Soviet government in Vilna. The leftists for the most part supported the changes that came in the wake of the Red Army’s occupation, as did the poorer members of the petit bourgeoisie and the lumpenproletariat. Young Jews, often regardless of political convictions, were glad to have the opportunity to study and participate in social and political life,** and the Soviet authorities took note of their engagement in politics. In one example of this type of activism a rally took place at the Stefan Batory University on 9 October in which approximately 2,000 students and university teachers participated. In a report from that event we read: Students from the ethnic minorities were particularly enthusiastic, and said that for the first time they had the right to speak in their mother tongues, which the Polish authorities had ridiculed and made fun of ... A Jewish student named Rudnicki, speaking at the meeting in Yiddish, said: ‘For the first time since the former Polish state was founded, ethnic minorities can speak and study in their own mother tongues. We thank Comrade Stalin for sending the Red Army to western Belarus, which liberated the peoples of western Belarus for ever from the yoke and captivity of the Polish lords.’?°

The mood was similar among some members of the Jewish intelligentsia, who expected Jewish culture to have the chance to develop freely under the Soviets. In contrast to the majority of Poles, who displayed reservations or animosity, many Jews continued to support the Soviets even after four Jewish dailies in Vilna were closed. (Even the leftist Dzzennik Wileniski, whose banner headline on the day the 22 Zepkaité, ‘Okupacja Wilna’, 303-4. 23 Jedrychowska, Zygzakiem i po prostu, 282-92. 24 “Uwagi o sytuacji w Wilnie i WileniszczyZnie’ (probably summer 1940), Archiwum Akt Nowych,

Warsaw (AAN), Hoover Institute Collection (HI), document group of the Ministry of Information and Documentation (Anders Collection), sygn. 122, p. 12. 25 “Meldunek operacyjny nr 44’ (12 Oct. 1939), in B. Gronek, T. Knatko, and M. Kupiecka (eds.), ‘Zachodnia Biatorus’ 17 [LX 1939-22 VI 1941: Wydarzema i losy ludzkie, rok 1939, 1: Zrodta do historu Polski XX wieku ze zbiorow Narodowego Archiwum Republiki Biatorus (Warsaw, 1998), 195-6.

496 Marek Wierzbicki Soviets entered the city had read ‘The Jews of Vilna Celebrate the Arrival of the Red Army’, was shut down.)

However, some of the Jewish political elites who were far from communism regarded Soviet politics with great reticence, despite an initial sense of relief. Along with the enthusiasm some Jews showed for the Soviet government, there were often displays of animosity and even hatred towards the previous government and Poles in general. Jews would ridicule Poles publicly, reminding them of their lost independence. Shouts of ‘Your [time] is over’ were so commonplace that they echoed in Polish ears for many years to come. As we see from Jewish sources, the local Jewish population looked on approvingly as Soviet authorities allowed traffic on the street that passed beneath Ostra Brama, the famous Catholic shrine to the Virgin Mary. The presence of a Jewish boy directing traffic at Ostra Brama was taken as a sign of the ‘change that had been wished for’. The local Jews were also

glad that they no longer had to doff their caps as they passed under the Ostra Brama gate, as the Catholics (mainly Poles) had previously required. Poles were outraged by these changes, which they perceived as an affront to their religious beliefs. Vilna’s Jews did not seem to understand this, although they themselves understood the need to respect religious symbols;*° perhaps their mood was one of revenge for pre-war discrimination. The Jewish militiamen were openly hostile to the Polish population, and their attitudes and behaviour exacerbated Polish—Jewish feeling in the city. Eyewitness accounts tell of how Jewish members of the militia harassed Poles. In one example Maria Piekarska described how Jewish militiamen harassed and ridiculed Poles as they waited in queues. Marian Targowski, a court clerk, accused the Jewish militiamen of abusing their rights in order to terrorize the population. This ‘terrorizing of the population’ was said to have occurred when the residents of Vilna crowded into queues for bread and other provisions. Andrzej Jatbrzykowski, the nephew of Romuald Jatbrzykowski, the archbishop of Vilna, told of similar incidents in his

report about his time in Vilna during the Soviet and Lithuanian occupations. According to the younger Jalbrzykowski, it was most often young Jews who harassed the Poles as they queued, “brazenly throwing the Poles out of the queues until Soviet officials finally forbade them to do it any more’. In another instance the seven members of a militia patrol (made up of five Belarusians and two Jews)

entered the apartment of a tailor named Leonard Zuromski. The militiamen searched him for tobacco, and took his bicycle and a suitcase. According to one Vilna official, the Jewish militiamen were arrogant and belligerent towards the Poles.?/ 26 Levin, “The Jews of Vilna’, 132. 27 Maria Piekarska, wife of a Polish railway engineer, AW, HI, Vilna, testimony 8050, Vilna; T.A.K.,

bureaucrat, Vilna, AW, HI, testimony 1975, Vilna; Andrzej Jalbrzykowski, ‘Sprawozdanie’, IPMS, sygn. A. g. II. 2a (MSW Dziat Spoleczny’); Leonard Zuromski, tailor, Vilna, AW, HI, testimony 10141, Vilna.

Polish—Jewish Relations in Vilna 497 Jews’ denunciations of Poles to the Soviet authorities were another source of conflict. In one example we learn from Polish sources that Professor Stanislaw Cywinski, a writer for the Catholic Endek (National Democratic) press, was denounced by Jews, whereupon the Soviet authorities arrested and imprisoned him; he was subsequently killed in prison in Kirov in March 1941.” Judging by the frequency with which such denunciations are mentioned in Polish accounts, they must have been widespread. Mailitiamen searched for opponents to the Soviet regime of any kind, including officers, policemen, and political activists; they also acted as informants. Jewish civilians also informed on Poles. Although they were

certainly not the only informers, it seems that they were the most numerous. According to Jatbrzykowski, the Soviet authorities arrested and deported local Poles on the basis of a list culled from the reports of informers, most of whom were young Jews. This appears quite likely, since one of the Jewish eyewitnesses of those events described the Jewish role in informing on Poles in a similar way. In that account we read, Jews often denounced Poles for having used the term ‘Jewish snout’ (zydowska morda) to refer to them and as a result Poles were put in prison and sent to Siberia. Jewish communists mocked Poles’ patriotism, denounced their illegal conversations, pointed out Polish officers and former high officials, co-operated with the NK VD of their own volition, and took part in arrests.?°

Thus, because of their strongly pro-Soviet feelings and their participation in Soviet-directed activities, it seems highly likely that Jews did in fact figure prominently as NK VD informers.®*°

The Soviet security police, the NK VD, used informers’ reports to help them identify those who should be arrested. Informers also provided incriminating evidence, although sometimes it was enough that the subject belonged to a certain social or professional group. The Soviet authorities decided that arrests would begin in Vilna under the direction of the NK VD. Those arrested were pre-war officials, Polish army officers, members of the landed gentry, political and social activists, and young people. The arrests affected all ethnic groups living in Vilna; Poles, however, were most often the targets because most of Vilna’s pre-war

bureaucrats, officers, and policemen were Polish. Members of the social, 28 “W Wilnie i w Toruniu: Rozmowa z prof. Konradem Gorskim’, Zycie Literackie, 11 Sept. 1988; J. Surwito, Rachunki nie zamkniete: Wileriskie Slady na drogach cierpien (Vilnius, 1992), 115.

29 Anonymous account by a 22-year-old man from Vilna, ZIH, Ring. I/932.

°° We know that members of other ethnic groups, including Poles, also served as informers; Lewandowska, Zycie codzienne Wilna, 203. On the Jewish role in denunciations, see also Alicja Drozdowska MA, high-school teacher, Vilna, AW, HI, testimony 5009, Vilna; Michal Sypniewski, student at Stefan Batory University, Vilna, AW, HI, testimony [no number], Vilna; Jozef Jachniewicz, train engineer, Vilna, AW, HI, testimony 8807; Bolestaw Wierzchos, doctor, Vilna, AW, HI, testimony [no number], Vilna. On the subject of the Poles’ role in denunciations in Vilna, see Tomaszewski, Krontka, 138-0.

498 Marek Wierzbicki economic, and political elite were the primary targets, but workers and secondaryschool students were also sought. ‘The arrests took place at night, in secret; nevertheless, the entire city soon knew of them. More than 560 people were detained during the wave of arrests (not counting the Polish army officers and more obscure people who were never mentioned again).?! They were then sent to prisons in Lukiszki, Wilejka, and Minsk. The arrests of so many innocent people, many of whom were well-respected members of the community, spread fear among the city’s residents. Attempts to intervene with the Soviet authorities were fruitless: they refused to provide any information about the people who had been detained. It should be added that it was not only members of the above-mentioned groups who were arrested, but committed communists as well. Among the latter was the Polish communist Bohdan Skarzynski, who had helped to organize the Workers’ Militia when the Soviets entered Vilna; later he had proved to be a fiery orator at rallies, agitating on behalf of the Soviets. When he learned that Vilna was to be handed over to the Lithuanians, he decided to leave for Soviet Belarus to continue his political activities there. One evening, as he was packing his bags to leave the next day, he was taken from his home by the NK VD. Nothing more was heard from him. Wanda Wasilewska, who was a member of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR at the time, attempted to intervene on his behalf with Beria himself, but to no avail. Skarzyriski disappeared without trace.” A few months later Szlomo Katz, the Jewish communist who had been secondin-command of the Workers’ Guard during the Soviet occupation, met a similar fate. While he was still in Vilna, he learned that he had been accused of Trotskyist deviationism. His attempts to clarify the matter with the head of the NK VD in Vilna accomplished little. He then went to NK VD headquarters in Wilejka, where he once again asked for an explanation of what he believed were unjust accusations. He even left his home in Lwow so that it would be easier to contact him. After a few months he was arrested by the NK VD,*? once again confirming the saying that the revolution, especially the Bolshevik revolution, eats its children. The arrests were directed by NK VD officials, but local Workers’ Guard units and the militia assisted in carrying them out. The locals were so enthusiastic that high-ranking functionaries of the NK VD noted their efforts with approval. One of the reports by the NK VD chief of the Belarusian SSR, addressed to the first secretary of the Belarusian Communist Party, P. K. Ponomarenko, reads: As aresult of the activities that have been carried out with the aim of cleansing the ranks of the Workers’ Guard of the enemy counter-revolutionary element that has infiltrated it, detachments of the Workers’ Guard are carrying out the enormous task of maintaining public order, confiscating weapons, and combating speculation and the criminal element. For example: members of the Workers’ Guard in Vilna have confiscated weapons from the 31 Lithuanian sources mention 361 residents of Vilna who were arrested. See Zepkaité, ‘Okupacja

Wilna’, 304. 32 Tbid. 306~7. 33 Levin, ‘The Jews of Vilna’, 130 n. 101.

Polish—Fewish Relations in Vilna 499 population: 500 rifles; 255 revolvers of various kinds; 4 machine guns; 19 hand grenades; 19 artillery shells; 13,020 various pieces of ammunition; 256 swords.

It was revealed that a great many important merchants, traders, and shop owners had raised prices on their wares. Members of the Workers’ Guard wrote up protocols on all those people, which were then sent to the provisional boards so that proper action [could be taken]... Members of the Workers’ Guard are in an exultant mood; they carry out every order willingly and enthusiastically.*4

The participation of the Workers’ Guard and the militia in arrests and (sometimes brutal) searches played a significant role in the deterioration of Polish— Jewish relations. The Poles accused the guard and the militia of having joined the Soviet occupiers in persecuting the Polish population. One consequence of the militia’s actions was unprecedented widespread animosity towards the Jews on the part of Poles. The mood of revenge intensified. Ethnic conflict affected even those

who served in the Soviet apparatus: in one instance conflict broke out between Polish and Jewish officials within the ranks of the Workers’ Guard when Jewish members of the guard arrested two Polish guardists for a crime whose details are not known. Polish friends of the men who had been arrested came to the station and demanded that their associates be released. The dispute quickly escalated, and gunfire followed, lasting until Soviet soldiers arrived on the scene.®? We know that

by mid-October the antisemitic mood was intensifying among Vilna’s Poles. A rumour spread through the city that planning was under way for a pogrom against the Jews, to take place after the Soviets’ departure. The rumour was mentioned, among other places, in NK VD reports: ‘October 12, 1939. Informer “Osip” reported: “I was in a queue in front of a shop and I heard someone, a Pole, saying to the Jews who were in the queue: ‘You were happy that the Red Army came, [but] now the Lithuanian army will come, along with the Poles, and then red blood will

pour from the Jews.’” ’°®

The Soviet—Lithuanian pact of g October 1939 saw the transfer of Vilna and the western Vilna region (the districts of Vilna—Troki and Swieciany) to Lithuania in exchange for the creation of Soviet military bases on Lithuanian soil. The prospect of the withdrawal of the Soviet troops bolstered the prevailing anti-Jewish mood. Some Jews expected that there would be reprisals and asked the Soviet authorities

for permission to evacuate with the army and emigrate to the USSR. Others applied for permission to leave for the USSR because they hoped that living conditions there would be better. Some of those applying did so for ideological reasons.

Lavrenty Tsanava, the head of the Belarusian NK VD, reported that crowds of

workers, officials, and members of the intelligentsia were turning up at the Provisional Board of Vilna every day.°’ For example, on 12 October 257 people 34 ‘Meldunek operacyjny nr 43’ (8 Oct. 1939), in Gronek et al. (eds.), Zachodnia Biatorus, 182-3. 85 Levin, ‘The Jews of Vilna’, 132. 36 ‘Meldunek operacyjny nr 46’ (14 Oct. 1939), in Gronek et al. (eds.), Zachodnia Biatorus, 215. 37 Thid. 214.

500 Marek Wierzbicki applied to leave for western Belarus. NK VD reports also stated that the Jews were concerned about the transfer of Vilna to Lithuania because they feared that Poles in the city would conduct pogroms against them. According to the Soviet documents, the poorest Jews were particularly eager to leave because they foresaw that,

with the return of Polish officers to Lithuania, Jews would be worse off than before the war. The sense of danger among Vilna’s Jews increased when the Workers’ Guard, which they had regarded as a guarantor of their safety, was disbanded on 19 October. In all, approximately 3,000 Jews from Vilna’s ‘leftist and pro-Soviet circles’, including members of the Workers’ Guard, left the city.°° It was the self-declared supporters of the Soviet regime in particular who departed. The Polish population turned its hatred on all the Jews who remained. The Lithuanian army entered Vilna on 28 October 1939. ‘Iwo days later,on 30 _ October (according to the Lithuanian press, on the 31st), it was announced that the

price of bread would be drastically increased—up to 400 per cent. Enormous queues formed in front of bakeries. Soon a rumour spread that the owners of the bakeries had received their allocations of flour, but that they were starting to speculate and were hoarding their bread. Skirmishes broke out in front of a Jewishowned bakery and then spread to other areas around the city, even reaching the outlying neighbourhood of Podbrodzie. People demonstrated in the streets, shouting various slogans. The main demonstration moved towards Vilna’s town hall,

where an anti-Lithuanian and pro-Soviet clamour broke out. The Lithuanian police began to disperse the demonstrators. According to Jewish sources, Polish secondary-school and university students then began to attack Jewish passers-by. The skirmishes escalated into an anti-Jewish pogrom. Poles—mostly criminals (the ‘polski motloch’ as Jewish eyewitnesses called them)—began to vandalize and loot Jewish shops. At first, the Lithuanian police seemed undecided about what

they should do, at certain points actually participating in the pogrom. The Lithuanian authorities refused to answer appeals and could not be contacted, which meant that the attempts to intervene by Vilna’s Jewish leaders, led by Dr Jakub Wygodzki, were fruitless. Finally, in desperation, Jewish leaders threatened to call in nearby Soviet armoured units for assistance. This threat appears to have worked, since the Lithuanian authorities then put a stop to the excesses. After a few days the Lithuanian police restored order, albeit with difficulty. As a result of these incidents two Jews were killed and approximately 200 were injured. Several of those who were most active during the violence were arrested and brought to trial.2° Despite the Lithuanian authorities’ efforts, anti-Jewish excesses intensified 38 Levin, ‘The Jews of Vilna’, 128-31; see also the report of the Polish underground entitled ‘Wilno: Sytuacja w kraju. 14 XI 39 r.’, AAN, HI, Anders Collection, sygn. 121, p. 3, in which we read: ‘It is said that several thousand people, mostly Jews, crossed over to the territory of the USSR.’ 39 Levin, ‘The Jews of Vilna’, 128-35; ‘Moshe Kleinbaum’s Report on Issues in the Former Eastern Polish Territories (12 Mar. 1940)’, in N. Davies and A. Polonsky (eds.), Jews in Eastern Poland and the

USSR 1939-1946 (London, 1992), 286; P. Lossowski, Litwa a sprawy polskie 1939-1940 (Warsaw,

Polish—Jewish Relations in Vilna 501 over the coming weeks, to the point that Vilna’s Jews decided to organize their own self-defence units. However, the Lithuanian authorities required that these units

submit to the control of the Lithuanian police, and the Jews were unwilling to accept this. In the end, no self-defence groups were formed, but the Lithuanians did curb the violence.*° As the Soviets withdrew from the western Vilna region, they left chaos in their wake. In Landwarow and Stara Wilejka hooligans attacked Jews and looted Jewish

shops. According to Soviet sources, in Podbrodzie, in the Swieciany district, a pogrom began on the night of 24-5 October, just after the Red Army had completed its withdrawal. Groups of local Poles looted Jewish shops and pelted Jews with rocks, injuring four. The Soviet authorities intervened immediately: a cavalry

squadron was dispatched, along with the division commander and the political

commissar. The NKVD arrested twenty people and transported them to Swieciany. An investigation was launched to determine who was to blame for the events.**

POLISH—JEWISH RELATIONS IN VILNA, 1939-1940 After the pogrom of late October 1939 relations between Poles and Jews in Vilna remained tense. ‘The importance of the Polish—Jewish question gradually receded, however, as the Polish—Lithuanian conflict in the annexed territories intensified. During the first weeks of Lithuanian rule, the authorities introduced relatively liberal policies towards the Polish population. For example, they permitted the most popular Polish daily in Vilna, the Kurier Wileriski, to start publishing again. They also tolerated the activities of the Polish Committee, which was a form of political representation for Poles in Vilna and the western Vilna region. In addition, Polish

schools were allowed to function unhindered. One indication of Lithuanians’ 1985), 66; Jakob Plonski, 16 years old, Vilna, AW, HI, Protokoly palestynskie, protocol 176; ‘Uwagi o sytuacji w Wilnie 1 WileriszczyZnie’, AAN, HI, KA, 122, p. 13. Some of the Polish sources emphasize the economic bases of the incidents in Vilna, implying that the main causes of the skirmishes were the radical increase in the price of bread and the devaluation of the zloty in relation to the Lithuanian currency. See ‘Wilno: Sytuacja w kraju, 14 XI 39 r.’, AAN, HI, KA, sygn. 121, p. 3; anonymous testimony

from Vilna (Rome, 5 Feb. 1940), AAN, HI, KA, sygn. 121, p. 8. According to a Polish underground report, Polish nationalists used the economic problems as a pretext for carrying out a pogrom. See ‘Uwagi o sytuacji w Wilnie i Wilefiszczyznie’, AAN, HI, KA, sygn. 122, p. 12. On the other hand, British sources provide doubtful information about the participation of ‘Jewish communists’ in attacks on shops owned by ‘their capitalist compatriots’ and about an agreement between the Jewish communists and the Polish nationalists that was supposedly the basis for the anti-Jewish excesses in Vilna. See Rojek, ‘Wielka Brytania wobec paristwowej przynaleznosci Wileriszczyzny’, 262. 40H. Minczeles, Vilna, Wilno, Vilnius: La Férusalem de Lituanie (Paris, 1993), 376-7. 41 “Meldunek operacyjny nr 53’ (27 Oct. 1939) (report by the people’s commissar of domestic affairs

of the Belarusian SRR); Lawrientij Canawa to the secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Belarus, P. Ponomarenko, in Gronek et al. (eds.), Zachodnia Biatorus, 323.

502 Marek Wierzbicki liberal attitude towards the Polish population was that Poles were granted permission to celebrate Polish Independence Day on 11 November. The Poles of Vilna celebrated the anniversary with unusual fervour in 1939. After a few weeks the policies of the Lithuanian government changed radically.

The rapid Lithuanization of Vilna, and the attendant liquidation of the city’s Polish character, were under way. Naturally, this led to conflicts with the Polish population, which opposed the elimination of the Polish language from the edu-

cational system and administration and the removal of Polish teachers and officials from their posts. One of the most spectacular examples of the policy of Lithuanization was the closure of Stefan Batory University, where Polish students were in the majority, on 15 December 1939.*” Lithuanization also affected social and economic life. During the first weeks of their rule the Lithuanian authorities secured more provisions for the city, and this improved their relationship with the city’s residents. However, the further actions

of the Lithuanian authorities, including the dismantling of all Polish economic institutions (banks and socio-economic associations such as co-operatives), destroyed the positive attitude among the Polish population. Poles who had been active in the economic sphere had to relinquish their hopes of ‘intensive and trans-

parent Polish—Lithuanian co-operation towards the achievement of a common goal: the improvement of the economic situation of Vilna and the Vilna region’.*° The policy of Lithuanization was bolstered by legislation on citizenship passed in November 1939, which introduced many restrictions and granted Lithuanian citizenship to a relatively limited number of Vilna’s residents. According to the Lithuanian authorities, only 21,000 heads of households were granted citizenship before June 1940, or a total of approximately 80,000 people, if we include their families. The remaining 120,000 residents of Vilna, not counting the Lithuanians who had arrived from the Kovno region and refugees from central Poland, were given the status of ‘foreigners’. The question of citizenship had a significant impact on the lives of average Vilna residents. Only citizens were permitted to engage in certain business activities or practise certain professions, such as physicians, lawyers, pharmacists, and clerks, and for this reason many Poles in Vilna applied for citizenship.**

42 See P. Lossowski (ed.), Likwidacja Uniwersytetu Stefana Batorego w Wilnie przez wtadze litewskie

w grudniu 1939 roku: Dokumenty 1 materialy (Warsaw, 1991); id., Litwa a sprawy polskie, 76-146, 237-333; anonymous account from Vilna (Rome, 5 Feb. 1940), AAN, HI, KA, sygn. 121, pp. g—10;

, ‘Meldunek: Wilno 17 marca 1940 r.’ (report by the commandant of the Vilna district of the Zwiazek Walki Zbrojnej (Union for Armed Struggle), Lt.-Col. Nikodem Sulika to General K. Sosnkowsk1), in H. Czarnocka et al. (eds.), Armia Krajowa w dokumentach 1939-1945, 1: Wrzesien 1939-czerwiec 1941 (Wroclaw, 1990), 176-8.

43 Lewandowska, Zycie codzienne Wilna, 76; testimony of ‘Jurek’ Wilner of Vilna, ZIH, Ring.

1/487. 44 Lossowski, Litwa a sprawy polskie, 111-16.

Polish—fewish Relations in Vilna 503 The Lithuanian authorities’ anti-Polish stance also manifested itself in policies favouring Vilna’s ethnic minorities, and particularly the largest of these minorities, the Jewish community. The culprits in the antisemitic excesses of 31 October 1939 were brought to trial, and the authorities appealed to Jews to use Yiddish and not

Polish. Vilna Radio introduced Yiddish programmes, although similar programmes were banned in Kovno. Finally, the Lithuanian authorities organized a colloquium in honour of the Jewish author Y. L. Peretz. The event took place with

special pomp in the main auditorium of the university, which was now in _ Lithuanian hands, with the rector himself participating. Some sources report that the authorities would not, however, grant permission for a similar session to be organized in Kovno.*? The aim of such policies was to place the various ethnic groups, particularly the Poles and the Jews, at odds. The Lithuanian government’s activities served to entrench the grudges and prejudices that had arisen between Poles and Jews during the Soviet occupation. A large proportion of the Jewish bourgeoisie supported the government’s actions. Some members of the Jewish intelligentsia spoke out publicly in support of the policies that had been enacted under Lithuanian rule. For example, the head of the Jewish religious community, Dr Wygodzki, stated in the Lithuanian press that ‘most of the Jewish community is pleased that Lithuanians entered Vilna’.*° Not everyone was so unequivocal in support of the Lithuanian government’s policies, however. Even Dr Wygodzki’s

statements were carefully calculated. At a celebration in memory of Ludwik _ Abramowicz he spoke warmly of the ‘national’ idea and of the concept of a multiethnic state reminiscent of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania before the partitions of

Poland. The next day, in a confidential conversation with a member of the Lithuanian government, he withdrew these statements, claiming that he had been

forced to make them. He also assured various people that he approved of the Lithuanian state’s ethnic composition. However, there was evidence of Polish—Jewish co-operation. Some members of the Jewish community demonstrated their solidarity with the Poles. Jewish secondary-school students joined their Polish counterparts in a strike organized in December 1939 in protest against the forced Lithuanization of the school system.

Furthermore, the Lithuanian authorities were displeased with the attitude of Jewish refugees from central Poland, and particularly their use of the Polish language. The authorities wanted Jews to use Lithuanian in public and to speak Yiddish among themselves, but despite an intensive press campaign and administrative pressures, Jews from central Poland continued to speak Polish in public places. The pro-Polish mood was also apparent in Jewish socialist circles, for instance among the activists of Jewish leftist political parties: the Bund, Poalei Zion, and Zydowski Komitet Robotniczy (the Jewish Workers’ Committee), some * “Uwagi o sytuacji w Wilnie i Wiletiszczyznie’, AAN, HI, KA, sygn. 122, p. 12.

46 Lossowski, Litwa a sprawy polskie, 215; A. Zbikowski, ‘Wilno’, in id. (ed.), Archiwum Ringelbluma: Konspiracyjne Archiwum Getta Warszawy, v: Relacje z Kreséw (Warsaw, 1997), 320—I.

504 Marek Wierzbicki of whom were refugees from central Poland.*’ There was co-operation in other fields as well. In November 1939 Polish and Jewish leaders were already attempting

to ease the tensions between the two communities. One important area of cooperation was in aid to refugees. The Committee for Refugee Affairs, which had been active in Vilna since the beginning of the Soviet occupation, worked with the Jewish community’s special commission for aid to Jewish refugees. Initially there were 16,000 refugees (10,000 Poles and 6,000 Jews), but the number grew to 30,000 by November (20,000 Poles and 10,000 Jews). After the Lithuanians entered Vilna, two committees for refugee aid, one Polish and one Jewish, were established to receive support from abroad. The Jewish committee was financed by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the Joint), and the Polish committee was supported by the Herbert Hoover Foundation. The Jewish Aid Committee’s assistance to a group of twenty-two Polish intellectuals, including writers, journalists,

professors, and artists, demonstrated the Jewish community’s goodwill. The Committee rented a dormitory and provided meals for these men, overlooking the fact that the group included well-known pre-war antisemites from Poznan and Warsaw. The generosity of Vilna’s Jews brought positive results: some of these antisemites later had their photographs taken holding Jewish identity cards.*® It was this group of Polish intellectuals that proposed an initiative for Polish— Jewish reconciliation. The man behind it was Feliks Gross, a 34-year-old lawyer and sociologist who before the war had been a member of the Krakéw section of the Polska Partia Socjalistyczna (Polish Socialist Party). In 1938 he published a well-known book entitled Proletariat i kultura. He arrived in Lithuania in early December 1939, and for the next six months was very active in the Vilna underground. At the same time he worked to unite the Polish political leadership behind the idea of reconciliation with Jewish circles. Among those who assisted him in | this endeavour were Count Michal Tyszkiewicz, Stefan Bratkowski (the pre-war Polish consul in Breslau), and Tadeusz Zajaczkowski (the former Polish viceconsul in Ostrava and secretary to Walery Slawek). This group of activists among the Polish intelligentsia helped create an organization called Liga (the League), with the aim of propagating the idea of Polish—Jewish reconciliation and combating antisemitism within Polish society. Among Liga’s members were the former

deputy to the Sejm, Wanda Pelczyriska, and Ambroziewicz, the former chief schools inspector in Warsaw. Gross polled Jewish public opinion in Vilna about Polish—Jewish co-operation, after which, at the request of Michat Tyszkiewicz, he wrote a report for the Polish government in Angers. Unfortunately, the contents of

this report are no longer known.*? In a series of meetings with representatives 47 Lossowski, Litwa a sprawy polskie, 215. 48 Zerach Zarecki, former chairman of the Refugee Committee in Vilna, Protokoly palestynskie, AW,

HI, protocol 153, Vilna; Report of Dr Feliks Gross, AW, HI, V-MID-63. 49 Perhaps this refers to the report entitled ‘Uwagi 0 sytuacji w Wilnie i Wileriszczyznie’, AAN, HI, MID 122.

Polish—Jewish Relations in Vilna 505 from Jewish circles, the Polish intellectuals attempted to unite Jews behind the idea

of rebuilding a Polish state after the war. There were a number of underground

meetings to this end, at which Gross read bulletins from Angers and lectured on the question of Polish statehood. He remarked that he had observed a great deal of patriotism and sympathy for the Polish cause among Polish Jews. His work was to culminate in a joint conference of members of Jewish and Polish political parties, whose main aim was to issue two declarations: one by Jewish political groups on the necessity of rebuilding Poland within its pre-war borders, and one

by Polish parties on equal rights for all citizens. ‘The conference, however, never took place. On 15 June 1940 Soviet troops entered Lithuania, and in July the Lithuanian state was annexed to the USSR as the Soviet Socialist Republic of Lithuania. The activities of the Polish and Jewish socialists appear to have had little impact on Polish—Jewish relations in Vilna. ‘The unfavourable political situation was partly to blame, but so was the fact that their activities were confined to elite circles, which meant that their audience, both Polish and Jewish, was small. As a result, Gross’s initiatives were not widely known.°° On 15 June 1940 the Soviet army assumed control of Lithuania, the Lithuanian government resigned, and President Antanas Smetona left the country. On 17 June the communist-leaning journalist Justas Paleckis took over as head of the newly formed government, and Soviet annexation of Lithuania became a fact. Soon after, on 14 July, elections to the Sejm were held under the watchful eye of the Soviet

army. On the 21st the new Sejm declared the annexation of Lithuania to the _ Soviet Union. The new government began to reconstruct the Lithuanian state according to current Soviet models. This involved, among other things, the nationalization of trade, industry, and services as well as the reform of agriculture, including the confiscation and appropriation of all landholdings. All of the bigger industrial enterprises, which had been largely in Jewish hands, were taken over by the state, as were 1,593 shops, workshops, and warehouses. Eighty-three per cent

of the enterprises that were nationalized in Lithuania had belonged to Jews. In Vilna itself and in the Vilna district most of the factories, workshops, buildings, and shops that were confiscated had belonged to local Jews. Thus, it was the Jews who were hurt most by the nationalization of trade and industry.”! The attitude of the Jewish population towards Soviet rule was not unequivocal. Many older Jews and leftists who had come from central Poland as refugees expressed reservations about it. At the same time some members of Vilna’s Jewish community did show strong support for the Soviets.°” Just as they had during the first Soviet occupation, many Jews backed the Soviet authorities and attempted to °° Report of Dr Feliks Gross, AW, HI, V-MID-63; A. Friszke, ‘Dialog polsko-zydowski w Wilnie 1939-1940, WieZ, 4 (1987), 88-90; ‘Uwagi o sytuacji w Wilnie 1 WileriszczyZnie’, AAN, HI, KA, sygn. 122, p. 14.

°1-D. Levin, The Lesser of Two Evils: Eastern European Fewry under Soviet Rule, 1939-1941

(Philadelphia, 1995), 60. 52 Testimony of ‘Jurek’ Wilner of Vilna, ZIH, Ring. 1/487.

506 Marek Wierzbicki Table 1 Students at the University of Vilna according to ethnic group before and after the closure of Stefan Batory University on

15 December 1939 ,

Ethnic group Percentage of total in academic year

1938/9 1939/40 (before 1941 the liquidation)

Poles 72.7 77.7 14.95 Jews - 13.4 16.9 29.9 Russians | 6.8 0.5 — Belarusians 3.0 2.0 — Lithuanians 2.8 2.0 51.06 | Ukrainians 0.9 — — Germans 0.4 — —

Other — 0.9 4.09 TOTAL 100.0 100.0 100.0

Total no. of students 3,110 2,586? 3,102

* The data for 1939 were taken from a survey conducted by the Lithuanian authori-

ties in November 1939. Not all students participated. See P. Lossowski (ed.), Likwidacja Uniwersytetu Stefana Batorego w Wilnie przez wladze ltewskie w grudniu 1939 roku: Dokumenty 1 materiaty (Warsaw, 1991), 223.

Source: A. Gtowacki, Sowiect wobec Polakéw na ziemiach wschodnich II Rzeczypospolite} 1939-1941 (L6dz, 1997), 477.

find their place in the new political and economic structure. Many—mainly communists or Soviet sympathizers—joined the rapidly expanding Soviet administra-

tion. With the nationalization of trade, former shop owners often became the directors of state shops. Many Jews with a technical education took administrative positions in the nationalized enterprises and economic institutions. For example, of the government commissars appointed to the 337 factories nationalized during the months of July and August 1940, 153 were Lithuanians (45 per cent), 107 were Jews (32 per cent), 40 were Poles (12 per cent), and 37 were Russians (11 per cent). The task of these commissars was to transform enterprises that had been private up to that time.°? Young Jews were now completely free to pursue their education, which they did assiduously. During the 1940/1 academic year they made up 30 per cent of the total student body at Stefan Batory University, or double the percentage in 1938/9 (see Table 1).°* This improved access to education was no doubt one of the reasons why the young Jews of Vilna supported the Soviets so strongly. According to Dov Levin, author of Baltic Jews under the Soviets, 1940-1941,°? many young Vilna Jews 53 Testimony of ‘Jurek’ Wilner of Vilna, ZIH, Ring. 1/487, 72. 54 A. Zbikowski, ‘Introduction’, in id. (ed.), Archiwum Ringelbluma, p. xvii. ®® Jerusalem, 1994.

Polish—Jewish Relations in Vilna 507 joined the Komsomol. During the elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in Vilna, of the sixty-five Komsomol delegates working in the election commissions, forty-six were Jews, and it is estimated that Jews made up about 50 per cent of the Komsomol membership. The fact that one of Komsomol’s publications, Shtraln, was published in Yiddish also suggests that the organization had many Jewish members. Polish sources also indicate that young Jews were heavily engaged in Soviet-sponsored activities. One such source, a report entitled ‘Uwagi 0 sytuacji w Wilnie 1 na WilefiszczyZnie’ (‘Comments on the Situation in Vilna and the Vilna Region’), contains the following observation: Typical [of the situation] was the fact that a large part of the Jewish youth had been communized; it was largely they who organized the welcome for the Soviets, joined all manner of institutions created by the Soviets, and who were transformed from a harassed ethnic minority into the ruling social group. (It seemed they meant to compensate for their earlier humiliations through their behaviour.) This state of affairs was encouraged by the Soviets. They usually trusted Jewish people, and in any case gave them a certain degree of priority over Poles.*®

Did the Soviet authorities really trust Jews more than Poles? It is difficult to answer this question definitively, since as yet no Soviet documents have been found that would directly confirm such a view. But hints in the existing Polish, Soviet, and Jewish sources lead us to believe that this was the case. For example, during the campaign leading up to the elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, which took place in Lithuania on 12 January 1941, the composition of the electoral com-

missions in the Vilna district of the western Vilna region was as follows: Poles constituted 31.5 per cent, Jews 29.5 per cent, Lithuanians 20.2 per cent, Russians g per cent, Belarusians 5 per cent, and members of other ethnic groups 4.8 per cent. Meanwhile, according to data from the 1931 census, the population was 69 per cent Polish and 12.6 per cent Jewish.°*”

The view that the Soviets favoured the Jews is confirmed in an account by a 22-year-old Vilna Jew. He makes quite a harsh assessment of the Jewish attitude towards the Soviet authorities: The Bolsheviks treated the Jews well in general. They trusted them completely and were sure of their total sympathy and loyalty. That is why they made Jews directors and gave them responsible positions, not trusting them to Poles, who had held them previously. The Soviet authorities were thus interested in gaining [control over] the Polish and Lithuanian masses and having them work in the Communist Party. In doing so, the Russians gave the lower posts primarily to Poles, giving them priority even over the Jews. °6 ‘Uwagi o sytuacji w Wilnie i Wileniszczyznie’, AAN, HI, MID 122, p. 12; see also Meldunek no.

65 (report of General S. Rowecki to the commander-in-chief), 31 Mar. 1941, Studium Polski Podziemnej (Polish Underground Studies, SPP), sygn. 3.1.1.1.2. °? A. Glowacki, Sowieci wobec Polakéw na ziemach wschodnich II Rzeczypospolite; 1939-1941 (L6dz,

1997), 127; P. Eberhardt, ‘Struktura narodowosciowa Polski pétnocno-wschodniej w latach trzydziestych XX wieku’, in Gizejewska and Strzembosz (eds.), Spoleczenstwo biatoruskie, 47-50.

508 Marek Wierzbicki , For example, the head of the personnel department in the ‘Foodstuffs Trade’ in Vilna refused to give a position to a Jewish woman who had applied, but took a Polish woman instead.°®

This testimony also highlights another aspect of Soviet nationality policy. The Soviet authorities actively recruited Poles and Lithuanians for positions in the bureaucracy; however, while declaring that all nationalities would be treated equally in the Soviet state, they placed members of these groups in low-ranking positions. The Soviets’ apparent distrust of Polish and Lithuanian elites certainly provoked resentment, and the presence of Jews in positions that had previously been occupied by Poles or Lithuanians heightened the sense of injustice within these communities.°? Jews constituted a large percentage of the employees in the Soviet administration. For example, they made up 51 per cent of all employees in the Ministry of Industry of the Lithuanian SSR, and about 50 per cent or more in the Miedzynarodowa Organizacja Pomocy Rewolucjonistom (International

Organization for Aid to Revolutionaries). In the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Lithuania, five out of the twenty-one members were Jewish. While the number of Jews in the police in independent Lithuania was negligible, their participation in the newly founded people’s militia was significant. A number of Jewish communist activists were given high positions in the security apparatus of Soviet Lithuania. Jews now had the opportunity to pursue a career in the military as well. Nevertheless, according to Levin, the percentage of Jews in the Soviet administration of the Lithuanian SSR, particularly at the highest levels, did not exceed their percentage in Lithuanian society.°° This opinion has no statistical support, however. The influx of Jews into the Soviet apparatus, in conjunction with the enthusiasm of some of these Jewish bureaucrats, cemented opinion among non-Jews that the Jews in Soviet Lithuania were pro-Soviet. The openness with which some of

Vilna’s Jews demonstrated their pro-Soviet attitude contributed to this growing conviction. For example, as one Jew from Vilna recalls, during a screening of the film Wiatr od wschodu (‘Wind from the East’, 1940), which depicted the circumstances surrounding the fall of the Polish state in September 1939, some Jews were ostentatiously delighted. The Poles in the audience did not conceal their hatred for those Jews who applauded during a scene in which Polish army detachments were shown fleeing.®! For these and other reasons, the conviction that Soviet rule was ‘Jewish rule’, and that all Jews were communist sympathizers, became widespread in the city and deepened the antisemitic mood. This mood was reflected in Polish

sources, including the reports of the Polish underground. On 25 February 1941 58 Anonymous testimony by a 22-year-old man from Vilna, Z1H, Ring. I/932.

°9 Zbikowski, ‘Wilno’, 320. °° Levin, The Baltic Jews under the Soviets: 1940-1946, 27-62. 61 Anonymous testimony by a 22-year-old man from Vilna, ZIH, Ring. I/932; testimony of ‘Jurek’ Wilner of Vilna, ZIH, Ring. I/487.

Polish—fewish Relations in Vilna 509 Table 2 The language of instruction in Vilna schools during the 1940/1 academic year

Language of No.of schools

instruction Elementary Percentage Secondary, Special Vocational of total incomplete elementary secondary

Belarusian ] 7.7 1.5 2— ]— — Lithuanian 5 — Polish 36355.4 8— ——— Russian 4.6 l Yiddish 20 30.8 3 — — TOTAL 65 100.0 14 ] 8 Source: A. Glowacki, Sowieci wobec Polakéw na ziemiach wschodnich II Rzeczypospolite; 1939-194] (Lodz, 1997), 454.

the commandant of the Vilna district of Zwiazek Walki Zbrojnej (the Union for Armed Struggle, ZWZ), Lieutenant-Colonel Nikodem Sulik, stated in his report to London: “The Jews co-operate with the Bolsheviks fully and without reservation, both economically and politically. As an element that knows the area well, for

the NKVD they are an invaluable whip in relations with the Polish population. This 1s especially true of young Jews, from both the intelligentsia and the working class,’©2

The attitudes of Jewish secondary-school students during the plebiscite carried out by the Soviet authorities in Vilna in December 1940 demonstrated that such opinions were exaggerated. To the surprise of both the Soviet authorities and the Lithuanians, 93 per cent of the pupils—including Jewish pupils—voted in favour of keeping the Polish language in secondary schools.®? Under Soviet rule the

Polish population’s access to education improved markedly. The number of Polish-language schools in Vilna increased significantly in comparison to the number that had existed in the period of Lithuanian rule. The Soviet decision to recognize citizens’ right to receive education in their mother tongue was the result not only of the authorities’ efforts to create an educational system that would reflect the ethnic make-up of Vilna (see Table 2), but also of the united stance of Polish and Jewish students.

The Polish community, especially the local intelligentsia, also attempted to adapt itself to the new sociopolitical reality. For instance, pupils and teachers participated in officially organized demonstrations on May Day and on the anniversary of the October revolution. Vilna’s young people turned out in especially large

numbers for the May Day demonstration because their matura examination 62 “Meldunek Komendanta okregu Wilerskiego pptk. Sulika (pseud. Ladyna) z 25 lutego 1941 rokw’ (photocopy), SPP, sygn. 3.3.1.4, p. I. 63 ‘Wiadomosci z okupacji (koniec grudnia 1940)’, AAN, HI, KA, Vilna, sygn. 121, p. 13.

510 Marek Wierzbicki results, and therefore their graduation from high school, depended on it. At the time patriotic Poles condemned the opportunism of teachers, pupils, and parents. They condemned even more vigorously the activities of some Poles, including some local authors, in supporting the Soviet regime or in co-operating with the NKVD as agents. In 1940 and 1941 the ZWZ in Vilna handed down several death sentences on Poles who were collaborating with the Soviets, and some were in fact carried out.®*

Animosity towards Jews increased as a result of the deportations that took place in June 1941. Some 30,000 people were slated for deportation from Lithuania; of these, approximately 7,000 were Jews. In the Vilna district 7,600 people were on

the deportation lists, and 2,200 were deported from the city itself. Some of the Jews—for the most part refugees from central Poland—were subjected to repression, while others had taken part in the repressions by assisting the Soviet security apparatus. Some of those arrested during the action of 14—18 June were executed by the NK VD.© The outbreak of war between Germany and the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 provided the local population with an opportunity to give vent to its simmering hatred of the Jews. Following the German occupation on 24 June, the German

authorities fomented that mood and drew the local Lithuanian population into contributing to the extermination of the Lithuanian Jews. Though anti-Jewish sentiment had been strong among the Polish population during the periods of Lithuanian and Soviet rule, there had been no eruption of hatred towards Jews after the Soviet authorities fled and the German army arrived. In fact, compared to

the antagonistic Lithuanians, the Poles were clearly sympathetic towards the Jewish population. Jewish testimonies recount instances in which Poles helped Jews. For example, a 22-year-old refugee from Krzeszowice recalls that she saw a Polish woman courageously intervening to defend Jews who had been thrown out of a bread queue by Lithuanian policemen: ‘Why are you tormenting Jews? They have to live, too,’ she said to the policemen. Unfortunately, the intervention had tragic results. The Lithuanian policeman took out his pistol and, without a word,

shot the woman on the spot.®° One Jewish woman noted in her account that Polish—Jewish relations were good after the Germans arrived.°’ According to another testimony, when Jewish forced labourers were supervised by Poles, condi-

tions were tolerable; when they were supervised by Lithuanians, on the other 64 ‘Tomaszewski, Kronika wilenska, 138—42; T. Szarota, ‘Problem kolaboracji w Wilnie pod okupacja sowiecka: Sprawa Teodora Bujnickiego’, in Jasiewicz (ed.), Europa nieprowincjonalna. 65 Zbikowski, ‘Wilno’, 319-20; ‘Relacja Jana A.’, in J. T. Gross and I. Grudzitiska-Gross (eds.), W czterdziestym nas Matko na Sybir zestah: Rosja a Polska, 1939-1942 (Warsaw, 1989), 82—3; Y. Arad, The Partisan: From the Valley of Death to Mount Zion (New York, 1979), 26-7; Eliach, There Once Was

a World, 572. .

66 Anonymous testimony of a 22-year-old woman who had fled from Krzeszowice to Vilna, ZIH,

Ring. 1/433. 67 Miriam Abramowska, ZIH, Ring. I/930.

Polish—fewish Relations in Vilna 511 hand, work was hellish. Jews under the control of Lithuanians were often abused, harassed, and beaten.®* An anonymous refugee from L6dzZ recalled the particularly

friendly attitude of Poles from Vilna who had worked as domestic servants in Jewish homes before the war. The witness, a woman who worked in the Jewish council after the Germans arrived, reported that when the German occupation began, these Poles brought food to their former employers in the ghetto. The author of this account spoke warmly of the Polish peasants from the Vilna area, and about their kindness towards the persecuted Jews. As an example, she mentioned that these Poles had helped the survivors of mass executions in Ponary and other places (which had been carried out by Lithuanian and German police units). One of the peasants, for example, took a 12-year-old girl to the hospital in Vilna; by some miracle she had survived the executions in Ponary but had been shot in the hand.®’ Some testimonies by Jewish survivors report that Polish and Belarusian peasants provided assistance to Jews hiding in the Braslaw district of the northern Vilna region. According to accounts by Jews from Braslaw, Jodow, Rymszany, and other places, the Catholic clergy also played an important role by encouraging the faithful to help the persecuted Jews.’° A refugee from L6dz, Dr Kac-Edelis, described the Poles’ comportment in similar terms. Hoping to get to Vilna, he volunteered for a labour camp that was located outside the town, and worked there as a peatdigger. In the camp he learned that the Polish intelligentsia in Vilna was helping to organize aid for the Jews. When the Germans demanded a levy of 5 million roubles and 2 kilograms of gold weeks before the establishment of the Vilna ghetto at the end of August 1941, the Poles of Vilnius helped the Jewish community to collect the money for this levy. Notably, Professor Michejda, a well-known surgeon and professor at Vilna University, personally donated a large sum. Peasants living near the camp reported that the archbishop of Vilna, Romuald Jalbrzykowski, as well as other priests, had instructed Catholics to show compassion and aid the persecuted Jews in any way they could. Dr Kac-Edelis also wrote that the attitude of Polish peasants was unusually caring. They often fed him without asking for anything in return, and expressed their sympathy and outrage at the German policy towards the Jews. After a few weeks Dr Kac-Edelis arrived at Nowa Wilejka, where he was one of the few who escaped an execution squad. Afterwards he spent the entire day lying in a field covered with

branches. Towards evening he asked a peasant passing by to tell the local landowner that he was wounded and needed help. A few days earlier the landowner had tried to give bread and apples to the detained Jews but the Lithuanian guards 68 Anonymous testimony from Vilna after the Germans had arrived, ZIH, Ring. I/931. 69 Tbid.

7° A. Machnes and K. Rina (eds.), Darkness and Desolation: In Memory of the Communities of Braslaw, Dubene, faisi, fod, Kislowszczizna, Okmientc, Opsa, Plusy, Rimszan, Slobodka, Zamosz, Zaracz (Tel Aviv, 1986), 573-5.

512 Marek Wierzbicki had beaten him and chased him away. Around midnight the landowner came and took Dr Kac-Edelis to his home, dressed his wound, and fed him. Before dawn

he sent him on his way to the General Government. When they parted, the landowner gave him a rosary as a keepsake, peasant clothing, some money, and a document addressed to his farmhand which he could use as an identity document.

Along his route Dr Kac-Edelis stopped at the homes of many landowners and peasants, and found their occupants to be kind and helpful. He recalls, however, that the degree of kindness diminished the further he got from the sites of mass executions of Jews. In western Belarus, in a small town on the Lithuanian border, he received care in a hospital thanks to the joint efforts of the mayor, the local priest, and the head of the local Jewish council. He was given money and documents for the rest of his journey. The local auxiliary police (mostly Poles) in the western Belarusian towns he passed through were quite accommodating towards the Jews. It was only after he crossed the river Niemen that he was caught by the Lithuanian police, who questioned whether he was Aryan; they beat him and sent him to be examined in order to determine his race.’ Finally, he reached Warsaw

and gave testimony to the underground archives of the Warsaw ghetto (the Archiwum Ringelbluma).

CONCLUSION The Soviet and Lithuanian occupations of Vilna and the western Vilna region in 1939-41 were brief episodes in the history of Vilna during the Second World War. Moreover, these occupations involved only a relatively small part of pre-war Poland’s eastern lands. Nevertheless, Polish—Jewish relations evolved during these periods in all the territories of pre-war Poland later occupied by the Soviets. This is especially true of the Kresy. Since this area is not a perfect model, the conclusions we can draw from an analysis of the history of Polish—Jewish relations there should be treated with caution. Above all, Vilna was not a typical urban centre in pre-war Poland’s northeastern borderlands. On the contrary, it served as a regional capital, and the attitudes of its residents must therefore have differed significantly from those of the average shtetl resident. The elite character of Vilna’s society brought an influx of Jewish refugees from central Poland, most of whom were educated and wealthy. Undoubtedly, this in turn influenced the attitudes of Vilna’s Jewish community. But despite these caveats, comparing Polish—Jewish relations under the Soviet occupation of Vilna with analogous relations in occupied areas of north-eastern pre-war Poland does lead to some interesting conclusions. The first relates to Jewish attitudes towards the Soviet authorities during the

first period of the occupation. It appears that the initial reactions of some of Vilna’s Jews were as positive or enthusiastic as those of most of the Jewish popula71 Dr Kac-Edelis, ZIH, Ring. 1/494.

Polish—fewish Relations in Vilna 513 tion in the occupied territories. Their motives also seem to have been similar. In Vilna, as in other regions, the Jewish view of the Soviets stemmed from a fear of Nazi brutality, the wave of anarchy and violence, aversion to (and sometimes hatred of) Poles and the Polish state, and a fascination with Russia (even Soviet Russia) and Russian culture. Also very important to the Jews was the quest for freedom and security, as well as for real equality within the Soviet structure. It is impossible to say definitively which of the above factors was decisive in making the

Jews in Vilna, or in other areas under the Soviet occupation, favourably inclined towards the Soviets. Naturally, attitudes depended on local conditions, the current political and military situation, and the mentality and personal experiences of specific individuals. Nevertheless, even the local Poles noticed that a key reason for the pro-Soviet stance of the Jews was the situation of the Jewish community before the

war. In particular, Jews had been victims of discrimination, and this contrasted with the lack of discrimination against them in the Soviet state. Their attitude was described in the report of the Polish underground mentioned above. Written for the Polish government-in-exile, it read: The persecution of Jews in Poland and their conviction that they are a lower category of citizen have provided the basis for the Jews’ attitude. I met members of all Jewish classes and social groups during my travels. Everywhere, regardless of whether they had adapted politically and socially to the Soviet system, there reigned a conviction that “There, in the Soviet Union, I will be a person, a person the same as all the others.’ And thus de facto equality before the law—the removal of the stiff, inflexible criteria of ancestry, race, or religion—is the reason for the Jewish people’s positive attitude towards the new government. Above all, it was the national aspects that were decisive. All aspects related to class and ideology were somehow forgotten in the face of the conviction that a national liberation was under way. Hence the attitude towards the Soviets in the first period was almost fanatically positive, particularly since the only alternative to remaining in Soviet territory was going to

the area occupied by the Germans.

After joyfully welcoming the Soviets, some of Vilna’s Jews actively co-operated with the Soviet authorities. Believing that the changes under way in the areas occupied by the Red Army would be permanent, many of them entered the institutions created by the Soviets and helped to construct the new social and political system. At the same time the old order was being dismantled, and those with close ties to the Polish state or the pre-war social and economic order were persecuted. Some Jewish officials and Soviet sympathizers took part in the persecutions, assisting the NKVD in its identification of ‘enemies of the people’. The victims of this perse-

cution by the Soviet security apparatus were most often (but not exclusively) Polish; this heightened the sense of injustice among Poles, as did the fact that Jews (in addition to Belarusians and Russians) were appointed to many administrative posts that had been held by Poles before the war. Moreover, during the first period of Soviet rule in Vilna the Jewish community expressed animosity towards Poles. 7 ‘Uwagi o sytuacji w Wilnie i Wileriszczyznie’, AAN, HI, MID 122, p. 12.

514 Marek Wierzbicki These attitudes were rooted in age-old prejudices and traumas and were a response to discrimination. In Vilna, as elsewhere, the pro-Soviet mood of some Jews provoked increased hostility on the part of the locals against the entire Jewish community. In the last days of the Soviet occupation of 1939 the unexpected retreat of the Soviet army and the chaos that ensued allowed Poles to manifest their antisemitic

mood; they took revenge on the Jews, who had come to be identified with the Soviet regime. In taking revenge, the Poles did not discriminate between those who had collaborated with the Soviet occupiers and those who were innocent of such collaboration. The local criminal element also took advantage of the opportunity to loot Jewish property.

The second Soviet occupation, following the outbreak of war between the Germans and Russians, was entirely different. As a reaction to the pro-Soviet stance that many Jews had adopted in the autumn of 1939, the pro-Lithuanian sympathies of the Jewish bourgeoisie during Lithuanian rule, and the activities of some Jews on behalf of the Soviet authorities in 1940—1, the Poles of Vilna exhibited widespread animosity towards Jews, who were blamed for the Soviet repressions.

The Polish—Jewish antagonism, it seems, was rooted in the fact that the socioeconomic situation had changed during the occupation. Conditions deteriorated for the Polish population, who had lost not only their own state, but also their privileged status and many of the rights that they had enjoyed in the Kresy. The Jewish population, on the other hand, despite the repressions and confiscations, adapted better to the new reality. In many cases their situation improved, and they were

sometimes able to benefit more from the social and economic changes than were the Poles. The fact that Jews often replaced Poles in administrative positions, the security apparatus, and the educational system is evidence of this. Jews were also able to arrange special access to food and manufactured goods that were in short supply—dquite a significant factor in socialist economic conditions, when shortages of basic items were the norm. We may assume that the Jewish community’s more advantageous situation also resulted from its social and professional standing. Before the war Vilna’s Poles were employed for the most part in the state administration as teachers, policemen, and clerks, or in industry as labourers. Thus, the political changes and economic chaos of 1939—41 affected them most. Since Jews were primarily employed in trade and industry, they had the capital needed to survive the difficult war years. The disparity between the Polish and Jewish situations often provoked resentment towards the ‘privileged’ Jews.’? And yet, despite their resentment and prejudice, Poles in Vilna and its environs did not participate in the mass murder of Jews. ‘This is in contrast to the Lithuanians, who participated at first on their own, and then

under the direction of the German authorities. On the contrary, the Poles (the intelligentsia, as well as the peasants and the workers) displayed a great deal of 73 Testimony of ‘Jurek’ Wilner of Vilna, ZIH, Ring. 1/487.

Polish—Fewish Relations in Vilna 515 sympathy for the Jews at that time, and provided them with concrete assistance. It is difficult to say with certainty what the reasons were for the sudden and radical change in the attitude of Poles towards the Jews of Vilna. For lack of data, we have to confine ourselves to hypothesis. The first of the likely explanations has to do with the multi-ethnic character of

Vilna and the Vilna region. The constant conflicts between the several ethnic groups meant that nationality conflicts there were not as sharp as they were in the areas inhabited by only two ethnic groups (such as the LomZa region, which was inhabited only by Jews and Poles). In the case of Vilna, the Polish—Lithuanian conflict was of the first order, and the Polish—Jewish conflict was only of secondary importance. It seems that the Poles saw Lithuanians as the primary threat in that

area. The Lithuanians’ hardline anti-Polish policies and their programme of Lithuanization confirm this view. Polish—Lithuanian relations did not improve with the second Soviet occupation of Vilna, despite the fact that the majority of both Poles and Lithuanians regarded the Soviet Union as an enemy. Reports from

the Polish underground in Vilna told of the tensions between Poles and Lithuanians. For instance, a report from late August 1940 reads: Attached we are sending documentary material collected by church groups; however, we could provide documentary material in each of several areas (cultural, educational, economic, etc.) that would enable us to confirm that Lithuanian chauvinism, both under Smetona and today, with red armbands, works tirelessly for the eradication of all signs of Polishness. One cannot deceive oneself that it is possible to achieve friendly relations with the Lithuanians, even now, after the tragedy they have experienced.”

In a report of the commandant of the Vilna district ZWZ, dated 29 September

1940, we discover a similar view about Lithuanians: ‘Here I note that the Lithuanians’ hatred of us has not diminished in the least, and that Poles feel it to the same degree as during the previous regime.’’° The Polish—Lithuanian conflict did not decrease in the following months. In the report of 25 February 1941 mentioned earlier, by the commandant of the Vilna district ZWZ, we find the following assessment: ‘Lithuanians appoint all of their skilled workers to all the posts in industry and trade, with what is simply a savage fervour, just so that Poles will not get them. They prefer to let Jews [have the posts].’’©

The Lithuanians took power in Vilna after the Soviets withdrew in 1941, and the Germans supported them and co-operated with them in removing Poles— whom they clearly did not trust—from positions of authority. The crimes committed against the Jewish population did not win the moral or political support of the Polish community. According to the Poles, these were simply the acts of the 74 “Raport Ob. Ladyny [pptk. Nikodema Sulika] z terenu Wilna z dnia 28 sierpnia 1940 r.’, in Armia

Krajowa, 280. ” Wotkonowski, Okreg Wilenski, 48-9. 76 “Meldunek Komendanta okregu Wileriskiego pptk. Sulika’, SPP, sygn. 3.3.1.4, p. I.

516 Marek Wierzbicki German and Lithuanian ‘occupiers’. They amounted to the murder of ‘citizens of the Rzeczpospolita [pre-war Polish Republic]? committed by ‘external enemies’; moreover, they were evidence of the ‘moral superiority’ of those who opposed the Germans and the Lithuanians. The fact that they had a common enemy undoubtedly increased Poles’ sense of solidarity with and sympathy for the Jews.”” Evidence of this sentiment can also be found in the German sources. At the beginning of German—Soviet hostilities the German authorities sent Einsatzgruppen, the special security police detachments, to ‘cleanse’ Vilna of the Third Reich’s real or imagined enemies. ’° (These, as we know, included Jews.) The functionaries of Einsatzgruppe B found that Vilna had been taken over by the Lithuanians, who had organized armed units that not only shot Jews, but also persecuted Belarusians

and Poles, in order to stress the Lithuanian character of Vilna, thus furthering their aim, which was to build an independent state. In addition, the Germans cooperated closely with the Lithuanians in implementing their occupation policies— including the extermination of the Jewish population. Poles saw that the Jews were now, like themselves, among the persecuted ethnic groups. This may explain their sense of solidarity and their helpfulness towards the Jews, which, in light of the strong animosity apparent before 22 June 1941 and the events in the LomZa region, would otherwise have seemed surprising.” An analysis of the attitudes of the Polish population towards the Jews in Vilna and in the western Vilna region provides new information about the Polish attitude towards Jews in pre-war Poland’s eastern Kresy during the summer of 1941. The Polish aggression against the Jewish population in the Lomza region—of which the most brutal examples were the massacres of Jews in Wasosz, Radziléw, and Jedwabne—was not the only attitude that could be observed on a mass scale during the war years. A comparison of the attitudes of Poles in Vilna with those of Poles in Jedwabne might explain what led some to participate in massacres and others to refrain.®° Translated from the Polish by Claire Rosenson

™ Dr Dariusz Stola noted the influence of Polish—Lithuanian relations on the attitude of Poles towards Jews in Vilna in 1941 in his work ‘A Monument of Words’, Yad Vashem Studies, 30 (2002), 44. See also T: Szarota, U progu Zagtady: Zajscia antyzydowskie i pogromy w okupowane Europie (Warsaw, 2000), 265-6.

78 In May 1941 the German security authorites organized four Einsatzgruppen for special tasks as part of operation Barbarossa. Einsatzgruppe B, led by Arthur Nebe, was active in the Vilna region. It

included special detachments (Sonderkommandos 7a and 7b) and operational detachments (Einsatzkommandos 8 and g). See E. Dmitrow, ‘Oddziaty operacyjne niemieckiej Policji Bezpieczeristwa i Stuzby Bezpieczeristwa a poczatek zaglady Zyd6w w Lomzyiskiem i na Biatostocczyznie latem 1941 roku’, in P. Machcewicz and K. Persak (eds.), Wokét Jedwabnego, i: Studia (Warsaw, 2002), 284-5. ” Tbid. 286—7. See also Szarota, U progu Zagtady, 265-6; M. Wardzyriska, Sytuacja ludnosci polskie] w Generalnym Komsariacie Litwy czerwiec 1941—lipiec 1944 (Warsaw, 1993), 28-43. 80 My thanks to Dr Dariusz Stola for his valuable comments during the preparation of this chapter.

MAP

aT POLISH BORDERS

IQIQ~1945

.‘

sens: State borders according to the ) ° Potsdam agreement (July 1945) Liepaja Bauska : Jékabpils eee Curzon Line (December 1919) Sp.\ ——E 0 25 50km OMazeikiai weaes Lithuanian borders agreed after Skuodas Ski NN, N the First World War: jon Se a Soviet Russia (1920) —. BirzaiO a ~~ Russian guberniya borders

Latvia (1921) palangA1si0 i‘ Pasvalys ~

(Klaipéda district) a is 5 \ : » state border : PanevéZzys py 4} tynS—

Germany (1928) D>. + oa O Telsiai iauliai © Pakruojis . Daugavpils ==mm North-eastern border of Memel J. T. Gross, Sgsiedzi: Historia zaglady zydowskiego miasteczka (Sejny, 2000); trans. as Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne (Princeton, 2001).

® See the report by Krzysztof Burnetko, ‘Antyk—cigg dalszy nastapil’, Tygodnik Powszechny, 30

Nov. 2001, IT. ” The letter was published in Gazeta Wyborcza, 3 Dec. 2003. 8 See the report ‘Lekcewazenie milosci blizniego’, Gazeta Wyborcza, 5 Dec. 2003, 4.

The Antyk Bookshop 585 Father Zdzislaw Krol, asserted that he was ‘disgusted’ by antisemitism, but was not conscious of ‘any excesses’ in the bookshop. Moreover, he had accepted money from its owner to renovate the crypt of his church and would be happy to take action if someone would reimburse him for these expenses. He subsequently claimed (incorrectly) that antisemitic books had been removed, and refused an offer to meet the cost of the renovation from 7ygodnik Powszechny, whose editor had been quietly raising money. This matter is still unresolved. We reproduce the assessment of three of the

books sold in the bookshop written by the expert witness Professor Jerzy Tomaszewski, which formed part of the plaintiff’s case in the unsuccessful lawsuit of early 2003.

FATHER JOZEF KRUSZYNSKI

Dlaczego wystepuje przeciwko Lydom? (“Why Am I Coming Out Against the Jews?’) (reprint of the 1923 edn., Warsaw: Milla, 2001)

Among the various antisemitic publications currently on sale, this pamphlet stands out because of its correct use of the Polish language. This is its only virtue. Even if we take into consideration that it dates from 1923, the author’s ignorance of many of the questions on which he writes 1s remarkable. Like many other authors of his type, Kruszynski treats the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a serious work. It is true that a detailed analysis of this peculiar document was undertaken only after the original publication of Kruszyfski’s pam-

phlet (for more information on this subject, see J. Tazbir, Protokoly medrcow Syjonu: Autentyk czy falsyfikat (Warsaw, 1992). Even so, substantial doubts about

its origins had been raised much earlier—the nonsense and anachronisms contained in it could have fooled only an ignoramus or someone who read it in bad faith. Today the fact that The Protocols was written by an agent of the tsarist secret police is unquestioned, and Janusz Tazbir’s analysis of the text allows us to identify its author (or rather, authors) with a high degree of certainty. It is difficult to accept that Kruszyrski really believed in the authenticity of The Protocols, and he is clearly deeply biased. For example, on Einstein’s theories he writes: “The theories of the Jew A. Ensztejn operate in this spirit [of 7he Protocols| and are loudly publicized by all of world Jewry’ (pp. 11~12). Clearly, he is referring here to Albert Einstein, of whom he had heard; but of whose theories he is completely ignorant. The pamphlet is full of factual errors. The assertion that there used to be 4.2 million Jews in Poland (or 14 per cent of the entire population) is clearly false. The

586 Ferzy Tomaszewski results of the 1921 census were known by 1923, and thus before the original publication of the pamphlet. Similarly, the claim that ‘In the Jewish press we have been slandered by accusations about pogroms that never happened’ (p. 34) is also false. To be sure, some modern authors of antisemitic literature in Poland support the thesis that no pogroms occurred in Poland. However, a sufficient number of testimonies and documents from police investigations, state committees, and criminal proceedings have been preserved in the archives (several of which have been published) for us to know that this statement is part of the political propaganda of the

time when the pogroms occurred, when such anti-Jewish violence was often played down or openly denied. (For more on the pogroms, see Jolanta Zyndul, Lajscia antyzydowskie w Polsce w latach 1935-1937 (Warsaw, 1994); Wiadystaw Belina Prazmowski’s report on the pogrom that took place in Czestochowa on 28 May 1919, organized by the supporters of General Jozef Haller and the Silesians,

is located in the Archiwum Akt Nowych, Warsaw, in the Komitet Narodowy Polski collection, file 161, p. 54. I have published extensive extracts in my book Rzeczpospolita wielu narodow (Warsaw, 1985), 144—5. Documents on the wave of pogroms that took place in the spring of 1919 are also contained in the Archiwum

Akt Nowych and I wrote on this topic in ‘Zaburzenia antyzydowskie na Rzeszowszczyznie wiosng 1919 roku’, Kieleckie Studia Historyczne, 15 (1999), 95-109.) The argument that the Zionists wanted to establish a Jewish state on Polish territory (pp. 32—5) is pure fantasy. This would have conflicted with the programme of the World Zionist Organization as well as with the documents of the Zionist Organization of Poland, which Yitshak Griinbaum published in 1918—21. (For more information, see Jolanta Zyndul, Paristwo w panstwie? Autonomia narodowokulturalna w Europte Srodkowo-wschodnie; w XX wieku (Warsaw, 2000), 35-45, 83-122.) In sum, the contents of the pamphlet are at odds not only with modern historical knowledge but even with what a conscientious author could have gleaned in 1923 and, in addition, it contains outright nonsense. Published today, a document of this type obliges a publisher with even a minimum of respect for the reader to provide an appropriate introduction by someone with expertise on the subject. The formal aim of the pamphlet, as indicated in its title, testifies to its propagandistic character; analysis of its forms of expression, its arguments, and its conclusions confirms this. The introduction by Edward Zajaczek, who describes himself as ‘the regional director of the Rozw06j (Development) Association in the district of Kielce’, is similar. This association, which changed its name several times, was known during the inter-war years for propagating antisemitism. (See Szymon Rudnick, “The Society for the Advancement of ‘Trade, Industry, and Crafts’, Polin, 15 (2002), 311-34.) In this introduction we read, inter alia, that on the eve of our project of [national] rebirth we were faced with another danger, coming from an enemy whom we should not seek in neighbouring states, for he is among us, we live

The Antyk Bookshop 587 with him ... All of Jewry is this enemy. I say all, for if we are speaking of a hostile attitude towards Poland, then this is a characteristic of every Jew in the world without exception. (p. 3)

This is blatant nonsense and its author cannot adduce the slightest confirmation for it.

The entire pamphlet is written in the same spirit. Let me cite a few of Kruszynski’s observations: The Jews’ relationship to the Polish nation has always rested on great fraud. (p. 9)

[The Jews] had contact with the population of the country only to the extent that commerce demanded it... . The greater part of the Jews acquired their riches by illegal means. (p. 10)

Their deception of the Poles did not stem exclusively from a desire for enrichment; ideological opinions played a role here, too. (p. 11) [The Jews] aim to possess Poland, and because the Jews are and will remain an alien people, they will thus begin to displace us from our native land. (p. 15)

In a few years they will constitute half of the population and in one generation the majority will be on their side and that will be the end of us. .. . [The Jews] created the League of Nations and have in fact taken refuge in it. (p. 16) The battle for the establishment of Judaeo-Poland that is taking place today has no equivalent in any other country in the world . . . The collective will of the Polish nation must therefore oppose Jewry. (p. 22)

The time has come, the Zionists declare, to do battle with Poland. We must drive ‘the goyim’ out of their land as Joshua once drove the Canaanites out of their native Canaan. The land of the Lechs [Poles] is our due. Here we will establish a new Zion, here we will display a new power; we will force the goys to bow to the golden star of David. . . The battle has begun here, where we are strongest and where we have the best views of our winnings. The Polish land is our new Zion! (p. 32)

The propagandistic tone of the pamphlet and its blatant falsehoods, which seek to present ‘all (szc) the world’s Jews as vehement enemies of Poland who long to drive the Poles beyond its borders and create here some kind of ‘Judaeo-Poland’, as well as the mendacious representation of the entire history of the Jews of Poland, have as their goal incitement to war against the Jews. The pamphlet is thus not only slanderous and offensive to every Jew but also seeks to promote hatred and crim-

inal actions on the basis of ethnic and religious difference. Although this 1s a reprint of a publication that came out more than eighty years ago, it is part of a campaign of propaganda that has been carried out since 1989 by a small number of right-wing radical publishing houses.

588 Jerzy Tomaszewski Pozna Zyda (Talmud 1 dusza zydowska) (‘Know the Jew (The Talmud and the Jewish Soul)’) (Poznan: Wydawnictwo Samoobrony Narodu, 1936; repr. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Ojczyzna Bogustaw Rybicki, 1998)

This anonymous pamphlet was originally published by an extreme antisemitic group centred around the periodical Samoobrona Narodu (‘Self-Defence of the Nation’) in 1936, a period when attacks in print as well as physical violence against Jews were on the rise in Poland. The group was the next incarnation of the notoriously antisemitic Rozw6j (Development) Society. (See Rudnicki, “The Society for the Advancement of ‘Trade, Industry, and Crafts’). In the introduction the author of the pamphlet claims: Jewry constitutes a separate world of spirit and thought, ethics, morality, custom, aspirations and goals. Living in complete separation from the rest of the world, in strict concealment of its aspirations and goals, it stands before us like a sphinx, like a riddle, somehow unknown. At the same time Jewry penetrates our lives, infiltrates us, takes everything it needs from us, revealing in exchange nothing of its spiritual and moral secrets. For this reason, too, any counter-action of de-Jewification is difficult, arduous, and in many cases impossible. (p. 5)

The book’s starting point and its basic premiss is that we must fight the Jews, and the anonymous author strives to provoke his readers to do so. As a result, the pamphlet repeats various stereotypes that are hostile and sometimes offensive to Jews as a community, as well as statements contrary not only to our current state of knowledge but also to information that could be found in serious works before 1936. Thus we read: ‘criminal Freemasons (in other words, Jewry)’ (p. 7). The stereotype equating all Jews (‘Jewry’) with Freemasonry was common in the first half of the twentieth century, though it had nothing to do with reality. In Poland it was primarily Poles who belonged to the Freemasons, and so it would have been just as appropriate to identify all Poles with that organization. Extensive argument is used to support the thesis that in the USSR, Judaism—

in contrast to persecuted Christianity—is treated with tender care. The basic proof here is a proclamation by a rabbi from Minsk that is treated as ‘most authoritative’ (pp. 8—g). The author fails to note that similar ‘authoritative reports’ from the USSR—and not just from official Soviet sources—have contained denials of many other instances of persecution in the USSR and have praised the liberation of the workers (including Poles) from capitalist exploitation and national oppres-

sion. Such declarations have value only as propaganda. (See, for example, M. Iwanow, Pierwszy narod ukarany: Polacy w Zwigzku Radzieckim 1921-1939 (Warsaw, 1991), 132-3, 175, 219, 329.) On the basis of this declaration the author

The Antyk Bookshop 589 draws a picture of the favourable situation of the Jewish religion in the USSR: ‘Jewry propagates, supports and disseminates godlessness among us; in Russia, with the help of their government, they have brought all Christian faiths to ruin while leaving Judaism unscathed’ (p. 9).

This is contradicted by the facts set out in the historical literature (particularly in English). A very different picture is presented by, among others, Nora Levin in her work The Jews in the Soviet Union since 1917: Paradox of Survival (New York, 1990). On the persecution of Judaism, see, for example, vol. 1, pp. 275—6. It should

be emphasized that the Soviet authorities’ hostile attitude towards all religions, including Judaism, was no secret at the time of the original publication of this pamphlet; neither were the liquidation of non-communist Jewish organizations and the persecution of their leaders. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that infamous forgery of the Russian secret police, is cited as evidence of the ‘international Jewish conspiracy’ (p. 10). The unambiguously propagandistic goal of the pamphlet is clear from its use of categorical statements and from its method of argumentation. Two burials in the Jewish cemetery—those of the distinguished scholar Szymon Askenazy and of a certain official (described on pp. 6—7)— are used to justify the thesis that ‘Jewry is “progressive” only for export; that is, for the infection of non-Jewish, Christian societies and nations. We could quote thousands of pieces of evidence; it would be difficult to list them all on an oxhide’ (p. 7). This is connected with the thesis that is repeated in many different forms, that there is no difference between Jews; they all have the same goals and they all do battle with Catholicism (pp. 5—6, 9, 10). Does the author believe that if these two individuals had been buried in a Catholic cemetery, this would have undermined the thesis that ‘Jewry’s progressive views’ are intended solely for export? Elsewhere in the pamphlet statements by various authors are offered as proof of the ‘Jewish peril’. Among them are the words of Jan Dlugosz: “The Jews living in

Krakow murdered a Christian child and carried out their abominable practices with his blood’ (p. 51). And the words of Szymon Syreriski: ‘Every year the evilminded Jews kill and foully murder innocent Christian children out of cruel conviction’ (p. 51).

Accusations of ritual murder were—and still are—a stereotypical slander that has been repeated in many European countries since the twelfth century. In the past many such accusations led to trials involving the torture of the alleged perpetrators and often ending in death sentences. In the last century and a half, with torture no longer used, there has not been a single case in which the accusation has been confirmed. (See Die Legende von Ritualmord. Zur Geschichte der Blutbeschuldi-

gung gegen Juden (Berlin, 1993).) On many occasions rumours of ritual murder have provoked pogroms against the Jews; in Poland the most recent incidents were in 1946 in Kielce and Krakow, and the accusation is repeated even today in antisemitic literature. Yet the author can write: ‘Our forebears, wise and dignified people

590 Jerzy Tomaszewski , of faith, understood the Jewish peril centuries ago.’ Thus he suggests that the slander of ritual murder is a fact confirmed historically by serious authors of past centuries, and remained unquestioned in the twentieth century. Another problem is the use of opinions randomly extracted from the Talmud, which supposedly testify to Jewish evil and perfidy. It is easy to find very different opinions in the ‘Talmud. For example, Thus said Rava to Rabbi Bar Meir: ‘Where does the saying “Do not throw stones into the well from which you have drunk” come from?’ He answered him: ‘As it is said: Do not insult an Egyptian, for you were a stranger in his land’. . . ‘Our masters taught us: You should give alms to poor non-Jews, visit sick non-Jews and the sick of Israel equally, and bury dead non-Jews and the dead of Israel equally—and this guided by a desire for peace.’ (Z mgdrosct Talmudu (Warsaw, 1998), 139, 163)

31) | Or:

You may not steal or rob even the least little thing—neither from an Israelite nor from a heretic, from an adult or from a child. (Jifi Langer, Talmud: Ukazky a déjiny (Prague, n.d.),

In both cases these translators had a good command of the languages necessary to understand the ‘Talmud (Hebrew and Aramaic). However, the author of the pam-

phlet did not consider it necessary to cite the sources of the translation he employed, making it difficult to assess the degree to which the unknown translator

had command of these languages. |

An additional problem is the specific character and structure of the language used in the Talmud. The author appears to be unaware that it is not a formalized code of behaviour for adherents to Judaism, but rather a work of very complex construction. The commentaries and views of many scholars, analysing various questions in the field of Jewish religious law, are set out side by side. As a result, differing views are found in it, as there will be in discussions among commentators. Thus the Talmud 1s not a collection of rules concerning the various spheres of the religious person’s life so much as the record of a debate stretching across several ~ centuries. Even if they are translated precisely, opinions taken out of context are not sufficient for understanding the principles put forward there. Even today individual rabbis interpret differently the prescriptions and conclusions contained in the Talmud—including those concerning fundamental questions of ritual, morality, and legal commands and prohibitions. The modern Talmud scholar Abraham

| Cohen explains: Particular problems are rarely treated in a single section. Usually one must seek out references scattered throughout many chapters in order to collect all the elements of a given doctrine. Moreover, the arguments and observations set forth in the successive volumes come from several hundred scholars who lived across a span of more than six centuries. Is it possible that they could have formulated a unanimous opinion on any subject? In the Talmud we are usually dealing with a collection of varying, sometimes even conflicting,

The Antyk Bookshop 591 opinions, which of course does not facilitate the elaboration of a clear and concise exposi-

tion of particular doctrines. (Abraham Cohen, Talmud: Syntetyczny wyktad na temat Talmudu i nauk rabinéw dotyczacych relign, etyki 1 prawodawstwa (Warsaw, 1995), 5—6)

The exposition of the principles of Judaism contained in Cohen’s work, as well as in many other works published in Poland and other countries in major languages

(especially in English, in which successive tracts of the Talmud have been published for the last few decades), contradicts the caricature contained in the pamphlet under discussion. The modern publisher, if he wishes to behave conscientiously, cannot use ignorance of his subject as an excuse. If he considers a pamphlet from 1936 worth reprinting, then it is his obligation to preface it with a suitable introduction and to provide a commentary, just as historical documents are published. To present this type of reprint to the reader as a work in keeping with the facts and the current state of knowledge, without explanation, is to mislead him and to transmit falsehoods. The final sections of the pamphlet deal with political and economic problems that were current in 1936. They also contain errors and falsifications. In particular, we find the claim that the Jews were exclusively responsible for the victory of com-

munism in Russia and for the results of the policies of the Soviet authorities— which were supposedly directed primarily against Christians. We read among other things: We all know very well how Jewry deceives the masses in Christian societies and nations. Namely, it deceives them with its promises of some kind of heaven on earth .. . And so at the cost of a sea of Christian blood, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of murdered peasants, workers, intellectuals, and clergymen in Russia, a ‘new order’ has been introduced there; the communist order was to bring a better existence to the Russian population, which was supposedly oppressed by the Muscovite tsars. (p. 57)

We read further that ‘the entire ruling apparatus of the USSR is made up almost exclusively of Jews’; ‘Foreign policy is completely concentrated in Jewish hands’ (p. 59). The author fails to mention that Polish communists (Feliks Dzierzynski

being the best known among them), representatives of other ethnic minorities (such as Stalin, a Georgian), and ‘native’ Russians played an essential leading role in the revolution as well as in the policies of the USSR. The word ‘supposedly’ should also be noticed; it calls into question the view that oppression reigned in the auto-

cratic Russian monarchy before 1917 and gave rise to revolutionary mass movements. The fact is that national minorities (so-called aliens) and religious minorities (especially Jews) were subject to special restrictions, which led to their conspicuous participation in all conspiratorial movements directed against Russia. The pamphlet concludes with a summons, printed in boldface type, to hate the Jews and to drive them out of Poland: No restrictions on the rights of Jews, no repressive acts or pressures applied against the Jews residing and living among us, will protect us from the danger of the Jewish infection.

592 Ferzy Tomaszewski These are all half-measures and do not lessen by one iota the magnitude of the evil that Jewry brings upon us. The only deliverance for the Christian world 1s to isolate the Jews. .. Let them establish their own state, one with which, for its own sake, no Christian nation can maintain any relations. For this is a leper nation; whosoever approaches it succumbs to infection! (p. 70)

This appeal is offensive to all of Jewish society. The ‘exposition’ of the principles of the Talmud is likewise offensive and libellous. In addition, the concluding appeal contains an open promotion of ethnic or religious hatred directed against all Jews.

JAN MARSZALEK | Polska zdradzona: Rzecz nie tylko o ktamstwach Grossa lecz1 antypolomzmie, ksenofobu elit polttycznych na przyktadzie Ffedwabnego (‘Poland Betrayed: A Discussion not only of the Lies of Gross but also of the Anti-Polonism and Xenophobia of the Political Elite in the Case of Jedwabne’) (Warsaw: Polska Oficyna Wydawnicza, 2001)

In form, this pamphlet is a propaganda pamphlet in which Marszatek’s comments on the political scene in Poland are chaotically interwoven with many and diverse quotations and texts taken from newspapers that are linked to sermons and even sections of the Bible. The author’s approach to his sources lacks any critical distance. He treats as true only those data and opinions—no matter how absurd—that are in accord with his views, and rejects all others, accusing their authors of working for the Jews or the Germans for material advantage and to the detriment of the Polish nation and state (or hinting at such an accusation). His scrupulousness in the use of sources also leaves much to be desired. An extreme example of his distance from reality is the assertion that Bohdan Wytwytski, the author of the book The Other Holocaust: Many Circles of Hell (The Novak Report (Washington, 1980) ), ‘blames the Poles

for the slaughter of the Ukrainians’. This demonstrates that he has never seen Wytwytski’s book. In reality, Wytwytski describes the tragic fate of Gypsies, Poles,

Ukrainians, and Belarusians under the rule of the Third Reich. A reviewer described the work as follows: Wytwytski’s book is the first attempt to introduce an ethnic (Slavonic, Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian) point of view into this great pool of the points of view that make up American

The Antyk Bookshop 593 democracy. Because the truth is on Wytwytski’s side, he has a good chance of creating the first crack in the ignorance or indifference (and, more rarely, ill will) of the Americans. Introducing into American consciousness the knowledge that Poles, Ukrainians, and Belarusians lost altogether ten million citizens will undoubtedly have a positive effect on the attitude of the majority of Americans towards Slavonic ethnic minorities and weaken the often unconscious practice of discrimination against them. (S. Ross, ‘Problem etniczny w USA’, Kultura, 10/397 (1980), 128-9)

As a result we find in the text bizarre assertions, far from any reality, and invented facts (it is not always easy to ascertain their truth or falsehood) concerning both individuals and international events often supported by chance newspaper references. According to the author, the internal colonization of the Polish nation [is being carried out in Poland] by the Jewish nationality as well as other ethnic minorities, including the German minority. (p. 6)

International Jewish capital . . . with the help of, among others, such individuals as President Kwasniewski, illegally took over nearly all of Polish national property in 198g—2001. (p. 13)

[Excerpt from an alleged plan of action:] 5. Physically eliminate the Polish nation (evictions, displacement, deportations, etc.) and replacement of the Poles with other nationalities (SLD, PSL, UP, UW, AWS [the main Polish political parties]). (p. 13) In the eighteenth century Prussia, Russia, and Austria carried out an identical plan for lig-

uidating the Polish state and the Polish nation with the help of international Polish, English, French, German, Saxon, Austrian, and Russian Freemasonry; at the same time Jews living in Poland and beyond her borders contributed significantly to the partition of the Polish state. (p. 13)

The German government extensively funded scholarships for Polish students and scholars

in Germany, where they were brainwashed. They returned to Poland fanatical Germanophiles. (p. 15)

[In writing about the Holocaust, Jan Tomasz Gross] entirely eliminates the German Hitlerites from this very bloody historical picture. (p. 16)

In fact, Gross writes: ‘But it is also clear that had Jedwabne not been occupied by the Germans, the Jews of Jedwabne would not have been murdered by their neighbors’ (Jan Tomasz Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the fewish Community in JFedwabne (Princeton, 2001), 47). The majority of Polish Jews did not know Polish, to say nothing of German, and the Jewish Council of Elders translated all of those German orders into Hebrew or Yiddish; thus the Jewish police served the Germans not only as dogs hunting down Jews but also as translators. (p. 19) Adolf Eichmann ‘was Jewish to the core’, born in Haifa in 1905. (p. 19)

... the Soviet Jew Beria. (p. 23)

Gross based his generalizations about Poles from Jedwabne and Poles in general on the reports of the Stalinist prosecutor and the testimony of the accused in the case—testimony elicited under torture, we add. (p. 29)

594 Jerzy Tomaszewski The actual sources used in the book are easy to establish by looking at the text. [After 1945] Nazi Hitlerites and fascists . . . created a Fascist International—at the behest of the governments of the USA and Great Britain. (p. 29) Minister Bartoszewski . . . also boasted that in the 1980s he ‘lectured’ in Germany. What? ... He didn’t say that. Too bad, too bad! So the current senator of the Polish Republic (from the Unia Wolnosci) and minister of foreign affairs (from AWS [Akcja Wyborcza Solidarnosé, Electoral Action Solidarity]), like those thousands of so-called dissidents from Poland, was on a scholarship in Germany. And after 1989 isn’t Wladystaw Bartoszewski by any chance a German political advocate in Poland? Doesn’t he defend German interests in Poland? (p. 30)

[The attack on Bartoszewski continues:] This is not paranoia . . . we are talking about a well-prepared conspiracy against the Polish state and the Polish people? (p. 31)

President Kwasniewski’s unconditional support for the calumnies and vulgar slanders against the Poles from Jedwabne and Poles in general contained in Gross’s book Neighbors is

irrefutable evidence that President Kwasniewski, taking advantage of the dignity of the Polish Republic, has joined the International Legion (created several dozen years ago), which is absolving Nazi and fascist criminals of their mass murders, which covers President Kwasniewski with shame! (p. 39)

[Of Aleksander Kwasniewski:] The newspapers that appear in Poland chose what they deemed to be most important from the president’s statement; one would take this point and another would take that, but these scattered statements woven together provide us with an image of the official Polish-language policy of propaganda carried out in the Third Republic by the descendants of the Stalinist colonizers and their janissaries (for we must always keep in mind that the president of the RP [Republic of Poland] is the son of the Stalinist colonizer of Poland, UB [Urzedy Bezpieczefistwa (Security Office)] Major Stolzman) in still-occupied Poland. (p. 45) Before Poles knew what was going on, twelve years had passed (1989-2001) and the Polish state, thanks to such ruthless individuals as President Kwasniewski, had become a semi-

colonial state . . . The situation is similar (in 1989-2001) in. . . other countries of eastcentral Europe: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary. (p. 54) Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia have fallen and now it is Poland’s turn for partition. (p. 75) [Chapter headings: ]| “The Internal Colonization of the Polish Nation by the Descendants of the Stalinist Hired Assassins Descended from the Jewish Nation’ and ‘On Adam Michnik’s Latest Lie’ (p. 109) [The KOR (Komitet Obrony Robotnikow, Workers’ Defence Committee) arose] out of the

most anti-Polish party structures: the WKP(b), KPZU, KPU(b), KPB(b), KPF KPD(Germany), and MOPR [the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), the Communist Party of West Ukraine, the Communist Party of Ukraine (Bolsheviks), the Communist Party of Belarus (Bolsheviks), the Communist Party of France, the Communist Party of Germany, the International Organization for Providing Assistance to Revolutionaries in Gaol]. (p. 148) Jew-Stalinists worked to achieve the total collaboration of the Jewish masses in the Soviet zone of occupation after 17 September 1939. (p. 149)

The Antyk Bookshop 595 The Jewish occupier is destroying the Polish mining industry. (p. 204)

In some instances Marszalek repeats in all seriousness absurdities contained in

the statements of people whom he considers to be authorities. He cites Father Orlowski’s account of why Roman Dmowski became an antisemite. He says that, when Dmowski was in the United States recruiting volunteers for the Polish army, ‘the Jews met Roman Dmowski and imposed a condition: they would support his cause and give him ships to transport these young people from America, but only on the condition that Dmowski would give them a piece of Poland to govern; this would be their government, their country, an independent one’ (p. 189). This is entirely at odds with the picture of the course of these talks that emerges from the documents and from the very brief outline in Roman Dmowski’s memoirs. (See

G. J. Lerski, ‘Dmowski, Paderewski, and American Jews (A Documentary Compilation)’, Polin, 2 (1987), 95-116; R. Dmowski, Polityka polska 1 odbudowante panstwa (Warsaw, 1988), 11. 93-4.)

In another place we read the assertions of Mathis Bortner, ‘the author of the well-known book Jak dobya sie gospodarke polskg od 1989 roku’ (‘How the Polish

Economy has been Destroyed since 1989’). Marszalek quotes approvingly his description of relations between different religious groups in old Poland: Poles of all faiths—Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, Muslims, and Jews—lived in complete harmony and enjoyed full civil rights and access to public offices. The authorities guaranteed them full legal protection, as nowhere else in the world, despite the protests of certain churchmen... Pogroms? Is this a joke? Those jokers who are mincing that sad truth should study history just a bit. (pp. 179-80)

One may read about the pogroms in Poland before 1939 in the work of Jolanta Zyndul, Zajscia antyzydowskie w Polsce w latach 1935-1937 (Warsaw, 1994), and other historians. Some of Bortner’s assertions quoted by Marszalek are unequivocally slanderous. It is characteristic of the pamphlet that it uses invective and levels unsubstanti-

ated accusations against the majority of Polish politicians and political parties, impugning their honesty and that of the Instytut Pamieci Narodowej (Institute for

National Remembrance), particularly in connection with the massacre in Jedwabne.

Following page 154 there is a list of the names of the ‘moral authorities’ (the word ‘authority’ is put in quotation marks) whom Marszalek condemns. A significant number are given their ‘real’ Jewish names (for example, Antoni Stonimski was supposed to have been named ‘Poznariski’) and are charged with Stalinism. For example, next to Jerzy Turowicz’s name is the comment ‘editor-in-chief of Tygodnik Powszechny from 1945 to 1994; this fact alone should cause Poles to think’. It appears that the author does not know that for several years Tygodnik Powszechny was appropriated by the group PAX, and the entire editorial board was removed.

596 Jerzy Tomaszewski The mass of names, miscellaneous quotations, groundless assertions often supported by fabrication and sham argument (for example, a quotation from a book by Helena Michnik is intended to compromise Adam Michnik, p. 104), slanders, and invective serves to implant in the reader the conviction that modern Poland is the victim of a conspiracy on the part of the Jews, the Germans, the Freemasons, and other mysterious forces, and that politicians of nearly all stripes who are under the influence of Jews, the intellectuals whom Marszaltek condemns (labelled primarily as Jews), and the clergy of the Catholic Church are responsible for this. The author

categorically declares at the beginning of the book, | Those extremely cruel and ruthless colonizers from the Soviet empire had so much in common with Poland and Polishness that in some cases they did not even speak Polish. In time, however, they learned the language of the nation occupied by them. Everything else (other than language) divided them from Poland and Polishness and continues to divide them. Natural history, habits, customs, language, and faith divided them from Poland and the Polish nation. And those anti-Polish individuals who so hated Polish, Poles, Polish culture, receive in Moscow Polish pedigrees (surnames) and from 17 September 1939 until today (March 2001) these circles with Stalinist and neo-Stalinist pedigrees are active in the Polish political arena as prosecutors, judges, and accusers, time and again placing the entire Polish nation on the defendant’s bench and organizing show trials. (p. 5)

This fragment, in its original Polish, demonstrates, incidentally, the strangeness of the author’s manner of expression; his mastery of the Polish language leaves something to be desired. In another place we read: The war with Poland bears all the marks of a class war: the expropriation from working people of property (factories, banks, state-run farms), which they constructed together with the entire Polish nation (among other things the attacks on Lepper, Senator Ceberek, Zagorny, Representative Gabriel Janowski, etc.). The war with Poland bears all the marks of

a religious war (with attacks on the Polish primate, Glemp, the Catholic Church, Father Jankowski, Father Rydzyk, Father Chrostowski, the removal of the crosses from the gravel pit in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and recently the attacks on Bishop Stefanek and Father Orlowski). (p. 55)

In other words, Marszalek leads the reader to the conclusion that Jews have long conducted and continue to conduct a war against the Catholic Church and Poland, have taken over the posts of president and ministers, and even penetrated the Catholic clergy, in the service of German and American interests. Ukrainians supposedly take part in these activities as well. Marszalek writes: From 1 September 1939 to 20 June 1941 Adolf Hitler’s Third German Reich and Joseph Stalin’s USSR jointly battled against the Polish nation and the Polish state with, among other things, the help of its agents, former citizens of the Polish Republic descended from the German, Jewish, and Ukrainian national minorities. Poles thus had at that time three enemies that were used by Berlin and Moscow. In 1941-5 Adolf Hitler’s Third German Reich battled against the Polish nation and the Polish state jointly with, among other

The Antyk Bookshop 597 things, the help of its agents, former citizens of the Polish Republic descended from the German, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Jewish national minorities (the Jewish secret Gestapo numbered 800 people). In 1945-56 Joseph Stalin’s USSR battled against the Polish nation and the Polish state jointly with, among other things, the help of its agents descended from the Jewish, German, and Ukrainian national minorities. For the purpose of hiding their origin the agents received from Moscow purely Polish surnames. In 1989-2001 the Germans, together with the Jewish International of capital and banks, battle against the Polish nation and the Polish state jointly with, among other things, the help of their agents, citizens of the Polish Republic descended from the Jewish, German, and Ukrainian national minorities as well as the janissaries of Polish origin that they have bred. (p. 57)

In sum, this publication promulgates hatred primarily towards Jews, but also in some measure towards Germans and Ukrainians, treating many leading Polish politicians and intellectuals (including several clerics) as their voluntary (corrupt) or unwitting agents and possibly as ‘hidden Jews’ who have established a semicolonial system in Poland. In the process Marszaiek makes various false assertions, which are contradicted by facts that can be established on the basis of publications freely available in Polish libraries. The texts appended at the end of the book, taken from other books, are largely in the same spirit. As a result, the reader of this book receives a mixture of information and disinformation, which, as a whole, represents national minorities, and particularly the Jews, as an unremitting threat to the Polish nation. It is slanderous in nature, and contradicts the findings of modern historiography. At the same time it creates the conditions for inciting ethnic conflict. Translated from the Polish by Clatre Rosenson

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New Edition of the Memoirs of a Jewish Policeman: The ‘True Testimony of Perechodnik Reprinted from Rzeczpospolita, 11 December 2004 THIS interview was conducted by Andrzej Kaczynski. Zbigniew Gluza is the chairman of the Karta Centre, which documents the history of modern Poland and eastern Europe. He edits the quarterly history journal Karta and publishes monographs. He manages the Eastern Archive, which is composed of material contributed by the public (covering the years 1917-56) and the Archive of the Opposition (1956—89) as well as the index of Polish citizens victimized in the USSR. He is preparing for publication the biographical dictionary Opozycja w PRL (‘Opposition in the Polish People’s Republic’).

Rzeczpospolita. Instead of reissuing Calel Perechodnik’s book Czy ja jestem mordercg? (‘Am I a Murderer’’; Warsaw: Karta, 1993; 2nd edn., Warsaw: Zydowski Instytut Historyczny and Instytut Naukowo-Badawczy Karta, 1995), you’re publishing a text signed by an author with the same surname of Perechodnik, but with the different given name of Calek, and with a different title—Spowiedz (‘Confession’). There is also a note stating that this is the first edition, as if there did not exist two previous editions and four foreign-

language editions, all of which have been cited for ten years in all serious works on the Holocaust. Why?

ZBIGNIEW GLUZA. We feel that this work should always be available on the book market, and so we were preparing the third edition of Czy ja jestem mordercg? when we received (after a great delay, unfortunately) a review questioning the authority of our edition, even accusing us of falsification. The review was written by Professor David Engel, an American researcher specializing in Polish—Jewish relations, and published in the international journal Polin in 1999. It compared the book issued by Karta with the manuscript and demonstrated that it was incomplete and that it omitted certain parts of the original text and distorted others, blunting their words and their importance. But the thing was that we hadn’t known of the existence of an

600 Andrzej Kaczyrskt author’s manuscript. We believed that the only surviving copy of Perechodnik’s memoirs was the typed copy that was located in the archives of the Zydowski Instytut Historyczny (Jewish Historical Institute, ZTH) and which was prepared for publication and provided with notes by someone who

was at that time an employee of the Institute. ZIH was, after all, a copublisher of the book. But from Professor Engel we learned not only that

there existed a manuscript that had been given to the author’s brother Pejsach Perechodnik after the war, and which was in the possession of the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem; but also that there were two typescripts of the memoirs of Calek Perechodnik at the ZIH. The first is a fairly faithful copy of the manuscript made by Pejsach and entrusted (along with permission to publish, as his brother wished) to the Centralna Zydowska Komisja Historyczna (Central Historical Commission of the Jews in Poland, ZIH’s predecessor). The second, seriously corrupt typescript is probably what remains of someone’s attempt to prepare the memoirs for publication. And it was this second version that the historian who prepared the text for publication for Karta chose to give us. And he gave it a further working-over: for example, he changed the present tense to the past tense, transformed quotes into discussions of statements, and ‘toned down’ some opinions. We do not know why only that second typescript was used as the basis for publication. Our mistake as publishers was that we did not compare the computer printout that we received with the archival source. Rzeczpospohta. How does the new edition differ from the previous one?

Z.G. Of course we used as our basis the handwritten original, with no abridgements, and with corrections of only a technical nature. Professor David Engel agreed to prepare for us the canonical text and to provide notes and editorial comments. We gave it a new title because the previous one was erro-

neous. Perechodnik does not ask himself the question ‘Am I a murderer?’ Although he did write such a sentence, he directs it to those who will come to know his story. He anticipates their reaction and seems to say, ‘It will surely suit you to consider me a murderer as well.’ He predicted correctly. Alongside Chaim Rumkowski, the chairman of the

Lodz Judenrat, Perechodnik 1s for antisemites the crowning evidence that Jews were allies of the Nazis in the Holocaust, and that they accuse Poles of various sins only to deflect attention from their own collaborators. Perechodnik spares neither himself nor his fellow citizens. But he does not confuse the issue: the Germans were the enemy. German Nazis pronounced a sentence upon the Jews, and it was they who carried it out. The burden of responsibility for the extermination falls on them. Among Poles, the majority

of whom were indifferent to the fate of the Jews, there were those who

The True Testimony of Perechodmk 601 helped the Germans to identify Jews, uncover their hiding places, and hunt down those in hiding. They informed on people who provided aid to Jews. Perechodnik writes about them straightforwardly. But he is likewise aware

that as a policeman he himself helped to carry out the sentence of the Holocaust. He reproaches himself and other Jews for egoism, meanness, cowardice, and naivety. He had an opportunity to hide his daughter, but he didn’t take advantage of it. He believed that as a policeman he would be able to protect his family from deportation, and, taken in by false promises, he put his wife and daughter on a train for Treblinka. He treats his memoirs as a confession in which he recognizes his sins and begs his wife for forgiveness.

For this reason we felt that the most accurate title would be precisely Confession. We changed the author’s given name after consulting with his nephews, who assured us that he used the name Calek and that that was how friends and family members addressed him. The changes are so numerous, so extensive—and entirely justified—that in fact we are dealing with two different texts. We were forced to recognize the two previous editions as editorial errors and, in a certain sense, as void. For this reason we are announcing that anyone who brings us a copy of the 1993 or the 1995 edition by the end of the year can exchange it for a copy of

the new one for free. |

Rzeczpospolita. What was the purpose of meddling with Perechodnik’s original text? To spare the readers’ feelings? ‘To soften the blow of the judgements? And if so, in favour of whom? Poles or Jews?

z.G. I consider Perechodnik’s account to be a masterpiece of factual writing and a completely exceptional Holocaust testimony. It 1s the only exhaustive chron-

icle of the provincial ghetto, the only account by a Jewish policeman—a record of the experiences of someone who not only became a victim of the Holocaust himself, but was to a degree an accomplice in it. He wrote knowing that he would not survive, and so he did not practise any self-censorship. In such a text there can be no interpretative manipulation or editing of a type that would alter the message. The accusation of falsification was particularly painful for us because everything that we do, we do with care, trying to get as close as we can to both the historical truth and the author’s emotional truth. We have never done anything for reasons that were not substantive—political

or national. But one could read, in the subtext of Professor Engels’s criticism: ‘You see, you can’t trust Poles after all.’ As to the meddling, of which, I repeat, we were unaware, I suppose that it was done above all with the intention of making this text, which is painful to

read and which one would like to reject, more bearable or acceptable. Do the alterations spare one group’s feelings more than those of another, for

602 Andrzej Kaczynski example according to nationality? I don’t think so; they spare everyone, because the author wrote against everyone. In the original text his visceral hatred of the Germans manifested itself. Perechodnik wrote that he wanted

to survive in order to take part in the slaughter of the Germans—of all Germans. So that none of them would survive, so that they would be as destroyed as the Jews. Perechodnik thinks of the Poles, whom he accuses of widespread indifference (and in many cases of participation in the crime),

| only with pain. For their betrayal—for that is how he treats it—he was completely unprepared. There are also very harsh comments directed at Jews— against the predominant attitudes among them in the face of the Holocaust and the lack of solidarity; against the Jewish religion and against the longstanding isolation in Poland from Polish society—which so complicated efforts to seek assistance.

In the version prepared for publication much of this was toned down. Perechodnik dedicated his testament ‘to German sadism, Polish meanness, and Jewish cowardice’. ‘This dedication, too, was excised.

Rzeczpospohita. In his book Neighbors, Jan ‘Tomasz Gross wrote that it took him four years to grasp fully what Szmul Wasersztajn’s report was saying: that the Holocaust of the Jews in Jedwabne was carried out by the victims’ Polish neighbours. Perhaps we’re better prepared today to read Jewish testimonies on the Holocaust than we were several years ago? z.G. That’s a good example of a process that 1s still unfolding. I think that both the first (unknown) and the second editor of Perechodnik’s report were weighed down by the burden of the pain that comes with reading it. ‘That they were

not guided by ideological or ‘national’ censorship. I have the impression that it was not conscious, but rather reflexive. But at the same time unacceptable.

Here I agree completely with Gross that testimony from the heart of the Holocaust deserves special attention. We’re not talking about being uncritical, as some impute to him, because that would be absurd. It’s just that we must prepare ourselves for the fact that these messages may contain things that we are not ready to accept. I have experienced this myself. As the pub-

lisher I worked closely with both the first and the second versions of Perechodnik’s story. Now I see how many things I failed to grasp at first. Partly because they were softened, flattened, but also because neither my consciousness nor my sensibilities were ready to accept them. I have the feel-

ing that only now, after the debate around the crime in Jedwabne, have I become the kind of reader on whom Calek Perechodnik was counting, and am I able to keep company with such an oppressed person as he was then (he wrote—in Polish—in 1943 and perished in Warsaw in 1944).

The True Testimony of Perechodnik 603 I deeply regret that the debate about Jedwabne was broken off so suddenly, as if in mid-sentence, without a conclusion. As a result of this debate signifi- cant numbers of Poles accepted it as true that our countrymen committed the murder of the Jews in Jedwabne, Radzilow, and Wasosz. But this exhausted our readiness to confront Jewish reports on the Holocaust and on the attitudes of Poles then and now. What message do we glean from Perechodnik’s testimony? The depth of the alienation between the two communities, the indifference of the Poles to the fate of the Jews, the absence of compassion and mourning. Perechodnik certainly exaggerates, but he wrote that the proportion of Poles prepared to provide unselfish assistance to Jews was one in ten thousand. The indifference and antipathy of the Poles ended all hope for the Jews. I think that if the majority of us can take in that message, then it will have been a great success for modern Poland. Translated from the Polish by Claire Rosenson

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PART III

Exchange

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. o> ‘

Reply to the Review by Andrzej Trzcinski and Marcin Wodzinski, ‘Some Remarks on 2 Leszek Hondo’s Study of the Old Jewish Cemetery in Krakow

‘°,

‘ o> °

LESZEK HONDO

READING the review! by Andrzej Trzcitiski and Marcin Wodzirtiski of my study Stary zydowski cmentarz w Krakowie: Historia cmentarza, analiza hebrajskich inskrypcjt (“The Old Jewish Cemetery in Krakow: History of the Cemetery with

Analysis of the Hebrew Inscriptions’), one might conclude that I displayed exceptional dilettantism in my work on the old Jewish cemetery in Krakow. I feel that the accusations made in the review are exceptionally tendentious and on many points incorrect; some of them are simply absurd.

Before I respond, I must mention my personal contact with the reviewers, which I believe coloured the aggressive tone of the article. Some of their accusations will then appear in a different light. Until 1996 we worked together, and the result of that collaboration was the publication Cmentarze zydowskie w Polsce: Vademecum opracowania 1 opisu (ed. J. Woronczak).*® It was our decision to have

each of the chapters edited by experts on the particular subject, and the group would then jointly edit the final version sentence by sentence. This meant that many conclusions in each text, including mine, were the result of consideration by all of the parties. Thus the assertion that specific individuals were the sole authors of particular chapters is simply fraudulent. Likewise, the accusation that I have made use of these materials 1s all the more absurd as I do not know to which version they are referring, since after seven years

(2003), 467-82. 2 Krakow, 1999. 1 “Some Remarks on Leszek Horido’s Study of the Old Jewish Cemetery in Krakow’, Polin, 16

3 The work has yet to be published. The authors were J. Woronczak, J. P- Woronczak, M. Wodzitiski, A. Trzciski, A. Sygowski, and L. Horido. Jan Jagielski also took part in drafting the work; although he did not write any particular section of the text, 1t could certainly be said that he was a co-author.

608 Leszek Hondo the work has yet to be published. Since the reviewers did not support their accusation of plagiarism with concrete examples, it is difficult to form an opinion on it. The following example, in which the authors refer to the ‘slight paraphrasing’ of Wodzinski’s publication Hebrajskie inskrypcje (p. 153, first paragraph) is evidence of how odd these accusations are. Starting from the same wording, which appears widely in Jewish cemeteries, I arrive at a different understanding and the same

translation.* In fact I note on page 174 of my book that I disagree with Mr Wodzitiski’s conclusions.

From the outset, collaboration on the editing did not go smoothly. I am of the

opinion that it is not possible to write a complete work on the subject of all the cemeteries in Poland since few of them have a full inventory, and therefore little material has been published. One cannot base one’s conclusions on superficial appraisals arising out of a visit toa cemetery and a search for and description of the most interesting preserved monuments. From the beginning, my adversaries have

believed that detailed inventories are not needed for such a synthesis, for they ‘know best what is in the cemeteries’. However, this methodological difference in the editing of the Vademecum was not the ultimate reason for the ending of the collaboration. In the course of one of

the editorial meetings Mr Trzciriski and Mr Wodzinski proudly showed photographs of gravestones from Lesko and claimed that these were the result of their ‘excavatory’ work in that cemetery. I want to stress that this was not a matter of removing layers of earth covering the graves, but of the systematic excavation of the oldest parts of the cemetery in search of the oldest graves. I am of the opinion that a close examination of their photographs will confirm this.° At first I thought that this was a joke, but I soon saw what they are capable of when they came to Tarnow to visit the cemetery. I took them round the cemetery and pointed out to them the most interesting and valuable gravestones. They stayed longer, saying that they wanted to take additional pictures. The next day I saw the results of their searches. To my horror, I found that the oldest part of the cemetery, which I had pointed out earlier, had been dug up and some of the tombstones had been pulled out of the ground. I took a few pictures, which are evidence of their digging. From that time on, I have wanted to have nothing to do with these gentlemen, for this was vandalism disguised as scholarly research; I will not comment on the question of respect for the Jewish tradition. I said to myself, ‘Enough’, and I wrote a review of Wodziriski’s book.® My pri-

mary concern was with the incompleteness of the materials that would have allowed me to verify its conclusions. The assertion that they could be found on the * Hondo, Stary zydowski cmentarz w Krakowie, 173-4. > A. Trzcitiski and M. Wodziriski, Cmentarz zydowski w Lesku, pt. 1: Wiek XVI i XVII (Krakow,

2002). |

6 M. Wodzitiski, Hebrajskie inskrypcje na Slasku XIII-XVIII wiek (Wroclaw, 1996); L. Hoxdo, Studia Judaica, t (1998), 101-4; id., Slaski Kwartalnik Historyczny Sobotka, 1-2 (1998).

Reply to Trzcinskt and Wodzinski 609 internet turned out to be false. To this day they have not appeared, and I dare say that no detailed inventory of the cemetery has come into being. The late Professor Woronczak acknowledged in conversation with me that such a database for Silesian cemeteries does not exist; further, some of the materials are not exclusively of Wodzinski’s authorship.’ There can be only one conclusion: that Wodziriski’s work

cannot be considered in any way complete, nor can its theses be considered reliable. The accusation against me—that my work is similar—therefore sounds somewhat odd. The authors remark that the first volume of gravestone inscriptions from the old Jewish cemetery had already appeared when my book came out,” but they consider that these inscriptions have no value since their content cannot

be verified. |

This is even less comprehensible since numbers assigned to the graves correspond to those contained in the analysis. Furthermore, not only the title, but also the introduction, explain what is in the book. It should be stressed here that this 1s not a chronological arrangement but one that follows the numbering of the gravestones from 1 to 174. This is the logical consequence of wishing to present all the gravestones in the cemetery. Contrary to the assertions of the reviewers, this database, which they criticize, and, in particular, its specific structure, have been the subject of scholarly debate (of which they purport to be ignorant).'° On many points I can document the ill will of the authors. For example, they accuse me of having incomplete footnotes, offering as an example my page 67 footnote 157, which refers to catalogue cards, although the next sentence explains that these are accessible electronically in the form of a computer database located at the Interdepartmental Center for the History and Culture of the Jews in Poland at the Jagiellonian University. Some of the reviewers’ assertions are baseless. For example, they maintain that ‘Researchers in the field are interested above all in the frequency with which particular elements occur in different regions’ and that the time period that I used— the century—is not in keeping with this division. On the basis of evidence known only to themselves, they believe that there is, for example, a significant difference in form between the oldest gravestones of the mid-sixteenth century and the steles ” As yet, the materials from the Silesian cemeteries have not appeared—they could not appear because the synthesis presented was, in my opinion, based not on a detailed inventory, but only on a

search for the oldest gravestones in specific cemeteries. Some of the materials were gathered by J. Woronczak and J. P. Woronczak.

8 Similar concerns could be raised about Wodzinski’s book Groby cadykéw w Polsce (Wroclaw, 1998). The book was based not on a detailed inventory of the cemetery, but only on a superficial selec-

tion of samples. This is demonstrated if only by the example of Tarnow, where the author omitted several significant figures. See L. Horido, Zydowski cmentarz w Tarnowie (Krakow, 2001), 104—6, 117-24. 9 L. Horido, Inskrypcje starego zydowskiego cmentarza w Krakomie, pt. 1 (Krak6w, 2000). 10K. Pilarezyk and P. Pilarczyk, ‘Komputerowa inwentaryzacja nagrobkéw z cmentarzy zydowskich w ramach “Programu Judaica” (Krakow 1989-1992)’, in J. Woronczak (ed.), Studia z dziejéw kultury zydowskiej w Polsce, 11: Cmentarze zydowskie (Wroclaw, 1995), 217-27.

610 Leszek Hondo from the end of that century. I surmise that what demonstrates this difference, for them, is their ‘representative sample’ of eight gravestones from Szczebrzeszyn™ and ten from Lublin.'* My adversaries reproach me for failing to take into account materials from Matlopolska (Lesko), Przemysl, Olkusz, Lublin, and Szczebrzeszyn; however, it would be impossible for me to do so since the material for three of these localities appeared after my work was published.'* They are mistaken, however, in stating that the articles on the cemetery in Lublin are a documentation of that cemetery, since there is no complete plan of the gravestones. I consciously

chose not to form an opinion on the modest collection from Szczebrzeszyn because it contains errors. The accusation that I am not familiar with inscriptions from Olkusz is simply a mistake since the inventory materials from the old Jewish cemetery in that town have not been published; and if this is in fact not the case, I will gladly update my bibliography. Furthermore, how can one assert simultaneously my lack of familiarity with the materials, and that I have made use of several articles from the volume edited by Woronczak? Should I also have quoted my own article in that volume? ++

This twisting of the facts is obvious at least in relation to the formula »’4 which was ostensibly examined by the reviewers in the cemeteries of Wielkopolska, Silesia, and central and eastern Poland.’ I have already expressed my opinion concerning the materials from Silesia. The inventories from Wielkopolska and Tarnow exist only in my adversaries’ review.'° I should like to stress most emphatically that before my book came out, no inventories had appeared that might have been considered complete; at most, there were contributions pointing to specific instances. It is not at all strange, therefore, that my references were to completed materials obtained on the basis of detailed inventories, such as that in Frankfurt am Main. 11 A. Trzcitiski and J. P. Woronczak, ‘Nagrobki z XVI wieku na cmentarzu zydowskim w Szczebrzeszynie’, in K. Pilarczyk (ed.), Zydzi1judatzm we wspotczesnych badaniach polskich: Matenaty 2 konferencji, Krakow 21-23 XI 1995 (Krakow, 1997), 349-65.

12 A. Trzcitiski and J. P. Woronczak, ‘Nagrobki z XVI wieku na starym cmentarzu zydowskim w Lublinie przy ulicy Siennej’, in T. Radzik (ed.), Zydzi w Lublinie: Materialy do dziejéw spotecznoset zydowskiej Lublina (Lublin, 1998), 41-64 (in the same volume there is an article about gravestones from the 17th century). 13 Trzcitiski and Wodzirnski, Cmentarz zydowski w Lesku (2002); M. Wodzitiski and A. Trzcisiski,

“x VI-wieczne macewy ze starego cmentarza zydowskiego w Przemyslu’, in K. Pilarezyk and S. Gasiorowski (eds.), Zydzi 1 judaizm we wspotczesnych badaniach polskich: Materiaty z konferencpi,

Krakow 24-26 XI 1998 (Krakow, 2000), 113-39. In the same volume, see ‘Cmentarz zydowski w Lesku w wieku XVI i XVII (pp. 141-59). 14 L. Horido, ‘Cmentarz zydowski—charakterystyka hebrajskich inskrypcji’, in J. Woronczak (ed.), Studia z dztejow kultury zydowskie] w Polsce, ii: Cmentarze zydowskie (Wroclaw, 1995), 69-76.

15 My adversaries mention many places in Poland, but they in fact cite only Trzciriski’s and Woronczak’s publication ‘Nagrobki z X VI wieku na cmentarzu zydowskim w Szczebrzeszynie’.

16 Unless we accept that a one-day visit to a cemetery that contained several thousand graves is enough to gather all the materials.

Reply to Trzcinski and Wodzinski 611 It is worth discussing a concrete example here. One gravestone to which the reviewers refer 1s that of David Saba, the son of Ephraim (not, as they wrote, David, son of Ephraim Saba). This inscription has been published not only by Bernhard Friedberg (see the reviewers’ footnote 13) but also by J. M. Zunz.!” The beginning of the inscription is now in fact illegible (one wonders how they know what it was). However, in the illegible space there is room for at most the abbreviation 14, and not for the entire phrase }2v174 as the reviewers would have it. Thus, the commentary in footnote 13 not only is impolite, but also flies in the face of my critical conclusions regarding the reproduction of the inscription by J. M. Zunz or even that by Bernhard Friedberg. Further arguments raise similar questions. ‘The reviewers reject my generalization that this abbreviation became popular in the seventeenth century, on the basis of their own research at the cemetery in Krakow, which covered only sectors 4 to 7. One might inquire why their deduction was not based on all seven sectors, or, no less importantly, where these conclusions have been published. It is difficult to form an opinion on the authors’ criticisms in regard to concrete examples. In principle one should present a photograph to illustrate each problem. Let the example of the gravestone of Gitel, who died in 1552 and was the daughter of Moshe Auerbach (p. 104), demonstrate how unreliable are the reviewers’ assertions. I used this example only to show the elements of the inscription, though I realized that the gravestone did not date to the sixteenth century—as was noted in

my text. The accusation that I changed the order of the elements so that they would support the formula that I had proposed is clearly tendentious since I wanted only to present elements of the inscription. How the text looks on the stone 1s illustrated by the photograph set beside the text (p. 105), and a copy of the inscription is to be found in the collection.‘® The authors are also mistaken in their assertion that this gravestone dates to the nineteenth century. In my view, a new inscription was carved in the nineteenth century on an original sixteenthcentury gravestone. A similar example is the accusation that I incorrectly dated gravestone 84 (with the dates 1758 and 1800). In the case of limiting dates, we have to make a methodological decision regarding classification, namely: should this be determined by the dates on the gravestone alone or by the stone’s formal characteristics? The first criterion would suggest that the gravestone was put in place immediately after the death of the most recently deceased, which was never the practice on Polish lands. The common practice was to erect the gravestone within twelve months of that death, and this would place it in the nineteenth century. In this instance the fact that there were actually four dates on the gravestone (1757, 1758, 1782, and 1800) testifies to the honesty of the reviewers.'* 7 J. M. Zunz, Geschichte der Krakauer Rabbinate vom Anfange des sechzehnten fahrhunderts bis auf die Gegenwart als Beitrag zur Geschichte der Jfuden in Polen (Lviv, 1874), 174.

18 Horido, Inskrypcje, 202-3. 19 Tbid. 117-19.

612 Leszek Hondo Likewise, the assertion that the list of archival photographs is incomplete 1s false. It is a pity that the authors did not check to see that the photograph I cited, by M. Kipnis, came from the YIVO Archive in New York,”° which they refer to in their footnote 8.

On some issues the reviewers are simply wrong. They claim that they do not know who is responsible for the copy of the inscription cited on page 22. In fact, I write in the book, ‘In the cemetery there is the gravestone of Kala, the daughter of Mordechaj (footnote 675), but the text of the inscription diverges from that cited by B. Friedberg and F. H. Wetstein.’ To avoid any doubt I provide a contemporary photograph of the inscription on the following page. A separate question is the reviewers’ tendency to make arbitrary statements relying on the assertion that they ‘know better’. This concerns even the translation of the days of the Jewish week into Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and so on; in my opinion, their lack of familiarity with the idiomatic language leads in this case to a clear Polonization of the concepts. They repudiate my assertions several times in a similar manner, even in regard to the incompleteness of the Yiddish language, which I support using two examples (p. 471). This also concerns titles (p. 473). However, in no case do they give evidence for their assertions, unless on the basis of their ‘secret materials’. After all, how can one state that ‘analysis of the script of inscription 133 dates this stone unequivocally to the seventeenth century’ and then that ‘Many formal characteristics of gravestones 81 and 83 indicate that they date from the nine-

teenth century, and characteristics of gravestone 300 date it to the seventeenth century’? In each of the cases mentioned the reviewers are wrong. Gravestone 133 can be dated to the beginning of the nineteenth century, numbers 81 and 83 to the beginning of the twentieth century, and number 300 to the beginning of the eighteenth century. It is not possible to date them unequivocally to within any single century, but this was the time interval that I had adopted, which meant that I accepted that it was better to provide no designation than to stretch the facts.

Unfortunately, the review is in no case a ‘war of reason’ based on concrete evidence; rather, it is a mixture of the ill will and dishonesty of the authors. It is a living reminder of the nineteenth-century polemic between researchers studying Jewish cemeteries in Polish lands, which consisted of slinging mud at one’s adversaries. I am not infallible; I do not claim that all of my conclusions are correct, especially since we are all aware that to take too categorical a position will shape subsequent Polish research. My analysis of the review of Trczifski and Wodzinski is only an ‘attempt to show’ who in Poland really knows Jewish cemeteries. My publications on Jewish cemeteries have, after all, earned the recognition of the

selectors of the prestigious Jan Karski and Pola Nirenski Prize, which I have the honour to have been awarded. Translated from the Polish by Clatre Rosenson 20 Horido, Stary zydowski cmentarz, 81 n. 204.

Explanation ANDRZEJ TRZCINSKI and MARCIN WODZINSKI LET us recall that in our review we criticized Leszek Hondo’s work above all for his lack of clear ideas or structure, unfounded selectivity, and incompleteness in raising questions, as well as an unsatisfactory analysis of the issues (mainly the failure to keep to a clear chronological framework), methodological shortcomings, and, finally, poor editing.

To the majority of our reservations, and particularly the most serious ones, Hondo does not respond. The only issue of a general nature that he touches on in his polemic is the question of the construction of his primary sources and comparative material. He asserts: ‘I should like to stress most emphatically that before my book came out, no inventories had appeared that might have been considered complete; at most, there were contributions pointing to specific instances. It is not at all strange, therefore, that my references were to completed materials obtained on the basis of detailed inventories, such as that in Frankfurt am Main.’ In other words, Hondo asserts that only complete and published documentation of entire cemeteries can serve as the basis for comparative studies. A fine ideal. If we wanted to apply it to historical research, we would have to throw out any work that was not based on in extenso archival items (or collections?). Just as we do not expect all archival materials to be edited and published, we also should not believe that some day a significant portion of the Jewish epitaphs in Poland will be published, for they number several millions. Rather than accepting a postulate that limits us to complete and published materials, which would paralyse all research, researchers on Jewish cemeteries are conducting surveys of numerous objects. These surveys are almost never published, but they form a scholarly framework. It is true that these materials are usually incomplete, and that a thesis based on them can turn out to be incorrect. But this is true of all of historical knowledge, for there is always the risk that researchers will come across previously unknown materials that will change the picture.

Hondo is right when he asserts that we established the ‘difference in form between the oldest gravestones of the mid-sixteenth century and the steles from the end of that century’ ‘on the basis of materials known only to [ourselves]’. But this is not ‘secret material’, nor was it obtained by stealth as he suggests; it consists of recordings and photographs of thousands of gravestones collected in the course of numerous visits to cemeteries, as well as supplementary archival documentation

614 Andrzej Trzcinski and Marcin Wodzinski (for example, old documentation from the now destroyed cemeteries in Brzeg Dolny and in Przemysl). As in archival research, our profession requires that in the absence of completeness, the collected materials must be representative. Besides, our publications—

the representativeness of which Hondo doubts—are in essence complete collections (for example, the collections of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century inscriptions from Szczebrzeszyn, Lublin, Przemysl, and Lesko); Hondo’s gibe 1s thus off the mark. He may also sneer at our comparison of the Krakow inscriptions with those of Olkusz because ‘the inventory materials from the old Jewish cemetery in that town. have not been published’. The materials have not been published, but the gravestones do exist; one can convince oneself of this simply by visiting that town.

Cemetery research is not only a matter of archival research but primarily of research in the field. Working on the well-preserved and -maintained cemetery in Krakow, Hondo sneers at all those who make their way to the deteriorating, often difficult-to-reach cemeteries that will never receive funding for extensive preservation and documentation, and for which preliminary cataloguing is the only hope of documenting at least some of the most valuable relics. Honido’s remaining arguments are petty in nature or take issue with individual corrections, but sometimes expose more general methodological problems. For example, he rejects our assertion that the abbreviation 1” became popular in the eighteenth century rather than the seventeenth, as he has said. In his book this assertion was supported by a single example from 1695. Horido rejects our view, which is formulated on the basis of gravestones from Wielkopolska, Silesia, and

eastern Poland, as well as four of the seven sectors in the Krakow cemetery, and asks ‘why [our] deduction was not based on all seven sectors, or . . . where the graves appeared’. He is surely pretending not to know that it was he, and not we, who documented the Krakow necropolis, and that we can only conduct verifying survey research. Four out of seven is thus more than half of the cemetery, and the

result was surprisingly powerful (of 153 seventeenth-century inscriptions only three bore the inscription in question—all from the end of the century). The examples that we provided from outside Krakow’ (materials from seventeen ceme-

teries) can be verified in relevant publications and archival collections or at the cemeteries themselves. Of course, Hondo is not familiar with these materials, and he does not want to recognize those that are published as representative. It 1s diffi-

cult to understand, however, why his ignorance should be a stronger argument than the results of our research on many cemeteries, even if it is incomplete. Likewise, Hofido rejects our corrections to the dating of a series of gravestones

and asserts that ‘better to provide no designation than to stretch the facts’. However, instead of ‘stretching the facts’ it is enough to conduct a detailed formal 1 “Some Remarks on Leszek Horido’s Study of the Old Jewish Cemetery in Krakow’, Polin, 16 (2003), 472.

Explanation 615 analysis in order to establish unequivocally the date of a gravestone with greater precision than the dating by century that he accepts. It was for incompetence in precisely this type of analysis that we faulted Horido’s work. In dating a gravestone, we take into account the type of script, the technique used in executing the inscription and the ornamentation, the placing of the inscription, the framing of the field of inscription, analogies concerning the materials from which the gravestone was made, and the breadth and thickness of the stele. The recurrence of these features within a designated period of time and in a particular place—in this instance, Krakow—is not accidental and allows us to conclude that they have a common source of production. On this basis it is possible to distinguish groups of gravestones of common origin and similar date. Let us take, for example, steles 31 and 83. Horido disagrees with our assertion that these are nineteenth-century gravestones and asserts that they could just as easily date from the beginning of the

twentieth century. These gravestones form a group with steles numbered (in chronological order) 40, 41, 42, 44, 14, 67, 53, 30, 90, and 34, dating from 1765-6 to around the middle of the nineteenth century.” Steles 81 and 83 have, in addition, some close parallels to matsevot (tombstones) 14 (1847), 67 (1847), and go (1849) in the framing of the pediment (a flat ledge) and the placement of decorative motifs in it (ribbons of greenery arranged symmetrically). On the basis of these data we can state unequivocally that they were produced around the middle of the nineteenth century. Of course, we have at our disposal similar analyses in regard to the other cases in which Hondo questions the dating. With this we conclude our substantive debate with Hondo; we must move on now to the ad personam arguments. Of course, we will not enter into an exchange of insults here as it would be irrelevant to the arguments we raised in our review. Nevertheless, we must respond to several of the accusations made against us, especially as Hondo is attempting to undermine our scholarly credibility. First of all, it is not true that the documentation of cemeteries that we have conducted has anything in common with vandalism, or that we ‘dug up’ any part of

the cemetery or pulled gravestones out of the ground. Indeed, our cataloguing efforts differ from those of Hondo in that among other things we clean the grave-

stones we are researching, and if necessary uncover an inscription that has collapsed into the ground. However, we do all of this with utmost care for the gravestone and the inviolability of the cemetery. Our publications—including 2 For greater clarity, we consider only gravestones published by Horido in his /nskrypcje starego zydowskiego cmentarza w Krakowmte, pt. 1 (Krakow, 2000). We present them here in chronological order.

They have the following features in common: the type of script is Sephardi (no. 34 is mixed, with most characters Sephardi); the technique used in the inscription is concave (no. 44 has convex letters in the standard opening phrase); the technique used in the ornamentation is convex (flat relief; nos. 53 and 34 are illegible in the photographs); layout of the inscription—flush down both sides (though short lines in nos. 40, 42, and 14 are aligned separately); the absence of framing of the field of inscription (except for no. 67); the material is sandstone; dimensions in cm. (width): 49.5, 45, 52, 51, 51-5, 51, 46, 61.5, 52, 62, 60, 61, (thickness): 15, 11, 11, 17, 10, 13, 14, 16, 14, 12, 21, 16.

616 Andrzej] Trzcinski and Marcin Wodzinski those referred to by Horido—are proof of this. We must emphasize that the documentation collected in this manner is of significantly greater value than Horido’s incomplete records. In a decade or so it may be impossible to read the neglected inscriptions and complete the documentation because of both the advancing erosion of the stone and incidents of vandalism. Hondo may not like our methods, considering them arduous and time-consuming, but it is difficult for us to understand what this has to do with the arguments raised in our review of his book. Secondly, even if Horido’s slanders against Wodziriski’s book were true, what connection could this have with Hofido’s reviewed work? This is not the place to enter into a polemic concerning Wodzinski’s book: the author responded to all of the accusations in his reply to the review cited by Honido.? It is a pity that Hondo limited himself to libels and did not so much as mention these polemics, especially since he never publicly took a position on them (he was refused the opportunity to do so in Studia fudaica because ‘the editorial board . . . decided not to publish the response of L. Horido .. . considering it to be without merit’*). Thirdly, the planned publication Cmentarze zydowskie w Polsce: Vademecum opracowanta t opisu was not intended as a synthesis, as Honrido claims, but rather as a

publication of an instructional nature, providing basic information on methods for the description and documentation of Jewish cemeteries. This is clearly expressed in the title itself. Perhaps Hofido did not understand the basic assumptions of that work; however, this too has no connection with his publication. Fourthly, turns of phrase such as ‘they “know better”’ are not quotations, and no such remark was ever uttered by us.

, So much for the personal accusations. Finally, a few words about plagiarism. Hondo defends himself against that charge by asserting that he is not familiar with the version of the texts to which we refer (because the book has not been published), and then immediately adds that he had used texts on which the editorial board had co-operated; “Thus the assertion that specific individuals were the sole authors of particular chapters is simply fraudulent.’ Even if Hondo really is not familiar with the latest version of the texts in which the editorial boards supposedly co-operated, he should know that unpublished texts are also subject to copy-

right. We should also explain that Horido is not a co-author of these texts. Although it is true that he was a member of the group that was to edit the afore-

mentioned Vademecum, he was not a co-author of the chapters by Andrzej Trzciiski or Jan Woronczak, from which he copied fragments. Each chapter of the Vademecum had and has one designated author. Participation in the discussion of early versions of these texts most decidedly does not authorize anyone to claim the authorship of someone else’s text. (In fact there was only one such meeting for discussion, and it never reached the editorial level mentioned by Horido.) According 3 ‘Odpowiedz na recenzje Leszka Horidy’, Sobdtka, 54/1 (1999), 131-3; ‘O hebrajskich inskrypcjach na Slasku: Kilka uwag w odpowiedzi recenzentowi’, Studia Judaica, 2/1 (1999), 127-33. 4 Editorial note to ‘O hebrajskich inskrypcjach na Slasku’, 133.

Explanation 617 to Hondo’s logic, every participant in the scholarly conference could claim joint authorship of all the chapters of the post-conference volume. Moreover, even if the polemicist intends to claim authorship of certain theses that he plagiarized, it is difficult to understand what in his opinion allowed him to copy fragments of someone else’s text almost word for word.°

Hondo also asserts that he did not plagiarize Wodzinski’s text: ‘Starting from the same wording, which appears widely in Jewish cemeteries, I arrive at a different understanding and the same translation.’ The question is not how the expression was ultimately translated, but how his argument and supporting materials were constructed. The fragment concerning the history of the wording 1s simply a restatement of Wodzinski’s text in his own words with cosmetic changes (made with the literature cited by Wodziriski). There would be nothing inappropriate in

Hofido’s reporting of the history of the expression as he learned it from Wodzinski’s text, or even in his referring to certain publications quoted there— this is after all a widespread practice. But scholarly honour requires in such cases a clear note of the fact, and not the claiming of someone else’s work.® In sum, Leszek Hondo does not respond to the general criticisms that we raised

in our review and that were the crux of the matter. As we wrote, ‘Our purpose is not so much to list the mistakes evident in this particular work, but rather to discuss the wider methodological issues arising in the analysis and description of > Horido asserts that our accusation of plagiarism was not illustrated by concrete examples. Here, then, are some examples. In J. P. Woronczak’s chapter (p. 8) we read: “There are variations in the names of certain months: “’8 TTX” and “]}WN81 4TR”, which mean “Adar I” and “first Adar” (more often called even in Polish “Adar riszon” [Adar rishon]); “’2 TTR”, “27M TTR”, and “TTR”, “Adar Il”, “Adar sheni”, and “Ve’adar” (the latter is rarely encountered); “JTN1” and “WNW”. The month of Av is often called “AX 02” or simply “0M3”.’ In Honido’s work the fragment looks like this: “There are variants in the names of certain months: “’X TTR” and “JIWN1 TTR”, which mean “Adar I” and “first Adar”, and “’2 TTX” and “?7¥ 7TR”, which mean “Adar IT’ and “Adar sheni’. Also: “}1wn”, “second Adar”. The month of Av is called “28 072” or simply “ON29”.’ The quotation continues in this vein. In Trzciriski’s chapter, in the section entitled ‘Sarcophagus-Shaped Gravestones’, we read, ‘By this term we will designate the kind of gravestone that consists of an elongated cuboidal box, constructed of vertical walls and covered by a horizontal slab with a retable . . . 2. With a lower horizontal retable with different types of finials (for example, flat, polygonal, cylindrical, concave—convex). Adjoining the shorter sides of the retable are flat, vertical slabs (or only one) standing on the box, or more rarely on the plinth . . . In all cases the walls of the box, as well as the retable, are richly ornamented.’ We find this same text, somewhat abbreviated, on page 34 in Horido’s work: ‘This type of gravestone consisted of an elongated, cuboidal box and retable (in different form—for example in the form of a semi-cylindrical graveslab). Sometimes flat, vertical slabs were added to the shorter sides of the retable. As a rule the box covered the entire area of the grave and was built on a brick foundation or plinth. The walls of the box, as well as the retable, were richly ornamented and often covered with inscriptions.’ © Both texts have been published, so the interested reader can compare for himself. See L. Horido, Stary zydowski cmentarz w Krakomie (Krakow, 1999), 172-3; M. Wodzitiski, Hebrajskie inskrypcje na Slasku XILI-X VIII wieku (Wroclaw, 1996), 153—4.

618 Andrzej Trzcinski and Marcin Wodzinski Jewish cemeteries.’ Horido does not explain the lack of discussion of the literary genre studies, style, and versification, or of formal analysis of script or iconog-

raphy; nor does he refer to the postulate of comparative research taking into account the diachrony and geography of the phenomena studied. The polemicist took our review as a personal attack and resolved to respond in kind. He clearly has difficulty distinguishing genres, and confuses a review with a lampoon just as he confuses his polemic with denunciation. He is not correct when he asserts that we intended to show ‘who in Poland really knows Jewish cemeteries’. We were concerned not with who should, but rather with how to, write about them. This subtle difference clearly escaped our polemicist. Translated from the Polish by Claire Rosenson 7 “Some Remarks’, 467-8.

Obituary

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Jacek Kuron (right) and Adam Michnik, 1986 By ‘Tomasz Michalak; now in the Gazeta Wyborcza photographs archive, Warsaw; repr. from Zeszyty Literackie, 88/4 (2004), special issue: homage to Jacek Kuron

Jacek Kuron2 ‘The last romantic politician committed to the struggle for the rights of minorities’ 1934-2004 We lived like children lost in a fairy-tale. We lived and fought not for the basics of life, but for the freedom of movement and the freedom of friendship. SERGIUSZ PIASECKI

Kochanek mielkie] niedZwiedzicy, 1937

ON 17 June 2004 Jacek Kuron, the last romantic Polish politician, died at the age of 70 after fighting a prolonged illness. Kurofi belonged to a rare breed of politicians, public intellectuals, and human beings. His original mind, his charisma, his openness towards people of different ethnicities, cultures, and ideological conviction, his deep and genuine concerns about poverty, his support for disadvantaged and excluded social groups and individuals, and not least his ability to admit his mistakes publicly—all these were part of his extraordinary character. His passion for social action, his struggle against injustice, and his compassion for the weak were manifested at every stage of his life. In 1949 at the age of 15 Kurof, who was brought up on the ethos of the pre-war Polska Partia Socjalistyczna (Polish Socialist Party, PPS), joined the communist organization Zwigzek Miodziezy Polskie; (the Union of Polish Youth, ZMP) and threw himself into educational work with underprivileged children from the poorest section of Warsaw’s working classes. In 1953 he wrote his first critique of communist practice—on the activities of the ZMP—and as a result was expelled from the Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (United Polish Workers’ Party, PZPR), which he had joined earlier the same year. In 1956 he rejoined the PZPR during the Polish October, which promised internal political, social, and economic reforms of the system. During the first half of the 1960s, when he still believed that communism could be reformed, he wrote a severe critical analysis of the regime, which had failed to deliver the goods it had promised a few years earlier. In 1965, with

Karol Modzelewski, his close associate in political endeavours, he wrote the famous ‘Open letter to members of the PZPR and ZMP at the University of

622 Obituary Warsaw’, in which they condemned the party’s elitist practices. For their actions, Kuron and Modzelewski were sentenced to prison on 19 July, for three years and three and a half years, respectively. The political events of 1968—9 were to mark Kuron’s final disillusionment with communism. Kuron’s departure from communism was plainly evident in the 1970s, when he began to inspire the post-1945 generations of Poles, especially the generation of 1968, to struggle against communist rule. He was ‘the brain and the heart’ of the Komitet Obrony Robotnikow (Committee to Defend Workers, KOR), the key dissident organization of the 1970s which provided support and resources to workers

and their families imprisoned by the Communist regime. His two articles ‘Polityczna opozycja w Polsce’ (“The Political Opposition in Poland’), published in the Paris-based Kultura (11, 1974), and ‘Mysli o programie dzialania’ (“Thoughts about a Programme of Action’), published in the London-based Anceks (13-14, 1977), were the bible of the dissident movement in Poland. As one of the most radical leaders of the first Solidarity movement of 1980, Kuron was feared and constantly harassed by the communist regime. Lech Walesa, the former president, whom Kuron served as a political adviser during the pivotal moment of post-1945 Polish history, the workers’ strikes of the summer of 1980, paid tribute, in his eulogy, to Kuron’s salient role in that historic event: ‘without Kuron the events of August 1980 would have been impossible’.

In the post-1989 period, as one of the founding fathers of post-communist Poland, Kuron enthusiastically began to teach Poles how to create a pluralistic civil society in which the voices of people of a different ethnic, cultural, and ideological

heritage could be heard, respected, and valued. In his article “Testament’ (‘Legacy’), originally published on 22 June 1996 in the weekly Polityka, he insisted that a pluralistic civil society was the only way forward for the country in spite of the challenges that would be entailed by its realization: Poland belongs to all its people. I understand the legacy that our great ancestors gave us, that I have to work out a compromise that will unite all the citizens of our beautiful, our bitter, and only homeland. This idea, which may sound somewhat lofty, is that no compromise can take the place of pluralism. We must not gloss over the differences between the values, interests, and goals of different social groups. But pluralism and democracy may lead to sharp social tensions if we are unable to understand each other, bring about compromise, and transcend our individual interests. We must remember that we have only the one state and that under its skies there must be enough room for everybody.”

Kurof not only disseminated this vision of society but also attempted to realize it. Having been elected a member of the Polish parliament in June 1989, he imme-

diately initiated the establishment of the Komisja Mniejszosci Narodowych 1 Etnicznych (Commission for National and Ethnic Minorities). As chairman of the 1 Lech Walesa, ‘O Jacku Kuroniu’, Zeszyty Literackie, 88/4, special issue dedicated to Jacek Kuron

(2004), QI. 2 Jacek Kurof, ‘Testament’, ibid. 34.

Obituary 623 Commission in the years 1989-91, 1993-7, and 1997-2001, he fought for comprehensive legislation that would guarantee communitarian rights to all minorities living in Poland. His unequivocal condemnation of and fight against antisemitism, before and after 1989, and his position on Polish—Ukrainian relations are outstanding for the

profound understanding of the problems of national minorities which they demonstrate. In fact, Kuron’s approach to Polish Jews and Ukrainians places him among a very small number of Polish intellectuals, which include the philosopher Stanislaw Vincenz. For Kuron, like Vincenz, had the rare gift of understanding all types of people and seeing life from their perspective, a gift formed in his childhood, in his home town of pre-war Lviv, at that time a vibrant multi-ethnic city

inhabited by ethnic Poles, Polish Jews, and Ukrainians. In his eulogy Marek Edelman, one of the last surviving fighters of the Warsaw ghetto and a close friend of Kurof, noted the influence his childhood had on his adult attitude to minorities: He was always with the weak, and everybody here recognizes that that was his life. The weak always belong to minorities and different minorities are weak. He spoke of the twentieth century as the era during which the ulcer of antisemitism burst into genocide. . .. He had had that vision since his childhood. He wrote about Zoska, a 14-year-old girl who on one occasion he imagines dying in his bed and on another being shot dead by Germans in a courtyard (in Lviv)—and that no one is moved—because it is only a Jewish girl that has been murdered. ZoSka was to represent the Ideal for that 8-year-old boy. ZoSka became the symbol of all those people taken to the Umschlagplatz and shot on the streets. . . . The pain that remained with him after her death became the pain that he extended to other minorities.°

In the first volume of his personal memoirs, Wiara 1 wina: Do 1 od komunizmu (‘Faith and Guilt: To and Out of Communism’), from which excerpts have been published in Polin, 14 (2001), Kuron himself vividly and thoughtfully describes those childhood experiences that opened his heart to others and their suffering.* That intimate encounter of a few months with the 14-year-old Jewish girl whom his father provided with shelter and with the false identity of Zoska Czarniecka, a cousin of the family, was the pivotal experience of his childhood. Her tragic story, ending in her suicide in wartime Lviv—‘the valley of death’—seemed to leave the young Kuron with an open wound, as recounted in his memoirs: Some time later he told us we had a cousin called ZoSka Czarniecka. He said she was in the isolation hospital with typhus and we had to visit her. We took her some rhubarb compote in a bottle. She leaned out of the window and waved to us. . . . It was the Jewish girl, for whom he had procured ‘Aryan’ papers. At that time there was danger that someone might

inform on us, so we moved from Zulitski Street to Kochanowski Street, to the flat of a Hungarian general’s wife. Later on a transfer point for Jews was set up at 5 Asnyk Street. 3 A large excerpt from Marek Edelman’s eulogy was published in Zeszyty Literackie, 88/4 (2004), 83-9. * Jacek Kuron, ‘My First Encounters with Jews and Ukrainians’, Polin, 14 (2001), 237-48. Kurori’s Wiara t wina was first published in 1989 by the publishing house Aneks.

624 Obituary ZoSska lived there, and I was with her for the whole of the autumn and half of the winter. I do not even know what her real name was. She was my great childhood love. .. . One day we fell asleep snuggled against one another, and when I woke up I felt she was cold, dead. I knew straight away she had poisoned herself. . . . I knew I had to tell my father she was dead. I washed and dressed, went back, and kissed Zoska. . . . Afterwards there was her funeral. My mother, father, and I walked behind her wooden coffin. She was buried in the Lyczakowski cemetery, where my great-grandfather, an insurgent who fought in the anti-Russian uprising of 1863, is buried. A cross with the name Zofia Czarniecka was placed on her grave. No trace of her was left, no real name, no real surname. I felt I was the only one in the world who could have helped her, and J had not known how.®

The young Kurofi’s close-up observation of the population of the Lviv ghetto,

especially of starving Jewish children—his peer group—was to be heavily imprinted on his memory as an adult. His bold picture of the contrast between his relatively normal childhood, full of the usual daily pleasures of childhood, and that of Jewish children behind the ghetto fences of Nazi-occupied Lviv, is among the most moving and honest observations ever written by a Pole. Outings with my mother to the swimming pool in Zamarstynow made the greatest impression on me. We used to travel by tram through the ghetto to get there. Jews from the whole voivodeship had been brought into the ghetto, where they were crowded together in a few streets and houses. Many people lived on the streets, dying of hunger. For me, on my way to the pool, however, it seemed that the worst thing was that they did not have any water. At the end of the tramline there was a market, and mother bought cherries—large, juicy cherries. Starving Jewish children watched through the gaps in the fence. . . . We walked to the pool. I would not eat the cherries or go into the water, as I could not put out of my mind the image of the starving people on the other side of the fence and of those people lying in the street dying of thirst—or so it seemed to me. The water was greenish, wonderful, inviting. Later I went for a swim and ate the cherries, which had earlier stuck in my throat.®

Perhaps it was these wartime experiences that led to Kuron’s active participation in the annual independent commemorations of the Warsaw ghetto uprising that began in the 1980s as a tribute to Marek Edelman, who, in 1983, refused to participate in the official commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the uprising organized by the communist regime. Even on 19 April 2004, on the sixty-first anniversary, Kuron, already terribly weakened by his illness and in a wheelchair, took part throughout the event, as in previous years, with Marek Edelman. The young Kurofi’s acute observations of his own community’s response to the dying Jews in Nazi-occupied Lviv, and to those local Jews who returned soon after the war to Krakow, where his family had moved in the spring of 1945, also left an imprint on his memory, and contributed to his becoming one of the most astute analysts and critics of modern Polish antisemitism. In turn, as Kuron himself commented, the spread of anti-Jewish attitudes within the non-communist political camp, and within society at large, including his own generation, 1n the early > Kuro#, ‘My First Encounters’, 244—5. © Ibid. 241-2.

Obituary 625 post-war period, turned him towards the ideology of communism and the new regime. The antisemitism I encountered at school and in the courtyard was crucial in my attitude towards the new authorities, people’s Poland, the world. The war made me hypersensitive towards the Jewish question. I only had to hear the word ‘Jew’, and I saw Zoska and old Grab thrown out of our flat. I saw the children who had hardly finished eating their soup, when they had to go out on the street again. The underground propaganda against the new order and the arguments used every day were toa very great degree antisemitic. This placed me on the side of the new order and made it just in my eyes. ’

Later, in communist Poland, Kuron did not hesitate to impersonate a Jew in order to confront individuals directly who had demonstrated anti-Jewish prejudice. He is known to have played a Jew in prison, to which the communist regime twice sentenced him in the second half of the 1960s—a period marked by the official antisemitic campaign of 1968-9, and by an increase in anti-Jewish tensions in sections of society. ‘It is not easy to be a Jew in Poland. . . . The idea of playing a Jew in prison began to gnaw at me. When I was taken to the prison in Sztum, I began to say that I was a Jew. Later I played a Jew in the prison in Potulice.’® Kurofi also took an active part in the 2000—2 debate about Jedwabne, the most salient and long-lasting debate on Polish—Jewish relations to take place in Poland since 1945. In his article ‘Nienawis¢ do ofiary’ (“Hatred Directed at the Victim’) he

once again spoke boldly about his personal experiences as an eyewitness of wartime antisemitic attitudes and behaviour. Like Jan T. Gross, he urged society to

accept the ‘dark pages’ of its history as a part of the national heritage. He also expressed an implicit optimism about the possibilities of such a broad social acceptance, since he himself sincerely believed that people’s desire was to live by truth.? Kuron, Henryk Wujec of the former Unia Wolnosci, the Revd Professor Michat Czajkowski, and the well-known courier of the underground Polish state the late Jan Nowak-Jeziorariski, were co-authors of an appeal for active participation in prayers of repentance during the official ceremony to commemorate the victims of the Jedwabne massacre, which took place in Jedwabne itself on ro July 2001.1°

Asa child Kuron was also fascinated by the Ukrainian world, which he encountered on the streets of Lviv. His father, who was a member of the PPS, opposed the anti-Ukrainian social prejudice that was common in pre-war Polish ethnonationalist circles. Kurofi’s own pre-war memory of Ukrainian Lviv led him to

respect the Ukrainians and their fight for their national cause. In the 1980s he became one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Ukrainian independence, and was one of the most passionate advocates of rapprochement in Polish—Ukrainian 7 Tbid. 247-8. 8 Jacek Kuron, ‘Polityka wedtug Kuronia’, Zeszyty Literackie, 88/4 (2004), 98. 9 Jacek Kuron, ‘Nienawis¢ do ofiary’, Gazeta Wyborcza, 17-18 Feb. 2001, 23. 10 The appeal was published in Tygodnik Powszechny, 16 (22 Apr. 2001), 5.

626 Obituary relations. According to him, this rapprochement had to entail Polish recognition of the political, social, and cultural discrimination that the pre-war Polish state had imposed upon the Ukrainians. In his article ‘Rozumiem gniew Ukraincow’ (‘I understand the Anger of the Ukrainians’), published in Gazeta Wyborcza on 22 May 2002, and in his speech delivered in Lviv in October of the same year, he was

not afraid to address directly the most painful issues of pre-war, wartime, and post-war periods of Polish—Ukrainian history.

I am completely in love with Ukraine—from my early childhood. I am thrilled and strengthened by the incredible Ukrainian will to achieve their independence—the will to self-determination which generation after generation has paid for with the labour camps. ... Lam moved by the generational transfer of martyrdom, but at the same time I am horrified that so much of one’s own and others’ blood has to be shed in order to achieve independence. .. . Is it possible for us to balance the accounts of Polish—Ukrainian relations?

Can we make a reckoning of suffering and genocide? It is clear that we cannot... . Nevertheless, when it comes to a reckoning of crimes, we can do that. Volhynia was the place where genocide took place; the killings of Poles in Volhynia was ethnic cleansing. . . . Ukraine never deprived Poland of its independence and never occupied the Polish state. These events never took place. On the contrary, Poland deprived Ukrainians of their independence and occupied their country. ... We deprived the Ukrainians of their independence in the Galician war (in the nineteenth century). Later we signed the agreement with Petlyura and then we signed the treaty of Riga, which resulted in the next partition of Ukraine. Of course, some people claim that it was the Bolsheviks and not the Poles who carried out ‘Akcja W’ (the Vistula Action), aimed at the displacement of people from their small homelands. With sadness I must state that I well remember that time, its climate, and its people. ‘Akcja W’ was accompanied by social approval. They used to say at the time, ‘We will sort out the Ukrainians.’ Of course, the fact that Ukraine supported Nazi Germany had an impact on that process. An awareness that the Ukrainians had betrayed us was prevalent at the time. However, we have to ask ourselves why the Ukrainians should not

have betrayed us. After all, we ignored all our treaties and obligations towards the Ukrainians, we did not fulfil any of these obligations. During the entire inter-war period the Ukrainians had to fight for the establishment of a Ukrainian university in Lviv. Today we have to create a future in which we will be able to overcome our differences without losing our separate identities, namely without blurring the fact that we are Poles, Ukrainians, or French. At the same time, we have to act in such a way that our separate identities will enrich one another. This is what happens with me. I feel that I am enriched because of Ukraine; I owe my own inner spiritual growth to the Ukrainians."

In the protracted debate between the Polish and Ukrainian sides about the Polish cemetery in Lviv, which only in the summer of 2005 reached a mutually acceptable agreement, Kuron, the idealist, suggested the erection of a new monument dedicated to ‘the memory of the victims of the brotherhood’s battles’. Although neither the Poles nor the Ukrainians received this initiative with enthusiasm, Kuro enjoyed great respect in Ukraine. For his efforts in supporting an independent 41 Jacek Kuron, ‘Wspdlna ojczyzna wspélnych grobow’, Zeszyty Literackie, 88/4 (2004), 43-4.

Obituary 627 Ukraine and in building bridges between Poles and Ukrainians, he received the title of honorary citizen of Lviv. Members of the Ukrainian liberal cultural elite, such as Yaroslav Hrytsak, are admirers.'* In June 2005—tthe first anniversary of his death—the independent Ukrainian cultural journal Yi organized a special meeting dedicated to Kuron’s works on social activism. Viktor Yushchenko, the new president of Ukraine, has paid tribute to Kurofi on many occasions. At the funeral of Kurofi in June 2004 Yushchenko called him ‘a great man, a great Pole,

and a great Ukrainian’.'° In his interview on 4 November of that same year Yushchenko recalled Kuron’s famous statement, rooted in romantic idealism, that ‘without an independent Poland, there cannot be an independent Ukraine, and without an independent Ukraine, there is no independent Poland’.'4 In the name of the romantic ethos expressed in the slogan ‘For your freedoms

and ours’, Kuro supported Charter 77, the dissident movement in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s. In the 1980s he also supported the idea of a Polish—-Czech— Slovak alliance. During the civil war in Kosovo in the former Yugoslavia in 1999 he

was the co-initiator of an action in support of Flora Brovina, the Serbian physician, poet, and women’s rights activist who was accused of treason and terrorist activities by MiloSevic’s regime.

In his beloved neighbourhood of Zoliborz, in Warsaw, Kuro was known as a warm, approachable individual, and one who was always ready to help people on the margins of society. His unusual favourite choice of reading as a teenager, about

poverty and the harshness of life at the extreme margins of society and in its underworld—such as Izydor Koszykowski’s Dziecko ulicy (‘Child of the Street’), Jan Dabrowski’s Na zachéd od Zanzibaru (“To the West of Zanzibar’), and the Jewish memoirist Urke Nachalnik’s Zyciorys wlasny przestepcy (“My Personal Criminal Curriculum’)—doubtlessly played a role in developing his compassion for those who suffered social deprivation.‘° His understanding and support of women’s rights also places him among a rare breed of male politicians in Poland. In his private life Jacek Kurofi was also unquestionably romantic at heart. His collection of letters to his first wife, Grazyna (Gaja), written over a long period from the 1960s to 21 November 1982 from various prisons, reveals that particular side.4© The "2 T should like to thank Yaroslav Hrytsak for expressing his views about Jacek Kuron in our conversations.

‘8 A short excerpt from Viktor Yushchenko’s eulogy dedicated to Jacek Kurofi was published in Gazeta Wyborcza, 25 Nov. 2004, .

4 Waldemar Piasecki’s interview with Viktor Yushchenko, 4 Nov. 2004, ‘Yushchenko: Foreign Policy Part II of the Right to a European Choice’, Brama, 10 Nov. 2004, . 5 T should like to thank Padraic Kenney for granting me permission to use his article about Kuron’s teenage library, ‘Jacek Kuron’s Little Bookshelf’, presented at the panel ‘Jacek Kuror’s Legacy: The Last Dissident’, organized by Irena Grudzitiska Gross, 5 Dec. 2004, Boston University. : *© A small collection of private letters between Jacek and Grazyna Kuron was published in Karta, 43 (2004), 122-51.

628 Obituary letters present him as a strong, manly man who was not afraid of expressing his emotions. For him, Gaja, whom he met in 1955, was the great love of his life, and their marriage was a union of soulmates. Reminiscent of Plato’s concept of love in the Symposium, Kuron spoke about Gaja as ‘the woman who created him and everything that was good in him’, and saw his marriage as the union of ‘two halves of the same apple’. Gaja, who, like her husband, was interned during the imposition of martial law in December 1981, died on 23 November 1982, in hospital in Lodz. Kuron was granted permission to see her on 22 November, the day before her death.

In his essay ‘The Revenge of a Mortal Hand’, Stanislaw Barariczak, the acclaimed poet and literary critic, and close friend of Gaja and Jacek Kuron, discussed his poem “To Grazyna’, which he wrote upon receiving the news of her death.‘ Although Barariczak recognized that his poem neither managed to keep Grazyna Kurofi among the living, nor brought her back from the dead, nevertheless he insisted that this poem challenged the void to which those who pass away are confined: ‘remembering the dead through the act of writing challenges Nothingness’. The sadly premature death of Jacek Kuro marks the end of a particular era in Polish politics and public life. It is a great loss to his son Maciej from his first marriage to Grazyna, his second wife, Danuta, and the rest of his family, friends, and colleagues, to all those who knew him, and to Polish society as a whole. The eulogy of Adam Michnik, for whom Kurofi was both ‘political master’ and close friend, reminds us how important it is to remember both the man and his legacy, and to keep alive his visions and ideas. Jacek did not just love humanity. He loved people, real people—made of blood and bones. He loved them in their searching and drifting into erroneous paths, in their struggle with the burden of existence, suffering, illness, and death. We should repeat: he was a man of struggle—but without hatred, and a man of reconciliation—but without hypocrisy, and bravery—without fanaticism . . . He had the gift of great timing, without opportunism. He was a man of strong principles—but of gentle heart, a man of compromise—without conformism, a man of community—who respected the individual, a man of forgiveness— though not rooted in happy sclerosis, and a man of trust—though not of naivety.'®

JOANNA B. MICHLIC 17 Published in S. Barariczak, Breathing under Water and Other East European Essays (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 239-45. 18 A. Michnik, ‘Rzecz o Jacku: Wolnos¢, sprawiedliwosc, milosierdzie’, Zeszyty Literackie, 88/4 (2004), 60; first pub. in Gazeta Wyborcza, 19-20 June 2004.

Notes on the Contributors KAREN AUERBACH is a doctoral student in modern Jewish history at Brandeis University. Her research focuses on assimilation, social integration, and Jewish - communal life in Poland after the Second World War.

MiEczystAw B. BISKUPSKI holds the S. A. Blejwas Endowed Chair in Polish History at Central Connecticut State University. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University and is the author of The History of Poland (Westport, Conn., 2000), as well as more than fifty articles, and the editor of Jdeology, Politics, and Diplomacy in East Central Europe (Rochester, NY, 2004).

STANISLAUS A. BLEJWas was Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University, where he also co-ordinated the university’s Polish Studies Program.

He worked on both Polish and Polish American history. He was the author of Realism in Polish Politics: Warsaw Positivism and National Survival in Nineteenth Century Poland (New Haven, 1984) and St. Stanislaus B. and M. Parish, Meridien,

Connecticut: A Century of Connecticut Polonia, 1891-1991 (Meridien, Conn., 1991), and co-editor of Pastor of the Poles: Polish American Essays (New Britain, Conn., 1982). He died prematurely in 2001.

ALINA CAzA, a researcher of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, is the author of Asymilacja Zydéw w Krélestwie Polskim (1864-1897) (‘The Assimilation of the Jews in the Kingdom of Poland, 1864-1897’, Warsaw, 1989), The Image of

the few in the Polish Folk Culture (Jerusalem, 1995), and (with B. Letocha and A. Messer) Zydowskie druki ulotne w II Rzeczypospolitej w zbiorach Biblioteki Narodowej (Warsaw, 2004— ), and the co-author of Dzieje Zydéw w Polsce,

1944-1908: Teksty zrodtowe (“The History of Jews in Poland, 1944~1068: Sources’, Warsaw, 1997). At present she is working on the history of antisemitism in Poland. ROBERT CHERRY 1s Koppelman Professor of Economics at Brooklyn College. He has published widely on topics related to discrimination, including Who Gets the Good fobs? Combating Race and Gender Disparities (New Brunswick, NJ, 2001). Currently he is completing two books: Welfare Success Stories (Oxford) and Polish Images and the Holocaust (Lanham, Md.).

Tosy W. CLYMAN is Professor Emerita of Russian literature at the State University of New York at Albany. Among the books she has edited are _4A Chekhov

Companion (Westport, Conn., 1985), Women Writers in Russian Literature (Westport, Conn., 1995), and Russia Through Women’s Eyes: Autobiographies from Tzarist Russia (New Haven, 1996).

630 Notes on the Contributors Davip ENGEL is Greenberg Professor of Holocaust Studies, Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, and Professor of History at New York University and a Fellow of the Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center at Tel Aviv University, where he edits the journal Ga/-Ed: On the History and Culture of Polish Jewry. His books include In the Shadow of Auschwitz: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews 1939-42 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1987), Facing a Holocaust: The Polish Government-inExile and the Jews 1943—45 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1993), Bein shthrur leorthah: Nitsolet

, hasho’ah vehama’avak al hanhagatam 1944—46 (‘Between Liberation and Flight: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Poland and the Struggle for Leadership’, ‘Tel Aviv, 1996), The Holocaust: The Third Reich and the Jews (Harlow, 2000), and a definitive edition of the journal of Calek Perechodnik, published under the title Spowiedz (‘Confession’, Warsaw, 2004).

DaANUSHA V. GOSKA received her Ph.D. from Indiana University, Bloomington. Her most recent teaching post was at William Paterson University. Her writings on Polish and/or Jewish matters have appeared in 2B: A Journal of Ideas, New York Folklore, TheScreamOnline, Sarmatian Review, and in the new book The Impossible Will Take a Little While (forthcoming). ANDRZEJ K APISZEWSKI is Professor of Sociology at the Jagiellonian University in

Krakow and Director of the Department of Middle East and Far East Studies. He has written numerous studies devoted to ethnic and national issues, including Stereotyp Amerykanow polskiego pochodzenia (“The Stereotype of Americans of Polish Descent’, Wroclaw, 1978), Asymilacqja 1 konfitkt: Z problematyki stosunkow

etnicznych w Stanach Zjednoczonych Ameryki (‘Assimilation and Conflict: The

Problematics of Ethnic Relations in the USA’, Warsaw, 1984), Native Arab Population and Foreign Workers in the Gulf States: Social, Economic and Security Issues (Krakow, 1999), Nationals and Expatriates (Reading, NY, 2001), and Conflict across the Atlantic: Essays on Polish—Fewish Relations in the United States during World War I and in the Interwar Years (Krakow, 2004). JONATHAN KRASNER is an assistant professor of American Jewish history at the Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion. His dissertation, which he is

currently revising for publication, explores the representation of outsiders and insiders in American Jewish textbooks. His articles have appeared in the American Jewish Archives Journal, the fournal of Fewish Education, and American Fewish EMistory.

SARUNAS LIEKIS is Associate Professor at the Mykolas Romeris University in Lithuania. He is Director of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University. His main field of research is modern Lithuanian Jewish history and politics. He is the author of 4 State within a State? Jewish Autonomy in Lithuania 1915-1925 (Vilnius, 2003).

Notes on the Contributors 631 KAREN MAJEWSKI received her Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan. Her book Traitors and True Poles: Narrating a Polish-American Identity, 1580-1939 (Athens, Ohio, 2003) discusses the Polish-language fiction written and

published by immigrants before the Second World War. She is curator of the Polish book collection at the Orchard Lake Schools complex and Executive Director of the Polish American Historical Association.

Ewa MorawskA ts Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex, where her research focuses on the comparative-historical study of migration and ethnicity, primarily from eastern Europe to the West (western Europe and North America).

Her most recent publications include International Migration Research: Constructions, Omissions, and Promises of Interdisciplinarity, co-edited with M. Bommes (Aldershot, 2005); ‘Sociology and History of (Im)Migration: Reflections of a Practitioner’, in Morawska and Bommes (eds.), /nternational Migration Research; ‘Exploring Diversity in Immigrant Assimilation and Transnationalism: The Case of Poles and Russian Jews in Philadelphia’, International Migration Review, 38/4 (2004); and Toward Assimilation and Citizenship: Immigrants in Liberal Nation-States, co-edited with C. Joppke (New York, 2003).

DAVID PATTERSON held the Bornblum Chair in Judaic Studies at the University

of Memphis and was Director of the University’s Bornblum Judaic Studies Program. A winner of the Koret Jewish Book Award, he published more than a hundred articles and book chapters on philosophy, literature, Judaism, and Holocaust studies, as well as more than two dozen books. His last book was Hebrew Language and fewish Thought (Abingdon, 2005). He died in 2005. GUNNAR S. PAULSSON is an Associate of the Centre for Soviet and East European

Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw 1940-1945, which has won the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History and the Biennial Polish Studies Association/Orbis Prize. He earned his

D.Phil. in modern history in 1998 from Oxford University, where he was a Commonwealth Scholar, and he has been the Senior Historian of the Holocaust exhibition project at the Imperial War Museum in London, Koerner Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, and Resnick Fellow at the US

Holocaust Memorial Museum. ,

JOHN T. PAWLIKOwSKI OSM is Professor of Social Ethics and Director of the Catholic—Jewish Studies Program at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. He currently serves as president of the International Council of Christians and Jews. For twenty-four years he served by presidential appointment on the United States

Holocaust Memorial Council. He continues as a member of the Council’s Academic Committee and chairs its Church Relations Committee.

632 Notes on the Contributors ANTONY POLONSKY is Albert Abramson Professor of Holocaust Studies at Brandeis University and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Until

1991 he was Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is chair of the editorial board of Poli, author of Politics in Independent Poland (Oxford, 1972), The Little Dictators (London, 1975), and The Great Powers and the Polish Question (London, 1976), and co-author of A History of Modern Poland (Cambridge, 1980) and The Beginnings of Communist Rule in Poland (London, 1981).

ToMASsz POTWOROWSKI was born in 1924 in Warsaw, the son of a diplomat. He was educated at French, Polish, and Swedish schools and, after service in the Polish

army during the Second World War, graduated in engineering from London University. He retired after a forty-two-year career in telecommunications engineering and business administration. He lives in California and devotes much time to his interest in Polish diplomatic history during the Second World War. LAURA QUERCIOLI MINCER is a Lecturer in Jewish Culture and History in the Slavic Countries at the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’. She has written several articles on Jewish culture in east-central Europe and is currently writing a book on Jewish literature in Italy and Poland after the Second World War. JOHN RADZILOWSKI is a historian and author. He received his Ph.D. from Arizona State University and is at present a Fellow at the Piast Institute.

ANNA P. RONELL received her Ph.D. in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies from Brandeis University and is currently teaching at Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts. Her research focuses on the renewed interest in the east European

past in contemporary Jewish fiction. Her fields of interest are east European Jewish civilization, Hebrew—Russian literary relations, American Jewish literature, and ethnic, literary, and cultural studies. RONA SHERAMY is Executive Director of the Association for Jewish Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Jewish history from Brandeis University. Her research examines the history of Holocaust education in the United States.

DANIEL STONE is Professor of History at the University of Winnipeg. He is the author of Polish Politics and National Reform, 1775-1758 (Boulder, Colo., 1976), The Polish Lithuanian State 1356-1795 (Seattle, 2001), and many other works about the history of Poland and Polish Jews. ADAM TELLER is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the Department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa. Educated at Oxford University and the

Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he has two books currently in press: Harova hayehud: shel poznan vetoshavav bemahatsit harishonah shel hame’ah ha-17 (“The

Jewish Quarter of Poznan and its Inhabitants in the Seventeenth Century’) and Tafkidam hakalkahi uma’amadam hahevratt shel hayehudim be’ahuzot bett radzivil

Notes on the Contributors 633 belita beme’ah ha-1& (‘Money, Power and Influence: The Jews on the Radziwill Estates in Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century’). He has published a number of articles on the social, economic, and cultural history of Polish—Lithuanian Jewry in the early modern period, and is currently working on a history of the Polish— Lithuanian rabbinate in that period. JERZY TOMASZEWSKI is Professor Emeritus of the Mordecai Anielewicz Centre

for the Study and Teaching of the History and Culture of the Jews in Poland (Warsaw University), Professor of the Wyzsza Szkola Gospodarki Krajowej w Kutnie. His main fields of interest are national minorities in Poland in the twentieth century (particularly the Jews) and the history of central Europe in the twenti-

eth century. Among his publications are Z dziejow Polesia 1921-1939: Zarys stosunkéw spoteczno-ekonomicznych (‘On the History of Polesie 1921-1939: An Outline of Social and Economic Relations’, Warsaw, 1963); Rzeczpospolita wielu

narodéw (‘A Republic of Many Nations’, Warsaw, 1985), Ojczyzna nie tylko Polakéw: Mniejszosci narodowe w Polsce w latach 1915-1939 (‘A Fatherland Not Only for Poles: National Minorities in Poland in the Years 1918—1939’, Warsaw, 1985), and Preludium zaglady: Wygnanie Zydéw polskich z Niemiec w 1938 r. (‘Prelude to Destruction: The Expulsion of Polish Jews from Germany in 1938’, Warsaw, 1998).

CaRLA TONINI is Professor of East European History at the University of Bologna. She is the author of Operazione Madagascar: La questione ebratca in Polonia, 1915-1968 (‘Operation Madagascar: The Jewish Question in Madagascar, 1918-1939’, Bologna, 1999) and co-editor of Primavera di Praga e dintorm: Alle

origini dell 8g (“The Prague Spring and its Connections: On the Origins of the Changes of 1989’, San Domenico di Fiesole, 2000) and I/ tempo dell’odto e 11 tempo della cura: Storia di Zofia Kossak, la polacca antisemita che salvo mighata di ebrei (CA

Time of Hatred and a Time of Care: The Story of Zofia Kossak, the Polish Antisemite who Saved Thousands of Jews’, ‘Turin, 2005). MaJA TROCHIMCZYK is a music historian specializing in Polish music and twenti-

eth-century music. A holder of three degrees (MA, University of Warsaw; MA, Chopin Academy of Music; Ph.D., McGill University), she has received postdoctoral fellowships from the Social Science Higher Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies. In addition to writing over a hundred

articles, book chapters, and reference-work entries (in English, Polish, and German) and editing the online Polish Music Journal (1998-2004), she has published three books, After Chopin: Essays in Polish Music (Los Angeles, 2000), The Music of Louis Andriessen (New York, 2002), and Polish Dance in Southern California (forthcoming). From 1996 to 2004 she directed the Polish Music Center at the University of Southern California, where she organized the International Conference on Polish Jewish Music in 1998.

634 Notes on the Contributors STEPHEN J. WHITFIELD is Max Richter Professor of American Civilization at

| Brandeis University. Among his books are The Paradoxes of American Jewish Culture (Ann Arbor, 1993), The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, 1996), and In Search of American Fewish Culture (Hanover, NH, 1999). He is also the editor of A Companion to 20th-Century Amenca (Malden, Mass., 2004).

MarEK WIERZBICKI is a Senior Assistant at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. He graduated from the Catholic University of Lublin in 1988. In 1997 he defended his Ph.D. dissertation, which was devoted to Polish—Belarusian relations under the Soviet occupation of the territories of pre-war Poland (1939-41). Since 1991 he has been researching interethnic relations under the Soviet occupation of Poland (1939-41) and the relations

between the communist authorities and Polish youth during the Stalinist era (1948-56). He is the author of Polacy 1 Biatorusint w zaborze somieckim: Stosunki polsko-biatoruskie na ziemach potnocno-wschodnich II Rzeczypospolite; pod okupacjg sowieckg 1939-1941 (‘Poles and Belarusians under Soviet Occupation: Polish—

Belarusian Relations in the North-Eastern Lands of the Second Republic under Soviet Occupation 1939—1941, Warsaw, 2000), Polacy i Zydzi w zaborze sowieckim: Stosunki polsko-zydowskie na ziemach potnocno-wschodnich II RP pod okupagga

sowieckg (1939-1941) (‘Poles and Jews under Soviet Occupation: Polish—Jewish

Relations in the North-Eastern Lands of the Second Republic under Soviet Occupation 1939—1941’, Warsaw, 2001), and ‘My z Zetempe’: Upadek 1 likwidaga

Zwigzku Mlodziezy Polskie (1955-1957) (‘“We of the ZMP”: The Fall and Liquidation of the Union of Polish Youth (1955—1957)’, Warsaw 2004).

Glossary arenda A lease of monopoly rights, usually of an estate. ba’al shem (pl. ba’alei shem; Hebrew; lit. ‘Master of the Divine Name’) The title given in popular usage and in Jewish literature, epecially kabbalistic and hasidic works from the Middle Ages on, to one who possessed secret knowledge of the Tetragrammaton and other ‘Holy Names’ and who knew how to work miracles by the power of these names.

beit midrash (Hebrew) House of study. Bund The General Jewish Workers’ Alliance; a Jewish socialist party founded in 1897. It joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, but seceded from it when its programme of national autonomy was not accepted. In independent Poland it adopted a leftist, anti-communist posture, and from the 1930s co-operated increasingly closely with the Polish Socialist Party.

cantonist Jewish children who were conscripted to the army in tsarist Russia in the reign of Nicholas II in which they served for twenty-five years were often compelled to attend special schools established in barracks (cantonments). Hence these schools were called cantonist schools, and those who attended them, cantonists.

commonwealth (Polish: rzeczpospolita) The term rzeczpospolita is derived from Latin res publica. It is sometimes translated as ‘commonwealth’ and sometimes as ‘republic’, often in the form ‘Noblemen’s republic’ (Rzeczpospolita szlachecka). After the union of

Lublin in 1569 it was used officially in the form Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodow (Commonwealth of Two Nations) to designate the new form of state that had arisen.

In historical literature this term is often rendered as the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth. Also used for the independent state established after 1918.

Council of Four Lands See kahal. eshet hayil (Hebrew; lit. ‘a woman of valour’) The opening words of the praise of the virtuous woman contained in Proverbs (31: 10-31). In many families this passage is recited by the husband, alone or together with the children on Friday evenings before the Kiddush. This practice originated in kabbalistic circles and initially referred to the Shekhinah (divine presence) as the mystical mother and wife. Later this became a domestic ceremony in which the family pays homage to the housewife and mother. It may also have legitimized situations in which the wife was the breadwinner.

General Government An administrative—territorial unit created in Poland during the Nazi occupation from some of the territory seized by Germany after the Polish defeat. The General Government was established on 26 October 1939 and first comprised

four districts: Krakow, Lublin, Warsaw, and Radom. Its capital was the town of Krakow and its administration was headed by Hans Frank. After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, an additional province, Galicia, made up of parts of the pre-war Polish provinces of Lw6éw, Stanislaw6ow, and Tarnopol was added to the General Government. On the territory of the General Government, the Germans pursued a

636 Glossary policy of mass murder of the Jewish population and reduced the Christian Poles to rightless slaves, who were to provide a reservoir of labour for the Third Reich.

hasidism A mystically inclined movement of religious revival consisting of distinct groups with charismatic leadership. It arose in the borderlands of the Polish— Lithuanian Commonwealth in the second half of the eighteenth century and quickly spread through eastern Europe. The hasidim emphasized joy in the service of God, whose presence they sought everywhere. Though their opponents, the mitnagedim, pronounced a series of bans against them beginning in 1772, the movement soon became identified with religious orthodoxy.

Haskalah (Hebrew; lit. ‘learning’ or ‘wisdom’, but used in the sense of Enlightenment) A movement that arose in the wake of the general European Enlightenment in the second half of the eighteenth century and continued into the second half of the nine-

teenth century. Its adherents were known as maskilim. Its most prominent representative was Moses Mendelssohn (1729~—86). The Haskalah was particularly important and influential in German and Slav lands. It advocated secular education, the acquisition of European languages, the adoption of productive occupations, and loyalty to the state. In eastern Europe there was considerable emphasis on Hebrew as opposed to Yiddish, which was rejected by most maskilim. heder (Hebrew; lit. ‘room’) Colloquial name for a traditional Jewish elementary school in which teaching was carried on by a melamed.

kahal (pl. kehalim), kehilah (pl. kehilot) (Hebrew) Although both terms mean ‘community’, kahal is used to denote the institution of Jewish autonomy in a particular locality,

while kehilah denotes the community of Jews who live in the town. The kahal was the lowest level of the Jewish autonomous institutions in the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth. Above the local kehilot were regional bodies, and above these a central body, the Va’ad Arba Aratsot (Council of Four Lands) for the Kingdom of Poland and the Va’ad Medinat Lita (Council of Lithuania). The Va’ad Arba Aratsot was abolished

by the Polish authorities in 1764, but autonomous institutions continued to operate legally until 1844 and in practice for many years after this date in those parts of the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth directly annexed by the tsarist empire and until the

emergence of the Polish state in the Kingdom of Poland and Galicia. Here the reorganized communal body, which no longer had the power to punish religious heterodoxy, but administered synagogues, schools, cemeteries, and mikvaot, was often called the gmina (commune). In inter-war Poland the legal status of the kehilot was regulated by statute in October 1927 and March 1930. The legislation gave them control over many aspects of Jewish communal life with both religious and social functions. All adherents of the ‘Mosaic faith’ were required to belong to a kehilah, and one could not withdraw except through baptism or by declaring oneself an atheist.

Kresy The eastern provinces of Poland between the two world wars. Today parts of Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine.

landsman (Yiddish) Jews from particular localities; Jandsmanshafin are societies of such Jews.

Matopolska (Polish; lit. ‘Lesser Poland’ or ‘Little Poland’) Southern Poland, the area around Krakow. Also referred to under the Habsburgs as (western) Galicia.

Glossary 637 mezuzah (Hebrew) A parchment inscribed with texts from Numbers and Deuteronomy and enclosed in a protective case, attached to the doorpost of a Jewish house in fulfilment of a biblical commandment. mtkveh (pl. mikvaot; Hebrew) A pool or bath of clear water, immersion in which renders ritually clean a person who has become ritually unclean through contact with the dead or any other defiling object or through an unclean flux from the body, especially menstruation. muitsvah (pl. misvot; Hebrew) A commandment, precept, or religious duty derived from the Hebrew tsavah ‘to command’.

peyes (Yiddish; Hebrew: pe’ot) Literally ‘corners’, but referring to the uncut sidecurls worn by ultra-Orthodox Jewish men. podwojewoda (Polish) See wojewoda.

propinacja ‘The monopoly on the sale of alcohol on a noble estate. From the sixteenth century the propinacja had formed an important part of the estate owners’ income from their lands, particularly in those regions where the export of grain to the international market of Danzig was not practical.

seder (Hebrew) Passover eve ritual meal.

Sejm The central parliamentary institution of the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth, composed of a senate and a chamber of deputies; after 1501 both of these had a voice in the introduction of new legislation. It met regularly for six weeks every two years, but could be called for sessions of two weeks in an emergency. When it was not in session, an appointed commission of sixteen senators, in rotation four at a time, resided with

the king both to advise and to keep watch over his activities. Until the middle of the seventeenth century the Sejm functioned reasonably well; after that the use of the liberum veto began to paralyse its effectiveness. Also used for the local parliament in Galicia as in ‘Seym Galicyjski’.

starosta (Polish) A royal administrator, holder of the office of starostwo. From the fourteenth century three distinct offices were covered by this term: the starosta generalny (general starosta) in Wielkopolska, Rus, and Podolia represented the Crown in a particular region; the starosta grodowy (castle starosta) had administrative and judicial authority over a castle or fortified settlement and its surrounding region; and the starosta niegrodowy (non-castle starosta), or tenutariusz (leaseholder), administered royal lands leased to him.

szlachta (Polish) ‘The Polish nobility. A very broad social stratum making up nearly 8 per cent of the population in the eighteenth century. Its members ranged from the great magnates, such as the Czartoryskis, Potockis, and Radziwills, who dominated political and social life in the last century of the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth, to small landowners (the sz/achta zagrodowa) and even to landless retainers of a great house. What distinguished members of this group from the remainder of the population was their noble status and their right to participate in political life in the dietines, the Sejm, and the election of the king.

tsadtk (pl. tsadikim; Hebrew; lit. ‘righteous person’) The leader of a hasidic group was called a tsadik or rebbe. Often his hasidim credited him with miraculous powers, seeing him as mediator between God and man.

638 Glossary Wielkopolska (Polish: lit. ‘Great Poland’ or ‘Greater Poland’) Western Poland, the area around Poznan. wojewoda (Polish) Initially this official acted in place of the ruler, especially in judicial and military matters. From the thirteenth century the office gradually evolved into a provincial dignity; between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries the wojewoda conducted the local sejmzk, led the pospolite ruszenie, the levée-en-masse of the sz/achta in times of danger to the Commonwealth, and occasionally governed the cities and collected certain dues. The podwojewoda (assistant sub-voivode) often acted as judge of the Jews. By virtue of his office, the wojewoda sat in the senate. In inter-war and postwar Poland the administrative head of a voivodeship.

yeshiva A rabbinical college, the highest institution in the traditional Jewish system of education.

Yishuv (Hebrew, lit. ‘settlement’) The Jewish settlement in Palestine before the establishment of the state of Israel, particularly its Zionist aspects. yizkor bikher (Yiddish) Memorial books.

Index

A antisemitic tropes 18 Abel, Theodore 144 antisemitism in America 213-14, 290-2, 299, Abramovich, Mariya 547 327

Abramowicz, Ludwik 503 between the wars 34, 36, 38 acculturation 570 Nn. 2 during the Second World War 45 Achad Ha’am 355 antisemitism in Poland 108, 258-9, 268-9, 328, Adamczyk-Garbowska, Monika 425 421, 426, 433, 461, 468, 572-3, 579, 623,

Adams, John 302 625 Adler, Cyrus 19, 232, 243, 252 in 1956: 559, 564

Adler, Elkan 245 in the 1980s and 1990s 262-4, 271-2 Adler, Julius Ochs 300 Cardinal Hlond’s pastoral letter 341 AJC, see American Jewish Committee in debate on Jedwabne 393-413

Alderman, Geoffrey 237 and exclusion of Jewish musicians 363 |

Alexander III 235 Paderewski and go-3

Alliance Israélite Universelle 28 in the Polish army 191-2, 196, 201 Alliance polonaise de toutes les croyances Polish denunciations of 187, 282 religieuses (Polish Interfaith Alliance) 10 in popular culture 205-28, 479-82

Alliluyeva, Svetlana 303 in Russian Poland 20

Alter, Israel 356 and scholarship on Mickiewicz 450

Alter, Leon 472, 474 in writings 583-97

Alvarez, Al 303 see also blood libel, accusations of; boycotts of Ambroziewicz (schools inspector) 504 the Jews; cemeteries, Jewish, in Poland,

Newspapers 27 sations of :

American Association of Foreign Language desecration of; deicide; ritual murder, accuAmerican Committee for the Relief of Jews in anti-Zionist campaign of 1968: 569-82

Poland 110 Antyk Bookshop 583-97

American Federation of Polish Jews (AFPJ) Apenszlak, Jakub 139, 144

97-116, 143 Arendt, Hannah 549

see also Federation of Polish Jews in America Armia Krajowa (Home Army, AK) 43, 206, 278,

American Jewish Committee (AJC) 19, 23, 36, 538 44-5, 93, 111, 257, 260-1, 273, 313, 340, Jews in 484

405-6 Polish—Jewish perceptions of 331-44

American Jewish Congress 26, 36, 44—5, 88, Armia Ludowa (People’s Army) 43

107, III army, Polish, Jews in 191-2, 196, 199, 201

American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Ascarelli, Mosé Jechiel 455

23, 560 Askenazy, Szymon 589

American Polish Industrial Bureau 107 assimilation 570 n. 2, 572, 575-6 American Polonia (Polonia Amerykafiska) 135 post-war 558

Anders, Jaroslaw 395 associations, Polish, in America 4, 10-13, 16-17,

Andrzejkowicz, Juliusz 12 21, 35, 42, 135, 139, 260 Anglo-Jewish Association 28 Auerbach, Jon G. 289 Anti-Defamation League 258 Auerbach, Karen 569-82

anti-Jewish violence: August II, King 434

IQI8—21: 31-3 Auschwitz 190, 196, 205, 209, 421 1956: 565 50th anniversary commemoration 275-6 Antin, Mary 289-90 Carmelite convent at 268—70

6 40 Index Auschwitz (cont.): blood libel, accusations of 433, 482 and the March of the Living 314-15 see also ritual murder, accusations of

religious symbols at 280-1 Bloomfield, Sara 421

reports about 188, 191 Blum, Léon 468, 470-1 Auschwitz Jewish Centre Foundation 280 Blumental, Alexander and Henrietta 550

autobiographies of Polish Jewish women B’nai B’rith 7

459-66 Board of Deputies of British Jewry 28

| Bojonowski, Lucjan 17-18 B Boniecki, Adam 583-4

Ba’al Shem Tov (Israel ben Eliezer) 232-3, 449 Bonnet, Georges 476

Badior, Roman 157 Bookbinder, Hyman 260

Baker, Jacob 412 Borejsza, Erzy 451

Balinski, Michal 171, 177 Borkowicz, Jacek 227

Bamberger, David 251 Bortner Mathis 595

Barariczak, Stanislaw 628 Boyarin, Daniel 241 Baron, Salo 5,244 boycotts of the Jews 18, 20, 23, 108-9, 111-12,

Bartal, Israel 55, 65 125, 468

parosnevic’ Wen! ‘ boycotts of German goods 37

artoszewski, Wladyslaw 227, 263, 279, 405, Boy-Zeleriski, Tadeusz 449, 452-3

425, 481, 584, 504 Bracken, John 199

Bartrop, Paul R. 156, 167, 168 n. 55 Brandeis, Louis 20, 27, 93

Barzynski, Wincenty 11 Brandes, Georg 23~4, 89

Battle, George Gordon 113 Branisk 229 Bauer, Yehuda 44 Bratkowski, Stefan 504 Beck, J ozet 468-71, 473 Brazil and Jewish refugees 161 Beck, Leon 474-6 Breines, Paul 224 Benderly, Samson 242-3 Breyer, Stephen 287 Ben-Gurion, David 223 Brott Alexander 356

Beniowski, Maurycy August 474 Brovina Flora 627

Ben-Tov, Mordechai 355 Brown, David 106

Berenbaum, Michael 425 Brumberg, Abraham 402-3, 406

Berger, Alan 378 Buber, Martin 244 Berlin, Irving 298 Budny, Michal 166

Bermuda Conference on Refugees 45 Budz ewicz, Lieutenant 492

Bernshtein, Mirra 545 Buivydaito-Kutorgiené, Elena 552—4 Bernstein, Herman 23-4, 89-90, 92 Bukowezyk, John J. 370

Bernstorff, Joachim von 26, 91 Bund 503

Bialystok 539 Bunder, Miles 313

ghetto 547 Bureau of Jewish Education 242

‘Bieganskr’ images 205-28 Burys, Ypatingas 547

Bigar t, Jacques 28 Bustamante, Alexander 172 Bikont, Anna 413 Buszczyrfiski, Konstanty 89 Bildersee, Adele 235, 238, 240-2 Buzek, Jerzy 405-6 Bindenagel, J. D. 281 Byrne, Robert 289 Birenbaum, Halina 227 i Bzhilevskaya, Viktoriya 547 Birkenau and the March of the Living 314-15

Birnbaum, Mariana D. 218 C Black, Edwin 214 Cala, Alina 557-68

Biskupski, Mieczystaw 3-53, 87-95 Cahan, Abraham 303

Blazys, Ignas 535 Campbell, Roland 159, 166 421-2 Canada and Jewish refugees 159, 161, 172-3,

Blejwas, Stanislaus A. 17, 50, 257-85, 396, camps, labour 548

Blonski, Jan 452 179

Index 641 Capote, Truman 290 Cohen, Harvey 303 Carroll, James, Constantine’s Sword 207 Cohen, Morris Raphael 297 Carter, Jimmy 418-19 Cohen, Rich 224 Catholic Church: Cohen, Robert 303 aid to Jews 511 Comay, Sholom D. 272-3

antisemitism 341 Comité des délégations juives 28 and the Antyk Bookshop 583-5 Comite pour la défense des droits des Israelites conflicts with Jews in the 18the. 441-3 en Europe centrale et orientale (Committee

economic ties with Jews 433 for the Defence of the Rights of Jews in

and Jewish property 441 Central and Eastern Europe) 470

and the Jews 483 Commager, Henry Steele 302-3

Polish—Jewish perceptions of 331-44 Committee on Polish Jewry 41, 136

Polish National, in America 14 communism, Jews and 222, 572 cemeteries, Jewish, in Poland 607-18 see also ‘Zydokomuna’

desecration of 565-6 composers, Polish Jewish 51 in Lviv 626 concentration camps, reports about 188—92,

Central Representation of Polish Jews 146, 148 195-6 Centrala Polsko-Amerykanskich Towarzystw w see also names of individual camps Nowym Yorku (Central Organization of conversion of Jews 442 Polish American Associations in New York) Cook, Blanche Wiesen 213

139 n. 16 Copland, Aaron 297

Centralna Zydowska Komisja Historyczna Corpus Christi, Jewish reactions to 435, 482 (Central Historical Commission of the Jews Coughlin, Father Charles 36, 213, 291

in Poland) 600 courts, Polish, and Jews 435-46 Centralny Komitet Polski (Central Polish courts, rabbinic 436-7

Committee) 4, 9-10 Coxey, Jacob S. 65 n. 31

Centralny Komitet Zydéw w Polsce (Central Cranborne, Lord 170, 178 Committee of Jews in Poland) 46, 557 criminal activity, Jewish 444-5

Cerf, Bennett 290 Cuba and Jewish refugees 167, 173 n. 73, 179

Chamberlain, Neville 476 Cudahy, John 112

Charles, Noel 162 Cywihski, Stanislaw 497 Chazan, Eliyahu 455 Czajkowski, Michal 625

Cherry, Robert 47, 327-44 Czas (Winnipeg) 25, 185-93

Chicago 117-33 Czechowski, M. B. to

Chicago Hebrew Institute Observer 123 Czerniakow, Adam 189, 199

Chiapowski, Alfred 362, 364 Czestochowa 567

Chodakiewicz, Marek Jan 399-400, 405, 412, Czolgosz, Leon 18, 65

479-85 Czupka, Julian 61

Chopin, Fredéric 351-2

Chrobot, Leonard 260, 269 D

Chrostowski, M. Alfons 18, 59—60 Dabrowski, Jan 627 Churchill, Winston 155, 163-4, 201 Daily Fewish Courter 124 birthday greetings from Polish refugees 163 Daily fewish Forward 126

Cichy, Michal 538 Daladier, Edouard 476

Ciechanowski, Jan 37, 99, 136n. 3, 137-8, 146, Davies, Norman 264, 403-4, 484

1740.75 Davis, Abel 130

Cienciala, Anna 397 Dawidowicz, Lucy 212, 215 Cieszkowski, August 456 Deak, Istvan 411-12

Cioran, Emil 292 Debicki, Roman 174-5, 179 Clark, Joanna Rostropowicz 451 deicide 291

Clyman, Toby W. 459-66 Delbos, Yvon 472-3, 475-6 Cohen, Abraham 590-1 DeLeon, Granville and Horty 169

642 Index Dershowitz, Alan 271 Einhorn, David 7

Deskur, Cardinal Andrzej Maria 264 Einstein, Albert 585

deSouza, Ernst H. 180 Eishyshok (Eysziszki) 278-9

Deybel, Xawera 452-3 Eliach, Yaffa 278-9

Diaspora, American 287-305 Elin, Khaim 551 Dickstein, Lore 381 Emerson, Herbert 159—60, 165, 176-7 Dinnerstein, Leonard 292 emigration, Jewish:

Disney, Walt 303 to French colonies 470—1

Dtugosz, Jan 589 to Madagascar 467-77

Dmitrow, Edmund 538-9 from Poland in 1957: 563-4

595 inthe r9thc. 3-17

Dmowski, Roman 21, 25-7, 34, 87, 92-3, 480, emigration, Polish, to America:

Dobrzanski, Tadeusz 358 in the 2othc. 17-18

Dodds, Harold 177 1940-53: 46

Dogim, Isaak 546 Endecja (National Democrats) 16-17, 20-3, 26, Dominican Republic, Jewish refugees in 174 30, 34, 35 n. 82, 87-8, 483, 5390

Dowbor-MuSnicki, General 31 coalition with Catholics 17, 88—90 Drohojowski, Jan 174.n. 75 Engel, David 28, 41, 135-53, 214, 404,

Dror (Freedom) 547 599-601

Drymmer, Wiktor Tomir 469, 474 Entartete Musik exhibition 364

Dubicz-Penter, Karol 156 Erdmans, Mary Patrice 370 Dubnow, Simon 239, 244-5, 252 Evans, Jane 36

Duker, Abraham 4, 8, 455 eydelkeyt 241 Duncan, Todd 298-9 Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven 374 Dundes, Alan 217-18 Dwugroszéwka (Warsaw) 90 F

Dybowski, Marcin 583—6 Fackenheim, Emil 544, 548

Dyk, Salomon 472, 474 Fain (Gestapo agent) 551 Dztennik Chicagoski (Chicago) 62, 122, 143 Fallek, Wilhelm 457

Dztennik Polski (Detroit) 103 Falwe I, Jerry 294 oo,

Daiennik dla Wezystkich (Buffalo) 68 F areinikte Partizaner Organizatsie (United Deztennik Zwiqzkowy (Chicago) 55, 124, 143, Partisan Organization, FPO) 545, 547

400, 405 Fater, Issachar 370

Dziewanowski, Kazimierz 271 Federation of American Zionists 20

Federation of Polish Hebrews 37-8, 97

E Federation of Polish Jews Abroad 110

eastern Europe: 197

E. R. Kaminska State Jewish Theatre 563 Federation of Polish Jews in America 37, 186,

in American Jewish textbooks 229-55 see also American Federation of Polish Jews imagined by American Jewish writers 373-91 —_—_‘ Federation of Polish Societies of Canada 200

Eban, Abba 251 | Fedetskaya, Mariya 547 Echo Polski (New York) 10 Felhendler, [. 561

economy, Polish, and the Jews 15-16, 73-4, 431 Fenelon, Fania, Playing for Time 219

Edelman, Marek 623-4 Fenig, Maldwin 110 Edelstein, M. (senator) 188 fiction set in eastern Europe 373-91 Eden, Anthony 473 Fiddler on the Roof 230 education, Jewish 562 Fiedler, Arkady 472, 474 of Jewish women 461-4 Filipov, Boris 531-2 Eggerth, Martha 351 Filipowicz, Tytus 102-3, 105-6 Ehrenburg, Ilya 543, 545 film, see under Holocaust Ehrenburg, Irina 543-4 film composers 367

Ehrenkreutz, Andrew 260 see also Kaper, Bronislaw; Vars, Henry Eichmann, Adolf 215, 220—1, 223, 593 film industry, American, role of Jews in 51

Index 643

Fink, Carole 28 Glassman, Leo 100 Finkelstein, Louis 193 Glazman, Ari 550

Finkelstein, Norman 49, 221-2, 228, 413 Glazman, Yosif 547

Fitelberg, Grzegorz 383 n. 50 Glemp, Jozef, Cardinal 268, 270, 274, 282, 394,

Foer, Jonathan Safran 386—90 406, 584 Ford, Henry 214, 291 Gluza, Zbigniew 599-603

Folks shttme 558 Gliwic, Hipolit 33

Forster, Albert 548 Godowski, Leopold 364

Forverts 84 Goebbels, Joseph 553

FPO, see Fareinikte Partizaner Organizatsie Goering, Hermann 107

Frank, Hans 187 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 455 n. 44 Frank, Jakub 448, 455 Goldberg, Jacob 432

Frank, Leo 300 Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah 212, 412

Frankel, Max 301 Goldman, Emma 18, 65 Freedman, Samuel 224 Goldman, Nahum 471

Freud, Sigmund 302, 304 Goldstein, Rebecca 380—3 Friedan, Betty Goldstein 288 Golub, Jacob 242, 244

Friedberg, Bernhard 611 Goode, Alexander 295

Friedlaender, Israel 239 Good-Will Committee of Jews and Non-Jews of

Friedlander, Henry 426 Polish Extraction 102-3 , Friedman, Philip 467 Gordon, Judah Leib 253 Fronczak, Franciszek 33 Gorski, Konrad 456 Front Morges 42 Goska, Danusha V. 47, 205-28 Fundusz Obrony Narodwej (Fund for National Gourevitch, Philip 212, 225

Defence, FON) 141 goy 241

Grabski, Stanislaw 93 G Graetz, Heinrich 236, 238—40 Gabler, Neal 51 Graham, Billy 290-1

Gales, Harold 260, 269, 271 Gray, Morris A. 200

Galiiski, Edek 220 Grayzel, Solomon 236, 253 Gamoran, Emanuel 36, 243-4, 249 Greenberg, Irving 415, 418 Gamoran, Mamie 242, 248—s0, 252 Greenzweig, Gene 300, 313

gangs, youth 121-33 Gromada, Thaddeus 262, 421 Garbel, Solomon 546 Gross, Feliks 504—5

(Winnipeg) 184, 193-6 : 7

Gazeta Katolicka (Gazeta Polska from 1940) Gross. Jan 523

Gazeta Polska, see Gazeta Katolicka (Winnipeg) wee . oo 393-413, 537-41, 584,

Gazeta Poranna 23 Grossman Len 406

Gazeta Wyborcza 278, 407 Gr ossman, Vasily 543

Gebert, Konstanty 327 Grinbaum, Yitshak 100, 105

Geiger, Abraham 236-7 Gruszka, Sylwester 108, 110, 137, 141

gematriyah 448 Grynberg, Henryk, Memorbuch 569-82 Gens, Jacob 544n. 4 Gura, Anna 463 Geremek, Bronislaw 284 Gurowski, Adam 4

Gershwin, George 298-9 Gutman, Israel 48, 404, 425 Gieysztor, Aleksander 484 Gutowski, John 260 Giller, Agaton 12 Gwardia Ludowa (People’s Guard) 43 Gilman, Sander 219, 230, 247

Ginsburg, Ruth Bader 287 H

Ginzburg, Carlo 454 Hafftka, Aleksander 104 Ginzburg, Louis 244 Hagen, William 412 Gisser, Solomon 356 Haldeman, H. R. 290-1 Gladsky, Thomas 217 Halifax, Lord 178, 476

644 Index Haller, General 31 Holocaust Memorial Museum, planning of Haller, Jozef 586 418-23 Hammerling, Ludwik M. 27 Hondo, Leszek 607-18 Hannover, Nathan Neta 234, 240, 431 Hrytsak, Yaroslav 627

Harris, David 261, 277, 406 Huberman, Bronislaw 364 Harris, Maurice 231, 235-9, 253 Huggins, John 179

Harwood, Charles 159 n. 19 Hull, Cordell 108, 112 hasidism in textbooks 232-3 Hundert, Gershon 433

Haskalah 236 Hyman, Joseph C. 111 Hausner, 24, 90-1 Hebrew Artur language 562I . ,

; identity: wae national 390 Heilprin,; Michael 10 ; Loe. ; Hecht, Sigmund 233, 235, 238, 240 ;

Polish, transmitted in immigrant literature

Heller, Joseph 295

Helmreich, William 322-3 57-69 identity-building, Jewish 307-25 Henry, H. A. 10 ideology, Nazi Herbaczewski, Jozef Albin 452 BY426 4

, of PolishO. Jews the ;USA Henriques, K. in 169 . a. .345-71 Idysz Buch 563 Infeld, Prof. 192 Instytut Pamieci Narodowe (Institute of National

Hertzberg, Arthur 216 aoe ; ; ; Hesburgh, Theodore 288 Memory, IPN) 537-41, 405-6, 41 Hertz, J. H. 190

Himmelfarb, Harold ; nOrYs 337~AT, 405M)Jewish ATS ; i. insurrection of312 1863, attempt to secure

Himmler, Heinrich 189 support for 811 Hirsch, Samson Raphael 7 intermarriage 313 |

Hirschson, Abraham 308 Israel and the March of the Living 317-29

Hitahdut Israelite, The g—10 Hlond,136 Cardinal 341 9

Hodur, Franciszek 14 J

Hoess, Rudolf 221-2 Jabotinsky, Vladimir 110, 143 n. 31, 186

Hoffman, Eva 217, 230 Jachimecki, Zdzislaw 363 Hofstadter, Richard 304 Jacobs, Robert S. 265

Hoinka, Mr 147, 152 Jaffe, Miles 260 Holc, Janine 412 Jatbrzykowski, Andrzej 496-7

Holocaust: Jatbrzykowski, Romuald 511

attack on significance of 49 Jamaica, Jewish refugees in 155-6, 168-82

education 307-25 Janion, Maria 448, 451-2, 456 film treatments of 211-15, 219-20, 229, Jankelevich, Vladimir 457

264-7, 276, 279 Jankowski, Henryk 283

first use of word 197 Jaruzelski, Wojciech 262-3 historiography 401 Jastrow, Marcus (Mordecai) 17 memorialization of 264 Jastrun, Mieczyslaw 451-2 perceptions of Polish—Jewish relations Jay, John 289

during 327-44 JDC, see Joint Distribution Committee

Poles seen as perpetrators of 206-28 Jedrychowski, Stefan 491 Poles as victims of 205—6, 328, 397, 407, 413, Jedwabne 226, 327, 421, 537-41, 603, 625

419-27 debate on in America 393-413

and Polish—Jewish relations 415-27 Jerzmanowski, Erazm 12 press coverage in Winnipeg 183-203 Jessel, George 302

rescue of Jews by Poles 421 Jewish Agency 471 slighting of Polish suffering in 46—8, 50—1 Jewish Courier 126

term 424, 426 Jewish Labor Committee 37

in textbooks 251 Jewish Post (Winnipeg) 184, 197-202

Index 645 Jews as army chaplains 7 Kochanski, Pawel 364

Jidysze szrifin 563 Kohler, Kaufmann 237 John Paul II, Pope 207-8, 264-5, 282, 358 Kolbe, Maksymilian 264 Joint, see Joint Distribution Committee Komarnicki, Tadeusz 471

Joint Boycott Council 37, 139 n. 15 Komeda, Krzysztof 348 Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) 106, 111, Komisja Mniejszosci Narodowych i Etnicznych

158, 164-6, 172, 174, 180 (Commission for National and Ethnic

Jolson, Al 302 Minorities) 622—3

jutrzenka 18 Komitet Narodowy (National Committee) 17 Komitet Narodowy Amerykanow Polskiego

K Pochodzenia (National Committee of

Kac, Rachel 464 Americans of Polish Descent, KNAPP) 42 Kac-Edelis, Dr 511-12 Komitet Narodowy Polski (Polish National Kaczynski, Andrzej 599-603 Committee, KNP) 21—2, 27, 33, 92-3 Kaczyntiski, Tadeusz 368 Komitet Obrony Narodowej (Committee of

Kalik, Judith 433 National Defence, KON) 21-2, 67, 143

Kalussowski, Henryk 4, g—10 Nn. 32

Kalwarczyk, Grzegorz 584 Komitet Obrony Robotnikow (Committee to

Kamay, Dr 547 Defend Workers, KOR) 622 Kaminski, Aleksander 484 Kommittee fiir den Osten 25

Kania, Mr 143 Komsomol 507

Kaper, Bronislaw 349-53, 369 KON, see Komitet Obrony Narodowe} Kapiszewski, Andrzej 10, 37, 97-116 Koneczny, Feliks 482, 583

Karboniski, Henryk 195 Koniuchy 401 n. 20

Karge, Jozef 4 Korczak, Janusz 189

Karlowicz, Mieczyslaw 362 Kordek, John 271, 279, 422

Karpf, Anne 215 Kosciuszko, Tadeusz 8-9, 100, 107 Karski, Jan 214, 264, 328, 331, 334, 421, 481 Kosciuszko Foundation 260

Kartun, Berl 549 Kosinski, Jerzy 216 Kassow, Samuel 404 Koszykowski, Izydor 627 Kats, Aron 549 Kot, Stanislaw 137 n. 6 Katz, Jacob 236 Kovner, Abba 547

Katz, Szlomo 493-4, 498 Kovno ghetto and death forts 549-53

Kauza, Honortusz 456 Kozlowski, Willi 550 Kaye, Mindy 350 Kraczkiewicz, Karol 148—50 Kedem, Yosef 310 Kraft, Joseph 288 Kennard, Hugh 473 Krasinski, Zygmunt 456

Kennedy, Eugene 207 Kraskov 493

Kepitiski, Zdzislaw 448 Krasner, Jonathan 48, 229-55

Kerouac, Jack 290 Kraushar, Alexander 570 n. 2 Khmelnytsky massacres 234, 251, 431 Krawczynska, Dorota 580

Kiepura, Jan 351 Krock, Arthur 301

Kieres, Leon 400, 584 Krol, Zdzislaw 585 Kilpatrick, William Heard 243 Kromkowski, John 260

King, Mackenzie 199 Kronenberg, Baron 480, 484 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 292 Kruszynski, Jozef 585-7

Kisielewski, Stefan 484 Krzyzanowski, Wlodzimierz 4

Kittel, Bruno 547 Kucharski, Kazimierz 490-1 Klingenstein, Susanne 383 Kugelmass, Jack 210

KNP, see Komitet Narodowy Polski Kullmann, C. G. 160-3, 171

Kobielno 540 Kundrat, Dr 170

Kochanriski, M. 146-7, 151 Kurter Wilenski 501

646 Index Kuron, Grazyna (Gaja) 627-8 Lozowski, L. 562

Kuron, Jacek 620-8 Lubieniecki, Feliks 492

LM

Kuryer Polski (Milwaukee) 64 Lublin court records concerning Jews 434-46

Kusielewicz, Eugene 260 Lukas, Richard 400-2, 413, 421-2 Kwapiszewski, Michal 107 Lukaszkiewicz, Czestaw 38, 67

594 Lviv ghetto 624

Kwasniewski, Aleksander 261, 276, 393, 405—6, Lukomski, Kazimierz 265 n. 30

LaCapra, Dominick 376-7 McCall, William 245 Landers, Ann 288 Machcewicz, Pawel 396, 411, 537

Lange, Oskar 152 n. 42 Maclaren, A. 462

Lanzmann, Claude 215 Madagascar, plan for Jewish settlement in 467-77

Shoah 264-7, 546 Magdziak-Miszewska, Agnieszka 396

Larson, Randall D. 351 Magnus, Katie 231—3, 235—7, 240, 243, 253

Law, Richard 177 Magnus, Laurie 238 n. 23

Le Sage, Alain-René 413 Magnus, Philip 235, 238 n. 23

League of Nations 124 Magnus, Shulamit 460

Leeser, Isaac 7, I0 Mailer, Norman 295

legal proceedings involving Jews 435-7 Majda, Adam, Cardinal 274

Lehrman, Irving 303 Majewski, Karen 18, 38, 55-69 _

Leibovich, Mendel 549 Makk (head of Gestapo in Shavli) 549

Lelyveld, Joseph 301 Mally, Fredryk 157 Lenartowicz 453 Mandel, Arthur 455 Lepecki, Major 472 Manley, Norman 172

Lerman, Miles 282, 420—2 March of the Living 48-9, 280, 307-25, 423-4

Levi, Julius 130 criticism of 323-5 Levi, Primo 554 Israel and 317~—29

Levin, Dov 492, 506, 524-5, 529 Polish participation in 324

Levin, Nora 589 Marchlewski, Julian 483

Levine, Irving 260 Marchlewski, Mieczystaw 101-2, 104-5 Levinger, Elma Ehrlich 242 Marcus, Jacob R. 245 Levinger, Lee and Elma 253 Margolis, Max 244-5

Levitan, Samuel 356 Margoshes (editor) tog

Levitskaya, Lyuba 548 Marlewski, Jozef 165 Lévy, Armand 451 Marshall, Louis 19, 27-8, 36, 93

Libo, Aleksandr 560 Marszalek, Jan 592-7 Lichtman, Jacob 105 martyrs, list of 570-1

Lieberman, Herman 198 Marx, Alexander 244~5

Liekis, Sarunas 521-36 Marzynski, Marian, Shtet] 229, 276, 279

Liga (League) 504 Mason, George 302

Lilienthal, Max 236 Matalon, Florence 168 Linenthal, Edward 418 Matalon, Joe 168-9

Liner, Paul 356 Mather, Cotton 292

literature, Polish immigrant, Jews in 59—69 Maurer, Jadwiga 449-50, 455

Lithuanian Jews, Black Book of 543-55 Maxamin, Karol 157

Little, Franklin 415 Mayer, Louis B. 51, 349

Long, Breckinridge 213 Mazewski, Aloysius A. 258, 265, 419

Lookstein, Haskel 215 Mazowiecki, Tadeusz 271-2, 584

Lopian, Anna 464-6 media, Jewish domination of 290 Lord, Robert Howard 27 Medoff, Rafael 215 Lota, Casimir 127 Melcer-Szczawiniski, Henryk 360, 362 Lourengo, Hipolito Agostinho 158 memoirs of a Jewish policeman 599-603

Index 647 memory, collective 229-55 Nagiel, Henryk ton. 27, 62, 69

Mendelsohn, Ezra 482 Naimark, Norman 412 Mendelssohn, Felix 356 Nalkowska, Zofia 227

Mendelssohn, Moses 236 Naréd Polski 122, 124-5, 130 Mengele, Josef 220 Narodowe Sily Zbrojne (National Armed

messianism 457 Forces, NSZ), Jews in 484 Meyer, Martin 233, 235, 237 Nasz Przeglad 480 Micgiel, John 427 Nasza Trybuna 186

Michejda, Professor 511 National Conference of Christians and Jews 45 Michlic, Joanna 412, 621-8 National Democratic Party 198 Michnik, Adam 278-9, 393, 403, 407—I1I, 413, National Polish American—Jewish American

596, 620, 628 Council (NPAJAC) 50, 257-85, 329-44,

Mickiewicz, Adam: 405, 417, 423

controversy over Jewish origins 447-57 nationalism, Polish 418

Pan Tadeusz 578 Nationalsozialistische Anwaltsgilde (Union of Mickiewicz, Wladyslaw 454 National Socialist Attorneys) 554

Miczynski, Sebastian 432 naturalization:

Midowicz, Kazimierz 148, 150, 152-3 of Jews 80, 84 Mikolajczyk, Stanislaw 188, 194 of Poles 80—1, 83—4

Milewski, Barbara 366 Neuman, Kazimierz 62—4, 69

Milewski, Jan 539-40 New York Times 300-2 Miller, Davy 130 New Zionist Organization 110, 472

Milosz, Czeslaw 262 Nicholas II 236 Milton, Sybille 426 Nichols, Mike 295 Mincevicz, Jozef, aka Fanar 535 Niewiadomski, Stanislaw 361—2 Miron, Dan 382 Nikolay, Grand Duke 22-3 Mtynarski, Emil 362 Nixon, Richard 290 Moczygemba, Fr. 12 n. 36 NKVD 497—501, 509-10, 539 Modras, Ronald 258, 260, 418, 419, 426-7 Noah, Mordecai Manuel 8

Modzelewski, Karol 621-2 nobility, Polish, and the Jews 437-8

Moffat, Pierrepont 112 Noél, Léon 472-3

Moise, Penina 8 North American Center for Polish Studies 260

money-lending to Jews 437-8 Norvaisa, Balys 547

Moore, Deborah Dash 252 Novick, Peter 49, 212, 214, 216, 222—5, 228

Moor-Jankowski, Jan 405 Nowak, Jan 421, 425

Morawska, Ewa 15, 71-86 Nowak-Jeziorafiski, Jan 261, 277, 282, 393—4,

Morawski, Wojciech 59 403, 422, 584, 625

Morgan, Ted 297 Nowy Swiat (New York) 39, 59 Morgensztern, Ignacy 12, 18 NPAJAC, see National Polish American—Jewish

Morgenthau, Henry 32 American Council Morton, Nails 130

Moskal, Edward 261, 269, 272-3, 276-7, 283, O

285, 327-8, 400, 405-6 Oakes, John 300 . .

Moskowitz, Henry 37,97 Ob6z Narodowo-Radykalny (National Radical

Moszczuska, Teodora 453 , Camp) 450

Moutet, Marius 468, 471-2, 474-5 Oboz Zjednoczenia Narodowego (Camp of music by Polish Jewish €migrés 345-71 . National Unity, OZON) 473

Myers, David 374 Occident,Ochs,The 10 Adolph 299-300

N Office for Refugees of the League of Nations

Nachalnik, Urke 627 155-6

Naczelny Komitet Narodowy (Main National Oleszkiewicz, Darek 351

Committee, NKN) 21, 24, 90 Olsztyn 566—7

648 sd Index Olszyn-Wilczynaski, General 523 Peyser, Andrea 208 Omanut Verein zur Forderung jiidischer Kunst philosemitism 292

in der Schweiz 355 Piasecki, Sergiusz 621 Opieriski, Henryk 362 Pienkos, Donald E. 269 Opalski, Magdalena 55, 65 Piekarska, Maria 496

Orhanizatsiya Ukrayinskykh Natsionalistiv Pieracki, Bronislaw 107 (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) Pietrkowski, Dr 144

523 Pigon, Stanislaw 450

Orlemanski, Stanislaw 14 n. 42 Pitsudski, Jozef 21, 24, 26~7, 30, 34, 108, 483

Orlowski, Father 595 Piltz, Erazm 93

ORT Komitet do spraw Szkolenia Zawodowego Pinsker, Leo 253 Ludnosci Zydowskiej (ORT Committee for Pinto, Diana 572

the Job/Professional Training of the Piotrkowski, Mr 151 Jewish Population in Poland) 561-2 Pipes, Richard 218

Osada, Stanislaw 18, 65-6 Poalei Zion 503 Osovsky, Rabbi 550 Pogonowski, Iwo Cyprian 402, 405 Ostrowski, Wiadyslaw 536 ‘pogrom’ in Chicago 126

P in eastern Poland 31-3 PAC, see Polish American Congress Kielce 276

pogroms 112, 254, 586, 589, 595

Paczkowski, Andrzej 394, 411 in Vilna 500

89-92 Shavli

Paderewski, Ignacy Jan 21-2, 24, 26-7, 32, 34, see also Jedwabne; Kovno; Ponary; Radzilow;

Paleckis, Justas 505 Polak, Berta 174-5

Palester, Roman 368 Poland, American Jewish tourism to 311-12

Palestine 193 Polanski, Roman 348

emigration to 202, 471 Polish American Chamber of Commerce 107

Paley, William S. 290 Polish American Congress (Kongres Poloni Palmer, Christopher 351 Amerykarfiskiej, PAC) 42, 50, 139, 144, 147, Patistwowy Teatr Zydowski (State Yiddish 150—2, 258, 260-1, 264-5, 276, 283, 419

Theatre) 557 Polish American Historical Association 277

Panufnik, Andrzej 368 Polish Committee of National Liberation paramilitary organizations, Polish 13 201

Paris Peace conference (1910) 27—30 Polish Council of Christians and Jews 423

partisans, Jewish 545 Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America

Patterson, Col. 186 (PIASA) 277, 405

Patterson, David 543-55 Polish—Jewish relations in America:

Paulsson, Gunnar S. 537-41 in the r9thc. 8-11

Pawlikowski, John T. 50-1, 280, 282, 415-27 1863: Q—II peasants, Polish, relations with Jews 15, 73-6, 1880-1914: 16-17, 76-81

241 1914-18: 20-7, 87-95

Pelczyfiska, Wanda 504 IQIQ: 31-3 Peleg, flan 234-5, 240 , 1940-1: 135-53

Perechodnik, Calek 599—603 between the wars 33-9, 81-6 Perechodnik, Pejsach 600 during the Second World War 39-46

Perelman, Nathan D. 107 after the Second World War 46-53

Peretz, Y. L. 249, 503 in Chicago 117-33

Perkins, Frances 112 role of the American Federation of Polish Pessin, Deborah 242, 248, 250, 253-4 Jews 97-116

Peter the Great 235 Polish—Jewish relations in Poland 71-6

Petluk, Sima 463, 466 in 18th-c. Poland 431-46

Petrusewicz, Kazimierz 491 after the First World War 30-1

Index 649 in immigrant literature 55—69 R Polish National Alliance (PNA) 64-5, 113, 184, Raczkiewicz, Wladystaw 186, 190 |

261, 370 Raczynski, Edward 174 n. 75

Polish National Council 136, 189 Rada 42

Polish National Fund 113 Rada Narodowa (National Council) 21, 40, 44 Polish and Polish American divisions 34—5 Rada Polonii (Polish Council, RP) 35

Polish Question 1914-18: 87-95 Radzik, Zuzanna 583

Polish Relief Committee 89 Radzilow 539

Polish Roman Catholic Union 65, 371 Radzilowski, John 33, 117-33

Polish Royalist Association 201 Radzilowski, Thaddeus 425

Polish Spiritual Seminary 11 Rae, Alan 156

Polish—Ukrainian relations 625-7 Rae, Ernest 156, 169, 171-2

polonaise 352 Randall, A. W. G. 163-7, 170-1, 177-8

482 Raphall, Morris 7

Polonsky, Antony 3-53, 50, 272, 393-413, Rankin, John 291

Polska Partia Robotnicza (Polish Workers’ Party, Rathaus, Karol 364

PPR) 43 Rauchwerger, Anna 465

Polska Partia Socjalistyczna (Polish Socialist Rauka, Helmut 551

Party) 483 Reform Judaism 20, 36-7

Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (United and textbooks 235-7

Polish Workers’ Party, PZPR) 621 refugees, Jewish: Polski Centralny Komitet Ratunkowy (Polish in Brazil 161 Central Relief Committee, PCKR) 21 in Canada 159, 161, 172-3, 179 Polski Koscidt Narodowy (Polish National in Cuba 167, 173, 179

Catholic Church) 14 in the Dominican Republic 174

Ponary 546 in Jamaica 155-6, 164-82 Ponomarenko, O. K. 498 in Portugal 155-68, 176-7 population, Jewish, in the USA 287 in Vilna 504

19the. 5-11 Reiner, Charles 356

in 1900: 72 Representation of Polish Jewry 190 in Chicago, 1890-1940: 119 Resurrectionists 63, 65 population, Polish, in Chicago, 1890-1940: 119 Rhode, Pawel 21

Portugal, Jewish refugees in 155-68, 176-7 Rice, Abraham 7 Portuguese Jewish Refugee Committee 160 Richards, Arthur 163, 178

Potocki, Jerzy 1og—10, 186 Ringelblum, Emanuel 482 Potocki, Wladyslaw 201 Ripa, Karol 137-8, 144, 148, 153

Potok, Lola 205 Rischin, Moses 238

Potworowski, Gustaw 156, 162 n. 29, 178 ritual murder, accusations of 483, 564, 589-90

Potworowski, Tomasz 41, 155—82 see also blood libel, accusations of

Poznan 564 ritual slaughter 566

Poznaniski, Czeslaw 187 Rodzinski, Artur 364

Poznanski, Gustav 7 Rogers, P. 163

Prazmowski, Wladyslaw Belina 586 Ronell, Anna Petrov 48, 373-01

Prochazka, Adolf 170 Roosevelt, Eleanor 213 Protocols of the Elders of Zion 36, 583, 585, 589 Rosati, Dariusz 276

Przeglgd Powszechny 483 Rosenbaum, Thane 376-80, 391 Przewodnik Katolicki (New Britain, Conn.) 17 Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel 223

Pula, James 34 Rosenfeld, Alvin 49, 406 Pulaski, Kazimierz 8 Rosenman, Shmuel 308

Q Rosenwald, Julius 26, 93 Quercioli Mincer, Laura 447-57 Rosner, Bernat 220-1 : Rosenthal, A. M. 301

650 Index Roszkowski, Wojciech 412 Schwarzbart, Ignacy 41, 136

Roth, Cecil 245 Schwarzbart, Mr 150 Roth, Philip 305 Schwerke, Irving 363

Roth, David 260, 271, 273, 277 Schweinberger, Horst 546

Rothmuller, Marko 355 Sedlis, Dr 547

Rothschild, Edmond de 89 See, Eugéne 28

Rozenblatt, Pearl 461, 465-6 Segall, Helen 543

Rozmarin, Henryk 195 Segel, Harold 55 Rozycki, Ludomir 362 Segev, Tom 212, 215, 223-4, 226 Rubin, Gary 264-5 Selznick, Lewis 297-8 Rubinowicz, Izrael 443 Serafinowicz, Jan 442

Rubinstein, Artur 350, 359, 364 Seward, William 4

Rudin, James A. 273 Sfard, David 561

Rumkowski, Chaim 600 Shamir, Yitshak 268 Russia, tsarist, in textbooks 231, 235-6, 242—4, Shapiro, Edward S. 295

250—I Sharp, William G. 93

Rutkowski, Krzysztof 452 Shavli ghetto 548—9

Rybakowski, Jan 65 n. 31 Shaw, Irwin 295 Rycerz Niepokalang 483 Shawn, William 290 Rydz-Smigly, Edward 470, 473 Sheramy, Rona 48, 307-25 Rytel, Piotr 360—1 Sheraton, Mimi, The Bialy Eaters 208-9 Ryterband, Roman 349, 353-60, 369 Sherwin, Byron L. 227, 274

Ryvkind, Jakub 493 Sholem Aleichem 382

Rzeczpospohta 394, 599 shtetl:

Rzeplinski, Jan 538, 540 in fiction 373, 381-3

S ~ Shulman, William 313 Saba, David 611 Shuster, Hayyim 494 nostalgia for 85

Sachar, Abram 245 Sidlauskas, Juozas 547

Sachs, Karol 174-5 Sienkiewicz, Henryk 22, 89, 120

Salamon, Julie 211, 215 Sikorski, Wladyslaw 39-42, 44, 188, 190, 198,

Salomon, Haym 8, 100 200

Samoobrona Narodu 588 Silverman, Ira 269, 272

Sanacja 468-9, 473 Simaite (journalist) 547 Sandauer, Artur 456 Simon, Paul 273 Sandzer, see Stanton Simoncini, Gabriele 481

Sarna, Jonathan 6, 20 Simons, Thomas, Jr. 273 Schaper, Hermann 539 Singer, Isaac Bashevis 385, 579 Scharf, Rafael 369 Skarzyfiski, Bohdan 491, 498 Schechter, Solomon 244 Skawiniski, Citizen 4 Scheps, Samuel 449-51, 453, 455 Stawoj-Skladkowski, Felicjan 468 Schiff, Alvin I. 309, 322 Slepetys, Jonas 527-8

Schiff, Dorothy 300 Slonimski, Antoni 595 Schiff, Jacob 19, 24, 90, 92, 299-300 Smetona, Antanas 505 Schlichter, Dr 164 Smith, Gerald L. K. 291 Schmidt, Anton 547 Smolinski, Marian 567 Schmitzek, Stanislaw 155, 157—8, 162 n. 29, Smulski, Jan FE 22

163, 167, 169 n. 64 Sokolowski, Wladyslaw 102-3, 109

Scholem, Gershom 447 Solidarity 622

Schriftgiesser (publisher) ro Soloff, Mordecai 28-9, 244, 250, 254 Schudrich, Michael 48, 282, 406 Solomon-Loc, Fanny 481

Schwartz, Mr 162 Spielberg, Steven, Schindler’s List 211, 215, 288

Index 651 Stanficzyk, Jan 171, 187 Swiatpol, see Swiatowy Zwiazek Polakow z

Stariczyk, Minister 150 Zagranicy

Stansky, Otto and Renela 179 Swietlik, Francis Xavier 41, 137, 146~7, 150, Stanton (née Sandzer), Miriam 155-6, 163-4, 152-3 165 n. 44, 167-9, 171, 175 synagogues in USA following Polish rite

Starzynski, Teofil 13 6-7 Stefanski, Bronislaw 540 Syrenski, Szymon 589 , Steinberg, Neil 328 Szabad, George 260, 263, 271-2, 282, Steinberg, Saul 304 416-17 Steiner, Genia 463-4 Szarota, Tomasz 537 Steinlauf, Michael 205, 212, 425 Szaynok, Bozena 482

Stender, Robert 550 Sziennik Wileniski 495

stereotypes: Szold, Henrietta 232 of antisemitic Poles 205-28 Szopski, Felicjan 362 of Jews 15, 479-85 Szoszkies, Henryk 107, 139, 199 of Poles 229, 233-4, 240-1, 259, 267 Szpajer, Rozia 463-4

of Polish peasants 15, 48 Szwarc, Malka 463-5 Stern, Miriam Heller 242 Szygowski, Juliusz 199

Stitz, Ernst 551 Szyk, Artur 107 Stola, Dariusz 411 Szymanowski, Karol 361-3 Stone, Daniel 45, 183-203 Stowarszyszenie Mlodych Muzykow Polakoww 3 T

Paryzu (Association of Young Polish Talmud, interpretation of 590-1

Musicians in Paris) 362 Tanenbaum, Marc 260, 416

Stowarzyszenie Obywateli Polskich (Association §Tansman, Aleksander 360—9

of Polish Citizens) 162 n. 29 Targowski, Marian 496

Union) 581 151-2

Stowarzyszenie Pisarzy Polskich (Polish Writers’ Tartakower, Arieh 41, 136-8, 144, 146-7, 149,

Stowarzyszenie Polskich Wygnancow w Tazbir, Janusz 585 Ameryce (Association of Polish Exiles in Teller, Adam 431-46

America) 4 Tenenbaum, Joseph 38, 100, 102, 104-6, Straus, Oscar 19, 90 Tennenbaum, Mordechai 547 Stromenger, Karol 362 Territorialists of the Freeland League 472 ,

Strasburger, Henryk 194 139-40

Stronnictwo Narodowe (National Party, SN) 541 textbooks and memory 229-55

Struc, Roman 374 Thomas, Tony 349, 351 Stutschewsky, Joachim 355-6 Thrasher, Frederick 117

n. 52 Toaff, Elio 453

Styron, William, Sophie’s Choice 206-7, 216 Tikin, Zalman 548

Sulakowski, Walerian 4 Tobin, Gary 313

Sulik, Nikodem 509 Tog, Der 23, 109

Sulzberger, Arthur Hays 301 Tomaszewski, Jerzy 479-85, 583-97 Sulzberger, Arthur (Punch) Ochs 301-2 Tonini, Carla 467-77

- Sulzberger, Iphigene Ochs 300-1 tourism, Jewish:

Sulzberger, Mayer 19 to Israel 312-13

Sunday Jewish Courier 125 to Poland 311-12

Supinski, Paul 104 see also March of the Living

Sutzkever, Abraham 543-8 Towarzystwo Demokratyczne Wygnancow

Suwatki 5 Polskich w. Ameryce (Democratic Society Svidercoschi, Gian Franco 454 of Polish Exiles in America) 4

Swiatowy Zwiazek Polakéw z Zagranicy (World Towarzystwo Polakow w Ameryce (Society of

Alliance of Poles Abroad, Swiatpol) 35, 42 Poles in America) 4

652 Index Towarzystwo Popierania Osadnictwa Polskiego violence, Polish—Jewish, in Chicago, 1919:

| na Madagaskarze (Association for the 125-33

Support of Polish Colonization in violence against Jews 105-6, 440, 443

Madagascar) 476 in America 36

Towarzystwo Spoleczno-Kulturalne Zydow w Vitenberg, Isaak 547 Polsce (Social-Cultural Association of Jews =‘ Vitkauskas, General 531

in Poland, TSKZ) 557 Volfovich, Mark 550 Towarzystwo Uniwersytetu Robotniczego Vorzimer, Dr 124

(Workers’ University Association) 491-2 Vorzimmer, Jakub 38 Towianski, Andrzej 447, 453, 456

Treblinka 190, 196, 565 Ww Trigano, Gilbert 304 Wagner, Jan 469, 474-5 Trillin, Calvin 289 Wahl, Saul 198

Trochimezyk, Maja 51, 345-71 Walbrzych 566

Tropper, Mr 158 Walentynowicz, Leonard 260

Trzcifiski, Andrzej 607—18 Walesa, Lech 272-4, 365, 622

Tsanava, Lavrenty 499 Walichnowski, Tadeusz 484

Tshertcof, B. 126 Walker, A. 178

Turner, Frederick Jackson 294 War Refugee Board 45

Turowicz, Jerzy 264, 595 Warsaw in fiction 386 Tuwim, Julian 350, 369 Warsaw ghetto 199-201, 317

Twain, Mark 292 reports on 197

Tygel, Zelig 37, 97, 100, 102, 104, 106-12, uprising IQ0—I, 194-5, 200—I, 251, 264

115 Warszawski, Henryk, see Vars, Henry

Tygodnik Powszechny 583-5, 595 Wasersztajn, Szmul 602

Tymowski, Andrzej 396-7 Washington, Booker T. 292 Tyszkiewicz, Michal 504 Wasilewska, Wanda 498

Tzoran, Gabriel 374 Wazeter, Franciszek 139-40, 151 U Wazyk, Adam 451 underground, Polish 539-40 Weinbaum, Laurence 52 n. 106 Union of American Hebrew Congregations 20 Weiss, ANI 268, 276

Union of Jewish Students in Poland 423 Weiss, Martin 546 Union of Jewish Veterans in Poland 193 Weizmann, Chaim 249, 470 Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations 23 Wendell, Barrett 259 United States Holocaust Memorial Council 418 Wengeroff, Pauline 460

United States and Jewish refugees 179 Weschler, la wrence 262 Urbanowicz-Gilbride, Bozena 282, 421, White, William Allen 141 n. 26

423-5 Whitfield, Stephen J. 49-50, 287-305 | Uris, Leon 295 Wi iadomosci Codzienne 143 Urynowicz, Marcin 538 Wieczerzak, Joseph 8 Urzedy Bezpieczenstwa (Security Office, UB) Wiener, Leo 289

564 Wiener, Norbert 289

Wierzbicki, Marek 487-520

V Wiesel, Elie 215, 415, 418-20 Van Buren, Abigail 288 Wieseltier, Leon 407—11

Vars, Henry 347-9, 369 Willowski (Ridvaz), Rabbi 13 Verband, Der 99—100, 112 Wills, Garry 207

Vilna: Winnipeg, coverage of the Holocaust in

ghetto 544-8 183-203

Jewish—Polish relations in, 1939-41: 487-536 | Winrod, Gerald 291

Vincenz, Stanislaw 449, 457, 623 Winter, Benjamin 37, 97, 99, 107, 103-5,

violence, Jewish 443-4 109-10, I12—13

Index 653 Wirth, Louis 340 Zionism 20, 25, 45, 88, 237 Nn. 23 Wise, Isaac Mayer 7, 9, 300 Polish support for 418 Wise, Stephen 24, 36, 44, 194, 200 in textbooks 252-3

Wishner, Maynard 279 Zipperstein, Steven 230, 249, 254

Wodzifiski, Marcin 607-18 Zjednoczenie Polskie Rzymski-Katolickie

Wolf, Lucien 28 (Polish Roman Catholic Union, ZPRK)

Wolf, Simon 8, 90 12-14

. Wolfson, Harry Austryn 299 Zjyednoczenie Polskie Rzymsko-Katolickie w

women, Jewish 459-66 Ameryce (Polish Roman Catholic Union in in Polish immigrant literature 65-6 America) 142 n. 28, 143

World Federation of Polish Jews Abroad 109 Znamya 543 World Jewish Congress 41, 111, 136, 560 ZNP, see Zwiazek Narodowy Polski

Wouk, Herman 295 Zuckerman, Henry 305 Wrobel, Jozef 571 Zuckerman, Nathan 305 Wrobel, Piotr 397-9, 421, 425 Zunz, J. M. 611

Wujec, Henryk 625 Zunz, Leopold 236 Wydziat Narodowy (National Department, WN) Zurawski, Dr 152

21-2 Zuromski, Leonard 496

Wygodzki, Dr 503 Zwiazek Miodziezy Polskiej (Polish Youth Wytwytski, Bohdan 592-3 Movement, ZMP) 13, 473, 621

Y Alli ZNP) —18 Yerushalmi, Eliezer 548-9 ees f12) 12 139 Tos 949 143 D389 aad Zwigzek Religijny Wyznania Mojzeszowego Yiddish language 289, 373, 557—8, 562 oow, Zwiazek Narodowy Polski (Polish National

YIVO 459-66 ; ,

Vidishe vort (Winnipeg) 184, 197-202 Polsce (Religious Federation of the Mosaic Faith of Poland, ZRWM) 559-60

icbor bihker 287-8 Zwiqzek Sokolow (Falcon Alliance) 13 JYolles, 3°7 Zwigzek Sokolow Polskich Peter (Piotr) 39, 59, 151 ; (Polish Falcons

Young,: Zwiazek James Spiewakow 387 ; Alliance) aDSingers Lo ) PolskichMae (Polish

Yushchenko, Viktor 627

Alliance) 13

Z Zwiazek Walki Zbrojnej (Union for Armed Zajaczek, Edward 586 Struggle, ZWZ) 509-10

Zakhor 415-16 Zwigzek Weteranodw Zydowskich w Polsce Zaleski, August 136n. 3 (Union of Jewish War Veterans in Poland)

Zalkindson, Dr 548 186 Zangwill, Israel 237 n. 23 Zyciniski, Jozef, Archbishop 406, 584 Zarychta, Apolloniusz 469, 474-5 ‘Zydokomuna’ 475-6, 539, 564

Zbikowski, Andrzej 541 Zydowski Instytut Historyczny (Jewish

Zbyszewski, Antoni 102 Historical Institute, ZIH) 600

Zechlin, Erich 534 Zydowski Komitet Robotniczy (Jewish Workers’

Zegota 420-1, 426 Committee) 503

Zeligs, Dorothy 244-8 Zygielboim, Shmuel 189-90, 194 Zgoda (Chicago) 14, 80, 369 Zygmunt, Art 354

Zhilyanin, I. 493 Zyndul, Jolanta 586

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