The Taste of Ashes by Marci Shore

Author:Marci Shore [Shore, Marci]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-88883-9
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2013-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

TAMARA HAD GONE to Jerusalem because she no longer wanted to be different, and because one could no longer be a Jew in Poland. In Jerusalem, Tamara thought, she had found herself. Really she had lost herself, though, lost herself in her dissertation, lost herself in her own narrative of determinism. She hated her grandfather for not crossing the border into Czechoslovakia, for not emigrating to Palestine. She was obsessed: here was the fatal error, the moment before her own birth when she was thrown off the train of History and became lost, exiled, an aberration.

Now she was determined to leave Poland. Her life was a szpagat, she lived in a split. In Israel her friends could not understand why, each time she was in Jerusalem, she used her return ticket to Warsaw.

At a café with Tamara and Seth, I asked Tamara again about relations between the communists and the Zionists after the war. I knew that in my question there was something almost cruel: she did not want to talk about it. And I did not want to let it go. She looked down into her cup of coffee. Now she turned to Seth and they spoke in Hebrew, as if I were not there, and I supposed that for them I was not.

I went to see Kostek Gebert, the editor of Midrasz, the new Polish-Jewish magazine that publicized the confidential hotline for those struggling with their Jewish identity. It was not a joke: the magazine, Kostek explained, was aimed at Jews who were still in the closet.

I’d subscribed to Midrasz. Each issue arrived in my mailbox in an undistinctive brown envelope with no return address.

“Tamara feels as if she’s been thrown off the train of History and must, at all costs, get back on,” I said to Kostek.

“I’m not on a first-name basis with History myself.” He said this with a smile.

We spoke about fascism, communism, Zionism.

“And Israel exists,” I said to him.

“Yes, it exists.”

“Every time I go there I’m surprised that the country exists at all.”

“Me, too. Only I am also surprised that Poland exists at all.”

We spoke about the war. Kostek told me that for the Polish Right the war was a war between nations. For the Left it was a war between ideologies. If I were a Jew in Poland in September 1939, wouldn’t I, too, greet the arrival of the Red Army with cheers? The Poles could never forgive them.

Or did he say, “The Poles could never forgive us”?

Kostek told me about his friend Staszek Krajewski, also a Jew and a former Solidarity activist, and the son of Stalinists. Staszek believed that the Jews should make a collective apology for communism.

I was fascinated. But Kostek, who was also the son of Stalinists, did not agree.

“Fascinating? No, it’s stupid. I feel responsible for communism as a person on the Left, but not as a Jew.”

I asked him about Adolf Berman, who had watched Władysław Bartoszewski imprisoned under his brother’s rule and apparently said nothing to his brother.

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