A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [18]
P A R T O N E
THE
BREAD
YEARS
“Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland” (Death is a master from Germany.)
PAUL CELAN, Todesfuge
1
From Lódź
to Paris
THE THUD OF AN ORANGE STARTLED MOISHE WAKS. After hearing stories about Poland all his life from his parents, he was not surprised that the Poles were throwing things at him. What was surprising was that they would waste an orange. Oranges were expensive in post-Communist Poland. Then he picked it up, and the Waks family laughed. It was only the peel, so there really wasn't anything to be amazed about.
The Waks family always did a lot of laughing when they got together, which was not that often. Moishe lived in Berlin, a plump and successful Berlin businessman, and he was the one leader in the West Berlin Jewish Community who took an interest in Irene Runge and the Ossis at the Kulturverein. His older brother Ruwen, taller and less plump but otherwise looking very much like his brother, lived in Israel. Their mother, Lea, a strong-willed woman with a crisp, ironic sense of humor and a proud, straight posture, still stubbornly lived in Dusseldorf, all the while preaching Zionism.
By the time Poland opened up for visitors and the Wakses could go back to look around, Moishe's father, Aaron Waks, a dogmatic but loving man, had died in Dusseldorf. Moishe and his brother had gotten the idea of having their mother show them Lodz, where she and Aaron had grown up. But the trip was making her visibly ill. She was showing her sons things she had never even been able to talk about. Still, like many Jews with Polish roots, in recent years her sons felt that they had to see Poland.
Families from Lodz were part of almost every Jewish community in the world, but in Lodz itself there was only one usable synagogue left. The Wakses knew better than to look for Jews there. They went directly to the cemetery. The few Jews left in Lodz knew that the best chance of meeting foreign Jewish visitors was to wait around the cemetery. When Jews came to Lodz now, they were looking for the dead. On Saturday mornings, Shabbat, Jews went to the cemetery and waited for weekend visitors like the Waks family.
Piotrkowska Street was being cleaned up and transformed into a commercial pedestrian mall to greet the new capitalism. But most of Lodz was chipped and peeling, its bygone affluence revealed in the richly decorative architecture. The wood-paneled mansions with long sweeping stairways that used to belong to the mill owners were now museums. Some of the old mills were still operating, like the colossal red brick gothic cottonworks of Poltex, and a few two-story wooden houses with outdoor staircases, where mill workers’ families crowded together, were still standing.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and its trade bloc, Lodz was again without a local economy. It had lost its Russian market. Between 1990 and 1993, forty thousand Lodz textile workers were laid off. Almost half of the 285 factories had closed.
The same thing had happened at the beginning of the century. In 1918, when Poland received its independence, Lodz had also lost its Russian market. The Poles started getting their wish, that often-proposed answer to “the Jewish question’: The Jews, on the bottom of the crumbling economy, were leaving Poland, not by the hundreds but by the hundreds of thousands. In the seventeenth century, three-quarters of the world's Jews had lived in Poland, after fleeing anti-Semitism in Western Europe but stopped from going further by anti-Semitism in Russia. But over the next four centuries Poland became an increasingly unfavorable place for Jews to live. By the 1920s, only one out of every five Jews