Negotiating Jewish Nationalism in Interwar Warsaw

chapter 16 Negotiating Jewish Nationalism in Interwar Warsaw

Kenneth B. Moss

The memoir literature on Jewish life in interwar Warsaw reveals a peculiar ambiguity. Some memoirs present Warsaw as the center of a newly intense interwar Jewish nationalism. Moyshe Zonshayn describes Nalewki Street as the heart of a Jewish national “kingdom,” where the Jewish national council sought to shape the fate of a putative Jewish nation, where every “national holiday” brought forth grand Jewish national processions, and where every soccer game between ethnically Jewish and ethnically Catholic-Polish teams was a nationalistically-framed event.1 Another memoir by the Łomża Zionist activist Yisroel Levinsky represents Warsaw as a site of “historic” Zionist achievement, as when he recalls with evident pride his participation “in the historic national conference in Warsaw for the Jewish National Fund, when [Menahem] Ussishkin, the president of the fund, [demanded of] the Jews of Poland a levy [. . . .] [towards] the half million pounds sterling [. . .] needed for the redemption of 100,000 new dunams of land” in Palestine.2 Conversely, other memoirs of interwar Warsaw register little Jewish nationalism there or maintain that Jewish nationalism in Warsaw was notably weak by contemporary standards. Indeed, this perspective can sometimes be found in the very same memoirs that elsewhere trumpet the city’s significance in the annals of Jewish nationalism. The aforementioned memoir by Zonshayn, for example, describes certain streets in the city’s Jewish neighborhood as almost wholly socialist in terms of their public political culture, and pinpoints other sites in the city—like the marriage-halls on Franciszkańska street—that served as stages for manifestations of a robust Hasidic subculture.3 The Yiddishist

* The research for this chapter was conducted with the support of a Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Thanks to Glenn Dynner, François Guesnet, and Marci Shore for their editorial comments, to David Engel and Shaul Stampfer for their encouragement, and to my friend and Polish tutor, Dr. Zbigniew Janowski, for his help with some of the Polish-language sources. 1 Moyshe Zonshayn, Yidish-varshe (Buenos-Ayres: Tsentral-farband fun poylishe yidn in argen- tine, 1954), 23–24. 2 Yisrael Levinsky, Kotsim u-frachim (Tel Aviv: Irgun ‘ole lomzah be-yisrael, 1963), 99. 3 Zonshayn, Yidish-varshe, 40, 41–44. Franciszkańska was already a hub of Hasidism in Warsaw as early as the 1880s; see Glenn Dynner, “Hasidism and Habitat: Managing the Jewish-Christian

Nakhmen Mayzl was appalled by the absence of Yiddish-language signage in Warsaw by contrast with the much smaller Vilna.4 And to the recollections of Yisroel Levinsky, one might counterpose the recollections of another Zionist activist, Shlomo Onikovsky, a member of the He-halutz Zionist youth pioneer movement in Warsaw in the 1930s, who remembered that “[m]ost of the Jewish population in Warsaw related to our path with indifference.”5 Such contradictory assessments by contemporaries of popular engagement with Jewish nationalism—primarily but not only Zionism—were not peculiar to Warsaw, but rather characterize the contemporary record on Polish Jewish political culture as a whole: it is no accident that Ezra Mendelsohn began his classic 1989 essay on “Jewish Politics in Interwar Poland” with just such a counterposing of contradictory reports by Zionist emissaries regarding their reception by the Polish Jewish public in the early 1930s.6 As Mendelsohn did in that essay, this chapter attempts to point a way beyond seeming contradiction by drawing together a range of primary sources and scholarly treatments that begin to trace a suitably complex portrait of the place(s) of Jewish nationalism in interwar Warsaw Jewish political culture. This chapter begins by suggesting Warsaw’s special place in the topography of interwar Jewish nationalism as the premiere center, alongside the young city of Tel Aviv, of organized and visible Jewish nationalism, particularly but not exclusively Zionism. It then turns to the seemingly contradictory evidence of the relative weakness of Jewish nationalism in general and Zionism in particular in Warsaw, suggesting some particular local sociological and spatial factors that blunted the attractiveness of Jewish nationalism as an option while lend- ing special credibility to various alternatives to it—assimilationist, pietistic, and revolutionary alike. Finally, the essay turns to the much less well-explored topic of how Zionism actually functioned on a day-to-day level in Warsaw from the late 1920s through the late 1930s, and suggests that it possessed two very dif- ferent, perhaps even largely unrelated dimensions. On the one hand, Zionism

Encounter in the Kingdom of Poland,” in idem (ed.), Holy Dissent: Jewish and Christian Mystics in Eastern Europe (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), 110. 4 Kalman Weiser, Jewish People, Yiddish Nation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 225; on Jewish cultural display in public space in Vilna, see Cecile Kuznitz, “On the Jewish Street: Yiddish Culture and the Urban Landscape in Interwar Vilna,” in Leonard J. Greenspoon (ed.), Yiddish Language and Culture: Then and Now (Studies in Jewish Civilization 9; Omaha, NE: Creighton University Press, 1998), 65–92. 5 Shlomo Onikovsky, “Hishtatafnu be-feulat behirot” in Sarah Segal and Aryeh Pyalkov (eds.), Be-shadmot grokhov (Kibbutz Lohamei ha-Getaot: Beit Lohamei ha-Getaot, 1976), 278. 6 In Yisrael Gutman et al. (eds.), The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1989), 9–10.