A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [130]
It was a period of change when the old faiths weren't working, a time when Poles were asking many questions. Ever since a thug had called him a Jew and punctuated it with a smack in the face, Konstanty Gebert had been asking himself, “What was I supposed to do about things? How come I'm a Jew? What does I mean?” He was not going to start going to a synagogue. Synagogues and churches were “relics of the past,” not something for an enlightened modern Communist. Gebert was not even sure where to find a synagogue. He suspected that some of his friends were also Jewish. But you could not go to your friend and say, “Are you Jewish?” He compared it to saying to someone, “Are you an ape?” In Poland to ask someone if he or she is a Jew is to make an accusation.
The alternative was reading. He tried reading the Bible, but it did not speak to him. So he turned to the great nineteenth-century Yiddish literature. Writers such as Russian-born Sholem Aleichem a ad Polish-born Isaac Leib Peretz had been recognized by the regime as part of official culture and therefore were translated into Polish and made available to the public very inexpensively. Culture for the masses was a Communist ideal, and these writers had been included. What amazed Gebert when he read these stories of Jewish life in Poland and Russia—the world that had been exterminated shortly before he was born—was that it did not seem alien. Though he had never seen a shtetl or met religious Jews, they seemed very familiar and understandable, as though somehow certain values and ways of thinking had been passed on to him without the hat, beard, language, or rituals. Was Jewishness, then, a way of thinking?
In 1971, Gebert decided to visit the United States and look up some of his father's old Jewish Communist friends. He discovered a great-uncle in Sacramento, California, whose family included a grandson his age. They were not deeply religious, but they did observe the Sabbath, and Gebert, for the first time, went to a synagogue and to a family Sabbath meal. Although he was intrigued, he could not imagine living like that. In 1976 he met the family again in London. He even tried hosting his own Sabbath meal with Warsaw friends. But it didn't really work.
By then, Gebert, a psychologist by training, was reading more intellectual Jewish writers such as Martin Buber. When Carl Rogers, the American humanist psychologist, came to Poland to meet with Polish psychologists, Gebert and most of his friends went to see him. After a general talk, Rogers suggested that they break up into groups of special interest. There could be a group on divorce, one on parents of small children—
“How about a Jewish group?” someone said. Everyone laughed. Jews were always a good joke. But the person who had said it wasn't joking. He ignored the laughter and stubbornly added, “Well, anybody who is interested, meet me in my room at eight o'clock.”
Gebert went, pressed his way into the packed room, looked around, and discovered that most of his friends were Jewish. After that, he started talking to his friends about being Jewish. He found that most of them had in some way been abused in 1968 and that for them, too, the experience had led to reflection, but they hadn't known what to do. Gomulka's 1968 campaign had driven most Jews out of Poland but it had rekindled a Jewish consciousness in the few who remained. An unofficial Jewish group formed to meet twice a month in the hope that their common questions would lead to some common answers.
THE GIEREK YEARS—from 1970 to 1980—were a good time for this kind of activity. Under Gierek, Western fashions and culture started to appear, and there was a minor boom in the publication of what were perceived as “Western-type” books, which included a wide variety of titles on Jewish subjects including Holocaust history, World War II memoirs, studies of Jewish art, and reprints of prewar Jewish books.
The history of Eastern European Communism has been colored by the irony that opposition