How Jewish Was Polish History?
How Jewish Was Polish History?
David Stromberg Interviews Magda Teter About I.B. Singer, Jews, and Poland.
PUBLIC SEMINAR • September 3, 2018
David Stromberg [DS]: What position did Isaac Bashevis Singer occupy as a writer, or cultural figure, when you grew up in Poland?
Magda Teter [MT]: Soon after Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Literatura na świecie, a literary monthly predominantly interested in world literature, devoted a portion of its April 1979 issue to Isaac Bashevis Singer. This marked a turning point for a discussion about Polish Jewish history and culture, which had been taboo since the events of March 1968. Soon his other works began to appear, three in 1983: The Magician of Lublin, The Manor, and The Estate. These publications began a renaissance of interest in Polish Jewish literature and culture. Soon the conversation opened up to other topics as well. By the early 1990s, works by other Yiddish writers were translated into Polish. During that period I. B. Singer was one of the most popular writers in Poland, and part of the attraction was precisely the fact that his novels and short stories were about Poland – rooted in the Polish landscape, its sights, smells, and sounds. But for Poles, Singer’s works also confirmed the Jews’ otherness, a society that was no more. A people apart though living within. A stereotype of Polish Jews was shared and perpetuated, if for different reasons, by both Jews and Poles.
DS: What do you think it means that Singer wrote this article in September 1944 – as the extent of the Holocaust was already known and yet still being perpetuated? Do you think this should influence how we read the piece?
Singer received his news, as he reported, from the dispatches of the Polish government in exile. Reports of atrocities concerning Jews had been coming to New York for almost two years. A December 10th, 1942 report issued by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in exile was published in New York, London, and Melbourne under a very explicit title “The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland.” By 1944, such information was not new. In fact, on August 1st, 1944, even the New York Times, which famously avoided the topic, reported (on page 17!): “Declaring its fear that by the time the war has been won the largest part of the Jewish populations of Europe will have been extinguished, a mass meeting of 40,000 American Jews gathered in Madison Square Park yesterday afternoon adopted a resolution embodying a program for saving as many Jews in the Nazi-occupied territories as possible.” And on September 7th, on page 11, the same paper noted that “during the five-year war period, Jews in 4,200 communities throughout the nation have contributed $82,000,000 to the United Jewish Appeal for Refugees, Overseas Needs and Palestine to save Jews in Europe.” Though these reports were buried in the paper, for Singer, who was so connected to the Jewish presses, these accounts would not have been unknown. Just a few months earlier, another Polish Jew wrote a powerful essay the question of Polish Jewish identity. Julian Tuwim’s essay, “We, the Polish Jews…” is a powerful response to the reports of extermination. But unlike Singer, whose language of literary creativity was Yiddish, Tuwim wrote in Polish. And he too addressed the question of otherness and belonging of Jews in Polish society. Tuwim did not write with broad historical strokes. He boldly claimed to be “a Pole” and divided “Poles” just like “Jews and other peoples” into “wise and stupid, polite and nasty, intelligent and dull, interesting and boring, injured and injuring, gentlemen and non-gentlemen…and also into fascists and anti-fascists.” Indeed, he claimed his Polishness not just because of the land where he grew up with its soil and landscape, the language he spoke and wrote, or “national vices” he himself adopted, but also “because my hatred for Polish fascists is greater than for fascists of any other nationality. And I consider that a very important feature of my Polishness.” The two essays arise from the pain each writer must have felt thinking about their families in Europe. Both were spurred by the news about the Nazi destruction of European Jews to reflect on Jewishness and Polishness. Each approached it through different cultural prisms. Each did it in different styles. Tuwim’s is a poetic reflection on nationalism, identity, and blood. Singer’s almost pedantic prose offers a short history of Polish-Jewish relations.
DS: Where do you think Singer gets the historical part of his article right? Where do you think he get it wrong?
MT: Singer’s essay on Jews and Poles might not be a shining example of his literary abilities. But it reflects, I believe, a more common perception of Polish Jewish relations, and the history of Jews in Poland. Some of the questions Singer raises in the beginning of his essay reflect nuance, even if the rest of the essay might not be read in that way. Singer wonders “if these two peoples did influence each other in something” and explores what then constituted that influence. “What did we Jews take from the Poles,” Singer asked, “and what did they learn from us?” He did not answer that question, conceding that “it would be necessary to write a thick book.” And Singer was right: to understand the relations between Polish Jews and Polish Christians has taken scholars decades to unpack, and is still a work in progress. And now we increasingly know how entangled and connected Polish Jews and Polish Christians were, and how deeply rooted and embedded Jews were in Polish society. They were, in fact, an integral part of the landscape and culture. Polish culture left an imprint on Jewish culture — even on the Hasidism that was so familiar to Singer. And Jews and their presence left an indelible imprint on Polish history and culture. There is no other way to look at it — and if one does, one subscribes to a partial version of history. Singer saw Polish Jews and Polish Christians, whom he called “the Poles,” as “living together but not together,” and took a sweeping look at hundreds of years of history. Yes, Polish Jews retained their distinct Jewish identity, since before the modern period there was no expectation of anything else. To use Moshe Rosman’s phrase, Polish Jews were “categorically Jewish, distinctly Polish.” Jews in Poland were Jews, in a legal, cultural, and religious sense. To expect otherwise in the premodern era would be to expect their conversion. Modernity challenged these social structures, re-inventing the concept of nations, and with it cultural expectations of “assimilation,” which is perhaps a secular version of conversion. But before the modern period, close and intimate relations between Jews and Christians anywhere, not just in Poland, were not only discouraged by both Jewish and Christian authorities, but in some respects were even illegal. Still, that does not mean that they did not happen. Jews and Christians did in fact live together, sometimes under the same roof, and maintained intimate relations — historical evidence from both the premodern and modern periods demonstrates this unequivocally. As historian Shmuel Ettinger once said, “at no period in their history have Jews barricaded themselves against social and cultural developments of other nations.”
DS: How is the narrative that Singer conveys – which derives from his own personal experience and inherited folklore in Poland – different from historical circumstances or sources that you’ve come across in your work?