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A SORT OF RETURN TO EUROPE
JEWISH CULTURE REDISCOVERED - WITHOUT
THE NECESSITY OF JEWS
Elaine Kalman Naves
The Gazette, Montreal, 16 February
2002
Virtually Jewish, Reinventing Jewish
Culture in Europe
By Ruth Ellen Gruber
University of California Press (304 pages, $59.95)
In her earlier works, Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide
to Eastern Central Europe and Upon the Doorposts of
Thy House: Jewish Life in East-Central Europe. Yesterday
and Today, Ruth Ellen Gruber displayed a keen curiosity
about Jewish history and a solid handle on contemporary
Jewish life in eastern Europe.
In her new book, she brings this interest and expertise
to bear on an intriguing recent trend that cynics might
well call a fad. The phenomenon she explores in this
fascinating and very readable study is the explosion
of enthusiasm for Jewish culture (klezmer music, Yiddish
songs, new books on Jewish topics, new Jewish bookstores
and Jewish-style restaurants that sometimes feature
dishes made of pork) in a part of the world decades
ago Holocaust made the Jews practically extinct.
Gruber is well equipped for the task she has set herself.
Now a freelance journalist dividing her time between
Hungary and Italy, she was born in the U.S. and for
many years shuttled between Rome, Brussels, London,
Belgrade, Warsaw, and Vienna as a foreign correspondent
for United Press International. Since the late 1980s
she has been crisscrossing Germany, Poland the Czech
Republic. Austria and Italy with a view of writing this
book.
It's based on a striking paradox. In the countries that
she's surveying Jews are clearly the participants, sponsors
and consumers of art, dance, theatre and scholarship
that make up "virtual Jewishness". But these
countries for the most part contain miniscule Jewish
populations. Austria, for instance, numbers 10,000 Jews
out of a total of seven million people; the Czech Republic
contains between 3,500 to 6,000 out of 12 million; Poland
has at most 20,000 out of 38 million. Germany account
for no more that 80,000 Jews in a country of 80 million,
In numerical term, then, the preponderance of those
lapping up the new Jewish culture in Europe are non-Jews.
"The result" writes Gruber "is a form
of Jewish culture, or at least Judaica, minus the Jews"
She advances several possibilities to try to explain
the process that some have compared to the appropriation
and exploitation of aboriginal cultures in North America
by the mainstream. In present-day Europe, crass commercialism,
political correctness, "post-Holocaust necrophilia"
and wide spread ignorance of Jewish history coexist
with thoughtful re-evaluations of the past and genuine
desire to fill the enormous void created by the Holocaust
and reinforced by more than four decades of Communist
repression.
In other words, the scene that Gruber reports on is
by turns murky, confusing, disconcerting and heartening.
She tackles this emotionally charged terrain both as
observer and as active participant. Herself Jewish,
in 1980 she became involved in a clandestine study of
Jews and non-Jews in Warsaw who were trying to explore
the dimensions of Jewish life at a time when such pursuits
were being actively discouraged by the state.
It is Gruber's refusal to be co-opted by any one group
or to take up doctrinaire positions on the appropriation
debate that makes Virtually Jewish such an absorbing
and at the same time perplexing read
She stays true to her objective of presenting snapshots
of a process rather than the final word on it. Some
of these are devoted to non-Jewish Poles - such as Tomasz
Wisniewski, a journalist born after the war - who have
gone out of their way to document and preserve Jewish
memory in Poland, often braving the opprobrium of the
former communist regime. About his search to uncover
the history of the town of Bialystok (of which before
the war, Jews made up more that half the population)
Wisniewski told Gruber, "Back in the early 1980s,
few people wrote about the Jews, so I considered what
I did almost a duty….An honest history of Poland does
not exist without the history of the Jews".
But the increased number of Jewish visitors to Poland
since the raising of the Iron Curtain have been slow
to perceive any change in the Polish attitudes since
the virulent anti-Semitism of yore. "The experiences
they remember of their trip are likely to be those that
enhance an already existing negative opinion. Indeed
they are the experiences they expected to have in Poland,
and because they confirm deeply held convictions, they
are almost a desired part of the trip."
At the same time the non-Jewish mainstream may find
it easier to deal with dead Jews than with the living.
Among the many examples Gruber gives of the representation
of Jewish culture in museums and tourism, installations
reconstructing Passover seders are common. However,
the impressions these exhibitions leave is of an illustrated
death myth, not of a family ritual of great meaning
to leaving Jews.
One of the most troubling of the vignettes presented
in the book is the Schindler's List Tour of Krakow so
completely melts historical reality with imagined reality
that it's impossible to ascertain which of today's sites
in the city of Oscar Schindler pertains to the Holocaust
and which to Hollywood.
And yet, while she's thoroughly disconcerted by it,
Gruber finds much to appreciate in the revitalization
of Krakow's Jewish quarter, Kazimierz - a direct consequence
of the enormous popularity of Steven Spielberg's film.
The klezmer bands,.Jewish style cafes, the bookshops,
she maintains, represent an important transitional moment.
"Rather than scarifying Jewish Kazimierz as a place
of mourning and remembrance. It signifies it instead
as a place to be enjoyed."
A pop-culture happening still
in the process of evolution, "virtual Jewishness"
gets a provocative airing in this unusual take on the
uses of memory.
Elen Kalman Naves's book "The
Shoshanna Stories us dye out next year"
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