I’d taken my first trip to Poland soon after I originally discovered Freuen in di Ghettos, back in 2007. Accompanied by my then fiancé, my brother, and a friend, I went on an autumn “roots” voyage where I crisscrossed the country in a week, visiting all four shtetls where each of my grandparents grew up, as well as Jewish historical sites in several larger cities. Back then, I had my pick of tour guides who were eager to show me around, to tell me their versions of stories. One night my phone rang at midnight: it was the deputy mayor of ??d?, who’d heard I was in town. Could we meet for coffee the following day? Could he arrange a tour for me? New Jewish organizations were sprouting up to preserve cemeteries and provide kosher lunches. A Jewish Community Center was about to open in Kraków. I met twenty-and thirty-somethings who’d recently found out they were Jewish; their grandparents had kept it hidden during the years under Soviet rule. One of my guides was exactly my age, had a grandfather from the same town as mine, and had grown up across the street from the Majdanek concentration camp. He’d become obsessed with the war and talked with me through the night. I had come to Poland searching for my missing roots but found a Poland that was searching for its missing Jew.
On the other hand, I’d had dinner at a “Jewish themed” restaurant in Kraków where musicians played “Fiddler on the Roof,” the waiters served hamantaschen for dessert, and my fellow diners were busloads of clapping German tourists. I met distant relatives of mine who had stayed in Poland after the war because of their Communist beliefs, and who lived through Soviet rule and antisemitic attacks. One of them relayed how as a young boy, his parents had grabbed his hand, and the three of them fled from the ghetto into the forest; he survived the war in a partisan camp. He was livid about the “new Jew” culture in Poland, furious about the kosher lunches that he felt did not address the needs of the long-suffering Jewish community, and convinced that this was just a way for Poles to exploit American donations.
I did not know what to make of these two conflicting takes. Admittedly, I felt skeptical about the growth of a Jewish consciousness and philosemitism, in a country drenched in Jewish blood.
Now, returning to Poland by myself in the summer of 2018 to conduct research for this book about female fighters, I was still unsure. But whatever I’d experienced a decade earlier was no longer. On the one hand, Warsaw had become an urban megapolis; I stayed on the forty-first story of a hotel that looked out onto a futuristic cityscape that had once been the area of the ghetto and, before that, where all my grandparents lived. The hotel was filled with Israeli tourists; apparently, Warsaw is a popular shopping destination, and as young Israelis are priced out of their own real estate market, they’ve started investing in the old country. I walked down the city streets, passed monuments to the likes of Frumka P?otnicka and the sewage canal of Zivia’s story, to POLIN, the new, impressive museum of the history of Polish Jews, with exhibits about the Holocaust but also the thousand years of rich Jewish life that preceded it, and the decades after.
Kraków, this time around, was packed with tour buses, gelato shops, and pickpocket warnings; I kept confusing it for Venice, except that its café culture seemed more hip. Tour guides were harder to secure, most of them booked for months. The Kraków JCC, now well established, had opened a nursery school for Jewish offspring. （The director, American Jonathan Ornstein, referred to the old Kraków Jew-themed restaurants as “Jew-rassic Park.”） There were Jewish organizations in numerous cities catering to older populations and to young “new Jews.”
I attended the twenty-eighth annual Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków, founded and curated by a man who was not Jewish himself. The festival was based in the stylish, artsy Kazimierz, the old Jewish area, with seven still-standing synagogues dating from as early as 1407. The festival drew Jews and non-Jews from around the globe. Alongside klezmer music and art, the festival presented lectures, tours, and seminars probing contemporary Polish-Jewish relations, and asking why Poland needs, wants, and misses its Jews.
I had lunch with a group of literary Poles my age who surprised me with their keen interest in my work; when they found out that all four of my grandparents were from Poland, they mocked me for being more Polish than any of them. Once, at a busy crosswalk, I stopped and stared: I looked just like everyone around me. I was given a discount on a tour ticket because, based on my appearance, it was assumed I was a local. Since my London days, I thought I looked obviously Jewish, but nowadays here it was hard to tell . . . perhaps because there are so few Jews in Poland.