I went to Poland on an academic fellowship, full of mixed emotions about the country and its people, and was anxious about how those feelings would influence my stay. Poland remains a very gloomy place to be a Jew. But beyond the discomfort caused by the haunted landscape and the anti-Semitism of many of its people, a deeper source of my disquiet was that I had never interrogated the cultural foundations of my own response to Poland. For Jews, the American diaspora has not inspired rumination on the Old Country. It has been a place for avidly embracing America, and shutting the door on our European past, which has not seemed worth remembering. But why have we forgotten, and at what cost?

i.   

While in Poland, I imagined that my zaida was turning over in his grave. I willingly returned to the places he immigrated from, places that he could not even formulate a sentence about to express his contempt. When he was asked about the Old Country, however one describes the place within the obscure borderland region of the Czarist Empire from which he fled—Belorussia, Poland, Russia—he couldn’t muster anything more than a dismissive hand gesture, which was the ultimate mark of contempt and impatience for the old Jews of his generation. In any argument between my father and his father, for example, the gesture formed a defense against my father’s final rhetorical gesture—“What do you think, you’re still in Bialystock? ” Bialystock was not actually the place of zaida’s birth, but nevertheless became an expressive symbol for the irrelevance of my grandparents’ Old World experience in understanding America. The gesture was never used more emphatically than when my grandfather was asked naive questions by his American–born grandchildren of the “What was it like in the Old Country?” variety.  The force of his body language on those occasions nearly created a gust of wind.  For him, my going to Poland would be paradoxical, inexplicable, foolhardy—a mistake in judgment to which only the American-born, with their childish notions of significance and false sense of safety, could be tempted.                                                                          
ii.

For the majority of American Jews, curiosity or engagement with Eastern Europe, and especially Poland, is considered strange. Zaida’s generation, my father’s generation, my generation, the response to Poland in particular is always the same—if it is not greeted with a dismissive hand gesture, than it is greeted with its verbal equivalent. Every Jew I know to whom I related that I had received an invitation to teach at a Polish university, and was thinking of accepting it, responded in the same manner—absolute or near–disbelief.  Level of education did not matter in determining this response. Some of my historian colleagues, all of them accustomed to weigh carefully generalized claims about peoples, cultures, and nations, were as dismissive as less analytical friends. A few thought I was putting them on, making a grim and ironic Jewish joke, and responded with variations of, “Watch what you say there, or you’ll start a pogrom.”
   
There is, in fact, probably no place more suspect, if not cursed, in the mind of Jews than Poland, the home of the largest Jewish diaspora population in the world before the Holocaust.  Russia may rank a close second in aversive reactions, but Poland and its people have always seemed especially bad for the Jews.  In fact, I never heard a good word about Poland in the years I was growing up, surrounded by people—whether rabbis, teachers, relatives, neighbors, shopkeepers, and friends’ parents—whose roots were there. The ground seemed cursed, and not simply because the Nazi death camps were located there.  The attitudes were older than the Holocaust, and lay deep within the perceptions of the immigrants about the place from which so many of them came. Through their stories, or through their emphatic refusal to tell stories, countless bubbes and zaidas embedded such attitudes in the ethnic culture they created. They possessed nothing less than contempt for the place where they had lived and for its people. There was never anything positive said about Poland, which was looked at as something between a protracted nightmare and a terrible mistake, corrected only by a mass exodus, abandonment, and the effacing of collective memory. Everything Polish, everything connected with Poland, directly or remotely, including for many the culture that the Jews themselves formed there, was viewed as at best left behind and not spoken of, and at worst as an object of scorn and derision. Maybe the entire world of Eastern Europe was regarded the same way, but the sorry reputation of Poland seemed especially imprinted in the collective diaspora consciousness. Mama’s love and father’s wisdom, a little sister’s smile, or a family celebration might be recalled fondly in the immigrants’ songs, but not the native gentry or the peasants, the village priest, the town square, or the market place of the towns from which they had emigrated.
                                                                 
iii.                       

Whether or not this intense negativity about Poland, or the Old Country in general, is an accurate interpretation of life there is less central than the pervasive attitudes that suggest the depth of that alienation. Are the Jews different in this respect? Isn’t it arguable that all the European peoples who came to America left the Old World behind eagerly and with an abrupt finality?

The embrace of Americanism among these other peoples is indeed amply documented, but running simultaneously alongside it, and often intersecting with it, is the long history of transnational engagement with the lands of their birth. I speak not of lasting connections with family, friends, and individual communities, for the Jews had these, too, but instead of connections with the national cultures and states (or imagined states-to-be) of the places from which they had emigrated. The Serbs, Croats, Slovenians, Irish, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Greeks, and countless other peoples developed a lively conversation among themselves on the future of their homelands, and a variety of political organizations advancing views on their liberation and progress. The great empires of the day—British, German, Hapsburg, Russian, and Ottoman—ruthlessly suppressed these growing national longings for self-determination, and often exacted a high price for those organizing in behalf of nationhood. But in the diaspora, nationalists who had butted heads against the gendarmerie in Europe were free to debate, organize, and mount campaigns to influence the American state on behalf of their homelands. That they often bitterly disagreed with one another meant not the alienation of large numbers from a consensus, but rather a deeper involvement in ethnicity, for each fragment fought to define the center after its own image. Such disagreements actually strengthened diaspora European ethnicities, for they were both a formative element in the politics of identity that proved vital to a sense of ethnic belonging and a practical source for the internal social organization that formed the building blocks of ethnic community. Consensus existed not on the means or precise direction of the struggle for national liberation, but instead on the goal itself, concern for which provided a sine qua non for belonging to the national community. To be a part of the debate was the measure of belonging.

That one was in Boston rather than County Kerry, or Pittsburgh rather than Bratislava did not make one less Irish or Slovak. The intensity of emotional identification and of transnational political activity itself seemingly increased in direct proportion to distance. Its consequences were not simply symbolic, but helped determine the course of European history. The Irish Gaelic revival began in Boston, and Czechoslovakia was founded at a meeting hall in downtown Pittsburgh. Some people never stopped identifying with the struggles of their land of origin, which has continued to the present day, as anyone with knowledge of the Irish Republican Army’s funding efforts in American neighborhood taverns knows. You only have to watch who composes the official line of march in a St. Patrick’s Day parade to understand the depth of such feeling about a national homeland in an otherwise well-assimilated Irish America. With Eastern European ethnics such as the Poles, whose re–emergent, post–1918 nationhood was stunted by Nazi and Soviet tyrannies, the moment for exile and refugee politics has passed. Via democratic institutions, free markets, and NATO, their homelands are rapidly joining Western Europe, and they are embracing consumer aspirations familiar to the twenty–first century Western European and North American middle class. But the moment for cultural and social engagement has not ended. Investment, tourism, and a year abroad for the children of the fourth or fifth generation are possibilities many embrace.

The Jews have been marginal participants in these developments, for they always found themselves at the boundaries of the national narratives in the various nation-states that were the Old Country. The similarities between these places in regard to the tenuousness, if not the impossibility, of Jewish membership in the national family have been greater than the differences. For many, the homeland never felt like home. Consequently, Eastern and Central European diaspora political contentions did not wrack Jewish diaspora communities.  While diaspora Jewry was not prominently engaged in the conversations over the destinies of the places from which they had come, they did, of course, have their preferences.  Bitter hatred of the Czarist Empire, with its deep, abiding and government-inspired anti-Semitism, led many to favor the Central Powers in World War I, thus alienating the Poles in the eastern provinces of Imperial Germany and in Galicia, in the northern reaches of the Hapsburg Empire.  For the multitude of Jewish converts to Marxism, there was intense sympathy with the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution. When that sympathy carried over to the Soviet state in its early armed clashes with the new  Polish Republic, the Poles were once again prone to see Jewry as their enemy, though many Polish Jews expressed their loyalty to the Polish state and were strong supporters of independent Poland’s first president, Józef Piªsudski.  But, for the most part, diaspora Jews sat on the sidelines while those culturally endowed with status as members of the nation took positions as activists. Zionism, the quest for an imagined homeland far distant from the places of their birth, would ignite Jewry’s diaspora politics, as would relief of the besieged Jews of Europe in the 1930s and during the war and after, but not the debates about the fate of the countries they had left, though they had lived in them for many centuries.

I grew up in Chicago during the most confrontational years of the Cold War. While transnational politics preoccupied the Serbians, Poles, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians, I cannot recall ever hearing a conversation among my parents, grandparents, their friends or their neighbors about matters such as the legitimacy of the decisions made about Poland at Yalta. Had I asked my father about whether it was right or wrong to recognize the legitimacy of the Oder-Niesse Line, he probably would have been startled, then shrugged his shoulders, and said the equivalent of, “Why should I care about that?  Don’t we Jews have enough of our own problems?”  My grandfather, otherwise a thoughtful and well–read, if deeply opinionated man, would not have dignified the question with an answer, though in the right mood he might have put down his copy of the Freiheit just long enough to have replied something like, “They’re all meshugga there,” or “a bunch of antisemiten,” followed by a dismissive hand gesture. He was not emotionally involved in the contentious politics of the Cold War, and certainly not engaged enough to identify with the victims of  Stalinism and of the deals hatched by politicians and diplomats at Yalta.

The reasons for this disengagment were complex. The victims my family was most concerned with were those who perished in the Holocaust, or the survivors who spend the post–war years in displaced persons camps. Zaida spent years, without any success, trying to find out if there were any survivors from the large family of cousins he and bubbe had left behind. If they could be found, and brought to America, my grandparents would have willingly closed their minds to memories of the place of their birth. Then, more than five years after the end of the war, they received a letter from a Jewish GI, writing on behalf of a distant cousin and his wife who were interned in a DP camp in Italy. My grandfather spent his own money to bring them to America and help them establish a new life. No other survivors were ever found.   

Furthermore, zaida never completely gave up on Communism, though, because of political necessity in the 1950’s, his opinions were voiced in muted tones; and this faith, too, influenced his response to the Cold War and the victims of Soviet tyranny. Years after the starvation of the kulaks, the purges and murders of the Old Bolsheviks, the rise of the Gulag, and the mass deportations of peoples, he would not surrender his religion. However imperfect the efforts to realize socialism, in the long run, it would be a better system than capitalism. He received no encouragement from his family, who looked at his politics with a mixture of amusement and scorn. For the Americanized children, such as my father and the grandchildren, there was no greater proof that zaida and bubbe were still in Bialystok than their loyalty to such foreign, Utopian notions as Marxism. Only toward the end of his long life, after the building of the Berlin Wall, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and, above all else, story after story of state–inspired anti–Semitism in the Soviet Union and Poland, did he come reluctantly to accept the possibility that the exercise of power without democracy was tyranny, and that he was  worshiping a particularly dangerous god.

His continuing faith in communism depended on two quite particular illusions he embraced, and both of them illustrate the depth of his alienation as a Jew from the land of his birth. The first was that Stalin’s gift to the Jews, a homeland in Birobijan in the wilderness in Soviet Asian Siberia, was not a cynical maneuver for getting them far from European Russia, while exploiting their idealism to develop a remote, strategic corner of the Soviet Empire. The Jews were to have their own country, at last a homeland of sorts, and develop their socialist destiny apart, indeed very far apart from the other European peoples of the Soviet Union. The Yiddishist in zaida delighted in the Freiheit’s news stories about productions of Sholom Alaichem at the Yiddish theater in the capital of Birobijan and about new volumes of Yiddish poetry published by the Jewish province’s publishing house, and the Communist in him, in stories about the Autonomous Region’s record potato harvest or the opening of a new maternity hospital. Socialist Jewish peasants working happily on collective farms; Jewish doctors, Jewish nurses, all in a Jewish quasi–country, all constructing socialism! Thus, zaida’s Zion was not in Europe, even Communist Europe, but instead in Siberia, and nothing so riled the old man as my father’s efforts to convince him that this Utopia was a cruel hoax. 

The practical man in zaida thought separate development was wise and safe in light of  Jewish experience. This was the basis for his second illusion: that by removing scarcity and competition from human existence, communism would slowly but inevitably improve the moral and cultural level of the Russians, Poles and related peoples, so that they might eventually begin to wake up from the long night of barbarism that had made them so deeply anti-semitic, and join the family of enlightened nations. Eventually, though necessarily from a vast distance, they might become dependable neighbors. What these beliefs amounted to from one perspective was the feeling that, on the one hand, you could not really live with gentiles, but on the other hand, they did not have to be as benighted as they often appeared to be. One might live in peace, if from faraway, given the right social system.

All of these socialist hopes for humanity and for the Jews were dreamed and rationalized from the safety of America, where new lives were being constructed and new family lines being established. America generated more than enough ordinary problems, problems that were pressing enough to overwhelm the declining concern for anything European. Zaida might have been Red—very Red when provoked—but he was ultimately a practical man concerned with practical things.  How were his three daughters and their husbands to support themselves?  Were the grandchildren all going to college?  How would this be paid for? What would they do after graduating? Would they be able to support themselves? Would they make good marriages? This reality was overwhelming, and what in Europe had been of special concern was, by the 1950s, dying for all time. The solutions to these daily problems all pointed forward. Reinforcing the prominence of these concerns was the fact that in Eastern Europe, there was no family left there to be concerned about. The American realities of the postwar period, in which families were formed and grandchildren grew to adulthood, reinforced what was the dominant emotional response to the history that had made him—to shut the door on the past, and never reopen it. If he or bubbe had personal memories, fond or otherwise of their shtetl, their childhood, or their families or friends, they never discussed them, except perhaps in private conversation with one another. For them, it appeared, the past in the Old Country was dead, as was the relevance of Eastern Europe and of the centuries–old Jewish presence there.
                      
iv.

So, the Jews had their own history, a mountain of their own problems, and not a great deal of assistance in confronting them from their ethnic gentile neighbors, to whom they in turn offered little in the way of attention or sympathy. The Jewish immigrants looked to themselves, and defined “home” and “homeland” in ways that were inclusive only of family and community. They possessed a profound negativity toward the cultures of daily life and common attitudes of their gentile neighbors, even if they might live near them in America and own the stores in which they shopped. Their children and grandchildren passionately embraced the United States. On balance, perhaps no significantly sized American ethnic group conceived of its emigration as much as a liberation as did Eastern European Jews. None willed themselves to be as positive about the future—or, to put it another way, none looked backward with as many collective bad memories. To be sure, we now know from historians’ research that some Jews returned to Eastern Europe. But such aspirations were hardly dominant in the North American diaspora; those who returned were easily conceived of as fools, especially from a post–Holocaust perspective. We know, too, that none of these long European residences in the history of Jewish peoplehood was merely a protracted nightmare. Jews once did thrive in Poland and Eastern Europe, but that memory was so distant that it hardly mattered to the immigrants and their children who conceived of themselves as having fled, not simply as having left.

This effort to begin anew in the United States, akin in its way to the energies that formed Zionism and shaped Israel, came at a price for which there has never really been an adequate accounting.  The Jews denied a part of their past, and embraced, sometimes with uncritical enthusiasm, their American future in direct proportion to their alienation from the world they had left. Their increasingly intense identification with America and desire to be accepted involved having to prove themselves worthy of trust and respect as Jews, to whom ancient, aversive images still clung. They feared that respectable Americans with manners and important family names doubted their ability to become real American citizens. Their state of mind was a consequence of closing that door behind them that they never wished to reopen. Indeed, not just closing it, but locking it and throwing the key away.

I think of that concern for fitting in, for being respectable, and for not sticking out that so characterized my middle class parents, as well as their friends and neighbors, and in effect, led them to silence zaida and bubbe every time they started to voice their admittedly non-mainstream political views. Of course, zaida and bubbe allowed themselves to be silenced by the dismissive comments about Chicago not being Bialystok. I have no memories of my grandfather, a cunning dialectician even in his late 80’s, ever responding to that particular provocation with any number of plausible responses: “Well, not everything that happened there was a nightmare, and we learned some important things, ” or “Bialystok wasn’t perfect, but neither is America.”  He had no rejoinder to “What do you think, you’re in Bialystok? ” not only because they were indeed not in Eastern Europe, but also because they emphatically never wanted ever to be there again. Ultimately, for all of their Marxist convictions, they possessed no real conceptual alternative to soften the rigid adherence to the American model that loomed before them as the only road they could practically traverse. 

The self–conscious destruction of memory and closing off of the past helped produce that debilitating self-consciousness that I became aware of as a child growing up in my neighborhood of upwardly mobile families of second generation professionals, small business owners, and civil service employees. As individuals, Jews could not be too ethnic in public, for this was kikey. They had to think right—in other words, like the respectable goyim, and speak right, live right in their homes, eat right, spend their leisure in the right way, all in the name of fitting in. They allowed themselves not even mental escape from America. In daily life, in public, they must appear as much as possible just like the Americans who set the Anglo-Saxon Standard. 

The thought that the goyim might be confused and poor guides for self-modeling was rarely allowed in public discourse. In private, of course, there was the near–universal derision of goyisher kopf, but this was largely mockery of their tribalisms, such as excessive drinking, exuberant weddings, crawling down the aisle of the church on Easter in penance, belief in superstitions such as the evil eye of the working class gentiles, who were European ethnics. It was contempt for the same people they had disliked in Europe.
     
I never heard Dwight David Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles, Adlai Ewing Stevenson, or Norman Vincent Peale accused of having the kopf of a goy. True, the Jews did not vote for Eisenhower, but not because he was the personification of gentile. In fact, their political champion in the 1950s, Stevenson, was, if anything, an ur-WASP and a big snob. Unlike the plain-spoken, good-hearted Eisenhower, he privately had the condescending, country club prejudices toward Jews that those like my father attempted to counter through modeling themselves in ways that would make them acceptable within the American mainstream. They didn’t vote for Eisenhower, because their original champion was a Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, another ur-WASP aristocrat, who privately shared, along with his wife Eleanor, Stevenson’s prejudices, and who did nothing to stop the slaughter of the Jews of Europe and little to gain admission for Jewish refugees during the war. But Roosevelt nonetheless spoke the compelling and inclusive language of social democracy. Roosevelt’s politics created an ideological space that all of America’s little people could share together, without reference to their differences. For his social democratic politics of inclusion, our rabbi called Roosevelt “a saint” from the pulpit on the occasion of one election–time Rosh Hashanah sermon in the 1950s.  But one wonders whether being courted by a Roosevelt or a Stevenson, with their fancy pedigrees and rural estates, and hence appearing to be acceptable and validated by them, also made a psychological difference in the overwhelming support the Jews gave these Democrats?

As a boy sitting at the dinner table, I became aware of the various registers of significance indicated by the sound of my parents’ conversation. One of the themes that was always indicated by seriousness of tone was what my father called in whispered tones “kikeyness,” which was embodied in stories of inappropriate, greenhorn behavior of those who were an embarrassment to the Jews in their quest to become acceptable Americans. The Jews of Chicago were rapidly vacating the West Side, where their immigrant parents had resettled after coming from Europe, and where a great wave of African Americans was now laying down new, northern roots. Jews were moving En masse northward and eastward toward the borders of the city. Prosperous as never before and hardly enthusiastic about living amongst their new black neighbors, many of them were abandoning the working class and its neighborhoods, and buying homes, which not a few were unprepared to live in. There emerged stories of the missteps of first-time homeowners, whose foibles provided a basis for mockery and collective embarrassment. There had never been a large Jewish peasantry in Europe, but this technical point did not stop my parents from referring to some of the new co-religionists in the neighborhood as “peasants,” which was ultimately another reflection of their contempt for the ordinary Poles and others, who really had been peasants, among whom their parents had once lived, both in Europe and in America. Of course, what went on in the houses of these migrants to the near–suburbs was their business, but when you picked the grass in the front of your house by hand (an instance of which was once a topic of my parents’ dinner table conversation) because you did not know that there were lawnmowers, you held the entire Jewish people up to ridicule! 

What you needed for that job, even if you had a postage stamp-sized property, was a big, noisy, gasoline-driven power mower. That’s what the goyim used, so it had to be right. The summer weekend mornings in West Rogers Park were a tumult of power mower noise. Forget the fact that the engine required cranking again and again, that it flooded and stalled repeatedly, and that in the end, the whole procedure took three times as long as that employed by the uprooted peasant down the street who did the work by hand. And when that peasant did the job in a sleeveless undershirt, of the sort you associated with the dumb-ox Stanley Kowalski yelling for his Stella in the darkened streets of New Orleans, it seemed the final capitulation to inborn incapacities that would keep the Jews forever from fitting in.

But miraculously these peasants soon improved themselves, as if the very air of our near-suburb cleansed their souls of greenhorn tendencies. Lawnmowers and other appropriate technologies proliferated, and sleeveless undershirts disappeared from the streets. Jewish homeowners of my father’s generation in our neighborhood were probably the only men in Chicago who worked on their lawns in slacks with belts and buttoned sport shirts, so that they would not appear to be grubbers.

But why this self–consciousness? The neighborhood was so Jewish that there were few potentially disapproving gentile eyes that could survey the scene, looking for reasons to mock. There was no cultural tourism then, and if there had been, those gentiles coming to gawk would have died of boredom. This was not Chinatown, with its distinctive architecture and colorful signs. There was absolutely nothing to be exoticized. West Rogers Park was as colorless and featureless a place as the 1950’s could have produced. The homes, public schools, synagogues, and commercial properties all looked the same, separated one from the other only by size and the color of the brick used in construction. All that really stood out was an occasional tavern on a prominent corner that obviously predated Jewish settlement. 

But outside appearance is hardly the point. The model for how they should behave and think and of the world they should aspire to build around them was in the heads of these men and women, and they had no source of release from it, even in private moments when surrounded by one another.  Their plight is easily satirized at this level, but its pathos is what strikes me now.
European ethnics like the Poles certainly felt pressures to conform, but many embraced their difference, take refuge in positive collective memories going back to the Old Country, and romanticized the past to provide mental relief. The Old Country has been a positive point for daydreaming—a refuge, a release, and a source of pride as they negotiated their American lives. 

v.

“Poland is a beautiful place,” Matt Okoniewski told me, as the time for my journey drew near.  Matt, who pumps my gas at his service station in our Buffalo neighborhood, grew up in a Polish–speaking household, with immigrant parents. He speaks Polish, and tried to tutor me, but I never completely trusted his tutoring for fear that he and his brother Paul would put words into my mouth that would get me in trouble in polite company. For Matt and Paul, the Polish language is an extension of an ethnic, working–class world that they recall nostalgically, and is best employed to call to mind that world. They joke about their boyhoods on the Polish Eastside of Buffalo, a happy world filled with memories of taverns and tipsy but good-natured working men, leaving the neighborhood bar at dusk after stopping to have a drink with their buddies from the factory before going home to dinner. But when Matt speaks of Poland, a country he has never seen, he does not joke. He speaks with respect and pride, and indeed a measure of awe. But the Jews cannot. History conspired to remove that option from their mental life. In doing so, it has made their often awkward embrace of America that much more passionate.