The Taste of Ashes

by Marci Shore

  You are an enemy of our present, but what frightens you most is our future. You know that the fulfillment of the six-year plan will make a great and strong socialist country of Poland. You don’t want every person in Poland to have work, bread, and education. You don’t want hundreds of new factories and hospitals, dozens of new universities and laboratories to arise on this land, you don’t want the works of the great writers of the world to reach the working masses in hundreds of thousands of copies, you don’t want the liberation of your own nation from the capitalist yoke.

  What do you want? What is your program? Let’s be honest. You want only one thing. You want war. A war more terrible than all past wars. On the new corpses of millions of children, women, and men, on the new ruins of cities today rebuilt, do you rest your hopes.

  I recognized the language: it was the language of the show trials of Milada Horáková and Rudolf Slánský.

  IN SEPTEMBER 1999 Gazeta Wyborcza published an open letter to Polish Jews written by an Israeli woman, a young philosophy professor named Shoshana Ronen who was living in Warsaw.

  Shoshana was unimpressed by Poles—“even those worldly and intelligent Poles”—who reacted with embarrassment when she introduced herself as a Jew. She was still less impressed by the confidential hotline for closet Jews listed alongside the confidential hotlines for alcoholics and AIDS patients.

  Above all, she was unimpressed by Warsaw’s “Jewish revival.” With condescension she pointed out the pathetic character of the “rediscovered Judaism” of people like Kostek and Staszek—who, in deciding to return to Jewishness, had chosen the most narrow-minded kind. Moreover, half of them were not even Jewish according to Jewish religious law, and that they would not be accepted by Orthodox Jews elsewhere rendered their constructed identities still more absurd—and hypocritical.

  The choice of Orthodoxy by “New Jews” in Poland points not only to a lack of understanding of the essence of Judaism and of what it means to be a Jew. It seems to me that it also testifies to a feeling of inferiority, to a lack of self-confidence.… I claim that it’s possible to be a Jew in many ways, and the way chosen by the “New Jews” in Poland is the worst of them all.

  Shoshana herself suffered from no inferiority complexes, and she advised Polish Jews to follow her lead: proposing secular Jewishness—liberal, tolerant, and pluralist—in the spirit of Spinoza, the Jewish Enlightenment philosophers who came after him, and modern luminaries like Freud, Einstein, and Kafka. It was the secular Jews who were the more secure, the more intelligent, the better Jews.

  “A nonreligious Jew,” wrote the young philosophy professor, “has a sufficiently strong Jewish identity to acknowledge that in a short story by Kafka there can be more wisdom than in several chapters of Talmud.”

  Kostek was angry. He responded in the same newspaper: today very few Jews remained in Poland. Those who were living in Poland were dispersed throughout the country, entirely assimilated, speaking neither Hebrew nor Yiddish, and unable to create their own distinctive culture. It was not anti-Semitism—although this remained present—but rather demography that was the main obstacle to rebuilding a Jewish community. In these circumstances only a religious identity gave this handful of Polish Jews an opportunity to engage immediately, in some sense fully, with the Jewish world. Only Judaism provided a framework for Jewish spiritual growth.

  It was a reasoned defense. But in the end Kostek could not bear Shoshana’s condescension and added:

  In the name of intellectual curiosity, I’m prepared to countenance the possibility that one story by Kafka, as she writes, can contain more wisdom than several chapters of Talmud. It’s difficult for me to believe, though, that in speaking of the Talmud, she knows what she’s talking about. And even about Kafka I’m beginning to have my doubts.

  Soon afterward, Rachel came with me to the Yiddish Theater, where a public debate had been announced between Kostek and Shoshana: “How to Be a Jew in Poland?”

  Staszek was there, and the aging leading actress of the Yiddish Theater. Most of the room was filled with elderly Polish Jews, the oldest generation of Holocaust survivors—the last to remember the large Orthodox community that for centuries before the war had made its home in Warsaw. The ones who stayed in Poland because they were committed to building socialism here. Atheists and communists. Old enough to be Shoshana’s grandparents, sharing no language with the young Israeli professor. People, in turn, about whom she could only have known very little.

  Yet they had come to cheer for Shoshana—Shoshana, who wrote about Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and was too young even to remember 1968, who spoke in English through an interpreter, who had hardly been thinking of these long-forgotten aged people who’d been devoted to building socialism when she wrote her open letter to Poland’s “New Jews.” Shoshana had been writing as a young secular Israeli. The audience members were expressing their support as elderly Polish Jewish socialists.

  A woman in her seventies introduced herself by saying that she had lived the first fourteen years of her life before the war.

  “To live through all of it and be normal—this is too much,” she said.

  Nobody applauded for Kostek.

  “These are my people,” he said to me a few days later, “and they hate me.”

  Now he tried to comfort himself with the thought that God would also like to be making the world with better Jews than He had.

  We were at a Jewish book festival that Rachel and Yonah had organized at Twarda 6. The historian Jan Gross had come from New York; he led me to a table at the café where Stephanie was waiting for him. She was my age, dressed all in black and without any pretentiousness radiating a Greenwich Village–art café hipness. She was glamorous without any makeup. And sensitive.

  STEPHANIE WAS SPENDING the year in Krakow. I saw her again in late October, when we met at a prewar-style inn named Klezmer Hois, on Szeroka Street in Kazimierz, once Krakow’s Jewish quarter. At Klezmer Hois there was a small, perfect black cat. He jumped on Stephanie’s lap, lying down on her black skirt, becoming invisible.

  I’d come to Krakow that day to see the poet Czesław Miłosz, and when we’d sat down in the living room of his Krakow apartment, I was immediately struck by his laughter, unusually deep.

  He was an encyclopedia, he told me. The only one left.

  Miłosz dismissed Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism. It had been after all, only “a short-lived fashion in Paris, for a while they started to wear black sweaters.”

  And the connection between the avant-garde and Marxism?

  “It would be a wonder if such a connection didn’t exist,” he told me, pointing out that in the interwar years all of New York was Marxist, either Stalinist or Trotskyite. Such was the zeitgeist.

  Of Adam Ważyk, the prewar avant-garde poet, Apollinaire’s translator-turned-“terroretician” of postwar socialist realism, Miłosz said, “We were good friends … even in the time of Stalinism Ważyk sort of winked at me.”

  And Antoni Słonimski, who had written the diatribe against him?

  Despite everything, Czesław Miłosz had remained good friends with Antoni Słonimski. In 1948, when Miłosz was serving as cultural attaché in Washington, D.C., Słonimski told him: “Listen to an old Jew, stay as long as possible abroad.” Three years later Miłosz defected. Then came the vituperative attack. Miłosz explained it to himself by the fact that Słonimski was “clearly out of his wits from fear.”

  “Then he came to Paris and we became friends again,” Miłosz said.

  Again that deep laughter.

  “Because I forgave him.”

  IT WAS ONLY, I thought, on November first, the Day of the Dead, that Warsaw came into its own. The city was never more consumed by its past, never more ensorcelled by death, never more itself. The cemeteries were beautiful: vast and aglow. Warsaw by candlelight.

  Now the days became ever shorter; the sun had barely risen before it began to set again. In Warsaw I walked with Stephanie along Nowy Świat, pa
using inside shops, looking at tall leather boots and black dresses. In one boutique Stephanie tried on a long silver coat. It was stunning, she was stunning. Suddenly here, with Stephanie’s bright eyes and black hair, I saw interwar Warsaw, with its cabaret glamour.

  Later we sat in my kitchen. Stephanie lived in Brooklyn. She knew Awiwa, the once-fourteen-year-old girl who had miraculously survived the war to join her father in New York. I showed her Chaim Finkelstein’s letters. I told her that after the war his daughter could not believe her father would love her, the only one who survived, and begged him to commit suicide with her, and Stephanie cried.

  DARIUSZ HAD BEEN in his midtwenties and already married when the revolution of 1989 had come. Now, a decade later, from time to time the same nightmare returned: the Iron Curtain had not yet fallen. Dariusz had been in the West, he had crossed the border back into the East, but he had forgotten his wife on the other side, and there was no longer any way to get back to her.

  Over coffee at a café in Mokotów, he told me, too, of his meeting several years earlier with an intelligence officer who wanted to recruit him. Dariusz was a good candidate: well educated with excellent English. But he refused.

  “You won’t tell anyone about this conversation,” the agent told him in closing.

  “On the contrary, I will tell everyone,” Dariusz answered.

  Now he told me, “If I had agreed to keep the secret, that would have been the first step.”

  DARIUSZ WAS FINISHING his book about March 1968. More and more I thought about the letters written to Adolf Berman by those “last children to be eaten.”

  A Polish journalist asked me if he could publish some excerpts from the letters I’d found in Adolf Berman’s Tel Aviv archive. I agreed. Among them was the letter from Aleksander Masiewicki telling the story of the day in March 1968 when he returned his Party card—the day that “meant self-annihilation, the negation of my entire life.”

  A week or so later I was asleep in my apartment when the phone rang. It was an elderly man who spoke in Polish but told me he was calling from New York. He was upset, and it took me some time to realize who he was: he was Aleksander Masiewicki. Adolf Berman had been dead for more than twenty years, and Aleksander Masiewicki had never suspected that his letters had survived. How was it that I, a stranger, had gotten them? And how could I have published them?

  He was right: How could I have?

  Later I sat drinking wine with Jan and Stephanie in the living room of the apartment with the high ceilings on Mokotowska Street. I showed Jan the letter Dariusz had given me, the letter Grzegorz Smolar had written to the Party general secretary Władysław Gomułka in 1968, pleading for the release of his sons. Should I send it to Alik Smolar? Neither decision could be innocent: Grzegorz Smolar had been dead for many years, and he had never meant for his children to know about the letter. I had no right to give the letter to his son—and yet no right to keep it from him either.

  Jan read the letter. He had known Alik Smolar for many years.

  “You should send it to Alik,” he said.

  “What does it say?” Stephanie asked.

  “It’s a letter written by a man in despair,” Jan said.

  The next day I photocopied the letter and posted it to the son who did not believe his father would have written such a letter.

  FIVE YEARS AFTER Oskar’s suicide, Amanda returned to Prague for her sixtieth birthday. I took the train from Warsaw to meet her, and together we went to a club to see the debut poetry reading from Vlasta’s daughter Diana’s punk feminist journal Bloody Mary. The journal had adopted an English slogan: “Only a dead fish flows with the stream.” Diana and her friends called themselves the Riot Girls, and Diana wore a turquoise dress, her hair dyed in streaks. No longer a child, she was coming into her own as a feminist. After Diana’s performance, Vlasta and I danced. She was glowing for her daughter.

  Before I left Prague, I promised Diana I would write an article about postcommunist Poland’s antiabortion laws for Bloody Mary. Not long before, in the Polish town of Lubliniec, the police had received an anonymous phone call accusing a doctor of having performed an abortion. Two policemen were sent to investigate. They burst into the doctor’s office and encountered there a gynecologist, an anesthesiologist, and a patient. They searched the office and confiscated surgical equipment and the remains of an aborted fetus. They took the patient for forced gynecological testing: the only way to prove her crime.

  It was a chilling story. A conservative senator explained to the press that the antiabortion law existed to protect women’s “natural dignity.”

  PAN SŁAWEK, THE kind and generous curator of the Władysław Broniewski Museum in Warsaw, had once wanted to be an actor. Today he had no real regrets, although he missed the costumes very much.

  “I felt splendid and apparently looked just right in a tail-coat, in the attire of the old Polish nobility—a kontusz, or an uhlan uniform from the Napoleonic era.”

  Instead Pan Sławek studied Polish philology and remained nostalgic for the bohemian atmosphere at the drama school.

  It was there at the museum that I found a poet’s letters to his friend Władysław Broniewski. The letters were written in the textile town of Łódź in the 1920s. The poet had returned to Poland from Ukraine during the Russian Civil War, bringing with him Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poetry. Władysław Broniewski’s friend from Łódź was a futurist and a proletarian poet, a manic-depressive and a graphomaniac, a self-absorbed individualist with a fatal attraction to revolution.

  “Revolution is a painful tragedy, a glorious fire, in which you must burn yourself, descend into savagery, into barbarism—in order to discover in yourself the simple joy of life,” he wrote.

  He went on:

  Joy gives me the conviction that I’m disposed with my entire being toward life, toward everything that matures, that fights for its right to existence, that is healthy, manly.… I know that I’m a true futurist-constructivist. That means: All the force of my decision is directed toward the future—and the present is only a joyful ladder toward the approaching future.

  This last letter was eight pages long, written in black ink, as if by a feather, in prewar calligraphy. Pan Sławek helped me to make out the words I could not read. He was taken by my enchantment. He had not spoken of the graphomaniac poet from Łódź in a long time, and he had much to say.

  Pan Sławek was a Catholic. One day he told me that, notwithstanding his Catholicism, he, too, had his own communist past. He had joined the Party in 1966, when he was twenty-three years old. Later—in 1968, again in the 1970s—he thought of returning his Party card … but he did not.

  “Why?” he asked me, or perhaps himself. We were the only ones in the room. “An instinct for self-preservation? Cowardice?”

  I wanted to reassure him, but I could think of nothing to say.

  Pan Sławek invited me to give a lecture in the house in Mokotów where Władysław Broniewski had once lived, at the museum dedicated to the poet who had died an alcoholic thirty-eight years before I’d arrived there. Pan Sławek used a new graphics program on his computer to print invitations with a red star and Lenin’s profile.

  I began with the author of “The Eternally Wandering Jew,” with Aleksander Wat’s feeling of unbearable guilt, his insistence, in the conversations he had with Czesław Miłosz in the 1960s, that his engagement with communism had been a pure, free choice. That he had chosen it himself, that there could be no excuses. The Marxist literary monthly Wat had edited between 1929 and 1931 had appeared for only twenty issues, two of which were confiscated. Yet for the rest of his life Aleksander Wat was haunted by those twenty issues, “the corpus delicti of my degradation, the history of my degradation in communism, by communism.”

  “It was in a communist prison that I came fully to my senses,” he told Czesław Miłosz, “and from then on, in prison, in exile, and in communist Poland, I never allowed myself to forget my basic duty—to pay, to pay for those two or three year
s of moral insanity. And I paid, and paid.”

  “I say to Aleksander Wat, yes, fine, I understand,” I said at one point during my lecture, “but tell me: Who managed to escape from those years with clean hands?”

  And yet, I told the audience, it was a rhetorical question, inspired by empathy, perhaps pity—because in the end I did believe that history was made by making choices.

  I spoke, too, about Władysław Broniewski’s letters to Janina written during their courtship, about how—despite the romanticism of those letters—he wrote crudely of the woman in Krakow who was then pregnant with his child. Broniewski insisted she have an illegal abortion. He wanted nothing to do with her.

  The audience was scandalized. How dare I?

  When I finished speaking, an older woman in the audience said to me, “You, a young person from another continent, you’re unable to understand Poland.”

  ON ŚWIĘTOKRZYSKA STREET, I stopped by the table of an outdoor book vendor. The birthday of Rachel and Yonah’s friend’s Star Wars–obsessed son was coming up, and I wanted to buy him a present. I chose a book with brightly colored illustrations of Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker. As I handed the bookseller the money, I saw that, alongside the children’s books, he was selling a variety of anti-Semitic literature, books about Jewish-Masonic conspiracies. I knew that I should leave, that I should put the book down, that I should refuse to patronize him. Yet I lacked the poise. The bookseller had already taken my money. I took the illustrated guide to the Star Wars characters and left quickly, but when I gave it to the little boy I felt as if I had touched something I should not have, as if I were giving him a tainted gift.

  Among the other Shabbat guests at Rachel and Yonah’s apartment one Star Wars–filled Saturday was an elderly woman who had been born in Warsaw in 1915, during the First World War. Now she lived in Belgium, and today she had returned to Warsaw for the first time in sixty-seven years. Every few sentences she would drift from Polish into French or Yiddish. The place where you were born, she believed, always drew you back. She told us how, in 1961, her husband had taken their savings and gone to Israel to see the trial of Adolf Eichmann, organizer of the Nazis’ “Final Solution.” Fifteen days later her husband returned, having been unable to bear watching Eichmann in the glass booth.