Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places

Conclusion: Toward a Polish-Jewish Milieu de Mémoire

C O N C L U S I O N TOWARD A POLISH - JEWISH MILIEU DE MÉMOIRE Cultural tourism becomes simply life-enhancing rather than life-consuming, not a spectacle but an experience, because real people still live it and share it with real people who interpret it. We are able to experience reciprocity and feel enriched by it. —Stuart Hannabuss A Shifting Ecology of Jewishness Locating ethnography in time is a perennial problem for anthropologists. Despite the sense that we are describing current cultural problematics, the “ethnographic present” is already over by the time we sit down to write. Especially in social settings defined by rapid global flows like tourism, the challenge is to capture the emergence, historicity, and dynamism of the cultural formations we document and in whose change we participate. This book, in particular, was written, and is being read, in a very different moment than when many of the situations it describes took place. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Poland was just rediscovering its Jewishness publicly. Catapulted into the orbit of the West, Poles were suddenly faced with entirely new discourses about (and for some, encounters with) cultural difference. Most of my fieldwork took place before the country was gripped by the polarizing debate that would soon be provoked by historical scholarship regarding Polish complicity in crimes against Jews, set off by the publication in 2001 of Jan Gross’s Neighbors. 198 Jewish Pol and Revisited from a Jewish perspective, Europe was still a site of old, rather than new, antisemitism, with Poland its symbolic epicenter. While old myths have certainly persevered among both groups, the decade-plus after the fall of communism also saw the first popular opportunities for Jews and Poles to experience (and for an older generation, reexperience) each other as living realities rather than. Equally significant was the range of unexpected new actors that emerged, social agents who have taken up Poland’s Jewish heritage as a key domain of cultural and ethical transformation. Whether in the form of shop owners, festival organizers, tour guides, or souvenir figurine carvers (as well as their consumers, local and foreign visitors on a variety of journeys), these actors have been at best overlooked as agents of change, and often vocally dismissed or derided. In this book I have tried to sketch out the evolving, perhaps ephemeral environment that they have inhabited, and in important ways created: a new ecosystem that has developed atop—and because of—the Jewish void left by the Holocaust. By the time I did my “official fieldwork” in the late 1990s, a range of global flows were making inroads, further complicating the seeming boundaries of time and space. These were visible if I stepped back and looked beyond the lovingly curated tableau of antique Judaica that Mateusz had curated in the apartment described in my prologue. On his Ikea dining room table, Mateusz had left me three video store membership cards and nine pages of handwritten directions for how to use the eco-friendly Italian washer/dryer and Japanese Tv/vCR with hundreds of cable channels. There were also other nostalgias in the mix: a communist-era “Polski-fiat” placard recalling the tiny, once ubiquitous maluch, or “little one,” car, from an auto manufacturer that disappeared in 1992; a massive oak credenza filled with feather bedding from Mateusz’s grandmother’s prewar home in Lwów; and a variety of antique bric-a-brac: a wooden radio-box; art-deco tins and glass bottles with faded labels; 1920s golf shoes and a pair of rusted pinking shears. from still farther afield, a Native American dream catcher hung on the bedroom wall, and a hand-held African drum and Australian Aboriginal boomerang sat nearby. Just as in Mateusz’s home, continuing economic development in kazimierz had also begun to obscure the particularly Jewish quality that was the primary theme of interest for early investigators and investors in the neighborhood . With the exception of Szeroka Street, kazimierz’s character has been incrementally flattened to that of a hip, bustling, youthful quarter, described to me during a visit in early 2004 as the de rigueur weekend jaunt for War- conclusion 199 saw’s nouveau riche. In summer 2011 a chic varsovian curator focusing on Holocaust memory told me that her crowd now eschewed the “folkloric” kazimierz and its festival of Jewish Culture as passé. In any case...