A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [8]
A half century later, the global Jewish population is still some three million fewer than the eighteen million Jews in 1933 when the Nazis came to power. What was once a population of almost nine million European Jews—half of world Jewry—is today four million, little more than a quarter of world Jewry. But at last it can be said with some confidence that European Jewry will continue, that the remaining Jews of Europe will not all move to the United States or Israel, as had often been suggested. There are only one million more Jews in Europe today than there were when the camps were liberated, but Paris has become a major Jewish center, traditional Jewish life is thriving in Antwerp, and Budapest has the makings of a large and diverse Jewish center. Communites in Berlin, Prague, and Amsterdam are struggling, but there are reasons for optimism. Poland, on the other hand, which started the century with one out of every five Jews in the world, seems today almost devoid of Jewish life—an historical reversal of Jewish demography comparable only to the Spanish expulsion in 1492 and the final Roman conquest of Judaea in A.D. 135.
I grew up in immigrant America. The Poles, Italians, and Irish had relatives in “the old country/’ but Jews did not. No Jew I knew did. I certainly didn't. All the relatives I knew of had either left or been killed. No one really gave much thought to the fact that American Jews lacked European relatives. It was just one of those things that made Jews different, like Saturday instead of Sunday. Jews are accustomed to the idea of being different. But while no one said it, it was generally understood that Jews did not have relatives in Europe because there were no longer Jews in Europe. People seeing my name would ask me if I had relatives in Poland. “No, I'm Jewish,” I would say as an unemotional and readily understood explanation.
But even in Poland, a few Jews are trying to breathe life into the remnants of Jewry. The question arises—is often rudely asked— why a Jew would want to live in Poland. More than three million Jews were massacred there, the survivors were subjected to pogroms and attacked on trains, and finally a new regime that had promised to end racism unleashed its “anti-Zionist” campaigns. Not only in Poland but everywhere in Europe Jews are faced with the question, often from Jewish visitors, “Why are you still here?”
I wanted to know the answer to that rude question. I also wanted to know what price had been paid and what struggles waged over the past fifty years to stay and rebuild. Not surprisingly, I found no single answer to the question. People stayed because, in spite of what anti-Semitic countrymen might claim, they were indeed Poles or Frenchmen or even Germans. Some stayed because they did not want to see the history of their Jewish community come to an end. Some sta)ed to build a new society. Some never intended to stay but couldn't get their relatives to move. Some hated the thought of moving anywhere. Some always meant to move but could not get organized to leave, and some just got too involved with their careers.
What has emerged is a half-century of European history seen through the eyes of Jews—a traumatized and damaged people's experience in rebuilding their lives in the postwar, cold war, and post-Communist eras.
The Jews who were committed to rebuilding their communities sometimes found themselves at cross-purposes with their local Zionist movement. In much the same way, this book too is in conflict with Zionism, a conflict that is inevitable but in neither case specifically intended. I have never believed that all Jews should move to Israel, and I have always been bemused by Zionists who themselves had no plans to move there. I like the idea that there are still Jews in Europe, that Amsterdam's Esnoga and Prague's Old-New Synagogue are still working synagogues and not museums. Perhaps it is just that I do not want Hitler to posthumously attain his goal.
On the other hand, I understand that many Jews and non-Jews alike view Europe's future with foreboding.