Ester and Ruzya by Masha Gessen

Author:Masha Gessen [Gessen, Masha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48438-3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-04T05:00:00+00:00

NOVEMBER 1999, BIALYSTOK

I have lunch at New York Bagels across the street from the Cristall Hotel. Leonard Cohen is dancing to the end of love on the stereo; framed posters on the walls feature bagels, the Chrysler Building, and the Statue of Liberty. All of this, like my glossy new hotel, is geared to the homesick Jewish home-seeker of the sort that come here by the tens of thousands from America, Israel, Australia, every summer. The hotel, as it happens, is on one side of the street that used to have the wooden fence dividing it down the middle; the Bagels is on the ghetto side.

I came by train from Warsaw, getting in yesterday after dark. I wanted to see Ester’s beloved Bialystok, and I was hoping to find a local historian or, better yet, a contemporary who remembered the ghetto and Jakub and could talk to me. This was something of an unfounded hope. The Bialystok entry in the Encyclopaedia Judaica indicates that “after the war there remained 1,085 Jews in Bialystok, of whom 900 were local inhabitants, and the rest from the neighboring villages. Of the ghetto inhabitants, 260 survived, some in the deportation camps, others as members of partisan units. The community presumably dwindled and dissolved.” Some presumption. On the train on the way here I read Jewish Bialystok and Surroundings in Eastern Poland, written by local journalist Tomasz Wisniewski, one of a score of ethnic Poles throughout this country who have fashioned their fascination with the gap of history into an avocation. He maintains a database of archival mentions of Bialystok Jews. Tomasz’s Jewish Bialystok says that there are five Jews living in Bialystok now. Professor Adam Dobronski at the Bialystok branch of Warsaw University tells me that, unfortunately, “they have been dying off,” and now there are one and a half Jews in the town: one Jew and another one, who is married to a Catholic and does not consider himself Jewish. This is my first trip to a place where the number of Jews is known precisely.

None of the very few survivors of the Bialystok ghetto lives in the town: most of them settled in Israel. The resident Jews, all one and a half of them, are not native Bialystokers, so I do not go to see them. Instead, I walk around a lot. This is a small town, but by no means a backwater. There are something like 280,000 residents, screeching traffic, busy young people, and, even more noticeable, scores of flashy fashion shops serving them. There is no sense of absence, no conspicuous empty space, and the Jewish memorial boards scattered throughout the center of town are overshadowed by store displays. It all reminds me of a line from a Brodsky poem: “Life without us is, darling, thinkable.”

I continuously refer to Tomasz’s guidebook—the most essential of guidebooks, for it leads the reader through the invisible, from the site of the burned-down synagogue to the city park that was once a Jewish cemetery. His book is also a work of glorified history, the sort that appears in the absence of eyewitnesses.

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