The Taste of Ashes

by Marci Shore

  For some time we watched the musicians; then we walked to Klezmer Hois, where two summers earlier Tim and I had been married. It was a warm evening; we sat down at a table outside and ordered vodka.

  “I hate ‘small talk,’ ” Stefan M. began, then added, “In Polish we don’t have such an expression, because we don’t have this phenomenon.”

  Henry Dasko had felt similarly about Americans and our lightness of being. “Americans are a nation of a cheery and carefree psyche,” Henry had once written. “Not for them is the Slavic question ‘how to live,’ German Angst, French existentialism.”

  And so instead of small talk Stefan M. told us a story: In 1980, when he was a young scholar still in his twenties, he participated in an academic exchange with Humboldt University in Berlin. The university assigned him a spacious, comfortable room all to himself. Then, after a short time, a roommate appeared, a Polish student from the University of Lublin. The two young men quickly became friendly.

  “In the evenings,” Stefan told us, “we would go out to pick up girls together. I was somewhat bolder, and we would go together.”

  After two months, it was time for the roommate from Lublin to return to Poland. Stefan went along to the train station and helped him with his luggage. Only when Stefan returned to the room they’d shared did he notice that his friend had forgotten his student identification card.

  Stefan picked it up, and when he returned to Poland, he telephoned the University of Lublin and asked for his former roommate’s address so that he could return the student identification card.

  “My dear,” the university secretary answered him, “there is no such student, nor has there ever been.”

  Stefan realized then that in this way—by leaving behind the card provided to him, no doubt, by the secret police—his friend was trying to tell him who he was.

  THE TRAUMA OF encounters with the secret police lingered long after communism’s fall. Following various difficulties, Todd James, who had once been Jarmila and who had once been a Catholic, succeeded in graduating from a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. Afterward he returned to Vermont. In January of 2001 he wrote to me,

  Life is better when you come home from school and someone is there. For four and a half years now I’ve had Siamese cats, and life with the cats is much better. I take them everywhere with me. The male cat is named Ray and the female Joy.… I have several friends in Burlington, where I go to synagogue. There is a small Hasidic community and the people are very nice.

  Todd James moved then to Boston, where he registered as an external student at Harvard and began taking courses to prepare for medical school entrance exams. He was concerned about calculus—but also certain that he could learn anything if only he put his mind to it.

  That first semester at Harvard went well. In June he wrote proudly that he had gotten As on his exams and was now preparing for the MCAT. He spent all his time in the library, studying—while at home he continued to have his cats for company. He attached their photographs.

  That August of 2001 Todd James came to California to visit friends, and we met for lunch. By then it had been several years since we’d seen each other. It was a warm visit but an awkward one. He was a Jew now, and unambiguously a man, and I had always—despite all gender ambiguity—related to him as if he were a woman. I felt resistant to opening myself to this man the way I had to Jarmila.

  In the years that followed I seldom heard from Todd James. I knew only that he was still taking courses at Harvard.

  Then one day in January 2007, some six and a half years after September 11 and the inauguration of President Bush’s war on terror, I got a phone call from a lawyer in Massachusetts. Todd James, the lawyer told me, had been arrested. She would not say exactly why; she only alluded to some “unfortunately misinterpreted comments about Al Qaeda” that Todd James had made at a mosque near Boston. She was certain the judge would dismiss these unfortunately misinterpreted comments, yet now there was another problem: years before, Todd James had applied for political asylum. The case had dragged on—or perhaps had been ignored, or forgotten. Now, though, the American government had remembered. Todd James was in detention, facing deportation to the Czech Republic. His attorney was collecting supporting documentation for the asylum case, and Todd James had given her my name.

  “At a mosque?” I asked. “I thought that Todd James was an Orthodox Jew; he converted from Catholicism.”

  “He’s a Muslim now,” the lawyer answered.

  I talked to her about Czechoslovakia. It was very possible, I explained, to document Jarmila’s participation in the anticommunist opposition, her role in the Velvet Revolution, likely even her experience of police persecution during the 1980s. It would almost certainly, though, be impossible to prove that returning to the Czech Republic would pose any physical danger. It could be psychologically traumatic, of course, but no credible source in 2007 would be willing to testify to the likelihood that the agents who had interrogated Jarmila in the 1980s would now be seeking revenge. On the contrary: in all likelihood those former secret policemen would themselves now very much like to forget those times.

  “Prague is a beautiful city,” I told the lawyer. “The communists are absolutely no danger any longer. Please try to persuade Todd James to go back.”

  The lawyer promised she would tell him what I’d said about Prague. In the meantime, though, she would be grateful if I were to write a letter supporting the claim of past persecution and send it to her together with any relevant documents.

  I agreed. I enclosed the two long letters Todd James had sent me in 1996. One of them, I told the attorney, alluded to some kind of recruitment, or at least close involvement, with American diplomacy and the American military, as well as the CIA and Radio Free Europe. The letter expressed, too, Todd James’s subsequent disillusionment with American dignitaries and military generals.

  A few weeks later an Immigration and Naturalization Service prosecutor called me at my office. She had received a copy of the letter I’d written at the request of Todd James’s lawyer. Could I prove everything in it? Could I begin by proving that I was who I claimed to be? Had I in fact met Todd James at a mental hospital? Did I have a history of mental illness?

  I tried to reason with her: she had called me at my office, on a Yale University telephone number. She could look it up on the university website to confirm that. She could look up my profile as well: it was on the history department faculty page.

  The prosecutor was uninterested in that. She was unable to locate the Yale University website at all, she told me. In any case, the burden of proof was on me: Could I prove my own identity? The existence of samizdat? Charter 77? The Helsinki Accords? Communist Czechoslovakia? How was she to know this was not all the invention of a delusional personality?

  I began to tell her about the origins of samizdat literature in Russia and the development of underground publishing in the communist era, the philosophy of “antipolitics,” the dissidents’ adoption—following the 1975 Helsinki Accords—of a discourse of human rights.

  The prosecutor cut me off: she wasn’t interested in an explanation, she was interested in proof.

  I mentioned the documents I’d included with my letter, but she was uninterested in documents written in a language she was unable to read—and which in any case could have been forged. Could I prove I had not met Todd James in a mental hospital?

  I was in tears when I hung up the phone. Unlike Jarmila, I never would have lasted under interrogation.

  DURING THE YEAR I’d spent in Vienna, Jan Gross had sent me a draft of his new manuscript titled Fear. It was, in some way, a sequel to Neighbors—a long, reflective essay on postwar anti-Semitic violence, assaults against Jewish survivors returning to Poland from the Soviet interior and from the Nazi camps. The central narrative drama was a pogrom that had taken place in 1946, in the small city of Kielce. It began with the false accusation that Jews had kidnapped a Christian child. So it emerged that in Polan
d in 1946 the premodern myth of blood libel—the belief that Jews used the blood of Christian children to make Passover matzoth—remained potent.

  On 4 July 1946 forty-two people were killed in Kielce. One pregnant woman survived but lost the child she was carrying when her assaulters pierced her uterus. An elderly woman was stoned to death. One man, while being chased by his assailants, dropped his newborn. The baby was shot in the head at once. Some victims knew their murderers personally. After all, they were their neighbors.

  It was not the first thing Jan had written in recent years that was part history, part moral reflection, part self-criticism. Why—Jan wanted to know—hadn’t the Polish intelligentsia, then and since then, seen this? Why hadn’t Polish intellectuals—the “conscience of the nation”—done something, said something? Why had it taken himself so many years to confront these questions?

  For Jan the answer, at least in part, was that so many past and present Polish intellectuals—himself among them—had been “blinded by social distance.”

  It was a persuasive argument. I thought about Aleksander Wat, descended from rabbis, who had barely experienced anti-Semitism in either prewar or postwar Poland. I thought about people like Władysław Broniewski and Wanda Wasilewska, Polish intellectuals who, while not Jews themselves, belonged to a milieu that included so many assimilated Jews—they saw little anti-Semitism as well. Aleksander Wat could imagine his friends denouncing him to the NKVD but not accusing him of ritual murder.

  When, at the end of the Second World War, the communist poet Władysław Broniewski found himself in Jerusalem, he was adopted by the Polish Jewish intelligentsia there. He seemed to take this as a matter of course—like the fact that he had something to read from at his own poetry readings because Polish Jewish emígrés to Palestine had brought his books with them to Jerusalem.

  Władysław Broniewski’s granddaughter, Pani Ewa, who now lived in Greece, had married a Polish Jew in the 1960s. She had been raised by the dogmatically principled Janina Broniewska and would never have thought to make a distinction between “real Poles” and “Poles of Jewish origin.”

  But these people belonged to very particular milieus. Jan, too—born into a Warsaw intelligentsia family, his father, a Pole of Jewish origin, a lawyer, and his non-Jewish mother a translator from French—had not seen anti-Semitism when he was growing up in postwar Poland. It had not been part of his world. Yet, as it turned out, his world had been narrowly circumscribed.

  Now Jan, fighting his way through the “blindness of social distance,” was confronting a darker side of Polish society. He hypothesized that the origins of postwar anti-Semitism were actually to be found in wartime behavior—in particular the “widespread collusion” of the Poles with the Nazis’ extermination project. Many Poles were not sorry to see the Jews leave, they were quick to appropriate their property …

  But was it collusion—I asked him in a letter—or simply indifference, or passivity?

  In any case, the point remained: postwar anti-Semitic violence occurred not in spite of the Holocaust, but rather because of it.

  It was a poignant manuscript—both compelling and in some way unsuccessful. For what Jan really wanted to know was: Why was there evil in the world? And to that question there was no answer.

  I VISITED KOSTEK. We talked about Jedwabne, and Kostek told me that he’d first been in that very small and very provincial town in 1975, when he was a young man, hitchhiking around the Polish countryside. In Jedwabne he’d asked a local man he passed where he could find the road to the nearby town of Łomża.

  The man pointed, “Over there, where the barn is, where they burned the Jews.”

  Something in the man’s tone made Kostek ask, “The Germans burned them?”

  “What Germans? It was us!”

  “I blocked it out,” Kostek told me.

  AT A COMMUNIST period–style restaurant at the Stalinist Palace of Culture, Dariusz and I talked about Fear, about Jan’s quest for answers to the question of evil.

  “We can piece together narratives from fragments and palimpsests,” I said to Dariusz. “In the best case we can learn what did happen, perhaps how it happened—but can we ever know for certain why?”

  Dariusz was relieved that the mystery of human motivation lay beyond our competence as historians.

  “If it were possible to know that,” he said, “then some regime would come and control us all completely.”

  MY CZECH FRIEND Vlasta was unable to picture me at Yale, in that atmosphere, the New England patriarchy, the snobbery—she found it unimaginable. That summer of 2007 I had come to Prague for just a few days, and we began drinking at one pub and continued all day, sipping wine and Becherovka and eating Bohemia potato chips. We rented a rowboat and went out on the Vltava River.

  Recently Vlasta, who years earlier had translated Erica Jong’s Fear of Fifty, had herself celebrated her fiftieth birthday. It was a new stage in her life: she was now the caretaker for her mother, who was dying of Alzheimer’s disease. Theirs had always been a difficult relationship: Vlasta had been closer to her father, a revisionist Marxist philosopher. He had died in 1989, just two weeks after the Velvet Revolution. In the years that followed Vlasta thought of how it was good, perhaps, that her father didn’t live to see the times of anticommunist backlash.

  By now that moment had passed. In the Czech Republic, as elsewhere in postcommunist Europe, a market was emerging for communist nostalgia. Prague now had a Museum of Communism, with statues of Karl Marx and socialist realist posters and an original noose from Pankrác Prison, where Milada Horáková had been hanged. It was a market emerging not only for communist horror but also for communist kitsch. In Poland a new travel company was advertising “Communism Tours” to Nowa Huta, a Stalinistera industrial settlement just outside Krakow: “Experience Stalin’s gift to Krakow in a genuine Eastern Bloc Trabant automobile!” “The only private tour of Krakow’s communist district!” The company offered several varieties of tours: Communism, Communism Deluxe, Commie Tour, and Disco.

  Now Vlasta showed me the wedding pictures of her punk anarchist daughter. Diana was wearing a deep crimson medieval dress, and she’d dyed her hair a flaming Renaissance red. She was radiant and ravishing. She and her husband had a baby boy for whom communism would mean nothing at all.

  When I saw Diana’s father, Honza, in the pictures, I did not recognize him, he had changed so completely. By now he and Vlasta had been divorced for ten years, and Honza’s long hair—his entire gaunt, bohemian look—was gone. Now he was bald; he’d gained weight and become an advertising executive. He looked much more serious.

  Diana, her new husband, and their son were now living in Vlasta and Honza’s old apartment, far from the center of Prague. The apartment had been transformed since I’d last seen it, so long ago: Diana had painted the rooms in bright lemons and oranges and limes.

  We went out on the balcony. Vlasta and Diana smoked, and I looked out over the apartment complexes to the park where, in the fall of 1994, the three of us had once spent an afternoon with Honza, Amanda, and Oskar. Thirteen years had passed since then.

  “There are always surprises,” Vlasta said to me.

  THAT SUMMER, AT the end of July, Tim and I went to Lviv, where there was a beauty salon on Hnatiuk Street, which had once been Jagiellońska Street. This was the home of the restaurant where in January 1940 Aleksander Wat and Władysław Broniewski’s seductive scenographer friend had hosted the party that ended in his friends’ arrests.

  We stayed at a newly opened hotel, conspicuously run by the Mafia, where the waitresses seemed perpetually terrified. “Please make up the room” signs were bilingual in Ukrainian and Russian, and pictured a long-legged woman in a tank top, black miniskirt, and green stiletto heels pushing a strangely phallic-looking vacuum cleaner.

  All signs in Lviv, Tim pointed out, directed drivers and pedestrians alike to the Grand Hotel. It was a telltale sign of corruption. The city was otherwise full of electronics and
cell phone stores—absurdly, disproportionately so—as well as the ubiquitous hralni avtomaty with their slot machines and smoke.

  Throughout modern history, Lviv had been a city that everyone wanted: Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Germans, Jews. Now it was neglected by all.

  One afternoon, Tim and I passed a crowd gathered outside a drab block of apartments. When we came closer, we saw that a cat was stuck on a window ledge between perhaps the fourth and fifth floors. There was a woman standing in the window of the higher apartment, a man standing in the window of the apartment beneath her, and a cat suspended on the ledge between them. The man and woman were passing between them a long stick with a bag tied onto one end; they were trying to cajole the cat into the bag. After some time the man succeeded in coaxing the cat from the ledge, but the cat did not manage to jump either onto the stick or into the bag. Instead the cat fell toward the pavement—where four people were holding the corners of a sheet to cushion its fall. The cat hit the sheet, and—as if the sheet were a trampoline—rebounded onto the pavement, landed on its feet, and scampered off.

  In a city where human life had often appeared to be worth very little, there was much concern for a cat. It was a fantastically successful rescue operation, one involving six rescuers and dozens of onlookers. Yet the crowd that had gathered was silent—no one applauded. The cat was saved, and all turned and went on their way.

  God-Seeking

  The year I lived in Vienna was the year that my Ukrainian friend Galina, my fellow teacher in Domažlice, left the Czech Republic to study in England. For years she had dreamed of returning to university, a desire interspersed with dreams of going to the Holy Land, or joining a convent, or both. Earlier she had written to me, in Russian, of her joyous discovery: her task in life was to “unite with God’s will.”

  The sentiment was reminiscent of communist-era self-criticism: the consummation of one’s own subjectivity by its liquidation, the individual’s dissolution into a seamless unity with the objective laws of History.