A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [227]
PG: At the same time, as you say, Jews have been a diasporic people for two thousand years, and the way that one's Jewish concerns surface and are expressed is distinctively colored by where you live. A French Jew and a Russian Jew may feel their common Jewish-ness strongly, and not only when Hitlerian push comes to Stalinist shove, but their national identities may exert at least an equal and opposite sense of difference between them. Consider how Primo Levi was acutely aware of and perceptive about the manifestations of national character among his fellow inmates at Auschwitz.
MK: A lot of Jews don't like to think about this, but the truth is that the nationalism is not an unimportant part of my book. That is why certain Jews wanted to go back to Germany—because they were Germans and they liked Germany. The Jews I know in Poland are a very special group of people not only because they came back but because they stayed through all the anti-Semitic campaigns. They were a small minority of the Jews who were there in 1945. After the pogrom in 1946, many left. Things kept happening and Jews kept leaving. These were the hardcore people who stayed. They stayed because Poland is their home and they love Poland. There is this tremendous tension between the Jews in Poland and Jews in the United States because Jews in the United States hate Poland, and they know it in Poland and both Jews and Poles there resent it.
PG: That makes sense, especially when you consider that among the Jews in Poland there must be a great many who were protected—or whose parents were protected—through the Holocaust and since by their Catholic neighbors. In fact, many who were hidden in this way as children are steeped in Polish Catholic culture, and a good many Jews have continued to live as Catholics, or at least as non-Jews. This is something one finds in the Czech republic and Hungary, unrecognized or unacknowledged Jews.
MK: Madeline Albright is a classic story.
PG: Yes, and it remains awfully hard to believe that she was as shocked as she claimed to be to learn of her Jewishness. I suspect that many Jews who were raised as Christians in Europe do know, at least vaguely, about their ancestry, and of course these days especially there are Jewish groups coming around seeking them out and trying to win them back.
MK: In a lot of these countries—Germany and Poland are two outstanding examples—it is practically a vocation to be a Jew. And not everyone wants to spend the rest of their lives in this vocation of being one of the 7,000 Jews in Poland. But in the time I was researching this book, the Jewish population of these places, especially in central Europe, was growing dramatically.
PG: You mean because Jews were coming out of the closet, so to speak?
MK: Yes, a lot of people, and this was very exciting.
PG: And now?
MK: I was back in Warsaw recently and some had gone much deeper into Judaism, but others say, “This was an interesting experience, but now I want to get on with my life.” But sometimes their children have done a lot of Jewish studies there, and even in Israel, to the point where parents are getting concerned that perhaps they are doing too much.
PG: It's the eternal question for Jews: How Jewish—or assimilated—is it okay to be?
MK: Exactly. It's always too much or too little.
Reading Group Questions
and Topics for Discussions
1. The book both opens and closes with Passover. What is the significance of this holiday to this story?
2. What has been the impact of the Holocaust on subsequent generations of European Jews? How does this differ from the impact on subsequent generations of American Jews?
3. Was it reasonable for Jews to return after the war to the countries where they had been betrayed?
4. After the fall of Communism, very few Jews were left in Eastern Europe who had