Bruno Schulz
Dan Clore
for Bruno Schulz's fantastic stories, so I believe that this
will be of interest. -- DC]
June 24, 2001
From a Mural, New Life in a Debate Over Memory
By CELESTINE BOHLEN, the New York Times
For almost 60 years, a series of wall paintings by Bruno
Schulz, the Polish-Jewish writer and artist, lay buried
beneath a coat of pink paint on a pantry wall in the
once-Polish, now-Urkainian city of Drogobych where Schulz
was shot and killed in 1942 by a Nazi storm trooper. In that
state, the paintings survived — unseen, but untouched.
But as soon as the murals were discovered last winter, their
future became a matter of dispute, a dispute so painful and
bitter that last month the work was divided in half — like
the baby in the biblical story, had King Solomon not
intervened.
On May 21, representatives from Yad Vashem, the main
Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, removed five fragments from
the wall and took them to Israel, reopening the rawest of
post-Holocaust wounds, namely the quarrel over who has the
right to stand guard over the memory of Jews killed in the
Nazi slaughter.
It is a not a new question, but it may have changed in the
last decade, as Eastern Europe slowly, sometimes
uncertainly, reawakens to its own past. So, now that the
cloud of Communism has been lifted from the memory of the
Holocaust, can the victims' legacy be safely trusted to the
countries where they lived and were killed, or should it
remain the rightful property of the world's surviving Jews,
wherever they may live?
The legality of Yad Vashem's action is under question, but
in a statement, a Yad Vashem spokeswoman laid claim to a
"moral" right to the property of the Holocaust's Jewish
victims — a right that summarily dismisses the Poles' claim
to Schulz as a writer, and any recognition of him as
Drogobych's native son.
In questions like this, the Jewish perspective is loaded
with layers of pain and distrust built up over centuries, of
which memories of the Holocaust are only one part.
Survivors, and their children, point out the failure of the
Poles, Urkainians and others to protect the Jews from the
Nazi slaughter, or in some cases, of joining in. Others
point to the slowness with which these nations recognized
the special tragedy suffered by the Jews, and instances of
modern-day anti-Semitism.
On the Polish and Ukrainian side, there is a reluctance to
admit how deep those wounds are, and how easily they were
set aside and forgotten once the Jews were gone from the
region.
But now, increasingly, some say that debates like the one
over Schulz's legacy only serve to perpetuate these cycles
of distrust. "There are two sides to this debate and the
problem is that the way it is discussed now, no one can
win," said Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, a director of CLAL/Center
for Learning and Leadership, a Jewish institute based in New
York. "Maybe," he continued, "the question should be: Do we
look at this legacy as a zero sum thing, or do we look for
ways to commemorate the Holocaust in ways in which we can
all participate?"
Rabbi Hirschfield and others say the time has come to change
the debate, in part because so much has changed in Poland
and other countries since the dead weight of Communist Party
ideology was lifted. "The new freedom has actually evoked
Europeans' ability to respect the particular nature of the
Jewish suffering in the Holocaust," said Rabbi Hirschfield.
"And that makes me turn to the Jewish community to say we
have an obligation to connect the particular to the
general."
From the annual festival of Jewish culture in Cracow, to the
opening of Jewish restaurants and houses of prayer, to the
reopening of the synagogue in Oswiecim, a mile and a half
from the Auschwitz death camp, Jews and non-Jews in Poland
have begun the process of putting together the shards of a
culture that was virtually destroyed in the Holocaust, and
suppressed under the Communism that followed.
The last known Jew in Oswiecim died a year ago, just as the
restored synagogue (which had been converted during
Communist times into a carpet factory) was being reopened,
along with a nearby Jewish center. An anticipated 50,000
visitors, half of them non-Jews, are expected to come to the
center this year, said Daniel Eisenstadt, executive director
of the New York-based Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation.
There are several reasons for the revival in Poland of a
Jewish culture without Jews. Tourism certainly is one,
suggesting that the motive in some cases is simply profit.
Another is a kind of folkloric nostalgia that seeks to
recreate the past shared by Poles and Jews as seamless and
painless — which it most clearly was not.
But still, there is an attempt to acknowledge the role of
Jews and Jewish culture in Poland, and can that be bad?
"There is an awful lot happening," said Mr. Eisenstadt.
"Some of it is to serve visitors, but part of it is a
genuine effort to present a Polish-Jewish past in an
authentic light."
Rabbi Hirschfield, who helped in the restoration of the
Oswiecim synagogue, argues that the fight over Schulz's
legacy is in itself a sign that Poland has shifted beyond an
exclusively nationalist view of its own identity. "Could we
imagine a large number of Poles competing to carry the
legacy of a Jewish writer back in the 40's?" he asked. "Here
we have Poles standing and saying this was a good Pole. If
Poles had felt way about Jews 60 years ago, perhaps fewer
would have died. Now it is the other way, with Jews saying
no, he is not Polish, he is Jewish."
But these arguments hold little sway with some Jews, who
argue that the defining moment for Schulz's identity was his
death, which they feel the Poles tend to overlook. "Will the
Poles value Schulz for his powerful Polish prose, or will
they value him as a Jew too?" asked the writer Cynthia
Ozick. "If he were honored as a Jew, as well as a Polish
writer, then Yad Vashem might not have undertaken what they
perceive as a rescue."
Some argue that Drogobych, a city of 100,000 30 miles from
the Polish border, is hardly the place to honor a writer of
international standing like Schulz. "If memory is the
central issue, then the place of memory is preeminently Yad
Vashem, and it belongs there," said Iosif Hayim Yerushalmi,
a professor of Jewish studies at Columbia University. "The
town of Drogobych is not a place of memory. A few tours
might go by to see the flat, and that would be it."
But to Dora Katznelson, 80, a literary scholar who is also
vice president of a Reform Jewish congregation in Drogobych,
those arguments ignore the desire of the city's residents to
honor a man they now — belatedly — recognize as one of their
own.
"There is nobody here — Ukrainians, Jews, Poles, Russians —
who doesn't care about this except maybe the authorities,"
she said, "but then you have to remember that in Communist
times, the local authorities sold off an organ out from the
Polish cathedral."
--
Dan Clore
mailto:cl...@columbia-center.org
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