Recommended Reading I: Jews of Eastern Europe

You may have noticed an addition to this blog.  On the right of the page you will find a list of books that I’ve read in the past few years with Jewish content.  They cover a wide range of subject matter, but all have been helpful to me in expanding my understanding.  Many of them are nonfiction although there is also some fiction among them and some of them I’ve written about in these pages.  I find that many of the ones I enjoy the most are written by journalists as they seem to have a unique talent for taking real events and crafting them into a rather gripping story.  As my discussions of recommended books have become buried in these pages, I thought I’d cull them out and in subsequent entries provide brief comments on some of those I haven’t previously discussed.

In this blog entry I’ll focus on the ones I’ve discussed within the blog already and where you can find them.  While I’ve included the books with Jewish content on this list, they provide interesting reading for a broad range of readers, Jewish ancestry not required.

You will find discussion of Masha Gessen’s book Ester & Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler’s War and Stalin’s Peace in Jewish Life in the Soviet Union.  This book provided insight into both the war time and post war period and its impact on Jews in the Soviet Union.  A good companion book on this topic is A Hole in the Heart of the World by Jonathan Kaufman which follows the life of five Jews from the war to post-war in Eastern Europe.  You will find some discussion of it in my entry Readings on the Jews of Eastern Europe.  I found these books both very readable and very important in increasing my understanding of Jewish life in Eastern Europe post-war. 

Also in Readings on the Jews of Eastern Europe is The Great Jewish Cities of Central and Eastern Europe by Eli Valley, a must read prior to visiting Budapest, Warsaw, Cracow or Prague, unfortunately too big to easily carry on your travels.  Filled with historical anecdotes it brings color and context to your travels. 

The Kati Marton books on Budapest are discussed in the The Budapest Brain Drain and I highly recommend all of her work for both insights into post-war experience and the many influences of Budapest Jews on the United States. My favorite book was The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World. 

 In Favorite Travel Tools and Books you will find discussion of The Zookeeper’s Wife that I suggest you read prior to visiting Warsaw or to learn more about the Warsaw ghetto.  It is based on actual people and events and we were delighted to find references to the people of whom we read at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Also in that entry you will find discussion of Not Me, a fictional story that was interesting reading that also touched on Madjanek. 

Anton, the Dove Fancier is discussed in How They Lived, short stories based on Radom, Poland by a survivor.  These are beautifully written with a photographer’s eye for detail.  In A Contact, A Book and An Interview you will find mention of Everything is Illuminated and The Heavens are Empty, books based on the virtually all Jewish town of Trochenbrod.

In Across the Pond you will find discussion of the Ponary Diary which I often reference when I speak about my Lithuanian based artwork as it recounts the story of the Vilnius Jews murdered in Ponar.  As background on Vilnius you may also want to read Lucy Davidowicz's From That Time and Place which is discussed in Jewish Ghetto Walk.  While not easy reading and filled with names, it is a first person account of Vilnius in the pre-war period and a sad recounting of the fate of many of Davidowicz's friends.

In addition to these books I also wrote of The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson in the entry The Great Migration.  While not Jewish in content so not on this list, it sparks insights for anyone with an interest in immigration and certainly made me think of Nazi Germany in its description of the South at the time of the Jim Crow laws.

In subsequent entries I will address some of the other readings that have informed my search, deepened my understanding and provided context for much of what I've observed.

Sleeping With the Chickens and Bricks for Bread

It has been a bit of a whirlwind since returning from Poland.  I recently spent a weekend in New York where I met up with my Israeli friend who set much of my Radom project in motion when he sent me the 1937 film of Radom.    While there I interviewed two survivors from Radom, one of whom lived next door to my family in Radom.   I’m not quite sure what I’ll do with the interviews, but given that most survivors are in their late 80s and early 90s, I felt that I should take advantage of the opportunity while I could. Interviewing an elder population does forestall procrastination.

Upon my return I received my work back from Poland, just one day before a huge open studio event in Minneapolis known as Art-a-Whirl.  It is always a good opportunity to interact with people around my work so I was pleased to be able to include the Hole in Time Series on Radom that you’ve seen in this blog.  Art-a-Whirl which sports a tornado as its symbol ended up with a real tornado and closed with a rainbow visible from our studio window after a weekend of  visiting with art patrons.

Since returning from Poland I’ve been winding up my oral history project on Jewish Identity and Legacy.  With most of our interviews done and the end date looming, I’ve been drafting a final grant report and teaching myself video-editing.  Many of the interviews generated wonderful stories that I hope to include in a DVD.

I have also begun to develop paintings around the stories that have emerged.  In fact, source material was my original impetus for the project although it has proven to be quite fascinating in its own right.

One of our interviews was with a woman who grew up in north Minneapolis, originally the home to much of the Jewish community.  She related the following story to us about staying with her grandmother when she was young.

I remember my grandmother had a one bedroom apartment.   She had a mattress must have been about that thick (holds hands two to three feet apart), all feathers you know, and a stool to get up.  So when it was time to go to bed, I crawled in to get into bed to sleep with her… next to the bed my grandmother had  two live chickens in a box and I was deathly afraid of chickens and that’s where I had to sleep that night with the live chickens there.

In the morning she’d go to the shocket (a kosher butcher) and have the chickens killed.  She’d carry them to the shocket and come back and flick them.  Sit in the back yard and flick ‘em.  Every time on a weekend.  She’d go like on a Friday morning before Shabbos started and get her chickens and when I’d come to sleep with her she’d have the chickens Friday.  And every time I went I had to go sleep there and I had to sleep with those chickens.  I’ll never forget that.  I was scared to death that night.


That image stayed with me and led to the  painting called Sleeping With the Chickens.

 Another story that I’ve sought to capture was provided by a subject who was a Holocaust survivor.  He told us of being sent from Auschwitz to Warsaw to help dismantle the Warsaw ghetto.  After the ghetto was destroyed, buildings were dismantled and bricks sold to the Poles.  He told me that he would go down in the basements for bricks and discover bodies that he covered with sand.

Then they (the Nazis) need a transport to go to Warsaw.  But they didn’t take any people who speak Polish, but they didn’t know … I could speak Polish.  So I got in between the French and the Italians and the Greeks and I got into Warsaw…  The Warsaw ghetto was bombed.  People were laying on the basements there like flies. So what they did is to blow up the rest of it, the rest of the building and they covered up the other ones.  Then I had to do clean up with the bricks...The Polish people came in with a horse and a wagon and they were buying those bricks from the Germans.  When they got in they had to pay so much and they had to show me a piece of paper, how many bricks they need to buy.  So I gave them the bricks they needed to buy and sometimes I ask them if they have bread or something like that. Pretty soon they got smart, they brought me a bread, they brought me a salami and I gave them those bricks.  I gave them instead of 20 bricks, I gave them 25 bricks. See the five bricks they had a hole on the wagon and they put it in the holder so the Germans, because they count the bricks when they went out. They gave them 20 bricks and going out they had to show the paper that they got 20 bricks, so they went up on the wagon and count the bricks, but they didn’t count the other ones. 


The painting, Bricks for Bread, shows the Warsaw ghetto in its destruction in the distance.  One church remained amongst the rubble.  This gentleman survived frequently by his wits and used his skills in bartering later in rebuilding his life and a business.

 These early paintings are experiments in capturing the imagery based solely on the words.  Usually I have some visual imagery to work with, but in this case I need to create my own.  When I travel I frequently take photos for reference so my photos of horse-drawn carts in the Ukraine came in handy.

  This project has been made possible in part through the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund through the vote of Minnesotans on November 4, 2008. Administered by the Minnesota Historical Society.

Warsaw Wanderings

We had a whirlwind visit to Warsaw and found ourselves wishing we had more time there. During WWII over 85% of the buildings were destroyed. They were replaced during the era of Communist control which makes for some rather blocky unadorned buildings. Despite that appearance, as we began to explore the city we found many things of interest and could have used at least another day or two.

We dropped off our car in Warsaw and had that evening and the following day to explore. In the evening we wandered over to Prozna Street which is the one street that survived within the borders of the Jewish Ghetto. In response to the Ghetto Uprising, the Nazis burned the ghetto down. Much of Prozna looks abandoned, but large photos of its former inhabitants hang on the buildings making an interesting display. We walked around to the back of the buildings where we could see balconies and a courtyard and envision what the buildings were like in the time of the ghetto. Ironically the name Prozna means “vacant” as it originally joined two vacant lots. Now its name seems oddly appropriate.

Nearby we found the Nozyk Synagogue, the one surviving synagogue in Warsaw after the destruction of WWII. Like many we have seen, it was used as a stable by the Nazis during the war years, but is now an active synagogue.

We continued on our walk through the Jewish area to find a remaining section of the ghetto wall. We later discovered metal plaques embedded in the pavement to highlight the boundaries of the ghetto.

The following day we headed for the Jewish Historical Institute. The Thomackie Street Synagogue, the major synagogue in Warsaw, used to be located across the street until it was dynamited by the Nazis. The building in which the Institute is located was the synagogue library and Institute for Judaic Studies. It is one of the few buildings that survived. There we were able to go through an exhibit on the Warsaw ghetto and uprising. A film is available in English which tells the story of the ghetto. It has extensive footage from that time period. There is also some chilling footage taken by the Nazis of the burning of the ghetto. Pre-war there were 380,000 Jews in Warsaw and they made up 30% of the city. About 100,000 died in the ghetto of starvation and disease. Others were deported to their deaths. The story of life in the ghetto is known to us today because of the efforts of Emmanuel Ringelblum. Ringelblum was a historian who prior to the war sought to tell the story of the Jews of Warsaw until the 20th century . By the time the war broke out he was up to the end of the 18th century and had published widely. In 1939 his attention shifted to what was occurring around him. He begain meeting with a group of the underground leadership under the code name of “Oneg Shabbat”. They collected documentary information and conducted research on ghetto life. When they learned of the Nazis’ plans for annihilation of the Jews they smuggling a report to London reporting on the 300,000 Jews who had been deported to their deaths in Treblinka. Thus knowledge of these activities was available to the US and British early in the war. Three milk containers were hidden in Warsaw containing this documentation. Two of these were discovered after the war containing 40,000 pages. One of the milk containers is exhibited in the Jewish Historical Institute today.

In addition to the ghetto exhibition, there was an excellent art exhibit of work done by artists who lived in the ghetto, most of whom died in the camps.

I had heard that the Institute did some genealogy work and inquired as to where. I was directed to the building across from the Institute where I found a small office. There I introduced myself to Yale Reisner and Anna Przybyszewska Drozd who work with the Jewish Genealogy and Family Heritage Center. I provided them with my family names and towns and they reviewed their records to determine what information was available. The materials which they located included a 1901 Homeowners List for Radom which included some family names and addresses. They also pulled out a 1932 and 1941 phone book. The 1941 phone book had just a few Jewish names because they would have been moved to the ghetto by then. It was chilling to see the Gestapo listed in the phone book. They provided me with a link I had not yet discovered for the Radom Municipal Library which has documents which can be downloaded that include information on the Jewish community, yet another source to mine for my research. They also have photographs of some of the Jews of Radom. I obtained a list to post on the Radom Shtetlink site which I created earlier this year. I took the opportunity to share the site with them and was gratified to learn that they had already accessed the site recently.

Yale told me of the AGAD Central Archives of Historical Records also housed in Warsaw. I learned that they have some information on voter lists from Radom and other materials that will have to wait for a future visit.

Yale told me that there had been a lot of activity in Radom in trying to clear title for development of abandoned buildings. Our friend Jakub in Radom had also talked of the difficulty in developing areas because of a lack of clear title due to buildings that previously belonged to Jews who were murdered. Apparently this is an issue throughout Poland. A notice is placed in the paper for three months and if no response is received the government takes control of the building.

We still had a few evening hours in Warsaw and decided to visit the Old Town. The Old Town is a bit of a misnomer as it was destroyed during the war and rebuilt exactly as it had once been. It is now a UNESCO Heritage site because of the faithful reproduction. We wandered the streets and took photos of the many striking and colorful buildings. Many included paintings and sculpture on their façade.

We also did a stop at the Ghetto Heroes Monument which is located in front of what will be the Museum of the History of Polish Jews slated to open in 2012. In this area we also found the monument of the bunker which was the headquarters of the Jewish Resistance Organization. A mound stands at the height of the rubble from the destruction of the ghetto. There is a memorial route with a number of stones engraved with the history of the key participants in the ghetto uprising. This ends near the plaza where the Jews were assembled for deportation where a monument lists out the given names of the Jews.