Remembering a Vanished World: A Jewish Childhood in Interwar Poland (review)

It would be hard to find a more biased reviewer of Hamerow’s book than myself. The author “was born on August 24, 1920, in Warsaw, during that great, fierce debate, at what was also a critical moment in the history of the newly established Polish Republic” (p. 3). I was born on August 22, 1945, in Krakow, at what was also a critical moment in the history of Poland. The author was brought to the United States by his parents at the age of ten. I came to the United States at the age of 39, as a parent of two sons at the ages of fifteen and five. The author is a historian, I am a sociologist. He wrote the book with “the hope that it might in a small way help broaden the common perception of the way of life of East European Jewry ... [and] tried to emphasize those recollections that might to some extent throw light on the vanished world” in which he grew up (p. x). I read the book through the screen of my personal experiences of a Polish Jew and couldn’t help being overflown by my own memories of my Jewish childhood in postwar Poland.

First, I want to offer some remarks related to the Hamerow’s use of the concept of a “vanished world.” He says, “But the world about which I am writing, the world of Polish Jewry, and indeed of East European Jewry as a whole, vanished not as the result of a gradual historical evolution but within the space of a few years, amid an outburst of genocidal fury exceeding in intensity anything previously experienced” (p. ix). If by vanish he means to disappear quickly and completely, then I must not be here. However horrific the destruction of Polish Jewry and East European Jewry as a whole actually was, we haven’t vanished yet and our “world” hasn’t vanished either.

The book is a story of one individual life, the first ten years of such life, “remembered” sixty years after a permanent relocation hundreds of miles away from where it occurred. In 1986, Hamerow visited Otwock, the town where he grew up before he immigrated to the United States in 1930, and right there he realized that “[t]he past was dead, dead beyond recall” (p. 151). Throughout his book, he describes in great detail various elements of the “culture of his family,” such as the aspiration to identify as members of the upper middle class, the emphasis on education and development of artistic talents, the role of a “matriarch” in the household, the ability to cope with migrations and their consequences, support for liberal ideologies, or secularization of the worldview. The descriptions of family life Hamerow provides, page after page, are a mirror reflection of the “family culture” maintained by Jews who lived in post-war Poland. I can say that his life is a “matrix” for mine or mine is almost a “carbon copy” of his. And, to the best of my knowledge, the same values and norms, ideals and ideas, beliefs and patterns of gender roles, etc. can be found in the families of Eastern European Jews born after the war, and today, also in some families established by their children. Like the author, we also “had to” learn languages and play an instrument, spent most of our time reading and expanding our intellectual horizons, and were not required to be athletic or get involved in any sport activities. We also spent most of our childhood interacting with adults and had very few friends among our peers. We were raised to be emotionally ready for an attack by some not-quite-well-defined people and lived in anticipation of emigration from Poland at a not-quite-well-defined time and to a mis-imagined place.

What world has “vanished,” then? If the author refers to the “world” of his individual childhood...