“ a Jew from Poland is not and never was simply Polish. … it was clear to Jews and Poles alike
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Polish literature had no appeal for me nor did it have any impact on my state of mind… I do not recall ever being moved by the partitions of Poland or the country’s loss of independence. That was not part of my history. I knew only too well that none of my ancestors had taken part in any Polish uprising. … In my family—and I’m thinking here above all about my grandparents, goys were spoken of with a certain disdain. They were the ones who didn’t know that Christ was not the Messiah. Moreover, just like the pagans, they prayed to pictures. … the boundary between our world and their strange world was laden with an entire system of taboos. I knew that the worst, the most unimaginable sin was to convert. It was not permissible even to assume a kneeling position, even through inadvertence.257
A Jewish woman from a village in Volhynia recalled: At one point the teacher called on my father and asked him to send my brother Yitshak to an art school in a larger town. … The teacher even said that in such a case the government would provide a stipend, and that he would even request it. However, he could not persuade my father. One, he could not imagine his child so far away from him. Two, who knows, maybe he would fall in, God forbid, among Christians, and be so confused as to forget his Jewish roots?260 A Jewess from a village near Kołomyja recalled: At times I would slip out of the house quietly and hurry to the meadow, to play with the shepherds. This was a constant source of worry for my grandparents. Grandpa often said: “What will she grow up into among these Hutzul [highlander] children—a shikseh, nothing else.” And he would shake his head sadly as he said it. I did not understand what he was talking about; I couldn’t see how I was different from them.261 A Jewish woman, who lived in a tenement house in Mińsk Mazowiecki, has similar recollections: “Our neighbors were the Izbrechts, a Polish family … The youngest girl was named Józka, and I played with her all the time despite the fact that my grandmother beat me good so that I would not play with her. My grandmother did not allow me to play with Józka Izbrecht because she was Polish and she feared that if I went to her home I would eat something with pork in it. So my grandmother beat me, but I still played with Józka.”262 A girl from Skała, in southeastern Poland, recalls: We knew little about the gentiles; they lived their lives and we lived our lives. … Business was the main contact between us. … One of my fellow pupils was the grandson of the manager of the count’s estate … As children, this boy and I played hide-and-seek in the estate’s huge and beautiful park … His family would invite me at Christmas to see the tree … But typical of our relationship with the gentiles, we never invited them to our home for Chanukah.263 Sally Grubman recalled her childhood in the large industrial city of Łódź: It was one of those integrated areas where Jews clung together and had nothing to do with the gentiles. We never visited our gentile neighbors and they didn’t visit us. The children didn’t play together. I remember once there was some Easter celebration and the girl next door wanted to show me the beautiful table. She sneaked me in for a moment when no one was looking—just to look—and then I left.264 Joseph Kutrzeba, then Arie Fajwiszys, the son a music composer and conductor from Łódź, recalled bitterly during his wartime odyssey: Why, oh, why didn’t my parents know a single Polish family they could turn to in times like these? It was always “Jewish this, and Jewish that,” and “we want you to associate only with nice Jewish boys we approve of” and “we don’t want you to have anything to do with the goyim.” Damn them, it’s their own fault. How can you live in a country surrounded by Poles, their country, and all but isolate yourself from them? Why, the only Poles I ever knew were our maid, Vala, and the few actors from the theater who came to my father for music lessons. Serves them right. Now we could use a few Polish friends. Once I brought home a Polish friend, and I was told not to invite him again …265 Kuba Goldberg’s experiences were somewhat similar. He studied at the Ignacy Skorupski high school, where almost half of all students were Jewish. “There was no anti-Semitism in our school. There were friendly relations among Polish and Jewish students. These friendships, however, stopped at the school entrance. They never invited each other to their homes.”266 Martin Zaidenstadt, from Jedwabne, recalled his father’s disapproval of his playing soccer with the Polish boys in town. On one occasion he was whacked thrice with a thick leather strap for the “misdeed” of playing soccer with the shaigitzi and missing temple.267 For Orthodox Jews playing was simply not allowed, especially with Christian children. The following account is from Kulbuszowa: Mostly Polish boys rode bicycles. That doesn’t mean that I was not interested. I was, and actually learned to ride one. Unfortunately, someone saw me and promptly reported the incident to my religious school teacher. For that earned yet another suspension from Talmud Torah. When the war came, prohibitions eased and many things changed. I rode about on my own bicycle—unpunished!268 These memoirs are consistent with Polish recollections. Władysław Bartoszewski, one of the founding members of the wartime Council for Aid to Jews (Żegota), recalls that, when he was growing up in a tenement-house in a primarily Jewish area of prewar Warsaw, the mothers of the Jewish children often scolded their children for playing with “that stupid, Polish goy.”269 Stefania Podgórska, who rescued thirteen Jews in Przemyśl, recalled that in the small village she grew up in, “sometimes the mother of the Jewish children would say to them, ‘Don’t play with the goyim.”270 A Pole from Międzyrzec Podlaski recalled the admonition a Jewish child received from his mother: “If you won’t eat, a goyka will take you away.”271 As some Jews admit, even culturally assimilated Jews from the educated classes—generally, professionals—who spoke only Polish generally considered themselves to be Jews, not Poles, and shunned personal contacts with Poles: People usually think that Jews didn’t socialize with Poles because of anti-Semitism, because of the Poles’ reluctance. That’s a great over-simplification. … However, anti-Semitism alone cannot account for the barrier between Poles and Jews in those years. Had my parents wanted to establish social ties with the Poles, it would have involved a great deal of effort on their part to bridge the cultural gap. … Above all, they [i.e., the interlocutor’s parents] were not Poles. Even my mother would not have called herself a Pole. A Polish Jew, yes, but not a Pole, despite the fact that she spoke and read only Polish and that she knew Polish literature so well. These paradoxes were typical not only of my mother, but my parents’ circle—the liberal, assimilated Jewish intelligentsia—as a whole. It was an entire community, a community of neither Poles nor Jews, but of assimilated Jews! … Jewish lawyers, doctors, professors, mathematicians. They were secular, educated, spoke only in Polish, and kept together.272 Even Jews who had Polish acquaintances tended to view the latter as strangers: “Although we had known many Catholics quite well and had lived with the Nowickis [their tenants] for almost a year, they were always seen as strangers, goyim, the people on the other side of the fence.”273 To be sure, a similar phenomenon existed among some Poles.274 Jews who emigrated from Poland to the United States often transplanted these attitudes with them, as 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.”275 Writing in prewar Poland’s foremost literary weekly Wiadomości Literackie (no. 35, 1924), Antoni Słonimski, a leading Polish poet of Jewish origin, summed it up in the following words: “I know very few Jews who are not convinced of the superiority of the Jewish race. For that reason this nation … does not neglect even the smallest of reproaches. … Those Jews who complain about the lack of tolerance of others are the least tolerant …” Societal pressures were especially strong in small towns and villages where Jewish religious leaders endorsed isolation and breaches of traditional norms were treated mercilessly. The rabbi—if he was Orthodox and certainly if he was Hasidic—maintained no contact with Christians. The rabbi of Płock, Yona Mordechai Zlotnik, publicly urged that Jews and Christians be educated separately: Jewish religious education was possible only in schools established exclusively for Jewish children.276 Most Jews seemed to favour this state of affairs, especially in smaller communities, certainly well into the 1920s. Polish schools were never welcome or fully accepted. In Ostryna, north of Grodno,
Many young Jews—not only from Orthodox but also Zionist backgrounds—were adamant in their support of total segregation from Christians and creeping polonization. A Jewish girl from Kołomyja participated in a boycott of girlfriends who had chosen to attend a Polish instead of a Jewish high school: “We considered them as delinquents and renegades and we did not speak to them or have anything to do with them.” A girl from Kowel, in Volhynia, describes how she, together with her whole class, put pressure on her girlfriend to break off relations with her Christian friends (“shkuts”) and to stop using the Polish language. Nojma left primary school and had many friends. It was quite common for her to exchange a few words or to cross the street with a goy. This used to antagonize the whole class and later the whole grammar school. Her friends, including myself, used to defend her and we tried hard to persuade her that she should stop doing this. And finally we managed it. It was Nojma who introduced the tradition of speaking Polish into our class. I did not like that at all, because I hated all goyim … They eventually succeeded in persuading their friend “how terrible her crime was.”281 Self-imposed alienation was pervasive among Jewish youth, albeit not universal. A student named Esther from a Hasidic family commented, Naturally, I cherished the Beys Yaakov school more than ever. I didn’t consider the public school to be “ours,” even though we were taught by Jewish men and women. Since they didn’t observe the Sabbath and always spoke Polish, as far as I was concerned they were “unfortunate people.” When Esther did acquire some interest in Polish matters, she was quickly corrected, “Father stopped eating his dinner and declared that under no circumstances was I to read any Polish books.”282 Ludwik Stockel felt that Poland’s Jews were unassimilable, and that Jews would give up too much that is essentially Jewish even if they could feasibly assimilate. He said, “Assimilation cannot be the solution to the problem, since there are certain essential differences in the way that we and the Catholics live, which make assimilation impossible. In this case, it would be a diminution of one’s own worth.”283 Traditional Jewish schools were not known for their tolerance of others. In cheders or heders (Jewish religious schools), rabbis traditionally referred to gentiles using derogatory terms.284 Haim Grzybower, who attended a Hebrew school in Warsaw in the 1930s, recalled: It was good that I got away from the rabbi’s lessons, for I was starting to resent some Jewish teachings—that only a Jew is good and goys are no good. And this wasn’t just what we were taught by the rabbi; it was all around us. If you lie to a non-Jew, it was said, it’s not really a lie. And if a Jew kills a goy, it’s not as big a sin as if you kill a Jew. “How could this be?” I asked my mother in confusion. “Isn’t one person just as good as another?” “It’s in the Talmud,” she would reply, with a dull finality that indicated there was nothing more to be said. There was more: I heard it said that if you were considering marrying a non-Jew, a shikse, you first had to shave her head and pull her nails out. Then, the theory went, she would be so ugly that you wouldn’t want to marry her. … When the Sabbath came, Jews weren’t supposed to do any “work,” even turning on a light. So a Jewish family would get a neighborhood child to do this—a “shabbos goy”—and give the kid a few pennies to turn on the lights or the gas stove. On Saturdays at our house, once the Sabbath goy had turned the stove on, it simply stayed on till sundown, when my mother could turn it off. “Damn it, I thought, “I could do that if they’d pay me. It didn’t make any sense. I wondered which was the worse sin: breaking the Sabbath by turning on a light, or paying someone to do something your religion considers a sin.285
That was no good either. So my father turned to another school where the children were all Jewish and the teachers were mixed, some Gentiles and some Jews, and this school was much better.286 In large cities, even among Jewish children who attended Polish-language state schools, interaction outside the classroom was generally minimal. Marian Małowist, a teacher in interwar Warsaw, recalled a survey that he a Christian teacher conducted among their students. Jewish and Polish students were each asked what Poles or Jews they know, etc. It turned out that the only Pole the Jewish students knew was caretaker of the building in which they lived. It was not better among the Polish students.287 Regrettably, measures taken to overcome barriers often proved to entrench them. As one Jew from Otwock recalls, There were other incidents as well, like the annual athletic contests between pupils from the Jewish school and those from the nearby Polish school, contests by which some well-meaning but overoptimistic educators hoped to encourage closer contact between the two. The result was usually the reverse; the competition merely aggravated their mutual dislike and hostility. The young spectators would gather on opposite sides of the running track, the Jews in one group, the Poles in another, each cheering the runners from its own school, each jeering at those from the other. What had intended to foster greater understanding only revealed their underlying mistrust and resentment. Worse still, the athletic contests sometimes led to displays of hostility more graphic even than cheers and jeers. There were also epithets and insults and occasional blows. I remember how at one of those competitions a little Polish boy made the mistake of standing on the Jewish side of the track. Trying to encourage the runners from his school, he urged them loudly to show those ‘mangy Jews’ who the real athletes were. That had unfortunate consequences for him. On the other side of the racecourse his remark would have gone unnoticed … But on this side it brought swift reprisal. An older girl who had overheard his exhortation, outraged, berated him angrily, underscoring her disapproval with a sharp blow to the back of his head. The little fellow seemed startled; he was not even aware that he had said anything improper. … He lowered his head, tears came to his eyes, and sobbing softly he crossed over to the opposite side. There he undoubtedly found a more sympathetic audience.288 Tolerance and enlightenment were not hallmarks of traditional Jewish schools, as a Jewish village boy learned when he started to attend cheder in a synagogue in the nearby town of Dębica near Tarnów: Within the sanctuary itself, though, I felt ill at ease. The city boys were mainly Chassidic, their long payes—sidelocks—just one visible expression of their faith. I had been raised to observe the Jewish holidays, including the Sabbath as a day of rest; I kept kosher, and I was, after all, studying for my bar mitzvah—but I did not wear sidelocks like most of the other boys, did not dress in the traditionalist black caftan and felt hat, did not practice my religion with anything near their fervor. “Are you a goy?” they often taunted me, using a Yiddish term for “gentile.” “You dress like a goy!” “I don’t have to look different to be Jewish,” I would reply, which left me open for the retort, “But you do look different. Different from us, and we’re Jewish.” There would never be a meeting of the minds, it seemed, between us so-called assimilated Jews and the Chassidim. By the time Friday afternoon came around, I could not wait to get back home.289 A Jewish boy from Działoszyce recalled: Father, an ultraorthodox Gerer Hasid, did not want his sons going to public school. … Nobody taught us math, science, or Polish in heder. In fact, the rebbe often did not even know Polish.290 A Jewish girl from an assimilated family in Grudziądz recalled the cold reception she received when she started to study the Jewish religion: “So, starting in fourth grade, I attend the afternoon classes of Jewish religion at the Wydzialowa [Wydziałowa] School—where the Jewish pupils look at me suspiciously as if I did not belong. … And I wonder if I belong with these stuck-up Jewish kids who give me a cold shoulder because I missed a year of Jewish religion.”291 Haim Grzybower, a Jewish schoolboy from Warsaw who dared to say a Christian prayer, soon faced the wrath of his Jewish peers: Every morning at school, when the Christian boys crossed themselves and said the Lord’s Prayer, I found myself wondering what would happen if I prayed along with them. Would I get stoned? Would my hand fall off? Would I drop dead? One day I got up my courage and, right out loud, said the Lord’s Prayer and crossed myself with the rest of them. The Christian boys paid no attention, though a couple of them gave me puzzled looks over their shoulders, but when it was over the Jewish boys—there were only a few girls, and they had separate classes—cornered me and yelled, “You’re not supposed to do that; you know it’s against our religion. We’re going to tell your mother.” I didn’t say anything, and I certainly didn’t think they’d really tell her, but when I left school that day all the Jewish boys cornered me. “What kind of Jew are you?” they asked. “What’s wrong with you?” When I didn’t answer—what could I say?—they started punching me and kicking me, not letting up until I was bruised and lying on the ground in tears. After that they all disappeared together. I did not see where they went, but when I made my way slowly home and was standing across the street from our apartment house, I saw them all trooping out, with righteous little smirks on their faces, so I knew they had told my mother. My hands were trembling when I opened the apartment door. I had to be in for a beating this time. But my mother just glanced over at me, then went back to her sewing. She never said a word to me about it—not one word. I’ve never understood that.292 Maintaining close contacts with Christians was also a basis for social sanctions. A popular Yiddish play, Der Dorfs Jung, railed out against the evils of marrying a Christian and warned of the fires of hell that such a vile deed invited.293 For many Jews intimate relationships with Christians were anathema. In Baranowicze, Sara Bytenski, the daughter of a pious Jew was spotted one afternoon behind some trees kissing her Christian boyfriend. A group of teenaged Jewish boys spontaneously rallied to her “defence”: When the man turned his head, our horror turned to outrage. He was a ‘goy’—a Gentile! For us, it was not only sin, it was mortal sin—a Jewish soul was in danger of being lost! We looked at each other, wild-eyed. She had to be saved—it was our sacred duty! There were plenty of stones lying around; collecting pocketfuls of them we stormed forward, valiant saviours, hurling our weapons of destruction at the infamous desecrators … A few months later we all had a second shock. The poor girl had had no success in convincing her family that her lover was willing to convert to our faith in order to marry her, so she ran away with him. The shame of it was too much for her father, a poor but well-respected tailor. He declared a whole year of mourning, closed his shop and sat, all day long on the floor, wearing a torn black garment praying loudly and begging the Almighty for forgiveness for the daughter, now dead to him, who had brought such shame and humiliation on her parents and her people alike.294 Yüklə 2,49 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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