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Conclusion: . . . and Back Again: What Will Be the Future of the Jewish Past?
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135 conclusion . . . and Back Again what will be the Future of the Jewish Past? But the man and the age are rare who can choose their own path; we have generally only a choice between going ahead in the direction already chosen, or halting and blocking the path for others. The only kind of reform usually possible is reform from within: a more intimate study and more intelligent use of the traditional forms. Disaster follows rebellion against tradition or against utility, which are the basis and root of our taste and progress. But, within the given school, and as exponents of its spirit, we can adapt and perfect our works, if haply we are better inspired than our predecessors. —George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty Recently the New York Times reported on the famous shtetl photographs taken and published by Roman Vishniac. The journalist Alana Newhouse had dug up the records at Vishniac’s daughter’s Shuva 136 home and those of the organization that had dispatched him as a documentarian, and discovered that the mythic undercurrent of the photos themselves and especially the captions was “false”: Vishniac had crafted a particular narrative around and about the photos, sometimes placing together images that had no connection in real life, in order to amplify the pathos and a particular understanding of the shtetl culture. He had been wildly successful, even if (or perhaps because) it was not widely known that he had been dispatched by a Jewish organization hoping to use the photos in a fundraising campaign, and even if the traditionalist-impoverished picture that his lens painted of the shtetl was a historical misrepresentation of a far more complex phenomenon. The Vishniac photos then are the bear/log that we encountered earlier, and the intense response generated by the article showed that a particularly sensitive nerve had been touched. Vishniac’s photos had been deeply inspirational and evocative to multiple generations of Jews—it was the frightening bear, one that had conveyed a stable impression of the “vanished world” from before the Holocaust . Indeed, this awe-inspiring collection implicitly told a story about how to interpret the magnitude of the loss involved in the Holocaust, the sense of fear, and the piety of the past. And this story was accentuated in the increased publication and editing of the book over time and its juxtaposition with the voice of Elie Wiesel as the author of the book’s foreword. Like a revelatory experience, the Vishniac images became canonized in their own unique way; and like the scientists, empiricists, and historians, the author of this article sought to question that canonization. So here, photographs jog the memories of those who see them, and make for what—distorted memory? Selective memory? And when the photos are demystified, what becomes of the identity that has been generated around them, the story that binds past and present ? We do have to prepare ourselves for demystification even of the highly unmystical, like photos from a shtetl. Jewish memory-making has subsisted in our ability to take historical moments, events, episodes—regardless of how sublime or mundane—and make them mythically instructive. Leon Wieseltier is quoted at the end of Newhouse’s article as follows: [18.226.166.214] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 00:24 GMT) Conclusion: . . . And Back Again 137 Jews should be absolutely elated—and not at all surprised—to discover that Jewish life in Poland was like human society anywhere, in that it contained all the human types and all of the human experiences. Will they resent being deprived by the full historical record of the holy beards and the mystical sparks, or will they have the wisdom to say, “Good, they were blessedly like all of us”? For historians, the desire to see generative and restorative myth based on our past hold us together does not mean we turn our back on the historical project of establishing empirical truth when we can and demystifying what should be human and mundane. But we must be conscious of the costs, and eager to resupply the mythology as needed. A mythology on shtetl normalcy is just fine! It may supply what this generation of Jews needs more aptly, and more accurately , than what previous generations needed. But we should not mistake accuracy for truth—for both the old myths and new myths expressed something true and deep for their stakeholders—nor should we mistake our historical consciousness for a sense of having outgrown or left...