A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [223]
A Conversation with Mark Kurlansky
In November 2001, Mark Kurlansky and Philip Gourevitch sat down to discuss A Chosen Few. Gourevitch, a staff writer at The New Yorker and formerly an editor at The Forward, is the author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda and A Cold Case.
Philip Gourevitch: It's nearly ten years now since you traveled through Central and Eastern Europe gathering the material for this book. At that time, the region was still just emerging from half a century behind the Iron Curtain. Today the Communist period already seems a much more remote memory—at least from over here. What is your sense of how the Jewish communities you immersed yourself in for this book have experienced the intervening decade?
Mark Kurlansky: I did the reporting for this book in ‘92 and ‘93. I've been back to most of these places since anyway, but I specifically went recently to write a new introduction. The communities have not greatly changed, in part because I did my original reporting after the fall of the Soviet Union, which was a huge event. It is remarkable that the East Germans and the West Germans, both Jews and non-Jews, are no closer together now than they were ten years ago. They are so distinct that you could just walk into a bar or restaurant and pick out who's an Ossie and who's a Wessie. In the Jewish communities in Western Europe, there's a slight difference in atmosphere now because they went through a period, mostly in the ‘80s, of constant attacks, bombings, and machine gunnings by Palestinian groups. Sometimes neo-Nazi groups claimed the attack, but most of them turned out to be the work of Palestinian groups. This is all clearly remembered but the attacks have become less frequent.
PG: What made them taper off?
MK: I don't think anybody is really sure, since so little was done to apprehend the terrorists. What do you want to bet that some of these people who were doing that then are still very active attacking other places? It is interesting to note that those terrorism networks were not nearly as urgent to uncover and stop when they were just killing Jews. The climate in those places has somewhat changed, although you can still go to any city in Western Europe on Rosh Hashanah, or even on a Friday night, and if you are looking for a synagogue just look for a place where the armed guards are out in the street, and there you will find a synagogue. That has become a way of life for European Jews, just as I suspect it is going to become for American Jews.
PG: When you wrote this book, you were writing in a time of transition, and the transition was a time of hope. There was a sense of emergence and reconnection with the rest of the world—and for Jews with their Jewishness and with international Jewish life more broadly. So when you say that things haven't changed all that much in the intervening decade, I wonder do the people you visited at the time still feel that hope, or has it faded into discouragement?
MK: I would have to say a lot of that hope came from America, or from the world Jewish community. Especially in Central Europe. The Jews there were always a little dubious, kind of dazzled by the interest that the Jews in the rest of the world were taking, and fascinated by what was available to them and what they were learning. And now a lot of these people, a lot of their children, have spent a year or two in Israel—something that was unimaginable before—but it hasn't translated into a flowering of Judaism in Central Europe, partly because the numbers aren't really there, and partly because of the irony that while Communism often repressed Jews it also repressed anti-Semites, or at least right-wing anti-Semites. So now Jews are much freer, but anti-Semites are much freer too. It's extraordinary the kinds of debates that are going on in Poland, that would have been unthinkable under Communism.
PG: Like what? Is the Nazi past being reckoned with or denied, or both?
MK: It was recently discovered in Poland that some Poles actually were