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Chapter 4. Flavors of Memory: Jewish Food as Culinary Tourism in Poland
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CHAPTER 4 Flavors of Memory Jewish Food as Culinary Tourism in Poland Eve Jochnowitz Every year since achieving independence, Poland has hosted greater and greater numbers of tourists from abroad, and in so doing has taken on the negotiation of the numerous issues in Poland's construction of its own heritage and the conflicting ideas about Polish history that visitors bring along. For non-Jewish Poles, Jewish tourists are both welcome signs of prosperity and unwelcome reminders of the past. For Jewish visitors, Poland is at once a site of abjection, both degraded and degrading, and a surrogate Holy Land. Jewish settlement in Poland dates from the tenth century (Roth 1989:265h by the thirteenth century, Poland had become the haven of Ashkenazic Jews fleeing persecution and expulsion from France and Germanic lands. Poland's Jewish population was exceptionally fruitful, and on the eve of the SecondWorldWar, more than three million Polish Jews made up 10 percent of Poland's population and the largest Jewish population in Europe. Poland's history as a Jewish center endedhorriblywith the German occupation and the murder of 90 percent of Poland's Jews. Many of those who survived the war fled Poland in 1968 in response to the "anti-Zionist" purges. Depending onwhom you ask, Poland's current Jewish population is somewhere between three thousand and twenty thousand. Culinary tourism figures significantly in the encounter of Jews with contemporary Poland. For the purposes of this essay, I will examine both the culinary tourist productions intended for foreign visitors and the domestic culinary tourism of Poles living in Poland. The production of Jew- 98 I Flavors of Memory 111l11) A Jewish magazine examines Poland's interest in kosher food. IIr I (I) ~t"7 4,2f1l Indtka 331tl2 ISSN tUI - tlt x ish food and cooking in Poland sheds special light on the paradoxical role of Jews in Polish history and memory and the unique position of Poland in the Jewish collective imagination. It is useful to begin with a case study of Cracow's Szeroka Street. [3.81.30.41] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:44 GMT) Eve Jochnowitz I 99 "The Broadway of Jewish Cracow" was Roman Vishniac's name for Szeroka Street, the center market square of the Kazimierz neighborhood, which for six centuries was Cracow's Jewish section. Kazimierz is named for King Casimir the Great, king of Poland from 1333 to 1370, who in 1354 extended economic and political protection to the Jews of Poland. According to Jewish and Polish popular history, Casimir's kindness to the Jews was because of his love for his beautiful Jewish concubine, Ester. Before the war, Szeroka Street was the site of three synagogues, two cemeteries , and a mikve or ritual bath; it was the cultural and ceremonial center of Jewish life in Cracow. Szeroka Street today is the site of five Jewish restaurants, two Jewish coffee shops, a Jewish museum, and one functioning synagogue. It is no longer a ceremonial center, but in a way, the culinary has been rendered ceremoniaL All five restaurants produce food primarily for the tourist market, and interestingly, all claim to offer their guests much more than food. Food functions as the medium of cultural transmission, real and imagined, for tourists, many of whom are Jewish, who visit Szeroka Street to taste Poland's Jewish past. In effect, Cracow's politicians and entrepreneurs have produced Szeroka Street as a Jewish theme park in a country where few Jews survive. Szeroka Street is short but very wide (the word"szeroka" means wide in Polish) so that the street itself forms a small square. The center of the wide street, which once accommodated market carts, is now used as a car park, except during the annual festival ofJewish art and culture in Cracow, when Szeroka Street is the site of open-air concerts and performances for ten days. Many Jewish tourists come to Cracow for the festival each year, but the crowd of thousands that packs Szeroka Street is overwhelmingly Polish. Here is the paradox of the site of Szeroka Street: in the years since the advent of democracy, Cracow has been gentrifying at a rate that surpasses Warsaw, L6dz, and Gdansk. Coffee shops and retail establishments have thrived where they have appeared. At first, however, the Kazimierz, which is a poorer area, lagged behind the rest of Cracow. Topography was destiny for Kazimierz; the narrow and poorly paved streets and the tenement buildings that fronted on them were...