Unsettled Heritage: Living Next to Poland's Material Jewish Traces after the Holocaust

Yechiel Weizman concludes his excellent book on how Poles reacted to the material traces of Jewish life after the Holocaust by suggesting that the contemporary “return of fragmented Jewish remnants to their original places” might give “the opportunity for local Polish inhabitants to accept and make peace with the lingering presence of their local past, offering perhaps a modest path for sustained and long-overdue communal mourning” (p. 226). As is well known, Sigmund Freud defines mourning as a reaction to the death of a loved one that, though painful, frees the libido to love again. Freedom to love again occurs when mourning comes to an end with the realization that everything lovable is transient and limited. “Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of the enjoyment,” Freud writes.1 If mourning frees one to love again by revealing that the lovable is transient and fragile, then Freud's concept of mourning can be interpreted as expressing a kind of peace with or acceptance of transience and death. In Ode XI of Book I, Horace puts Freud's point beautifully, “Life is so brief: cut short far-reaching hopes. / Even as we speak, envious Time is fleeting.”2By invoking Freud's concept of mourning and by suggesting that Poles might be able to find some kind of “peace” with their past, Weizman arrives at a conclusion that his book otherwise questions, if not undermines. For, as Weizman anticipates in his title and shows in brilliant detail throughout his book, there is no peace in Poland when it comes to its unsettled heritage, when it comes to its Jewish sites. There is no peace in Poland when it comes to Jewish sites because there is no settled answer as to what Poles should do with them and what meaning they should give to them. Rather, Poles have offered since 1945 many different and conflicting responses: on one page we read about officials covering a Jewish cemetery with heaps of gravel and sand (p. 90); on another page we read a poignant poem written by a Pole mourning the loss of her town's synagogue (p. 98); on still another page we read about Poles vandalizing Jewish religious spaces (p. 133). Even with regards to Jewish spaces that have been repurposed or erased the past still comes back to haunt local residents in the form of ghost stories about Jewish souls, spirits, and specters returning to admonish Poles for what they have done (pp. 153–160). The list of examples could go on, and, indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of Weizman's book is its narrative attempt to create a “mosaic” or “montage” of diverse and conflicting Polish reactions to Jewish sites (p. 9), that is, his attempt to write a narrative that does not eliminate “ambivalence” (pp. 209–210).If Weizman associates the desire to eliminate ambivalence largely with antisemitism, urban modernization, and ethno-cultural nationalism, I might connect it more broadly with the ostensibly modern attempt to eliminate the pain of time that Freud explores in his essay on transience (Vergänglichkeit). Time is painful to the extent that it yields not peace or harmony but unsettlement and ambivalence, if not estrangement and terror in the face of emptiness and nothingness: “the mere existence of Jewish prayer houses and graveyards in a landscape devoid of living Jews [. . .] introduces a ghastly, liminal element that defies the clear dichotomy between presence and absence, past and presence, and life and death” (p. 210).What is this ghastly, liminal element to which Weizman refers? Is it a referential object? Or is it “something” beyond objectification? Might it not be time and death as ineluctably mysterious, unknowable, and, thus, as “outside” our everyday distinctions between something and nothing? If Weizman's “ghastly, liminal element” can be interpreted as referring to time and death, there probably can never be a settled, conclusive approach to Jewish sites in post-Holocaust Poland: no matter what one might do with a Jewish site the physical handling of it does not eliminate the site's “enduring ambivalence” (p. 203) as an unsettling space of time and death. To be sure, Poles have engaged in numerous attempts to arrive at a resolution. They have produced many projects, memorials, and narratives that all seek to place Jewish history and culture within a conclusive and stable order. Yet, do not these efforts fail to the extent that they approach as an object what is not an object?If memorialization ends up in failure, can there be no working through the past? Though some thinkers such as Theodor W. Adorno might come to such a conclusion, I am not sure that is the conclusion Weizman wishes to draw. Instead, he seemingly wishes to suggest that one can work perpetually through the past, if one understands the past not as a stable object but rather as a fluid event or happening that eludes containment and stabilization. However, I am not entirely sure about the latter point, given that Weizman, though he often stresses ambivalence, proceeds nonetheless to identify the period between 1945 and 1989 as the “span of time that the current tangible and symbolic status of the nation's Jewish religious sites were developed and took on the form they have today” (p. 4). By privileging one historical era over another and viewing the past as having solidified into a form, as having stabilized into a distinct period of time, Weizman approaches the history of Jewish sites as a permanent and stable object of narration.Nevertheless, Weizman has written an outstanding book. Its singular achievement lies in its emphasis on the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of achieving closure when it comes to time and death. In this regard, Weizman notably tells of his ambivalence about reciting the “El Male Rachamim” (God Full of Mercy) at a memorial event in Otwock when someone asked him to say the prayer. “Confused and resigned to fulfill the social demand, I took out my old kippah that I found in my bag and put down my ethnographer's notebook. I had no siddur (Jewish prayer book) on me, so the best I could do was attempt an oral recitation, struggling to recall the prayer from memory” (p. 204). This little story, which Weizman recounts in his conclusion, affirms the difficulty of making peace with the past, of making peace with suffering, violence, and death, in contrast to Freud.