Readings on the Jews of Eastern Europe

Whenever I travel somewhere I create a reading list to prepare for my travels. My current focus is Eastern Europe, especially Budapest, Prague, Warsaw and Cracow, specifically the Jewish experience. I thought this would be a good place to share some recommended reading for others who may be interested in similar travels or a similar emphasis.

One of the books that I would highly recommend is A Hole in the Heart of the World: Being Jewish in Eastern Europe by Jonathan Kaufman. Kaufman is a journalist by training and used to be a page one feature editor for the Wall Street Journal. He tells the story of five Jews living in Prague, Budapest, Poland and East and West Berlin. While he touches on their experience during the war, the primary focus is on the period after the war under Soviet control and the difficult compromises that people had to make to survive. While most books on Eastern European Jews end with the Holocaust, Kaufman’s book pursues how one reconstructs one’s life in the midst of countries which often contain the very people who either actively or passively supported your extermination. While the book is a powerful history lesson, it is also personalized by the focus on the real experiences of its five protagonists. Because the stories span several generations he captures the ebb and flow of Jewish consciousness throughout generations. While many people of the post-war era had to suppress their religious and cultural identity, their children and grandchildren are finding their way back to their heritage.

In writing about the pre-war period he underscores the fact that the poor shtetl Jew who has entered the public’s consciousness through productions such as “Fiddler on the Roof” was not representative of the broader Jewish experience in the cities. A recent article in the New York Times on the photos of Roman Vishniac also addresses the often misleading image that was created of the Eastern European Jew (see links).

In the larger cities of Eastern Europe one often found wealth and sophistication within the Jewish community. Jews edited the newspapers, owned the department stores and in 1933 75% of plays in Berlin were written or directed by Jews. Before the Nazis, Germans were the most frequent recipient of the Nobel Prize. After 1933 a quarter of those receiving the Nobel prize in medicine were German-Jewish. None of them lived in Germany. In many ways the loss of the Jews robbed these cities of an energy and vibrancy that had existed in earlier times and furthered the growth and vitality of the city.

I was surprised at the level of pre-war assimilation and intermarriage, trends that I tend to associate with the United States. Post-war many Eastern European Jews backed away from Judaism both because of the pressures of Soviet control as well as the harm which they experienced because of being Jewish. Ironically the very fact of the Holocaust deepened the sense of Jewish identity for many American Jews.

Kaufman follows the stories through the Soviet occupation to the fall of Communism and the Berlin Wall. He reports the rise of anti-Semitism after the fall and then the stabilization and rediscovery of Jewish roots among the next generation and those that remained. This book was first published in 1997 and closes with the resurgence of the Jewish community within Eastern Europe.

The Great Jewish Cities of Central and Eastern Europe by Eli Valley was published in 1999 and focuses upon Budapest, Prague, Cracow and Warsaw. While it does not address the period of Soviet control, it reports on the Jewish communities and institutions as they existed in 1999 and provides important back story on the Jewish communities from those cities, dating back many centuries to their origin. Valley also shares Jewish legends that had developed within these communities. History book, folk stories and travel guide, this book is an insider’s view of the Jewish communities within these cities. The book is written in a very readable style and would be of interest to anyone with an interest in Jewish history even if not traveling to these regions.

Valley's history of the Jewish people reminds us that the Holocaust, while on a scale previously unknown, was an extension of a long tradition of anti-Semitism often fostered by the church or economic competition. Kaufman in turn reminds us that it did not end with the Holocaust and continues to rear its head whenever economic distress or nationalistic tendencies develop.

Eli Valley is the son of a New York rabbi and clearly steeped in Jewish history and folklore. He also was a travel guide in Prague, having moved there soon after the fall of communism.

Valley also writes of the resurgence of interest in Jewish roots and the role historic Jewish buildings play in coalescing a community as it develops a new identity.

I found this book at the library and quickly decided it would be an invaluable addition to my personal library. Its only drawback is that it is over 500 pages which makes it cumbersome to take on one's travels. I can only hope that Amazon will come out with a Kindle version prior to our departure.

More Paintings: I Was Here and What Is Left

Two more paintings to add to my Lithuania collection.  The first is recycled from another painting I shared on this blog called "Tombstone Braille".  I decided I wasn't quite satisfied with it and attempted to rework it.  Along the way I destroyed it and then turned it into a new painting. Despite my frequently expressed wish for an artwork undo button, I often find that my favorite works comes from being willing to destroy and re-create.

The painting is called "I Was Here" and is based on the Ninth Fort located outside of Kaunas, Lithuania.   The Ninth Fort was a place of mass murder used by the Nazis to kill 50,000 Jews.  In addition to Lithuanian Jews, this site was used for the murder of Jews from France, Germany and Austria.  The building was used as a temporary holding point prior to executions in adjacent killing fields. If the Nazis didn't complete all their murders during the work day, they held the Jews overnight until the next day.  It was in the holding cells that I saw the imagery which inspired this painting.  Carved into the bluish rose walls were names and dates.  A last attempt to say, "I was here", to assert one's existence in the face of death.   When I painted over the face in the earlier painting, it still showed through the layers of paint.   I liked the effect and decided this subject required a face to remind the viewer that a person stood facing this wall as they carved their last words.

The second painting that I've completed is based on a vestige of the great synagogue of Vilnius.  In 1938 the synagogue was celebrating its 500 year anniversary.  The synagogue survived the war, but was badly damaged and torn down by the Soviets.  In the Tolerance Museum I found the doors to the Torah Ark.  I was captivated by their handcrafted quality and surprised by how modern they appeared.  I loved the variation in colors on the metal and wanted to try to capture it with paint.  Because I made use of metallic paint, the colors change with the light.  The name of the painting is "What Is Left".

"Negative Space" and the Synagogues of Eastern Europe

Recently I gave a talk in conjunction with a show of artwork by Andrea Strongwater at the Tychman Shapiro Gallery. Andrea is a NY artist who is focusing on the lost synagogues of Europe (http://www.astrongwater.com/) . She has created a series of paintings based on black and white photographs. Her vibrantly colored paintings bring these synagogues back to life. The narrative that accompanies each painting is like a drumbeat with the relentless repetition of the Nazis setting fire to synagogues across many cities in Europe. Before they murdered the Jewish people they sought to rip the heart out of the community as a synagogue is far more than just a building. Countless buildings were destroyed, many dating back many centuries.

I was asked to share some comments based on my travels in Eastern Europe and thought I’d share some of my comments within this blog.

During my travels in Eastern Europe I was struck with the sense of “negative space”. Negative space is an artistic concept. You may have seen the image of two silhouettes of faces facing each other. First you see the faces, but if you look at the area between them you see a vase or a goblet created by the edges of the face. Negative space is what you see in the absence. In Eastern Europe there is a great deal of negative space. Synagogues together with whole communities of people have been destroyed. Former synagogues have been re-purposed into other functions, but seldom is there any mention of what they once were. Similarly many people have no knowledge of the significant presence within their city that was once filled by the Jewish community.

The synagogues in Eastern Europe fall within three categories. There are those which are still functioning as synagogues. Unfortunately that number is small as is that of the remaining Jewish community. There are those that have been re-purposed into other functions and there are those that are in negative space. They exist no longer, destroyed by the Nazis in flames. Often they required the Jews to pay for the removal of the debris.

In Latvia there is one synagogue that remains. The major synagogue was destroyed in flames with 300 Jews locked inside. Today there is a memorial on the site of that synagogue which appears to be in the footprint of the synagogue. A red and white cracked floor has grass growing through it. One cannot stand in that space without thinking of those 300 Jews and wondering if the floor cracked from fire.

The synagogue which survived exists only because the local priests went to the Nazis and protested that burning the synagogue would also destroy the church and the neighboring buildings, too much collateral damage. Today a van sits in front of the synagogue up on blocks. Two policemen guard the synagogue 24/7 as there was a bombing some years ago. While I was there the synagogue was being refurbished and there is now a youtube video which shows the interior in its refurbished state.

In Vilnius the great synagogue survived the war, but was badly damaged. It was torn down by the Soviets after the war. It was located on Zydu Street (Jew Street) and in 1938 was celebrating its 500 year anniversary. When they built the synagogue they were not permitted to build it taller than any church so they dug down to get the required height. Its doors were armored so it could serve as a place of safety for Jews during times of pograms although as we saw in Latvia, the synagogue was not always a place of safety.

While I was in Vilnius I visited with the owner of a local restaurant which sits in front of the area where the synagogue once stood. She noted that when they renovated they discovered a tunnel under their restaurant which ran across the street and out the ghetto gates, so presumably there was an escape route from the synagogue. Today a building stands on the site of the old synagogue and interestingly its windows are filled with photographs of sections of the old synagogue.

Once there were over 100 synagogues in Vilnius with 30 in the small ghetto alone. They were organized by guild so there was a dressmakers’ synagogue, a shoemakers’ synagogue. The synagogue which survived in Vilnius survived because the Nazis took over the Jewish hospital across the street and used the synagogue for storage. After the war many Jews came back from Russia. They had gone there out of fear that their daughters would be conscripted into forced labor. Little could they have imagined. After the war they gathered at the synagogue to see who had survived. Under the Soviets they had a matzo bakery and a kosher butcher secretly housed in the synagogue as they were not permitted to have either. Today you can still see the matzo making machinery off of the women’s balcony.

In Kaunas you will find the second remaining synagogue in Lithuania. It survived because the Nazis used it for storage of the clothing they took from the Jews before they murdered them. There was a thriving business in used clothing in those days.

There is also a synagogue in Kaunas which has been turned into an autobody shop. The only giveaway that it was once a synagogue are the arched windows in the back. The middle window is bricked in as that was where the Torah ark was located.

In Mariampole there is a repurposed synagogue with a sculptural detail of the ten commandments at the top of the structure.

 In Siauliau there is a building which I found interesting and took a photo of it only to learn later that it was the former synagogue. A wide plank way enters the building crossing over a waterless moat. A religious statue caught my eye through the window. It now serves as a church.

Next door stands the Chaim Frenkel house. Chaim Frenkel owned the tannery business and the shoe factory. He built many of the important Jewish buildings including the hospital and the synagogue. As an orthodox Jew who walked to the synagogue, he made sure to build it conveniently next door. The building has the double arched windows that resemble the Ten Commandments and are found on many Jewish buildings.

I have an upcoming trip to Budapest-Warsaw-Krakow and Prague and anticipate that I will encounter many more synagogues, past and present, so more to come. I’ve been deeply engaged in a wonderful book called The Great Jewish Cities of Central and Eastern Europe by Eli Valley. The book addresses the four cities I’ve noted above and shares much of the history and legends from the Jewish communities as well as the synagogues that once stood and those that remain.

Buried Truths

My trip planning progresses with most of my hotels booked and transportation in Eastern Europe yet to be determined. In the process of planning this trip, I've connected with a 15 year old girl who lives in Radom. She had reached out to people through the Family Finder on Jewishgen.org as she was writing a paper on the Jews of Radom. I shared some information with her and advised her that I was planning a trip to that area. She has kindly invited us to come to their home for dinner. That should add an interesting personal experience to our travels.

I returned to the studio yesterday where I finished a painting that has been challenging, but which I am pleased with now. It is called "Buried Truths" and is based on an image derived from the book " Diary 1941-43 by the journalist Kazimierz Sakowicz. Sakowicz lived near the forest where he witnessed and documented the murders of the Jews of Vilnius. Each day he buried what he wrote in a jar in the forest. In his book he writes of how local Lithuanians performed the murders. After the war these pages began to surface in archives until Dr. Rachel Margolis got access to them and was able to piece them together for the first publishing in Polish. The publication of the book was edited by Yitzhak Arad, Yad Vashem Chairman emeritus. Interestingly the Lithuanian government filed charges against Arad for "war crimes" against Lithuanians and sought Dr. Margolis for questioning. Obviously not too comfortable with what these pages told. Hence the title "Buried Truths".

I found the image of bottles buried in the forest to be an interesting one, but found it challenging to paint. There are no reflections on bottles that are underground so I had to figure out how to suggest bottles and build a sense of layering that conveyed something hidden. I wanted a few bottles near the top to be sprouting pages as if they were plants. I relied on medium to build up the form of the bottles and to create layering. I find that I am departing from my more figurative work to work more semi-abstractly out of my imagination.

Artwork Site and Travels to Radom

This week I’ve put together some web pages to share the artwork I’ve completed on my Lithuanian travel. Completed is a relative term. Some reworking may yet occur. You can find it at http://studio409art.com/EasternEurope/index.html or click on Lithuanian artwork on the links to the right. Some of that artwork has already been shared in this blog, but these pages gather it all together along with some discussion of what I was trying to capture.

I’ve also been deep into trip planning as I will be traveling back to Eastern Europe in early summer together with my husband. Our travels will take us to Budapest, Warsaw, Radom (the town my grandfather came from), Cracow and Prague. I’ve gotten to know Radom quite well in putting together the Shtetlink site, but felt it was time to visit the town and do some research in the archives. I have no idea how I will respond to being there. Of all the places in Eastern Europe from which my family came, this is the city which is closest to the Holocaust for me personally. I have a list of at least 50 family members who died, many as close as second cousins. They all have names, ages and family histories that make them real. My grandfather immigrated to the US in the early 1900s, but everyone else remained in Poland only to perish in the Holocaust. Based on my experience in Lithuania, I know how intense this type of visit can be so sought to mitigate it with travels to other areas where I don’t have a personal connection.

I do my own trip planning and it involves considerable research that may prove helpful to others planning similar travels. The hardest part is figuring out the itinerary. I briefly considered going to both Radom , Poland and Kamenetz-Podolsk in the Ukraine where the rest of my family came from. Ultimately I decided that I needed to focus on one region at a time. Preparing to do research is even more time consuming than planning a trip and I want to make sure I allow sufficient time and focus to do it justice.

I’ve been fortunate in that a friend who had traveled to Radom advised me on how he would put a trip together in hindsight. Our travels will begin with five days in Budapest, then on to Warsaw by train. We will rent a car in Poland and travel from Warsaw to Radom where I will go to the archives to do research and put in an order. While they gather the information that I will request, we will head down to Krakow for several days. From there we will visit Auschwitz, a visit I feel I must make, but also dread. We then come back to Radom for a few days to gather the information from the archives. My friend suggested I leave enough time to make any additional requests that might be spurred by the information that the archives provide. Also while in Radom, we may do a side trip to Majdanek, a well preserved concentration camp that the Nazis didn’t have time to destroy. From there we head back to Warsaw for a few days and then on to Prague for six days. All total a trip of three weeks.

While in Radom I plan to visit both archives, the Polish State Archives (PSA) has information older than 100 years ago and the civil registration office (USC) which has the records from the last 100 years. I’ve been told that for the USC, I need to document my relationship to the people for whom I am requesting information. Not much clarity on how to do that, but I should be able to put a chain of birth and death certificates together that will take me as far back as the 1700s on one side of the family. I have ordered many records from the PSA and anticipate sending them an e-mail advising them of my arrival and what I hope to see while there.

I am especially interested in records that they have of identity papers that were required by the Nazis in 1941, the year before they murdered the Jews. Identity papers frequently have photos attached, often the only family photos that people have. I have gotten some identity papers in the past from the PSA although it seems those should be at the USC as they are more recent.

Understanding what information is where will be one of my challenges and I’ve been told that what I find in one archive may send me looking for information at the other. My other challenge will be language. I do not speak any Polish and based on my one phone call there, English speakers are a scarce commodity. They do accept e-mails in English, but respond in Polish, so I assume there are some English speakers. My friend who traveled there was able to manage without the language skills and found people who spoke English or enough that he could be understood.

The records present yet another language challenge, but one I’ve been able to contend with successfully in the past. Written Polish is somewhat decipherable in official records, but the Russian records remain challenging despite a few courses in Russian. I’ll need to brush up on my Russian before I leave as records from the 1860s through World War I are in Russian.

I am also interested in a file that sounds as if it has name changes for the Jews who first took last names around 1822/23. Prior to that time Jews had patronymics, the father’s last name with an ending added to it. It is possible that I can find the fathers’ names for my great-great-great grandparents David and Sura.

I’ve been watching the recent TV series on Who Do You Think You Are and thinking how much easier it is when you have a crew of genealogists doing your legwork. At the same time I am often glad that I’ve never found that a family member has already documented our family tree. Instead they left to me the wonderful opportunity to discover my family through my own efforts. Those efforts imbue the discoveries with much greater satisfaction than if someone had handed me the information. The search is itself a great gift for a mind that loves to solve puzzles.

Foot in the Door

Today we waited two hours to drop off a painting for the Minneapolis Institute of Arts “Foot in the Door Show”. The line was so lengthy that it extended outside for a portion of our wait on this snowy Minnesota day. It gave new meaning to the term "foot in the door". Each decade the MIA does a show in which they accept entries that fit within a 12” X 12” requirement. This sends local artists scurrying to art stores to purchase 12” X 12” canvases and I was no exception.

I ended up with two paintings and one collage from which I would choose my entry. The painting on which I lavished the most time, in fact didn’t make the cut, while the one I dashed off in two hours spoke to me. Of course the first painting was necessary to get to the second. It is all about process.

My first painting was a study of Ruta, a woman who we met at the Vilnius Synagogue. Ruta had a very old-style look that looked very at home in the synagogue. She graciously had shown us around the synagogue and was there to greet us when we attended services on our last evening in Vilnius. The image that I painted of her had the dome of the synagogue behind her as she stood on the women's balcony. The dome framed her face with blue creating an almost Madonna-like quality, not exactly the effect I was going for, but it felt strangely appropriate. Ruta will likely show up in a larger painting in another form and this study will surely inform that effort.

The painting that spoke to me was one I did of Marek, an older gentleman who was in our Yiddish class. Marek only spoke Russian so we didn’t have much opportunity to communicate with him, but I found his face very interesting and have already used him as a reference for my painting “Sholom Aleichem”. While I liked the painting of his face, it needed something more. I went to my list of Yiddish expressions and searched for something that would relate in some manner. The one quote I found was “Vi men iz gevoint oif der yugend, azoi tut men oif der elter”. This translates to “That which is practiced in youth will be pursued in old age.” When I thought about the meaning of this relative to Marek, I realized that he must have heard Yiddish as a youth, but grew up under Soviet rule where pursuing one's Jewish heritage openly was very difficult. Here he was in his 70s, now studying Yiddish, no doubt returning to something that had once been familiar. I wrote the expression in cursive Yiddish and did washes of yellow ochre and red oxide over different sections.

In addition to the studies for the Foot in the Door Show, I have also completed some additional paintings. One is called “Afikomen” for its association with hiding the matzo at Passover. When Ruta had shown us around the synagogue she pointed out a room off of the women’s section. Behind curtains it housed equipment for making matzo. She told us that they had a matzo bakery and a kosher butcher housed secretly within the synagogue. Under Soviet rule they did not allow for the practice of one’s religion, so they had to do this surreptitiously. The painting “Afikomen” is semi-abstract, but you can pick out the forms of the equipment.

I also completed my painting called “The Jews Like Blue”. In the apartment in which we stayed, our landlady and her husband had started to scrape down the walls. Soon they found traces of former tenants. They left squares of the underlying layers intact in their apartment, some of which we were certain contained Hebrew letters. Our landlady noted that Jews once lived in this home in the corner of the small ghetto. Commenting on the blue in the background, she noted that “the Jews like blue”. The painting consists of a rough approximation of that phrase. I’m often not sure if I’ve captured an expression correctly, but in this case my objective was to have the suggestion of the phrase, but obscure portions of it. So I layered medium, embossed letters and then scraped portions down until I ended up with something that has an almost waxy appearance which captures the suggestion of something hidden beneath layers, an apt metaphor for the Jewish heritage in Vilnius.

While I’ve been painting, I have also been spending considerable time on my genealogy efforts. Early this month, Avotaynu, an International Journal of Jewish Genealogy, published my article on my travels and research on Dunilovichi.

I have also been deeply immersed in website design. Having completed my first Shtetlink website for Dunilovichi, I decided it was time to tackle another so began one for Radom, Poland, the town from which my grandfather immigrated. Radom is a large city, many times the size of Dunilovichi and with that brings many layers of complexity.

Dunilovichi has fewer than 20 people researching the town. Radom has about 400. I began by contacting them all to ask for information. Soon I was communicating with people from Melbourne to Israel and many places in between. I am working with a man in Israel who has a homemade film of Radom from 1937 which I hope to be able to post. I’ve also connected with the Radomer Society in NY where I’ve been invited to attend a meeting to try to access additional information. And I’ve been contacting publishers to publish excerpts from books on the site. This has turned into a pretty significant effort, but I’m enjoying connecting with other researchers. As I have less left to find in my own history, I’m glad there are other opportunities to stay engaged in the topic. I’ve just gone public with the site, but will continue to add to it as more information becomes available. You can find it at http://www.shtetlinks.jewishgen.org/Radom .

Synchronicity

Have you ever had two seemingly unrelated events connect in unexpected ways?

This week I attended a closing event for a friend's art exhibit. Robyn Awend is a printmaker who did a series of artworks based on the poet Abraham Sutzkever of Vilna. One of the stories about Sutzkever is that he and some friends took lead type from a printing house and melted it for use in bullets against the Nazis. He wrote of this in a poem as 'melting words into bullets of lead. We poured the molten type as our forefathers once in the temple poured oil into golden menorahs'. To underscore this imagery Robyn created “bullets” of lead embossed with Hebrew letters. The exhibit also contained her wonderful prints and photographs of the traces of the former Jewish community in Vilna.

In Vilna, Sutzkever was a member of the "Paper Brigade". When the Germans sought to plunder Jewish cultural artifacts, he was among those charged with selecting what was considered valuable for the Nazis to retain. The "Paper Brigade" sought to smuggle some of these artifacts to safety. Sutzkever ultimately escaped with his wife to the forest where they fought the Nazis as partisans. As I listened to the readings about Sutzkever’s story, I was moved by the efforts to preserve the cultural history even at the cost of their lives.

A few hours later I headed off for my second event of the evening, a gathering at a games center. Here I met up with two individuals who had family from Dunilovichi. I had met them in the course of creating my ShtetLink website. Surprisingly one of them lived in the same area as me. That day was his son’s bar mitzvah and his cousin who also had roots in Dunilovichi came in for the event. While the noisy post bar mitzvah party took place with occasional interruptions from 13 year-olds, three people with family from Dunilovichi gathered to discuss family history. As I shared the closing event from which I had just come, Simon told me about his mother who was a partisan from Vilna. Not only did she know the poet Sutzkever well, but she too was part of the Paper Brigade. He told me of how the Nazis would have two people translating the same document to assure that they got accurate information. If the translations didn’t match the translators risked losing their lives. The Germans were not always there, however, and that was when they were able to smuggle out documents.

Two separate events, yet all the threads seem to knit together as if they were carefully coordinated.