Last update - 00:00 29/04/2005
Circles of attraction and repulsion
By Yossi Avni-Levy
"Polin hi eretz yeruka" ("Poland is a Green Country") by Aharon Appelfeld, Keter Publishing, 217 pages, NIS 79
"Poland is a cemetery that has been plowed over. It's hard to pray in such a place. All that rich greenness can drive you crazy," says a fellow passenger to Yaakov, the hero of Aharon Appelfeld's book, on the plane back to Tel Aviv at the end of his journey to Poland. The man captures the feelings of many people who find themselves drawn to the black magnet of Poland's soil, where a millennium of Jewish life was swallowed into oblivion.
Appelfeld, a particularly prolific writer who enjoys a position of unshakable prominence in contemporary Hebrew literature, makes a double leap in his new book, moving rapidly across both time and space. He abandons the landscapes of the individual soul, that childhood terrain to which he has so obsessively returned, and instead takes a chilling, complex journey to the black vortex itself - a vast and alien Poland (which he knows not from childhood, but from his visits to Krakow). For this purpose he chooses a tiny village called Szydowce, which may or may not exist in reality.
The plot is simple and highly symbolic. Yaakov Fein, a clothing merchant who lives a boring family life in Israel, arrives in a Polish village, all trees, cornfields and a fast-flowing river. He spends the night in the first house he sees and soon discovers that Alexander Penn was right: Only coincidence can be believed. The owner of the house, a buxom peasant woman named Magda (the kind of mythic female Appelfeld enjoys sketching), cooks him country delicacies and soon offers him access to her bed, heart and secrets. (The description of their first amorous night is sloppy and disappointing: Folks, the mysteries of sex are well known to Polish men, and even to Polish women.)
Yaakov opens a window in Magda's life, and through this window the memories begin to drift. The language is pure Appelfeld, a powerful language of contraction, lined with yearning for a landscape of water, grass and light. Appelfeld, who in his previous books infused such mundane words as "the merchants" or "the old people" with imagination and force, this time kneads with great pleasure that very un-Jewish word, "the peasants."
But the stroll through the country fields drags the "real story" behind it, and with it the central message of the book: In elliptic circles of attraction and repulsion, fascination and loathing, Appelfeld exposes to the reader a rural Polish world, dark and haunted by its past - a stereotype that accords well with the common Israeli belief that "the Poles are anti-Semitic."
One by one, as though they were passing by him on a conveyor belt, Yaakov Fein meets colorful types from the tranquil Polish periphery, where prejudice, cruelty and obtuseness coexist with natural beauty, religious faith and human kindness. One by one Appelfeld pushes the buttons, with the help of his hero, and the Polish peasants respond like human ATMs, spewing out hatred, fear, horror, nostalgia and even hints of guilt - a welter of emotions fluttering within the enormous void that was left behind by Poland's 3.5 million murdered Jews.
"The Jews awaken the darkness in man," says the old woman Wanda. "The dead Jews are frightening." "They were killed because they were Jews," says old Nikolai, the only peasant who was willing to hide Jews in his yard, and that for a hefty sum. "A man doesn't just kill for no reason. Only rebels against God are hunted and killed," he explains. The Jews, we learn, are hardworking, tight-fisted and unpopular even in death. An elderly farmer in the field makes a lofty philosophical declaration to the visitor: "The fate of the Jews was rooted in themselves." A nameless farmer in a bar says: "Even now there are so many of them. But now they are hard to tell apart. They look a bit like the Germans, a bit like the Poles. They hide their origins, and that's a despicable trait."
Stinking of garlic
A few days ago, on tram No. 36 from Filtrowa Street to Zbawiciela Square in downtown Warsaw, I saw boys putting up handmade posters of President Kwasniewski hanging from a rope, with a beard and long earlocks added to his face. "The Jews stink of garlic," the poster said. "Poland is dominated by the Jews. God help us to save our country."
I asked the boys if they had ever seen a Jew. "The Jews are everywhere," they snickered. "How many Jews are there in Poland?" I asked. "Millions," they answered. "Only 2,000," I corrected them. They burst out laughing. "Poland is swarming with Jews," they said, "especially in commerce and the government. Even the president is Jewish. His real name is Stulzman, not Kwasniewski," they insisted, then shook my hand amicably and got off the tram. A popular radio station known as Radio Maria, located in Torun, Copernicus' lovely hometown, is freely broadcasting anti-Jewish slander.
That is the other, hidden face of modern-day Poland. The country's most lively Jews are its dead Jews. They are conspicuous by their absence. Moral and intellectual Poland is filled with a touching nostalgia for the vanished Jews. Many young locals are obviously curious about, and even nostalgic for, the rich culture left behind by the Jews and the enormous cities abruptly erased from Polish demographics: One-third of the people of Warsaw and Lodz were Jewish, 40 percent of the people of Lublin, no less than 67 percent of the people of Bialystok (higher than the rate of Jews living in Jerusalem).
The philo-Semitism in Poland is among the most thrilling of its kind in contemporary Europe. Young patrons at Warsaw's modern cafes boast of Jewish grandparents, which may be only figments of a wishful imagination. The Jewish festivals held in Krakow and Lodz are bigger than those of Tel Aviv and Haifa. A town called Kutno, located on the road from Warsaw to Poznan, is now building a museum in memory of the Hebrew author Shalom Asch, who was born there. Does anyone in modern-day Israel remember Shalom Asch?
"The Jews were stuck in our throat. They were ours, very much ours, and at the same time foreign," says another nameless peasant to Yaakov Fein. A very Appelfeldian statement, precise and electrifying: That is how Jews and Poles lived for generations, until the Nazis spread their destruction.
While reading, I was reminded of the words Amos Oz recalls hearing from his aunt Sonia: "The Polish attitude toward the Jews was one of disgust, like someone who has bitten into a piece of bad fish and can neither swallow it nor spit it out ... they were keen to look good. Like a drunk trying to walk straight, so that no one can see he's weaving ... But under the table they oppressed and humiliated us, so that we would gradually all go off to Palestine" ("A Tale of Love and Darkness," English translation by Nicholas de Lange). And go they did: a few to Palestine, a great many to the crematoria and mass graves.
The Polish ambivalence was evident to the Jews even in the midst of the atrocities. Some Poles turned the Jews in; others risked their lives to save them. One-third of the Righteous Among the Nations (non-Jews who saved Jews during the war) are Polish. This is important to remember - even on days when the Poles' ratings in Israel are particularly low.
Vague echoes
On July 9, 1942, a few days before the mass deportation to Treblinka, Polish hoodlums threw rocks into the Warsaw Ghetto. The Polish intelligentsia frowned on harassment of this kind. The head of the Judenrat, Adam Czerniakow, who two weeks later would swallow a cyanide capsule at his desk on Grzybowska Street, recorded the incident in his diary. He had always wondered, he wrote, "whether Poland is Mckievicz and Slovacki or the street thugs"; the truth, he concluded, lay somewhere in the middle.
The truth lies in the middle: a rule that (almost) always applies. The classic Polish anti-Semitism of the 1920s and 1930s, whose vague echoes can still be heard in the radical fringes of Polish politics, may have been vicious and poisonous, but it neither created the Holocaust nor allowed it to happen. Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor and Majdanek were not built by Poles. It was Nazi Germany that murdered the Polish Jews; the Poles were one of the few peoples in occupied Europe that did not collaborate with the Nazi invader or contribute soldiers to the Nazi ranks.
Quite a few Israelis have over the years developed a distaste for the Poles, and with impressive acrobatics created a formula that, through an exaggerated account of the Polish "contribution" to the extermination of the European Jewry, somewhat diminishes and flattens the Nazi culpability. This is an injustice not only to the Poles, but first of all to ourselves, and to the truth.
Yes, some Poles turned Jews over to the Germans, tattled on them on the streets of the "Aryan side" and even brutally murdered their own neighbors, as the investigation of the July 1941 massacre in Jedwabne has shown.
Even the village (real or imagined) whose fields of denial and longing are explored by Appelfeld's hero has its secret. "This village is under a horrible curse," the barmaid at the local tavern tells him. "Since the Jews were burned, the village has been cursed," reveals a nameless old man. One fine day "the soldiers" (is it a coincidence that Appelfeld does not explicitly say "the Germans?") gathered up the 40 local Jews and burned the women and children inside the synagogue. Dozens of cities and towns in Poland witnessed something of this sort. Frightened Jews seek refuge in their neighbors' homes, but to no avail. And so the pharmacist Laufer, who treated the poor free of charge, goes up in flames, along with the Sternbergs, a family everyone loved. The neighbors, almost all of them, lock their doors and hearts before the Jews. That, it seems, is the core of the accusation currently hurled at the Polish door: You could have saved them, but you refused to.
It would have been one thing had Appelfeld settled for that. His hero, Yaakov Fein, tries to save and transport to Israel some uprooted headstones being used as paving stones by the local council. The description of the act of sly blackmail, peppered with the words of God, is masterfully drawn.
A few months ago I happened to visit a Polish village south of Lublin, and I asked the head of the local council if Jews had lived there. Flustered, he consulted with his colleagues and finally sent me to a nearby village. Eventually it turned out that he was not being truthful: Some one-third of the villagers had indeed been Jewish. The official was afraid that revealing the past would lead to property claims. The terror of Jewish (and German!) property haunts quite a few Poles nowadays.
Especially heartrending is the wonderful description of the hero's meeting with Uncle Leszek's converted son. The latter denies any connection to the stranger, but is also magically drawn to him. It is, however, a seemingly bland line Appelfeld gives to Magda that hints at his deeper, more serious accusation against the Poles. "In their heart they [the villagers] know that killing and also taking possession is not something God easily forgives," says the large-breasted peasant.
Taking a moral stand on the issue of the Polish failure to rescue the Jews undermines the credibility of the words, already problematic, that Appelfeld gives to his villagers. The Jewish phrases he occasionally puts in their mouths are baffling; and if the old woman Wanda speaks Catholic Polish, how is Yaakov able to understand her, having only ever heard the language in his parents' Israeli home?
At the beginning of his journey Yaakov meets a Jew on the train to Krakow. "A man walks up to him and asks in Yiddish, `Jewish?'" The description sounds as though taken from Poland's demographic landscape before the devastation; it is therefore not quite believable. The chance today of being approached out of the blue by a Yiddish-speaking Jew in southern Poland is only slightly greater than having a dolphin address you in Mongolian and offer to sell you a Van Gogh. The symbolism, however, is clear: Yaakov meets a Jew at the beginning of his journey ("It is strange to travel to a place where there is nothing," the first Jew tells him) and another, tired Jew on the plane back to Tel Aviv ("Poland is a cemetery that has been plowed over," the last Jew tells him). Because everything has ended there, in Poland, and everything so yearns to begin anew.
Yossi Avni-Levy, author of "The Garden of Dead Trees," "Four Sons" and "Auntie Farhuma Wasn't a Whore After All" (all in Hebrew), is a senior diplomat at the Israeli Embassy in Poland.