I knew from the beginning that I would be coming to Eastern Europe, where my own ancestry can be traced in jagged lines, and I knew I would be approaching borders of an historic ethnic cleansing my father had been warning me about since I was a little boy; but my sensitivity towards such things was so low. I was amused when Wendy sent me articles about the rise of anti-Semitism in parts of Hungary by way of the Jobbik party. When it's not funny, hyperawareness among the Jews has always been embarrassing to me.
What's more, too much of what's pronouncing itself Jewish these days is hateful, from Israel's vile loyalty oath to the more banal fears and hatreds and fatly entitled victimhoods.
My own relationship feels simple to me. I have pride in our intellectual tradition and a sort of distant respect for a ritualized, spiritual focus. I have a yearning for the melodic minor key chants I learned in those impactful years before high school, as well as a perverse sense of propriety about how a Jew should worship, ingrained in those same years -- no organs, no English, no bare heads -- a feeling contradicted by almost all of my brain. I don't believe in God, but even this belief is slack and apathetic. Despite these dull leanings, even the word, "identify," as in, do you identify yourself as a Jew, is too weak: Do I identify as Jewish? How could I not when my father was born to parents running for their cheap, Jewish lives? There's no ignoring the roots of a family tree clipped brutally bare to the trunk.
Even so, even with a father born into and during the Holocaust to parents haunted for the rest of their lives, Jewishness has played little part in my functional thoughts. I was unconflicted marrying Stephanie, and unconflicted again with children who don't know a Jewish God.
Coming to a country once allied with Nazi Germany only gave me a kitschy merriment, like Kent in his determination to be in Transylvania on the night of Halloween.
My relationship to history, in short, was the typical ironic stance most Americans my age bear.
It made me start to think: What happened to all the Jews?
Back in Barcs, I started thinking more about this question. But thinking is the wrong word: I started feeling more about this question.
What happened to all the Jews?
I knew about a synagogue in our town; I knew our school's forestry dorms were located in a villa that once belonged to a Jew. I knew that somewhere there was a Jewish cemetery too, and I was curious to see it. There were Jews in Barcs!
The cemetery, only one street over from my own, is walled and locked, and I'd seen it on a previous run; but I wasn't sure this was it until I peered over the locked gate and saw Hebrew engraved on every stone.
The graveyard was long and full, and the gravestones, many of them, didn't look that old; but the most recent among them dated to the 1930's, like Adolf Stern below, and the markers went back at least 100 years.
The stones were crowded, proud, demonstrative of a real and thriving community; the grass looked as though it had been tended to, and the markers were preserved as well as in any cemetery; and just on the other side of the wall lay the rest of the town dead.
There really was a Jewish community in Barcs, a good one, one that in some sense is still side by side with the rest of Barcs. Where did the Jews go?
I know what happened in 1944. It's the same thing that happened all over Europe, and the same thing that happened in my grandparents' homes and villages, the same thing that's been happening since my father started showing me pictures as a boy, the same thing I've been reading about in books, seeing in movies, hearing in stories: It's the thing that happened far away. To someone else.
But now I am seeing these graves and there are no Jews anywhere I've met, and it starts to seem like a town mystery, a great village secret: What happened to the Jews?
I told Tibor about this, and about how when I made a joke about doing a Nazi tour visiting palatial offices and death camps, how Sophie was totally ready to do it, and Tibor asked me if I had visited the Barcs castle yet, and then he told me about the Kremsier-kastély. It was owned by a very successful Jewish family, though one could see only its ruins today. Tibor told me if I travelled down a particular street, I would see the spirits factory as well as the mansion. Kremsier was the richest man in Barcs, owning the biggest mill in the country.
I had seen an image of impressive ruins on Wikipedia when I first heard about going to Barcs, but once here I'd never found them. In any event, there was no way this could be the same place, because the picture I had seen looked like a castle in ruins for centuries; but the place Tibor described was in its glory only half a century ago, until the the Kremsiers fled and left old man Kremsier to kill himself when the Germans occupied Barcs in 1944.
Here is what is left. The day I visited was Wuthering Heights. See the contrast in pictures a week later when I returned with Stephanie. You will also see in pictures the beauty and dream-like quality to a house taken over by the earth, and also signs of history, including floor tiles verifying the building's youth, and graffiti giving dark overtones to vandals. Go through the pictures, which I provide here without further comment.
There is nothing ironic or kitschy about history, when it looms empty and harrowing and broken, and its traces are everywhere about you. We are in Europe now, and the past is never so past.
Last Monday I went to find the Barcs synagogue. I heard it was a furniture store for a while, but now it too lies empty.
It turns out I'd seen this place nearly every day--half a block from my turn to the school, right there at my turn to the pool. It would be a little hard to identify were it not for the distinctive tiling of the house at its right.
Great writing. I never thought of their lives as cheap, but I suppose that's what it amounted to - to the nazis in a sense. Amused by being in a Nazi - allied country. That also was an unexpected turn... although, I suspect it's similar to feeling how distant the past is - mentality-wise around the world at least - for most people anyway. It's a trip it's all around you, so near by, this evacuated, grand jewish past. Anyway, Sophie I am not surprised wants to see all of this, given her adoration of Ann Frank. She's not afraid of being grossly disturbed at such a young age?
ReplyDeleteReading your account I think of a poem:
ReplyDelete"We have a homeland without borders, like our idea of the unknown: narrow and wide.... A homeland, when it aborts us into the unknown, it gets bigger..." (Mahmoud Darwish, "Wa Lina Biladun")
Somebody was telling me after one of those literary dinners a couple of weeks ago about the new crop of novels at a local publisher: universally, houses and women are used as the stand-ins for an entire people or an entire age. Why? We thought it was because they are at once relatively powerless and relatively stable. Things are done to them, but (said two men, drinking) they remain when the men are called away to war, or sent into exile, or murdered.
There is something about an empty, ruined house, and even more of that something about an empty, ruined house of worship. What is that something? Structures with particular human functionality, social associations, now in the act of being replaced: slowly, incrementally, after the initial blow. You sense it even in the last picture of the absent synagogue, where nothing remains at all. All the energy of the community that built it, the community that was destroyed, released suddenly into the atmosphere. But of course the energy comes from inside you, not from the world outside. It's like Plato's idea of vision, not a beam of light bouncing off the object and entering the eye, but a beam projected from the eye to the object:
"With a protean key you unlock the house in which drifts the snow of that left unspoken. Always what key you choose depends on the blood that spurts from your eye or your mouth or your ear." (Paul Celan, "Nach dem Unheil")
I like the picture of the abandoned castle in the fog. It is interesting that no one inhabits them. That must be a conscious decision by somebody, to keep them vacant.