by Marci Shore
However well intentioned, it had felt like the Theater of Grotesque Kitsch. A farce. The director had once been a communist and was now an old man.
“Was he a believer?” I now asked Adam, one of his friends.
“He believes in that which is to his advantage,” Adam answered.
He smiled gently. He himself was neither an actor nor a director, but rather the editor of a publication already long an archaism, its tiny readership literally dying by the day.
As a child, Adam had spent the war years fleeing east with his family. The winter in Siberia was beautiful, he told me.
He felt some resentment toward Kostek and Staszek, whom he understood to be the new “court Jews,” whose wives had converted to Judaism, who spoke American English but could not read the Yiddish pages of his magazine, who found it curious that he even bothered to publish in Yiddish anymore. Adam was soft-spoken and generous with his time—more than that, he seemed happy to talk. He was sensitive to the fact that Kostek and Staszek had become the spokespeople for the Jewish community. They monopolized this role—not by aggression but by English. Adam’s own trilingualism in Polish, Yiddish, and Russian was no longer of very much importance in this new, postcommunist world.
Adam spoke to me about the postwar years. It had been a difficult time: Poland was in the midst of a civil war, Jewish survivors were killed by bandits. Yet Adam insisted on a distinction: while postwar Polish society was anti-Semitic, the communist government was not. Under the communists, there was a space for Jewish culture, it only had to be a secular Jewish culture. As for Michał Mirski, Grzegorz Smolar, and Szymon Zachariasz, the communist representatives in the postwar Central Committee of Jews in Poland—the contribution they had made to postwar Jewish culture was very real.
It would be a mistake, Adam believed, to describe the Stalinist years as a negative time for Jewish culture. After all, the Yiddish Theater had been much better then.
Adam’s own father was a communist who before the war had spent seven years in Polish prison. Adam himself had never joined the Party, but he understood his father’s choice—after all, at the time there was no choice.
“If the Jews accepted the communists,” Adam said, “it was only because the communists were the only ones who accepted us.”
“Staszek believes the Jews—himself, too—should in some sense apologize—for communism …,” I began.
“Let him do so in his own name,” Adam said.
Later, at a café in Mokotów, I met Dariusz, the historian who had described the animosity between the Zionist Ignacy Schwarzbart and the Bundist Szmuel Zygielbojm, the only two Jewish representatives to the National Council of the Polish government in exile during the war.
Dariusz and I talked more about Adolf and Jakub Berman, about Michał Mirski, Grzegorz Smolar, and Szymon Zachariasz. Dariusz was excited: he—a Polish Catholic—could never tell this story, this tragic story of the Polish-Jewish communists, for he would be branded a Polish anti-Semite. But I could.
Marxism, Dariusz now suggested, was for these figures a post-Jewish alienation.
That came to an end in 1968, of course. Dariusz was working on a book about the so-called anti-Zionist campaign. A revolution always devoured its children, and March 1968, Dariusz said, was the story of the last children to be eaten.
Dariusz told me about a letter he’d found in the archives. It was a letter written by Grzegorz Smolar, the communist who in 1949 had taken Adolf Berman’s place as chairman of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland. Grzegorz Smolar was a professional revolutionary, a communist since the age of fifteen who before the Second World War had spent five years in Polish prison; his wife had spent nine. In 1949, the year when they deposed Adolf Berman from the chairmanship of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland, Grzegorz Smolar and Szymon Zachariasz were campaigning to stop immigration to Israel. A year or so later, the door was closed: Jews could no longer leave Poland. Dariusz believed that Grzegorz Smolar had wanted emigration cut off so as not to lose his constituency.
Then, in the wake of March 1968, Grzegorz Smolar—a devoted communist for some half century—was removed as the editor of the newspaper he himself had co-founded and was cast out of the Party. Now it was his children who were in Polish prison for their participation in student protests against censorship. It was then that Smolar wrote a pleading letter to the Party general secretary Władysław Gomułka. He bargained: he was willing to leave Poland and never return if only Gomułka would free his sons.
“I am writing at a moment,” Grzegorz Smolar told Władysław Gomułka, “when the despair that has overtaken me has begun to turn into desperation.”
Grzegorz Smolar’s whole life had been devoted to the cause of the Party: he had been in Polish prison in the 1930s; had taken part in armed battle in defense of the Bolshevik Revolution; had helped to create some seven partisan divisions during the Second World War; had organized the Bolshevik underground in Minsk during the German occupation. For twenty years he had been the editor of the best Yiddish-language communist newspaper; he was also the author of the only postwar book in Yiddish dedicated to the battle against Jewish nationalism. Now he stood accused of Zionism by the Party to which he had devoted his life. He had only his children left, two boys whom he had tried to raise as honest citizens and ideologically committed communists—and who now, together with his daughter-in-law, the mother of a three-year-old child, faced prison sentences. In despair, Grzegorz Smolar offered himself in exchange for his children: “Perhaps, as has been suggested to me by various parties, the situation would undergo a fundamental change if I were to express a desire to leave the country. In light of the situation that has developed, I declare this: If soliciting permission to leave the country can save my imprisoned children, I am ready to carry this out.”
The following year his two sons were released from prison. The older son tried to persuade his father to leave Poland. In the end, Grzegorz Smolar did.
In the summer of 1998 I met the older son. After being released from Polish prison, Alik Smolar had gone to Bologne, then to Paris, where he found he had little in common with his contemporaries, veterans of 1968 in Western Europe. Now, after two decades in France, Alik Smolar commuted between Paris and Warsaw. In the years since his release from prison in 1969, he had become an eminent political scientist and the chairman of a foundation established by George Soros to support democratic civil society.
Alik spoke quickly and brusquely—but, I sensed, quite honestly as well. He told me that as a child, he, too, had been a good communist.
Alik’s father had been devoted to the communist cause throughout his entire life. This was true even though he feared Stalin. During the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, Grzegorz Smolar, like so many other Polish communists, was summoned to Moscow. He remained in Poland only because he was then in Polish prison. Otherwise Alik believed his father would have followed the Party’s orders and gone to Moscow—even knowing what awaited him there: almost certain execution. The 1930s were the years of the Terror, the years when Stalin had more than a hundred thousand people shot as Polish spies, including almost all of the leading Polish communists.
“I think,” Alik said to me of his father, “that he knew about Stalin very early.”
Looking back on his life in his old age, Alik’s father had been happiest with his biography during the war years—heroic years when he’d organized the Jewish resistance in Minsk, when he’d worked with the anti-Nazi Belarusian resistance to save many lives. It was a gruesome war, yet nonetheless the most satisfying chapter of his life, when the divisions between good and evil were clear.
And as for Grzegorz Smolar’s postwar work in the Central Committee of Jews in Poland—his taking the place of the ousted Adolf Berman—this was work done, Alik’s father had believed, to save Jewish life in postwar Poland. The communists who worked “on the Jewish street” believed that Jewish life would continue in Poland, that a secular Jewish culture was compatible with communism.
In the end, Alik said, his father had left Poland because he was a professional Jew in a country where there were no longer Jews. By then his father understood that his generation had been corrupted by the times. Emigrating to Israel was a moral and intellectual defeat.
At the end of his father’s life, Alik visited him in a hospital there. It was then that the father told his son that they were very similar: for although Alik had gone to prison for protesting the very system his father had devoted his life to building, they were both devoted to an important cause.
My questions were invasive: What had his relationship with his father been like?
Alik respected his father and his father’s courage. Yet he—much like Pani Ryszarda—had also understood from a young age that he was the son of a professional revolutionary whose primary concern was not his family and who did not know how to deal with his children.
I told Alik about the letter Dariusz had found. Alik was dismissive: he knew his father. His father would never have written such a letter.
IT WAS SUMMER in Warsaw. I was talking to a literary scholar named Jacek at an outdoor café on Krakowskie Przedmieście.
Jacek was working on a book about the Warsaw Ghetto. He told me of a famous Polish actress, who was now an elderly woman. In his research he had come across newspapers from the ghetto and realized that as a very young woman this actress had performed there, in the cabaret in the ghetto. He went to visit her then, and she agreed to speak to him, but only if he promised to keep her secret. Jacek wanted to know: Why should it be a secret? After all, she was a celebrated Polish actress at the end of a splendid career; nothing could happen to her now. And she explained: she had two grandsons, two boys who would continue to live in Poland. She did not want to burden them with a Jewish grandmother.
Jacek himself was not a Jew. He had grown up, though, in Muranów, in the space that was once the ghetto, on the street named to honor the fallen hero of the ghetto uprising Mordechai Anielewicz. From his window, Jacek could see the Jewish cemetery, less than a mile in the distance. He used to go for walks there; when he was young it was an act of daring to walk through the graveyard at night. It was a fantastic place, as if in a Gothic novel: a quiet wildness crowded with slanted tombstones, overgrown by weeds, nearly reclaimed by forest.
Once, some fifteen years ago, when Jacek was no longer a child, he was walking in the cemetery with the woman who would become his wife. Suddenly they encountered, walking toward them, an older man, Jacek’s professor from the university. Jacek was wearing a hat, not a yarmulke but a hat, because it was a Jewish cemetery, and the other man, his university professor, was also wearing a hat, a multicolored beret. At once upon meeting each other they begin to explain, to reassure each other: of course they were not Jews, they were simply wearing hats …
“Why?” Jacek asked me over the wobbly plastic table.
“Only in Poland,” he answered himself.
WHEN I TOOK the train from Warsaw to Bratislava, I remembered that I used to love the trains. Now they filled me with anxiety. I had read too much about the trains, the trains that carried Prague’s Jews to Auschwitz, the trains that carried Warsaw’s Jews to Treblinka, the trains that carried some three hundred thousand Poles—including many Polish Jews—to Soviet labor camps in Kazakhstan and Siberia.
In Bratislava it was overcast. At a conference organized by Czechoslovak émigrés I spoke about Milada Horáková’s show trial, and the letters she’d written before her execution. I continued to think about the person who had saved those letters, who had read them perhaps, and who had marked them “for the archives.” This was Lenin’s legacy: the perversity of preservation.
The audience had other preoccupations, though. In my talk I mentioned that during the trial several thousand petitions had been sent to the Ministry of Justice demanding the immediate execution of the accused.
“It makes you wonder what kind of nation you belong to,” said one Czech man, pained.
A woman in the audience told me how, in the 1950s, schoolchildren were asked by their teachers to draw pictures of the gallows and to pencil in the figures.
Several other people wanted to know if I had found the people who had written those letters to the newspapers, demanding Milada Horáková’s execution. They wanted to know if the letter writers were still alive. There was a subtle rage in the room, a demand for accounting.
MY OLD FRIEND Miloš, no longer a Slovak parliamentarian, had become an entrepreneur—although exactly what he sold was unclear. He picked me up that evening at the conference hotel in an ostentatiously expensive car. I’d called him on his cell phone when I arrived in Bratislava. Postcommunist Eastern Europe was a land of leapfrog technology: a transition directly from phonelessness to cellular phones. We had drinks at an expensive restaurant. The waitress, when Miloš opened his wallet to pay her, gasped when she saw all the bills.
Miloš was among the winners of the transition—unlike my former landlady, Paní Prokopová in Prague. A few months earlier she had written to me of the current political scandals. The newspapers were full of very unpleasant things: millions of crowns in bank loans had not been repaid, and now the banks were on the verge of collapse. Prices of basic goods had become a horror. The doctors were on strike.
“Politics,” she wrote, “is a horrible thing.”
From Bratislava I went to Prague, again by train. Now a widow, Paní Prokopová’s pastimes were few: She made jam, she visited her husband’s grave at the cemetery. In the summer, she lived in her cottage in the country, tending her garden. Klaudie, though, was in Prague. She had passed her medical school exams and was searching for work. She remained poor and in debt, caring for her sister’s children.
The brother-in-law I had found so arrogant was not only distasteful but also violent. He could frighten his wife into submission but not Klaudie. She spoke back to him, until one day he struck her too. Unlike her sister, though, Klaudie responded not with fear but with fury.
“This will cost you dearly,” she told him.
And it was true: it was Klaudie who guided her sister through the divorce trial.
It was summer and Paní Prokopová was away at her cottage. Klaudie and I were sitting alone in Paní Prokopová’s living room, far from any walls. Klaudie grew nervous when we sat too close to walls, for someone could be listening. Nearly a decade had passed since communism had ended, yet some anxieties could not be uneasily unlearned.
“Did you testify at the trial?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she said.
“How was it?”
Klaudie’s eyes lit up. It was a triumphant story: she had testified not only as the battered wife’s sister but also as a physician. I saw then that it was her strength that had carried this divorce. There was something marvelous about her.
But the divorce lawyer could not perform miracles. Klaudie’s sister was granted the divorce, but she could not force her now former husband to leave the apartment they shared, and she herself had nowhere else to go. And so they continued to cohabitate. The physical violence, however, did end. The lawyer warned Klaudie’s former brother-in-law that the woman who had once been his wife now legally bore no relationship to him: now, if he hit her, it would be an ordinary assault. He would go to prison.
SOON AFTER I returned to Warsaw from Prague, I left again for Berlin, where the old Jewish graveyard was now a small park. Dogs were running about; the only gravestone was a reconstructed one for the eighteenth-century philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, the founder of the Jewish Enlightenment who had insisted on the compatibility between reason and God. I thought of what Marek Edelman had said of Adolf Berman: “You can’t dance at two weddings with one tukhes.”
In the tiny café by the synagogue the only picture on the walls was a dark painting of a Hasidic Jew. Nearby, in a café named Mendelssohn, a new generation paid homage to the dead with cappuccino.
The street where the synagogue had once been was now lined with the most fashionable caf
és. After midnight prostitutes came to move among the crowds of café-goers. I thought of Arnošt Lustig’s Tanga: “There isn’t a single woman in the world who wouldn’t like to be a whore for at least an hour a day …”
My friend Fabian had grown up in West Berlin, on the good side of the wall, on that Western island in the midst of the East. His mother was a Berlin politician, and Fabian could not escape the guilt of his aristocratic German heritage. He took me to a cemetery with gravestones of German soldiers fallen in the Second World War. He pointed to the gold paint on the inscriptions: the paint was new. Inside the graveyards Germans fallen in the two very different world wars mingled. Fabian felt disgusted. I wanted to say something to make him feel less ashamed, but I could think of nothing.
In a few days it would be the thirtieth anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Prague.
In the spacious, imperial Café Eisenstein in Berlin, Fabian’s girlfriend told me of the city’s plans for a new Holocaust memorial: a stone maze in which visitors could literally become lost. The newspapers were saying it would become merely a dropbox for wreaths.
“Can you imagine,” Fabian said, “erecting an enormous monument in the center of your capital to commemorate the worst thing your country ever did?”
“Aestheticizing the Holocaust,” his girlfriend said. She was against it.
Broken Families
Adolf Berman had spent the last decades of his life in Israel. It was from Tel Aviv that in 1956 he had written the nostalgic letter to Michał Mirski, reminding him of their visits together to the then-socialist activist Wanda Wasilewska and the Bundist leader Wiktor Alter. Now I wanted to find the other half of Adolf Berman’s correspondence with Michał Mirski.
In Tel Aviv I met Adolf Berman’s son, who was born in Poland and was now Israeli and who spoke to me in American English. And like more than one child of devoted Marxists, Adolf and Basia’s son had grown up to become a psychoanalyst. Like his father, Emanuel Berman was an engagé intellectual with deep moral convictions. He was not a dreamer, though. While the communists strove to create a “New Man” and the Zionists a “New Jew,” Emanuel Berman criticized the idea of the “purified New Person” as a “utopian fantasy,” liable to backfire, to claim victims, not at all innocuous.