We must admit that at first we found Poland’s new fascination with Jews creepy and uncomfortably ironic. Our bubbie might have an aneurysm—kinehora!— if she knew they’re dancing in the Krakow streets to klezmer these days, as she was driven from that country as a child just before Hitler moved in.
Her parents, our great-grandparents, settled in New York and here we are all the way across America, trying to imagine the terror and anger of being lucky enough to escape while the rest of the family perished.
It’s not a story that we like to drag out for company, but it inevitably informs a certain part of our personal Jewish identity.
We visited Poland in our post-college youth, where we toured Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, an experience so full of horrid impressions that we will spare you of them. But suffice it to say that when we read about a “Jewish Culture Festival” in a country that once was home to 3 million Jews and now has a population about the size of our two-stoplight California town, we shudder a little. As recently as 1992, Polish opinion was still fantastically anti-Semetic in spite of the fact that with a mere 10,000 left in Poland, nobody had ever met one.
Lately the Poles have become interested in what they believe to be a “dead” culture, because even though there are plenty of us thriving around the world, there will never again be the particular richness of Jewish Poland in the Renaissance and Baroque periods of history.
After reading Jeff Jacoby’s article, we sense that there is a sincere curiosity behind “the warm feeling” (as one woman calls it) of knowing more about their country’s lost history. And somebody is doing an excellent job of marketing Jewish history to Poland.
We’re imagining every single one of Krakow’s 200 Jews churning out press releases, printing glossy programs and scheduling tours of the restored Jewish quarter to produce the very professional, highly attended The Krakow Jewish Culture Festival, which just passed its fifteenth year. Instead on concentrating on the tragedy of the Holocaust, it offers Yiddish-singing workshops, klezmer jams and introductions to the “weird and wonderful world of Jewish cuisine.” The final event is a late-night dance jam that takes over Szeroka (“wide”) Street and looks like Jewlapalooza with that crazy inflated menorah.
They make think we’re dead, but at least they know we like to party.
Photos c/o http://krakow.zaprasza.net/fkz/koncert1999.html, there’s plenty more.