• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 674 0

Poland is very sought after. And there is something clearly anti-Semitic about that but, I think that while you are right about European Judaism existing in Melbourne and in New York and L.A., I don't think that it will remain European in these places. You and I were raised with Europeans in our families. But I have a daughter and it amazes me to realize that she has three American-born grandparents. When I was growing up, somebody with three American grandparents was a WASP. She is growing up without knowing any European Jews. If European Judaism as a culture is going to survive, it won't be here. Here, it will evolve into something else—American Judaism. Only Europe can keep European Judaism alive, and the level of survival of the European Jewish culture tremendously varies from country to country. I would say that—and I have Jewish friends in Poland who are going to be upset with me for saying this—but I would say that it is really not surviving in Poland. There has to be a certain critical mass to have a Jewish community. That is the concept of a minyon. And really, it's not there in Poland. Plus the fact that people who grew up in a Communist society, just like the New York Jews who came from that kind of socialist background, are reflexively secular. Religion is alien. They encourage the religious rituals because they think they're nice, because of “culture,” but they don't want to spend their weekend in schul. In Hungary, Budapest has a sizable Jewish community. Paris has a thriving Jewish community with a strong North African component to it. But a lot of the North African Jews were also of European culture.

PG: And do these thriving communities represent a Jewish renewal to you, rather than a vestigial manifestation of the presence of those who remained because they didn't want to or couldn't leave?

MK: I think that Judaism has been throughout its history, since A.D. 70, a diaspora culture that's all about being a minority. In fact, being a small minority. When I'm in Israel, I cannot get used to the notion that we're all Jewish. It doesn't seem to me that we're supposed to all be Jewish. I didn't grow up in a Jewish neighborhood. I'm just very used to the idea that Jews are a tiny group within a group, that functions in this larger country where things work well as part of a country, but it's never a huge force. So, I don't need to see huge Jewish communities throughout Europe to feel like European Judaism is surviving. If there is a Jewish community in most major cities, which there is, and if the Jew who chooses to live a Jewish life is able to, then there is.

PG: So what do you mean when you say Jewish life? When one speaks of a thriving Jewish presence in Europe before the war, it really falls into two categories. On the one hand there were the shtetls and ghettos, distinctively Jewish villages and neighborhoods, where Jews lived largely among themselves, where Yiddish was widely spoken, and religious tradition was strong. And then, on the other hand, there was the very cosmopolitan, assimilated form of Jewish interaction with the non-Jewish world, in the arts and culture, politics, intellectual life, and the sciences.

MK: And that is still there. It is very much there in France. It's there in the Czech Republic. It's there in Poland. I use to laugh at the fact that everybody I knew in Poland was Jewish because I used to go to Poland just to research this book. But subsequently I have gone to Poland researching other things and still almost everybody I know in Poland is Jewish. A lot of prominent people in intellectual life and cultural life and political life in Poland today are Jewish, which is incredible because there are only a few thousand Jews.

PG: Over the years, you've written a number of books about very different peoples and cultures around the world. But when you write, say, about the Basques, you are not a Basque, whereas you are a Jew, and it matters to you, and that comes through in this book. How do you feel that writing about your own people— however distant their experience may be from