Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews (review)

176 SHOFAR Winter 2001 Vol. 19, No.2 opened her writing to a critical community that might raise unwelcome questions but kept it within the circle of the admiring like-minded, protected by the solidarity of friends. Arendt teased out of Rahel's enduring preoccupation with self-preservation her own reconstruction ofRahel as "Jewess and Schlemihl," hovering, to the end, "between pariah and parvenu," that is, between a responsibly critical perspective on her minority group and unquestioning assimilation to the majority group. And this reading with all its distortions and limitations seems still the most thought-provoking precisely because it does not, as does Tewarson's interpretation, dodge the question ofhistorical agency: the question of Rahel's responsibility for her own life. What she wrote to her friend David Veit about her suffering as a young Jewish woman, her "bleeding to death," has been quoted again and again to argue her profound victimization by antisemitism: with the gift to "see the world as few see it," she wrote, came the curse "to be a Jewess" (March 22, 1795). Anticipating Veit's advice not to dwell so much on her unhappiness (her outburst had been caused by mother's refusal to take her along on a trip to Leipzig), she rightly points out that like him, she too needs to live in society, needs to have choices: And here, of course is the crux of the matter. After completing his medical studies in Halle, Veit traveled to Paris with his cousin Abraham Mendelssohn, afterwards working as a physician for the city of Hamburg in a highly responsible capacity. By temperament and upbringing, Rahel was not prepared to accept the limitations that came with being born a woman, Jewish or Gentile. If her violent rejection of restrictions imposed on her seemed to center on her Jewishness, she reacted to more than instances of social exclusions. Veit's articulate, sensitive, sensible letters say as much. Indeed, he was in these letters much more intelligently perceptive of the other person than she ever managed to be-in the thousands ofpages recording her emotions and thoughts over a lifetime. Dagmar Bamouw Department of German University of Southern California Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews, by Eva Hoffman. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. 269 pp. $25.00. Modem Polish history is desperate; Polish-Jewishhistory is still more desperate. Having achieved independence in 1919-after more than a hundred years of subjugation to Russia, Prussia, and Austria-by 1939, Poland was carved up into Soviet and Nazi spheres of domination. Poles of all stripes were rounded up, deported, tortured, and killed in both totalitarian spheres, while Polish-Jews were slated for extermination by the Nazis. By the end of the war nearly three million Poles, ten percent of the Book Reviews 177 population, and three million Polish Jews, ninety percent ofthe Jewish population, had perished. Giventheir commonhistory ofvictimization one could imagine that Poles and Jews would recognize their common humanity, but one would be wrong. Many Polish Jews recall the pervasive pre-war antisemitism that poisoned their lives and the wartime indifference, or worse, of their fellow Poles. They also point to the pogroms that engulfed hundreds ofHolocaustsurvivors when they triedto return to claim their homes after the war. Itzhak Shamir, the former Prime Minister of Israel, who had been born in Poland and emigrated to Palestine as a young man, once said: "Poles have imbibed hatred ofJews with their mothers' milk." Most Polish Jews and their descendants would sadly agree. However, most Poles view the matter quite differently. They minimize pre-war antisemitism, and they blame Jewish inability to assimilate for Polish-Jewish tensions. They argue that during the war, despite the extreme danger, thousands ofPoles perished hiding or defending Jews from the Nazis. And they explain that after the war, Poland was engulfed in civil war between nationalists and communists that led to thousands of casualties, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Eva Hoffman's aim in Shtetl is not to sort out these claims and counter-claims, rather it is to historicize the relationship, thereby allowing for some perspective and nuance to enter into the conversation...