by Marci Shore
He was small, shorter and thinner than I’d imagined. And terribly sarcastic. His was the very same Yiddish sarcasm of Marek Edelman, an acerbic humor that resonated through the boundaries of any other language. I asked him about Adolf and Jakub Berman.
He had met their older brother Mieczysław first, Chaim Finkelstein told me. It must have been 1909 or 1910. They were friends from school, and Chaim Finkelstein began to come home with Mieczysław in the afternoons. Warsaw was still part of the Russian Empire then, and Chaim Finkelstein and the Berman boys spoke Russian together.
Chaim Finkelstein spoke slowly, repeating the phrases he thought important, ending his sentences with ellipses.
“They were not Orthodox, but they were not not-kosher either. They wouldn’t eat not-kosher products at home.” In any case, where the Berman family lived, in Warsaw’s Jewish quarter, there was no place to buy nonkosher products.
“The house where he grew up—Jakub—was a Jewish house, a typical Jewish house. The parents spoke Yiddish, the children spoke Polish, and Russian …”
Jakub’s mother was a nice-looking Jewish woman, Chaim Finkelstein told me, repeating “nice-looking” twice.
I wanted to know what had happened in the 1920s that had drawn all three brothers toward such different ideological choices. How did it happen that Mieczysław joined Poalei Zion–Right, while Adolf joined Poalei Zion–Left, and Jakub joined the Communist Party of Poland? How was it that Adolf became a Zionist and Jakub became a communist?
“You have no idea of what you’re talking about, you know? You have no idea about the situation,” Chaim Finkelstein answered me.
His wife, who was in her eighties, was in the kitchen preparing lunch. I had to warn her that I was a vegetarian.
“So you’re a vegetarian,” Chaim Finkelstein said to me.
I nodded.
“And you have brothers?”
“Yes.”
“And your brothers, are they vegetarians?”
“One is,” I told him, “but not the youngest one, the youngest one isn’t.”
“So there, you see?” Chaim Finkelstein said. “One brother—is a vegetarian. The other brother—is not a vegetarian. So—Jakub was a communist and Adolf was a Zionist!”
His wife, who had been listening, interrupted. “Chaim, you’re being stingy with explanation! Chaim, the girl came all the way to the Bronx, tell her! You can explain why Jakub became a communist. This is not so difficult … so answer it!”
She was sharp, animated, in her way philosophical.
“What can I tell you? What can I tell you?”
“My husband is very stingy in explanation.”
Chaim Finkelstein’s wife believed that the underlying cause was anti-Semitism—and its economic implications.
Chaim Finkelstein interrupted, now in Yiddish, “A shikse bay a rov ken oykh a shayle paskenen” (The rabbi’s shiksa servant knows the answers to the questions people come to ask the rabbi).
“The lack of possibility to live as normal persons,” she continued, “the background was lack of economic possibilities to make a living.” She began to explain: there was very much anti-Semitism, there were not enough Jewish places to work, and Jews had no possibilities to find work …
“You, lady, come here, don’t listen to her,” he said to me.
“I am sorry I interrupted, but he is so stingy with words!”
He turned to me. “You have the best intention. Perhaps the right question, too.” He paused. “What should I tell you? What should I tell you?”
Yet there was something he wanted to tell me.
“Very seldom can you meet a person so straightforward as he was,” Chaim Finkelstein said of Jakub Berman.
He wanted me to know something else: he wanted me to know that despite everything, Jakub Berman was a good Jew.
“To me he was Jakub. And I was a person who visited the house very often.”
Chaim Finkelstein was absolutely lucid, absolutely sharp. I was sure he remembered—perhaps not everything, but at least very much. But there was little he was willing to tell me. I could feel that it seemed pointless to him, for how could he communicate this world—his world that by now had no longer existed for over half a century—to a young person from a wholly other world?
“You already know too much,” he said, “too much and not enough, and nothing.”
The Dead and the Living
That August of 1999 I visited Amanda in the house in the woods where she now lived. An hour’s drive from Boston, it was a wonderful, impractical house with a large kitchen where we made pesto with basil Amanda had grown herself. There was a studio outside where she would paint … when she was ready to start painting again. In the time since I’d last seen her, Amanda’s hair had grown longer; now it nearly reached her shoulders.
“He was the love of my life,” Amanda said.
We were talking about Oskar. She’d made a resting place for his ashes next to a small pond with a large goldfish whom she’d named Rybička—“little fish” in Czech.
A few days later I flew back to Warsaw, where violence lingered on the streets. Through the window of a taxi I watched a gang of boys move toward an older man who was no longer sober and perhaps never had been. The taxi driver watched, too, as one of the boys struck the first blow. Sudden, rapid violence. We drove past them. The driver said nothing.
Yet even so, by 1999 Warsaw was no longer nearly so frightening as it had been just two years earlier. The city had changed much in two or three years: The power of the taxi mafias at the train station had been broken. Large, bright supermarkets had opened. Late at night near the train station, on Marszałkowska Street and Aleje Jeruzalimskie, middle-aged prostitutes still solicited customers. Yet they were no longer alone on the streets otherwise dominated by staggering drunks and gangs of men in Adidas track suits: along with new shops and department stores, new restaurants and cafés had appeared. They stayed open in the evenings, and the streets were no longer empty at night.
AT THE UNIVERSITY I went to see Professor Tomaszewski, the historian. We talked about the Berman brothers, and about Polish-Jewish history. Professor Tomaszewski told me a Polish-Jewish joke: “A Polish client goes to a Jewish tailor and orders a pair of pants. A week passes. Two weeks. The client hears nothing from the tailor, so he returns to the shop and says to the tailor, ‘Your God created the world in one week. And in two weeks you can’t manage to make a pair of trousers?’ And the tailor answers him: ‘Take a look at God’s world. And then at my trousers.’ ”
We took a walk to the university bookshop, where Professor Tomaszewski showed me the literary theorist Michał Głowiński’s new book, Czarne sezony (The Black Seasons). Had I read it yet?
“You must,” he said.
At home in the small apartment I now rented just off Plac Trzech Krzyży on Mokotowska Street—a beautiful, prewar apartment with high ceilings—I opened The Black Seasons. It was a memoir by a Polish literary scholar who had once been a Jewish child in the Warsaw Ghetto.
In my memories the color of the ghetto is the color of the paper that covered the corpses lying on the street before they were taken away. The corpses belonged to the permanent landscape, as the street was a place of death: not only sudden and unexpected death, but also slow death—from hunger, from disease, from every other possible cause. The season of great dying lasted in the ghetto without interruption. These bodies covered with sheets of paper never failed to make an intense impression on me, and that paper itself became for me one of death’s embodiments, one of its symbols. I’m unable to describe its distinctive color; afterward, I never again saw such paper, yet I think that the description “discolored” would be closest, most fitting. Precisely that color without color—neither white nor ash nor even gray—defines the colorscape of the ghetto and imparts its tone.
I was struck by the softness of the language, horror described gently.
In one scene Michał sat in the attic where he, his mother, and hi
s aunt were hiding on the “Aryan Side.” A Polish blackmailer found them, and Michał waited to see if they would find the money to buy their lives or if the man would turn them in to the Gestapo. When his aunt set out in search of ransom, Michał, a young boy, remained in the attic with the blackmailer—who suggested they play a game of chess while they waited. And so they did. The game was never completed: Michał’s aunt returned. She had found, somehow, just barely enough money.
In another chapter a second aunt left young Michał alone in a pastry shop while she went in search of a telephone. The women in the pastry shop grew suspicious; their gazes fixated on the young boy, they suspected he was a Jew. They came closer, they began to examine him, to ask him questions. Among themselves they whispered, “We have to let the police know.”
It was, despite itself, a coming-out-of-the-closet book: coming out of the closet as a Polish Jew.
Later I met the book’s author at his office at the Academy of Sciences.
“In my book, I say nothing about relations between Poles and Jews,” he said.
“But of course the whole book is about that,” he added after a moment.
Later we spoke about the chapter set in the pastry shop. He was uneasy about such scenes being taken out of context—that is, used in English translation as evidence of Polish anti-Semitism. After all, he was a Pole, too. And in the end he, a Jewish child, was saved by Poles: the magnificent Irena Sendlerowa, Władysław Bartoszewski’s and Adolf Berman’s coconspirator in Żegota, the Council for Aid to the Jews, arranged for his trip to a place called Turkowice. And in that distant, impoverished convent, a priest and many nuns risked their own lives to save his.
Michał Głowiński spent a long time in Turkowice. Months after the Red Army had liberated the area from German occupation, Michał’s Jewish mother found him there. At a loss as to how to thank the nuns for saving her son’s life, she consented to his baptism. Yet unlike Bogna and her friends, baptized in the 1980s in very different circumstances, Michał Głowiński did not think of his baptism as a violation—on the contrary: it was something he had desired very much at the time. While he did not remain a Catholic, he had no regrets—the religious feelings he developed in Turkowice were real: in those years that church, that convent, was his sanctuary. He was protected there from the Germans.
AT THE JEWISH community center on Twarda 6 I learned that Bogna, the young Yiddishist and diaspora nationalist so filled with hostility toward Zionists, had gone to Israel and not come back.
Others, though, had arrived. The Lauder Foundation, hoping to re-invigorate Jewish life in Poland, sent to Warsaw a young American couple in their twenties: Rachel and Yonah were baalei teshuva—born-again Jews. Both had come from secular Jewish homes, and both had become devoutly observant while in graduate school at Oxford. They’d married in California and moved to Jerusalem. Now they were in Warsaw with their enchanting six-month-old baby.
Rachel had gone to university in the Pacific coast town of Santa Cruz, on a beautiful wooded campus on a hill. The university was known for the presence of the revolutionary Angela Davis, Bobby Seale’s fellow Black Panther activist, and for the legacy of the counterculture and its colorful movements: animal rights and environmentalism, feminism and gay liberation, civil rights and pacifism. Rachel had embraced feminism.
Now she wore only long skirts, covered her hair with a wig, and devoted every Friday to preparing Shabbat meals for some two dozen guests.
I began to spend Saturdays at Rachel and Yonah’s apartment, sitting through long, slow lunches and playing with the baby. A handful of Rachel and Yonah’s Warsaw friends were almost always there as well, including a man in his late twenties, a young father who was smart and sarcastic. Often he came with his five-year-old son, who was obsessed by Star Wars, which had recently appeared in Polish.
“Niech Moc będzie z tobą!” the little boy declared, raising his fist into the air. May the Force be with you!
“Niech Moc będzie z tobą!” I answered.
“That’s not so bad, but it’s not exactly it.” He was referring to my intonation.
One day Rachel asked me if I would go with her to church. It was a liberal church, in the northern district of Żoliborz, where a tolerant priest had agreed to Staszek Krajewski’s project: a Jewish-Christian ecumenical celebration of Simchas Torah—the festival celebrating the conclusion of the past year’s reading of the Torah and the beginning of the next year’s reading. Rachel was reluctant to go alone.
After the service there was a reception. I stayed downstairs among the pews, waiting for Rachel. There the priest found me. He was young and gentle and asked me: Was I here as a Christian or a Jew?
“I’m not a believer,” I told him, “only a friend of Rachel.”
He introduced himself, and guided me upstairs to the reception. I told him that until fairly recently Rachel had been secular as well.
“I wasn’t religious either,” he told me.
“And so … was it that one day, suddenly …?”
“No, not one day. But perhaps in the course of one month.”
He was speaking softly now, in the corner of the room, where the other parishioners could not hear him. Even today, even now, it was still difficult for him to believe in God, he admitted.
I was grateful to him for saying this to me, an American, a stranger, a nonbeliever.
POLAND HAD BEEN independent for just days when on 29 November 1918, at nine in the evening, Antoni Słonimski was among the handful of young poets who held their debut poetry reading at a Warsaw café. That night was a dazzling success.
“A pleiad of talent one encounters once in a hundred years,” Aleksander Wat wrote many decades later.
This group of five poets, who named themselves Skamander, was unique in those years. It was, Adam Ważyk later wrote, “the only formation in Europe of that time that … lit the lantern of the heart.”
Of the Skamander poets Antoni Słonimski was the most sardonic. Acerbic and irreverent, he held nothing sacred. He was not only a lyrical poet but also the Warsaw intelligentsia’s favorite satirist. In his weekly feuilletons published in a literary newspaper he spared neither Right nor Left.
In 1936 Antoni Słonimski devoted a column to a right-wing, anti-Semitic publicist: “Mr. Piasecki claims that Jews invented communism. If one considers the fact that Jews invented capitalism as well, it could seem that in relation to us their accounts are all squared. We could likewise add that Jews also invented Christianity, but let’s not complicate Mr. Piasecki’s ideological situation, which is already so complicated as it is.”
On April Fools’ Day of 1937, Słonimski published a full-page fictitious report describing Stalin’s coronation as “emperor of the proletariat, king of the bourgeoisie, and the grand prince of technical experts and the intelligentsia.”
Vacillating between the lyricism of the Skamander poets and the radicalism of the futurist poets was a young man named Władysław Broniewski, whose room was adorned with ancestral daggers. I learned that during the gray Polish winter of 1922, this young poet was dreaming of a tempestuous romance with a demonic woman. Instead he fell in love with a pretty girl named Janina.
Broniewski lived then among the artistic elite of prewar Warsaw. Evenings he would spend with a small group of writers who gathered on the upper floor of a café called Ziemiańska. The young poets were, for the most part, Poles and cosmopolitans, like Antoni Słonimski, “non-Jewish Jews.” Władysław Broniewski was an exception, an ethnic Pole, and among the poets most heir to the legacy of nineteenth-century romanticism. It was Broniewski who came out of Polish leader Marshal Józef Piłsudski’s military Legions, who had fought against the Soviets in his youth—before he became a proletarian poet. For Janina he composed florid love letters in the language of epic novels. Janina loved him as well, as she would for her entire life. Her deepest love, though, would be for Adolf Berman and Michał Mirski’s friend Wanda Wasilewska, who was a tall woman with a large voice in a man’
s world.
Władysław Broniewski, the romantic, fell in love first with independent Poland, then with revolutionary Russia. He was a poet and a soldier who could not live without passion, a man of extraordinary vanity who longed to sacrifice himself to a greater cause.
Władysław Broniewski’s friend Antoni Słonimski responded to the existential imperatives of the interwar years very differently: Słonimski, a lyrical poet, never lost his acerbic wit. As Hitler rose to power to Warsaw’s west, and Stalin to its east, Słonimski mocked them both. He harbored no illusions: unlike so many of his friends, he was not fooled by the Moscow show trials. In the 1930s, Słonimski’s was among the very last sober minds in Eastern Europe—if not in Europe as a whole.
In September 1939, when the Nazis came, Władysław Broniewski went east, Antoni Słonimski west. The following years the poet with the acerbic wit spent in England. There the war—and the end of Polish Jewry—broke him. When after the war he returned to the city that was his one great love, he embraced the Stalinist ethos. And when in 1951 the poet Czesław Miłosz defected from communist Poland, Słonimski addressed to him a vicious open letter:
You are an enemy of workers, peasants, and the intelligentsia, who for the first time in the history of our country have stood in battle to cast off the harm and exploitation of the capitalist system. You are an enemy of our workers’ and peasants’ sons, who fill the schools of higher education, who crave learning and work, you are the enemy of the architects and bricklayers who are rebuilding the capital, of engineers who are working out plans for new factories, of Party workers who are fighting against ignorance.… Each Polish success, each stage victoriously overcome, each new factory, new collective, each good book by a Polish writer evokes your hatred. You feel joy at every adversity that the ravaged country encounters on the path to socialism.
Antoni Słonimski, the satirist who in 1937 had harbored no illusions about Stalin, had now mastered Stalinist discourse: