Why Poland?: Poles and Jews Before the Fall of Communism

By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, April 9th, 2012
ewish bystanders are attacked by an angry mob after someone throws a bomb during the Christian Corpus Domini procession in Bialystok, June 1906. © Unknown | (Unknown) Wikimedia Commons

This in-depth post is the first in a series on the question: Why Poland? To skip this introduction, click here.

A few years ago, I was invited to give a series of lectures in Lublin, Poland. I was promised that the lectures would be translated and published as a book. It was a promise, never fulfilled. But preparing and giving the lectures was a very interesting exercise, nonetheless. It gave me an opportunity to start reflecting on how my research and public activities in Poland before the fall of communism could inform public life there “after the fall.”

I prepared and presented three extended lectures. The first was on media and the politics of small things, a topic that I have focused on in recent years. The other two lectures were on topics I haven’t explored further, but I think may be of interest to readers of Deliberately Considered. I will reproduce the lectures in the coming weeks. Today’s in-depth post: the first of three posts addressing a simple question I have often been asked, “Why Poland?” Later, my second lecture, another frequently asked question: “Why Theater?”

Why Poland? It was a question first posed to me by my mother. She wanted to understand why it was that I had chosen to do research in the country from where her parents fled. It was a question motivated by the troubled relationship between Poles and Jews. It is a topic that I have not spent much time addressing professionally, though I have had to deal with it personally. The lecture I gave in Poland was one of the rare times that I publicly addressed the topic, making the personal professional.

The lecture made three distinct moves, responding to the issue of the relationship between Jews and Poles from three different vantage points: the first, today’s post, was the most personal, built upon reflections on my personal experiences as a researcher in Poland in 1973-4. The second . . .

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Why Poland?: Poles and Jews Before the Fall of Communism

By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, April 9th, 2012

My mother was not pleased when I told her that I would be going to Poland to do my dissertation research, thirty-five years ago. “Why Po­land?” This was not a simple or innocent ques­tion, motivating it were the horrors of the twentieth centu­ry, and the pain and suffering of her family. For, I am the grandson of Victor and Brana Frimet who came from the small town of Bulschwietz near the city of Lemberg (Lwow to the Poles, Lviv, to the Ukrainians). The Frimet’s memories of their times in that place, then Poland, were not sweet. This was a town, a city, a nation and a region where multi­cul­tural­ism has not been a very happy matter, as it was not for much of twentieth century Europe, especially for my people. My grand­parents left in 1920, and they never looked back, never regretted leaving “the land of their fathers.” Our relatives who remained perished in the Holocaust. Why, then, was I going back?

My answer to my mother’s question was filled with the naiveté and the self-centeredness of youth. I was looking for adven­ture. I wanted to visit Europe after I had completed my stud­ies. I had a good disser­ta­tion proposal to study theater in Poland, and a major founda­tion was willing to pay for a year’s prepara­tion and language study and a year or more of research and living expenses in Europe. This was a great oppor­tunity, both personal and profes­sional. For me, the pain of my people and my family were things of the past, to be remembered and under­stood, but not some­thing that should restrict my ambitions and plans. In retro­spect, mine was “the wisdom of youth.”

Because I was not restrict­ed by the very recent past, which seemed not so recent to me, I could attempt to develop the capacity to remem­ber and to understand, as would never have been the case had I been constrained by my mother’s memories of her parents. But the insight of my mother’s question persists. It sheds light on many of the problems I have faced in the course of my research and experiences in East and Central Europe, and it may help us under­stand the prob­lems of clashing collec­tive memories . . .

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