More generally, I thought that the difference between and the Ukrainians were the worst and what we found when my siblings and I went to Ukraine and were treated so well by Ukrainians who knew we were Jews was clearly related to the subject I was interested in, which was how much gets lost as a result of the passage of time. To me, it seemed obvious that cultural habits and attitudes are also eroded over time, and even if it was once true that a seething anti-Semitism had raged throughout the Ukrainian populations of places like Bolechow, I wanted to believe that this was no longer the case—that I had no more reason to be fearful while traveling in Ukraine than I have when I travel in Germany, although some of my survivors had warned me that I should. Be very careful when you go back there, Meg had told me as we were about to leave Australia. Why, I asked, you think they still hate Jews? She looked at me wearily and said, That’s an understatement.
And indeed certain survivors to whom I’d described my friendship with Alex and, more generally, our pleasant reception by Ukrainians, had dismissed it all with a bitter laugh, or worse, saying the Ukrainians today had only been nice to us because we were Americans, because they thought we had money to give them. You weren’t there, you didn’t see, someone told me when I protested that the Ukrainians I’d met and talked to had been so warm, so welcoming, so nice to us; and what could I reply, I who believe it is impossible to draw facile analogies between the kinds of experience that I and others of my class and geography and generation are likely to have, and certain kinds of experiences that certain people had during the war? When certain of my survivors would shake their heads at me and tell me that I could know nothing of Ukrainians based on my experiences, it would occur to me that perhaps they were right: perhaps too many variables had changed, perhaps it was impossible to know, just as you can know nothing of what it was like to be on a transport to Belzec in the summer of 1942 by riding the cattle car ride at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington. I, more than most, knew too well the roots of this bitter, generalized animosity to Ukrainians—after all, the survivors I had spoken with had seen with their own eyes the Jewish babies impaled on Ukrainian pitchforks and thrown out of windows and smashed against walls by Ukrainians and stomped underfoot by Ukrainians, as Mrs. Grynberg’s newborn had been stomped moments after she delivered it, the umbilical cord still hanging from between her legs; they, not I, had witnessed a sheer, almost animal savagery so ferocious that, as has been recorded, there were times when the Nazis themselves had to restrain the Ukrainians. They had seen this, and I had not seen, would never see, anything like it. Still, it must be said that this unwillingness to believe anything good of Ukrainians struck me as irrational, too, since every survivor I talked to had been saved by a Ukrainian. I did not say this to them at the time, but it seemed to me that Jews more than others should be wary of condemning entire populations out of hand.
So I talked about all this with Alex, during my visit, openly and frankly. Because he is a historian by training, as I am a classicist, he tries to see things in their complexity, and is leery of generalizations, just as I like to see things through the lens of Greek tragedy, which teaches us, among other things, that real tragedy is never a straightforward confrontation between Good and Evil, but is, rather, much more exquisitely and much more agonizingly, a conflict between two irreconcilable views of the world. The tragedy of certain areas of Eastern Europe between, say, 1939 and 1944 was, in this sense, a true tragedy, since—as I have mentioned earlier—the Jews of eastern Poland, who knew they would suffer unimaginably if they came under Nazi rule, viewed the Soviets as liberators in 1939, when eastern Poland was ceded, temporarily it turned out, to the Soviet Union; whereas the Ukrainians of eastern Poland, who had suffered unimaginably under Soviet oppression during the 1920s and 1930s, viewed the cession of eastern Poland to the Soviet Union in 1939 as a national disaster, and saw the Nazis as liberators in 1941, when the Germans invaded and took control. This is not, of course, a formula that can explain everything, the pitchforked babies or the umbilical cords: but it is at least more complex, and therefore more likely to be accurate, than the formula that simply dismisses all Ukrainians, always, as the worst. Alex and I talked about this kind of thing often during our visit, and in the end he shrugged and sighed and said, echoing other people I’d talked to over the past few years, Look, some people were good, and some people were bad.
But that came later. At the airport, on the day of my return to L’viv, I hugged Alex back and introduced him to Froma. I asked about his wife, Natalie, about his studious son, Andriy, whom Alex always refers to as Andrew in my presence, and his round-faced daughter, Natalie, both of whom would be much bigger now than when I’d last seen them at the lavish farewell dinner Alex had held for my brothers and sister and me at their apartment. Everything was great! Alex said. Everyone is great! He refused to let us carry anything, even a computer bag, as we emerged from the bizarre little airport building into the bright sunlight. Sitting at the curb was the blue VW Passat. No! he said, when I made a theatrical gesture of recognition on seeing the car. This isn’t the same car you knew before, it’s the same kind but a different one, newer. Same, but different!
We sped off to the hotel. It was either then, or at some point later on, that he laughed his ringing laugh and said, You won’t believe it, but Andrew has taught himself to read Yiddish!
THAT WAS ON Tuesday. On Friday, we would drive to Bolekhiv.
It was good to spend some time in L’viv. The first time I’d gone to this city, I’d been so anxious about what we’d find in Bolekhiv that I hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to the sightseeing we did before and after we went to my family’s town. This time, I like to think we saw everything.
Many places of historical interest with respect to the city’s now-vanished Jewish life have not, I should point out, vanished, but are simply what you might call the same, but different. A good example of this is a plump and pleasant if somewhat eccentric building—it has little turrets—that stands at Number 27, T. Shevchenko Prospekt, and is now called the Desertniy Bar. To certain people it is far better known, however, as the Szkocka Café, the Scottish Café, which in its previous life stood on an avenue called Akademichna—an appropriate enough name, given that the café was the meeting place for a famous and influential group of mathematicians known as the Lwów School. The Lwów School was dominated by the Polish mathematician Stefan Banach, who did seminal work in an area called functional analysis, and who, with another Lwów mathematician, Hugo Steinhaus, founded in 1929 the journal Studia Mathematica, “Mathematical Studies,” which along with the Warsaw-based Fundamenta Mathematicae (“Foundations of Mathematics”) became one of the premier journals of the lively and important Polish mathematical scene during the interwar period. It is the liveliness of the Lwów School that brings us back to the Scottish Café, since the café was a favorite meeting place of the members of that group. It was Banach who bought the large notebook, later an object of legend, in which, over the course of animated conversation accompanied by many coffees, thorny problems were written down, and answers eventually entered as well. At the end of each gathering this notebook would be left with the headwaiter who, when the group returned on another night, would bring it out of the secret hiding place to which it would be returned as soon as they’d left once again.
The Lwów School and that lively and important Polish mathematical scene would never recover from the devastating effects of the Nazi occupation, which decimated the ranks of the Polish professoriat, Catholics and Jews alike. As it happens, both Banach and Steinhaus survived the war, although each suffered horrible deprivations. Banach, a Pole who was born not far from Kraków in 1892 and was, therefore, of the same generation as Uncle Shmiel, and who, because he was an illegitimate child, bore the surname of his mother rather than his father (a thing that as we know could happen even to legitimate children), was arrested by the Nazis at one point, and, stripped of the august standing he had enjoyed before the war, was put to wo
rk in an infectious diseases laboratory where, for the duration of the Occupation, the great mathematician spent his days feeding the lice that were to be used in experiments. He outlived the war by three weeks, dying of lung cancer in August 1945. Steinhaus, born a few years earlier than his colleague, was Jewish, which meant that when the Nazis came he had more to worry about than lice. He went into hiding and suffered severe privations, hunger not being the least of them, although it is said of him that, as one biographer has put it, even then his sharp restless mind was at work on a multitude of ideas and projects—in which he was not unlike Klara Freilich, who as we know was also thinking about mathematics while she huddled under the ground with the rats. In any event, when the war was over Steinhaus moved, as Ciszko Szymanski’s family had, to Wrocław, and died there at the age of eighty-five in 1972, having managed, I should add, to rescue and preserve the Scottish Café notebook, which was subsequently published. The rescue of the book may be thought of as a symbol, since Steinhaus is in fact often credited with helping Polish mathematics to rise from its ashes after the devastation wreaked by the war on Polish university and intellectual life.
It happens that I have just had the chance to handle a curious artifact of this particular aspect of the wartime devastation. I originally went to the Scottish Café—or rather, the Desertniy Bar—because my father is a mathematician, and when we all went to L’viv the first time he was eager for us to visit this famous place, which is in its way a shrine for mathematicians, a group of people not necessarily known for the intensity of their devotion to shrines. But most of what I know about the Lwów School I owe to my godfather, my father’s close Italian friend whose real name is Edward but whom we have always called by the affectionate nickname Nino, who for many years was a professor of mathematics at a university on Long Island, the man who was the only person we knew who would reach up and pluck apples from the tree in my parents’ yard and eat them, back when I was a child and wondering why the Tree of Knowledge was a tree. By a curious coincidence, one of Nino’s areas of expertise is functional analysis, the area opened up long ago by the Lwów School, and it was Nino who tried to explain to me, when I was visiting him after my final trip to Ukraine and telling him of what we’d found there, what exactly functional analysis is. A lot of what he told me was too difficult for me to understand. But I was fascinated to hear him say that he himself had used functional analysis to study problems in something called optimization theory. Since I had liked the name optimization theory, I asked him in an e-mail I wrote after I got back home to try to explain what that was, and he immediately replied:
optimization is the study of maxima and minima in different guises. two quick examples, the first classical, attributed to Dido, the second from the sputnik era:
1) what closed surface of given area encloses the maximum volume? (Dido: what planar figure of given perimeter encloses the greatest area. answer: the circle)
2) what flight path does a rocket take to minimize the time to rendezvous between two points in different orbits?
Reading this, I was moved to see that a name familiar to me from Latin literature had, strangely, become the symbol of a famous mathematical problem. In Vergil’s Aeneid, we are told a certain story relating to the queen of Carthage, Dido—the woman with whom Aeneas falls in love, only to abandon her later on, an act that eventually brings about her suicide. The story has to do with how Dido came to found her city, Carthage. Exiled from her native land, Dido wandered far and wide seeking a place to settle. After she landed in North Africa, a local king struck a strange bargain with her: he agreed to grant her and her followers just as much territory as could be enclosed by the hide of an ox. Dido’s ingenious response to this cruelly stingy offer was to cut an oxhide into thin strips and, making these strips into one long cord, to make that cord into the perimeter of an enormous circle: the territory of the future Carthage, which eventually became a great city, the city in which Aeneas would later so unexpectedly come across a painting of his own life, causing him to burst into tears. This is why, when mathematicians refer to “Dido’s problem,” they are worrying about this: how to find the maximum area for a figure with a given perimeter; although when classicists refer to Dido’s problem they are probably more concerned with the fact that after she was forced from her home and had to flee for her life, after she had built for herself a new and prosperous existence, she still ended up—for all her cleverness, for all she’d done to survive—a suicide, a woman whose new life was no life because her heart had been broken.
In any case, when I first read Nino’s e-mail I wasn’t sure what all of it meant, but—since I had just returned from that particular trip—the problems of how to get closed surfaces to enclose maximum volumes, and of how to minimize the time it takes to reach rendezvous points, had been much in my thoughts, although of course in a different context, and I suppose that’s why Nino’s answer pricked my interest.
It was while I was at Nino’s house that, in talking about the Lwów School, he mentioned that he had several volumes of both Studia Mathematica and Fundamenta Mathematicae, and it was in one of the latter that he pointed out to me the memorial issue of 1945, which began with a black-bordered list of the dozens of former contributors to that publication who had been killed in the war, a list that went a long way toward suggesting to me just how difficult Hugo Steinhaus’s project of reanimating Polish mathematics had been. When we think about great devastations, about what gets lost as a result of the decimation of entire populations of people, the million and a half Armenians slaughtered by the Turks in 1916, the five to seven million Ukrainians starved to death by Stalin between 1932 and 1933, the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, the two million Cambodians killed by Pol Pot’s regime in the 1970s, and so forth, we tend, naturally, to think first of the people themselves, the families that will cease existing, the children that will never be born; and then of the homely things with which most of us are familiar, the houses and mementoes and photographs that, because those people no longer exist, will stop having any meaning at all. But there is this, too: the thoughts that will never be thought, the discoveries that will never be made, the art that will never be created. The problems, written in a book somewhere, a book that will outlive the people who wrote down the problems, that will never be solved.
Anyway, I’ve been to the Scottish Café in L’viv. It is, you could say, the same, but different; which is also one way of describing L’viv today, which, with its renovations and new construction and rising tourism, may be said to be old and new at the same time, to be rising out of its ashes, at least in certain respects, at least in cases when there are ashes still left to rise out of.
BOLEKHIV, TOO, WAS the same, but different.
Once again, Alex had stopped the car at the crest of the hill beyond which it was possible to see the little town nestled in its valley, the hill where four years earlier Matt had paused to take a picture. Here we are in Bolechow again, I announced, a shade ruefully, to Alex and Froma. But this time, when we drove down into the town, over the little stone bridge that squats over the thin and insignificant trickle that the Sukiel River has become, past what used to be Bruckenstein’s Restaurant, the place seemed transformed. Before, on the overcast, drizzly afternoon of our first visit, the town had seemed deserted; the gray sense of desolation that hung in the wet air that Sunday had seemed, somehow, like another piece of damning evidence, as if the place itself were perpetually on trial and the weather and mood were witnesses for the prosecution. Now, on a brilliant and cloudless late morning, Bolekhiv was alive with activity: cars buzzed noisily around the square, construction sites clanged and buzzed and sputtered, mothers were pushing strollers, and the place was alive with the colors of many newly painted buildings. Meg Grossbard’s house, of which she’d given me a photo, and which she had asked me to take a look at—this was in the afternoon after the lunch at her brother-in-law’s, when, as Matt and I stood outside the apartment building waiting for a cab, Meg had i
nsisted that if we were foolish enough ever to return to Ukraine (cannibals!), we must not tell anyone that she was living in Australia; and, reacting to my amazed expression, went on, they killed the rest of my family, why wouldn’t they want to kill me too?—Meg Grossbard’s house, I saw, had been painted a bubble-gum pink.
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