Hold on to the Sun

Part I: A Retrospective note from Jerusalem, 1997

tHe JourneYto PolAnd (eSSAY) PArt i:A retroSPective note froM JeruSAleM, 1997 in late october 1975, when i was in my early twenties and completing my doctorate in Paris, i went to Poland. An almost impossible journey then for a young woman, alone, with an israeli passport, at the time when there were no diplomatic relations between the eastern Bloc and israel. it was only because of a french-Jewish friend,who turned me into a “representative of france” at the international theater festival inWroclaw [Breslau], that i received a special visa for a week. the night before the trip, when everything was ready, i called my parents in tel Aviv and told them. i asked my shocked mother for the exact address of her family home in krakow. only later that winter, when i visited israel, did i understand what profound emotion took hold of my mother ’s few surviving friends and relatives from krakow when they heard of the trip. 3 A week later i returned to Paris. for twenty-four hours, i closed myself in my student apartment in the latin Quarter, far from the Parisian street scenes, and feverishly wrote to my parents. A letter of more than twenty pages. first thoughts, a summary of the rapid notes taken on the trip.the words groped for another language, for a different level of discourse. that year, as every year, a commemoration for the Jewish community of krakow was held in the auditorium of my high school intelAviv. news of my trip and of my letter reached the members of the community, and they wanted to read it aloud at the commemoration. i agreed, and after it was commandeered from the family circle, i submitted it for publication to the literary supplement of the newspaper, Davar,with the title,“letter fromthe regions of delusion,” the expression “regions of delusion” borrowed from the title of a parable attributed to the Ba’al Shem tov.* Aside from some peripheral changes of style, that text appears in the following pages. traveling to Poland in 75 was not part of the social phenomenon it is today.the group definition of “second-generation Holocaust survivors” hadn’t yet been coined.You had to find out everything by yourself: how to plan the trip, how to feel, and how to talk about it.the letter to my par4 The Journey to Poland * (1700–60) charismatic founder and first leader of Hasidism in eastern europe. ents began a long process of formulation. even the choice of parents as the addressees of an intimate discourse was not the norm then. today, that trip seems like a geological rift that changed my emotional and intellectual landscape, and placed its seal on my writing.Yet the “journey to Poland” didn’t begin in 75, but in early childhood, intel Aviv in the 1950s. distant shocks preceded the rift. the “journey to Poland” began in that journey “to there”— the journey every child makes to the regions before she was born, to the unknown past of her parents, to the secret of her birth. My journey to Mother’s world began long before i “understood” who my mother, regina-rina Poserlaub -Govrin, was, before i “knew” that she survived the “Holocaust,” that she once had another husband, that i had a half-brother. But there was the other “knowledge,” that knowledge of pre-knowledge and of pre-language, transmitted in the thousand languages that connect a child and her parents without words.A knowledge that lay like a dark cloud on the horizon.terrifying and seductive. for years the journey proceeded on a double track.one outside the home and one inside it.And there was an almost complete separation between the two.As if everything that was said outside had nothing to do with Mother. outside, incomprehensible, violent stories about the “Holocaust” were forged upon the little girl’s consciousness. in school 5 The Journey to Poland assemblies, in lessons for Holocaust Memorial day, and later on in lessons of “Annals of the Jewish People,” which were taught separately from “history” classes, and described events that happened in “another, Jewish time and place,” where king david and small-town Jews strolled among the goats and railroad cars of the ghetto. even the eichmann trial, on the radio in school and at home, was an event you had to listen to, but it had no real...