An Ordinary Life? The Journeys of Tonia Lechtman, 1918–1996

The historian Anna Müller has achieved something remarkable in her account of the life of Tonia Lechtman (1918–1996). She has taken the seemingly narrow story of one individual—an ordinary woman in one reading—and helped us understand how the outside world determined her life path. In so doing, Müller encourages readers to consider how our relationships with family members, friends, political parties, and the political states to which we belong as residents or citizens influence both our ideals and our actions.Born Tauba Bialer in Łódź, Lechtman came from a family whose ancestors combined a history of successful entrepreneurship and Hasidic tradition. Attracted to communism as a young teenager in Poland because of “a commitment to brotherhood, justice, and freedom” (p. 47), she immigrated to Palestine with her family in 1935. The reasons for their immigration were never clear but likely involved both the family's response to political fascism and an awareness that life in Palestine would be easier for Tonia and her brother, both inspired by communist ideals (p. 55). Not long after her family's arrival, Tonia met and married Sioma Lechtman, a Russian Jew who shared and encouraged Tonia's communism. After serving time in prison for pro-communist activities, the couple was expelled from Palestine. Tonia and Sioma then went to Paris on transit visas, hoping to eventually find their way to Spain to fight fascism. By December 1937, Sioma had left for Spain to join the International Brigades while Tonia, pregnant, remained behind in France. In July 1938, Tonia gave birth to her daughter Vera, the catalyst for Müller's work. By the outbreak of war Sioma was already imprisoned in a camp at Gurs. Tonia managed to visit, and a second child, Marcel, was born in March 1940.Tonia's search for shelter for herself and her children eventually led to Switzerland, where they lived in refugee camps and shelters. Shortly after the end of the war Tonia learned that Sioma had been killed in Auschwitz in January 1945. After years of persecution and precarity, Tonia hoped that the emerging communist rule in Poland would align with her own ideals, and so she returned there. She took up work assisting in a hospital of the Unitarian Service Committee in Upper Silesia and then worked to organize care for mothers and children in the Ministry of Industry and Trade in Warsaw. But the Stalinist government imprisoned her from 1949 to 1954 on grounds of suspicious activity. Tonia eventually left Poland for Palestine in 1971. Müller carefully describes that the decision to emigrate after the 1968 anti-Jewish campaign was not a choice for Israel over Poland but rather a response to several of the family's problems, including the failure of the Polish health care system to meet the medical needs of her grandchildren (pp. 262–71).The point of Müller's story is less the many journeys demanded by Lechtman's status as a Jew from Poland than it is the consistency of Lechtman's principles, her belief in communism as an ideology that emphasized responsibility for others regardless of ethnic or national background. Lechtman's principles justify the question mark of the title, indicating just how extraordinary she was. One of the strengths of Müller's analysis is her explanation of the connection Lechtman made between communism and motherhood. Müller shows how one woman lived her ideals, in spite of the cost those ideals sometimes imposed on her family, especially her children.Though scholarly in approach and tone, An Ordinary Life? is far from a straightforward biography. Müller describes the affinity she feels with Tonia, as she is referred to in the text, and her increasing connection to Tonia's family as she conducts her research. Müller's honesty makes this a model study for scholars who want to share fascinating lives with a larger public. The experiences described here are Tonia's, but the ability to organize and tell the story is Müller's.Perhaps the signal contribution of this work is to point out that historians’ need to tell a communal story limits us. Müller understands that the stories of individuals do not just qualify our conclusions about ethnic or national communities; rather, they expand our notions of how we might redefine those communities. An Ordinary Life? is a gentle rebuke to historians who attempt to generalize about the choices made by Jews in Poland. The story Müller tells, with the help of an unusually rich collection of family correspondence, can only reflect the life of one individual, but the context she provides reveals more complexity than even the most sophisticated scholars recognize. This text should attract a diverse group of readers—anyone interested in prewar Polish Jewish life, Palestine, communism, the Spanish Civil War, wartime France and Switzerland, the experiences of women during and after war, postwar Poland, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. Müller's lightly worn erudition illuminates the context of Tonia's life and choices, allowing the reader to see Tonia as an individual and not just as part of any kind of larger group, whether women or Jews or citizens of Poland.Explaining that many questions remain about Tonia's story, Müller writes that “what we are left with is often chaotic and at best anecdotal” (p. 111). This is certainly true on both the individual and the communal level. By writing both sensitively and authoritatively about one individual's life, Müller forces us to reconsider making firm conclusions about the complex histories we study.