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C H A P T E R O N E MAKING SENSE OF PL ACE: HISTORY, MY THOLOGY, AUTHENTICIT Y I arrived in Kazimierz for the first time in April of 1990. It was a fortuitous moment; ferried by a hospitable middle-aged Polish painter who had become my and my brother’s impromptu tour guide to the city, we drove into the bleak neighborhood under a white banner stretched across the road, advertising the second annual Festival of Jewish Culture. As I tried to grasp this unlikely event, our new Polish friend’s white Polonez hatchback rolled to a stop, parking alongside a few other cars in a strip up the center of the spacious, aptly named Szeroka (“wide”) Street. We walked the few steps down to the old synagogue, where we saw a small crowd of people—the only sign of life in the otherwise dreary square—filing into the old synagogue museum for a concert . Our host was tickled by his good fortune in stumbling on such an apposite event for his Jewish guests. I was still orienting myself to the idea of Jewish entertainment in what for me was a post-apocalyptic Jewish site, when the evening’s performer, cantor Jeffrey Nadel from Washington, D.C., stepped onto the bimah and began to sing in a powerful tenor. I was perplexed by his presence. He represented a kind of contemporary, mainstream American Jewish normality that—foreign to me though it also was—seemed shockingly out of place in this seemingly most marginal of Jewish spaces. He was the Jewish present; what was he doing here in the Jewish past? Looking back, it seems clear that I might have posed the same question of us. But I wasn’t yet able to discern the trend of which we formed a part. We were all early evidence of the transnational flows of Jewish people and cul- 26 Jewish Pol and Revisited ture traversing Poland, and krakow’s kazimierz in particular, which began to burgeon through the 1990s. At times linking to local counterpart projects of Jewish salvage and revival undertaken by Poles (Jewish and non-Jewish), such flows eddied in the quarter. Whereas the Jewish neighborhoods in most Polish cities were destroyed during the war, kazimierz’s core is an architecturally intact, historic Jewish town; the neighborhood today comprises almost a quarter of krakow’s city’s historic center. Jewish seekers were drawn by the rich and heavy history, tangible as much through the Jewish human absence as the striking Jewish material presence. But Szeroka Street was also a magnet because it was endlessly surprising, yielding unlikely interlocutors and a regular stream of grassroots Jewish-oriented events, making it an epicenter of ferment, dispute, and development around Jewish and Polish heritage and identities and a touchstone for projects of cultural salvage and development.1 In 1993, the iconic Cracovian Jew Henryk Halkowski, amidst a sudden (if small) flurry of interest in kazimierz on the part of architects and planners, mused about his dream of a kazimierz that would provide a counterpoint to the dominance and teleological views of the Holocaust in popular conceptions of Poland’s Jewish history—the way the memory of Nazi destruction has made everything that came before seem inevitably doomed and rendered everything after it invisible. He wished that the quarter would be developed in a way that balanced attention to the old, absent, and irreplaceable with the new and functional. He saw kazimierz as a place where such historical and cultural synergy was uniquely possible, where Jews with Polish roots could feel proud of their heritage, a reminder of the everyday Polish-Jewish life that had once been a reality, yet “without [such life] remaining only in the past.”2 This was a hard sell for foreign Jews. I vividly recall the Argentine-Jewish student who voiced a widespread but usually unspoken sentiment regarding kazimierz’s growing liveliness. “I want to see the synagogue in ruins,” he said. “I have to see the ruins because that’s what I can find here. Ruins of a culture , of a cultural group. . . . I just don’t like to have so much life here.” from my earliest interest in the social life of Poland’s Jewish past in the present day, all roads seemed to lead back to kazimierz. Aside from its local and national magnetism among Polish Jews, the quarter quickly became a kind of “poster child” for (particularly North American) Jewish communal anxieties...

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