Poland's Jewish past, Shirley Jackson wine pairing, etc.

Dear friends,

In May 2019, I got a dream assignment: The New Yorker sent me to Poland to write a profile of novelist Olga Tokarczuk. I had spent some time living in Poland after college, learning Polish and interning at the New York Times Warsaw bureau. Back then, the country was still emerging from the grip of the Soviet Union, which meant, mostly, that McDonalds was starting to appear in the major cities and you could buy the International Herald Tribune (remember that?) several days late. There was one ATM, in Warsaw.

Untangling exactly why I felt compelled to live in Poland would take more space than I have here. Suffice it to say that on some unconscious level I wanted to imagine a world in which the Holocaust hadn’t happened, my grandparents hadn’t had to flee, and I could have grown up Polish. Despite the unhappy ending to their story, my grandparents loved Poland and the Polish language, the richness of which I had begun to discover through the poetry of Czesław Miłosz and Wisława Szymborska. I thought of the country as my ancestral homeland, an Eden from which my relatives had been tragically ejected.

The gravesite of my great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather in Łódz. 

I was ready to embrace Poland, but it wasn’t yet ready to embrace me. Jewish culture was limited to the “Schindler’s List” tour of Kraków, the city’s annual klezmer festival, and a couple of restaurants serving discouraging versions of traditional foods (“carp in aspic”). I got into an argument with my Polish grammar teacher when he insisted that the language spoken by Jews was called “Jewish.” During the summer, my boss at the New York Times assigned me to investigate a report that a flea market vendor was selling “real Jewish soap” manufactured at the Stutthof concentration camp. It was with some relief that I returned to the US to go to graduate school.

But I never let go of that longing for Poland. And when I returned to spend a week with Olga, over twenty years later, it was clear that the country had undergone a seismic cultural shift. There was a new openness to all kinds of multiculturalism—especially Jewish culture. I got a glimpse of how much things had changed upon landing at the Warsaw airport, where an exhibit of prints by Polish artists on display, titled “Polish Family Album,” included a portrait of a black-hatted, long-bearded Jewish man. A hip young magazine editor suggested we meet over falafel at a vegan restaurant in the heart of Warsaw called Tel Aviv. At the literary festival Olga had organized, a Polish intellectual sported a shirt with Yiddish lettering.

A Jewish bakery in the heart of Warsaw.
 

Most significantly, the huge new Museum of the History of Polish Jews had opened a few years earlier near the site of the city’s former ghetto—an endeavor not without complications, considering the law recently passed outlawing any discussion of Polish collaboration with the Nazis, but an important step nonetheless. Tears streamed down my face as I watched groups of Polish schoolchildren tour the artful, interactive exhibits. Unlike their parents and grandparents, they were being exposed to an honest and multidimensional portrayal of Jews in Poland.

The entrance to the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.

Then there was Olga herself. Five years earlier, she had published her ninth novel, The Books of Jacob, an epic chronicle of the life of Jacob Frank, a Jewish false messiah who captivated believers during the eighteenth century. This polyphonic book, which would win her the Nobel Prize, incorporates voices of Jewish as well as Catholic Poles and disrupts the longstanding mythology of the country as a homogeneous Christian nation. Olga had received death threats for taking this position, but she was undaunted. “There’s no Polish culture without Jewish culture,” she told me. 

Reviewing the book last week in the Times, Dwight Garner expressed admiration for its virtuosity but said that it left him unmoved. For the descendants of Polish Jews, though, it's hard to imagine what could be more moving than to see our history publicly recognized—in Olga's novel and elsewhere—as essential to the nation we once regarded as home.

The Books of Jacob is finally available in English. Like its author, the book is absorbing, zany, and brilliant. I’ll be interviewing Olga and her translator Jennifer Croft this Tuesday—virtually, of course. Register here.

What I’m reading

The Betrayal of Anne Frank by Rosemary Sullivan chronicles the investigation of a “cold case team,” led by a retired FBI detective, using all the latest forensic techniques to try to solve the mystery of who reported the Franks (and the others hiding with them) to the Gestapo. I started to feel skeptical when I requested an advance copy and was told the book was under strict embargo. Now that the big media rollout has taken place, we know that the team suspects a Jewish notary affiliated with the Jewish Council, an organization of Dutch Jews formed by the occupying Nazis for the purpose, essentially, of coordinating the deportations. My review will assess the evidence for this scenario as well as the tricky question of what the members of the council thought they could achieve by cooperating with the occupiers. Historians have been arguing over this one for decades.

Where I’ll be

In addition to the event with Olga, on February 17 I’m interviewing Nicole Rudick, former editor of The Paris Review, about her gorgeous new experimental biography of the artist Niki de Saint Phalle, What Is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined. Register here.

And February 24 is the second installment of my 92Y course, Can This Novel Be Saved? In the first session, I gave a reading of Jane Eyre largely based on postcolonialist criticism, arguing that the novel has a lot to tell us about British attitudes towards slavery and the West Indian colonies. This month I’ll be using a similar lens to look at Heart of Darkness, a novel that has become so notorious for its racist depictions of Africans that my sixteen-year-old’s high school English teacher confessed to me that he didn’t dare teach it. Was that the right choice? Come join the discussion.

From the Shirley Jackson archives

Amanda Feinman interviewed me for Guernica about Jackson’s novel Hangsaman, which is celebrating its 70th anniversary.

And this wine shop in Seattle has a unique idea: book-and-wine pairings. For Hangsaman, they recommend a nice rosé. Cheers!

As always,

Ruth

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are considered, by some, to dream."—Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House