Re-Judaizing the Polish (Studies) Landscape

EEPXXX10.1177/0888325414550361East European Politics and SocietiesUnderhill / Re-Judaizing the Polish (Studies) Landscape r550361esearch-article2014

East European Politics and Societies and Cultures Volume 28 Number 4 November 2014 693–703 © 2014 Sage Publications Re-Judaizing the Polish 10.1177/0888325414550361 http://eeps.sagepub.com hosted at (Studies) Landscape: http://online.sagepub.com The Doikeyt Model Karen Underhill University of Illinois at Chicago

Taking as its starting point the radical transformation of the Polish cultural and historical landscape that has resulted from Poland’s post-1989 Jewish revival, this article presents a proposal for a substantial reconfiguration of nationally and philologically based university departments and programs in Central and East European Studies—one that reimagines Polish Studies, Russian Studies, and other Slavic Studies programs as inherently multilingual, culturally pluralistic spaces of encounter, and that effects changes to degree requirements and language requirements that reflect this post-national shift in perspective. Making reference to the concept of doikeyt or “hereness,” a cultural and political attitude promoted within the pre– World War II Jewish world, particularly within Bundist and Yiddishist discourse, that saw Jewish culture and languages as native to Eastern Europe—as belonging in Poland and in Russia—the author asks specifically whether Jewish languages (Yiddish and Hebrew) and courses in Yiddish culture, and by extension other “minority” languages and cultures, should have a place within the curriculum and course requirements that contribute today to a degree or a major in Polish Studies, Russian Studies, or other European literature and language programs traditionally structured around the study of one dominant language and culture.

Keywords: Post-National; Polish Studies; Polish Jewish Studies; Jewish Revival; Curriculum Development

n the past twenty-five years since the 1989 transition to democracy, the Polish Ilandscape—physical, cultural, and scholarly—has been transformed by the Jewish revival; by the emergence of new narratives that emphasize Jewish belonging in Poland—now, in the past, and in the future. The new Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which opened its doors in April 2013 on the site of the Rapoport memorial to the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, offers an architectural metaphor for this paradigm shift, projected into the urban landscape of Poland’s capital city (Figure 1). The museum building, begun in 2007, now fills a previously empty space in the heart of Warsaw—a space of loss that, together with the monument, spoke to the heroism of the Warsaw ghetto fighters, to the murder of Warsaw’s Jews and the destruction of East European Jewish culture in Poland and Europe, and to the ago- nizing absence left in its wake.

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Figure 1 Photo of the Museum (MHPJ) facing the Ghetto Heroes Monument, Warsaw

Photo: Wojciech Kryński/ Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

The positioning and sheer size of the new Museum testify to the massive shift in emphasis that has taken place within narratives of the Jewish past and present of Poland. Architecturally, the building, designed by Finnish architect Rainer Mahlamäki, honors, interacts with, and to some eyes overshadows the monument, making a strong visual statement about the changing place of holocaust memory within the longer picture of Polish/Jewish1 memory and history. In these new narratives, Poland or Polin, understood expansively as the lands of the historical Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, including what would become the Russian Pale of Settlement, is no longer to be understood only as a place of Jewish death and destruction but rather primarily as a place of one thousand years of Jewish life: Poland as the European homeland of Ashkenazi Jewish culture, and the birthplace of modern Jewish culture and consciousness in at least four languages: Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, and Russian. The symbolic emphasis in the new narratives shifts from the memorial to the bridge—between the Jewish past and the Jewish future— that stretches across the terrible rupture of the Holocaust, brought by all of six years in that long history. Within the space of the new museum, this concept is realized as a literal bridge that connects two areas of the museum at the level of the second floor, stretching across an irregular chasm that cuts through the center of the museum building (Figure 2). Indeed, it can be argued that throughout the process of uncovering and renarrating the Jewish past and present, present-day Poland—including the country’s landscapes and cityscapes, growing sections of Polish society, and institutions and individuals in Poland devoted to preserving

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Figure 2 Interior bridge in the main atrium, Museum of the History of Polish Jews

Jewish heritage and to rebuilding Jewish life—is itself becoming a living bridge between the Jewish past and the Jewish future. Also in these maturing narratives, periods before and after the defining rupture or chasm of the war years become periods of shared Polish and Jewish history and life. Emphasis shifts from witnessing (trauma); to transmitting heritage, knowledge, and

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memory—to future generations: to Jews from America, Israel, and countries worldwide, who have lost contact with their European Jewish past; to a diverse and growing population of Jewish Poles; and to new generations of non-Jewish Poles, many of whom are learning to see Jewish heritage and history as an integral part of their own Polish heritage. The return to narratives of Jewish belonging in Poland still rings queerer in the Jewish world outside of Poland than it does within Poland itself, but in fact it represents an interesting confluence of needs in both Polish and Jewish communities—as nations and collectivities, and as communities of scholarship, whose members are exploring myriad forms of post-national identity and participation. Two national groups, whose representatives had for centuries developed discourses of Polish or Jewish identity (or, indeed, Polish-Jewish identity) from positions of disenfranchise- ment, subjugation, and existential threat are now faced with the (still-disorienting) responsibility of developing narratives of national or post-national group identity from positions of sovereignty, enfranchisement, and power. That shift, elegantly delineated by Peter Beinart in his book The Crisis of Zionism2 with regard to the international Jewish community, applies differently and powerfully to the situation of Poland following its transition to democracy. Younger generations in a wide range of Polish, Jewish, and Jewish/Polish milieux consider how to frame their own and their communities’ engagements with the world intellectually and politically from positions of power, and from within dominant scholarly and political discourses, while often seeking to preserve or recuperate elements of that idealistic past that was crucially formative for the self-definition of both nations: the proud legacy of strug- gling for sovereignty, democracy, and national and individual dignity. Within Polish and Jewish communities worldwide, the Jewish pasts of Poland, and physically, the diverse Jewish landscapes of Poland, have become an important terrain on which this ethical challenge is being addressed. Certainly within Poland the choice to explore Poland’s Jewish past signifies resis- tance to the inherited, pre-transition model of Poland as an ethnically homogeneous, Polish Catholic nation-state. In this context, repairing the erasure of Jewish history not only strives to right a wrong done to the memory and the dignity of the Jewish people and civilization that perished. It also contributes to and coincides with an affirmation of alternative models of association and identification that are becoming increasingly important within Poland today: civic identities, European and global identities, and affiliation with intellectual, political, artistic and philosophical communities that are not bound by political borders, or for whom existing religious and ethnic definitions have become irrelevant or insufficient. For Jewish organizations, philanthropic foundations and individuals from outside Poland that are engaged in the revival, the narration of Poland as a place of Jewish belonging—in the past and in the future—is similarly part of a larger exploration of alternatives to a model of post–World War II Jewish identity that has been supported for half a century by the twin pillars of the Holocaust and Zionism. For Polish/Jewish communities in Poland

Downloaded from eep.sagepub.com at UNIV OF MICHIGAN on May 16, 2015 Underhill / Re-Judaizing the Polish (Studies) Landscape 697 themselves, the Jewish revival represents quite simply the return of Jewish life and cultural expression, in all its diversity, to the public sphere. This confluence of needs within Polish and Jewish communities has contributed substantially to the re-Judaization of the Polish landscape over the past 25 years; and to the vitality of Poland’s Jewish revival as an international project, involving individuals and institutions beyond the Polish, Jewish, and Polish/Jewish communities whose communal narratives would seem to be most directly impacted. This experi- ment in wholesale memory-reconstruction has already engaged scholars, filmmak- ers, artists, musicians, philanthropic foundations, religious institutions, politicians, authors, tourists, educators, and journalists; and it will continue to do so at an accel- erating rate. In the context of the present forum, considering future directions for the field of East European Studies more widely, I have introduced the most cursory description of these dynamics in order to pose a question to our community about the implica- tions that this transformation of the Polish landscape has, or could have, for Polish Studies programs at institutions outside of Poland, and for other nationally defined fields and departments within East European Studies. The nationally and philologically based model on which many degree-granting literature programs, Polish Studies among them, are currently based has become obsolete. How can the phenom- enon of Poland’s Jewish revival, and attendant re-Judaization of the Polish landscape, suggest to us concrete directions for change within existing university programs and departments that will allow our institutions to respond to and encourage post-national, pluralistic, and non-hierarchical approaches to both research and pedagogy? Within Poland over the past two decades, the Jewish revival has both signaled and spurred a wholesale reevaluation of narratives of “Polishness,” and an exploration of both historical and new, still-experimental discourses of plurality. Does this transformation of a country’s cultural landscape open the way for a corre- sponding paradigm shift in the way that we structure our degree programs? If Jewish culture once again belongs in Poland, what elements of Jewish culture, language, and history belong in Polish Studies? By extension, can the terms “Polish,” “Russian,” “Lithuanian,” or “Ukrainian” be pried free from the ethno-national and linguistic constellations that they currently evoke, and become signifiers of complex, multilingual, and multicultural spaces of encounter, or must a completely new scholarly vocabulary be developed to accommodate post-national and pluralistic understand- ings of the really existing dynamics of societies and cultures in Central and Eastern Europe?

The Doikeyt Model: Challenging Majority/Minority Discourses

The term Jewish Revival in Poland is a catchall for a decentralized, grassroots, participatory, and public act of memory that has exploded over the past two decades

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into thousands of simultaneous cultural and educational initiatives throughout the country, in large cities like Warsaw and Kraków and small towns like Sejny3 and Chmielnik,4 in the countryside and on the web: from the once-subversive Festival of Jewish Culture in Kraków’s Kazimierz, founded by Janusz Makuch and colleagues in 1988, to the creation of degree-granting Jewish studies programs at six Polish universities. The revival deepened and gained maturity with the publication by the Borderlands Foundation (Fundacja Pogranicze, Sejny) of historian Jan Gross’s book Neighbors5 and the resulting debates that transformed public discourse in Poland about Polish anti-Semitism. It reached a new high point with the selection of Israeli Director Yael Bartana to represent Poland at the 54th Venice Biennale international art competition and with the dedication of the massive new museum project in Warsaw. “There can be no doubt,” stated the late Polish President Lech Kaczyński at the ceremony for the museum’s groundbreaking, “that the history of Polish Jews is a part of the history of my nation. And it must be remembered and honored.” A new mile-marker and a turning point in the Jewish revival and in the re-Judaization of the Polish cultural landscape will be reached with the opening of the core exhibi- tion of the Museum of the History of the Polish Jews, conceived under the direction of American ethnographer and museologist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, sched- uled for October 2014. The first gallery that visitors to the museum will enter consists of a forest, into which light filters down through the trees. This gallery represents the space of legend, of imagined collective memory. Embedded in the trunks of the trees in the forest gallery are the texts of real legends that the Jewish community told itself, about how it came to Poland and why it remained. The physical design of the gallery is based on the most well known of these Jewish legends of origin that was passed down for centuries within Polish-Jewish communities. That is the legend which interprets the name of Poland through reference to two Hebrew words, “Po-lin,” meaning “here rest ” or “here lodge.” According to this legend, when Jewish settlers fleeing perse- cution in Germany in the fourteenth century arrived on Polish lands, they found tractates of the Gemara hanging as leaves on the trees, or carved in the trunks of the trees, and received messages telling them that they had found their resting place.6 Indeed, the process of transforming the Polish landscape into a site of Jewish group identity and belonging occurs throughout centuries of Jewish literature and folklore, from legends of origin and place-name-midrashim of this type to Itzik Manger’s Yiddish secular rewriting in interwar Poland, of the biblical stories of the Patriarchs in his poem collection entitled Medresh Itzik (Itzik’s Midrash): “The alert reader,” wrote Manger in the foreword, “will recognize that the landscape in which these biblical figures move is not Canaanitish but Slavic. I was thinking of eastern Galicia.”7 In these gorgeous poems, to offer but one example, Hagar sweeps the kitchen of a house in the Carpathian mountains for the last time, remembering the amber beads that Abraham bought her at the local market, and singing the blues: “How like the smoke of a chimney, / How like the smoke of a train / Is the love of a

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man, dear mother, / The love of any man,”8 and while Isaac rides with his father Abraham to the market on a wooden cart, the roads of rural Ukraine become the roads of Scripture and of Jewish life: “‘Sad and lovely,’ the poet says, / ‘Are the roads of the Holy Book.’”9 This literature that embedded Jewish identity and tradition so deeply in the fabric of the Galician landscape was written in the spirit of Diaspora Nationalism; and evokes the Bundist concept of “doikeyt” or “hereness.” “Doikeyt,” a key slogan among Yiddishists in interwar Poland, is associated with a political and cultural pos- ture that affirms Jewish belonging in Poland and Eastern Europe, promoting an understanding of Jewish culture as inextricably rooted in and identified with the ter- ritories of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. According to proponents of Jewish “Autonomism,” articulated by historian Simon Dubnow,10 and the later “Diaspora Nationalism” or “Golus-Nationalism” of I. L. Peretz and others, Jewish culture, and in particular Yiddish-language culture, belongs “do” or “here”—that is, in Poland and on former Polish lands—where it developed and flourished as a native European culture.11 Importantly, proponents of the concept of doikeyt and autonomism were not argu- ing for Jewish inclusion into Polish culture. Diaspora nationalism represented a clear rejection of the model of assimilation put forward during the Haskalah that had held promise for some in the nineteenth century. Within Bundist and Yiddishist narratives, however, insistence on working for the development of a distinct Jewish national identity did not make Jewish life and culture less native to Polish lands, to Russia, and to Europe. On the contrary, autonomism called for a societal model that tran- scends the nation-state. It envisioned a morally superior synthesis, as Simon Dubnow elaborated in his letters on Autonomism, that was to follow after the immature extremes of isolationism (first) and assimilation (second): a “progressive nationalism, which balanced a Jew’s national rights with secular universalism.”12 Jews, it was argued, should proudly remain in their European home, and work to build a just and democratic society that protected the rights of all its minorities. In the present context, the doikeyt model returns us to the challenge posed by changing narratives of belonging in Poland and throughout Central and Eastern Europe. While Polish studies today faces the same crisis of relevance that confronts many philologically based programs structured around the teaching of the literature and language of one increasingly difficult to define national group, the doikeyt model is one powerful reminder that Polish/Jewish culture and history have long contained post-national or supra-national approaches to thinking about and teaching about culture and history in Central and Eastern Europe. Indeed, the Polish–Lithuanian Union and later Commonwealth (1410–1795), and later Independent Poland, both charac- terized by a constitutive hybridity, or linguistic and cultural plurality, provided the cultural and political space in which, in addition to literature in the Polish vernacular, more than five centuries of written and oral Jewish literature would develop in two languages simultaneously—Yiddish and Hebrew—supported by institutions from

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the Polish and Lithuanian Yeshivot of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to Hasidic courts and communities, to YIVO in interwar Vilne/Wilno, and the prolifera- tion of hundreds of Yiddish and Hebrew periodicals and cultural journals in the cities and towns of a reconstituted Independent Poland. For literary studies alone, this landscape represents a space of encounter in which no less than three modern literatures—Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew—developed alongside one another, and in dia- logue with one another, and in which the folk cultures and oral literary forms of Polish, Jewish, Ukrainian, Łemko, Hucul, Lithuanian, Roma, and numerous other cultures native to Polish lands had influenced and informed one another for centuries. While politically Jews and other minorities remained subordinate to the dominant Polish political institutions, the doikeyt argument suggests a cultural model that may disrupt assumed hierarchies of center–periphery, dominant versus minority cultures, and the primacy placed on linguistic and cultural assimilation, drawing atten- tion instead to a plurality of fully native and distinct cultures developing simultaneously, in a shared landscape. This slight adjustment holds interesting impli- cations, again, for the way that “Polish Studies,” “Russian Studies” or other nationally defined fields of study could be reimagined on university campuses. In the environment of intellectual freedom following the transition to democracy, Polish institutions have been afforded new opportunities to restore this inherent plurality: to reconceive of and re-present Polish lands as the multilingual, multiethnic, and multireligious spaces of encounter that they have historically been. The return of Jewish studies has been, again, the most visible bellwether of this conceptual shift away from ethno-national definitions of Polish culture and history. Polish scholars and universities responded to the post-1989 environment of intellectual freedom by creating, in the last two decades, major faculties of Jewish Studies in Wrocław, Kraków, Warsaw, and Gdańsk, that have already produced a generation of young scholars who speak and read both of Poland’s Jewish languages, Yiddish and Hebrew. Because Polish students come to these Jewish studies programs with an existing knowledge of Polish language, culture, and literature, they are prepared to conduct research in at least three languages—the three major print languages of interwar Poland—and to engage the complex past of a fully multilingual society. Poland is already becoming a world center for the study of Jewish culture, and a leading center in the world for the publication of books on Jewish subjects. From the perspective of East European studies worldwide, we might ask, What would be the corollary, within our international scholarly landscapes, to the research environment produced by the creation of vital Jewish studies departments at Polish and other East European universities? What structural changes would be required to broaden the conception of Polish Studies, for example, to fully include Jewish languages and literatures? Working from outside of the “home countries” or states of our national literatures, are we perhaps positioned to effect even a further step in the remapping of the terrain of Polish studies and Eastern European studies: namely, one which challenges the remaining premise of Polish cultural dominance and centrality

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within Polish historical and physical space? Following the doikeyt model, could Jewish and other languages be studied in Polish programs not as a minority phenom- enon within a dominant Polish culture, but as equally native to this region, equally relevant to the cultural life of modern Poland, and equally weighted in importance toward a Polish studies degree? I pose these questions in closing, and offer here only a few initial short-term and long-term suggestions to open a conversation within our fields, about the next steps that we may take to bring Polish and Jewish studies fields together into new degree-granting programs that will be best prepared to respond to the changing research needs and interests of our students in the coming years, on both the graduate and undergraduate levels. First, we can and should develop much closer cooperation between Slavic Studies or Polish studies and Jewish studies departments, where they exist, as well as cooperation with Germanic studies departments which house Yiddish, if it is available. The primary goal of this initial cooperation would be to allow Jewish studies courses to fulfill requirements within Slavic studies and Polish studies degree programs, and vice versa. Taking the reworking of Polish Studies degree requirements as an example that could be applied to other nationally based literatures, this shift toward a post- national framework for the field would include cross-listing Yiddish as a standard language of study toward a Polish studies or Slavic studies degree; and by allowing Hebrew to fulfill second-language requirements toward these degrees as well. Courses in modern Polish literature and culture ought similarly to fulfill requirements toward a Jewish studies degree and, increasingly, their syllabi at both graduate and undergraduate levels may consist of works of literature in translation from all three major literary languages of Poland—Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew. A standard program of study toward a Polish-studies degree at either the undergraduate or graduate level could optionally include courses in East European Jewish history, Yiddish literature, Modern Jewish intellectual thought, Hasidism, the Holocaust, and Intro to Judaism. The premise of Central and East European spaces as constitutively hybrid spaces of encounter should be further extended to argue that Ukrainian, Lithuanian, German, Belorussian, Roma, and other literatures and languages also have a place within a Polish or Russian studies program. When appropriate lecturers are not available at our universities, we may make it a priority to redirect resources toward teaching fellowships that bring (taking the example again of Polish studies) Jewish/Polish, Ukrainian/Polish, or German/Polish scholars from Poland or from other U.S. and Israeli universities to our departments, for a semester or a year at a time—facilitating the integration of new methodologies being developed within Poland into international scholarly discourse, as well as our students’ and universities’ contact with Polish/Jewish Studies and post-national studies as growing fields. Next, while I believe it is an excellent time to loosen or aban- don outdated institutional frameworks that limit the ways that our students can engage increasingly non-nationally based interests; I also believe that it is an excellent time to create a new international institute for the study of Polish/Jewish

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Notes

1. Recognizing the inadequacy of current vocabulary surrounding Jewish/Polish history, culture, and identities, I introduce here a new formula for referring to the complex inseparability of Polish and Jewish cultures. The use of a slash seeks to avoid the already-existing associations attached to the hyphenated term “Polish-Jewish” (which refers primarily to Jews from Poland, but does not include non-Jews deeply involved in Jewish life and culture), and also to the inaccurate formulations “Polish and Jewish” or “Poles and Jews” (which elide large areas of culture and identity in which the two groups cannot accurately be separated). In the present article, the terms Jewish/Polish and Polish/Jewish are used interchangeably, to describe a cultural and historical landscape in which Polish and Jewish cultures coexist and interact in continually changing permutations. 2. Peter Beinart, The Crisis of Zionism (New York: Henry Holt, 2012). 3. Sejny, Poland, a small town near the Lithuanian border, is the location of the pioneering Borderlands Foundation (Fundacja Pogranicze), one of the first Polish NGOs to develop educational, publishing, and community outreach initiatives highlighting multicultural encounter and the inherent plurality of cultures and languages as central to shaping culture and identity in Central and Eastern Europe. 4. Chmielnik, near Kielce in central Poland, is the site of “Encounters with Jewish Culture,” an annual festival celebrating the town’s Jewish heritage, now in its twelfth year; and the site of the newly opened museum of Jewish history in the Kielce region, housed in the restored Chmielnik synagogue. 5. Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 6. A version of this story was printed by Gershom Bader in 1927: “If you want to know how it sud- denly occurred to these Jews in Germany to seek refuge in Poland, legend has it that after the Jews had decreed a fast and beseeched God to save them from the murderers, a slip of paper fell from heaven. On it was written: ‘Go to Poland, for there you will find rest. . . . The Jews set out for Poland. When they reached it, the birds in the forest chirped to greet them: ‘Po lin! Po lin!’. The travelers translated this into Hebrew, as if the birds were saying: ‘Here you should lodge. . . .’ Afterwards, when they looked closely at the trees, it seemed to them that a leaf from the Gemara was hanging on every branch. At once they understood that here a new place had been revealed to them, where they should settle and continue to develop the Jewish spirit and the age-old Jewish learning.” English translation from Haya Bar-Itzhak, Jewish Poland: Legends of Origin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), p. 34.

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7. Itzik Manger, “Introduction, Itzik’s Midrash,” in The World According to Itzik: Selected Poetry and Prose, trans. and ed. Leonard Wolf (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 3. 8. Manger, “Hagar’s Last Night in Abraham’s House,” in The World According to Itzik, 13. 9. Manger, “Abraham Takes Itzik to the Sacrifice,” in The World According to Itzik, 17. 10. See Simon Dubnow, “Autonomism,” in Nationalism and History: Essays on Old and New Judaism, ed. Koppel S. Pinson (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1958). This position developed in opposition to competing attitudes of political Zionism that saw Jewish life in Eastern Europe as untenable, unsustainable, and also undignified, and Yiddish language itself as a mark of shame, and galut or exile. 11. Polish studies scholars may hear in the word “hereness” echoes of the term “tutejsi.” 12. Joshua Shanes, “Yiddish and Jewish Diaspora Nationalism,” Monatshefte 90, no. 2 (1998): 179.

Karen Underhill is Assistant Professor of Polish Literature and Polish-Jewish Studies in the Department of Slavic & Baltic Languages & Literatures, University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on Polish and Yiddish modernisms, Polish/Jewish culture and literatures, and the transformation of historical and cultural narratives in present-day Poland.

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