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involved in the Holocaust. This was not very surprising news to you and me, but when it was revealed by a Polish Jewish writer, Jan Gross, it launched a debate in all of the major newspapers, with hundreds of articles. Some responses have been positive. The government for the first time actually issued an apology. According to a survey, only about 30 percent of the Poles approved of the apology and there is a lot of talk about how this is just a Jewish conspiracy to defame the Polish people. Things get said in these debates that are the kinds of things that you and I would just be appalled by. You have to really extend your imagination to understand why these Jews are there and why they are staying there. After all of the history they have been through and their families have been through and the kinds of things that are still said, you'd say, “Why don't you leave?” They don't leave because it's their home.

PG: Yes, people on the outside often look at people in tough spots and say, “Oh, I would just get out of there,” but that really shows a failure of imagination, a failure to understand what it means to have a home, and even more what it means to be displaced from that home as a refugee. There are places in the book where you address this, and suggest that the continuation of European Jewish life after the Holocaust means, in an important way, that Hitler failed. I'm not so sure—but do you continue to feel that?

MK: Yes, in a certain symbolic sense, although I recognize that it isn't very easy to live your life as a metaphor. I went to a regular Friday-night service last week, which happened to be the sixty-third anniversary of Kristallnacht, and the Rabbi commented on the statement it made that we were still all there, a crowded synagogue with hundreds of Jews. You can feel good about that. But it's one thing to go on a Friday night for an anniversary and another to make it your life's work. I don't think that these people were largely motivated by symbolism. It's a thought they may have from time to time and feel good about, but they by-and-large went back and stayed for other reasons, often very pragmatic reasons, and there are a lot of people who really intended to leave someday but just never got it together to go to Israel or wherever it was they were planning on going. Or they came back and got involved with family things—all the things that happen to people that stop them from doing things they are planning on doing.

PG: My experience has been very much that Jewish life in Europe is vestigial—that, yes, there are Jews in Europe but not European Jewry, as it was before the Nazis, and that this reflects the sad fact that non-Jewish Europeans, as a whole, got what they wanted, or anyway lost what they didn't much mind losing. They didn't much care to have Jews around, and when Nazism created the opportunity, they succeeded pretty much in getting rid of them. I don't mean that all Europeans are guilty of banishing Jews, but that in the event, whether it was silently and passively or loudly and aggressively expressed, this was, alas, the sentiment that prevailed. And nowadays, you can certainly find more European Jewish culture in Tel Aviv or in New York or in Melbourne or in L.A., than you can in most European cities, even if there are Jews there. Of course, there's also a new, post-War generation in Europe that tries to act differently from its parents, and—I don't want to generalize—certainly in Germany and elsewhere that you find the post-War generation feeling guilty, there is a kind of intellectual fetishization of Jews and of antique Jewish culture, which is not entirely comfortable to behold. I wonder if you've encountered this, and if you feel as I do that there is a form of demonstrative philo-Semitism that can smell a lot like anti-Semitism on account of its fascination with Jews as exotic “others.”

MK: I think it is basically a modern, politically correct way of being an anti-Semite: Really, we love the Jews. Poles began to crave kosher vodka because the Jews really make it well. Everything Jewish in