Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places

3. The Quest: Scratching the Heart

C H A P T E R T H R E E THE QUEST: SCRATCHING THE HEART We Polish Jews . . . We, everliving, who have perished in the ghettos and camps, and we ghosts who, from across seas and oceans, will some day return to the homeland and haunt the ruins in our unscarred bodies and our wretched, presumably spared souls. —Julian Tuwim poland / we have lain awake in thy soft arms forever —Jerome Rothenberg At the Jarden Jewish Bookshop and Tourist Agency in Kazimierz, I bumped into Max Rogers, a forty-year-old Hasidic Londoner who travels to Poland frequently on business. Max had been involved in numerous local projects and delights the employees of the bookshop with his periodic gifts of falafel. He brings the mix from London or Jerusalem and cooks it at Noah’s Ark café next door. “Jews who come to Poland? What Jews?” asked Max rhetorically, in response to my description of my research. “The only Jews who come [to Poland ],” Max announced to me and to the non-Jewish Lucyna Leś, the bookshop ’s co-owner and coordinator of much Jewish traffic through Krakow, “are those who go to pray in some cemetery of famous rabbis, and leave.” “What about you?” countered Lucyna. “You came, you wanted [me to take you] to see Chmielnik”—the hometown of Max’s father. 92 Jewish Pol and Revisited “But my father didn’t,” Max retorted. “Why should people want to see places that they were thrown out of? Where they suffered? The only reason I wanted to see Chmielnik is because I hate the people who are taking over my father’s house.” “But you sent me there again! You wanted me to take pictures!” Lucyna prodded. “Okay,” Max admitted, “but only of the synagogue, the cemetery—not the house!” Max mimed his father looking at the photograph of the Chmielnik synagogue that Lucyna had taken and Max had brought home to London. He studied the imaginary picture for a few moments with a furrowed brow, then a slight smile developed and he gestured at a detail with his finger. “I remember , we went in this door,” he said. The smile faded and Max was suddenly back with us, reiterating that he wanted to go to Chmielnik only to confront those people living in his father’s house and demand to know “how it is possible [for them] to live here.” Several weeks later I encountered Max again in the bookshop, looking a little pale. Lucyna was sitting and smoking. I said to her and husband, Zdzis ław, “On nie wygląda bardzo dobrze dzisiaj” (He doesn’t look so well today). They agreed. Max asked, “What does it mean, ‘wygląda’?” We explained it means “look,” as in “appear,” and gave him some examples. “My mother always used to say that: ‘Wygląda, wygląda . . . ,’” Max said wistfully. “Beautiful, beautiful . . . I should speak such good Polish! You’re so lucky,” he told me. I asked him why he thinks so. “I don’t know!” The question seemed to irritate him. He ran his hand up and down his arm and said dismissively, “It’s in the blood.” I again raised the issue with Max about his wanting to visit Chmielnik. “Okay! Maybe I wanted to see Chmielnik because I heard every day in my house growing up in London ‘ChmielnikChmielnikChmielnik . . . ‘ And so what? Poland for us is finished. If not for the cemeteries, the holy men, there’s nothing here.” To quell my questioning once and for all, Max finally settled on a metaphor to explain his feelings for Poland. He asked if I had ever had a boyfriend and then broken up. He said Poland is like that. “Who would want to go back and see an old boyfriend with whom you are not together any longer? going back to Poland is like going back just to look at such a person, what they are doing now—we don’t want to do it,” he said. the Quest 93 “So what brings people back?” I asked. Max shrugged. “You scratch the heart? It speaks.” Many Jewish hearts are being scratched these days, judging from the number of Jews traveling to Poland on exploratory personal journeys, beyond the thousands of Jews who visit the country each year on insular mass missions. Mission tours, under one or another banner of Holocaust remembrance , employ a...