Dead Jews: Depictions of European History and Culture in Contemporary American Travel Guides

Jewish Culture in Contemporary American Travel Guides DEAD JEWS: DEPICTIONS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY AND CULTURE IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN TRAVEL GUIDESl by Alan E. Steinweis University of Nebraska at Uncoln 57 Each spring and summer millions of American tourists descend on Europe. They go for a variety of reasons: to view the scenery, study the architecture, taste the food, drink the beer and wine, meet new friends, fall in love. Some are even motivated by the sincere intention of learning about the history and contemporary state of foreign cultures. A relatively small number of American tourists to Europe arrive with special interest itineraries: researching family roots, tracing the careers of important Baroque composers, studying the configuration of Napoleonic battlefields, and so on. Such specialized tourism-in which category I would include the recent phenomenon ofJewish heritage travel-has generated its own literature, much of it well researched. For example, Ruth Ellen Gruber's Jewish Heritage Travel, now in its second edition,2 could effectively be used as assigned reading for a college-level history course. Using this book, or others like it, as a guide, an American tourist of any background could learn quite a bit about European Jewish history and culture, the high points of achievement as well as the catastrophes. But most tourism is not so focused, and neither is most tourist literature. This article is concerned with how several of the more widely used non-specialized travel guides describe sites related to European Jewish history and culture. It will focus specifically on locations in eastcentral Europe, primarily in Poland (Krakow, Warsaw, Lublin, and 'This paper was originally presented at the Annual Conference of the Midwest Jewish Studies Association, St. Paul, MN, October 1995. 2Ruth Ellen Gruber, Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to East-Central Europe, second edition (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1994). 58 SHOFAR Winter 1997 Vol. 15, No.2 Oswiecim/Auschwitz) and in the Czech Republic (prague and Terezin/ Theresienstadt). These places not only hold special importance in modern Jewish history, they have also become popular tourist attractions for Americans since the collapse of communism in that region. Moreover, the concentration/extermination camps are especially significant in conveying impressions of Jewish history. For better or for worse, the Holocaust remains the most widely known development of Jewish history among non-Jews (and perhaps among many Jews as well). The fact that many tourists will visit a camp but never think ofvisiting a nearby synagogue has important implications for the way they perceiveJewish history. This article will also concentrate specifically on three widely used travel guides: Let's Go Eastern Europe, published by the Harvard StudentAgencies and written by Harvard students; the Berkeley Guide titled Eastern Europe on the Loose, published by the Associated Students of the University of California and written by Berkeley students; and Eastern Europe on $30 a Day, an edition in the venerable Frommer series. The scope of such a comparative analysis could easily be expanded, but the strengths and weaknesses of these four publications are typical of a wider range of tourist guides designed for a non-specialized readership. In the past two decades scholars have begun to pay a good deal of attention to tourism and travel as a serious cultural phenomenon worthy ofclose study and theoretical contemplation.3 Sociologists have developed elaborate conceptual frameworks for understanding the role of tourism historically and in contemporary society, while historians have explored how international travel and tourism have influenced cross-cultural perceptions. The sociological literature on mass tourism has justifiably concerned itself with how the individual tourist experience is influenced by the modern, institutionalized, industrialized structure of international tourism, but the emphasis has been on organized routes and the development and marketing strategies of specific tourist sites (e.g., Disney World), while published tourist guides have received scant attention. Similarly, in the field of history, most of the existing studies focus on travelers' accounts or treatments of travel in literary fiction, while practically nothing of a systematic nature has been done on mass market travel guides. Although the present article is geared more towards a Jewish Studies 'For a good overview of recent scholarship see Annals of Tourism Research 18 (1991), a...