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PR o logu e: scen e o f a R R ival December 1, 1998 Kraków, Poland 8:45 pm I climb the stairs in Mateusz’s (temporarily my) shiny, as-yet-ungraffitied apartment block and step through the steel-reinforced, triple-bar windingbolt door (“Israeli,” Mateusz told me later, an almost prurient glint in his eye). On a nearby cabinet sits a lace doily on which two knitted yarmulkes (skullcaps ) are decorously propped. They lean against a fragment of black granite tombstone in which Hebrew letters are chiseled; he has gilded them since my last visit. An old wooden packing box from a Jewish margarine concern sits on top of the refrigerator, emblazoned with a menorah and product information in Polish and Hebrew. Among antique Jewish books on the bookshelf are nestled a yorzeit (memorial) candle in a mass-produced Israeli tin can and a Hebrew-language Coke bottle. It’s a mindfully atavistic aesthetic. It is elegant and cozy. It is also a bit strange. Mateusz is not Jewish. But there was a time he wished he were. I am. I spent a lot of my life wishing I weren’t, trying to escape a darkness and discomfort that were the principal inheritance of my line of Jewish descent. We met each other following a path of shards from the broken vessel of European Jewishness, shattered in this part of the world in our parents’ and grandparents ’ generations. The tangible debris was strewn in fields with new owners ; less concrete fragments were embedded in unlikely bodies. I chuckle at the surrounding décor (after many trips to Poland, I can finally laugh), flip up the glowing screen of my laptop, click to the fresh folder I had prepared entitled “fieldnotes,” and begin my scene of arrival in the field. I think of Malinowski—from krakow, no less—father of modern anthropological fieldwork methodology. Yet my “native informants,” the Poles whose imponderabilia I am here to investigate, have assembled such displays of Jewish culture as part of their own cross-cultural expeditions.1 As it turns out, I x PRologue am equally their native. I am reminded of my very first trip to Poland in early 1990. for an American Jew—abruptly confronting her nationally and culturally cultivated blind spots—it was astounding in every way. first of all, it existed in color. There were young people, happy people. flowers grew. But most of all, I recall discovering a menorah—one of the few Jewish ritual objects my family still used—on display in a Polish Catholic home. I ask its owner what it was and why he had it, and received a one-word response: “Artifact.” This word, uttered in this place at this time by this person, brought up a host of questions, none of them comfortable. Where did he get it? What does it mean to him? Is he really not Jewish? does he deserve to have it? And, more quietly, but perhaps the real root of my discomfort, I felt the fineness of the line that separated his relationship to the menorah from mine. for me it was only barely alive, as my post-Holocaust, assimilationist American upbringing left me without the universe of ritual, meaning, and social ties that would animate it. But surely (my gut prodded me) a cultural world emanating however shallow a breath is still a world away from one in which the menorah would be an “artifact” (isn’t it?). Surely I had a claim to that menorah, even if only as a relic, that this Polish Catholic man, however hospitable and generous, did not possess—didn’t I? My journey to Poland would put me in the company of tens of thousands of (mostly) American and Israeli Jews who would make similar trips that decade , unbeknownst to me at the time. The question of the Jewish “artifact,” and larger ones of cultural ownership and sharing, destruction and recovery, memory and desire that it provoked, kept me coming back to Poland. While my renewed and inquisitive relationship to this place made me something of an anomaly among the masses of Jewish visitors, for whom visiting Poland is generally a one-time, pre-scripted, and self-consciously negative ritual, I also found that I was not completely alone. There were a few other Jews who lingered , a few for whom Poland felt like a truncated limb they couldn’t go on without. But wherever I went in Poland in search...

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