I’ve done my time watching from the sidelines as schnapps-fueled
men dance for the hatan and kalah (“groom and bride” is the phrase,
not “bride and groom”). I always love their abandon; I always hate
their complicity in a regime of separation, boundaries, limits. Today,
the response is mixed. Some are charmed, but others seem put out by
—what? The lack of decorum? The in-your-face display of Sadan’s
unlikely Jewishness?
A warmer reception is given to the next lecturer, Tomasz
Chmielik. Trained in German and Polish philology and a novelist
himself, Chmielik is one of the premier translators of literature into
Esperanto; thanks to Chmielik, Samuel Beckett, Günter Grass,
Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Georges Perec, and I. B. Singer have found
places in the Esperanto library. Today Chmielik is screening two
short films made by Saul and Moshe Goskind, owners of the Warsaw
film studio Sektor. In 1939 the Goskinds, knowing that the days of
Jewish life in Poland were numbered, set out to document Jewish
life in six cities, Kraków, Vilna (Vilnius), Lvov, Warsaw, Białystok,
and Łódź; all the films survive except the one documenting Łódź.
Weeks before the invasion of Poland, the films were dispatched to
New York, but went astray until 1942, when they were auctioned off
by the dead letter office of the U.S. Postal Service. Only in the late
1960s did various portions of the surviving films make their way to
Israel, where Saul Goskind, who had emigrated there, reedited them.
Where the original soundtracks had been lost, new ones were
recorded in Hebrew and English.
“So, are these the same films?” Chmielik asks. As my students say,
he is “getting meta” on us: not only the Jews of prewar Poland, but
also the films about them are among the lost. What we’re watching,
then, are flickering shadows of flickering shades. The narration’s in
Yiddish, the subtitles in English; no one translates into Esperanto.
Białystok’s 55,000 Jews—rich and poor, capitalists and bundists—
bustle about their multilingual, sophisticated society. Places of
worship and palaces of culture lie cheek by jowl. Here’s the 1913
Great Synagogue (in which close to two thousand Jews were locked
and set on fire in 1941, two years after the film was made) and
there, the 1834 Khorshul (Choir Synagogue, destroyed by the Nazis
in 1943) over which Zamenhof’s father, Markus, had presided at the
groundbreaking. Here’s the Białystoker Yeshiva, and there the Musar
Yeshiva, and in yet another neighborhood, on Lipowa Street, the
progressive-Zionist Tarbut (Hebrew for “culture”) School. This
building, unlike the others, is extant, a repurposed craft school,
devoid of Jews. When we see a glimpse of Zamenhof’s birthplace (in
Białystok) and later, his tomb (in Warsaw), it’s like spotting a
family member in a photograph of Times Square on V-E Day.
The final shots are of Jewish children lounging on a summer day
in a large, leafy park, dappled sunlight playing on their faces. I
recognize the Branicki Palace gardens, where just last night we had
listened to JoMo under lanterns. Seventy summers earlier, in these
gardens, Jewish children in crisp white uniforms had played circle
games; Jewish teens, mugging at the camera, had comically flexed
their muscles; plump Jewish babies had been prammed up the allées
like stately galleons. Here and there a baby gazes, fascinated, into
the lens, heedless of its nurse, pushing, pushing on. At the end, a
subtitle tells us that “these children are precious; they are the
future.” The footage lasts three or four minutes; the children would
last two or three more years, at most.
When the lights come up, people are sniffling. Quietly, Chmielik
says, “I close my eyes and imagine how the story of all these people
ended. We know the ending. They did not.”
Suddenly, from the audience, an Israeli named *Josi (Yosi)
Shemer rises to his feet. I know Josi from his weekly email of Jewish
jokes translated—and laboriously annotated—in Esperanto. But Josi
looks transfigured; as if seized by the gift of tongues, he exclaims:
“This is holy work! From a non-Jew! To translate from Yiddish to
Esperanto! To bring us this film!…” and trails off, in a paroxysm of
acclamation. Chmielik is too embarrassed to respond. Announcing
where we can order the DVD online (though no one had asked), he
adjourns the session.
8. A Nation Without Pyres
Like Jewless Kraków, which hosts a huge annual klezmer festival,
the city of Białystok has turned its Jewish quarter into a Jewish
reservation. Shops sell tribal souvenirs: CDs, books, and postcards of
Jewish life between the wars. In certain tourist restaurants, one can
order “Jewish-style” food—borscht, herring, brisket with prunes.
Tonight, on the Rynek’s massive stage, an Israeli dance troupe
performs to an accordion, a wailing clarinet, and a snare drum. But
if these are meant to show us real, live, dancing Jews, they’re
unconvincing. There’s something odd about their costumes, not
Jewish but Jew-y: dresses made of tallit fabric, faux kapotas, phony
black fedoras held on with rubber bands. Music blares, lights glare,
and the dancers wheel about smiling red lipsticked smiles. It’s a
Ballet Folklórico, only hold the Mexicans.
Friday morning I board a bus full of Japanese Esperantists to the
seventeenth-century synagogue at Tykocin. I recognize some of the
Japanese from my hotel, where they move in flocks herded by their
own professional guide. Apart from deferential bowing and a
friendly “Saluton!” in the elevator, they fraternize mainly with one
another. An Italian friend explained that the Japanese Esperantists,
as enthusiastic as they are affluent, generally make a strong
showing at world congresses, but most aren’t comfortable in
conversation. “You’ll hear them crocodile,” she said, and so I did;
they spoke Japanese in the corridors, at breakfast, and now on the
bus.Twenty-five miles west of Białystok, Tykocin was the birthplace
of Zamenhof’s father. The Jewish community dates back to 1522
and, despite fierce competition from Christian guilds and an episode
of blood libel in 1657, they had prospered. By the time Markus
Zamenhof was born in 1834, there were nearly three thousand Jews
in the town, about 65 percent of the population. Fortunately, I’ve
read about the fate of Tykocin’s Jews during World War II, since our
slim, ponytailed Polish guide barely mentions it. A detachment of
Nazi police entered the town on August 16, 1941, and secretly
ordered the digging of three large pits in the nearby Łopuchowo
forest. On August 25, at six in the morning, Tykocin’s Jews were
rounded up in the market square, told they were being taken to the
Białystok ghetto, and marched to a nearby school. Then by the
truckload, men first and then women, they were taken to the forest
and shot in the freshly dug pits. The next day, a sweep of the town
yielded another seven hundred Jews, the old and the sick, who met
the same fate. The synagogue became a storehouse for plundered