Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places

5. Traveling Tschotschkes and “Post-Jewish" Culture

C H A P T E R F I V E TRAVELING TSCHOTSCHKES AND “POST- JEWISH” CULTURE In times of change, controversy, ritual, or performance, people are led to examine their culture, and the coming of the tourists has a similar result. —Edward Bruner Józef brooded over a vision he had in the early 1960s. He grew animated. “A path led to a wooden fence, and a man sat there, in a black cloak and hat. It was just before dusk, the distance between us was about twenty meters. This man just looked at me. I felt paralyzed, as if something unnatural were happening . I turned away, and then back. There was nobody. I had never seen anybody dressed like that. I was ten years old.” Decades later Józef understood he had seen a Jew. Fragments of the prewar Jewish world, physical and metaphysical, linger in the Polish landscape. Tombstone shards, crumbling synagogues, troubling or puzzling memories—in the absence of a significant Jewish community, they have been up for grabs. For a long time, few Poles shouldered their weight and ambivalence. But as we have seen, tourism, economic necessity, and a growing sense of obligation in the post-communist era are increasingly making some into keepers of Jewishness in this post-Holocaust terrain. Some excavate the Jewish histories of their towns, others subsist by ferrying Jewish visitors around the archive, cemetery, and death-camp loops. Józef makes wooden Jews. 160 Jewish Pol and Revisited An elfin man in jeans and a button-down shirt, Józef invited me to his home. He is a sculptor and ice cream vendor in a small Polish town. Why, I want to know, do Poles carve tiny Jewish figurines—have carved them for over a century—and why do Jewish tourists buy them? I set off in search of answers. What I found serves as a micro-ethnographic portrait of the complexities of tourist economies and the ways they mediate the central themes of this book: heritage making, cultural stewardship, and memory work in commercial contexts. The new moment in the history of these figurines also reveals links between Polish and the Jewish heritage quests spanning a range of transnational domains; these overlapping memory projects collude (wittingly or unwittingly) in ways that shape even the smallest manifestations of the Jewishness found in and around kazimierz. Lilliputian Jews stare out by the hundreds from shop shelves in krakow ’s tourist shops. Tiny mountain-folk, Jesuses, Marys, and devils accompany them in segregated regiments. The Jews are all men, traditionally coifed and black-cloaked. In the early post-communist 1990s I saw meaner caricatures , echoing Nazi wartime propaganda: sneering lips framing a single tooth, money-clutching fists, a nose threatening to topple the piece forward. The image seemed to grow tamer with time and tourists. Most were described by Jewish visitors during my fieldwork in the early 2000s as “melancholy ,” with “sad eyes,” “drooping,” “gaunt,” “haunted” faces—“prayerful” or “resigned”—even as some played tiny violins or accordions. Through the lens of the Holocaust, these wooden Jews seem to know their fates. The idiom has shifted with the era, the carving tradition swelled and receded , along with the lurches of politics and the demands of memory and the market. krakow’s ethnographic museum, only a five-minute walk from the center of kazimierz, and often empty during my fieldwork except for attendants who lit the exhibits on demand, is not on Poland’s Jewish tourist itinerary. given the tendency to read all things Polish as precursors to Jewish tragedy, perhaps that’s a good thing. Here, grotesque masks of Jews and little puppet Jews on sticks in elaborately decorated Christmas crèchetheaters , and a black-and-white photograph of a straw Jewish effigy—Judas the betrayer—hanging from a tree are interspersed with tall, ribboned, marsh fronds and delicate hand-painted eggs.1 In these dim rooms, the Jew is presented in his prewar guise as an ambivalent, often-baneful character internal to the rituals of Christian Polish peasant culture. dorota, a curator, presented the collection of Jewish figurines for my video camera. Behind a long pane of glass, fading and worn Jews with un- tRaveling tschotschkes and “Post- Jewish” cultuRe 161 kempt locks of hair made of real fur, seem a clear proto-form of today’s Jewish figurines. Made as children’s toys for sale during Easter...