Ebook Living in the Land of Ashes mobi,epub

Jews, Dorotas grandparents survived the war under adopted Polish names and did not resume their Jewish identities after the war ended. Anti-Semitism did not end with the war, and whatever remained of Jewish life was deeply marked by the shadow of the Shoah. For Dorotas grandparents, like many others, moving to Silesia and maintaining their Polish identity was a way to make a clean break with the past and start anew. This strategy worked to a certain extent. But suspicions emerged and lingered since the family history was full of holes, they did not go to Church and they did not look like their gentile neighbors. Nor did they have the right reactions and reflexes; they seemed too soft on the Communists and too skeptical of the Church. Dorotas family was never ostracized, but neither did they become truly accepted in their community. Each political crisis threatened to blow their cover, to expose them as Jews, the familiar scapegoats. The few friends they had were just like them: marginalized, skeptical, insecure. Some were Jewish and some not, but all were outsiders. Dorota wanted to belong. In the new climate of freedom that followed the fall of Communism, the familys Jewishness ceased to be a secret. Dorota began frequenting a Jewish club in a nearby town, run by the Jewish Socio-Cultural Association. But its members were mostly elderly and she did not feel at home there. When she learned of the summer camp organized in 1989 for Jewish teenagers she was overjoyed. There were many such Dorotas, twice as many as the forty young people the organizers of the camp had hoped for. As they kept arriving (news of the camp spread by word-of-mouth) the camp ran out of cots, and armchairs became temporary beds. Still more came on Shabbes, and for most of them this was their first experience of Jewishness. To run the program, the Lauder Foundation had sent a young Conservative rabbi from New York City, Michael Schudrich, along with a group of American Jewish teenagers (Schudrich has since become Orthodox, and is now Chief Rabbi of Poland). They worked from morning until night, supervising everything from the kosher kitchen to Hebrew classes. For some of the participants, the camps busy schedule was not enough, and they used every possible opportunity to bombard the Americans with questions about Judaism. Dorota was one of them. One night Schudrich couldnt take it any longer: "Look," he said, "it is after midnight and I have to sleep. Well continue with the questions and answers later." "But you dont understand," Dorota cried out. "We are the new generation of Jewish mothers in this country. We must learn all there is to be learned." Indeed, Dorota was right. She and her friends will be - must be - the new Jewish mothers and fathers in Poland or else there is no future for Polish Jewry. The old community, organized around the synagogue and the Socio-Cultural Association, is dying out. Then we lost a generation: the Jews who were young adults in March 1968 and who overwhelmingly opted for emigration. The generation that followed founded the Jewish Flying University, but by the time we discovered our Jewishness our adult lives were already under way. There were mixed marriages, children and jobs. We were too old to really change. Dorotas generation is the next. Will Dorota and her friends persist? That, indeed, is the question. Once the enthusiasm of finally simply belonging is over, what can the Jewish community really offer them? Its institutions, some of which come dangerously close to being pathetic caricatures, will have to be revamped and remodeled to suit the needs of Dorotas generation; a process of change is, of course, under way, but in the end the task may prove too great. To be sure, one can always count on anti-Semitism to remind young people of their Jewish origin and of what their place is and is not. But this might scare them away as easily as bring them into the fold, and in any case a return to Jewishness because of external hostility is not a sound foundation for the reconstruction of a vibrant Jewish community. Anti-Semitism, however, is part of the mental heritage of many Poles, and, given current circumstances, it is hardly surprising that old demons have been aroused again. The country attained its independence less than 20 years ago, after more than half a century of war, foreign domination, economic ruin and lack of democracy, for much of that time crushed by the weight of Communist, and often anti-Semitic, indoctrination. Meanwhile, the generation that witnessed the Shoah and was aware of the moral urgency of the issue (though this awareness was dimmed by later tragic experiences) is already dying out - in the West, too, the disappearance of this generation has also coincided with a resurgence of anti-Semitism. These factors have a real influence. But to understand does not mean to minimize or to forgive. The use of anti-Semitism by Lech Wałęsa in his 1990 presidential campaign, and by t