Polin

Reviewed by Daniel J. Gilman University of Texas, Austin Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry. Vol. 16. Eds. Michael C. Steinlauf and Antony Polonsky. (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2003. Pp. xix + 602, preface, introduction, articles, 40 photographs and illustrations, literary excerpts, review essays, book reviews, correspondence, obituaries, notes on the contributors, glossary, index.) The latest volume in the annual series Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry focuses on "Jewish popular culture and its afterlife" in Poland, which is almost too apt a subtitle. The essays dealing with current Polish Jewish culture largely treat the ways in which such culture now exists as a re-creation or an exhumation. Figurative exhumation in fact constitutes a major theme of the volume, primarily because of the deeply ambivalent national self-examination that has arisen in the wake of Jan Gross's book Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton University Press, 2001; Pogranicze, 2000), which has indicted the non-Jewish residents of that town for a massacre of Jews during World War II previously ascribed solely to SS troops. The accounts of contemporary Jewish culture in Poland—klezmer music festivals, the heritage restoration of the Kazimierz ghetto, the trade in souvenir figurines of Jews—fold into the ongoing reckoning of the nature and development of Polish anti-Semitism that the discourse on Jedwabne has opened. It is unfair, perhaps, to begin a review of the volume here. As the numerous contributors make plain, Polish Jewish culture encompassed far more than catastrophe. A wealth of well-written articles meticulously detail the wide variety of expressive arts that flourished in the Jewish community, articulating a multiplicity of Jewish and Polish identities through the intersections and conflicts between traditional cultural practices and the agenda of the maskilim, the proponents of the Jewish Enlightenment. The maskilim championed secular learning alongside the Torah and Talmud and encouraged Jews to read and write both Hebrew and European languages, in an effort to promulgate their vision of cultural modernity. To that end, they frequently tended to view traditional Jewish culture, and its preponderant linguistic medium of Yiddish, as shund (trash). Traditional communities, especially the Hasidic sects, responded with equal scorn: songwriters and badkhonim (wedding entertainers) often slipped jabs at the maskilim into their compositions, mocking the modernizers as wannabes, snobs with no appreciation for real art, and, worst of all, humorless scolds who could not take a joke. Soon enough, though, the maskilim opened Yiddish-language presses while badkhonim and other musicians began to compose songs in various secular languages for the theater. Joshua Shanes's chapter, "Papers for the Folk: Jewish Nationalism and the Birth of the Yiddish Press in Galicia," offers a particularly insightful Andersonian analysis of how cultural modernists courted the political sympathies of an apolitical populace by using the Yiddish language to call for various forms of national unity. Here Yiddish served both as a literary vehicle and as ethnographic evidence of the Jews' distinct national minority status. Equally fascinating is Erica Lehrer's beautifully realized article, "Repopulating Jewish Poland—In Wood," on the meaning of the carved wooden figurines of Jews sold in Polish souvenir shops today, many of which are avidly purchased by Jewish tourists. The figurines, which can be read as both romantic tribute and grotesque kitsch, are imbued with very different emotional resonances by Poles and Jews, and the people she interviews express conflicting feelings about the souvenirs that reveal the deep divides in cross-cultural knowledge and understanding of history. Beyond the scholarly articles, Polin includes several selections of literature translated out of Yiddish and Polish, presented here primarily as ethnographies of popular culture. From the Yiddish-language writer A. Litvin, translated [End Page 490] here by Michael C. Steinlauf, we hear about the entertainments of the poor in a Lithuanian town: the blind musicians and the "look-box" peddlers, whose pleasures sold for just a few kopeks each. The Polish-language writer Urke Nachalnik, translated here by Frank L. Vigoda

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