Hold on to the Sun

by Michal Govrin

  Among the group of stone buildings and the expanses of crumbling huts, the story of humanity is buried. Here, everyone comes to confront their own past: the children and grandchildren of the murderers and the murdered, of the torturers and the tortured, of those who stood on the side and those who reached out a hand. It is the meeting place of the human spirit. The meeting place and the place for the accounting of the soul. Here the battle for memory and meaning is waged, a battle that is ongoing and urgent—a battle that will determine the face of our world.

  Auschwitz wasn’t on another planet; it was an extreme manifestation of the human soul. This is the place to hear the voices of man. To listen to the trenchant lesson of the camps: the lesson of how man can create a machinery of annihilation, and the lesson about the ways to hold on to life and to meaning—the founding lesson of humanity. This is the place where the visitor comes to listen to the voices of man, and from here she will carry them to her home to turn to them in the crucial moments of her life. Inevitably, we will all have our own moments of accounting—in situations when we ourselves will be strong or will be held hostage, when we will be asked to choose between turning our backs or holding out our hands.

  In a new techno-savvy Auschwitz Museum, visitors should have access to an enormous human mosaic of voices and stories. Voices of the murdered and voices of the survivors, voices of the second and third generation, and of artists, thinkers, and psychologists. A mighty chorus of voices that will resound through the silence of the graveyard. And the visitor will lend an ear to the voices he will choose, the voices he will encounter, the voices with whom he will converse in his soul.

  In the bus that took my daughter and me and the other visitors out of Auschwitz, there was silence. I looked at the numb, withdrawn people.There were Europeans and Americans, Asians and Africans, and a young hippie couple with Tartar features who were resting, their heads leaning on one another. The setting sun gilded the summer fields and the faces of the passengers, and bathed the gentle motion of the bus in a soft light.

  In Auschwitz, a universal story of humanity was written. A story with many voices, many moments of people facing Evil. A living memory, like the Exodus from slavery in Egypt, compelling, demanding, of every single human to view themselves as if they, too, had come out of Auschwitz.

  SELICHOT 24 IN KRAKOW: MIGRATIONS OF A MELODY

  (ESSAY, 2007)

  The only one of my mother’s melodies to remain is the sing-song of the shamosh25 from the Remuh Synagogue in Krakow, as he passed at night through the streets of the ancient ghetto, Kazimierz, knocking on the window shutters and waking the Jews for selichot, the early morning service before the high holidays. “Yidelekh, yidelekh, tayere koshere yidelekh, shteyen oyf, shteyen oyf lavoydes haboyre uleslikhes .” Jews, Jews, dear, kosher Jews, please rise, please rise to worship the Creator and for selichot.

  My mother, Rina Poser-Laub Govrin left her beloved native city on the eighteenth of October, 1944, on a train going from the Plaszow labor camp to Auschwitz. By then, both her husband and son had been murdered. My mother never set foot in Krakow again.

  Recently I was invited by the Polish Institute to participate in a cultural exchange program. I agreed only after receiving assurance that, alongside the official visit, I would be able to join in the annual march commemorating the expulsion of Krakow’s Jews. In 1942 the Jews were banished from their homes to a ghetto in the Podgorze district, and in 1943, after a series of murderous Aktionen, those remaining were deported by foot to the Plaszow labor camp, whose construction, inspired by the sadism of its commander, Amon Göth, was undertaken on the grounds of the Jewish cemetery.

  The Memorial March from the Podgorze district to Plaszow was set to take place on a Sunday morning. I therefore arrived on a train from Warsaw to Krakow on Friday afternoon, before sabbath. On the platform I was met by Sylvia, my official escort, a petite, shapely woman wearing a checkered coat—a perfect Polish beauty. I took down my suitcases and shamefacedly apologized for their weight. I found it hard to explain the anxiety that gripped me in anticipation of retracing the footsteps of my mother, of my murdered eight-year-old brother. And so, tormented by the migration of souls that I had embarked upon, I dragged with me on my journey all the books I deemed absolutely essential for my survival: Kafka, and Rilke, and Gebirtig, and Primo Levi, and Szymborska, and Bruno Schulz, and Viktor Frankl, and a siddur,26 and a mikraot gedolot,27 and Noam Elimelech by the Rebbe of Lizhensk,28 weighing in all some sixty pounds . . .

  Sylvia, delicate as she was, kept up a smile, even when, in her tiny car stuffed with baggage, we reached the small hotel with no elevator in Kazimierz, the ancient ghetto, and even as we athletically dragged the huge suitcase up floor after floor after floor. I was the one who broke down when I saw the cramped, dark attic I’d been allotted, with a skylight that barely illuminated the room’s old wallpaper. I knew that if I spent three days there, including the march of returning souls, they’d have to carry me out straight to the loony bin. Sylvia, feeling responsible, was drenched in sweat. Sabbath drew near, and it was only by sheer luck that, at that last moment, a comfortable room was vacated in a hotel a few alleys away.

  And so we set out, Sylvia with the small bags, and I with the suitcase full of selected classics of world literature, bumping along the paving stones of the ancient streets. But then, in the midst of a struggle to negotiate a turn in the road, the suitcase handle snapped. The suitcase stopped and the detached handle remained in my hand.

  “What will we do!?” Sylvia was in a panic from the daze of Jewish wandering she had been thrust into. “It’s ok,” I said, trying to calm her. “I’ll carry the suitcase like this.” And immediately I began dragging the great weight God knows how. But Sylvia’s worry did not subside, sweat dripped from her brow, and her entire slender figure exuded despair. I knew I had to encourage her, and in a flash it came to me. “This reminds me of a song in Yiddish!” I called out, “Me without you, and you without me is like a handle without a door.”With my breath short from the effort of dragging the suitcase, I began to sing the love song set in a waltz tempo, “Ikh on dir un du on mir iz vi a kliamke on a tir . . . ”

  And so, down the narrow streets of Estery and Jozefa, with one hand waving the broken handle and the other grasping the orphaned metal rod, I lugged the huge weight as if effortlessly and sang, “Ikh on dir un du on mir iz vi a kliamke on a tir . . . ketzele, faygele, mayn.”The word “kliamke,” handle, had found its way into Yiddish from Polish. The familiar word and the sweetness of the waltz calmed Sylvia down a bit, so that finally even she began to hum along with the irresistibly beautiful tune.

  That evening, after prayers at the ancient Remuh Synagogue, I was invited to a sabbath meal held in the hall at the top of the half-deserted Hochschule Synagogue and organized by the young rabbi, Boaz Pash, who had been sent to Krakow from Israel. The modest meal, served at tables covered with paper tablecloths, drew a unique admixture of guests: two or three elderly members of the community, living in solitude and speaking tatters of Yiddish, several wildly excited women, some of whom had recently discovered that beneath their Polish biography a Jewish girl had been kept in hiding for the past sixty years, and who were now frantically trying to bridge over a lifetime, a group of goyim from France and Poland meeting in Krakow for discussions of goodwill, and a few young people who, having also one day discovered that ancestral Jewish blood was flowing in their veins, founded a group called “Cholent.”29 They were the ones serving the simple food to this curious congregation.

  I was seated at the foot of the table, facing the French. The young rabbi addressed the members of the community with fatherly warmth, made the blessings, went over the songs the guests knew, and encouraged them to say a few words. And so, between the modest courses, a young American who somehow wound up in Krakow got to deliver a “sermon.” For a moment it seemed as if he were nostalgically recalling his Bar Mitzvah party, but then the young man, whose literary ambitions were apparently inf
luenced by Henry Miller, led his story from the synagogue bimah30 straight to the toilet, and to his uncle, who sighed while he masturbated in the midst of the celebration in one of the stalls. The lecherous grin was still on the young man’s face when the door of the hall burst open, and in sallied two shtreimels31 three feet high, and beneath them, two white-bearded Jews wearing traditional kapotas.32 “The Rabbi of Galicia and his shamosh,” the whisper spread among the castaways seated at the table. The rabbi, an American who receives his appointment (and salary) from NewYork, gave a short speech in a thundering voice, after which he burst out in song in a yet more thundering voice, which seemed to emanate from an amplifier. At first the thickly bearded shamosh joined him, but when some of the emotional ladies also joined in the singing with their indecent feminine voices, the shamosh took off, and shortly after the rabbi departed as well, sternly carrying the weight of his enormous shtreimel.

  The community of castaways was left fragmented and forlorn following the Sermon of the Toilet and the departure of the shtreimels. Confusion settled on the tables.

  Suddenly the voice of the young rabbi rang out, “Michal, sing that song.” What is he talking about, I thought, astonished. “What song?” “The one you sang in the street today.” “What?! How do you know?” “I passed by and heard you singing. That’s how I recognized you.” The circumstances of my dizzying visit to Krakow rushed through my head, what had been told, what had been silenced, the pitiful state of the community, the rabbi’s appeal, and I knew I had no choice but to do my part.

  I sang the Yiddish love waltz. After the first time the guests at the tables hummed the tune. “Again!” called the rabbi, and the next time everyone sang, instinctively rocking from side to side and waving their hands, “Ikh on dir un du on mir . . . ” By the third time, everyone rose to dance around the tables, with the young rabbi at the head, waving his arm.

  The sudden echo of my private experience made me giddy. And then, when the dancing stopped, on impulse I declared, “I have another tune for you! From here, from Krakow.” The excited ladies, the elders, the rabbi, all raised their faces to me when I began the sing-song of the shamosh from the Remuh Synagogue, which had reached my ears in my mother’s voice, “Yidelekh, yidelekh, tayere koshere yidelekh, shteyen oyf, shteyen oyf lavoydes haboyre uleslikhes.” Jews, Jews, dear, kosher Jews, please rise, please rise to worship the Creator and for selichot.

  The standing guests nodded their heads, listened; the flushed older women, the ardent youth, some of the Jewish elders hummed along in Yiddish, and the young Israeli rabbi repeated after me the tune that had been exiled from the streets of the ancient ghetto of Krakow and forgotten, “Yidelekh, Yidelekh . . . ”

  At a late hour we emerged, a small handful of guests summoned to Szeroka Square in the heart of Kazimierz. The large square was totally empty. “How does it go?” the rabbi asked, as he began chanting in the dark, “Yidelekh . . . ” Following him, more voices joined in, “Yidelekh, yidelekh, tayere koshere yidelekh, shteyen oyf, shteyen oyf lavoydes haboyre uleslikhes .”

  The façade of the Remuh Synagogue, and the great gate of the ancient cemetery, locked at that hour, shone white through the darkness. And in a melody’s return, the sing-song of the Remuh Synagogue shamosh echoed once more, across the destruction, and after so many years, passing as he once did through the nighttime streets, knocking on the shutters and waking the sleeping—the dead and the living—for selichot.

  A CONVERSATION BETWEEN MICHAL GOVRIN AND JUDITH G. MILLER

  2009

  On coming to writing ...

  JM: I’d like to start by situating the stories and the essays in this collection within your work as an Israeli writer. Here’s my quick summary of your trajectory: You began writing poetry as a child in the 1960s and you still do. You direct theater; you have published two novels; you’re writing a third; you’ve compiled the memoirs of your father and you’re writing about your mother . . .

  MG: And I have an unpublished first novel.

  JM: Right! So where do your short stories fit within all this?

  MG: The short stories arrived before the novels, and they were my first venture into prose writing.They emerged from the poetry, but from the beginning I felt a very great urge to tell a story—to catch the world in prose. So as I didn’t yet feel like launching into a novel, the short stories imposed themselves, as much of my writing does.

  JM: When was this?

  MG: In the late 60s.That’s when I started the first short story I ever wrote. It’s not in this collection and I wrote it as though a movie script. It was a fantastic love story. And I think it shows something about the nature of my vision, even then. I see the world as visual narratives, and I think that also explains my need for theater, because in theater I can really see the characters. They appear on stage, as it were. My three modes: poetry, prose fiction, and theater all date from the same time, and they stem from the great influences and the great ambitions I’ve felt since adolescence.

  JM: I know that coming back to this first collection of short stories has been an interesting voyage for you, because you wrote these stories in the 1970s and 1980s, and you hadn’t really reread them until this summer when we started seriously revisiting the original translations into English from the Hebrew. How has this plunge back into the stories affected you?

  MG: At first, I was very afraid of rereading them.Without your giving me a hand in this Dante-esque descent into what seemed like who knows what, I wouldn’t have dared do it. I’ve been afraid that something from my old self would disturb me, that entering into the intimacy of the mind that created these stories would be a sacrilege, an attempt to deny time. But I must say that it’s been a very powerful experience. I’ve come to recognize and appreciate that young person who wrote them and I give tribute to what that person was at that time, that person who’s not me anymore. And then I also recognize my recurring themes, recurring needs, poetic needs—and I recognize the process. Suddenly to see life as a process, to see things that literally wrapped me up whole and that I took years to unravel . . . I now understand that what I theoretically believed about the power of adolescence is true.

  JM: You mean that in adolescence one’s deepest needs, one’s desires are already in place?

  MG: It’s a moment of big potential in a life story, of powerful urges and desire, of a vivid encounter with the world of experience and of culture, and the time when the individual personality emerges from a person’s heritage. Cracks and openings occur in your psyche and if you know how to respect and listen to them, they’ll carry you all of your life. My departure from Israel, my going to Paris in the early 70s answered both an unconscious and a conscious need to direct my life in a way that would allow me to listen to these voices, to these urges. Otherwise, they may not have been granted the space they needed.

  JM: This harks back to when we first met in Paris in 1972. Our work on these stories has also been a revelation to me, because in Paris we talked about ideas, we talked about theater; we went to the theater a lot together. We even did theater! But I was unaware of the kinds of things you were writing.You were very secretive about that.

  MG: Because I didn’t take my writing for granted.These short stories are also very moving for me because they represent my determination to write. I had a room to myself, a chambre de bonne—a very small room—I didn’t know at that time about Virginia Woolf’s notion. But the need to have a room for myself was strong. I also felt I had to camouflage it. Maybe out of insecurity, because who knows if you have the right to claim to be a writer in this world . . . Also, in terms of the subject matter, there was really the danger of exposing something scary about myself.

  JM: So it was easier for you—and for me, I think—to be the good students we’d always been. To talk about our dissertations, our graduate studies, our theater work, while you had this secret writing life.

  MG:Yes, but mind you my dissertation was on a parallel path to the short stories because it took me mo
re and more into Jewish mysticism. That was my way of learning what I felt was needed for my writing career. I used my dissertation to get to what was most important in what I wanted to be in life, which was not a research person, but a writing person.

  JM: Let’s talk about the essays in this volume. In them you speak of going back to Poland, although it’s not that you came from Poland but, rather, that’s where part of your family’s history is. In these journeys you discover your roots; you discover horrors, but also real communities, especially through art. How do we connect these essays to the stories?

  MG: I’m very happy about these essays being included in this volume because they represent something I mentioned a minute ago—the fomenting of a theme, a life theme that evolves through time.They add a dynamic aspect to the collection. For example, the first essay, “Journey to Poland,” was written in 1975, immediately upon returning from a journey that shattered something I had repressed. But I wrote the framing meditation around it in 1996 when my novel The Name was published in English. In the novel, I articulate through fiction this legacy of horror and community. “Facing Evil” and “Migrations of a Melody,” which close the volume, date from 2006 and 2007 when I finally dared to start writing openly my mother’s story. The essays document the ongoing process of how to face something that was denied, a trauma I couldn’t cope with. The urge to go to Poland, which came upon me while I was in Paris, was part of my meeting with Europe. Going to Europe, as I express in the first essay, was meant to be something totally different from what I actually discovered. Being in Paris, on the Rue de Rivoli, and seeing that this was a place where World War II actually took place, made that war—which was so far away looking at it from Israel and from our home where my mother’s silence blocked it—very real. Suddenly I couldn’t run away from it.