YIVO Annual. Volume 21: Going Home (review)

Book Reviews 99 YIVO Annual. Volume 21: Going Home, edited by Jack Kugelmass. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press and the YlVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1993. 463 pp. $45.95. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Empire it has become much easier to travel to its former subject lands like Poland, Romania, Hungary, and lithuania and less of a bother and ordeal to get around in them once there. A consequence of this, little noticed, is that Jews in increasing numbers have been visiting the Old Country seeking out the shtetlekh and towns where parents and (now mostly) grandparents and great aunts and uncles once lived and died and dreamed of escaping from; and going not only to ancestral homes like Cracow and Lodz but to Auschwitz and other death places of the Holocaust. Jews are a "heavy" people, a people who carry the weight of their history around with them. The Yiddish language renders this as a pekl tsores, "a pack of sorrows," and part of the weight of that pekl derives from an accumulation of yearnings and senses of loss, of unfulfiIled desires-for Deliverance, for the waters of Jordan, for Return, for "Next Year in Jerusalem. " And since not every American Jew who drinks to "Next Year in Jerusalem" at Passover actuaIly wants to live there next year, it isn't reaIly very surprising that other variants of Return sometimes displace Israel in the stirrings of the memory of the folk. That is what this handsomely produced and unusually readable, well edited Volume 21 of the YlVO Annual (Going Home) is about. Jack Kugelmass has assembled thirteen essays on the theme of Return understood in its widest sense: Lucjan Dobroszycki on the painful, impossible return of Polish Jews to Poland in the postwar period; Ronald Webster on German Jews who returned to Germany or tried to after 1945; Suzanne Vromen on nostalgia in general and Jeffrey Shandler on nostalgia in the German/Yiddish silent film Ost und West from 1923j a moving account by Marc Kaminsky of his Bessarabia-born grandmother for whom "Yiddish was a motherland"; the Return motif among Sephardim OoeIle Bahloul, Harvey E. Goldberg); a pair of superb photographic essays on the Lower East Side (Aviva Weintraub) and a return in the 1920s to a shtetl in lithuania (Roberta Newman); Daniel Soyer on a Lodz-born New York travel agent, a makher one wouldn't have minded knowing, who in the interwar period facilitated trips back to Poland ofJewish immigrants; an interesting comparative account ofethnic identity ofJewish and Slavic representations (Ewa Morawska)j a nice memoir (nice because composed equaIly of both 100 SHOFAR Summer 1995 Vol. 13, No.4 personal and academic perspectives) of a pilgrimage far afield in search of the emanations of a place/region in the Old Country called Maramarosh by Susan Slyomovics: and finally a piece by the editor, Jack Kugelmass, on the meaning ofPoland for American Jewish tourists ("Rites of the Tribe"). The essays are all a pleasure to read, almost completely free of postmodern jargon; I cannot recall even a single occurrence of "hegemony" or "simulacrum." The idea of Return, of Going Back, of Homeland, pulls powerfully on the folk memory, the Volksgeist, of all displaced peoples who remain attached to their histories. Jawaharlal Nehru thought of Kashmir as his homeland even though his grandfather, the last Nehru to actually live there, had come down generations before from that mountain-ringed valley so fabled in the imagination and spiritual history of the Indian subcontinent . The theme-Return-deserves a collection. Nostalgia can easily become sentimentality (nostalgia and Return go hand in hand), but the editor and the contributors to this volume have resisted the slide into sentimentality. Nostalgia I understand very well. I respond to the resonance of "Ziftsn fun der alter heym" ("Sighs from the Old Country") a feature of the Yiddish-language newspaper Der Tog shortly after the turn of the century (as I learned from the Morawska essay). But how curious it is, really, when you think about it, that very many Jews would ever want to go back to Poland, or to Germany, or to any of a half dozen wretched east European...