A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [159]
“Boys are different,” explained Andrzei. “If you can play sports, that's all they care about. I've never experienced anti-Semitism. American Jews see something written on the wall, and they call it anti-Semitism. But I've never experienced what a Jew in Poland calls anti-Semitism.”
Malka also went to school in New Jersey. For her, one of the deciding factors had been the mounting power of the Catholic Church in Poland. It was able to get mandatory Catholic religious classes into the school system in 1990. Malka was allowed to skip the classes, but that fact was noted by her teachers and might be reflected in her grades. She also felt set apart. She, in fact, was put back into the same dilemma in which young Barbara Gora had found herself in the 1930s. There were other signs that the Catholic Church was again going to be controlling life in Poland. Priests were denouncing the concept of a separation of church and state as Communist. The Church succeeded in getting a law passed reversing the liberal abortion policies and making Poland one of the most difficult countries in Europe in which to obtain an abortion.
In America, Malka felt free to be Jewish without being set apart. But she missed her parents and came back after the first year. It only took a few weeks back in Poland to decide: “I know I don't want this,” she said resolving to return to New Jersey.
Barbara Gruberska felt she had to square things away with her mother, who she couldn't even remember. When she saw her children become Jews, she felt she had done that. The price, however, was losing them, shipping them away to a distant country whose language she could not even speak. She could no more imagine living in America than in Israel. “I'm too old to go to America,” she said, though she was only in her fifties. “Too old to move.… Well, maybe to raise my grandchildren.”
WHEN THE WAKS FAMILY made their trip to Lodz, they went directly to the cemetery to find what was left of Jewish life in this city whose population had once been one-third Jewish—home to the Wakses, the Turskis, the Yoskowitzes and the Moreinos, the Finkelsztajns, the Silbermans. Jewish families from Lodz were part of every Western Jewish community. Where else to find Jews on a Saturday morning in Poland but at the cemetery? Lea chatted with what was left of the Lodz community, none of whom remembered any Wakses or Lessers. Then Lea and her family went to the area that had been the ghetto, in search of the houses in which she and Aaron had grown up. The closer they got to Lea's house, the more distraught she became. She had not wanted to take this trip. She found her old building and struck up a conversation with a woman in the back, where the housekeeper had lived. When the woman explained that she was the housekeeper's daughter, Lea introduced herself and recalled that they had played together as children. The woman did not seem to remember her.
The building, the entire neighborhood, was exactly the way Lea Waks remembered it, except for the deterioration from almost fifty years of neglect. The Jewish owner of the house had fled to Canada before the war. By coincidence, Ruwen Waks knew a relative of his in Tel Aviv. But the tenants only knew that the owner had left a long time ago, and they were still hoping that one day he would return and repair his property. The sukkah—the little hut for celebrating the Jewish harvest-time holiday, Sukkot—was still on the balcony where he had built it. It had not been used since 1940, and when Lea pointed it out to residents, none of them seemed to have any idea what it was for. Apparently, no one had ever asked why there was a hut on the balcony.
The people in Lodz did not see Jews very often anymore. In Communist times the few Lodz Jews had had a second-floor cockroach-infested canteen in the once-Jewish neighborhood that claimed to offer kosher meals. Their only noticeable dietary concession, however, was that they did not serve pork. The staff was