A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [155]
With the growth of Jewish tourism, Grzybowski Square, the green triangle on the opposite side of the Culture Palace from the Polonia, became an attraction. The Culture Palace itself—a tower ornamented in the basic medieval/Moorish/art deco/neoclassical architecture that had become a symbol of Stalinism—though hard to ignore, was not an attraction. But a guidebook for Jewish tourists could describe the Grzybowski Square area as offering a synagogue, a Yiddish theater, and a kosher restaurant.
The kosher restaurant, decorated in white and blue, was one of the more expensive restaurants in Warsaw and struggled to survive with a small, mostly foreign clientele. The synagogue also often needed a tourist or two to have a minyan. The Yiddish Theater was of some distinction until 1968, when its director, Ida Kaminska, and most of its actors emigrated. Now it was run by a dramatic white-haired man, Shimon Szurmiej, who was one of the least-liked figures in the Warsaw Jewish community. During Communist times, as head of the Social and Cultural Association, Szurmiej was a token “Jewish leader” and was ready to give credibility to any position that the regime took, from rejecting criticism from world Jewry to establishing martial law.
The Yiddish Theater would not be much of a draw for Polish Jews in any event, since only Moishe Shapiro and a handful of others understood the language. Next to the synagogue was a free lunch program—a very basic lunch weighted with a lot of potatoes—where these few could socialize with each other and speak Yiddish. These people had very little money and went neither to the kosher restaurant nor to the Yiddish Theater. The rarely-more-than-half-filled theater was made up of a few Poles curious about Yiddish theater and schoolchildren who had no choice. Headphones were provided with a monotonous, droning translation into Polish, but many of the schoolchildren did not even put the headphones on. Aside from Szurmiej, his wife, and his son, most of the actors were not Jewish. They had been coached in Yiddish but were not conversant. And since they knew nothing of Hasidim or shtetl life, their attempts to imitate it ended up as buffoonish anti-Semitic stereotypes. It was the performance equivalent of the carved wooden dolls.
Pinhas Menachem Yoskowitz, a Gerer Hasid from Lodz who had survived the ghetto, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, was brought from Israel to Warsaw by American Hasidim to be the rabbi for the Nozyk Synagogue. He came from an important Ha-sidic family, and a marriage had been arranged between one of his seven children and Chaim Rottenberg's son, Mordechai, who took over from his father on Rue Pavee. Yoskowitz, in his sixties, was a tall, thin, meticulously dressed figure in the long dark garb of Gerer Hasidim with an expensive-looking black broad-brimmed fur hat. His eyes seemed to sparkle with a sense of mischief, and his long white beard caught the breeze and rippled across his chest.
Yoskowitz was given to making outrageous statements to the press, at one point talking about the evacuation from Poland of the Jewish community because of growing anti-Semitism. Many of Poland's Jews, especially the young ones who were just discovering their Jewish identity, found Yoskowitz a difficult man with whom to talk. He appeared to have a short attention span and little patience for lengthy conversations, which was an odd trait for a rabbi. In fact, although he