Bieganski: The Brute Polak Stereotype in Polish-Jewish Relations and American Popular Culture 9781618110251

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BI E G A NSK I:

The Brute Polak Stereotype, Its Role in Polish-Jewish Relations and American Popular Culture 

JEWS OF POL A ND Series Editor: Antony Polonsky

BI E GA NSK I:

The Brute Polak Stereotype, Its Role in Polish-Jewish Relations and American Popular Culture

By Danusha V. Goska

BOSTON

2010

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Goska, Danusha V. (Danusha Veronica) Bieganski : the brute Polack stereotype, its role in Polish-Jewish relations and American popular culture / by Danusha V. Goska. p. cm. – ( Jews of Poland) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-936235-15-5 1. Antisemitism–Poland–History–20th century. 2. Stereotypes (Social psychology)–Poland–History–20th century. 3. Ethnicity– Poland–History–20th century 4. Jews–Poland–Public opinion–History–20th century 5. Poland–Ethnic relations–History–20th century. 6. Jews–United States–Public opinion. 7. Polish people–United States–Public opinion. 8. Stereotypes (Social psychology)– United States. 9. Popular culture–United States. 10. United States–Ethnic relations. I. Title. DS146.P6G67 2010 305.891'85–dc22 2010021775

Copyright © 2010 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-936235-15-5

Book design by Ivan Grave Published by Academic Studies Press in 2010 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

This book is for my father, Anthony Goska, my mother, Pauline (Pavlina Kerekova), my grandparents, Lena and Antony, Mary and Filip, my beloved Uncle Jan Cerno, my Aunts Jolana and Bora, the villagers around the world who have been among my best teachers and to whom I owe a debt I can never repay, and for my beautiful, brilliant, and blessed niece Amanda Cooney.

TA BL E OF CON T E N TS

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  15 Chapter One: Bieganski Lives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  43 Chapter Two: Bieganski in the Press . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  65 Chapter Three: Bieganski Takes Root in America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Chapter Four: Bieganski in American Cinema . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .125 Chapter Five: Bieganski as a Support for Jewish Identity . . . . . . . . . .148 Chapter Six: The Peasant and Middleman Minority Theory . . . . . . .170 Chapter Seven: The Necessity of Bieganski: A Shamed and Horrified World Seeks a Scapegoat . . . . .193 Chapter Eight: Interviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .216 Chapter Nine: Bieganski Lives — Next Door to Shylock . . . . . . . . . .246 Chapter Ten: Final Thoughts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283 References Cited. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .293 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335

ACK NOW L E DGE M E N TS

The people I thank here demonstrated the exceptional courage, integrity, and heart to support someone who, to employ the most politic phrasing, was not welcomed with open arms in academia; they befriended an outcast who could offer them nothing in return. Were space ample, I would devote a poem to each; a mere thank you will have to do: Lucille Bertuccio, Mark W. Braun, John Cash, Frank DeCaro, Alan Dundes, Don Freidkin, Jacky Grindrod, Thomas Gundling, Chris Jaworski, Tony Krucinski, Paul Loeb, Virginia Lumb, Benjamin Miedzyrzecki Meed, Sister Mary Montgomery, Anne Mylott, Judith Neulander, Bernard Newberger, Alvin H. Rosenfeld, Arlene Holpp Scala, Jonathan Shanoian, Moira Smith, Roman Solecki, Tomasz Tabako, Norman Wechsler, Rachel Wetzsteon, Tim Wiles, Maggie Finefrock, Laura Young, and James P. Leary. My informants gifted me with their priceless stories. During the course of our interviews, I think I fell in love with each. I cannot thank you enough. I remember the very first question I ever sent to the reference librarians at the Herman B Wells Library: did Polish peasants really sell the heads of murdered Polish nobles to Austrian colonizers? Librarians rapidly responded, not just with the affirmative, but with the price paid. They, and the reference librarians at the David and Lorraine Cheng Library, are the kind of people who uphold civilization. Thanks also to the interlibrary loan staff at both libraries. Poland is a flat, northern country. Why does it arouse such passion? Poland teaches this: even in hell, there will be heroes. The heroes I read 9

Acknowledgements

about kept me going. Just a few names in a list we can never forget nor complete: Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, Marek Edelman, Edek Galinski, Maximilian Kolbe, Janusz Korczak, Michal Landy, Adam Michnik, Irena Gut Opdyke, Eliza Orzeszkowa, Stefania Podgorska, Emanuel Ringelblum, Lech Walesa, Anna Walentynowicz, Mieczyslaw Wolski and Mala Zimetbaum. I thank the many authors who inspired and educated me by writing about Polish-Jewish relations in a way that I admired. These include Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, Norman Davies, Istvan Deak, Jan Tomasz Gross, Eva Hoffman, Gunnar S. Paulsson, Antony Polonsky, Brian Porter, Harold B. Segel, and Michael C. Steinlauf. I thank the artists, including Krystyna Janda, Marcel Lozinski, Jerzy Radziwilowicz, Tadeusz Rozewicz, Bruno Szulc, Julian Tuwim, Andrzej Wajda, and Anzia Yezierska. I'm very grateful to John Mearsheimer for being willing to have a look at this book and offer guidance and support. It was an honor and a pleasure to receive his many upbeat and encouraging e-mails. Indiana State Senator Vi Simpson's Legislative Aid Rick Gudal was the sole good man who would not allow a grad student who'd had a run in with the dark side of academia to fall through the cracks. Thanks only to Rick's intervention, I was able to get medical care, and I can walk again. God bless you, Rick Gudal. As a child, I had an experience shared by many Bohunk kids. Before dawn, still misty-eyed, or after dark, just surrendering to the Sandman, I heard my mother enter or leave the house. She often worked two fulltime jobs. Had I not learned, from her, about Bohunk hard work in the face of impossible odds, this book would not exist. I've learned from sad experience that some understand the challenges I and this book faced as a demonstration of their favorite conspiracy theory: “The Jews” control the world. Um … nope. It's true that I met resistance from some Jews; I met resistance from more non-Jews. On the other hand, among the people who encouraged me when I was a blue collar worker, who guided me in graduate school, who wrote letters of recommendation for me, who sent me key material I needed to read, who funded me, who allowed me to cry on their shoulder in late night 10

Acknowledgements

phone calls, a large percentage were Jews. Just one story: I mentioned on an internet discussion list that I was writing a dissertation on PolishJewish relations, and that I didn't have a computer. Within a few days, a new computer arrived at my house. The sender was a retired professor, a Lwow-born, Jewish-American Holocaust survivor, and a Home Army veteran. I approached Jewish scholars, journalists, and activists, with nothing to recommend me, and with an obviously Polish Catholic name. Often, those I approached exhibited no fear, but answered my every probing question with an expansiveness typical of the kind of courage and enthusiasm without which intellectual life is impossible. This is true not only of Jews who supported the thrust of this work; this is true of Jews who, I might assume, might disagree, for example Michael Lerner, Glenn Richter, and Steven Pinker. Even in brief contacts, they communicated to me that they respected my work and wanted to contribute to making it better, by sharing personal reflections, facts, and even family photos. Special thanks go to Leonard J. Baldyga, Anna M. Cienciala, Irena Szewiola, and Marion V. Winters for being wonderfully supportive, active, and proud Polish Americans. I want to especially thank Alexander and Patricia Koproski of the Koproski Family Foundation for key support when it was most needed. My mother was the most formidable human being I've ever met, and I've met Sir Edmund Hillary and Lech Walesa. She was widely admired, including by me, for her incisive intelligence, her beauty, her courage, and her unstoppable strength. She was a child immigrant; doors of opportunity were locked against girls like her. She spent her life cleaning rich people's houses. She also abused me, her youngest, the one who looked just like her. It has never been easy for me for talk about this. No one would wish a person as admirable as my mother, who had suffered so much from prejudice, any more pain than she had already endured. In 1987, during a pioneering Kosciuszko Foundation Summer Session on Polish-Jewish relations, I met Arno Lowi. While the Poles were obsessed with Poles' suffering and the Jews with Jews', Arno 11

Acknowledgements

broached the plight of Ukrainian peasants. No one offered solutions, but Arno introduced me to Jeff Beck's “People Get Ready” and Dire Straits' “Brothers in Arms.” Arno's father was a survivor of the Plaszow Concentration camp. Everyone admires and is grateful for such survivors. No one would wish a man who had suffered so much any more pain. Arno's father had abused him. In Arno I finally found someone who knew, from life experience, something of my own pain. We'd both been hurt by a noble victim. We both felt pain that it was not appropriate for us to speak. If we spoke, we risked being labeled the worst kind of traitor and ingrate. Our pain complicated heroic narratives. I was born decades after the racist panic that peasant immigrants like my mother had inspired in America; my life was seared with the pain that that panic had caused. Arno was born in the New World, years after the end of the Holocaust. As Arno put it, metaphorically speaking, when he visited Auschwitz, he realized for the first time that he had never been there. Some see Poles and Jews as diametric opposites. I experienced, with Arno, one of the most important contacts I have ever had. Had I never met him, this book never would have been written. For nineteen years, Rabbi Laurence Skopitz kept me laughing, and he kept me believing. Even while confronting his own death, he devoted time to telling me the tale of Rabbi Akiva, water, and eroding rock. Laurie had faith that like that water, my work would erode the resistance I faced. I have faith that his warm soul continues to participate in all that is good in this universe. Laurie's friend, Rabbi Michael Herzbrun, has been endlessly generous to me with his brilliance, his time, and his expert knowledge of all things Jewish. He never let one of my questions, no matter how obscure, go unanswered by the end of the day. I always felt thrilled to be in touch with such a fine mind. Mark Sost is the very best sound engineer a researcher working on Polish-Jewish relations could possibly hope for. Prof. Simon Stern of the University of Toronto immediately enthralled me with his brilliance, courage, integrity, and stunning good looks. His immense positive impact on my life is visible in anything I did right in this book. 12

Acknowledgements

Charlene Lovegrove stored my Nepali goat hair blankets when I was homeless, drove me to the store to buy the chair I sat in while writing this book, and was nice to me after I received the most thuggish of academic rejections. Decent people like Charlene make the world go round, and they deserve everyone's gratitude. Professor Maria Villar, a member of the Focolare Movement, noted a moment of struggle in the production of this work, stepped up, and, without being asked, made a significant contribution to the book you hold in your hands right now. People like Maria Villar are living proof that the bad guys' victories are always temporary and incomplete; there is goodness in this world. It has been my profound honor to be inspired, helped, taught, and encouraged by Antony Polonsky. In reading his work, I was grateful to Prof. Polonsky before I ever met him. Getting to know him over the years, I have come to feel for him the affection and respect a daughter feels for her own father. Stuart Vail, of TheScreamOnline, stuck by me through the years of paralyzing illness, the hunger, the homelessness, the academic ugliness, what came to feel like perpetual night, with no possibility of dawn. His commitment to being a supportive friend has been Bohunk-like in its stubborn insistence on soldiering on through punitive conditions. There is a special place in heaven for Stuart Vail. My friend, as we used to chant on the streets of Poland, “Zima wasza, wiosna nasza.”

I N T RODUCT ION

This work addresses Bieganski, one stereotype of Poles. Other Eastern European, Christian, peasant-based populations are conflated under this stereotype, while Poles, given the size of their population and the location of Nazi death camps in Poland, remain the primary target. Evidence that non-Poles are conflated with Poles is ample. In 1903, Dr. Allan J. McLaughlin, a public health administrator, attempted to explain all Slavic immigrants to America in terms of Poles. In 1976, scholar Michael Novak wrote that “Dumb Polak” jokes were directed against Slovak-Americans like him. “No one can tell us apart.” In 1999, on television's “The Sopranos,” an Italian-American said to a character from the Czech Republic, “Czechoslovakian? What's that? That's a type of Polak, right?”Borat, the most talked about film of 2006, conflated all Eastern European, Christian peasants into a character whose catchphrase, “Dzien dobry. Jak sie masz?” is Polish. In a 2008 London Times column, Giles Coren said that “Polack” immigrants, who “amuse themselves at Easter” by “locking Jews in the synagogue and setting fire to it,” should “clear off out of ” England. Coren cited accused war criminal Radovan Karadzic. Karadzic, as Times readers protested, was a Serb. In 2008-2009, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was accused of corruption. Though his name is obviously Serbian, Blagojevich was discussed, on various internet sites, using the following terms: “Polak politician,” “Pollock,” “THICK HEADED Polack,” “a wop in polack clothing,” “dumb Polack ass,” “a Polack who thinks he's Huey Long,” “Illinois sonofabitch Governor O'Polack,” “Polack swine,” and “Blago the POLACK.” 15

Introduction

Eastern European, peasant, Christian populations do share significant cultural, historic, political, and geological features. The word “Slav” does not cover the territory; Lithuanians, Romanians, and Hungarians are not Slavs. When speaking of Eastern European, Christian, peasants or peasantdescent populations, this author will use, sparingly, the term “Bohunk.” This American coinage derives from a combination of “Bohemian” and “Hungarian.” It is the only available term that refers to the group it designates. In the stereotype in question, Poles are brutes. They possess the qualities of animals. They are physically strong, stupid, violent, fecund, anarchic, dirty, and especially hateful in a way that more evolved human beings are not. They are thuggishly, primitively nationalistic. The special hatefulness of Bieganski is epitomized by his Polish anti-Semitism. This stereotype relies on images of Eastern Europeans that have existed for centuries (Wolff), and has been produced, significantly, by Poles themselves, Jews, Germans, and Americans. Regardless of the actual status of the stereotyper, the stereotype reflects the perspective of someone relatively empowered, literate, urban, mobile, and mercantile observing relatively disempowered, oral, rural, poor, Eastern European Christian peasants. This stereotype relies for its power on a modern person's disgust and contempt for actual or imaginary qualities associated with peasantry: dirt, primitive dwellings, contact with animal dung, odiferousness, rootedness, powerlessness, sexual savagery, coarse social manners, and a lack of formal education or contact with the wider world and a concomitant lack of sophistication. Members of all social classes might display these qualities. In Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Golem, Count Bratislawski, though a nobleman, is a thug. He screams, spits in a man's face, and resorts to violence. Bieganski is related to an American stereotype of rural and working class WASPs, variously identified as trailer trash, rednecks, white trash or hillbillies. Former WASP farm boy Edwin Markham's 1899 poem “The Man with a Hoe” economically conveys the terror and disgust that rural laborers arouse in their betters. Markham refers to the peasant depicted in Jean Francois Millet's controversial 1862 painting “The Man with 16

Introduction

a Hoe” as “stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox … a monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched … this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world.” There has been some conflation of the white trash and Bieganski stereotypes. Oklahoma-born poet Lloyd Van Brunt referred to all of America's poor whites as the “the Polish-joke class.” The films “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Monster's Ball” made their thuggish, working class, Southern characters Poles, though in reality there are relatively few Poles in the American South; most white Southern working people are WASPs. In 2008, during a closed fundraising event on Millionaire's Row in San Francisco, presidential candidate Barack Obama made comments widely interpreted to mean that Pennsylvania's and the Midwest's rural and working class whites are particularly religious, unintelligent, racist, and dangerous. One blogger paraphrased Obama's comment as directed against: “Corncob-Smokin', Banjo-Strokin', Chicken-Chokin', CousinPokin', Inbred, Hillbilly, Racist, Morons” (Ace). This list of attributes corresponds with the white trash, WASP stereotype. A frequently-cited essay understood Obama's comments as directed against Bohunks, a large percentage of Pennsylvania's and the Midwest's working class: “You're talking about white people who have neither the family connections nor the racial credentials to gain entrance to the world that you inhabit. Many of the people you're talking about are those whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe who came to these places to work in steel mills, coal mines, and factories” (Grabar). “Bieganski” is the name of an anti-Semitic Polish character in American novelist William Styron's critically and popularly successful 1979 novel Sophie's Choice. The term is used here as one would use “Sambo” or “Shylock.” Using the name of a grotesquely stereotyped fictional character helps to communicate that these are not images of real people, or even snapshots of representatives of real peoples, but, rather, the distorted brainchildren of their creators. Stereotypes of Poles and Jews interdigitate; their qualities are complementary opposites. Where Bieganski is poor, stupid and physically expressive, moneyed Shylock is excessively intelligent and inadequate in his meager physicality. 17

Introduction

Bieganski is responsible for anti-Semitism; his vanquishing is a boon to humanity. Influential American comedian Lenny Bruce (19251966) anachronistically defined anti-Semitism as “two thousand years of Polack kids whacking the shit out of us coming home from school” ( John Cohen 30). Bruce imagined a world where all ethnicities could unite in brotherhood. Multicultural humanity would then turn on the real enemy: Poles. “It won't matter, it won't matter any more even if you are colored and I'm Jewish, and even if Fritz is Japanese, and Wong is Greek, because then…we're all gonna stick together — and beat up the Polacks!” (Bruce). Bieganski's peasant status explains his anti-Semitism. Bob, 59, an informant for this work, reported that “What I know [about Poland] is a history of anti-Semitism. I've read a fair amount about the Holocaust. The Painted Bird seemed to me to be about a very primitive folklife in Eastern Europe. I kind of used it as a way of understanding how people could be the way they were.” Jerzy Kosinski's 1965 The Painted Bird was initially presented as a Holocaust memoir of bestial, violent, sexually perverse peasants tormenting a Jewish child. It was later revealed that the book was fiction. In the racist expression of the Bieganski stereotype, no narrative arch is possible. When a Pole exhibits what appears to be positive or neutral attitudes or behaviors toward Jews, that must be understood as a temporary failure of his anti-Semitic essence fully to express itself. In 1997, Eva Hoffman, a Polish-born daughter of Holocaust survivors, wrote a “daring and generous” book (Lipton), Shtetl, that rejected stereotypes of Poles. Thomas Laqueur, Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor of History at U. C. Berkeley, not a historian of Polish-Jewish history but rather of masturbation, disparaged Hoffman's conciliatory work. Hoffman insisted that Polish anti-Semitism must be understood in the context of a complex history that included significant philoSemitism. Laqueur was contemptuous. “Anti-semitism is not like a limp that affects every step. Even the most rabid anti-semites have moments of weakness … one cannot count on them” (Laqueur). Hoffman rejected Laqueur's essentializing — and corrected his historical errors (Hoffman letter). 18

Introduction

In the evolutionary expression of the Bieganski stereotype, the worldview of universal human progress is applied. In this treatment, Bieganski is “medieval.” He must “evolve” into a “modern” form. Universal human progress is the conviction that an unseen hand inexorably improves the world. It is associated with Auguste Comte, who theorized that humanity moved through three phases of progress with religion at the bottom and science at the top; with Karl Marx, who taught that history would inevitably create the worker's paradise; with Charles Darwin and evolution; and with E. B. Tylor, “The Father of Anthropology,” who placed human beings on an evolutionary ladder, with religious peasants near the bottom, and who argued that all humans were evolving along the same unilineal ladder that would, eventually, mean their reaching the pinnacle of being something like himself, the fully evolved human, a secular, scientific, Victorian gentleman. As Bieganski has greater contact with the modern world, and evolves beyond his primitive, medieval identity, including his peasant status and his faith, he will abandon his anti-Semitism. Examples of this understanding are legion. In a recent scholarly book, Joanna Michlic diagnoses a “backward looking, traditional, conservative, and ‘folkish’ type of religiosity” as having “retarded the development of Polish society” and prescribes a “forward-looking” “modern” approach typical of “Western liberal democracy” as antidote (268; 278-280). A Princeton University Press book depicts Eastern Europeans as mired in “myth,” tending to “hearken back to old doctrines and visions,” impatient with the “rational,” and in need of Western, liberal “truth” (Powers 1080). As a reviewer of this “dark and unsettling” book put it, “Tismaneanu concludes that some Eastern European countries will evolve into some version of liberal democracy, while others may not” (Green emphasis added). Alina Cala reports that in a search for the roots of anti-Semitism, “In Polish folk culture the trail leads to Catholicism in its specific, plebian form” (17). In 2009, British actor Stephen Fry said, “there's been a history of rightwing Catholicism which has been deeply disturbing for those of us who know a little history and remember which side of the border Auschwitz was on.” Historian Timothy Garton-Ash cited Fry because “the automatic equation of Poland with Catholicism, nationalism and antisemitism — 19

Introduction

and thence a slide to guilt by association with the Holocaust — is widespread” (Garton-Ash). Communism was on its deathbed, but still breathing, in 1989, when Walter Isaacson wrote in Time magazine that “there are no signs so far that Poland or Hungary will evolve toward a Western-style, genteel” political model (Isaacson emphasis added). In a review of Jan Tomasz Gross' Fear, Ira Rifkin, writing in Baltimore's Jewish Times weekly, approvingly quoted Gross' formulation of Poles as afflicted with a “‘medieval prejudice’ born of vile Christian fantasies about Jews.” Dennis L. Harris, self-identified as an “Aware Jew,” wrote in an Amazon review of Fear, While today, [Poland's] younger generation is seemingly tolerant of jews and readily embrace the cultural trappings of Judaism, i.e the Klezmer festival held each year in Krakow and the ‘jewish’ style restaurants, stores etc. run by non-jews, one gets the feeling that not far below the surface could be a very strong return to anti-semitism and the accompaning violence. This book should be read by anyone who thinks that the Holacaust could never, ever happen again. Once one travels away from the major cities, local life has remaines much as it was 50, 60, 70 years ago. (Harris)

In Harris’ view, the location of peasant villages in the past indicates that they are likely sites of anti-Semitism, which, in this worldview, is of the past. Descriptions of Poland as “medieval” are not limited to postHolocaust discourse. In the 1930s, organized American Jews petitioned the American government to intervene in Poland, which, they said, exhibited “the barbarism of the Middle Ages.” The Federation of Polish Jews in America used “medieval” in a discussion of Polish-Jewish relations (Kapiszewski 160, 220). The reflective reader will recognize several things wrong with the model that locates anti-Semitism in the past and that associates passing time and exposure to, or imitation of, the West with inevitable improvement. The medieval, 1264 Statute of Kalisz, issued by Polish Duke Boleslaus the Pious, encoding Jewish rights, showed “an awareness of the vulnerabilities and the needs felt by a small subject group which is sophisticated even by 20

Introduction

contemporary standards.” Eva Hoffman described it as “a set of laws that could serve as an exemplary statement of minority rights today” (Hoffman Shtetl 30-1). In 1414, the Catholic Pole Pawel Wlodkowic argued for the rights of Pagan tribes in Christian lands. The 1573 Warsaw Confederation declared religious freedom. Poland was not a significant site of blood libels during the Middle Ages. Blood libel trials reached Poland from the West and increased during, and decreased after, the Enlightenment (Tazbir 236, 239). Nazism first took root, not in a Polish peasant village, but in Germany's Weimar Republic, a Western, liberal, modern democracy. Nazism was facilitated by modern technology, from the pesticide Zyklon B to IBM's punch card system. Clearly, the evolutionary model is inadequate to describe, or to provide solutions for, the problem at hand. Discussion of the Bieganski stereotype will raise alarms. In 2001, Jan Tomasz Gross published Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland; in 2006, he published Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz. Gross' works gained new attention for shocking crimes committed by Poles against Jews during the World-War-Two era. This author concurs with Agnieszka Magdziak-Miszewska, Polish journalist and diplomat. “Neighbors is a book which had to be written … If I want to have a moral right to justified pride in [Polish] rescuers, then I must admit to a sense of shame over [Polish] killers.” Magdziak-Miszewska goes on to state, “It is all too human to seek justification and symmetry for our own guilt.” This work is not an attempt to create the impression of a symmetry of suffering, or an attempt to justify Polish crimes. Poles, as a group, suffered horribly during World War Two; Jews, as a group, suffered worse. There is no symmetry. There is no justification. This work stands in accord with the statement by the late Polish leader, Jan Nowak-Jezioranski, who wrote of Polish crimes, nothing can justify the killing of people by stoning, by butchering with knives, the decapitations, the stabbing with sharpened stakes, the wholesale murder of women and men, of the old and the young, driven to the Jewish cemetery, the burying alive of still breathing victims, the drowning of women with their children in the pond, and at the end the 21

Introduction

driving of the remaining victims to the barn and burning them alive. (Nowak-Jezioranski)

The two phenomena — Polish guilt for Polish crimes, and stereotyping of Poles — are both real. The reality of one does not negate the reality of the other. “Why must we use the word ‘stereotype’?” a reader might ask. “Are we not discussing objective reality? Aren't Jews — disproportionately represented among doctors, lawyers, financiers and Nobel Prize winners — simply smarter? Aren't Poles, once peasants in their own country and often manual laborers in America, simply stupider? Poles did victimize Jews! Talk of stereotyping is a ruse to avoid responsibility!” As terrifically convincing as such othering — the process of declaring, “we are quality x, they are quality not-x” — is — folkloric research exposes it as a fallacy. John Lindow has shown that Scandinavians lived in an ethnically homogenous environment. Like Poles and Jews, Scandinavians were convinced that their ethnicity was best defined through contrast with a neighboring people who were the exact opposite of Scandinavians. While Scandinavians were clean, sexually well ordered, and hard working, their neighbors, their ethnic other of choice, were dirty, sexually profligate, and lazy. Who were these neighboring people? Trolls, and other supernatural beings, who were understood to be quite real. “Supernatural beings enjoyed an empirical existence and were probably ... more real to many people than, say ... the King of England ... What mattered, apparently, was the primary distinction between one's own group and everything outside of that group” (21). Bieganski is as real as a troll. Lauren, a Jewish-American graduate student in her twenties, and an informant for this work, showed an awareness of the importance of images over reality. Jews do seem to consider themselves smarter than gentiles, both in the “intellectual” sense and in basic common sense. A “goyisha kup” (“gentile head”) implies that someone is not too smart ... I would have characterized Poles as big, beefy people, not overly educated ... my image of Poles throughout my life could be characterized as an urban version of 22

Introduction

well-to-do peasants (always working class, very blue-collar), but my actual experience of Poles from Poland as a college instructor showed them to be quite sophisticated and highly educated.

There is a group of people who, significantly, consider Poles as “backward outsiders,” undesirable and unimportant. Members of this group, in significant numbers, consider Poles to have victimized them during and after World War Two, and demand that Poles confess, apologize, and make amends for this mistreatment before closer relationships can be established. Members of this group look with disapproval on Poles' religiosity because “Catholicism is an obstacle to modernization.” Members of this group condemn Poles as being disrespectful of minorities. The group in question? Germans (Falkowski). The nation that colonized Poland for over a hundred years, and then all but destroyed Poland during World War Two, is a significant source of the Bieganski stereotype. Stereotypes do not scrupulously follow the laws of logic. It might be helpful to discuss the goal of this document in terms of one of the most world famous incidences of stereotyping, that of African Americans. One thinks of the 1995 O. J. Simpson verdict. Most white Americans concluded that Simpson was guilty of murdering his wife, and most feared that Simpson would “play the race card” and exploit an image of himself, an African American, as a victim of white supremacy to avoid facing consequences for his crimes. That a member of a race that has been stereotyped can, at the same time that he is a victim, also be a victimizer, was aptly summed up in a phrase many used to express their dismay over the handling of the O. J. case: the L. A. police “framed a guilty man” (PBS Frontline O.J.). Statistics show that African Americans commit more violent crimes than white Americans. Some choose to interpret that statistic as indicative of a violent African American racial essence. That understanding is incorrect, and makes the problem at hand — high crime rates among African Americans — worse rather than better. Quantifiable differences between ethnic groups aren't best attributed to any fixed or exclusive 23

Introduction

national character. Rather, these differences are the differences between expressions of universally human behaviors as fashioned by changing and changeable human choices that, in turn, are fashioned by circumstance. The most illuminating approach understands high African American crime rates in the context of a history of exploitation. Any group that was similarly exploited might produce an unusually high crime rate. This approach echoes the proverb, “Walk a mile in my shoes,” and asks, “What might I do in similar circumstances?” In this understanding, addressing exploitation, not inventing a posited flawed racial essence, is one key to addressing the problem. The solution to black crime is not to state, “African Americans were slaves a century and a half ago; therefore, nothing can be done about current crime statistics.” Pathological responses to victimization are often imbedded in culture. Songs, costumes, language and rituals arise that celebrate anti-social behavior. Culture becomes a circumstance that abets a given behavior. Those hoping to lessen black crime rates must not focus exclusively on past exploitation, but also on present cultural prods to anti-social behavior. At the same time, black criminality must be understood as a particular expression of a universal human tendency that, while, as statistics indicate, is expressed differently in non-black populations, is, nonetheless, expressed. While blacks do commit more violent crime than whites, powerful white men have also committed “white collar” crimes. The impetus to behave in an anti-social manner is not limited to any given population. The stereotyping of Poles is analogous to the stereotyping of African Americans in this respect: yes, Poles have done very bad things. The focus of this document is Bieganski — the understanding of evil acts by Poles in terms of a stereotype, a stereotype that insists that Polish crimes are expressions of a debased Polish racial or cultural essence. This work's acknowledgement that there is a stereotype of Poles is not part of any effort to deny Polish culpability. At the same time that this work suggests that the reader “walk a mile in the Poles' shoes,” and consider, for example, the devastating impact of one circumstance — the Nazi and Soviet invasions — this work also insists that Poles 24

Introduction

must work to extirpate another circumstance — pathological antiSemitism that has become imbedded in Polish culture, in, for example, the blood libel. Having rejected the Bieganski model, one must identify other understandings of Polish-Jewish relations. One scholarly attempt to understand Polish behavior in the light of Polish circumstances is Edna Bonacich's work on middleman minorities. Similar economic models have been developed and elaborated, apparently independently, by Davies, Hertz, Shahak, Zienkowska, and Zuk. Most recently, Amy Chua's work on market dominant minorities has echoed all. This author's acceptance of the middleman minority theory has this impact on this work: focus on the economic features that are often airbrushed out of discussions of outbreaks of anti-Semitism among Poles. This work is also inspired by George Lakoff. In 1987, Lakoff, a professor of cognitive linguistics at U. C. Berkeley, published Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Lakoff challenged the classical view that the mind is merely a computer that places objects in categories based on necessary and sufficient qualities. Lakoff was influenced by Eleanor Rosch, a U. C. Berkeley professor of psychology. She had discovered that, if asked to give an example of “bird,” most Americans might say, “robin,” rather than “penguin,” although both are birds. When asked for an example of fruit, most might say “apple,” rather than “pumpkin,” although both are fruit. When thinking about a given category, people focus on properties they associate with concrete, prototypical representatives of that category, rather than focusing on necessary and sufficient abstract qualities all members of a category share. When forming categories, people focus on examples that highlight differences between the prototypical example and surrounding categories. People choose a sweet fruit as a prototypical example of fruit because a sweet fruit differentiates fruit with greater contrast from vegetables than a non-sweet fruit like pumpkins or tomatoes. Prototype effects, or errors, result when one quality of a member of a group — that birds lay eggs, for example — is taken as necessary and sufficient to classify an item in the group — egg-laying reptiles are not birds. 25

Introduction

Lakoff popularized Rosch's ideas. One reviewer, Owen Flanagan, compared Lakoff to French philosopher Michel Foucault (19261984). Foucault had coined the term “heterotopia.” Flanagan defined a “heterotopia” as “a place where incongruous elements come together, where our scheme of classification can no longer track reality, and where our common names lose their trusted powers.” “We all exist in heterotopias,” wrote Flanagan, “at least as perceived by outsiders ... what seems like a neat, clear, rational, and world-guided conceptual scheme from the inside may hardly seem so from the outside” (Flanagan 344). To support his assertion that we all live in heterotopias as perceived by others who do not categorize as we do, Flanagan offered the title of Lakoff 's book. In the classification system central to the Dyirbal people of Australia, women, fire, and dangerous things are inseparably connected. Outsiders do not see the connection. Lakoff argued that humans classify according to “idealized cognitive models” that provide “organizing principles that affect our categorization of objects and give rise to prototypicality judgments.” One type of idealized cognitive model, the metonymic model, can be defined as a model that is used when one part of a category stands in for the whole. Value judgments result. Given that the word “mother” is associated with the metonymic model of “housewife,” a working mother may be judged as a lesser mother (Gibbs 272). Lakoff insisted that knowledge is embodied. An understanding of the body that processes any given bit of knowledge is central to an understanding of that knowledge. To understand stereotypes of Poles as Bieganski, one must factor in not just data about Poles, but also data about the “embodiment,” in Lakoff 's terms, of the person reporting the stereotype. Stereotyping occurs when insupportable conclusions are drawn from demonstrable facts. These conclusions come from a limited perspective. To the Polish peasant who saw Jews only as tavern keepers or estate managers who lured Poles into excessive drink and then pressured ruined, drunken peasants to pay very high tavern tabs, or pressured desperate serfs to work to fill grain quotas, the Jew is a greedy drug-pushing slave-driver, no more, no less. To the Jew whose most memorable encounter with 26

Introduction

a Polish peasant was the Pole who drank to excess and toiled like a mule in the fields, the Pole is a bestial drunk. The Pole did not factor into his assessment the tender Jewish parent, or the intimidated Jew pressured by the Polish magnate to wring the peasants for all they were worth. The Jew did not see the exuberance, generosity, and creativity that the peasant displayed with his peers. Another problem arises when the value system — one kind of perspective — of one lifestyle is applied to another. To a doctor, a lawyer, or a journalist, a peasant can never be intelligent — in the way that a doctor, a lawyer, or a journalist is. The urban, formally educated observer who applies his own set of values to an illiterate peasant will conclude that the peasant is stupid. Any comparable application of the peasant's store of knowledge to the urbanite renders the urbanite stupid. Tekla Hanczarek, a Pole taken to Germany for slave labor during World War Two, understood that the elite's measures of intelligence are not the only measures. Of her, poet John Guzlowski wrote: She learned that if you are stupid with your hands you will not survive the winter even if you survive the fall. (Guzlowski 11)

Peasants turn dirt into food. They turn fragile flowers, flax, and weeds, hemp, into suits of clothes. They survive humiliation, exploitation, and the genocidal impulses of invaders from the Tatars to the Nazis. Oral, as opposed to literate peoples pass on, from memory, sustaining myths. Peasants devise strategies that ensure their survival under consistently harsh conditions. One of those strategies is the feigning of stupidity. Tekla told her son how she survived slave labor under the Germans. She says sometimes she pretended she was deaf, stupid, crippled, or diseased with typhus or cholera, even with what the children called the French disease, anything to avoid the slap, the whip across her back the leather fist in her face above her eye. (Guzlowski 70) 27

Introduction

Similarly, in Polish stereotypes, Jews lack strength and patriotism, and do not or cannot fight for Poland. Poland never had a more valuable soldier, eager to fight for her freedom and her good name, than Frederic Chopin (1810-1849). His work was supported, at a key moment in his career, by the Jewish banking family, the Rothschilds. Leopold Kronenberg (1812-1878), of Jewish ancestry, “provided substantial funding for the 1863 Uprising” (Wiez 343). The New York Times has a history of significant Jewish ownership and production. The Times' exhaustive and sympathetic Solidarity coverage won Times' reporter John Darnton a Pulitzer Prize; it and coverage like it helped to deconstruct the “Dumb Polak” image in American eyes, and turn Polish workers into the heroes Americans were willing materially and politically to support. When asked, “Who should get the credit?” for bringing down communism, Lech Walesa said, “The journalists, especially the Western ones. If they hadn't publicized our struggle all over the world, we wouldn't have had a chance” (Walesa). Poles, as well as non-Poles, often define a Pole as either a stupid person, a negative quality, or as a person who does not bother with the silliness of academic pursuits, a positive evaluation of the same quality. Ewa Morawska described Eastern European peasants assessing themselves as constitutionally “stupid,” unsuited to formal education, and incompetent with money (Morawska Bread). On the other hand, “Polish aristocratic circles resented Fryderyk Skarbek for ‘lowering himself ’ to be a professor ... Stanislaw Tarnowski's scholarly career was viewed simply as the whim of a great lord” (Hertz 105). And this was the treatment for noble intellectuals. Most Poles were peasants. “Intellectuals of common origin met with unfriendly treatment, mockery, and mistrust” (Hertz 116). Poles who assessed Poles as inept with money might also assess skill with money as a negative quality. In Poland, “economic activity was considered base and contemptible” (Hertz 201). Poles might attribute to Poles qualities of simplicity. When Poles did this, they were evaluating that quality positively. Polish simplicity made Poles an open-hearted, welcoming people whose lack of self interest made their territory a haven for oppressed minorities elsewhere (Golczewski 92). 28

Introduction

Polish peasants, as well as others, might assess Poles as physically large. Peasants might give this assessment a positive valuation. In his memoir, former serf Jan Slomka wrote, Some men, some women, too, were known for their huge build of body — of the kind one rarely meets today. With this often went extraordinary strength ... Such a fellow ... carried neither a club nor a knife ... it was enough for him to shake his fist at anyone. Such folk were ordinarily the best of mortals, and mighty good friends. (Slomka 126-7)

Jewish assessments of Poles as workers, peasants, or even as simpler creatures did not always carry a negative valuation. Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote with fondness of simple Polish females whom he depicted as being capable of a generous, selfless love in a way that his Jewish characters are not. Anna Maria Orla Bukowska reported a Catholic woman's pre-World-War-Two reminiscences of embroidering for Jews. The woman embroidered a tablecloth and six napkins. Josef Syskind, the father of the Jewish household for whom the Polish girl worked, commented that no matter how much the Polish girl were paid, “it will always be too little, because she has left her eyes there. She had to sew a lot in order to embroider it like that” (98). Lauren revealed a similar appreciation of Poles, though she admitted that her image of Poles was of “urban peasants ... not well educated.” By the time I was in high school ... the Solidarity movement had taken off in Poland and Poles were accorded a kind of respect. The image was that of a working class man (salt of the earth) putting everything on the line in order to fight the Evil Communist Empire. There was a certain glamour to it. It's easy to be a revolutionary when you are young and a university student; that's romantic. But being a revolutionary when you are a working husband and the father of children; that's serious commitment.

Pulitzer-prize winning, Jewish-American journalist Meg Greenfield was described by her literary executor, the presidential historian Michael Beschloss, as “one of the most powerful women in Washington and one of the most powerful women in American journalism ... she was almost 29

Introduction

the embodiment of the Eastern establishment.” After she died Beschloss revealed “how much of a daily struggle” it had been for her to cope with that identity. “Every morning she looked in the mirror and said, ‘Have I become one of them yet?’” The “them” Greenfield dreaded becoming were “a city full of successful people all pitted against one another ... everyone wanting to be popular ... everyone wanting to sort of get ahead of everyone else.” Worldly power and ambition meant “you have to live such a controlled life ... the guy you once knew and liked suddenly when you talked to him in the grocery store he talks to you as if he's orating at the United Nations.” Whom did Greenfield figure as the opposite of, the antidote to, this life? Whom, in her tired moments, did she, who had so much, wish she could be? “At the end of her life,” Beschloss reported, “she wondered if she should have done this a little differently. ... ‘I began to admire [super Polak] Stanley Kowalski,’” she told Beschloss. “You know, that character in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire.’ And I thought, here's this woman who is so known for being so official and controlled, reasoned, deliberate, saying maybe she thought that the guy who acted out of his passions had something after all” (PBS NewsHour). “Pole, Poland, Polish Culture = anti-Semite = anti-Semitism” is a prototype for many persons. It is a part of their folk worldview. It is not, in the language of the computer model metaphor, objective reality processed by a neutral computer that merely reflects, without adding to, subtracting from, or altering, the reality fed into it. This folk classification system leads to prototypicality judgments. For example, “Poland” is shorthand for “anti-Semitism” in international journalism. It is the gold standard against which all other anti-Semitisms are measured. Recent years have seen a booming anti-Semitic industry in Japan (Burress, Goodman, Haberman, Helm and Weisman). Ironically, even the most blatant anti-Semitic material, publications that could never receive mainstream acceptance in Poland as they do in Japan, are understood in comparison to Poland. Writing in the New York Times, author Michael Shapiro assured his readers that Japan's anti-Semitism was not too much of a worry because there was no comparison between it and the “Polish” sort of anti-Semitism. In 1996, Northwestern University Professor 30

Introduction

Lawrence Lipking was discussing anti-Semitism in England. “Some places are undoubtedly worse,” Lipking wrote. “England never went in for pogroms.” “Pogrom” is a Russian word often associated with Poland. Lipking is not alone in his confidence that England exhibits a more benign anti-Semitism than Eastern Europe. Again and again in academic and journalistic accounts of anti-Semitism, one encounters variations on the following formula: “At least the anti-Semitism of group X was not as bad as the anti-Semitism of the Poles.” In fact, though, the anti-Semitism in England is not milder than that found in Poland. Lipking could not see the English origin, in Chaucer (blood libel), Dickens (Fagin), and Shakespeare (Shylock) of anti-Semitic images, the tragic record of English anti-Semitism's impact during World War Two, British pogroms from the twelfth century to the twentieth, because the English are not Eastern Europeans, are not Lipking's prototype of anti-Semites. After subtracting prototypicality judgments like Lipking's one is left, not with the category of “Pole = anti-Semite,” rather, one is left with the category “anti-Semite.” That category, “Anti-Semite,” can exist — and be lethal — in England or Japan fully as well as in Poland. Prototypicality judgments render one blind, mute, and morally and strategically hamstrung when confronted with persons like Jan Karski or Irena Sendler who possessed all the qualities meant to signal the identity of an anti-Semite — Polish ethnicity, Catholicism, and nationalism — but who endured torture and risked their lives to save Jews. More extreme in the challenge she offers the mind's category-making capacity is Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, a Polish Catholic nationalist and a self-identified antiSemite. She co-founded Zegota, the only government-sponsored group in occupied Europe whose raison d'etre was rescuing Jews. Kossak-Szczucka published, in Nazi-occupied Poland, where such publication was a capital offense, clarion calls to save Jews. She was a Righteous Gentile — Jews owe their lives to her — and an Auschwitz prisoner. Jan Mosdorf was a Polish nationalist and an avowed, politically active anti-Semite. In Auschwitz, Mosdorf, before being killed by Germans, risked his life to help Jews. These personages and others like them challenge the category-making capacity of the human mind. 31

Introduction

In autumn 2007, Richard Dawkins said that Jews “monopolize American foreign policy” (MacAskill). The statement is a trope of classic anti-Semitism. Dawkins held the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford. He is the author of the bestselling atheist tract, The God Delusion. A Lexis search made two years later found no mainstream press articles devoted to remonstrating with Dawkins' 2007 statement. Those weblogs that took Dawkins to task were notable for the number of posts that agreed with him (Pollard). Stereotypes — prototypicality judgments — play a role here. Had a Polish cleric of similar international stature stated that Jews “monopolize American foreign policy,” there would have been an uproar. Though Nazis repeatedly cited then current understandings of science and evolution as the justification for their genocide (Weikart), that a famed Darwin scholar made an anti-Semitic statement raised few hackles. In the logic of stereotyping, Dawkins, a leading scientist, an atheist activist, and an upper class Englishman, is the opposite number of the prototype anti-Semite — a Polish Catholic peasant. Dawkins' anti-Semitism is rendered invisible. Deployments of the Bieganski stereotype blame Polish peasants, not for the real crime of anti-Semitism, which they exhibit to the same degree that other ethnicities under similar conditions exhibit, but, rather, for the crime of being peasants. Anti-Polonist accounts of anti-Semitic crimes committed by Poles focus, not on the modular, international trait of anti-Semitism, but on the specifics of Polish peasant culture. A typical account, part of a flood of articles about Gross' Neighbors, lingered, sensationally, over details: Polish peasants “stabbed [ Jewish victims] with the full arsenal of sharp-nosed tools available to farmers … children were battered with wooden staves” (Boyes). It is a safe bet that neither the author of that quote, nor the London Times newspaper that ran it, has ever produced an article focusing on Polish peasants who used their distinctively Polish and peasant tools and skills, and acted on their Polish peasant worldview, to rescue Jews. Such stories are legion. As one Polish peasant rescuer of Jews reported, 32

Introduction

In the barn, we boarded up the mow and covered it with lupine. We left one board loose so that we could get food to them. In the spring, when the lupine had to be threshed, we found a trench for the Feldmans ... [Later] we made two dugouts for them in the forest near us. We worked at night. It was worst in the winter, when we had to take food to them and then cover up our tracks. (Fundacja 116)

Since Polish ethnicity is, alone, enough to signify anti-Semitism, when Poles do commit anti-Semitic acts, such as the massacre at Jedwabne, no analysis beyond identifying the ethnic identity of the perpetrators is necessary. In fact, any further analysis is all but forbidden and condemned as “polemics” and an attempt to “justify” atrocity. Conversely, when persons not of Polish ethnicity commit anti-Semitic acts, explanations are more than possible — they are necessary. Compare the many articles that appeared after the publication of Gross' books with the many articles that appeared after the publication of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. In the case of Goldhagen, reviewers struggled to cite extreme historical circumstances that played a role in the rise of Nazi Germany, and that conspired to situate otherwise civilized Germans in the commission of evil. In the case of Gross, reviewers insisted that there was no explanation for the horrible behavior of Poles — “Here there is no why,” one reviewer asserted — except for Polish culture and the Poles themselves, virtually all of whom are “so brutish …as to have excluded themselves from civilization itself ” (Mellen). Given that the observer's disgust is focused on Polish ethnicity rather than exclusively on anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism practiced by persons who are not Poles is often rendered the comprehensible result of overwhelming historical forces that would act on the observer in the same way as they acted on the anti-Semites; in some cases it is rendered completely invisible. This approach is related to the cultural relativism advanced by superstar scholar Franz Boas in the early part of the twentieth century. An example of this approach: students of history are often exhorted to reflect that had they been in the anti-Semites' historical shoes, they might have done the same (bad) things. Just one of many examples 33

Introduction

of this: a September, 2007 “Yahoo Answers” questioner asked, “If you had lived in Nazi Germany, would you have ‘supported the troops’?” The wording of the question, alluding to the American slogan, “Support the troops,” implied a relationship between Nazi Germany and contemporary America, where American soldiers were fighting an unpopular war in Iraq; this wording alone indicated that the questioner saw some equivalence between “us” — Americans — and “them” — Germans in Nazi Germany. Respondents thoughtfully weighed the pressures on Germans; some admitted that they would have supported Germany's Nazi troops. Recent films have included appealing Nazi characters. There was the suave, handsome Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) in the groundbreaking, multiple Academy-Award winning, 1993 Schindler's List. The prestigious television series, Masterpiece Theater, featured sexy and aristocratic Baron von Rheingarten (Philip Glenister), in the 2004 miniseries, “Island at War.” On the PBS website, viewers learn that “Von Rheingarten is … no pushover. He will not be made to look a fool and isn't afraid of making tough decisions, but he understands the frailties of human nature. He is also husband and a lover, away from home and in need of human companionship” (PBS Island). In 2006, The Good German featured Emil Brandt, a noble, handsome, SS man. Authentic Holocaust biographies might feature Jews in hiding. In 2006, it is the “Good German” who must hide; he cowers in a sewer and yearns to take a walk and breathe fresh air. His Jewish wife walks free and smuggles food to him. Brandt must hide because the dastardly Americans want to cover-up atrocities at a Nazi concentration camp. Brandt's wife asks him, “People are thinking of themselves. Why shouldn't you?” Because, Brandt replies, “The world must know the truth. What really happened.” Handsome German star Sebastian Koch played Ludwig Muntze, the Nazi lead in Paul Verhoeven's 2006 Black Book (Zwartboek). In addition to knowingly taking a Jewish lover, Muntze was so appealing that fans at the International Movie Database debated whether he was “too nice.” Typical posts: “i think captain muntzen is really hot and i'd fall for him immediately” “Yes, he is a hot 40-something man, no wonder Carice van Houten fell for him instantly. I would too.” “A soldier doing his job in a time of war. 34

Introduction

A pragmatist? A realist? He is VERY likeable.” “yeah, he's too hot, and i've fallen 4 him... wow, he really loves her and accepts he as she is. wow...!!!!!! we can't find a kind of man like him, today, yeah.” “Well, a lot of people have a very black and white view on World War Two, so the idea of a Nazi officer being sympathetic seems impossible. But it really wasn't that simple. I'm not even sure they all knew about the Holocaust” (imdb. com Zwartboek). The 2008 film Valkyrie featured box office champ Tom Cruise as the heroic Claus von Stauffenberg, who was awarded the Iron Cross for his contribution to the Nazi war effort. In 2008 Kate Winslet won the Academy Award and Golden Globe for her erotic, poignant portrayal of an SS guard who participated in the burning to death of three hundred Jewish concentration camp inmates. Winslet's scenes included full frontal nudity, graphic, tender lovemaking, and inspirational depictions of the SS guard overcoming illiteracy and teaching herself to read. The Reader was nominated for the best picture Academy Award. Christoph Waltz, as charismatic Nazi Hans Landa in 2009's “Inglourious Basterds,” inspired moist yearning. Fans gave themselves screen names including “MlleWaltz” and “AhhhhhhhhLanda.” One, who self-identified as Jewish, wrote, “I work at a movie theatre … I can go inside the theatres in hopes of catching him onscreen. If he doesn't appear, I move on, disappointed. But if he IS on, I stay in there far longer than I really should. I must have watched the strudel scene twenty times, the Italian scene 15 times, and the ending … around fifty … By the time I emerge from the theatre, I'm as giddy as a schoolgirl and singing Judy Garland specifically, Dear Mr. Gable” (imdb. com Christoph Waltz). If humans applied the classical method of categorization, in which necessary and sufficient qualities render all items in a category equal — in which any one anti-Semite were as repugnant as any other anti-Semite, and anti-Semitism alone, not ethnicity, religion, or social class, determined inclusion in the category — there would be no difference between the level of revulsion observers feel for one antiSemite, of one ethnicity or social class, and another. That we do not apply that system is demonstrated by popular culture. Anyone who wagers that a top box office star like Liam Neeson, George Clooney or Tom Cruise 35

Introduction

would appear in a film focused on a sexy, appealing, heroic Polish peasant would certainly lose his bet. Rather, in the Bieganski worldview, and other racist worldviews like it, anti-Semitism belongs to Poles and Poland. Similarly, greed, sexual ineptitude and intelligence are not universally human characteristics. Rather, in this racist view, they are either the exclusive property of Jews, or are qualities that can only achieve their pinnacle when expressed by Jews. In this racist view, further, dirt, lust, violence, and drunkenness are not universal human potentialities. Rather, in this racist view, dirt, lust, violence and drunkenness are either the exclusive property of Poles, or reach their Platonic ideal form only when expressed by Poles. The intelligence expressed by non-Jews is somehow a vitiated form of intelligence; the violence and stupidity expressed by non-Poles are lesser forms of violence and stupidity. Racism homes in on high-profile individuals or events that seem to “prove” its logic. Not just bestial Poles haunted the pages of America's popular press in early 2001, when Neighbors was released. A major scandal of the outgoing Clinton administration was President Clinton's issuance of a pardon to financier and Jew Marc Rich. This pardon unleashed a flood of outrage notable even for a president who generated a great deal of scandal. Marc Rich was widely condemned as unworthy of the pardon. A profile of him in Vanity Fair described a man who, like the violent peasants of Gross' Neighbors, seemed to have stepped right out of the central casting office that hammers out ethnic stereotypes. A favored motif of anti-Semitic material is the international financier who manipulates world politics. Marc Rich was described as “defined by his money, the kind of wealth that moves governments and transcends borders.” Rich's wealth, according to those who'd hoped to prosecute him, was significantly not the kind that builds, but, rather, that destroys. He was especially powerful in Eastern Europe. From Nigeria to Russia, everyone was on the payroll of Marc Rich ... he hijacked Jamaica's economy ... Rich became the sole provider of energy needs, grain, gas, oil, coal, at a higher than fair rate ... he controls the 36

Introduction

country ... [Rich] served as the teacher of a new breed of corrupt Russian traders, who looted the country's natural resources, which ruined the economy and bankrupted the government. (quotes in Orth 217)”

In 2002, Dennis Kozlowski also gained fame as a corrupt businessman. A Google search shows that mentions of Marc Rich are much more likely to include his Jewish ethnicity than mentions of Dennis Kozlowski are to include his Polish-Catholic identity. There is no stereotype of Poles as corrupt, high-stakes wheeler-dealers. Similarly, in 2009, the Bernard Madoff scandal was eagerly embraced by anti-Semites, convinced that Madoff proved their every fantasy true. Racism insists that an individual's expression of qualities not attributed to the stereotype of the ethnicity to which an individual has been assigned is pathological, sinful, unnatural, deviant, tragic, or merely inappropriate. A relatively benign version of this logic can be seen in a passage from Yehiel Yeshayahu Trunk's (1887-1961) memoir, Polin. This passage describes Simcha Geige, an earthy Jewish man, in terms of a Polish peasant. As I remember him, Simcha Geige walked around all day, in the manner of peasants, in an undershirt and trousers. He would get up with the goyim and the chickens. An odor of the barn exuded from him. Simcha Geige was friendly with the peasants and use to curse them in accord with their custom. His language was authentically peasant-like and the company of peasants was more pleasant to him than the intimacy of the Rabbi of Strikev. Simcha Geige was never separated from the pistol in his pocket and use to have a wild pleasure when he was shooting a few rounds among the trees. The echo of the shots in the wood, the voice of the cuckoo all around, the lowing of the cattle, the calls of the chicken and the geese, the mysterious humming of the ancient and massive oaks in the forests of Laginsky, the song of wind and rain, aroused in the crude and primitive heart of Simcha Geige a sweeter echo than the delicate and fragile sighs of the study tables of the righteous to which grandpa Baruch used to drag him on occasion. (Boyarin 78)

Simcha Geige was not understood to be an outdoorsy Jew; rather, he was seen as a Polish peasant, as if the qualities of outdoorsy-ness and 37

Introduction

violence belonged to Polish peasants. Of course, in Simcha Geige's world, by human decisions, these qualities did belong to Polish peasants, but that possession was a matter of culture, not spiritual or biological destiny. Similarly, Isaac Bashevis Singer created a Pole who was understood to be a Jew. “He had all the qualities attributed to Jews. He shunned fighting, could not stand liquor ... read serious books, avoided athletic sports, visited museums and art shows” (Singer Moskat 296). As in racist Jewish folk understandings of earthiness and violence as exclusively Polish, and never Jewish, property, there is a racist Polish folk understanding of cosmopolitanism and intellectuality as exclusively Jewish, and never Polish, property. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the former Polish prime minister, and alleged crypto-Jew, was a devout Roman Catholic. But he was also an urbanite, an intellectual, and a political leader with some prestige in the wider world. In the racist understanding that quality x is the sole property of ethnicity y, in this case that the qualities of intellectualism and worldliness are the exclusive property of Jews, Mazowiecki is no Pole because he is not a common laborer, because he wears suits, and because he thinks. He must be a Jew, regardless of the ethnicity of his birth parents, his native tongue, or his own self-identification. Adam Michnik summarized this anti-Semitic thinking this way: “Kowalski is a scoundrel; therefore he is a Jew” (Engelberg). That is, to these anti-Semites, the very quality of scoundrel-ness is perceived as the exclusive property of Jews. Not just negatively evaluated qualities are understood to be the property or function of one ethnicity. In 1987, Marek Edelman, then the sole surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, was asked what constituted Jewish identity. He identified non-Jewish Polish Solidarity activists, then in hiding from authorities who wanted them dead, as Jewish, because, “A Jew always has a sense of community with the very weakest” (Across Frontiers 33). This work contains excerpts from informant interviews. Except for John Guzlowski, who chose to use his real name, most informants are identified by pseudonyms chosen by them. Non-standard spelling, grammar, and punctuation have not been changed in transcripts of 38

Introduction

face-to-face interviews, informant e-mails, or in material taken from the internet. “Sic,” indicating verbatim quotes in which language has not been standardized, is used minimally. In these lengthy interview transcripts, there are no Bieganskis, and there are no Shylocks. Soundbites are short excerpts from much longer texts. They are calculated to advance an often invidious agenda. One need look no further than Alina Cala's The Image of the Jew in Polish Folk Culture. Cala does not name her peasant informants. They have no faces, no life stories, no joys, no sorrows, no homes, no families, no dignity, no logic, no humanity. They are not reduced to mere statistics; that would be less invasive. Cala reduces peasants to soundbites. A Cala informant says of Jews that they were “clean but also dirty.” In real life, if someone made such a self-contradictory utterance, the natural thing to do would be to ask for an explanation. It is easy to regard these peasants as other, and to hate them. Cala's informants might experience only humiliation and pain reading her redaction of their words, and of their selves. Transcripts reveal informants, Poles and Jews, to be full human beings. Exactly like the reader, these informants have families, homes, and lives, and tell stories. From these deeply textured stories, conclusions are drawn. Were these human beings reduced to statistics, this work would state that 100% of Poles came from families where drunkenness, a lack of formal education, and domestic violence were prevalent; 100% of Jews regarded Jews as arrogant, superior, separatist, or cheap. Those statistics would lie more than tell the truth. Transcripts reveal intelligent, sensitive Poles struggling with family members who lived punishing lives as coal miners, farmers, or survivors of Nazism, who drank and beat their loved ones, and yet who could, with effort, be understood. Transcripts of Jewish informants reveal people who treated me, a Polish American, as their equal and were generous with their time, who struggled with memories of family members who seemed to fit a stereotype — though their cheap Jewish relatives were no different from my — or your — cheap nonJewish relatives. Context molds identity and understandings of identity. No informant began an interview by announcing, “All the Poles I know are drunken 39

Introduction

fools; all the Jews I know are Shylocks.” People arrived at Bieganski or Shylock as if they were laid-out costumes. Informants, given my prods, were reminded of stories that caused them to approach the costumes, and to back away from them. These journeys — toward and away from thinking in stereotypical terms — are recorded in transcripts. Wolf remembered a fight between his wife and sister; that caused him to comment on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Given different prods from me, Wolf might never have addressed Israel. Humans structure their cognitive lives, including their understanding of their own ethnicity and that of others, around stories. What people say at the beginning of their reply is often different from what they say at the end of their reply; their transcript serves as a map of the cognitive route they took to arrive at their new destination. Julius reported, “I'm not observant … I don't keep kosher. Most anything that I was told nice Jewish boys do, I don't do. I even play touch football.” Julius struggles with the idea of God and felt he could be an atheist. He was dating a Lutheran. Would he raise his children Jewish? “I can't imagine no.” By the end of Julius’ interview, he admitted that he was still Jewish enough that, were he ever to marry his Christian girlfriend, he would allow neither a Christmas tree nor a cross in his house, nor would he allow his children to be raised Christian. Jeff began by saying that he had no prejudices or grudges against Poles, that, rather, he blamed Cossacks and Germans for anti-Semitism, and that his mother never disassociated herself from her Polish roots. Later, when asked about possible travel to Poland, Jeff refused to go and identified Poles as “complicit in the Holocaust.” Informants often began by insisting that they had no experience of anti-Semitism in America, but went on to recount harrowing experiences. Every time I asked verbally, Jacob insisted that he had never experienced anti-Semitism. I then asked, “Nothing ever happened that made you — ” and I cringed. Observing my body language, Jacob told of his friend telling him an anti-Semitic joke, and concluded, “I haven't thought about it till now, when you asked about something that made you cringe. I totally understand the cringing feeling.” 40

Introduction

Stories are made of language, and these transcripts, recorded in the informants' own words, express deep truths that only poetry can. When informant John Guzlowski said of his childhood as a Polish American, “Nothing ever seemed to go right…Shirts — even brand new ones — would be stained or missing a button,” I, a Polish-American who also grew up in economically strained, working class circumstances, understood perfectly. When Ruth insisted that a “tiny black cat” became, to her and her university chums, emblematic of Polish people's inferiority, I knew I'd heard a story that demonstrated, in a way that no summary could, how the human mind verifies stereotypes. Transcripts chart language's record of emotions and cognition. Sylvia's sudden switch from “they” to “we” when talking of the persecution of Jews, and her polysyndeton — “they've been kicked out and they've been persecuted and we've been purged and we've been murdered” — reveal much about Sylvia's understanding of her Jewish identity. Sylvia followed up her passionate litany of her people's suffering with statements ending with a rising inflection, as if they were questions, “I think that there's some significant differences? In terms of other places that we've ever been? That make it safer?” That rising inflection poignantly underlines Sylvia's identification with the suffering of her people, and her own vulnerability; a summary could not capture this. Blue emphasized the association of Poles with stupidity in the way that speakers emphasize anything: by repeating his point over and over. In print, he might have written, “Unequivocally, Poles are associated with stupidity.” While speaking, Blue drove this point home by repeating it eight times. Finally, stories reflect life's ability to insist on a reality that we, ourselves, could never imagine, or, if imagined, would not dare to tell. The ironic conclusion to Aaron's saga of the search for the perfect Jewish wife is worthy of Isaac Bashevis Singer. This “surprise ending” reminds the reader that life refuses to conform to our best attempts to reduce it to a pattern, an idea one must constantly, and humbly, keep in mind when approaching Polish-Jewish relations. A note on terminology: as per widely followed convention, a “Pole” is someone whose ancestors spoke Polish and were not Jewish; a “Jew” 41

Introduction

is someone whose ancestors were Jewish. Dr. Roman Solecki was born in Poland, speaks Polish as a first language, and fought in the Home Army. He is an atheist. In spite of all this, he is identified as a “Jew.” There is prickly debate around all methods of identification of Poles and Jews. For example, if a Pole focuses on the distinctiveness of the Jewish people in Poland, he can stand accused of not recognizing Jews as an integral part of Poland (Nosowski 162). On the other hand, Poles, with pride, tend to understand Bruno Szulc as a national author. In defending Yad Vashem's appropriation of Bruno Szulc murals from a house in Ukraine, formerly Poland, Seth Wolitz, the Gale Jewish Studies Professor at U. T. Austin, declared that it was only right for Israelis to take work created by a Jew, because “Jews in Eastern Europe were always a distinct nationality. The Schulz paintings belong to the direct inheritor: Israel” (Wolitz). In short, “Pole” and “Jew” are terms of art and convention; there are no easily accepted alternative terms.

Chapter One

Bieganski Lives

The current most prominent exemplar of Bieganski is British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's fictional character Borat Sagdiyev. Borat was the second highest-earning R-rated 2006 film, bringing in slightly less than Martin Scorsese's The Departed, the Academy-Award-winning best picture. Borat was arguably the most talked about movie of 2006. Its aggressive style — a typical example: Baron Cohen, as Borat, hands his dinner hostess a clear plastic bag containing his own fecal matter — was widely lauded and debated. Borat's distinguishing characteristics are shared with Bieganski. Borat is filthy and stupid; he washes his face in a toilet bowl. While performing Borat, Baron Cohen neither washed his clothing nor used deodorant; he wanted to stink, in order to “add to the authenticity” of Borat (MTVOne). Borat defecates and masturbates on busy Manhattan streets. Borat identifies rape as a national sport. He brags that his sister, with whom he has had sex, is the fourth best prostitute in the country. Women garbed in Eastern European peasant attire pulled the oxcart in which Baron Cohen, as Borat, arrived at the film's Toronto premiere. Borat is a chauvinistic nationalist; he wants to drink his enemy's blood. Primarily, of course, Borat is an anti-Semite. He leads an Arizona bar crowd in a fictitious folksong, “Throw the Jew Down the Well.” Borat identifies himself as being from Kazakhstan. Nevertheless, it is clear to many, including Kazakhs, that Baron Cohen's jokes target Poland, Poles, and other Bohunks, rather than the Central Asian, largely Muslim, Kazakhstan. A Kazakh official reported that, after all, Borat spoke Polish 43

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(Radosh). Indeed, Borat's catchphrase, “Jak sie masz,” as well as other words he uses — “Dziekuje,” and “Dzien dobry” — are Polish. The movie's opening scene was meant to take place in Borat's hometown; in fact the scene was filmed in a Romanian village. The soundtrack is provided by Eastern European folk musicians. Borat is “every Pole in every Polak joke ever told” comparable to other media images of Eastern European buffoons, like Saturday Night Live's laughable Czechs, according to Canada's Globe and Mail (Brown). In the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Colin Covert pointed out that Borat opens with “a tour of his village, filmed in an authentic hamlet that looks like a National Geographic feature on Third World slovenliness. With pride he shows off the kindergarten, where tots amuse themselves with automatic rifles, introduces us to his withered crone of a mother (‘oldest woman in village, she 46’) and greets the ‘town rapist’ (‘naughty, naughty!’)” This, Covert noted, is “an exaggerated Polish joke caricature.” An AustralianKazakh reported that the “bumbling,” “uncultured,” “bumpkin” Borat “is actually more Polish than anything else” (Vallejo). In England, where there is great public controversy over the admission of Polish and other Eastern European immigrants, “Borat has become a metaphor in parts of the British press for all that is ‘primitive’ and ‘uncouth’ about ‘eastern Europeans’, including Poles.” Just one example: the Daily Mail ran the following headline over a news story of sexual assault: “Polish Borat Claims Groping Women Is Normal in Eastern Europe” (Gentle). At the same time that curbs on the immigration of Eastern Europeans were being proposed, the London Times made the Borat connection. Ironically, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality charged that Eastern Europeans were such racists that they should not be allowed into Britain. Asking, “Who needs Borat?” — that is, with the popularity of anti-Eastern European stereotypes in Britain, who needs the Borat film to disseminate those stereotypes — Columnist Mick Hume summed up the problem: “today's elite think of the white working classes as an ignorant ethnic pogrom waiting to happen” (Hume). In the New York Times John Tierney called Borat “the new global Polack joke.” Tierney expressed discomfort with the film's elitism and 44

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racism. “What bothers me most about Borat is its premise: that villagers who have not embraced Western values are violently racist, homophobic and misogynistic. Borat is an absurd caricature, but we wouldn't laugh if we didn't think there was some truth to the stereotype of the morally backward peasant … [villagers] don't need Western guidance, let alone sneers from a Cambridge-educated comic affecting moral superiority” (Tierney). About.com addressed travelers' concerns raised by the film: “Will you meet anyone like Borat in Eastern Europe? … It is unlikely that you will meet anyone quite as over-the-top as Borat. Eastern Europeans are sincere, warm, generous, and concerned” the site assured its readers (Kubilius). Columnist Steve Sailer wrote “Borat is just a 21st Century revival of Polish Jokes. Then Baron Cohen and the critics make up a lot of cant about how his Stupid Foreign Person humor is really about fighting anti-Semitism so that means it has Moral Vitamins in it and is good for you.” Sailer entitled his review of Borat, “21st Century Polish Jokes.” The film is “a travesty of old stereotypes about Eastern Europe” typified by “the clever townsman's disdain for the slower-witted peasant.” “Borat,” Sailer wrote, “is a 21st Century version of the Polish jokes that Borscht Belt comedians like Henny Youngman once helped popularize.” Sailer protested “the anti-Slavic depiction of Borat as the ultimate goyishe kop (he carries a chicken in his suitcase and has no idea what a toilet is for)” (Sailer Althouse, 21st). International Movie Database users voted the following review, out of over a thousand posted, to be the single best of Borat. Its author is identified as “MoseKatzer” from Israel. The film has nothing to do with Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan just a metaphor for the Eastern European countries, where form most of the the American Jewish people are immigrated to America. Immigrated especially from Poland and Russia. That is why the titles are in the Cyrillic script, and that is why Borat speaks Polish words. The director shows everything with the Jewish eye. He wants to show that how primitive and uncouth brutes are East Europeans where the Jew lived in ghettos for centuries. The other 45

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half of the film is just showing that (from the Jewish point of view) the American people are not superior that the people in the Eastern European countries. Just wants to show, that how uncouth, uneducated, primitive and racist are the American people. That's why the Jewish people mustn't forget that although America looks like a friendly country for them, but be aware, that it is just the surface. (imdb.com MoseKatzer)

Aptly summing up Borat's distinguishing characteristics, David Edelstein wrote in the New Yorker that Borat is typified by his “minuscule IQ, cultural backwardness, rampant libido, sexism, homophobia, and antiSemitism.” Edelstein continued: To understand what Baron Cohen's Borat is up to in part, it helps to consider the most notorious scenes in Claude Lanzmann's nine-and-ahalf-hour Holocaust documentary, Shoah, in which the director trains his camera on Polish peasants who lived near the Nazis' most lethal concentration camps while they were in full swing. Under Lanzmann's probing, these old men and women — some of them residing on property seized from the Jews — murmur that yes, it was a terrible thing, the exterminations. Just terrible. But of course, the Jews did bring it on themselves, didn't they? I don't know whether Baron Cohen saw Shoah, but Lanzmann's gotcha journalism on untutored anti-Semites paved the way for what amounts to a (riotous) libel on Eastern Europe. (Edelstein)

Here we see the logic, the ethic, and the anodyne of Bieganski. Eastern European peasants deserve to be mocked as people who bathe in toilet bowls. They are responsible for the Holocaust. It is their very qualities, so different from those of the modern academic, movie star, or journalist and his audience, their qualities associated with peasantry, that cause them to be monsters. Modern people are exculpated from the crime of antiSemitism. Borat typifies Bieganski in popular culture; Bieganski inhabits high culture, and the academy, as well. Isaac Bashevis Singer won the 1978 Nobel Prize for literature. The pithiest encapsulation of the Bieganski stereotype may be in Singer's The Slave. Jacob, a lone Jew, lives with Christian, Polish peasants. They disgust him. 46

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The mountaineers no longer bothered him. But this was not true of the girls who slept in the barn and tended the sheep. Night and day they bothered him. They sought him out and talked and laughed and behaved little better than beasts. In his presence they relieved themselves, and they were perpetually pulling up their skirts to show him insect bites on their hips and thighs. “Lay me,” a girl would shamelessly demand, but Jacob acted as if he were deaf and blind. It was not only because fornication was a mortal sin. These women were unclean, and had vermin in their clothes and elflocks in their hair; often their skins were covered with rashes and boils, they ate field rodents and the flesh of rotting carcasses of fowls. Some of them could scarcely speak Polish, grunted like animals, made signs with their hands, screamed and laughed madly. The village abounded in cripples, boys and girls with goiters, distended heads and disfiguring birthmarks; there were also mutes, epileptics, freaks who had been born with six fingers on their hands, or six toes on their feet. In summer, the parents of these deformed children kept them on the mountains with the cattle, and they ran wild. There, men and women copulated in public; the women became pregnant, but, climbing all day as they did on rocks, bearing heavy packs, they often miscarried. (Singer The Slave 5-6)

The main non-Jewish character in Singer's The Golem is the violent, greedy, drunken, and sexually criminal Count Bratislawski. Singer described a stereotypical encounter between an aristocrat who wants money and a Jew who is called upon to provide it. “You cursed Jew! I will get the money one way or another,” the count screamed in rage. “And you will pay dearly for your insolence in refusing a loan to the great Count Bratislawski.” Saying these words, the Count spat in to Reb Eliezer's face. Reb Eliezer humbly wiped off the spittle with his kerchief and said, “Forgive me, Count, but there was no sense in gambling for such high stakes and signing notes that cannot be honored.” (Singer Golem 7-8)

Reb Eliezer is taken away by “a group of soldiers holding their naked swords in their hands” (9). Bratislawski's paid witnesses who assist in 47

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Eliezer's victimization are “a man who looked like a drunk and a woman whose face was full of warts and who squinted” (10). In 1992, the Pulitzer Prize went to Art Spiegelman, for Maus. Maus is a comic book about the Holocaust that depicts Poles as pigs. Pigs' habitual coprophagy contributes to their being widely despised, especially among Jews; “Goyisher chozzerai” expresses special disdain (“Gentile junk,” from “chozzer,” “pig;” Bloom 56, 210). When asked about Polish-Americans' protest, Spiegelman identified two groups, one who supports him — “the afflicted” — and Poles in contradistinction to the afflicted. Poles have not been victimized, in this contrast. He and his supporters have. His comments could be understood as arguing that victim status consecrates his depiction of Poles as pigs. In any case, Spiegelman dismissed Poles' “squeal” (Taylor 35). “Squeal” is, of course, the sound made by pigs. Spiegelman speaks of Poles as despised animals without encountering condemnation, other than that from Poles. He does so at a time when Americans are careful to parse their every word, lest they violate the prickly norms of political correctness, a time when a furor raged over the use of a neutral word like “niggardly” that merely sounds like an ethnic slur (Heaton). In 1998-99, Professor Bob Lamming wrote cordial letters to his superiors at Saint Mary's College in California protesting the use of Maus to teach students, including visiting Japanese, the English language (Lamming). Lamming's communications included support for his position from prize-winning authors, veteran teachers, and activists. Maryann Wojciechowski was one of many who protested. Her comments, in a shortened form approved by her, appear below. My Polish mother, a resister, was arrested by the Gestapo at age 18. She spent years in Nazi custody, all the while joining resistance cells. At Ravensbruck, she and other Polish women were forcibly injected with caustic chemicals. This was a test of mass sterilization methods for the planned genocide of the Polish nation. My Polish father fought for three years and was then arrested and tortured in Auschwitz. My Polish uncles, all resisters, were arrested; one was buried in a mass grave. One barely survived internment in Auschwitz and Dachau. 48

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My Polish grandmother survived Ravensbruck; my Polish grandfather was killed in Auschwitz. Which one of my Polish family members would you depict as a pig?

Lamming's eight-year employment at the university was terminated. In reference to Maus, St. Mary's President, Brother Craig J. Franz, cited “academic freedom” (Franz). Nushi Safinya, the professor who used Maus to teach English to Japanese visitors, went on to become a diversity consultant. Her company's website, which boasts the Peace Corps as one client, described Safinya as “a nationally known expert in the areas of cross-cultural communication” (Thomas Brown and Associates). When reached for comment, Safinya replied that Maus “is a text that should be universally employed in any discussion of the unfortunate capacity for human beings to cause unnecessary suffering for others and the fortunate case of those rare individuals who step forward under any circumstances to provide sustenance for others and to ease their pain” (Safinya). Spiegelman declined to comment (Ostroff). Prof. Raymond Federman was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. Prof. Federman posted, on a university-sponsored website, “Brudny Zyd Goes to Poland.” Federman's work calls Poles “Pollacks,” and communicates that they are crude, bestial, violent, smelly, fecund, Jew haters. Justifying his hatred for Poles with a sense of personal victimization, Prof. Federman's work identifies him, Federman, throughout as “Brudny Zyd,” Polish for “Dirty Jew.” In this story, Federman never self-identifies as a member of an American elite. He is a victim; his victimization as a “dirty Jew” justifies his hatred. When telling LOT (Polish airlines) personnel that he wants his free seat to be upgraded, for free, from business to first class, he declines to mention that he wanted this in order to avoid Poles. “Brudny Zyd does not tell charming sexy LOT lady that he does not want to travel economy class because of all the Pollacks.” Inferior Poles are worthy to be used as sexual objects, for his pleasure. “If the charming sexy friendly beautiful LOT lady 49

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wanted to he would wrap his knees around her to show her how strong his knees are.” When he was upgraded, Federman refused to describe this as an act of kindness on the Polish woman's part. “She senses he is a famous man. Brudny Zyd is so happy he almost jumps over counter to embrace charming LOT lady but refrains from doing so. Brudny Zyd does not want to be noticed by the Pollacks who are waiting in line behind him.” Federman receives airline giveaways, and rejects them. In business class Brudny Zyd gets lovely little kit full of lovely little Polish things in it. In the business class Polish kit Brudny Zyd finds a mini Polish toothbrush a mini Polish tube of toothpaste a Polish razor a Polish toothpick a pair of Polish slippers and many other Polish things. But Brudny Zyd does not use any of the Polish things in the kit. Brudny Zyd does not trust Polish things. Brudny Zyd does not trust Pollacks either. Brudny Zyd would love to fuck charming sexy friendly beautiful Polish lady LOT stewardess who gives him great service in business class. The one with the big Polish boobs. (Federman)

Even as Federman reduced a human being who is kind to him to the object of his racist and sexual fantasies, and to “boobs,” with “boob,” of course, referring to a stupid person, as well as being a gutter word for breasts, Federman emphasized his victim status. But Brudny Zyd is afraid that his cock would reveal that he is Brudny Zyd. On his way to Poland Brudny Zyd is suddenly sorry that he is on his way to Poland … While all the Pollacks in economy class are getting drunk on Polish vodka and making a lot of noise Brudny Zyd wonders as he tries to get some sleep in the big wide business class seat after he ate the good filet mignon and drank lots of fine French wine if he will ever come out of Poland alive … Brudny Zyd is worried that he may end up in a Polish bar of soap. (Federman)

The educated reader will note many things about this passage. One is that under the direction of a German Nazi doctor, soap was made from Polish, not Jewish, corpses. 50

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Did the Holocaust Generate Bieganski? Does the Holocaust Justify Bieganski? Haverford College is an elite institution proud of its “Quaker traditions of individual dignity, tolerance, commitment to diversity, inclusion, social justice and peaceful conflict resolution [that] have permeated our community for 173 years” (Tritton). In 2006, Haverford published an essay by David Langlieb protesting “stupid” “vermin” “Polaks” “infesting” Greenpoint, Brooklyn. In response to protest, Langlieb's mother reported to the media that family members had died in the Holocaust (Bode and Siemaszko). In 2002, the New York Times described “desperate” “aging” and “doleful” Polish cleaning women who, for low wages, work for Jews. They “scrub the floors on [their] knees … scrubbing the stoves and floors and toilets of Jews.” The Times quoted one Jew who said, “Three million Jews died in Poland … Everything happens for a reason.” The article supports this karmic diagnosis: “Millions of Jews were murdered in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka in Poland.” Polish cleaning women should be desperate; they are responsible for the Holocaust. In reality, Poles often cleaned Jewish homes before the Holocaust, and thereby became familiar with Jewish culture; the Times leaves readers with the false impression that Poles had never done this work before, and knew nothing of Jewish culture till they came to America: “Poles, whose homeland is nearly devoid of Jewish culture, have picked up its intricacies by picking up crumbs in Brooklyn” (LeDuff). In 2007, when Poland requested that the UK extradite Helena Wolinska for the Stalinist, show-trial, judicial murder of Emil August Fieldorf, deputy commander of the anti-Nazi Home Army, Wolinska, who was Jewish, said she would not return to that “despicable country,” land of “Auschwitz and Treblinka” (Warner). In 2007, the Fox TV show “Back to You” featured this joke, “Bowling is in your Polish blood, like kielbasa, and collaborating with the Nazis.” Alfred M. Karwowski publicly protested that Poles, for the most part, did not collaborate with the Nazis. Posters at the “Vos Iz Neias” (Yiddish 51

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for “What's News?”) website debated Karwowski's letter. “Grandson of Polish Jews” wrote, “Go crawl back to your trailer park and mourn the survival of the 300,000 Polish Jews you didn't get to send up the smoke stack. FWIW, I do find your jealousy of us rather entertaining. For two thousand years your kind has attempted to wipe us from the face of G-d's earth.” The reader will note the reference to crawling, the locomotion of beasts, to trailer parks, an American metonym for low class people, and the anachronistic association of Poles with two thousand years of anti-Semitism. Before the release of the 2008 film, “Defiance,” depicting the Bielski otriad, members of the Bielski otriad were accused of participating in a Soviet massacre of Poles in Naliboki. A descendent of the Bielskis said that the number of Poles killed in Naliboki was “in no way close to the millions of people that the Polish people herded towards the Germans so they could be extinguished” (Brostoff). In 2007, internet poster Alex Berger of Cedarhurst, New York, argued that his grandfather's victimization in Poland made it ethical and inevitable that he regard Poles as “Amalek.” In the Old Testament, God demands a genocide of the Amalekites, not just the men, but women, children, and their stock animals. Berger wrote, “Forgetting and befriending the Poland atrocities is equivalent for forgetting and befriending Amalek … unlike my grandparents, yours were never the guests of Polish hospitality in the camps” (Taube). The reduction of Poland to a metonym for evil appears repeatedly throughout Jewish thought and writing in the postwar period. David Ben-Gurion invoked “Poland” as metonym for the Holocaust. “There's no need to wait until they slaughter them. We don't have to wait until ‘Poland’ repeats itself there” (Segev 122). One Jewish Holocaust pilgrim reported: “For my people … that land is little more than … a witness to the devices of evil” (Kugelmass 439). Eva Hoffman wrote, “In postwar Jewish memory, in the minds of many Holocaust survivors and their descendants, Poland has come to figure as the very heart of darkness, the central symbol of the inferno” (3). 52

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Israeli students have been taught to identify the Holocaust with Poland. On one trip, one group of students' teacher told them, “Jew hatred is as natural to Poland as blue is to the sky” (Segev 491). Julie Salamon, a film reviewer, reported that when she was asked to consider travel to Poland in order to cover a movie story her only thought was, “Poland? Impossible. Only one story waited for me in Poland and that was Auschwitz” (Salamon 6). Salamon admitted her ignorance of a region and its peoples and cultures which she insisted on reducing to, and equating with, evil. While denouncing Eastern Europe as “an ignorant backwater,” she admitted that she couldn't find her mother's Eastern European hometown on a map, and that she didn't even know what country her mother's hometown is in (12-13). Anne Karpf, like Salamon, the daughter of concentration camp survivors, also reported understanding Poland as synonymous with death, and resisting any cognitive admission that Poland is populated by living citizens. “I'd clearly come to associate the country, over the years, almost entirely with death: now I had a strong if irrational sense of ‘See Poland and die’ … The first shock was that the country really did exist … its materiality astonished me” (Karpf 293). French Jewish historian Rachel Ertel wrote, “Poland remained a forbidden land to me … it simply didn't exist, at least not in a material sense” (Kugelmass 416). The March of the Living, according to observers, is a “must in Holocaust education,” (Eisenberg), a “secular religion” and “part of Israeli civic education” (Buruma). MOL is an international movement that, since its founding in 1988, has brought tens of thousands of Jewish young people to Poland. “Armed Israeli security guards … do everything possible to convince the youngsters that they're in constant danger in Poland … ‘Run straight to the buses,’” these armed guards tell children. “‘Don't stop for anything’” (Novick 160). A March of the Living pamphlet stated, falsely, that there were no Jews or Jewish life left in Poland, and that Jews could bring “empathy” and “knowledge” to a Poland that otherwise lacked these qualities. Jews themselves, the pamphlet stated, could feel only hatred and pity for Poles (Witkowski). Until recently, MOL events staged in Poland, at concentration camps where Poles as well as Jews suffered and died, were 53

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conducted in Hebrew, English, and French, but not in Polish. Journalist Gilla Eisenberg called “March of the Living” a “grotesque ritual” “inflicted” on Israeli youth who travel to Poland in order to be taught “mistrust of the outside world,” and “aggressiveness and narrow nationalism” (Eisenberg). Theodore Bikel wrote, “The reawakened Jewish cultural and religious life of Jews in Poland simply does not fit their agenda. The argument I sometimes hear is that Poland has had such a dark history for Jews that no self-respecting Jew should want to live there. Curiously, no similar argument is being heard from the same quarters about Jews living in Germany” ( JewishJournal.com). The Polish magazine Przekroj featured a 2007 article that reported that Israeli teens and their guards behaved badly in Poland. Bad behavior included defecating in hotel beds and sinks. Roberto Lucchesini, an Italian living in Poland, was allegedly permanently injured by MOL security guards. He alleges that this treatment came in response to his request that buses ferrying the teens turn off their engines. The engines are kept running because those guarding the teens believe them to be in danger at all times that they are in Poland, and might need to make a quick escape. Lucchesini says the exhaust-emitting buses were parked in front of his home. Shevah Weiss, former Israeli ambassador to Poland, and Yuli Tamir, Israeli Education Minister, responded to these allegations (Szulc). Internet posters continued responding to this article for the next two years. One, a self-identified Jew, wrote, The Jewish teens behave like the teens should behave. When they see the death camps they feel the pain of their, humiliated, abused and finally slaughtered brethren … regardless what the Jews do or don't do would upset them anyway. To Poles the zhids [ Jews] will always be arrogant, tricky, exclusive, deceitful or pompous. The Poles want to have a dialogue not because they feel for the Jews or Jewish suffering but because it would make them feel better … [ Jews] brought the honor, knowledge; modernity to their new homelands while Poland remained wallowing in misery and backwardness for another 2 generations. They murdered or chased out the greatest talent Poland would ever encounter. Had Poland been less hateful of its Jewish citizens it could become at least as advanced as the US or Israel. (Anonymous, in Szulc) 54

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In this and subsequent posts by the same author, we see a summary of the Bieganski stereotype and justification for it: If Jews behave badly towards Poles, monumental Jewish suffering in the Holocaust — for which Poles are responsible — justifies it. To question Jewish misbehavior is to denigrate Holocaust victims. No matter how Poles behave, their unchanging essence, and therefore, their motivations, are base. And, finally, Jews are modern and advanced while Poles wallow in backwardness, are, in fact, medieval. The assertion that Bieganski is merely a logical response to the Holocaust does not withstand analysis. Poles who are not anti-Semites are smeared with the Bieganski stereotype. In March of 2001, American Rabbi Mordechai Friedman, on his public access television show, called Pope John Paul II, who has been praised as a philo-Semitic pope of world historical importance, a “dumb Polak” a “vicious, racist anti-Semite,” and a “stinking old cocker.” Rabbi Friedman recommended a boycott. “Don't hire anti-Semitic Polaks. Not as maids … cleaning ladies … in construction companies,” he urged. Jewish doctors, dentists, lawyers and CPAs should heed his call: “Don't heal or service these anti-Semitic fiends. They're all destined to go to hell” (Polish American Journal). Wladyslaw Bartoszewski risked his life to advance Polish-Jewish relations, including under the Nazis and the Soviets. Both Nazis and Soviets imprisoned him. As Polish Foreign Minister, he visited the Israeli Knesset in November 2000. He was verbally attacked. Bartoszewski, a former Auschwitz inmate, a Righteous Gentile, a co-founder of Zegota, the only government-sponsored underground organization in occupied Europe founded explicitly to aid Jews, was denounced as if he were an inherently and essentially anti-Semitic Polak. (PAP, Cashman, NPAJAC press release). Too, Bartoszewski is asked in Germany, “why the Polish nation is anti-Semitic” (Polonsky 207-208). In 1941, Maximilian Kolbe sacrificed his own life for another's in Auschwitz. His 1982 canonization brought the previously obscure Kolbe international fame. As night follows day, this remarkable Pole was roundly denounced as a proto-Nazi. Accusers included superstar scholar Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Washington Post journalist Richard Cohen, celebrity 55

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attorney Alan Dershowitz, Vanity Fair's Christopher Hitchens, and the documentary film, “John Paul II: The Millennial Pope,” “an all-time bestseller” for PBS (Nash). The extreme language and distortion used to besmirch Kolbe was typified by Christopher Hitchens, who wrote that Kolbe was guilty of “stoking the very oven in which he was to perish.” Given the Bieganski stereotype, Rabbi Zev K. Nelson choose a very telling word: Kolbe was “unclean” (Finley). St. Louis University history professor Daniel L. Schlafly, Jr., and Warren P. Green, director of the St. Louis Center for Holocaust Studies, issued an eighteen-page response. Schlafly and Green do not depict Kolbe as without fault. Kolbe was certainly incorrect in some of his beliefs, and the journals he founded did publish a small amount of anti-Semitic material; there is no excuse for this. What remains pertinent is that Kolbe's defamers exploit Bieganski to distort the real man. Kolbe criticized his editors for publishing anti-Semitic material, counseling love, not hostility. Nazis arrested Kolbe and other priests, and told them they were “Polish swine” slated for extermination. After his release, Kolbe invited martyrdom by counseling Poles to aid Jews. At his friary, Kolbe sheltered between several hundred and two thousand Jews fleeing Nazism. Kolbe was re-arrested. In Auschwitz he was known as a saint. Sigmund Gorson testified. He knew I was a Jewish boy. That made no difference. His heart was bigger than persons — that is, whether they were Jewish, Catholic or whatever. He loved everyone. He dispensed love and nothing but love. For one thing, he gave away so much of his meager rations that to me it was a miracle he could live. Now it is easy to be nice, to be charitable, to be humble, when times are good and peace prevails. For someone to be as Father Kolbe was in that time and place — I can only say the way he was is beyond words. I am a Jew by my heritage as the son of a Jewish mother, and I am of the Jewish faith and very proud of it. And not only did I love Maximilian Kolbe very, very much at Auschwitz, where he befriended me, but I will love him until the last moments of my life. (Treece 200)

Even simple artifacts can be assumed to be anti-Semitic. At the “Ashkenaz, Theory and Nation” academic conference in Krakow, Poland, 56

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in May, 1998, Jana Dolezelova, a Czech scholar, mentioned that an excavation had uncovered a Jewish home with two fireplaces, one for meat and one for dairy. These two fireplaces, she said, were in a “black kitchen.” Dolezelova apologized that she didn't know the vernacular English for “black kitchen.” An American Jewish Studies professor from an Ivy League university suggested that the two-stove kitchen was called a “black kitchen” because anti-Semitic Eastern Europeans associated Jews with the devil. I raised my hand in order to rescue said Jewish Studies Professor from off-base speculation. The assertion that “black kitchen” was an expression of typical Eastern European peasant anti-Semitism was mulled over and accepted by many scholars. When I was finally given a chance to speak, I explained that throughout Eastern European peasant households, a two-room house type once predominated. One room had a stove and fire but inadequate egress for smoke. The other room had no source of heat, and was called, variably, the “svetlica,” or “light room,” “biala izba” or “white room,” “cistaja izba” or “clean room,” etc. The former room was caked with soot and was called the “black kitchen” (Botik, Frolec). The term had nothing to do with Jews, the devil, or anti-Semitism. Bieganski's Roots in Jewish Views of Polish Peasants Bieganski's roots are far older than the Holocaust. The taint derives from an ethnic interface between one group, Jews, who had, relatively, better formal education, greater sophistication and mobility, and their view of Poles, who, for the most part, and for most of Polish history, were peasants. Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein argue that Jews switched from being mostly rural peasants to being mostly urban, skilled workers in the first millennium AD. This change was the result of a reform in religious norms combined with increased urbanization and greater profit from urban, skilled work over farming. This change was accompanied by harsh Talmudic condemnation of non-literate, peasant Jews — ammei ha-aretz — as moral, communal, and human failures unworthy to be Jews. This viewpoint was so harsh, Botticini and Eckstein argue, that two million of the world's 3-3.5 million Jews who survived Roman oppressions 57

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converted to religions other than Judaism, thus accounting for a decline in the world's population of Jews in the first millennium. They converted because, as oral peasants, they were evaluated harshly by Jewish standards. As “people of the land,” these Jews were “outcast” (Botticini and Eckstein “Farmers”). As Botticini put it: the word ammei ha-aretz (literally: people of the land) acquired the new meaning of “someone who does not know or/and does not teach his sons the Torah” (Oppenheimer 1977). The transformation of the religion created the need for the devoted Jews to be literate and, more important, to make their children literate. To be an “am ha-aretz letorah” in a Jewish community meant to be considered an outcast, which involved a social penalty. (Botticini and Eckstein “Farmers”)

Forward columnist David Klinghoffer cited and exemplified this attitude in his 2005 book Why the Jews Rejected Jesus. Klinghoffer described those Jews who did accept Jesus as “amei ha'aretz,” “relatively simple,” “less knowledgeable,” “rustic,” “countrified,” “peasant” “hayseed,” “famously ignorant” Galileans (44, 43, 59). “There was some doubt among the rabbis whether it was advisable to marry such peasants (amei ha'aretz) despite their being Jews by birth” (44). Pre-Holocaust examples of a contemptuous evaluation of Polish peasants are legion in Jewish literature. According to Joseph Adler, Jews felt contempt for Poles and other Slavs at the genesis of their encounter. Poles and other Slavs were the merchandise for Jewish slave traders. They were viewed with the disdain reserved for the Biblical Canaanites, also slaves. “The emphatic Biblical statement, ‘cursed be Canaan a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren’ led to the easy linkage of the Slavic people with the descendants of ancient Canaan,” Adler wrote (Adler 27). Aleksander Hertz wrote that to Poland's Jews, a goy, that is, in the world described by Hertz, the world where most goys were Poles, a Pole, as a human being … was considerably inferior to the Jew. His beliefs, way of life, value system, economic activity, all departed form the norms that 58

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the Jew thought proper; and for that reason he was inferior and laughable … A goy's comicality would be especially apparent when he undertook an activity in which the Jews excelled. A goyishe kop (goy brain) could be seen primarily in business and in those activities that had required some economic experience. There the goy was a fool … The goy whom the Jew knew and encountered most frequently in daily life did not value knowledge. On the contrary, he was uneducated, ignorant, and usually illiterate. Hence the Jew's contempt for the peasant, who in the Jew's eyes was twice a cham, once as a peasant so defined by the world of nobility, and again as a stupid, ignorant creature to whom knowledge was alien. (76-7)

Chone Shmeruk, writing of Yiddish literature written between the two world wars, reported: Even in texts which have no Polish characters, we find phrases which express stereotypic attitudes towards Polish peasants. When a teacher in a heder, ( Jewish traditional religious school) wants to reprimand and insult a child who does not understand a Talmudic problem, he berates him by calling him a Maciek, adding poyer eyner (you peasant). Behind the Polish diminutive Maciek lurks the image of the clumsy and stupid peasant who was commonly an object of contempt in Jewish society. The gap between the learned Jew and the simple peasant is emphasized when a respected Hasid works as a woodchopper in order to demonstrate his contempt for the ideas current in traditional Jewish society. In his community's eyes he has lowered himself to the level of the poyer (peasant) who is the only one really suited to do such work. Elsewhere, a stingy Jewish peasant who watches obsessively over every penny is considered to be living ‘arger, lehavdl, fun a goy (worse, forgive the expression, than a goy). (Shmeruk “Jews” 178-9)

Jews did not encounter only Polish peasants, but also Polish nobility. In Jewish folklore and literature, Polish noblemen are often amoral beasts who ruin themselves, their peasants, Jews, and Poland, through greed and irrational spending (Bartal 59, 68-9). Scholar Israel Bartal reported that gentile aristocrats were portrayed as sexual threats in Yiddish literature: 59

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“the Polish nobleman represents the uncleanness, the lust, and the violent nature of the gentile world. The Polish noblewoman is the epitome of sexual attractiveness and lasciviousness, and can be resisted by the Jew only with difficulty” (Bartal 62). Bartal quoted passages from Peretz in which a young Polish radical expressed a sexual interest, glossed by Peretz as violently disruptive to Jewish life, in a Jewish woman, and a description of Polish noblewomen driving out in full regalia, Cossacks in tow, in order to search the countryside for “comely” Jewish men who are too overawed to resist their splendor. Jews were to serve as teachers to these inferior Poles. Gershon Hundert quotes Hayyim Hayyke ben Aharon's 1770 work Sefer seror ha-hayyim, republished in 1908: “the residents of Poland were immoral in their ways and the noblemen saw that the Jews were restrained. So they brought the Jews to this country to learn from their deeds” (Hundert “Agency” 85-6). A memoir of Jewish life in early twentieth-century Poland describes Jewish attitudes toward Polish farmers. “We looked down on the small farmer, whom we called Cham, which was an old traditional way of saying Am Haaretz (people of the earth), which to us meant simpletons” (Wells 3). In this worldview, Poles and Jews were opposites. Poles were earthy; Jews were intellectual. Poles were ammei ha-aretz, people of the earth. Jews were am ha-sefer, people of the book. From early childhood the farmers' children were involved in farm projects, helping their parents graze the cows and sheep, feeding and riding horses, and living with dogs and cats in their homes, whereas we were completely estranged from animal life … even in our childhood play we were different. We young Jewish boys did not take part in any sports as this was considered goish. (Wells 4)

Germans, who, like Jews, had a large urban population, were assessed as superior to Poles, who were the inferior “people of the earth.” The Jews … spoke about the good old days under Austrian rule … Our parents … spoke with pride about the superiority of German culture and its people compared to the Polish culture … Our mothers, having 60

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been educated during the Austrian occupation, proudly spoke about their “westernized culture.” To show off their refined education they quoted German poets such as Goethe, Schiller, and Lessing … German sayings and philosophical statements were also very much in vogue. To be able to quote a German writer like Heine was to show one's elevated status … I remember when the Jews spoke among themselves about the future under the Nazi regime: “Under the Germans it couldn't be so bad as the press wants us to believe because they are the leading civilized nation.” (Wells 8-10)

Jewish folklore provides many expressions of an understanding of a stereotypical Jewish identity, and its opposite identity expressed by Poles, being the product, not of changing and changeable human choices in response to cultural and geopolitical circumstance, but, rather, as the reflection of a spiritual essence. The “Jewish soul” is intellectual, spiritual, non-violent, and family-oriented. The Polish soul is stupid and brutal. In this understanding, the Pole may have been invented by God in order to punish Jews. English author and Zionist Israel Zangwill (18641926) wrote: “Beware of the goyim … drunkards and bullies, swift with the fist or the bludgeon, many in species, but all engendered of God for our sins” (Gonen 131). Justification for this belief was found in the Bible: Jacob came to symbolize the Jews and Esau the gentiles. Thus, an image of contrasting roles was formed whereby the Jews were supposed to use their heads and the gentiles their muscles … These role distinctions received expression in a folksong by the poet Bialik. In this song, while Jacob spends his time praising the Lord and devoting himself to his family, Esau spends his time drinking and beating his wife. Thus, the superior Jew uses his head in a variety of worthwhile pursuits, both divine and mundane, while the inferior gentile uses his hands in degrading activities. (Gonen 135)

An example of the motif of the Jewish soul and the Polish soul can be found in an anthology of interwar Polish-Jewish literature. In one story, the only daughter of a rich Jew was married to an unattractive yeshiva 61

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student. On her wedding night, she had carnal thoughts of the pig dealer, Maksim, a Pole. As the product of this biological and spiritual act grew up, it became clear that he was not a Jew. “He does not act like Jew … [he] learns ‘coarse Polish songs’” (Shmeruk “Jews” 181). The Baal Shem Tov himself, the founder of Hasidism, was called upon to exorcise the Polish soul from the Jewish body. He did so; the Polish soul was exorcised, the Jewish soul retrieved and placed in the body, and the boy began to behave like a Jew. This story is not unique; there are other stories with this theme (Shmeruk “Jews” 181). Sally, 30, a Ph.D. candidate, said, “Jewish souls sometimes get into other bodies. Anybody who converts has a Jewish soul. I learned that from my mom when I was very young.” Sally, when asked, answered that she has a Jewish soul. In his book Postville, Stephen Bloom recorded encounters, in late twentieth-century Iowa, with Hasidic Jews who understood the violent criminal career of one of their members as the expression of a non-Jewish soul. The criminal's biological parents were not Jewish, though he had been adopted as a child and raised by strictly observant, Orthodox Jews. When Bloom asked an Orthodox Jew about the criminal's actions, his interlocutor said, “Vonce a goy, always a goy” (Bloom 263). Polish-Jewish relations are profoundly complex. The Bieganski stereotype is one feature of Jewish understandings of Poles. It is not the only feature. Isaac Bashevis Singer, quoted twice above, produced one of the loveliest literary portraits of a Polish worker ever committed to the page. Most Poles have not been Nobel-Prize-winning chemists like Marie Curie, elite artists like Chopin, or popes like Karol Wojtyla. Most Poles have been the kind of peasants and workers who hold up the sky over luckier people. To truly honor them, one must penetrate their worlds, challenges, and vows. Singer's literary memoir of his early twentieth century Warsaw childhood, In My Father's Court, includes a profoundly vivid and eloquent salute to a Pole. Singer saw a washwoman for what she was, and honored her for it. His portrait is all the more remarkable given the limited contact young Singer would have had with such a person. In fact, as with the Polish 62

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peasant identified only as “our farmer” who helped a Jewish man survive the Holocaust (Datner), Singer's washwoman is nameless. Contact between orthodox Jews and common Poles was often limited to contact between servants (Poles) and the served ( Jews). As Singer wrote, Our home had little contact with Gentiles. The only Gentile in the house was the janitor. Fridays he would come for a tip, his “Friday money.” He remained standing at the door, took off his hat, and my mother gave him six groschen. (Singer, Court 29)

And there was the washwoman. She was a small woman, old and wrinkled. When she started washing for us she was already past seventy. Most Jewish women of her age were sickly, weak, broken in body … But this washwoman, small and thin as she was, possessed a strength that came from generations of peasant forebears … Every piece of linen sparkled like polished silver. Every piece was ironed … The old woman could have begged at the church door or entered a home for the indigent aged. But there was in her a certain pride and a love of labor with which the Gentiles have been blessed. The old woman did not want to become a burden, and thus she bore her burden. (29-30)

The old woman liked the young lad. She told him he looked like Jesus. His mother cursed this compliment. But his mother got along with her, too. They sat and gossiped together. A favorite theme was one universally beloved by mothers, no matter their creed: the ingratitude of children. Singer detailed the terrible burden the old washwoman faced in an era without indoor plumbing or even a place safe from thieves to hang laundry. Then, one severe winter day, when the woman was almost eighty, Singer's mother gave the washwoman a load. As Singer reported, she'd have to carry this load, on foot, for an hour and a half walk home. The bundle was big, bigger than usual. When the woman placed it on her shoulders, it covered her completely. At first she swayed, as though she were about to fall under the load. But an inner obstinacy seemed to 63

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call out: No, you may not fall … It was fearful to watch the old woman staggering out with the enormous pack, out into the frost, where the snow was dry as salt and the air was filled with dusty white whirlwinds, like goblins dancing in the cold. (32-3)

The old Polish washwoman disappeared. The Jewish household mourned, “for the laundry and for the old, toilworn woman who had grown so close to us through the years she had served us so faithfully” (33). Then, two months later, more gaunt, showing signs of perhaps a stroke or Parkinson's disease, the old woman returned. “She had been so sick that someone had called a doctor, and the doctor had sent for a priest.” A coffin was bought, a funeral planned. But, “I could not rest easy in my bed because of the wash,” the old woman explained. “The wash would not let me die.” And so she lived long enough, but just that long, to return the Jewish household's linens, sparkling like polished silver. After that she never came back. The wash she had returned was her last effort on this earth. She had been driven by an indomitable will to return the property to its rightful owners, to fulfill the task she had undertaken. And now at last the body, which had long been no more than a broken shard supported only by the force of honesty and duty, had fallen. The soul passed into those spheres where all holy souls meet, regardless of the roles they played on this earth, in whatever tongue, of whatever creed. I cannot imagine Eden without this washwoman. I cannot even conceive of a world where there is no recompense for such effort. (34)

Chapter Two

Bieganski in the Press

When addressing charges of anti-Semitism, academics and the press deploy importantly different narrative techniques depending on the ethnic identity of the accused. A comparison of treatments of the convent in Oswiecim, Poland, and the Khalid Abdul Muhammad speech at Kean College demonstrates this. All of the magazine articles listed in the 1989 and 1993-1994 Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature and all of the 1989 and 1993-1994 New York Times articles from LexisNexis pertaining to the convent and the Muhammad speech constitute the data for this chapter's comparison of these two events' treatments. In attempting to make a point about the treatment of Poles in narrative produced by academics and journalists, this chapter will refer to treatment of a control group, African Americans. The Muhammad controversy was chosen because of its many parallels with the convent controversy. Both occurred as part of a constellation of events prompting accusations of anti-Semitism. The accused in both cases were members of a stigmatized minority who had reason to feel ill-used and misunderstood by the press and academe. Both involved clashes between members of world religions. Both African Americans and Jews and Poles and Jews were portrayed as sharing important histories of suffering and struggle. The two controversies occurred within a few years of each other, and significant dramatis personae played roles in both. 65

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Mainstream Press Coverage of Khalid Abdul Muhammad's Speech at Kean College and Attendant Controversies In November, 1993, Khalid Abdul Muhammad, of the Nation of Islam, made a speech at Kean College in New Jersey. He said, inter alia, that Jews were not related to the main characters in the Bible, who were black (although, somehow, black Jesus' killers were Jews), that Jews hold economic, cultural, and political control of American and African blacks, which they use to torment and oppress blacks, that Jews were responsible for the Holocaust because of their obnoxious behavior in Germany, that Jews control the press worldwide, and that Jewish involvement in the Civil Rights Movement was a ploy to get blacks killed. These charges were leveled in non-standard, frequently obscene and contemptuous language. For example, when Muhammad accused Jews of controlling the world gem trade, he said, “That's why you call yourself Mr. Rubenstein, Mr. Goldstein, Mr. Silverstein. Because you been stealing rubies and gold and silver ... we say it real quick and call it jewelry, but it's not jewelry, it's Jew-elry, ‘cause you're the rogue that's stealing all over the face of the planet earth.” When ridiculing Jewish involvement in the Civil Rights movement, Muhammad imitated a Yiddish accent. Muhammad, in future speeches, called for death to all Jews: “Never will I say I am not an antiSemite. I pray that God will kill my enemy and take him off the face of the planet Earth” (ADL, McFadden 1994). Jews and others asked African American leaders to repudiate ties to Muhammad, the Nation of Islam, and its leader, Louis Farrakhan. Supporters of the Nation of Islam and NOI itself increased verbal attacks on Jews. Howard University sponsored a Jew-baiting speech; the Washington Post's Richard Cohen compared it to a Nazi rally (Corry 1994, 53). Benjamin Chavis, head of the NAACP, defied calls for him to denounce Farrakhan, and invited Farrakhan to an NAACP leadership summit. Muhammad's speech occurred at a time of tensions between African Americans and Jews. In 1991, African Americans in Crown Heights 66

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participated in an action, often labeled a “pogrom.” After one participant yelled, “There's a Jew; get the Jew,” Yankel Rosenbaum, a Jewish scholar, was stabbed in the street. His confessed killer was acquitted, released, and taken out to a celebratory dinner with jurors, only two of whom were white; none were Jewish (Vinegrad). Academics Leonard Jeffries and Tony Martin made anti-Semitic statements. Howard University turned away a scheduled Jewish guest speaker (Holmes 4/16/94). Mainstream press articles about Muhammad's speech and attendant controversies are so formulaic that they appear more like the scripture of some obsessive religious doctrine than the result of a free and vigorous press. One of the refrains of this formula was reference to black suffering. Some listed: “drugs, violence, high rates of teen-age pregnancy, poor schooling and poor discipline”(Holmes 2/1/94); “unemployment, alienation, drugs, violence, health care, education, and lack of economic opportunity” “poverty, hopelessness, and despair” (Chavis 3/16/94); “drugs, poverty, hopelessness and crime” (Terry 7/13/94); “crime, poverty, and inequality” (Chavis 7/12/94); “drugs, poverty, and bitterness” (Terry 6/13/94); “misery, drugs, crime, poverty, and dying hope” (Terry 6/11/94) “bitterness, alienation, and mistrust” (Shore 1994); “the bank that refuses to lend a dime to the inner city to the boy who lives next door and carries a pistol, a crack vial and a heart turned to stone by disappointment and hopelessness” (Terry 7/10/94). Other articles recounted black suffering in more intimate detail, often using vivid anecdotes: “The teen-ager pulled up his shirt to show the bandage on his lean belly and the round hole on his back that had been sealed shut. He had been shot the other week, walking down the street to buy a hamburger” (Terry 7/13/94). “The year was 1948 and the laws of segregation were in full force. For Muqaddin, who is black, it was a shattering experience that left him seething with rage against white America.” A Black Muslim woman was asked to remove her veil while shopping in a mall. The woman reported: “she was ‘humiliated’ by the encounter with the St. Paul police, who forced her to uncover her face. ‘I don't want men lusting after the way I look or sound. It's like someone 67

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else being made to pull down their undershorts in public’” (The Christian Century 10/26/94). Many references to black suffering went without amplifying commentary. The reader was invited to use his own devices to weigh black suffering in some ethical scale against anti-Semitism. Other writers offered more guidance, and advanced complex rationalizations as to why black suffering ought either to dilute or erase focus on anti-Semitism. Notre Dame American Studies chairman Robert Schmuhl spun references to black suffering into support for Ishmael Reed's argument that the real story was the threat to blacks and Jews posed by white Christians (Schmuhl 1994). The Times argued that since blacks were suffering so much, they needed to embrace and support each other, regardless of ideology (Holmes 2/1/94). The Times pointed out that blacks, consumed by their suffering, might be “too politically unsophisticated” to differentiate between ideologies (Greenberg 5/23/94). Writer Thulani Davis repeated this view in Time (1994, 30). An African American woman in The Times was quoted as saying that blacks don't know enough about Jews, and need to be given a chance to learn (Gonzalez 1994). One African American woman was quoted as saying that since African Americans faced so many threats from white society, it was necessary to choose a force that could protect them, and that that force was the Nation of Islam, regardless of its racism (Marriott 1994). This need for protection was also stated in The Christian Century (10/26/94). USA Today argued that black suffering made blacks hate all whites, not just Jews (Shore 1994). The Humanist argued that the traumas of slavery created a mythic vacuum that NOI was filling (Shore 1994). Benjamin Chavis, in the Times, argued that the suffering of blacks “has created an ... alarming chasm of attitudes and perceptions”; thus, whites could not judge people so different from themselves (Chavis 7/12/94). He also explicitly stated that black suffering, not the racism of NOI, was the real story, the story the press should be covering. This was repeated in several articles, by several authors, including in Time and Maclean's, and by Rabbi Michael Lerner (Gaines 2/28/94; Bruning 2/28/94; Lerner 2/28/94, 31). 68

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Great care was taken to avoid condemnatory headlines and to provide headlines that strove to represent “both sides,” without, somehow, stressing that one side was eliminationist anti-Semitism. With the use of such headlines and such “balance,” America's mainstream press changed the story. Muhammad's anti-Semitism was not the issue on which focus needed to be trained; focus needed to be trained, rather, on an effort to hear the “other side.” An article in which Farrakhan alluded to blood libel and a Jewish conspiracy to destroy him was headlined, “Farrakhan Softens Tone” (Nordheimer 3/30/94). Focus was turned from Muhammad to a presumed double standard. In 1993, Senator Ernest Hollings made a weak off-the-cuff joke: “Everybody likes to go to Geneva. I used to do it for the Law of the Sea conference and you'd find these potentates from down in Africa, you know, rather than eating each other, they'd just come up and get a good square meal in Geneva.” When confronted with Muhammad's speech, reporters, politicians, and prominent people repeatedly compared it to Hollings' joke (e.g. The Nation 2/28/94; Holmes 2/13/94; Alter 2/14/94). Other comparisons appeared. The Progressive compared Muhammad to David Duke. Shelby Steele, in the Times, compared him to Vladimir Zhironovsky, Meir Kahane and the KKK. Bob Herbert in the Times compared him to “[Theodore G.] Bilbo and [George] Wallace in blackface.” Henry Louis Gates, also in the Times, summoned memories of those who watched Kitty Genovese die and repeated a vivid quote by a rabbi at Baruch Goldstein's funeral: “One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.” New York magazine ran one issue with two covers; one featured an anti-Semitic NOI preacher; the other, conservative radio personality Bob Grant. The magazine's editor-in-chief, Kurt Anderson, said, “This idea of parallel covers began to make sense and seemed like a way to demonstrate that they go full circle to illustrate the different strident ends of the spectrum” (The New York Times 10/19/94). These comparisons were not buried towards the end of articles, but appeared up front, to confront the reader head-on. The important event to focus on was not the anti-Semitism of a black man, a member of a minority group, and therefore, a potential “other” for the reader, but 69

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racism in general, a human problem, and something the reader could not distance himself from and feel superior about. The New York Times entitled one Muhammad-inspired editorial, not with a headline condemning all blacks, or typifying black culture as diagnostically anti-Semitic, but with a more general headline: “The Stew of Hate.” The lead sentence was, again, not condemnatory of black culture, it did not report an anecdote about black anti-Semites; in fact, it made no reference to blacks at all: “Religious and racial bigotry never recede entirely, witness the ebb and flow of Klan membership” (The New York Times 2/6/94). Properly handled, such rhetorical ploys can serve several ethical and logical purposes. They remind the reader that crime is not the exclusive property of one group. Though Khalid Abdul Muhammad is a hatemonger, these ploys point out, not all hatemongers are black. By mentioning WASP, Jewish, and other hatemongers, these articles remind their readers that many — perhaps the readers themselves — cultivate hatred. By locating the crime in the reader, and not in an “other,” the crime is, potentially, brought closer to being understood and combated, and the creation of a scapegoated ethnic other is avoided. In addition to blurring the borders of Muhammad's specific antiSemitism into the more general problem of hatred and relocating it from one individual to something all of us must attend to, publications engaged in a contrary tactic: anti-Semitism among African Americans was dismissed as unworthy of note. “Less news than soap opera” comparable to the competition between figure skaters Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding, reported a political science professor (Reed 1994). “Just a pimple” said Franklyn Jenifer, president of Howard College, in US News and World Report (Schrof 1994). “I don't get so upset by Farrakhan,” yawned Michael Lerner in Time. Jews are never mentioned in the annual Ebony poll of urgent issues, sociology professor Raymond Mack reminded his readers (Mack 1994). “Forget Farrakhan” ran a headline in the Times, under which Bob Herbert advised: “It's time to turn to other matters” (Herbert 6/15/94). The mainstream press used cautious and trivializing vocabulary to report anti-Semitism among African Americans. Maclean's trivialized: 70

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“the Jews took a special shellacking, not much of a surprise” (Bruning). Professor Doris Wilkinson asked whether or not it was even possible that there be such a thing as “black anti-Semitism.” Others placed “black antiSemitism” in quotes (e.g. Reed 1994). In the lead sentence of one article, the Times reported that “Black racism” is, for some blacks, “a laughable oxymoron” (Holmes 2/13/94). Rather than opening with accusations or summations of presumed guilt, articles began with “balanced” rhetorical questions, as in this profile of the leader who invited Farrakhan to an NAACP summit: “Who is Benjamin Chavis Jr., and what in the world is he trying to do to the venerable NAACP? Is he a brash and brilliant innovator, pumping life into a sclerotic organization whose glory days are past and whose current relevance is questioned? Or is he an unrepentant radical and a peripatetic neophyte?” (Holmes 4/16/94). When Farrakhan made classically anti-Semitic statements, echoing blood libel: “The same people opposed to [ Jesus] are opposed to me. It's the Passover season. It's the right time,” the Times said merely that these statements “may register on many ears as patently anti-Semitic” (Nordheimer 3/30/94). Time said that Farrakhan “appeared” to be putting down other people; that he was “misunderstood” (Monroe 1994; Henry 1994). Statistics and anecdotes were cited to indicate that black anti-Semites were not representational of the black population. This in spite of other statistics that showed that African Americans are more anti-Semitic than the general population, and unlike the general population, become more anti-Semitic as they become more educated (Puddington 1994). Howard, said a student, had been “totally misrepresented ... most students were mortified by” campus supporters of Muhammad who invited him to campus, applauded his speech enthusiastically, and put on a “Nazi” like rally (Schrof 1994). Sociology professor Raymond Mack reported that NOI constituted “less than .05 percent of the black population ... hardly a mass movement” (Mack 1994). The Times reported that NOI “is a fringe group with negligible political and economic power” (Holmes 2/13/94). Times’ columnist Anna Quindlen focused on actor Danny Glover's appearance before “1,000 people — almost 10 times the number that heard Mr. Muhammad” (Quindlen 1994). A Times' headline stated 71

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simply: “Poll Says Most Blacks Don't See Farrakhan's Ideas as Theirs” (Kagay 1994). Howard President Jenifer was accorded space on the Times editorial page to say “Those who express anti-Semitic views on our campus are totally unrepresentative of the university as a whole” ( Jenifer 5/13/94). Another headline was accorded to Howard: “Howard University Is Stung by Portrayal as Anti-Semitic” (Holmes 4/21/94). The Times also ran an attractive photo of the “stung” students. In response to young blacks who taunted Hasidic Jews with “Heil Hitler,” church-going blacks were offered the opportunity to say, in the Times, that such slurs were “not representative of the larger black community, which rejected such hateful language” (Gonzalez 1994). Time dismissed the importance of Muhammad's Kean speech, which had occurred before only “a few dozen students” (Farley 1994). Reports flooded the press of African Americans who were not antiSemitic. US News and World Report and The New York Times focused on Vera Katz, a Jewish professor at Howard, who said she could not recall ever having encountered anti-Semitism among black students (Schrof 1994; Holmes 3/4/94). Colin Powell's speech at Howard, which condemned Howard's “Nazi” rally, was covered (Toner 1994). The Times devoted extensive coverage to an African-American woman in New Jersey who studied Hebrew and had a mezuzah nailed to her door (Liberman 1994). Nat Hentoff in The Progressive remarked that the only one to challenge Muhammad at his Kean speech was a black student. Articles about anti-Semitism among African Americans, as a review of the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature and the New York Times Index shows, occurred within the context of a rich and varied flood of articles about African American life. On the very same Readers' Guide page of references for articles about the Muhammad controversy, the researcher can also find articles about Black Motion Picture Directors, Black Leadership, Black Mayors, Black Married Couples, Black Musicians, Black Literature, etc. A researcher seeking articles about Muhammad's speeches in the Times Index must plow through hundreds of listing about Black art, Black social renewal, Black potters, Black spirituals, Black scientists, etc. Not only would the reader of articles about anti-Semitism among African 72

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Americans be introduced to the idea that not all haters are black, the reader would also quickly acquire enough information to conclude that not all blacks are haters. The media covering anti-Semitism among African Americans did not probe with the alacrity it showed in the convent controversy. Muhammad's speech would never have become a news item had the press been left to its own devices; only pressure from the ADL (Anti-Defamation League) and Jesse Jackson made it news (Diamond 1994). A history of African American racism and fascism went uncovered in the mainstream press, as a letter writer to the Times pointed out (Murray, H. 1994). Prominent African Americans, like authors Richard Wright and James Baldwin, who had recorded and attempted to rationalize an anti-Semitism of long standing among blacks, went unmentioned. Some insisted that anti-Semitism among African Americans was a media invention; Schmuhl used that approach as the main thrust of his argument (Schmuhl 1994). He quoted Ishmael Reed, “I have never heard any of my neighbors make an anti-Semitic remark” (46). Sociology professor Doris Wilkinson presented the argument that blacks were “programmed” and “set up;” that “anti-Semitism is, by definition a white term” that “African Americans did not create” (49-50). “‘Anglo-Saxons have blacks saying all of these silly things about Jews’” (1994, 48) she quoted a friend as theorizing. Benjamin Chavis, under the trivializing headline, “The Farrakhan Sideshow,” said, “our story of progress has been distorted by a media frenzy” (Chavis 7/12/94). Reports of anti-Semitism among African Americans were, it was posited, part of a hidden, nefarious, anti-black agenda. Various theories were advanced. Charles Rangel suggested that the ADL might have been milking Muhammad's speech for money and publicity. The Amsterdam News accused the ADL of “willful and cynical exploitation of a people for the purpose of raising money from Jews by frightening them” (Puddington 1994). Michael Lerner also suggested that Jews were using accusations of anti-Semitism among African Americans, in this case as “an excuse to deny our own racism toward blacks” and as “justification for some Americans to declare themselves ‘disillusioned with the oppressed’” and to cut social 73

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programs for the poor (Lerner 2/28/94, 31-34). The Times repeated this; charges of African American anti-Semitism were allegedly “an excuse for doing little to reduce inequalities” (Holmes 2/13/94). Writer Thulani Davis, in Time, wrote that accusations of anti-Semitism among African Americans were “attempts to set the terms of the discussion of racial conflict solely on African American xenophobia. Like all litmus tests, this one is reductive and promotes self defense rather than thought and disclosure.” The Progressive also denounced the application of litmus tests to African Americans in a way that they are not applied to whites. “Black people ... must prove that they deserve basic protections accorded automatically to all other citizens” (Reed 1994). The Nation said that litmus tests applied to blacks create “a residue of resentment and defensiveness that continues to pollute race relations” (The Nation 2/28/94). Davis also pointed out that in the litmus test atmosphere, “African Americans do not even feel comfortable to debate in public ... in such a delicate public discussion it is dangerous to risk having words taken out of context, ideas abbreviated into unrecognizable and harmful sound bites ... If the issue is used simply to identify enemies, few will step forward.” Davis further stated that media reports of anti-Semitism among African-Americans were part of a wider effort to create negative images of black people that fed off of whites' fears of “black hate.” “Black hate, though, is only a new wrinkle in the increasingly negative portrayal of blacks as a whole,” she wrote. This fear of black hate is taught to “each group of new immigrants settling in the big cities of America” (Davis 1994, 29). A letter to the Times denounced as “racist” and “paternalistic” A.M. Rosenthal's request that blacks denounce Muhammad. Rosenthal, implied the writer, was not just to blame for his whiteness, he was also a parvenu who told African-Americans, “in their own country” “what to do and say ... even by those that just arrive on these shores” (Ibidunni 1994). Muhammad himself, in a SUNY address, said that white racists were using him in a divide-and-conquer strategy aimed at weakening African Americans (The New York Times 2/11/94). Farrakhan repeated this 74

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claim; racists were trying to “destroy hope in the black community that was created by our budding but fragile unity” (Holmes 2/4/94). New York State Senator (subsequently Governor) David Paterson said that history showed that whites had used this ploy before to injure blacks (Paterson 1994). Benjamin Chavis repeatedly used this accusation to justify his association with NOI, at least once in a Times editorial (e.g. Chavis 3/16/94; 7/12/94; 6/15/94; Terry 6/15/94). Chavis and others sometimes used emotional language to support the equation of acceptance of NOI with justice for black people: “There's a yearning, an outcry, for unity. There's a yearning, an outcry, that justice be done ... we have locked arms, and our circle will not be broken” (Terry 6/15/94). The Humanist reminded its readers, “African-Americans, like any group that feels vulnerable, are extremely reluctant to turn on any of their leaders, particularly those who offer a vision of dignity and self-respect” who “bring meaning into their lives” (Shore 7-8/94). Time also condemned a “white racism” which expected blacks to criticize “black leaders” (Gaines 1994). Schmuhl argued that since black suffering had been caused by whites, blacks would support anyone who frightened their enemies. He quoted Taylor Branch: “‘Any black man who can make white America leap on its chair in fright or revulsion will win the generous admiration of suffering black America for the sheer guts of the deed’” (Schmuhl 44). In an editorial, the Times pointed out that it was important for a black man to show that he would not knuckle under to the demands of whites (The New York Times 6/1/94). Chavis played up this angle in quotes to the press: “It's not your responsibility to verify who our leaders are; it's our responsibility to verify who our leaders are” and “The NAACP will not be dictated to” (Terry 6/15/94; Kotlowitz 6/12/94). Finally, some hinted at a conspiracy in accusations of anti-Semitism among African Americans, e.g.: “I think there are larger forces at play here,” said Christopher Williams, a history professor at Medgar Evers College (Holmes 8/21/94). African Americans were depicted as victims of accusations of antiSemitism. Howard students, US News and World Report wrote, were losing job and internship offers because it had been, according to students, 75

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“Totally misrepresented” (Schrof 1994). The NAACP had to secure its meeting place forty-eight hours in advance of a meeting, according to Chavis (Terry 6/13/94). Scattered throughout news accounts of alleged anti-Semitism among African Americans were references to various death threats that the suspects had received. If black anti-Semites weren't all that important, or a media-created mirage, those accused were not all that bad. Articles about individuals or institutions suspect in the '94 wave of stories of anti-Semitism among African Americans often began with laudatory accounts of those in question. Howard University, in lead articles about its protective disinviting of a Jewish speaker and its “Nazi” rally, was not a racist institution, but, rather, in US News and World Report “the citadel of black academia” “perched atop one of the loftiest hills in the nation's capital,” which educated “emancipated slaves” and “influential alumni from Thurgood Marshall to Toni Morrison” (Schrof 1994). In the lead sentence of the Times account, Howard was “a cradle of black intellectual and cultural life,” educator of Douglas Wilder, Toni Morrison, and Jessye Norman. This roll call was performed in other Howard articles (e.g. Holmes 4/21/94). In an editorial, Howard President Jenifer complained that “an institution with a 127 year tradition of decrying and opposing bigotry has found itself accused” ( Jenifer 5/13/94). When the NAACP embraced Farrakhan, the Times editorial page responded to criticism with accounts of the organization's prestige: “The NAACP has been central to the quest for racial equality for more than half a century. Its efforts in such landmark cases as Brown v. Board of education have contributed mightily to the common good” (The New York Times 8/23/94). Black anti-Semites had a heartwarming side, which the press was sure to record. Time's cover issue on Farrakhan displayed photos of “Farrakhan, an accomplished violinist, entertain[ing] his family at home,” Farrakhan “praying at home” Farrakhan's “ornate” home, with its “garden, fountain, and a weight room,” and NOI members attempting to close a crack house (Time 2/28/94). African Americans and Jews shared a mythic historical bond, according to mainstream press accounts of anti-Semitism among African Americans. 76

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The most heart-wrenching evocation of this history was written by Bob Herbert in The Times. He interviewed the mother of slain Jewish Civil Rights hero, Andrew Goodman (Herbert 6/26/94). The Times again evoked the shared history of Jews and blacks in at least one other editorial (The New York Times 3/7/94). Israel deputized its consul general to form ties with African Americans. In her speeches, she drew comparisons between blacks and Jews, announcing that they had “common roots of faith and justice.” Comparing Job to Martin Luther King, she said blacks and Jews “ought to be natural allies” (Gonzalez 7/16/94). Time also emphasized the shared history of blacks and Jews, and quoted Roger Wilkins' assessment that WASPs, not blacks, were the real oppressors of Jews (Farley 1994). A shared historical bond between blacks and Jews was the main thrust of a thrice-published Paul Berman essay. Photos brought home alliances between blacks and Jews, including one of Vera Katz and her Howard students in U.S. News and World Report and one of Michael Lerner and Dr. Cornel West in The New York Times. If nothing else, black anti-Semites kept the trains running on time. The Times published a series of “balanced” articles describing NOI's “Ministry of Hope; Message of Hate.” NOI has “few problems with the city authorities,” readers were assured. NOI has a reputation for “turning desperate men away from a life of crime” (Terry 3/3/94). “Muslim Leaders on L. I. Temper Rhetoric and Focus on Local Social Problems” another Times headline reported. Qualities alarmist whites had called for in the black community — discipline and commitment to their families — were supplied by NOI, according to another Times article (Ruby 1994). White fears of blacks were addressed by Islam, said The Christian Century: “I was able to get past my anger by seeing a future ... and that future was God,” reported one previously violent Muslim. Too, NOI was anti-drug (The Christian Century 10/26/94). Time also praised NOI for its anti-drug, pro-dignity stance. Time admired NOI's all American “bootstrap message of independence and self-reliance.” It praised NOI for being able to “turn around lost lives” (Henry 2/28/94). When Time sat Farrakhan down for an interview, its first question was not, “Why is your organization disseminating the same kind of anti-Semitism that plunged the world 77

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into war and resulted in six million murdered?” But, rather, “What is the message that the NOI is imparting to African Americans?” and “How does the NOI take a person who has hit bottom with drugs or alcohol or crime and remake that person?” (Monroe 1994). In reports of Muhammad's speech and attendant controversies, Jews are fully empowered human beings, capable of action. The Jew in convent stories is typified by a photo published worldwide of Rabbi Weiss being doused with water. In this photo, the Jew is spiritual — clad in a prayer shawl, inactive — standing still, and a defenseless victim of “brutal” Poles. Such images could have been provided in coverage of Muhammad. The very same Rabbi Weiss of the dousing photo, in a letter to the Times, described a terrifying incident in which he and three followers, quietly standing behind police barricades, were menaced by eighty Farrakhan supporters. Not only was Weiss not protected by American police officers in his own country, and a democracy, but the police ordered Weiss to leave the area (Weiss 2/2/94). No photos of this incident appeared in the international press; in fact, the press didn't even report it. Other images were provided: images of Jews and blacks interacting. U.S. News and World Report gave us Vera Katz animatedly teaching enthralled Howard students; in the Times Michael Lerner and Cornel West powwowed. Time invented its own images: pen and ink drawings in which black and Jewish cartoons consumed each other in a circle, Jews with barbed wire hair cast baleful glances at blacks with toothed eyes, and angry faces joined to form a star of David. In these illustrations, both blacks and Jews are active haters, capable of doing damage, although they illustrate coverage of a black man's hatemongering against Jews. This trend of Jews as participants in, rather than victims of, black-Jewish relations veered into victim blaming. Blaming Jews for the anti-Semitism of blacks goes back at least to Michael Lerner's 1969 manifesto in Judaism, where he wrote: “black anti-Semitism ... is ... a tremendous disgrace to Jews, for this is ... rooted in the concrete fact of oppression by Jews of blacks in the ghetto. In short, this anti-Semitism is in part an earned antiSemitism” (Lerner 475 1969). Lerner was ready with similar accusations to explain anti-Semitism among African Americans in 1994: “Jewish 78

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neoconservatives at Commentary and neoliberals at the New Republic have led the assault on affirmative action;” and Jews have “delighted in the prospect of throwing black women and children off welfare as soon as possible” (Lerner 2/28/94). Others also blamed Jewish opposition to affirmative action for alienating blacks (e.g. Wilkinson 1994; Klausner 1994). Many others probed historical interactions between blacks and Jews to find some justification or explanation for anti-Semitism among African Americans which, in other places, they argued didn't exist or wasn't that upsetting. Paul Berman pointed his finger at Jewish housewives who were infamous for a lack of “genteel courtesy” to their black domestic help, and “hostile” Jewish landlords and storekeepers, “bad blood” over affirmative action, Israeli trade with South Africa, Jews “drowning out” blacks with talk of “Jewish suffering” Hasidic Jews chanting “back to Africa” and Jews pressuring Andrew Young to leave his U.N. post as causes of anti-Semitism among African Americans (Berman 1994). Doris Wilkinson reported that “some African Americans feel a sense of betrayal” by Jews in “the unending struggle for the actualization of democracy” (Wilkinson 1994, 49). Time spoke of Jewish militants who “shadowed” Jesse Jackson and delivered “death threats” against him. It reported that Jewish businessmen allegedly “torpedoed” a NOI toiletries business (Henry 1994). Smith sociology professor Peter Rose listed a similar line-up: Jewish storekeepers and usurers in black neighborhoods who had the audacity to use profits to move up. Jews were “paternalistic” towards blacks (Rose 1994, 38-39) “It is not hard to see how easily it could be asserted that what Jews accomplished could only be done by contrivance and connivance at the expense of those in the weakest power positions, like the blacks” (Rose 1994, 37). Black “man on the street” voices also blamed historical interactions in which Jews were more successful than blacks for anti-Semitism among African Americans. A student at a school hosting Muhammad said, “They do the dirty work. They're the lawyers, the tax collectors” (Purnick 1994). Jews, in this trend of reportage, are not immaculate victims about whom stereotypes are created and exchanged; they, too, are disseminators of stereotypes: 79

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Jokes exchanged on the mean streets of the old ghettoes and the whispered jibes made about the shvartzes ... [were] standard fare on the Borscht Circuit in the resorts of the Catskills and the clubs of the cities. It is still evident in the vulgar slurs, challenging political correctness, in Jackie Mason's latest Broadway show. Jews, so sensitive to slights and stereotypes themselves, were not — are not — exempt from criticism for their own prejudices. (Rose 1994, 38)

The above-described press coverage of the Muhammad speech and attendant controversies worked to avoid creating a scapegoated and stereotypical ethnic monster in the person of blacks or even identifiable black anti-Semites. Multiple complexities of anti-Semitic incidences and the wider African American community were sought out, exposed, and explored. Analysis of press treatment of a comparable controversy will reveal a very different process at work. The Pole as Ready-made Villain In 1984, Carmelite nuns moved into an abandoned theater near the Auschwitz concentration camp in Oswiecim, Poland. In 1985, statements by a Belgian group fundraising for the nuns were interpreted to mean that the nuns were praying for the conversion of Jews. Jewish groups began to protest. Catholic officials promised that the convent would be moved, but it was not. Rabbi Avraham Weiss and entourage attracted worldwide attention when, during a “non-violent” protest, they were ejected from the convent in a “revolting” and “anti-Semitic” action. The world press condemned Poland. Poland's primate, Cardinal Glemp, tried to present Poland's position in a sermon. This sermon was taken as evidence of Poland's “brutal and violent” anti-Semitism, as it was “resonant with ancient anti-Semitic canards” (Weiss 9/12/89). Mainstream press articles about the convent made use of condemnatory headlines that identified Polish identity with guilt for antiSemitism; no room was left for Poles, any Poles, to be proven innocent. Examples include: “The Problem That Won't Go Away: Anti-Semitism in Poland (Again)” (Brumberg 1989); “The Ghosts of an Ancient Plague” 80

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(U.S. News and World Report 1989); “At Auschwitz, Decency Dies Again” (Wieseltier 1989); “In Poland, Face of Anti-Semitism Still Jeers” (New York Times 7/28/89) “Clamor in the East: Walesa's View of Glemp Irks Jewish Leaders” (Lewis, N. 1989); “Bridges Rise over Gaps of Ignorance as Polish Priests Experience Judaism” (Steinfels 1989). Words like “again,” “ancient,” and “still” locate anti-Semitism, and Poland, in the past. In this worldview, Poland's failure to become as modern as the West makes it an especially dangerous place. The articles that followed did not advance arguments that proved the accusations in the headlines. For example, the penultimate negative headline appeared above an article describing Lech Walesa's being given a standing ovation by leaders of seventy Jewish organizations and his kissing their gift to him of an Israeli vase and announcing his “love of Israel and the Jewish people.” The last headline on Polish “ignorance” appears over an article about a group of Polish priests who spoke, according to the article, better Hebrew than their Jewish hosts, who voiced warm appreciation for Judaism, and had conducted research in Israel. If anything, the article records Jewish prejudice toward Poles: Jews were surprised that the Poles were not as ignorant as they had expected them to be; some invited Jews boycotted the event in order to avoid contact with Poles. Initial placement of negative anecdotes further assumed and condemned as guilty any and all Poles. Readers may acknowledge, on some level, that isolated anecdotes, in and of themselves, prove nothing; however, when an article begins with an anecdote in which a Pole is portrayed as a brutal and irrational anti-Semite, the reader may be left with the unexamined impression that that anecdote is representational of a people. Tikkun's treatment of the convent controversy began with a quotation from an “irate” letter to a Polish newspaper in which the author complained about Jewish protests against the convent. The average American reader would have no way of knowing that “openly anti-Semitic” letters to the same paper Tikkun quoted constituted ten per cent, slightly less than the amount of the population who supported communist dictator and crusher of Solidarity, General Jaruzelski (Bartoszewski 1990, 129, 145). 81

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Ugly words, repeatedly associated with a people, change the nature of discourse, bypass intellectual thought processes and create or ignite hatred. Ugly words and canned accusations were often thrown at Poles and Poland in mainstream press reports of the controversy. Abraham Brumberg called Glemp's speech a “putrid anti-Semitic homily,” without informing the reader of anything Glemp said. Wieseltier called the convent “morbid;” Flora Lewis “ugly.” Brumberg summarized Polish-Jewish history as “a priest carrying a wooden cross who led drunken mobs bent on setting fire to Jewish homes and maiming and killing their inhabitants” (Brumberg 1990). The World Jewish Congress labeled Glemp's sermon “grotesque and hate filled;” said that “it reveals that an ugly vein of antiSemitism runs through the Polish church,” called it “brutal and violent,” and a “tragic blow,” though the speech contained no images of nor incitement to violence. Leon Klenicki, in Commonweal, labeled Glemp's sermon as “a sort of 1938 version of anti-Semitism,” again, without telling the reader what Glemp said or what relation it had to 1938, a year one would associate with Hitler. He went on to say that Polish culture was a source of “poison” which threatened more “successful” societies. Newsweek informed its readers that a particularly dangerous and permanently rooted phenomenon labeled “Polish anti-Semitism” was “rearing its ugly old head.” It called Glemp's sermon “vitriolic” and informed the reader that “old attitudes” reigned in Poland, where “Catholic Poles are still infused with insensitivity and outright anti-Semitism.” The reader will note words like “old” and “still” that suggest that anti-Semitism is a relic of the past. The New York Times psychoanalyzed an entire nation and informed its readers that the reason for “Polish anti-Semitism” is Polish “jealousy” of Jews (Steinfels 9/29/91). Flora Lewis voiced the concepts of evolution, progress and race theory when informing readers that antiSemitism in Eastern Europe is “atavistic” (Lewis, F. 1990b). “Atavism” is a concept from genetics. It refers to throwbacks to primitive, ancestral traits. In another column, she informed her readers that Glemp's speech was “shameful,” said that the presence of the convent was “an international disgrace,” blamed an “endemic persistence of anti-Semitism, even without Jews,” and explained that “There is too much history of anti-Semitism in 82

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Poland for all this to be set aside.” Leon Wieseltier called Glemp's speech “unreconstructed anti-Semitism.” Brumberg condemned Poland in the Times as well as Tikkun. Glemp's speech was “anti-Semitic demagoguery.” He identified Poland as the international source of “classic, unregenerate anti-Semitism.” James Wall inadvertently revealed that there is a lack of similar weighted vocabulary to hurl at haters of Poles. When, in the midst of the convent controversy, Yitzhak Shamir attempted to explain it with the racist summation: “Poles suckle anti-Semitism with their mother's milk,” Wall could only call this comment “anti-anti-Semitism,” instead of what it is: anti-Polonism. Glemp delivered his infamous sermon, not, as in Muhammad's case, without immediate or discernable provocation by Jews, but in response to the incredibly one-sided international press that Poland had received after Rabbi Weiss was ejected from the convent. Glemp behaved in accord with Polish socialization. He rushed to defend the honor of his long embattled motherland. He did not do this through violent images and calls for death to all Jews, or even by stirring up hatred through historical fabrications, as does NOI, for example, in its claim that Jews controlled the African slave trade and owned 75% of American slaves. Glemp did not deny or belittle Poland's debt to Jews, as Muhammad denied and ridiculed the debt African Americans owe to many Jews' participation in the Civil Rights struggle. Glemp began by announcing that Jews are “a member of the household” who had “enriched” Poland. But, he said, some Jews had also caused Poland difficulties. He acknowledged, too, that Poles had harmed Jews. Just as Berman, Lerner, and other American Jews, quoted above, attempted to understand anti-Semitism among African Americans using black-Jewish history, Glemp spoke frankly of Polish-Jewish history, including the role of Jewish innkeepers who had a monopoly on the sale of alcohol, and of the role Jews played in the Communist party. Unlike Berman and Lerner, who resorted to stereotypes of greedy Shylocks eager to throw black welfare mothers out into the cold, Glemp was referring to historical realities acknowledged by Jews and Poles alike. The Encyclopedia 83

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Judaica reports that Jews had a highly profitable monopoly on the sale of alcohol in much of Eastern Europe, and that that role did cause social tension (XVI 542-546). Agnieszka Holland, Polish film director and child of a Jewish father, has impatiently responded to anti-Polonism in the West by reminding ignorant or amnesiac Westerners that “The fact is there were Communist Jews who worked for the secret police after the war and tortured Polish patriots, and so on, and so on. Jews are not without guilt” (Cohen 1993). Glemp asked Jews not to use their “power in the mass media” to defame Poland. Visceral condemnation followed. Ironically, Glemp- and Polandbashing were epidemic during convent coverage, and many anti-Polonist letters and articles were written by Jews. The Times ran several anti-Glemp editorials, granting his sermon a grave importance that was denied NOI anti-Semitism. Glemp-bashing Times letters and editorials with bylines were all written by Jews (e.g. Brumberg 9/1/89; Levine 10/5/91; Lewis 9/3/89; Dershowitz 8/15/91; Rosenthal 9/29/89). No articles or even letters on Glemp's sermon by Polish Catholics were found either in LexisNexis or Readers' Guide. After the furor, Glemp did not clarify his position, as Muhammad did, by declaring, “Never will I say I am not an anti-Semite. I pray that God will kill my enemy and take him off the face of the planet Earth.” Instead, Glemp apologized frequently, attempted to explain what he was saying, and made special efforts to meet with Jews. Glemp explained that Jews had taught him why his comments had the potential to be harmful. Glemp renounced ever making such comments again. Glemp flew to London exclusively to meet with Jewish groups. Upon arrival in America, Glemp's first action was to meet with Jewish groups. Even after these efforts, his frequently mocked Polish surname — e.g. “Lead us not into Glemptation” — (The Economist 9/2/89) remains synonymous with the crime of anti-Semitism (e.g. Shore 1994). To bolster the press's chosen stereotype of Poles, Polish history needed to be rewritten, and it was. A Times letter typified many's response to the Weiss incident: “Polish workers at Auschwitz, beating the children of survivors of Auschwitz.” Poles themselves were not identified as 84

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potential “children of survivors of Auschwitz,” though between 140,000 and 150,000 Poles were imprisoned in Auschwitz. Roman Dmowski was treated as if he were Poland's most important inter-war leader (Warszawski 1989 29). This is not true; Josef Pilsudski, more pluralist, and described by Jews as a philo-Semite, was and is more popular. Warszawski twinned Dmowski with Catholicism. Dmowski was a prominent biologist and Social Darwinist; his relationship with the church began as “strained and ambiguous” (Plach 34). He was anti-clerical, and questioned whether a “universal” church could ever be patriotic. “He was also contemptuous of the ‘love thy enemy’ teaching of the Gospels, because his ideology was focused on a ‘struggle for survival’ doctrine.” Dmowski's eventual acceptance of Polish Catholicism was pragmatic (Porter-Szucs “Dmowski”). Klenicki argued that “Polish suffering is regarded as a counterpart to Jewish suffering.” This is not true. The figure of six million is taught to every school child, while “Polish anti-Semitism” is popularly treated as co-equal with Nazism as a cause of World War Two and the Holocaust, while Polish suffering under the Nazis is frequently unknown. Examples of this last point could be found throughout coverage of the convent; for example, Klenicki went on to say that “Poles were killed by accident” — this is utterly false. Klenicki identified the “Polish government” and its manipulations of history at Auschwitz as representational of Poles (Klenicki 1989, 522). Even those with only fundamental Polish language skills know the key difference that has evolved in Polish, under centuries of foreign oppression, between the words for “the state” and “the people.” Pope John Paul II, when he made it a point to say a special prayer at Auschwitz for Jews, was far more representational of the Polish people than the Soviet approved government could ever be. The New York Times distorted Polish realities in the same way, reporting that Poles had “deflected the requests of Jewish groups” for fifty years (6/17/92) to change tablets at Auschwitz. In fact, the tablets were changed less than three years after the fall of communism. In the Times, Wieseltier wrote as if the nuns themselves were praying for the conversion of Jews. In fact, the statement in question was made by a Belgian fundraising group. The statement itself is ambiguous, and can be taken to mean that the nuns 85

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were praying for lapsed Catholics, as the group who made the statement claimed (Fleischner). Wieseltier stated that non-Jews who died at Auschwitz did not die because of their identity, but died “a death invented for Jews ... they were the victims of a ‘solution’ designed for others.” In fact, though, non-Jews did die in gas chambers, and many groups, including Poles, Roma, aka Gypsies, the handicapped, and homosexuals, were also targeted for mass death by the Nazis. Weiss repeatedly misidentified the stated purposes of the convent as “one more campaign” of Catholic “mythologizing” of the Holocaust. Among Catholics, “there was only indifferent silence” (e.g. Weiss 12/21/89). Perhaps not among the twenty percent of Polish priests killed by Nazis, or the numerous Polish convents that sheltered Jewish children. Weiss' entry into the convent and subsequent ejection were treated as evidence of diagnostic Polish anti-Semitism and brutality. Reuters called it “one of the most revolting scenes of violence against Jews to take place in Poland for many years” (Bartoszewski 1990, 91). Time told readers that Jews were “roughed up” by “Polish workers” (Time 8/21/89). Newsweek also used “roughed up,” reported that “anti-Semitic slogans” (none quoted) were shouted and repeated Weiss' claim that workers had poured urine and paint on him; it ran the photo of a worker pouring liquid over Weiss' head. Weiss and his cohorts are in religious garb. The New York Times reported that Weiss was “punched and kicked.” The Times ran the infamous photo. It also reported that the protesters were dragged away while policemen and nuns did nothing to rescue them (Tagliabue 7/27/89). This final plot element was wrung for all it was worth by a letter writer to the Times: “What an apropos image this all is: Polish workers at Auschwitz, beating the children of survivors of Auschwitz, while ‘religious people’ look on silently” (Goldstein 8/12/89). Another letter writer compared this incident to “the jeering faces of Germans and Poles who watched Jews carted into Auschwitz forty-five years earlier” (Kramer 1989). The Weiss incident was not the only time that inflammatory photographs were used in convent stories. Newsweek readers need hardly have read its account of the Weiss incident to develop an indelible image 86

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of Poles as ignorant, uncivilized brutes and the source of all anti-Semitism. Newsweek ran a gruesome and gratuitous Holocaust photo of a pile of naked female skeletal corpses under a sneering snapshot of Glemp and the Weiss dousing photo. These photographs convey the message that Poles, not Nazis, are responsible for the Holocaust. With an atypically evenhanded article on Polish-Jewish history, the Times ran a year-old photo of a defaced Warsaw synagogue (Steinfels 9/29/91). Journalists and academics could have introduced the complex facts of Polish Jewish relations into coverage of the convent controversy. They did not. Instead, they relied on stereotypes. Paul Berman managed to publish not once but at least thrice, once in an introduction for a book that would go on to serve as a text in college courses, the claim that life for Jews in “darkest Poland” was comparable to life for blacks in precivil rights era Mississippi. The phrase “darkest Poland,” is, of course, a highly suggestive echo of the book title In Darkest Africa, by Sir Henry Morton Stanley. In choosing “darkest Poland,” Berman economically communicated his attitude toward Poland, and the assumption that his audience will not object to his racism. While Jews in coverage of Muhammad's speech and attendant controversies were portrayed as three-dimensional human beings capable of interaction with blacks, and, in fact, were sometimes blamed for antiSemitism among African Americans, Jews in convent coverage were passive and spiritually superior victims. Jews in Poland were the utterly disempowered “Mississippi blacks” of Berman's essay. A more probing history of the convent could have revealed that all sides were working with limited information, and from benign motivations. The mainstream press made no effort to inform the public of facts that would weaken the presentation of Poles as monsters. During the Muhammad controversy, a reader could have found an interview with a Muslim woman who had been asked to remove her veil in a mall. That article may have helped the reader gain an understanding and tolerance for Muhammad's religion, Islam. The press could have educated readers about the special role of Catholicism in Poland, or of Carmelite nuns. It made no effort to do so. 87

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Carmelites, as any educated Catholic knows, are a rarefied subgroup of an already select breed, nuns. If devout Catholics accord nuns, as celibate females leading a life of sacrifice devoted to God, a special reverence, Carmelites, whose devotion involves isolation from the world, including their own families, and the renunciation of simple pleasures like shoes, an even greater awe. Males breaking and entering into a Carmelite cloister in a Catholic country could never be seen as a non-violent act. The press did not emphasize what the Carmelites themselves said about their reasons for living so near Auschwitz: “We perform a symbolic gesture. We seek to do penance, for it is up to Christians to expiate the evil perpetrated by other Christians, some of whom had become atheists, in a Christian land” (Fleischner 1986, 368). In a 1986 letter to Dr. Victor Goldbloom, president of the International Council of Christians and Jews, Cardinal Macharski of Krakow explained that the nuns were not there to co-opt Auschwitz as Christian, to convert Jews, or to engage in triumphalism, but as “a living monument of expiation for crimes done by men ... who had been Christians before they clung to Nazi ideology” (quoted in Bartoszewski 1990, 33-34). The press did not emphasize that, as a child, the mother superior of the convent was assigned by her family to bring food to Jews; this activity risked capital punishment from Nazis. Though the press would emphasize the prestigious history of Howard University and the NAACP, the press did not emphasize that convents in Poland, at mortal risk, sheltered Jewish children during the war, even though nuns themselves were Nazi targets (Kurek). The public was not informed that Weiss and his followers knocked at the gate of the convent for fifteen minutes; after that went unresponded to, they climbed the fence and entered, where they made noise by praying (probably in a language incomprehensible to Poles) and blowing horns. Had they done the same thing on private property in America, they might not have been met by workers willing to wait before ejecting them, but by gunfire. Workmen did not eject them immediately, but only after hours of telling them to leave. The bucket of water, according to the Mother Superior, who later apologized, was the practical joke of a man who is mentally retarded. The Jews were not an outnumbered minority 88

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abandoned by all; seven Jews were ejected by six workmen. Both sides appealed to the police for help. The police, perhaps afraid of the kind of incident which resulted anyway, perhaps afraid, given their association with the communist government at a time when communism was falling, of being seen as assaulting religious rights, ignored the pleas of both the workmen and the protesters. Weiss and crew were hardly in danger of permanent damage; later they climbed the fence again and returned for six more hours of uninterrupted and noisy protest. According to Bartoszewski, they had publicly renounced dialogue with Polish Catholics (Bartoszewski 1990; 86-95.) A participant reported, “My recollection is that we did not try for ‘dialogue’” (Richter). Weiss could have, at any time, provided these facts to the American press; rather, he wrote in the Times of being “beaten” “at Auschwitz” (Weiss 9/12/89). For anti-Polonism or any prejudice to render caricatures more compelling than flesh, it is necessary to segregate real, live specimens from significant contact, and America's mainstream press did this very neatly throughout the convent controversy. In 1989, Poles were underrepresented in the mainstream American news media, as a search of the Readers' Guide and LexisNexis shows. Amidst accounts of “putrid,” “brutal,” “revolting” “Polish anti-Semites,” Americans did not encounter a significant number of articles about Polish composers, Polish comedians, Polish lovers, Polish priests, Polish children or Polish geniuses. It says much about America's image of Poles that this list sounds like the punch line of a Polak joke. In a debate on the convent in Commonweal magazine, the Jewish position was represented by Leon Klenicki, identified as “director of the department of interfaith affairs of the Anti-Defamation League and liaison representative to the Vatican.” The Polish side was not represented; however, a Reverend Elias Mallon, Klenickis's interlocutor, revealed his ignorance of anything Polish by responding to Klenicki's inaccuracies about Poland by saying, “I am not sure that they see it that way” (Klenicki 1989, 522). To psychoanalyze Poland for its readers, Newsweek turned to a Jewish-American historian (Watson 1989, 35). She stated, inter alia, that Poland regards itself as the Christ of nations. Her comment strategically 89

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eliminated one element of that romantic myth, and thus distorted it, making it sound more nationalistic and anti-Semitic. The myth's most important propagator and Poland's national poet, Adam Mickiewicz, proudly linked Poland's tragic suffering to the history of Poland's “older brothers,” Jews, as did Walesa and Wojtyla, a century later. The Times was sure, in the midst of the Muhammad controversy, to cover an African American woman in New Jersey who studies Hebrew and has a mezuzah nailed to her door. No matter the depth of this woman's interest, it cannot be stated that her dedication to black-Jewish relations has ever been tested in the way that Polish war heroes were tested. Mainstream news media could have covered someone like Jan Karski. Karski was, and many other such heroes were, alive at the time of the convent controversy. Poles, like the African Americans discussed above, were, in 1989, necessarily obsessed with the burden of their own suffering. Accusations of “Polish anti-Semitism” could hardly be the main concern of people who must struggle daily for bread and dignity. Like blacks, Poles were feeling besieged, and might be tempted to circle the wagons around any Pole demonized in the international press. In spite of this temptation, many Poles publicly denounced Cardinal Glemp. Poles will no more enter into a callous and manipulative discussion of Poles who committed antiSemitic acts during the Holocaust than Jews would enter into a callous and manipulative discussion of the Jewish councils who cooperated with the Nazis and chose which of their fellow Jews to send to their deaths. During the convent controversies, the American mainstream press unilaterally enforced the morality and perspectives of the world's only superpower, the world's richest nation, a representational democracy. This application of American standards to Poles could only render Poles truculent, defensive, and passive aggressive. Thulani Davis' analysis of why African Americans shy away from public participation in discussions of “black anti-Semitism” could have been applied to Polish realities. Had it been, readers would have been offered a richer understanding of Poles and their behavior, and the readers' own readiness to accuse and hate. As Poland struggled against 90

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communism's almost insurmountable legacy, from a rising death rate to pernicious pollution on a scale not seen in the West to an impossibly high international debt burden, Poles were forced onto the pages of the world's media. The spotlight was turned on Poles, not in an effort to understand or overcome the issues Poles were obsessively attempting to solve, but to prove them guilty of a heinous crime. To quote Davis again, with a slight change in wording: Poles are uncomfortable with “attempts to set the terms of the discussion of racial conflict solely on Polish xenophobia. Like all litmus tests, this one is reductive and promotes self defense rather than thought and disclosure.” Again, to quote The Progressive, with a similar change: “Poles ... must prove that they deserve basic protections accorded automatically to all other citizens” And, The Nation: litmus tests applied to Poles create “a residue of resentment and defensiveness that continues to pollute PolishJewish relations.” Had the media applied to the convent controversy the insights of the altered quotes, above, and had it done so in an atmosphere of admission of Poland's history of foreign domination, the complexity of Polish-Jewish history, and the World-War-Two era, there may have been greater understanding of Glemp's defensiveness. Poles have made public statements revealing that they are sickened that Poland, the ideal homeland, is regarded as a unique source of the vile crime of anti-Semitism. In 1991, Polish churchmen stated: In expressing our sorrow for all the injustices and harm done to Jews, we cannot forget that we consider untrue and deeply harmful the use by many of the concept of what is called Polish anti-Semitism as an especially threatening form of that anti-Semitism, and in addition frequently connecting the concentration camps not with those who were actually involved with them but with Poles in a Poland occupied by Germans. (New York Times 1/20/91)

There is some hint in Polish statements that Poles may have wanted the convent at Auschwitz to somehow restore Polish honor and a torn Polish soul. That aspect of the controversy was not covered in mainstream press reports. 91

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During the Muhammad controversy, an avalanche of articles, commentaries, and op ed pieces were written by African Americans, including Steven A. Holmes, reporter of over a dozen stories, regular columnist Bob Herbert, and guest commentator Thulani Davis. During the convent controversy, and again when Neighbors and Fear were published, the American mainstream press largely did not publish pieces by Polish authors. The press did not highlight conciliatory Polish quotes; it excluded items as simple as Polish interlocutors for Jewish spokesmen like Klenicki, attractive photos of Poles or Poland or even stereotypedefying letters. One example: at the request of a Jewish Holocaust survivor who had placed a full page ad in the Times protesting the convent, I forwarded a letter to the Times that I had originally sent him. In this letter I identified myself as a Polish Catholic who was opposed to the convent and in concord with Jewish feelings that Auschwitz must be regarded as a place of special significance to Jews, in spite of the Polish Catholics who died there. The Times did not print this letter, though it printed many other letters on the controversy. The American mainstream press reinforced the image of Poles as mute and dangerous primitives who cannot contribute to a civilized intercourse of ideas. This mirrors the approach of a group of one hundred Jews who, in Poland, protested the convent on July 23, 1989, and read statements in English and French, but not in Polish (Bartoszewski 1990, 91). No parallel silencing of one side occurred in Poland. There the convent controversy inspired lengthy discussion in the press, representing every imaginable point of view. For example, both Gazeta Wyborcza and Zycie Warszawy printed interviews with Weiss. While the American press focused on ugly and terrifying aspects of Polish-Jewish relations, as in the Brumberg quote above, Poles displayed both pride in having been an important cradle of Jewish culture and compassion for and recognition of the uniqueness of Jewish suffering. In a typical comment, Glemp admitted that Jews “suffered the greatest persecution.” Poles admitted their ignorance, explaining the difficulty of acquiring accurate information in an occupied country, and expressed a need to know more. A typical comment included one by Glemp, who said: “Catholics in Poland knew 92

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too little the views of the Jews and the wounds that remained after the Shoah” (Steinfels 11/12/89). Glemp and Poland's bishops delivered an even more passionate evocation of Jewish history in a pastoral letter in 1991. After expressing pride in Poland's Jewish history, the bishops wrote: “Murderers did this [committed genocide] on our land — perhaps in order to dishonor it. One cannot dishonor a land by the death of innocent victims. Through such death a land becomes a sacred relic” (New York Times 1/20/91). Mainstream American press reports emphasized difference; Poles emphasized sharing. Typical of this trend was a statement by Walesa: “The Jewish community is the nation that has paid the highest price in the history of the world. And we, the Polish nation, have paid the second highest price. Are we supposed to fight among ourselves?” (Lewis, N. 11/19/89). The passionate and involved discussion of Polish-Jewish relations in a Poland freeing itself from communism was ridiculed in the American press. Poland's impassioned struggle with its history was dismissed as a desperate scam. Brumberg dismissed Polish efforts to uncover and deal with its Jewish history as “meretricious” (Brumberg 1989, 33) and quotes Warszawski in calling it “a game for the elite” (34). Comments like those above, in which Poles apologized for anti-Semitic acts committed by Poles, announced pride in Polish-Jewish heritage, or proclaimed the unique victimization of Jews, were followed by reports that Poles were desperate for western aid and trying to improve their reputation. After reporting that Walesa had vowed to fight anti-Semitism, the Times hurried to add that Walesa was on a mission promoting investment in Poland. Newsweek, under the sneering Glemp/Holocaust victim photos, quoted an unnamed Polish official who related criticism of Poland to “Jewish bankers” (Watson 36, 1989). The Times quoted the president of B'nai B'rith who attributed Walesa's concern with anti-Semitism to a fear that it would “tarnish the mood for investment” (Lewis, N. 11/18/89). The Times attributed conciliatory messages from Poles as efforts to get cash on at least three other occasions (e.g.: Tagliabue 9/5/89; 9/20/89; Brumberg 9/1/89). 93

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During the Muhammad speech controversy, the press was sure to mention haters who were not, as was Muhammad, African American. In coverage of the convent controversy, the mainstream press could have similarly challenged its readers to recognize that not only Poland has produced bigotry. Unlike in coverage of NOI, the ethnically neutral and universal crime of racism was not an issue; instead, the reader was informed of a peculiarly threatening “poison” (Klenicki) or “plague” (Lewis) labeled “Polish anti-Semitism.” With their repeated twinning in the press, “Polish” and “anti-Semitism” became synonymous. Acts of anti-Semitism committed by white Americans do not include reference to an ethnically specific and particularly pernicious and racial species of this prejudice called “American anti-Semitism.” An example of the Pole as anti-Semite, regardless of his behavior, and the non-Pole as neutral standard, presumed innocent, whose ethnicity need not be mentioned in accounts of anti-Semitism, appeared in the April 17, 1996 issue of The New York Times. Over the review of a documentary about a Pole who has refurbished the Jewish cemetery in his town and has devoted his life to the study of Jewish history and culture in Poland, the Times placed the headline, “Polish Anti-Semites” (Goodman 1996). In an article about the popularity of swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti in Washington, D.C., the words “American anti-Semites” never appeared ( Janofsky 1996). Articles about the convent controversy never addressed potential solutions to the problem of hatred. They didn't have to. The crime was anti-Semitism, and Poles were the perpetrators. The solution was to condemn and disempower all Poles. For example, Michael Lerner asked President Bush and the congress to cut off economic and political support to Poland (Bartoszewski 1990, 114; Lerner “Funding”). This is of course the same Michael Lerner who, during the Muhammad controversy, condemned Jews who wanted to “throw black women and children off welfare.” Articles about the Muhammad controversy frequently addressed potential solutions. They had to. The crime, hatred, was located, not in a marked, isolatable, and erasable community, but in the reader himself, in all of us. It behooved commentators to suggest solutions, for example: 94

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an exploration of “How Do We Fight Xenophobia?” the headline of Cornel West's contribution to Time's discussion; “a muscular humanism,” in Gates' Times article. Application of the Bieganski Image in Preparation for War In 1994, the Rwandan genocide, allegedly the world's fastest, appalled the West. It would have been easy to fall back on racist stereotypes. Journalists, scholars, and politicians did not allow it. Andrew Marshall, in the London Independent, conveyed the main points of many. His very title, “Heart of Prejudice,” challenged the reader. Heart of Darkness is a famous Joseph Conrad novella that communicates how very wrong the missionary impulse of self-identified ethnic superiors can go. Kurtz, the antihero of Heart of Darkness, travels to Africa to participate in the work of the “International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs.” He doesn't suppress any savage customs; rather, Kurtz acts out the savagery that self-defined ethnic superiors have always acted out against those they define as ethnically inferior. The eponymous heart of darkness is not Africa; it is, rather, Kurtz. Marshall warned his readers against applying a Kurtzian, colonial perspective to the genocide in Rwanda. First, Africans have no patent on atrocity. “When we stare into the darkness we are looking into our own hearts” Marshall insisted. Similar atrocities were committed by Western Europeans. The reader could find no solution in assigning the Rwandans a different humanity from that of the reader. Second, readers were taught that colonial manipulation, primarily by Belgium, practicing a divide-and-conquer policy, exacerbated tension between Hutu and Tutsi. Third, readers were taught how contemporary great power manipulation and inaction exacerbated the crisis. Fourth, readers were reminded that stereotypes provide no insight. If, when we look at Africa, “we simply see a caricature of tribal clashes and jungle savagery, then we see false.” The mainstream press provided thoroughly different coverage of the spring, 1999, American bombing of Serbia. Unlike the press coverage 95

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of the Rwandan genocide, press coverage of the Kosovo conflict did not point out that Serbs were faced, in Kosovo, with challenges to territory, identity, and life that America also faced, and that America solved by rigorous ethnic cleansing. In reference to Serbia, no one said “When we stare into the darkness we are looking into our own hearts.” Rather, Serbia was characterized as essentially different. Facts were altered to support this falsehood. President Clinton's March 24, 1999 speech announcing the bombing identified Serbia as “a powder keg at the heart of Europe that has exploded twice before in this century with catastrophic results” … it was “where World War One began. World War Two and the Holocaust engulfed this region.” This stereotypically Slavic “heart of darkness” followed its own rules: “We learned that in the Balkans inaction in the face of brutality simply invites more brutality, but firmness can stop armies and save lives.” This was important to America, because, since Serbia had caused World Wars One and Two, it posed a special threat to America. Bombing civilian Serbs, it was argued, ensured that “future generations of Americans do not have to cross the Atlantic to fight another terrible war.” Clinton's approach took the front page, and typified most articles on the crisis. Deep inside the New York Times, though, in a brief article, one could learn that About a dozen historians and Balkan specialists consulted yesterday said that President Clinton's use of history in justifying the decision to bomb Serbia to the American people was imprecise and misleading … Mr. Clinton seemed to be suggesting, they said, that, when left alone, the Balkans explode. Yet, historically, it has been foreign involvement that has escalated conflicts in this region … “The situations really don't seem analogous to me,” remarked John Lewis Gaddis, a historian at Yale, comparing the current conflict in Kosovo and the two World Wars. “In both of the earlier situations, the problems were created by involvement of great powers — Austria-Hungary and Nazi Germany.” (Bronner “Flaws”)

In “Vengeance of a Victim Race,” Newsweek's Rod Nordland trotted out the stereotype of Slavs as brutal, hate-filled, and stupid, to explain Kosovo 96

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to Americans. “Serbs are Europe's outsiders, seasoned haters raised on self-pity. Even the ‘democrats’ are questionable characters … the critical element of the Serb psyche is spite … [Serbs] have a talent for hate, which makes them formidable opponents ready to cross the boundaries of decency. Fortunately for Western foes, they also have an aptitude for losing.” Nordland claimed that Serbs had invented “ethnic cleansing.” One need only mention the fate of the Native Americans to call Nordland's conclusion into doubt. The reader might consider: what would the reception be of a journalist writing from Africa who called Hutus “haters” and “losers”? On the NPR program “All Things Considered,” Andrei Codrescu reviled the “drunken ditties,” alternately, the “nasty ditties,” the “morbid fairy tales, and musty chronicles” that constitute the identity of the peoples of Eastern Europe. He condemned their “deep-seated and emotionally unassailable stupidity.” He referred to their “stink;” their “muddy ravines” called home, their “smoke-darkened icons.” Again, I ask the reader to consider what the reception would be if NPR posited “stupidity” and irrational love of one's own “stink” as an explanation for events in Africa. In The New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch opened a plea for America to send ground troops to war against Serbs with a reference to vampires: “According to the lore, if you're in Transylvania and you want to kill a vampire, you've got to … drive a stake through his heart or … shoot him with a slug of solid silver” (Gourevitch “Reversing” 39). Vampires, of course, are a folkloric monster associated with Eastern Europe, in images of Eastern Europe as a particularly irrational, violent, and superstitious place were demonic magic reigns. In the middle of his appeal, Gourevitch referred to Eastern Europe as “darkest Mitteleuropa.” This is, of course, a play on the title of a book. In Darkest Africa was a racist portrait of Africa written by H.M. Stanley, an explorer and author who had facilitated Belgium's King Leopold's holocaust in central Africa. New Yorker readers who would never own up to prejudices against Africa can freely indulge racist notions of Eastern Europe as a place whose very air breeds violence, stupidity, and vampires, and which can be repaired only by the rationality and humanitarianism of Americans — in the form of ground troops. 97

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Previous to the bombing of Serbia, in 1994, The New York Times used racist ideas to explain Eastern Europe to its readers. The Times referred to Yugoslavia as “tribal” and as “atavistic.” Yugoslavia's “volatile soil” was to blame. In contrast, Westerners were depicted as rational and humanitarian: “Against this madness, grand Wilsonian principles like the self-determination of peoples and grand institutions like the United Nations and NATO have proved no insurance” (Cohen “Threaten”). Treatment of Nazis v. Treatment of Poles In 1996, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen published Hitler's Willing Executioners, which argued that German identity played a key role in initiating the Holocaust. His position was often summed up in his own formulation, “No Germans, no Holocaust.” Goldhagen's book received a great deal of press attention, and large sales unusual for an academic work. Many of Goldhagen's fellow scholars argued against his thesis. With a few substitutions — of the word “Poles” for “Germans” for example — their reviews could be summaries of the main arguments of this work: citing facts out of context strengthens stereotypes; identifying an essentialized ethnic identity as the source of evil and exculpating the reader who does not share that ethnic identity is factually untenable and ethically unsound; Goldhagen's speech about Germans parallels anti-Semites' about Jews. A few reviews will be quoted, below; positions very similar to those quoted here appeared in The Economist, Anthropology Today, Critical Inquiry, The New York Times, and other popular and scholarly publications. In Telos, Russell A. Berman worked hard to deconstruct stereotypical images, from Tacitus to Goldhagen, of Germans as violent. We must question, Berman insisted, whether certain stereotypical images predominate because they are accurate reflections of objective reality. After a careful discussion of the matters at hand, Berman wrote of Goldhagen's work, “That his misrepresentation could ring so true to so many ought to concern everyone engaged in understanding Germany.” Berman further castigated Goldhagen for claiming that “anti-Semitism is a function of 98

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Christianity.” Goldhagen failed adequately to address anti-Semitism in the pre-Christian, pagan world, Berman said. (135) Berman argued that anti-Semitism, rather than being essential to German identity, is an “extremist position which, in a particular historical context, was able to seize power.” “Nothing here is right,” pronounced Berman, in an unequivocal diagnosis. Berman excoriated Goldhagen for equating German identity with anti-Semitism and murder: “this hopelessly blurs the difference between real criminals and anyone else: whether one killed or did not does not count as long as one was German, which means one wanted to kill: one is guilty because one is German (which means that one is necessarily an eliminationist anti-Semite), and not because of what one did or did not do or think.” (136-7) Berman related Goldhagen's main idea and its mass appeal to its modern American audience's ideological needs. Berman said that Goldhagen's book is popular because it flatters an American worldview that locates evil exclusively in an ethnic other, and exculpates the American reader. Goldhagen's approach relieves the reader of the uncomfortable realization that bad things can happen anywhere, and be committed by members of any ethnic group. Every invocation of German evil reassures Americans that the US has… an imperial mission. Hitler must be stopped, even if his name is Saddam, just as Chamberlain's Munich became the master metaphor for foreign policy…Yet a second lesson emerges simultaneously: however global American aspirations must be, in order to resist the violent Germans and their clones, the American aspirations are always liberal and good, in contrast, again, to Germans who are either actively brutal or eager to follow orders, in a way American citizens presumably would not … It was all so simple and all so German. So not to worry, it cannot happen here. (138-40)

Istvan Deak chided Goldhagen for not contextualizing German antiSemitism with anti-Semitism in other countries, or Nazi hatred of nonJews like Slavs and Gypsies, or non-Germans' genocide of non-Jews, for example, the Turkish genocide of Armenians. “What about the brutality of the Luxemburgers”? Deak asked (301). And Deak stated, 99

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[Goldhagen] reduces German history to a struggle of Germans against the Jews… he sees an unbroken historical continuity all the way from the anti-Judaism of the Christian churches in the Middle Ages to the racial anti-Semitism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries … There is practically nothing in Goldhagen's account on historical contingencies, the social tensions of the First World War, the political conflicts of the Weimar era, the economic hardships of the Great Depression, the rise of the Nazi Party, the tyrannical nature of the Nazi regime, and World War Two. (302-3)

Deak concluded with a resounding insistence that all peoples, not just Germans, are capable of evil acts. “Murderous bigotry is not ingrained in the character of any one nation but is part of the human condition. It is not only young Germans who, as did happen after 1945, needed to be retaught humanity, but all children, white, black, brown and yellow, need to learn this now and forevermore.” (Deak, quoting Sereny, 307) In 1992, Christopher Browning published Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. That book drew on studies of evil by Philip G. Zimbardo and Stanley Milgram that did not emphasize the ethnicity of the evildoer. Rather, these two famous studies suggested, ordinary people of any ethnicity might do bad things under the right circumstances. Goldhagen's work, emphasizing, as it does, ethnic identity, has been opposed to Browning's. Browning, Lawrence Douglas noted in Commonweal accused Goldhagen of writing a “keyhole” history of German antiSemitism — a narrative without context and perspective that creates a “uniform portrayal of Germans — undifferentiated, unchanging, possessed by a single, monolithic, cognitive outlook.” This stereotyping of the German “cognitive framework,” Browning writes, discomfitingly echoes “how anti-Semites write about Jews.” (Douglas 20)

Douglas insisted that German ethnic identity must not be cited as the cause of German crimes. Rather, “the actions of these ordinary Germans can be understood as offering sobering evidence of how people behave when the strictures of morality have been dangerously relaxed, when one 100

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finds oneself, to borrow Hannah Arendt's language, in a world in which ‘everything is permitted’.” Victoria J. Barnett concurred with Douglas and Berman. By insisting that the Holocaust was “the logical outcome of German culture, Goldhagen resolves the most troubling aspect of the Holocaust: the problem of how well-fed, educated, civilized human beings can turn into monsters” (Barnett). Something entirely different happened in 2001 when Jan Tomasz Gross published Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland and 2006's Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz. Unlike Goldhagen's book, Gross' books did not advance a theory of Polish ethnicity as essentially debased. Even so, press response rushed to form that very conclusion. Expressing the assessment that Poland is anti-Semitic because Poland is not modern, author and professor Joan Mellen referred to post WorldWar-Two pogroms in Poland as “medieval”; Harvard Professor Susan Rubin Suleiman also used the word in her review of Fear in the Boston Globe. Elie Wiesel chose the related term “Middle Ages.” Pogroms have taken place in entirely modern settings, for example in Jakarta, Indonesia and New York City in the 1990s. Violence against Jews in Poland fluctuated over the centuries. It is not the case that the further back in time one goes, the worse it gets. In fact, in the case of Poland, the further back in time one goes, often, the better conditions for Jews get; modernity brought the worst anti-Semitism in Poland's history. In Mellen's review, Poles qua Poles are guilty. “Polish citizens of all classes,” she wrote, “Poles of all social classes,” she repeated; “The old order and the army, the new Communist apparatus, the cardinal and his bishops — all conspired to kill Poland's remaining Jews,” she indicted. Note the adjective: “all.” All Poles are murderous anti-Semites. Why? Because “Anti-Semitism was so embedded in the culture of Poland.” No other explanation dare be attempted. “Here there is no why… Gross finds no explanation for these horrendous deeds because there is none” Poles express “pure, unregenerate evil.” “‘People engaged in a murderous encounter belong in effect to a different species,’ Gross concludes,” and Mellen agreed. Even a casual reader might question this; if all Poles had 101

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always been so set on murdering Jews, how did so many Jews come to live in Poland in the first place? This question is never pondered, never mind answered. There is a possible implied answer in Mellen's article; Poles, unlike Germans, were not smart enough to carry out a methodical genocide. Poles, Mellen noted, are not just like the Germans. Poles are less intelligent and orderly. “Only in their being less wellorganized did they differ from their Nazi occupiers.” Admitting that Poles were themselves victims of those Nazi occupiers is not on Mellen's agenda. Poles claim a proud heritage. Mellen raged against it. Poles, all Poles, murdered “in contradistinction to the ‘Romantic’ Polish tradition ‘of nurturing the weak and defending the persecuted.’” While reviewers of Goldhagen warned that Goldhagen located evil exclusively in one ethnicity, thereby excusing members of all other ethnicities, for example, the American reader, Mellen had no problem with a parallel scapegoating. “Whatever our faults, we have never done anything remotely like this to our Jewish citizens” (emphasis added). The devil's bargain Mellen proffers is seductive; if she can recruit her American reader into attributing anti-Semitism to a vile Polish essence, Mellen will expunge the lynching of Leo Frank, the Crown Heights pogrom, the career of Breckinridge Long, etc, from America's rap sheet. Anti-Semitism in Poland is timeless; it is part of Poles' essence: “Gross has done a great service to the historical discourse by exposing the realities of what is, was and has been racist cruelty in Poland. I am Jewish, but I'm confident the evil he has illuminated will offend and disgust all his readers no less” (emphasis added). In the New York Times, David Margolick also cited “Polish antiSemitism,” not historical forces that might act on the reader in the same way, as the cause of evil in post-war Poland. “One might have thought that if anything could have cured Poland of its anti-Semitism, it was World War Two. Polish Jews and Christians were bonded, as never before, by unimaginable suffering at the hands of a common foe.” The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum does not concur with Margolick's assessment of World War Two as a “bonding” force. “One aspect of German policy in conquered Poland aimed to prevent its ethnically 102

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diverse population from uniting against Germany. ‘We need to divide [Poland's many different ethnic groups] into as many parts and splinter groups as possible,’ wrote Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS” (USHMM). Margolick referred to a “cesspool of ignorance and intolerance”; it is not clear whether the cesspool to which he referred is all of Poland or merely its Catholic church. Margolick invoked Shamir's “Poles imbibe antiSemitism with their mother's milk” comment, admitted that the phrase “may strike us as deeply offensive, simplistic, racist,” then argued that evidence indicates that this admittedly racist formulation is true. Thane Rosenbaum wrote that “‘Fear’ takes on an entire nation, forever depriving Poland of any false claims to the smug, easy virtue of an innocent bystander to Nazi atrocities.” Again, invoking the image of the primitive other, Poland is “a barbaric nightmare.” How could horrible things have happened in Poland after World War Two? “Poland had been in rehearsal for centuries.” “Poles have many reasons to be haunted. Theirs is a nation cursed.” In relation to Poland, even the nation's posited spiritual realm is debased. A letter-writer to the Washington Post indicated that he saw Poland's problem as being ignorant and backward, as not being modern. Poles needed Jewish authors to educate them. Gross and Elie Wiesel were “bravely attempting to educate the Polish people …the current generation still needs to… learn that racial hatred is no longer acceptable in modern society” (Wilkenfeld). The letter-writer was probably unaware of Polish authors like Jan Blonski, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, Alina Cala and Czeslaw Milosz who had written significant works on the Holocaust and PolishJewish relations well before Gross. Elie Wiesel's contribution to the dialogue was to label the cause of violence in post-war Poland Polish hatred: “their hatred entirely Polish” Wiesel wrote of the killers. Wiesel also diagnosed the problem as a lack of evolution: “Everything that is low, primitive, vile and ugly in the human animal” and “Gross's reader is suddenly thrust into the Middle Ages.” In addition to what did appear in the press and in public discourse, the discussion on anti-Semitism in Poland was fashioned by what did not appear in the press and what was not said in public discourse. A July 103

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27, 2001 LexisNexis search of the previous year's news stories found one hundred sixty four articles covering Gross’ Neighbors. Sampled texts emphasized a diagnostically and uniquely Polish racial essence that was typified by violent anti-Semitism. A July 27, 2001, LexisNexis search of the previous year's news stories found only two articles addressing Irena Sendler. One of those articles was a mere hundred words long, and in a local paper. The other article included lengthy mention of Gross’ Neighbors and described Poles as “viciously anti-Jewish” (Komarow). Irena Sendler was a Polish woman who is credited with saving 2,500 Jewish children during the Holocaust. She rescued Jewish children although, unlike the German Nazi Oskar Schindler, as a Pole and a target for eventual genocide or enslavement by the occupying Nazis, Sendler faced death for herself and her family if caught aiding Jews in any way. Nazis tortured Sendler. On May 31, 2001, Sendler, 91, met with Kansas schoolchildren who had uncovered her forgotten story. Only two newspapers covered this event, according to a LexisNexis search, and one felt it necessary to give lengthy space in its coverage to Gross' book. No articles focusing on Gross' book, according to a LexisNexis search, made any mention of Irena Sendler at all. Anti-polonists had done such a good job of communicating that Poles are essential haters that the idea of a Polish rescuer was so unbelievable that Sendler is accorded a page at Snopes.com, a website devoted to exposing urban legends.

Chapter Three

Bieganski Takes Root in America

Poles and Jews interacted for a thousand years, ample time for mutual stereotyping. How did Bieganski find acceptance in American audiences? In American consciousness, Poles were not always Bieganski. When Polish nobles fled west in the 1830s after a failed insurrection, Americans formed an image of Poles as dashing and romantic. Edgar Allen Poe planned to join the fight for Poland's freedom. James Fenimore Cooper helped organize an American-Polish Committee. Louisa May Alcott based one of the most appealing characters in Little Women on a Pole. The American image of Poles performed a volte-face after Polish peasants began arriving during the “New Immigration” of c. 1880-1929. Confronted with Poles who wore sheepskin instead of silk, Americans decided that “The Pole” was not a dashing, Romantic, freedom-loving hero on horseback after all, but an animal, violent, drunken, a nationalist and breeding machine whose fecundity was a threat. The partitions of Poland that had been condemned as treacherous when a Pole was an émigré count became necessary when a Pole was a dirt-encrusted peasant. The American elite decided that the Pole was not to be helped, emulated, and welcomed, but, rather, condemned, ridiculed, and quarantined. Both right- and left-wing Americans rejected the Pole; the right, because he was racially inferior, the left, because he was conscious of an identity, Polishness, and Catholicism, that threatened leftist cultural and political hegemony (Gladsky 88-9 See also Greene, “Poles” 795). The left's rejection of Polish peasants' insistence on clinging to their identity would find echoes decades later in leftist academics' and 105

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journalists' rejections of Polish and other Eastern European nationalisms as primitive and needing to evolve into Western liberalism (e.g. Powers). As one author summed up the status of Poles in America during the New Immigration, “The only place Poles are welcome is among their own people” (Gladsky 131). Though it became less emphatic with time, the core image has not changed. The American stereotype of the Pole, folklorist Alan Dundes wrote, consists of five characteristics: poverty, dirt, stupidity, ineptitude, and vulgarity (Dundes “Study” 200-1 see also Greene “Poles” 802, Bicha, Greene “Hunky”). While today's academics, media, and government agencies have made significant effort to renounce the bigotry against Jews that their institutions promulgated during the c. 1880-1929 immigration (Honan; James O. Freedman), they have made no parallel effort to renounce or deconstruct the devastating racist ideas about Bohunks that their predecessors promulgated in the same period. Scientists insisting that their data proves that Poles are intellectually deficient did not cease in the twentieth century. “Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence,” one of the most talked about scientific articles of the twenty-first century, posits that Ashkenazi Jews are gifted with superior intelligence, a superior intelligence exercised in their traditional role vis-à-vis Poles. As the article states, Jews “were the management class of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth” (Cochran et al), a commonwealth where the bulk of the population was peasants, a group of people, the authors state, with no need for superior intelligence. As they put it: “most likely cognitive skills did not have as high a correlation with income among farmers that they did among individuals whose occupations required extensive symbol manipulation, such as moneylenders, tax farmers, and estate managers” the jobs performed, primarily, by Jews (Cochran et al). Commenting on “Ashkenazi Intelligence” in The New Republic, famed scientist Steven Pinker reported that his Polish-born grandfather used to perform certain more refined stitching tasks on neckties himself, rather than trust those tasks to his employees, who suffered from “Goyishe kop” (Pinker “Lessons,” “Grandfather”). Pinker wrung his hands about whether or 106

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not public discussion of Jews' superior intelligence would harm Jews. Pinker's “Good for the Jews?” approach did not consider whether or not discussion of the relative stupidity of Poles would harm Poles. In a discussion of “Ashkenazi Intelligence,” a poster at Steve Sailer's blog concluded, “Stupid Polack jokes, I always wondered how this stereotype developed … Discovering that they originated with the Ashkenazi, median IQ around 110, explained it” (Steve Sailer's iSteve Blog). The c. 1880-1929 immigration of East Asians and Eastern and Southern Europeans was unique. Most previous immigrants to America had come from Northwestern Europe. The New Immigrants came from lands where feudalism and foreign colonization had lasted much longer than in Northwestern Europe. Serfdom did not end in Russian-colonized Poland until the 1860s. The immigrants might never have handled money, or gone to school. Their skills were agricultural; in America, Eastern European peasants were classified as racially most suited for heavy industry. They worked under nightmarish conditions that killed and crippled many young (Bukowczyk 26-27). Bohunks suddenly shunted to American factories floundered like the proverbial fish out of water. A minority, about ten percent, of Polish peasant immigrants made their way to the work they knew best: tilling the land (Blejwas, “Puritans” 49; Greene “Poles” 796). In New England, Poles were selected for work at events that one farmer described as “a little nearer to the slave trade than anything I had experienced.” Polish workers “virtually occupied the status of a slave,” according to contemporary observers. “Not one of them was given a place to sleep under the same roof with the boss but had to sleep in the barn over the horse stable; some straw or hay and a couple of old horse blankets, a fertilizer bag filled with hay for a pillow, constituted bedding” (Blejwas, “Puritans” 51). Animal comparisons abounded. One New Englander summed up Poles as akin to “raw cattle” (Blejwas 57); another compared their behavior to “the natural animalism of untamed stock” (58). At a Polish wedding, “Animal joy is on a rampage.” In the fields, “Animals, they work under the sun and in the dirt, with stolid and stupid faces” (58). Edna Ferber, a prominent Jewish American novelist, wrote of “Dumb Polak 107

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girls,” and a “conquering army” of “splendid cattle” (74-5). Some authors, while depicting Poles as animals, managed to work in a salute to their endurance. Annette Esty, a “dyed in the wool Yankee,” though mourning the “conquest” of the Poles, managed such a salute in a description of Poles viewing a flood. Over wrinkled foreheads and creased cheeks lay the dull, enduring expression of maltreated animals ... They were Poles, hardened for generations to misfortune. For generations their peasant ancestors had worked, been despoiled, and then set about righting what others had destroyed. What better training for a flood? The work of months of the hardest kind of labor, crawling down the field on hands and knees, weeding onions under the scorching sun; and then in one short hour it was as if God had plowed all their onions back into the soil ... Now they must freeze, they must starve, they must watch their little ones starve, and for a whole year, until the next crop comes. The men stood silent, without lifting their eyes to look out over the water that had swallowed up their homes. They were stunned. They were numb. The only thought in their heads was: Begin again. Plow again. Rebuild. Begin silently. There is nothing to be gained by the tongue. (Blejwas 80)

A collision right out of a time-travel novel was occurring: Americans, people who could read and write, who had been voting for one hundred years, who had indoor plumbing, lighted streets, a popular press, suddenly hosted peasants. Post-1965 immigrants would come when they could count on academics, journalists and politicians to argue for multiculturalism and diversity and against racism. These later immigrants would build on preexisting labor organizing. The c. 1880-1929 immigrants arrived during laissez-faire capitalism, when academics, journalists and politicians were generators of racism. Scientists adopted the problem. In an address before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Albert Edward Jenks announced, “The greatest problem before America today is the immigration problem ... This great problem is at base anthropological ... as out of these different physical characteristics of the different breeds of 108

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people come the psychic characteristics of the different breeds of people” ( Jenks 76-77). Madison Grant (1865-1937) was a key figure. Grant rubbed shoulders with people like US Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover. He was an important environmentalist contributing especially to the preservation of redwoods and bison. As secretary and co-founder of the New York Zoological Society, Grant encouraged the exhibition of Ota Benga, a Pygmy, in the Bronx Zoo. Grant's contemporary scientific community embraced him as one of their own; “elite scientists” regarded him as a “peer” (Tucker 88, “Grant” Biography). His Passing of the Great Race was the most influential of many well-received racist books. Adolf Hitler wrote Grant to say that it was his “bible.” “Mein Kampf is riddled with passages that seem directly inspired by The Passing of the Great Race” some “encapsulate all the aspects of Grantian thought including the primacy of race” and “the worship of modern science” (Spiro 357). Grant posited three European races: Nordic, Mediterranean, and Alpine, distributed, roughly, in, northwestern, southern and eastern Europe. Nordics are superior; Mediterraneans have made some achievements in art. The relation of inferior Alpine Slav to superior Nordic German is best summed up in the Europe-wide adoption of the word Slav as “slave” (127). Races differ mentally, emotionally and physically. These differences are unchanging (Grant xv). Races can be discriminated with exactitude. Poles, Czechs, and Romanians are racially inferior, while their Hungarian neighbors exhibit some positive race traits (Grant 55). When two unlike races mix, the offspring is always a lower form (Grant 15). This is the grave danger of the immigrants. These immigrants adopt the language of the native American, they wear his clothes, they steal his name, they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals, and while he is being elbowed out of his own home the American looks calmly abroad and urges on others the suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race ... New York is becoming a cloaca gentium [sewer of nations] which will produce many amazing racial hybrids and some ethnic horrors that will be beyond the powers of future anthropologists to unravel. (Grant 81) 109

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Welfare was a waste of time in Grant's Social-Darwinism-inspired worldview. He blamed Christianity for preserving the unfit. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit, and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race. It is highly unjust that a minute minority should be called upon to supply brains for the unthinking mass … The church assumes a serious responsibility toward the future of the race whenever it steps in and preserves a defective strain ... A great injury is done to the community by the perpetuation of worthless types. These strains are apt to be meek and lowly, and as such make a strong appeal to the sympathies of the successful. Before eugenics were understood much could be said from a Christian … view-point in favor of indiscriminate charity … [now we know charity does] more injury to the race than black death or smallpox … A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit — in other words, social failures — would solve the whole question in one hundred years, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums. (Grant 45-46)

Grant's vocabulary, in words like “race,” “trait,” and “Nordic,” became standard. Grant “immeasurably influenced the members of the Immigration Committee” (Hyatt 136) to pass the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act, meant to keep the different and undesirable immigrants out of our “new and clean country.” Those who take a Tylorean stance towards Bohunks, insisting that they must climb the unilineal evolutionary ladder to evolve past their medieval, peasant, Christian status, and reach the pinnacle of becoming just like their critics, fail to acknowledge that the critics' own milieu — modern, secular, academia, politics and journalism — developed and disseminated scientific racism, and have yet to formally renounce its application against Bohunks. Scientific racism inspired Nazism (Kuhl). It rejected as primitive Christian ideals of the brotherhood of all humanity. As the New York Times put it in commentary on Ota Benga, “he belongs to a race that ‘scientists do not rate high in the human scale…The idea that men are all much alike … is now far out of date’” (Spiro 48). Science, not religion, universities 110

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and newspapers, not peasant villages, provided the primary, respectable justification for the most notorious racism of the twentieth century. In canonical scholarly retellings of the c. 1880-1929 immigration debate, Madison Grant plays the racist villain. Grant's nemesis, Franz Boas (1858-1942), “The Father of American Anthropology,” is the liberal, academic culture hero, and savior of downtrodden peoples. Boas was mentor and role model to future generations of liberal academics. Boas' positions and honors are too numerous to list here; they include professor at Columbia University. One tribute demonstrates that Boas “both professed and acted upon the finest and highest ideals … concern for the dominated and oppressed, respect for ‘others’ as individuals as well as for other cultures, tolerance and humane dealing, and respect for the eternal quest for knowledge” (Lewis 462). Boas' cultural relativism overthrew the previously dominant paradigm, E. B. Tylor's unilineal evolution. The Darwin-influenced, Tylorean system was an evolutionary ladder. On it, an African wearing a loincloth, for example, occupied the bottom rung. Said African would have to climb, to evolve, to reach the pinnacle of the human species. That pinnacle was a secular, scientific, Victorian gentleman — just like E. B. Tylor. As seen through Boas' cultural relativism, an African who wears a loincloth is not a “naked savage.” Rather, the African's minimal clothing — an item of his culture — is intelligently adapted to his hot environment, a different environment from that of his Western observer. Cultural relativism insists on the internal logic, and worth, of all cultures, and ranks all cultures as equal, with none as the pinnacle of human evolution. Boas' cultural relativism is gospel today. Boas didn't just believe in cultural relativism, he acted on it, by writing significant works attesting to the value of primitive cultures and the primitive peoples who produced them, and by funding, mentoring, and championing ethnic minority and female students, several of whom gained success and fame. Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa and Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men worked to make Pacific and African American cultures not only comprehensible, but respectable and integral, to readers. Zora Neale Hurston was an African American; Ella Deloria 111

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was Sioux. With Boas, Deloria published work on Sioux culture. Boas' book Primitive Art insists on the unimpeachable aesthetic worth of Native American, Pacific Islander, and African basketry, tattoos, carvings, folksongs, etc. By extension, the people producing this art are just as good as any Nordic. Boas' approach, both in his publications and in his academic priorities, was very different when it came to the c. 1880-1929 immigrants. In his publications and in whom he mentored, Boas did not significantly apply cultural relativism. Rather, Boas' argument was that the immigrants were very much, as Grant himself argued, “types distinct from our own” (Boas quoted in Glick 545). Boas differed from Grant in this — Boas contended emphatically that America was improving the immigrants. For evidence of this contention, Boas used data that the racists themselves embraced: the cephalic index, a specific form of head measurement. The scholarly apartheid that Boas performed becomes painfully clear to any reader paging through two of his most influential works: Primitive Art and Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants. Primitive Art is a beautiful book, one any modern liberal would be proud to give prominence on the coffee table. It would serve, there, as an imprimatur of its possessor's sophistication, his ability to savor exotic yet worthy aesthetics. In page after lushly illustrated page, Boas hammers home his cultural relativist gospel: Yes, Native Americans, Africans, and Islanders do have cultures different than ours, but every bit as good as ours: witness these magnificent carvings, weavings, masks, songs, and tales. Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants, on the other hand, reads like the product of such a dystopic, nightmare civilization, so brutal in its racism, in its obsessive reduction of human souls to scientists' twisted calculations, that one wishes to deny that this civilization ever existed. Changes was funded by the U.S. government, as directed by senators like Henry Cabot Lodge, who warned that “Russians, Hungarians, Poles, Bohemians,” threatened a “great and perilous change in the very fabric of our race” (Lodge). The commission wanted to study social aspects of immigration. Boas insisted on studying heads (Glick 557). This was enough, he insisted; material reality determines human 112

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behavior. When America improved the immigrants' cephalic index, Boas wrote that “the whole bodily and mental make-up of the immigrants may change” (Dillingham 5). In page after scientifically precise page, Boas presents the results of the extent of his anthropological inquiry into the souls and lives and culture of 18,000 immigrants: the measurement of their skulls. Boas deputized a doctor in Galicia to carry on comparable research there (Stocking 209). Galicia was a notorious site of famine. This was anthropology that measured the cephalic index of hungry Bohunks in order to ascertain whether or not their race influenced their intelligence. The African Americans, Native Americans, and Islanders Boas and his protégés presented to the American public were thinkers, creators, artists, fellow humans. They had a voice; Boas listened to them, and presented their words to America. The immigrants Boas presented to the American public were malformed skulls, skulls that America would improve, as evidenced by his ever-so-careful charts and graphs. They had no voice, no culture worth noting. America need not hear them to judge them. In trying to understand why Boas did not apply cultural relativism to immigrants, scholars have posited various theories. One theory: born in Westphalia, an immigrant himself, Boas was proudly German, right down to his dueling scars. Boas viewed the Eastern and Southern European immigrants as “types distinct from our own,” because Boas considered himself German, not a Jew like his ancestors, and “adopted the perspective of an insider” when he looked at the outsider, the immigrant (Glick). Boas rejected religion, feeling that it would fade away as humanity advanced (Glick 554-56). In this, he was in accord with E. B. Tylor's evolutionary theory. According to Boas scholar Marshall Hyatt, Boas used African Americans as a cover in his own fight against the kind of prejudices he himself faced. Taking on anti-Semitism directly would have left him open to a charge of a lack of scholarly objectivity (Hyatt 33-34). Inevitably, some have asked if Boas suffered from Jewish self-hatred (Harrowitz 68). Racists like Grant deplored the many Jewish immigrants from Poland. Perhaps Boas insisted that America would racially improve the immigrants out of a complex response to his own identity. One third of those studied 113

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in Changes were, as Boas labeled them, “Hebrews.” These Ostjuden were different from him; they were not German, but Polish, and often devout. This pattern of considering one despised group — the immigrants — inferior and encouraging them to assimilate, and uplifting another despised group — African Americans — was echoed by one of Boas' superstar protégés, Margaret Mead. She displayed this triage in a few pithy sentences, pregnant with condescension, in her 1971 Rap on Race with African American author James Baldwin. Mead complimented Baldwin on his “good rhythms,” and African Americans' “marvelous oratory,” bragged that her WASP culture goes back “ten generations to England,” grouped African Americans and early WASP founders together as idealists, and posited that the New Immigrants, who “weren't idealists,” who “didn't have dreams,” who came to America “looking for things” have the “most limited” culture in America. These are the people, Baldwin and Mead agree, who might cause “social chaos,” of whom one must be frightened (Mead 108-10; 150-52). Franz Boas shared his liberal ideals with his Columbia colleague, liberal academic John Dewey (Lewis 451). Dewey, older, married, and successful, was romantically involved with his struggling, immigrant, Polish-Jewish student, Anzia Yezierska. In frequent retellings, Yezierska often depicted Dewey as a “scientist” treating her as a “specimen” fit only for study (e.g. Yezierska Hearts 9). Yezierska authored words that could serve as reply to Mead's contempt: “How will you set about to know the Poles? … How can Americans with their cold hearts and clear heads ever come to know people burning up with a million volatile ideas? … Who cares for the culture immigrants bring with them? They may sell the labor of their bodies. But how many get the chance to give to America the hopes in their hearts, the dreams of their minds? … [She realizes that academics' study of Poles is only a “slumming adventure,” “ethnic entertainment” to save the researcher “from looking into the depths where things get complicated and unutterable”] “You know less about the Poles than when you started out to study them … You know nothing about the heart of the Poles. Without love, what is there to write about?” (Yezierska All 37-38; 80-82; 108-09) 114

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“Papa Franz” or his protégés, deputized by him to do exactly this work, could have done for the immigrants what they were doing for African and Native Americans. Primitive Art would have been the perfect venue for discussion of the aesthetic worth of Slovak embroideries or polka, and the creativity and intelligence of their creators. Boas missed this opportunity. Further, the day's prominent folklorists were often anti-immigrant. “Boas played a leading role in founding the American Folklore Society” (Lewis 452). Henry Cabot Lodge was one of the early members. Henry Ford was interested in folklore, and he was also anti-immigrant. In 1888, American folklorists decided to study British, Negro, Indian, French, Canadian, and Mexican folk cultures; not included were the folk cultures of the highly conspicuous New Immigrants (Zumwalt 14). Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning social worker Jane Addams noted possible benefit from positive attention to immigrant folk culture. The first generation from the Old Country was easier to work with, more hopeful and healthier. On Sunday, she said, the immigrants still put on their folk costumes. Their children, deracinated from their ancestral culture and rejected from mainstream America, were a harder case (Addams 231-232). According to historian John Higham, denigration or casual exploitation of the immigrants' folk cultures caused pain. He summed up immigrant feelings thus, “You threaten to outlaw our speech and memories ... at the same time coax us to deck ourselves out like exhibits in a circus and entertain you with our quaint dialects” (254). In Out of This Furnace, his account of Carnegie's steel mills in Pittsburgh, Thomas Bell (1903-1961) told the story of his father Mike, a Slovak immigrant. Mike works dawn to night, sleeps on the floor, earns so little that if an accident causes him to miss a day's work, he has nothing to eat. Any talk of a strike, and Carnegie's thugs break heads. Mike's coworkers die in one gruesome industrial accident after another. Even so, Mike dreams of finding a way of communicating the humanity of his people to his social superiors. His folklore could do this, he decides. Once I had an idea, I thought to myself: If we were to sing some of our songs and explain what they were about — would it surprise them to learn 115

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that we sang about such things and had such feelings? If we told them how we lived in the old country, how we worked the land, the crops we grew, the little money we saw from one year's end to another, our holidays and festivals — would they realize that even though we spoke different languages we were still men like themselves, with the same troubles, the same hopes and dreams? I hoped that we might learn to respect one another, that we might even become friends. (Bell 196)

Slovak worker Mike is a better cultural relativist than superstar scholar Boas or his protégés. A description of Mike's Slovak folklife was used in the congressional debate to prove that Slovaks were at a lower level of evolution than Americans. Their homes are often nothing but scanty huts, of one room, wherein the whole family lives and sleeps promiscuously. The furniture and outfit is very primitive, mostly homemade, and has to last for generations ... The body clothes of the men are made of coarse linen, their summer clothing of the same material, only coarser, and in winter their clothing consists of suits made from a coarse and thick woolen felting, in the natural color of the wool; an everlasting cap of the sheepskin and a pair of sandals about complete an outfit which has been in vogue with them for generations and which may be an heirloom, since the style hardly ever changes. An important part of their outfit is the roomy and long mantle without sleeves, made up from half a dozen sheepskins which are tanned, the wool being left on ... when the men are away from home these mantles form their complete bed. What these patriarchal cloaks may lack in style is generally made up for by some gaudy embroidery or even painting on the leather side of it…In all, it will be seen that the tastes of these people are anything but refined, are low, in fact. (Warne 137-138)

Novelist Kenneth Roberts' (1885-1957) portraits of the immigrants were serialized in the hugely popular American icon, The Saturday Evening Post. Accompanying one Roberts' article, the Post ran derisive captions under photos of Slovak folk ceramics and a Slovak peasant hut painted 116

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with folkloric designs (Roberts May 29, 1920). In a 1922 article in Current History, Etta V. Leighton revealed that Americans were not allowing the wool of the Bohunk coat to be pulled over their eyes. Leighton said that immigrants were mistaken if they thought that what they brought, their folk culture, was as good as American culture. There is no danger that America will not appreciate the newcomer's contribution in art, music, folklore, or any other national heritage of value, but there is a very present danger of overrating that contribution ... The European peasant, coming to us unlettered and untaught, cannot bring to us the heritage of the art and history of his people. (Leighton 115)

Recognizing that achieving respect for peasants was an uphill climb, some immigrants sought respect by reminding Americans of elite members of reviled races. The Poles cited Tadeusz Kosciuszko and Kazimierz Pulaski. Paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857-1935) was the president of the Museum of Natural History. Osborn wrote in the New York Times that Pulaski's and Kosciuszko's having fought for America was no reason to provide entry to Polish immigrants, since those men's high achievements proved that they were not Poles, but mislabeled Nordics (Osborn). Boas' argument that the immigrants could assimilate to the superior Nordic race were ridiculed as “fairy tales” (Roberts 1922, 113) or “maudlin sentimentality” (Grant 228). Others believed in reverse assimilation. Prominent leftist professor Karl Pearson (1857-1936) changed his name from “Carl” to “Karl” in order to honor Karl Marx (Notable Mathematicians). Pearson was the founder of the science of statistics. He was a noted eugenicist. He stated, “You cannot change the leopard's spots, and you cannot change bad stock to good; you may dilute it, possibly spread it over a wide area, spoiling good stock, but until it ceases to multiply it will not cease to be” (Pearson 19). Kenneth Roberts offered an even less flattering analogy: “If an otter hound is crossed with a Welsh terrier, the result is a mongrel.” Like Grant, Roberts mocked as “sentimental,” “whimsical,” “hectic and vitriolic” those who 117

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advanced the Judeo-Christian concept of the human person: that “all people are equal in the eyes of St. Peter.” Roberts believed, rather, that “biological laws govern the crossing of different breeds, whether the breeds be dogs or horses or men” (Roberts 1922, 113). Roberts identified Eastern Europeans as being the most unassimilable. “An ostrich could assimilate a cobble stone with about the same ease.” Eastern Europeans were the source of “unrest, dissatisfaction, sedition, revolutionary and anarchistic doctrines” (November 6, 1920). They were possessed of a tragi-comic mentality that made their countries “a mess.” Poles were too stupid to open an umbrella when it rains (April 17, 1920). As in this passage from the Saturday Evening Post, Roberts' ethnographic details were always right; his contempt was undisguised. For the most part they are dirty people, and the stench that rises from them is strong enough to be used as a substitute for gasoline. The workers in the [American] consulate frequently become ill from the odor ... Practically all of them, viewed individually, were hard-working, well-meaning, likable persons. Even the most backward, illiterate, dirty, thickheaded peasants of Southeastern Europe have their excellent points. One who lives among them sympathizes with them and longs to better their lot. Taken in the mass, however, and viewed from an American standpoint, it is no more possible to make Americans out of a great many of them than it is possible to make a racehorse out of a pug dog. If a brace of full grown emigrants from backward districts of the old Austria-Hungary were to be brought to America and placed in an American home with two intelligent Americans who could devote their entire lifetime to Americanizing these backward aliens they might succeed in making Americans out of them and getting a genuinely American point of view into their heads. They might, I say. But they'd have to devote their entire lives to it. These people are inconceivably backward. They wear clothing that seems to have ripened on them for years, and they sleep in wretched hovels with sheep and cows and pigs and poultry scattered among them. They have been so for a great many centuries. It is almost impossible for them to slough the results of heredity and environment. (November 6, 1920)

Roberts and others also warned that Bohunks were especially and irrationally hateful in their nationalism, as contrasted with Americans, 118

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who were fair-minded and peace-loving, and that there was a danger that Bohunks would impart their diagnostic, hateful nationalism unto Americans, if Americans allowed it. Roberts wrote “In any sort of official hating contest they would probably tie for first place, along with all the other dominant nationalities in Central Europe ... [these countries] might more expressively be called the United Hates of Central Europe” (May 29, 1920). One of the many threats of reverse assimilation was the spread of “loathsome, contagious diseases” according to Harvard man and Teddy Roosevelt biographer William Roscoe Thayer (1859-1923). The immigrants were unclean in a “new and clean country.” “Life in foreign lands among filth and dirt brought upon them great plagues of typhus, cholera, leprosy, tuberculosis” (Davis). As prominent American cleric, social reformer, and author Josiah Strong said, “It is disease and not health which is contagious” (Strong 59). An essential New Immigrant character was blamed for high disease rates, rather than the circumstances under which the immigrants lived and worked (Kraut). Reverse assimilation, it was feared, would result in the dumbing down of America. The SAT test has been a rite of passage for collegebound American high schoolers for decades. The genesis of the SAT is inextricable from scientific racists' effort to prove the racial stupidity and ineducability of Poles, inter alia, the intellectual superiority of Nordics, and the danger of allowing immigrants like the Poles into the United States. Princeton Psychology Professor and eugenicist Carl C. Brigham (1890-1943) was the inventor of the SAT. Brigham used an early version to measure the intelligence of millions of World War I U.S. Army recruits. In The Atlantic Monthly, Robert M. Yerkes, professor at both Yale and Harvard, and founder of the famed Yerkes National Primate Research Center, reported solemnly: “Of natives of England serving in the United States Army only 8.7 percent graded D or lower in intelligence; of natives of Poland, 69.9 percent. In the English group, 19.7 percent graded A or B, and in the Polish group, one half of one percent.” Accompanying Yerkes' article were three charts; on all three, Poles scored the lowest of over a dozen ethnic groups (Yerkes 119

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364). Based on these results, Brigham wrote that American education was declining. He predicted that that decline “will proceed with an accelerating rate as the racial mixture becomes more and more extensive” (PBS History of the SAT). Relatively sympathetic, contemporaneous treatments of c. 18801929 immigrants are notable for the weakness of their sympathy. Even so sympathetic a person as Jane Addams had to admit that the immigrants were alcoholic and given to crime. A couple of short articles from the time offer distilled versions typical of more sympathetic treatments. Dr. Allan J. McLaughlin was a public health administrator who worked at Ellis Island. Dr. McLaughlin stated that it is “our right and duty to assess immigrant stock” (25). After being weighed by “the standard of humanity” if it be found wanting, it must be “sent back without ceremony or sentiment whence it came” (25). Given that, as he reported, nearly twenty-five percent of immigrants were Slavs, it was important to gain an understanding of them. Since Poles were a large percentage of the Slavs, McLaughlin chose to focus primarily on them. McLaughlin knew that “The lot of the Polish peasant has always been unhappy,” that Poland had little to no ethnically Polish middle class, and that it relied on Jews for commerce. Overall, McLaughlin assessed the Slavs as potentially beneficial to America. “The demand for rough unskilled laborers has steadily increased with our wonderful industrial growth,” McLaughlin reasoned (32). Given America's growth, because Slavs had a “good physique” and they were “willing to do rough, hard labor” (31), Slavs made desirable immigrant stock. Slavs did have one drawback. “The Slav is popularly supposed to be mentally slow” (32). McLaughlin saw two factors at work in this conception. One was the inevitable comparison between Slavs and Jews, inevitable because Jews and Slavs emigrated from the same region. The other factor that led observers to conclude that Slavs were “mentally slow” was the work they did in America. McLaughlin offered two counter arguments. Yes, Slavs were, McLaughlin observed, certainly “guileless,” especially in comparison with “The Hebrew” (31). “In comparison with the Hebrews who transact nearly all the business in Poland ... the Poles ... 120

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seem as children ... but it must be remembered that the Hebrew in business makes other races than the Slav seem slow” (32). Second, McLaughlin argued that attention to the work Slavs did in America be factored into any assessment of their native store of ambition and intelligence. The Slavic immigrant fills a place in the industrial fields of this country in which he hears no call for such attributes as ambition, energy and mental brilliancy, a place which no American envies him, and where he is as necessary to American advancement as the coal and iron that by his labor are mined and made ready for the American mechanic and manufacturer. (32)

A similar microcosmic text representational of relatively sympathetic treatments of Polish immigrants is found in Edward Kirk Titus' 1903 “The Pole in the Land of the Puritan.” Titus informed his reader that the Pole was Alien in thought, grotesque in manner of life ... slow to learn even simple English, unable to express in our tongue any abstract ideas; one can only conjecture his inner life and mental attitude. His part in the drama of conflicting races has thus a silent, pantomimic effect. It is not lacking in sinister suggestion ... expressionless Slavic faces ... looked as if flattened against a board at birth ... stunted figures ... bespoke grinding toil ... masculine forms of the women ... told of fieldwork beside brother and husband and domestic animal ... The Pole cherishes as essential to freedom the privilege of committing numerous acts of petty violence. When Martin van Buren invites Thomas Jefferson — it should be explained that a mill overseer, tired of the consonant-bristling names of his Polish help, renamed them after the presidents — when Martin van Buren invites Thomas Jefferson to his daughter's wedding, and Thomas quarrels with Grover Cleveland, the fiddler, for playing the wrong tune, Thomas feels that freedom involves the right to punch Grover in the head. No disgrace attaches to arrest, and the Pole who has no police court record is regarded as lacking in spirit. (Titus 162-3; 165)

Even positively-assessed qualities could be used against the immigrants. The immigrants, it was alleged, could perform impossible labor under 121

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conditions no Nordic would ever accept, and give birth with ease. Because of this, the Nordic chooses to commit “race suicide.” One promulgator of this theory was the prominent educator, economist, and statistician General Francis A. Walker (1840-1897), Chief of the U.S. Bureau of Statistics and Superintendent of the Census, Yale professor and M.I.T. president. “Peasantry, degraded below our utmost conceptions” were not needed to populate America, he asserted; the only reason America was under-populated was Nordic race suicide. He published his ideas in, among other venues, The Atlantic Monthly, where he vividly described the disgust inferior races cause in their superiors, thus triggering race suicide (Walker). Colliers ran a literary treatment of race suicide. Ezra, a Nordic, is being elbowed out of place by Poles and Italians. The immigrants are willing to work under unsafe conditions, which threaten all. One day the guide rope of one of the biggest derricks broke and the great block of stone swept across the flat car, breaking the leg of a Polak and all but mashing the life out of a little Italian water boy. Ezra was enraged. He went to the boss and demanded new equipment ... The boss laughed. “The equipment is good enough for a lot of Wops and Bohunks.” [Ezra threatens to quit.] The boss hesitated. The American workman was valuable in the intelligence he brought to his work.

The beautiful countryside, resting place of Civil War heroes, is marred by “a Polak roadhouse.” Ezra uses his racial intelligence to improve working conditions in the quarry. He is crushed while troubleshooting a “danger spot.” Before dying, Ezra envisions the immigrants as a pack closing in on him, and then death itself, “the pack suffocating him, closed in on him, blinded him and merged into the darkness into which none of us has seen” (Willsie). The word “pack,” of course, is the collective noun for wolves, dogs, and rats. In spite of academic and popular press racism, immigrants arrived in their millions. Because of their “habit of silent submission, their amenity to discipline, and their willingness to work long hours and overtime 122

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without a murmur,” immigrants were valuable in the work that turned America into an industrial power (Bukowczyk 21). Their fellow workers recognized it. I'll tell you what I mean by hard work, buddy. When an American shovels coal and has to take a piss, he quits for a while. When a foreigner is shoveling coal and has to take a piss, he pisses down his leg and goes right on shoveling coal. That's what I mean by workin' hard. Now these foreigners are really bulls, they work like dogs. (Novak 248)

They recognized this quality in themselves. Work. Work all my life. All my life, work. From small boy to old man, work. In old country, work. In new country, work. In New York. Pittsburgh. Detroit. Chicago. Imperial Valley. San Francisco. Work. No beg. Work. For what? Nothing. Three boys in old country. Twenty years, not see. Lost. Dead. Who knows? What. What-not. No foundation. All the way down the line ... Old country song, I play. (Saroyan 95)

When racists advanced anti-immigrant arguments, it was industrialists, not leftists, not liberals, not scientists, not academics, not journalists, who defeated them. The wealth of men like Andrew Carnegie who rose to be the richest man in the world was based on the desperation of people who weren't assimilated. At the same time, the industrialists benefited from the negative stereotype of the immigrants. In describing the murderous suppression Andrew Carnegie and his fellow industrialist, Henry Clay Frick, visited on strikers, Carnegie's biographer wrote, “Frick had ... been unfortunate in the type of workmen with whom he had previously dealt. The Hungarians, Slavs, and Southern Europeans of Connellsville were a savage and undisciplined horde, with whom strong-arm methods seemed at times indispensable” (Hendrick 378). Stereotypes facilitated the settling of Bohunk strikes by massacring “the Polaks,” as they did in Lattimer, Pennsylvania. In the Ludlow Massacre, immigrant strikers were machine-gunned down or burned alive. During the 1915-16 Bayonne refinery strikes, Standard Oil's manager announced, “I want to march up East 22nd street through the guts of Polaks” (Dorsey 23). 123

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In the end, racism carried the day; the immigrants of East Asia and Eastern and Southern Europe became the only immigrants to the United States to have immigration laws passed against them with the understanding that they were racially inferior. In 1938, Czechoslovakia was more or less handed over to the arch Nordic, Adolf Hitler. Racist discourse was then standard in The New York Times, according to G. M. Morant (16). Morant, a crusading biometrist, protested, but his book was not published until 1939. In September of that year Hitler launched World War Two by attacking Poland, a nation proven by accepted science to be populated by the racially inferior.

Chapter Four

Bieganski in American Cinema*

In the mid-nineteen nineties, Indiana University and its surrounding community of Bloomington described themselves as oases of progressive thought and action. The University sponsored internationally recognized scholarship, for example at the Kinsey Institute. Lawn signs announced participation in “Bloomington United” a citywide celebration of diversity. WFIU, IU's National Public Radio affiliate, was famous for its witty fundraising campaigns. One skit dramatized a takeover of WFIU by a buffoonish Polish man, who eliminated WFIU's cultural and intellectual programming to broadcast nothing but polka. Listeners were exhorted to pledge money in order to protect WFIU from this fate. Station managers reported that this oft-repeated skit had been used for years, had never raised any protest, and that they saw no reason to remove it. In the early twentieth century, Bohunks ceased being the peasants that they had been in the Old Country; they rapidly became America's representational proletarians (Gladsky 86). Rooted in elites' responses to peasants, the Bieganski stereotype came to be generated from elites' responses to proletarians. “Polishness is not culture, it's class” (107). Working class Polish Americans are associated with “a deteriorating urban America” (106). In 1938, Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet William Carlos Williams offered a succinct summary of how the Pole and the Jew are often seen by Americans, to whom they had become stock characters * An earlier version of this chapter was published in The Journal of Popular Culture, Volume 39, edited by Gary C. Hoppenstand and published by John Wiley and Sons, 2006. 125

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in the American ethnic drama. The Pole is the epitome of the working class — the Pole will “do for the whole bunch” of working class people; the Jew is a tricky merchant. This vignette dates from the Great Depression. All the streets of the Dundee section of Passaic have men idling in them this summer. Polacks, mostly, walking around — collars open, skinny, pot bellied — or sitting on the steps and porches of the old time wooden houses, looking out of place, fathers of families with their women folk around them ... [there were also] Jews, of course, trying to undersell somebody or else each other and so out of the picture. But the Polacks look stunned, mixed up, don't know what it's all about. Not even enough coin to get drunk on. They'll do for the whole bunch. (Williams 5)

Polish-Americans face a special burden. Oklahoma-born poet Lloyd Van Brunt describes it: Unlike blacks and other racial minorities, poor and mostly rural whites have few defenders, no articulated cause ... And they have been made to feel deeply ashamed of themselves — as I was. This shame, this feeling of worthlessness, is one of the vilest and most self-destructive emotions to be endured. To be poor in a country that places a premium on wealth is in itself shameful. To be white and poor is unforgivable ... That's why I call them the Polish-joke class, the one group everybody feels free to belittle, knowing that no politically correct boundaries will be violated ... trying to hide some shameful secret, some deep and unreachable sense of worthlessness ... is the legacy of America's poor whites. (Van Brunt)

Folklorist Alan Dundes concurs. “Lower-class whites are not militant and do not constitute a threat to middle-class white America ... with the Polack [joke] cycle, it is the lower class, not Negroes, which provides the outlet for aggression and means of feeling superior” (Dundes “Study” 202). Persons too sophisticated ever to tell a Polak joke may still sup on the Bieganski stereotype. Hollywood filmmakers, who stake millions of dollars on their every aesthetic choice, exploit Bieganski. This chapter will refer to four films: A Streetcar Named Desire, The Apartment, The Deer 126

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Hunter, and The Fugitive. These films were chosen because three of the four (save The Fugitive) are unusual among films of very high financial, popular, and aesthetic impact in that they focus on Bohunk characters. The Fugitive exemplifies brief deployments of the Bieganski stereotype in a high-impact film that features, but does not focus on, Polish characters. All four films appeared on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest four hundred films of all time; save The Fugitive, the films also appeared on the AFI's list of the greatest one hundred films of all time. These films represent four decades and four important Hollywood genres. Marlon Brando's performance in Streetcar is emblematic of The Method. The Apartment is a product of one of the “Jews who invented Hollywood,” (Gabler) and typical of the kind of highly intelligent, and yet still romantic, comedies of Billy Wilder and his mentor, Ernst Lubitsch. Deer Hunter's director, Michael Cimino, represents the wunderkinds of the auteur-theory influenced New Hollywood of the 1970s. The Fugitive is that rare critical success among the highly lucrative, action-adventure “summer movies” that have dominated Hollywood since 1975's Jaws. The variety of genres in which the Bieganski stereotype has been deployed testifies to its viability. Though the most recent film is 1993's The Fugitive, filmmakers' play of the Bieganski card is not a thing of the past. In 2001, Enigma treated the Nazi code of that name. Poles pioneered efforts to break Enigma; those efforts were not dramatized in the film; rather, a Pole appears as chief villain, contrary to historical fact. In 2002, the critically acclaimed Monster's Ball chose to depict white supremacy in the American South as generated by Polish Americans. In 2003, the box-office-smash, Jim Carrey comedy Bruce Almighty opened with a scene mocking oafish Polish bakers and their rat-feces-studded “chocolate chip” cookies. 2003's Under the Tuscan Sun was based on the Frances Mayes bestseller of the same title. Diane Lane stars as Frances, whose ex-husband marries a younger woman who is pregnant with his child. Frances leaves her home in America and travels to Tuscany. In Tuscany, three men appear on the scene. Since this movie is all about a search for a man who can redeem wounded Frances, the viewer inspects these three new arrivals with 127

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interest. Will any of them serve as an apt swain for our Frances? Indeed they will not. They are Poles. The Polish laborers here serve the same role that the one Polish laborer served in the 1991 British film, Truly, Madly, Deeply. In that film, Nina ( Juliet Stevenson) is trying to cope emotionally after her husband dies. Like Tuscan's Frances, Nina has a Polish laborer in her house. Titus (Christopher Rozycki) is a buffoon who falls in love with Nina, who, the film makes clear, would never slum so low as to flirt with a Pole. Titus declares eternal love for Nina, and then, behind her back, takes up with one of Nina's students. The three Polish stooges — that is — laborers — in Under the Tuscan Sun are Pawel (Pawel Szajda), who is young, lovely, blond, and more passionate than intelligent, Zbigniew (Sasa Vulicevic), who is unkempt, fawns unattractively over the heroine, and is afflicted by constant, unexplained twitching, and Jerzy (Valentine Pelka), who is small, morose, and clumsy. Pawel knocks himself in the head with a flag during an attempt to impress his Italian girlfriend. Jerzy handles household wiring explosively. The film never allows Jerzy to speak; it is Pawel who informs Frances of Jerzy's literature PhD. Frances is a writer; she shows Jerzy her copy of Czeslaw Milosz's poetry. She's looking for a man … Jerzy is in her house everyday … he's a literature professor … he's also far from home … like Frances, he's been insulted by life circumstance. Forget it. Frances does find a lover, but he is not Polish. Spiderman II was the second most profitable film of 2004 and one of the most profitable films of all time. Like The Fugitive, Spiderman II makes a brief, and telling, play of the Bieganski card. Spiderman's landlord, Mr. Ditkovich (a name that sounds like the obscene American insult, “dick”), shoves in front of Spiderman as he is waiting to enter the shared bathroom. He makes absurd statements like, “I have ears like a cat and eyes like a rodent.” His daughter is beautiful but deformed — she has a growth of some kind on her face. Even superheroes are tormented by Bieganski. The 2006 film The Break-Up received a great deal of attention because it starred Jennifer Aniston, whose life was a frequent subject of tabloid headlines. It ranked among the top twenty moneymaking films of the 128

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year worldwide. Aniston's character breaks up with Gary Grobowski (Vince Vaughn). Grobowski wears a Polish flag and Polish eagle t-shirt. He threatens a man leading a gay men's chorus. The gay man, much smaller than Grobowski, with some elegant karate moves, easily beats up Grobowski. Intelligence and style trump the brutal Pole. Later, as Gary holds tissues to his bleeding nose, he explains to his girlfriend that he intends to bring in some really tough guys to beat up the gay singer, including “Polaks who have no future.” In another scene, Gary is shown in a t-shirt reading, “Proud to be Polish.” He is watching a violent video game on TV. Later, Gary is at his workplace, a dingy office; a Polish flag hangs on wood-paneled walls. He works with two brothers. One is a sex pervert; the other is a worrywart. The worrywart pulls a large rag out of his pocket and attempts to clean his ear during a serious conversation. A 2008 film, director and star Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino, violated previous norms. Walt Kowalski (Eastwood) is a quintessential working class, Catholic, Polish-American. He lives in Detroit. He is a retired auto worker and a decorated combat veteran. He mows his own lawn. He drinks beer, owns guns, and his garage is fully stocked with graduated wrenches and other tools. He curses and uses politically incorrect ethnic slurs. He is, at heart, a good man. That the film needed its character who uses ethnic slurs to be Polish is standard. That a Hollywood film would treat that character with respect and affection is not. This aspect of the film was controversial. In spite of early Oscar buzz, the film was shut out of Oscar consideration. It was an audience favorite, though, earning over a hundred million dollars at the domestic box office, a remarkable sum for a small movie with a largely amateur cast. A Streetcar Named Desire A Streetcar Named Desire is the 1951 movie version of Tennessee Williams’ highly successful play. The play won most of the awards it qualified for; the film received a hefty twelve Academy Award nominations. The New York Film Critics and The New York Times named it the Best Picture of the year. Bosley Crowther, in an atypically gushy review for 129

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The Times, wrote, “... comments cannot do justice to the substance and the artistry of this film. You must see it to appreciate it. And that we strongly urge you to do” (Crowther). Many obeyed; the film was a financial as well as critical success. Since then the play, film, and Marlon Brando's Stanley Kowalski have not lost esteem, but gained mythic stature; each is regarded as a watershed in its field (Manso 219-235; 303-304). Playwright Dennis Reardon has called Streetcar the great American play (Kolin 2). Anthony Quinn, in language appropriate to its referent, said, “The character of Stanley fucked them all ... turned the whole world around ... Everybody started behaving like Brando” (Manso 304). In the opening scenes of the film, Blanche du Bois (Vivien Leigh) arrives in New Orleans for a visit to her sister, Stella. The dramatic tension in the film springs from the confrontation between Blanche du Bois, faded Southern Belle, and her brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski, crude and brutal Polak. As Crowther put it in his review, the film captures ” ... an essentially human conflict ... the last brave, defiant, hopeless struggle of ... Blanche du Bois to hold on to her faded gentility against the heartless badgering of her roughneck ... lowborn brother-in-law” (Crowther). Stella is “thrilled” by Stanley's brutality; Stanley himself is aware of how his wife prizes his animal nature: “You thought I was common. How right you was, baby. I was common as dirt ... I pulled you down off them columns and how you loved it.” The climax of the film is Stanley's betrayal of Blanche's checkered past to Mitch, her suitor, and Stanley's rape of Blanche, after which she, broken, is packed off to an insane asylum. Stanley is spectacularly offensive. He wears a sweat-stained T-shirt and scratches at his nipple; he strips in front of a strange woman; he drinks whiskey from a bottle; smacks his wife on the rump in front of his friends — all this while he is in a good mood. Angered — and it is usually Blanche's efforts to “make enchantment” that anger him — he throws a radio out the window, exposes Blanche in her underwear to a crowd of friends, beats his pregnant wife, cries, repents, carries her lustprostrate form on his naked back to bed for a taste of animal magnetism so compelling that Stella can't stay away, no matter what he does to her or her sister. Stanley's semi-human state extends to his family; he has a cousin 130

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“who could open a bottle of beer with his teeth. He was a human bottle opener. That was all he could do.” Stanley is similarly limited. In spite of his ability to enslave women sexually, it would be hard to argue that Stanley has any positive characteristics. In his calculated and flimsily motivated destruction of Blanche, he betrays a theatrical maliciousness comparable to that of Shakespeare's Iago. As Stella puts it, “Stanley's always smashed things.” The artistic power of Williams' and Brando's Kowalski is rooted in their exploitation of the Bieganski stereotype. That exploitation begins with the character's name. Stanley is a common Polish given name, Stanislaw being Poland's patron saint. “Kowalski,” from “blacksmith,” is comparable to the English “Smith.” That Stanley's Polishness is not incidental to, but explanatory of, his brutality and his opposition to decency and refinement, is made clear within the first few moments of the movie, and the first few lines of dialogue, and several times thereafter. In the opening scenes, Blanche takes exception to sleeping in a room with only a curtain, not a door, for privacy. “Will it be decent?” she timidly asks her sister. The situation is normal for this house, Stella assures her. “Stanley is Polish, you know.” When Stanley is shown to the viewer for the first time, he is bowling and fighting — two low prestige activities commonly associated with Poles in Polak jokes. Stanley is referred to as “Polish” or as “a Polack” several times, by Stella, Blanche, and Stanley himself. At one point of near overkill, Stanley takes exception to the epithets Blanche has been casting at him: “‘Pig-Polack-disgusting-vulgar-greasy!’ Them kind of words have been on your tongue and your sister's too much around here!” And then, “I am not a Polack. People from Poland are Poles, not Polacks ... don't ever call me a Polack.” Shouted in Stanley's assertive decibels, it would be impossible for anyone seeing this performance to forget that Stanley Kowalski is a Polak, and that his Polak identity is an essential ingredient of his malicious and destructive nature. In case they do forget, Blanche, representative of sensitivity, civilization and refinement, reminds them. When reminding her sister that she, Blanche, stayed by the plantation homestead and attempted to save it from ruin, Blanche reproves her: “Where were you? In there 131

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[gestures to bedroom], with your Polack.” When explaining that she takes hot baths to soothe her overly sensitive nature, Blanche says to Stanley: “You healthy Polack, without a nerve in your body, of course you don't know what anxiety feels like!” Blanche's characterization of Stanley is terribly close to the stereotype used by American industrialists to justify their brutal treatment of Bohunk immigrants, and of those who opposed immigration: He acts like an animal, has an animal's habits! Eats like one, moves like one, talks like one! There's even something — subhuman — something not quite to the stage of humanity yet! Yes, something ape-like about him, like one of those pictures I've seen in anthropological studies! Thousands and thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is — Stanley Kowalski — survivor of the Stone Age! ... Maybe we are a long way from being made in God's image, but Stella — there has been some progress since then! Such things as art — as poetry and music — such kinds of new light have come into the world since then! In some kinds of people some tenderer feelings have had some little beginning! That we have got to make grow! And cling to, and hold as our flag! In this dark march toward whatever it is we're approaching ... Don't — don't hang back with the brutes!

The foul lure of Polak identity is further driven home through a musical symbol and literary allusion. Part of what cripples Blanche is her grief over the suicide of her husband, a man too sensitive to live, who “wrote poetry but wasn't able to do anything else.” This young Apollo shot himself while Blanche was dancing to music which torments her in the form of an auditory hallucination, and which plays on the movie soundtrack during her tortured moments. The music? “The Varsouviana,” that is, citizen of Warsaw, a polka. Blanche abandoned her too sensitive husband while acting out her own inner Polak, lured by the primitive, as represented in overtly Polish music. Blanche, in explaining her name to Mitch, says that it means “white woods,” and is like “an orchard in spring,” an orchard in spring being, of course, the central symbol of Chekhov's “The Cherry Orchard.” The famous climax of Chekhov's play features the 132

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Slavic son of a serf destroying an aristocrat's beautiful cherry orchard. That Williams knew full well what he was doing is further demonstrated by his congratulatory telegram to Brando on the play's immensely successful opening night. Williams wrote Brando that the “greasy Polack” would be Brando's vehicle to stardom (Manso 232). That this exploitation of a stereotype is rarely, if ever, mentioned by critics says much about popular and elite America's unquestioning assimilation of it. In fact, one scholar recently praised Williams' positioning of a Polak in the demographically atypical site of New Orleans; Stanley's ethnicity well captures “parvenu aggression.” The scholar chided Williams, though, for his “shocking” under-representation of African Americans. They, after all, have “historical precedence” (Kelly 125). But of course Stanley can't be African American. Elite America has come to allow African Americans eyes and mouths; with these, African Americans implicate greed and injustice. An audience would understand an African American Stanley's desires as something other than unmotivated destruction. Since the Pole is denied vision and speech, and is allowed to be only what his elite viewer hates and fears, he can serve as the pure, unmotivated destruction of a Stanley Kowalski. Given that the history of the 1880-1929 Bohunk immigrants is not widely known or discussed, no conventionally educated viewer will be reminded of the exploitation of Bohunk workers, and no viewer need feel implicated by a Polish Stanley. “Real,” critics insist; Brando's performance was a watershed in theater and film because of its “realness” (Brodkey 78). To manufacture this “reality” elites worked hard. Brando worked out at a gym; Charles of the Ritz dyed his blond hair dark. Lucinda Ballard, costume designer, was inspired while ogling construction workers. “Their clothes were so dirty ... that they stuck to their bodies. It was sweat, of course” she said, of her great discovery. “That's the look I want ... the look of animalness” (Manso 228). To create her “undesigned garb” she had to wash seven pairs of jeans for twenty-four hours, strategically rip and then paint them, dye, rip, and resew t-shirts, which were too baggy and long, and send Brando to a team of Italian tailors for special fittings (Manso 229). 133

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If anti-immigrant racists like Madison Grant staged a play representing their ideas, they could not go wrong with Streetcar. In the racist thought predominant at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Bohunk was threatening because of his sex and his land hunger. The image of the uncultured, land-hungry, breed-animal Pole had been depicted in popular literature before this (Blejwas), but it entered the American canon with Streetcar. Blanche and Stanley wrangle over access to an American woman's body, and possession of American earth — Belle Reve — “Beautiful Dream” — as in, American Dream. Blanche is that quintessentially American hero, the Southern Belle, whose very raison d'être was resistance against forces erosive to American civilization ( Jordan 474, 475). Here she resists, physically as well as spiritually, the efforts of the parvenu Polak to get his hands on her plantation, that most sentimental piece of American real estate. The invasive manual imagery is Williams'; as huge, lowering Stanley and delicate Blanche literally wrestle over her possessions, she says, “Everyone has something they won't let others touch,” and, “Belle Reve can finally be this bunch of papers in your big, capable hands.” Blanche could not produce children with her refined husband. She conjectures that Stanley is “not the type that goes for jasmine and perfume, but maybe he's just what we need to mix with our blood now that we've lost Belle Reve.” In Williams' play, Americans have become too soft to breed successfully. Polaks are brought in as stud stock. Thus Streetcar dramatizes the racists' fear of miscegenation, and its twin conviction that America, overwhelmed by an influx of inferior others, was committing “race suicide.” Exactly because of Stella's racially suicidal sexual enslavement to the Polak, her use of him as a stud animal, Belle Reve is lost to creditors. The power and pathos of Streetcar's final scene, as Blanche is packed off to an asylum, derive from the portrayal of tradition, refinement and ethnic superiority defeated by Bieganski. The Deer Hunter In 1978 director Michael Cimino broke new ground. He made the first serious, artistically ambitious, Hollywood movie to depict combat in 134

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Vietnam, The Deer Hunter (Kutler 61-74). In this historic film America's involvement in Vietnam is understood not as the fruit of the machinations of wealthy and powerful Americans. It is not understood as the creation of men with names like “Kennedy,” “Johnson,” and “McNamara” who are divorced from the concerns of the blue-collar ethnics and other disproportionately poor and marginalized Americans and Third World peasants whose lives they destroy. Rather, the Vietnam War is depicted as the logical outcome of Bohunk culture. In this, The Deer Hunter gave artistic expression to a scholarly and popular press process that became noticeable in the sixties and seventies. Academic, press, and cultural elites came, inaccurately, to pin the social ills of racism and chauvinism on the stereotypically brutal and dumb blue-collar ethnic (Radzialowski 1976, 5; Novak 1975, 74; Hill 1975; Nie, et. al.1974; Hamilton 1972). It is ironic that imaginary Bohunks like Stanley Kowalski, so feared for the hunger that powerlessness brings, were now blamed for abuses of power that they never had. The Deer Hunter won the Best Picture Oscar for 1978. In his New York Times review, Vincent Canby praised the film as, “ ... a big, awkward, crazily ambitious, sometimes breathtaking motion picture ... close to being a popular epic,” and, “its feeling for the time, place, and blue-collar people are genuine, and its vision is that of an original, major new filmmaker” (Canby 1978 a). In a later article, Canby wrote: “more honestly rueful, sad, provocative, and finally, frightening than any other movie we've had yet about Vietnam” (Canby 1978 b). The Deer Hunter follows the fates of three friends from a tightly knit Lemko community as they work, love, and go to war. (Lemkos are a Slavic ethnic group who live in what is today Poland and Ukraine.) Work means steel; in the opening scenes the camera explores the almost unbearably bleak industrial face of a steel town, its smokestacks, monstrous, dehumanizing architecture, and soot. Men whose individuality is obscured by heavy protective gear do work that appears literally hellish: they manipulate rivers of molten steel. Later three buddies, clad in flannel shirts and long underwear, retreat to a locker room, where naked co-workers exhort 135

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them, “Kill a few for me, too,” and wish Steven good luck in his upcoming wedding. With this juxtaposition, the movie parallels Bohunk killing and Bohunk sex as manhood-proving rites. The men tell dirty jokes. “Did you hear about the happy Roman? He was glad he ate her,” wrestle, and then steer a white Cadillac through a game of chicken with an eighteen-wheeler. They drive to a dark bar where they play pool, watch football, gamble, and wear black leather. Cross-cut scenes introduce the town's female element. A beautiful young blonde is being beaten and called a “fucking bitch” by her drunken, fat-gutted father, who is costumed in a stained T-shirt. An obese old woman, dressed all in black, including babushka, beats her son, complains in a Boris Badenoff accent that his bride-to-be is pregnant, and exhorts him to wear a scarf to his wedding, because it is cold. “You don't wear a scarf with a tuxedo!” he is assimilated enough to tell her. Cimino staged a stereotypical Bohunk wedding, at which the de rigueur dancing, drinking, fighting and rutting take place, with a few variations. Stan becomes jealous when a singer fondles his girl; Stan knocks her out, not him. Axle carries off a screaming, flailing, underwear flashing bridesmaid on his shoulders, shouting to her, “Do you want to fuck or fight?” Michael (Robert de Niro) reveals complete sexual inadequacy. He can't even dance with the beautiful Linda (Meryl Streep) and ignores her into social embarrassment. After the wedding and their display of their control of the female population, the men, eating Twinkies dipped in mustard, go hunting. A Slavic men's chorus rings out on the soundtrack as the Bohunks track deer over difficult terrain. They return to the bar, deer over car, and celebrate. In the next scene, fire, smoke, and sparks reminiscent of the opening steel mill shots consume a Vietnamese village. The buddies are captured, imprisoned, and tortured. Thanks to Michael's stoic courage, physical strength, and resolution, the men escape. The rest of the film veers back and forth between Vietnam and their mill town, and the characters' struggle with their physical and emotional scars. In the final scene, the Bohunks comfort themselves and each other with food, alcohol, and by singing “God Bless America.” 136

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The characters share Stanley Kowalski's gender failure. “I get more pussy than a toilet seat,” this film's Stanley announces. Michael, the hero, is not a sexual beast; he is all but a eunuch. He runs from every intimate encounter Linda initiates with him. He never initiates an encounter with a woman. When Linda finally pins him, he falters. Having rejected the Bieganski model offered by both cinematic Stanleys, he has no other role to assume. The Bieganski stereotype that allows him to be a hunter who can down deer with one shot, a soldier who can survive captivity and torture, cripples him in love. What Michael has gained in sympathy over Stanley Kowalski he must trade for sexual dysfunction. No film of economic importance or artistic stature comparable to The Deer Hunter has ever focused on Bohunks with that film's teasing tastes of verisimilitude. The Deer Hunter's unique use of Bohunk cultural markers is combined with grotesque exaggeration that well represents stereotypes, but does not represent real people. Bohunks are not allowed either eyes or mouths in The Deer Hunter. If the film's Bohunks were allowed the ability to see and to speak, that is, to comment on, yes, to implicate the elite culture doing the commenting on them, the fragile, stereotypical artistic underpinnings of The Deer Hunter would crumble. As it is, its characters, blinded and silenced, are impersonated from the outside in. Their shapes conform, not to the expressions of real people's minds and souls, but to bigoted others' stereotypes. The viewer can pity The Deer Hunter's Bohunks, be disgusted or horrified by them, and can easily feel superior to them and blame them for disasters like Vietnam. Were these Bohunks allowed subjectivity, it would soon be revealed that they, no less than their ethnic and economic betters, are capable of producing individuals who can critique the elite machinations that lead to Vietnam in the first place. Indeed, a real life American of Slavic descent, Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, presented America with one of its most important critiques of the war. Ironically, Kovic implicated Hollywood movies as a major reason that he volunteered to go to Vietnam. Another problem is contextuality. Bohunk behaviors are not understood in context. The Bohunks carry and are expert in the use of weapons; the scene immediately preceding the first battle scene in 137

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Vietnam shows them celebrating, with some sentiment, a deer kill. One could draw the conclusion that Cimino is attempting to communicate that the unique macho of Bohunk culture combined with the brutality of American capitalism — symbolized by the smoke, sparks and fire of the mill, which are mirrored in the smoke, sparks and fire of the battle scene — have created a sub-human man who will go to war without conscience or thought. It is true that many Bohunk men, both in Europe and America, do hunt. The film does not explore the reasons for this. The Lemkos came from what was a scene of famine, where places have names like “The Valley of Hunger.” Men hunted in Europe to eat. Descendents of Bohunk immigrants today might remember grandfathers who were paid merely enough to feed themselves each day. If sick or injured, they could not work and received no salary. Hunting and foraging, where possible, were necessary to supplement diets. Other cultures, too, have their outlets for male predatory feelings. Oliver Stone's northwestern European father was a Wall Street trader. Stone did not cross-cut scenes of aggressive takeovers with scenes of killing in his autobiographical Vietnam movie “Platoon,” however. Slavic men's choral singing rings on the soundtrack during hunting scenes. When Michael finally succumbs to Linda, and the two enjoy moments of awkward tenderness, instead of playing tender Slavic love songs, the soundtrack switches to American, mainstream guitar music. This music, which jars the ear after so much Bohunkiania, is only played during tender or thoughtful moments. To experience tenderness or thought, the film's characters must depart from their culture, and become ethnically mainstream Americans. No matter what shattering experiences the Bohunks of this film go through, Cimino refuses them sight or speech. The ethnically mainstream filmgoer, sharing Cimino's assessment of Bohunks, will never learn the Bohunk assessment of anything, certainly not of him, the filmgoer. The filmgoer is thus protected from the kind of confrontations with self that make for great art. As Canby wrote, “The big answers elude [the film's characters], as do the big questions” (Canby 1978 a). “The characters can express feelings only in second-rate sentiment” (Canby 1978 b). This 138

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is for the best, asserted Canby; this picture of Bohunks as incapable of sight or speech is part of the film's laudable genuineness. The film is “at its worst,” he insisted, when it attributes any kind of insight to its characters at all (Canby 1978, c). Cinematic successes have been made that portray low class Slavic peasants wearing T-shirts, engaging in fisticuffs, etc. Three classics of world cinema serve as examples: the 1965 Czechoslovak film, The Shop on Main Street, Andrzej Wajda's 1972 The Wedding and his 1977 Man of Marble, both made in Poland. The heroes of these films have, superficially, much in common with the Bohunks in American cinema. They wear T-shirts, do manual labor, engage in fisticuffs, and fail at life. The Wedding portrays a rambunctious event that would make Cimino's fantasy wedding pale by comparison. As in The Deer Hunter, characters in these movies become the pawns of historic forces far beyond them: Nazism, Stalinism, and colonization. But these characters' creators are not expressing an anti-Bohunk stereotype, and, thus, are not threatened by their characters' subjectivity. T-shirted failures in these films are allowed to see Nazism, Stalinism, and colonization, to see their own puny place in history, and comment on it. Thus, these films are less about stereotypes meant to comfort an elite into believing that it is not responsible for racism, chauvinism or the Vietnam War. These films, rather, create complex portraits of three-dimensional human beings with whom the viewer can identify, no matter how alien their experience, rather than caricatures the viewer automatically feels superior to. The art of these films forces viewers to confront the place of man — any man, of any ethnicity — in the face of oppressive, overwhelming historical tides. Ironically, Canby, who insisted on wrongly identifying the characters in The Deer Hunter as “Russian,” once praised The Deer Hunter's genuineness in an article about artistic truth. Cultural arbiter Canby argued forcefully for his own disregard of poetic truth in movies about cultures he doesn't care about. Canby then insisted that he could not accept the artistic merits of a movie that flubbed details of the tensions between old and new money, tensions with which he is familiar (Canby 1978, b). In a further irony, The Deer Hunter has been criticized by many as “racist.” One viewer 139

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protested, “The movie is ‘a lie’ in which all the non-Americans are ‘sweaty, crazy, vicious, and debauched.’” The protesters were not concerned with the film's portrayal of Bohunks, but of Asians (Harmentz 1979; see also Kutler 1996, 61-74). One mainstream author rooted in working class and Bohunk life has voiced his objections to The Deer Hunter. In 1999, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Studs Terkel wrote: I've attended a number of such weddings and the parties that followed — Russian Orthodox, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Polish, Croat, Serb — but I have yet to attend a wedding as dull, one-dimensional, and interminable as this one. I have seen drunken brawls. I have heard words passed. But mostly I have observed the dignity that hard-working people have on occasions of this sort. At such times, encouraged by a drink or two, they talk of their lives; they reveal themselves, their hidden hurts and inchoate hopes as they rarely do in their workaday existence. Here [in Deer Hunter] we have the drunks without the revelation. For almost an hour, we stare fixedly at a banal wedding portrait. It is as though National Geographic were offering a portrait of the Watusi people. All detail, no insight. (Terkel 120-125)

The Fugitive The Fugitive was that rare thing: a movie that dominated the year's box office receipts as wells as critics' praise. Janet Maslin's review is an atypical, for the Times, cascade of superlatives. “A smashing success,” she stated. “A juggernaut of an action-adventure saga ... directed sensationally,” the principals act with “steely perfection” the supporting cast is “flawless”; the screenplay is “clever, inventive”; in fact “every element conspires to sustain crisp intelligence and a relentless pace.” “To put it simply, this is a home run” (Maslin). The movie consists of one long chase. A highly successful surgeon falsely accused of killing his wife runs from the law while trying to find the real killer. This contrived story gains force from the nightmarish fear that one wrong move could result in a man's losing his family, home, status, income; and the character-testing question: could a man who was at the 140

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top triumph if thrust to the bottom? The film chronicles Dr. Kimble's (Harrison Ford) desperate plummet from a man who had everything to an escaped convict who must function in a world he was probably never exposed to before: prison, cheap basement apartments, mean streets. Once convicted, Kimble shares space with African American prisoners, but they are intelligent and dignified. One could conclude that they are prisoners because of racial injustice rather than because of any crimes they may have committed. Further, the crack law-enforcement team chasing Dr. Kimble, headed up by Tommy Lee Jones, is integrated. Jones' character, Sam Gerard, is a WASP male, of course, but he leads a politically correct team. Gerard has a Jew and a very competent African American woman working for him. Will political correctness result in a vitiated film? No. The obvious choice is to exploit an ethnicity that is coded low class, and that is fair game. The film plays the Bieganski card. The Poles in this film are onscreen very briefly; the very brevity of their appearance, combined with the certainty of their ethnicity and their function, indicates how very strong the stereotype is. Kimble was formerly shown in a tuxedo, rubbing elbows with the svelte and glamorous. Running from the law, he must vacate his airy, enviable high-rent apartment and enter the world of dreary basement rooms. (Dundes quotes a joke associating the impoverished Polaks with basement apartments. “Why is the Polish suicide rate so low? Did you ever try jumping out of a basement window?” Dundes, “Study” 200). The viewer is given an idea of the gravity of Kimble's situation: his landlady is Polish. She speaks Polish repeatedly; a shoddy knock-off of Poland's revered Black Madonna hangs over Kimble's rented bed. The landlady herself conforms to the dictates of stereotypical Bohunk gender failure: she is ugly and expressionless, except for a vague, stupid hostility; her body is block-like. In case the viewer has missed how grim and low this state of affairs is for the hero, police raid the residence. An affirmative action team of cops, including an African American man, arrest the landlady's fat, balding, ugly son for “Stringing out twelve year old girls.” The African American cop leads the Polak prisoner away. In the police station the ugly Polak criminal, apparently bought out by the treats he is stuffing into his mouth, betrays Kimble's location. As with his mother, 141

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no thought or emotion flickers on his balloon-like face. “Relax,” this scene reassures mainstream America. “Yes, African Americans will advance, but they won't advance at your expense. A WASP male still leads the team. As a bonus, you, the viewer, can feel righteous watching an African American cop leading away a white bad guy. You can feel safe as well as righteous, because the bad guy isn't really white like you. He's a Polak. Yes there are bad, ugly, distasteful ethnic others in this world, people so perversely, stupidly hostile and possessed of such bad taste that they deserve our fear, disgust, and the rough treatment of our police. We can use them as shorthand for danger, perverse hostility, crime and ugliness in our art. The Bieganskis.” The Apartment The Apartment is treated out of chronological order because it represents a significant departure from the norm in its treatment of Bohunks. The Apartment won the best picture Oscar of 1960; Oscars also went to Billy Wilder for his direction and Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond for their screenplay. Bosley Crowther called it a “ ... gleeful, tender, and even sentimental film,” and praised its “ingenious” direction, “splendid” performances, and “action and dialogue tumbling with wit” (Crowther 1960). The New York Times named it one of the year's top ten. The Apartment opens with a crisp aerial view of Manhattan's skyscrapers. In a voice-over, Jack Lemmon, as the movie's hero, C. C. Baxter, recites statistics: if all the citizens of New York were laid end to end they would reach Karachi. The narrator knows things like this because he crunches numbers for an insurance company. The camera cuts to Baxter's desk, one of hundreds in a starkly lit office, beehive-like in its uniformity and buzz. We soon discover what sets Baxter apart in this dizzying series of images of an imperial, dehumanizing, gray flannel America: he allows higher-ups to conduct illicit sexual liaisons in his one-bedroom bachelor apartment. This boy is going places. In exchange for his compliance, Baxter's superiors put in a good word for him with the powerful Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray). Sheldrake, 142

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when promoting Baxter, puts an end to the other men's shenanigans, only to reserve Baxter's apartment for his affair with Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine; “Kubelik” is a Czech name) an elevator operator. A series of alternately melancholy, comic, and near tragic scenes follow, centering on Baxter's brokering of his apartment for professional advancement, and the erosive effect this has on his humanity. Fran, depressed by her affair with Sheldrake, attempts suicide in the apartment; Baxter nurses her. A neighbor, Dr. Dreyfus, helps Baxter rescue Fran. Cabby Karl Matushka, Fran's brother-in-law, arrives to punch Baxter out. Eventually Fran and Baxter come to understand that they love each other, and unite, happily, leaving Sheldrake and the rat race behind them. Fran Kubelik and Karl Matushka bear certain superficial similarities to the Bohunks described so far. They do blue-collar work; they abjure socially coded displays meant to impress as intelligence. Their physicality, in the form of Fran's sexual surrender and Matushka's violence, is essential to their characters. There is a world of difference, though, between the Bohunks of The Apartment and of the three previously discussed films. Many Bohunks did work with their bodies, live in poverty, lack education, and sense that they were different and despised. That sense contributed to a discomfort that outsiders often read as irrational hostility or anti-cultural clannishness (Novak Guns xv, xvi). As we have seen, writers, producers and directors may, in getting these surface ethnographic details right, get the inner men and women wrong. Fran Kubelik and Karl Matushka, however, communicate to the attentive viewer that the circumstances of their lives do not define them, and that their manifest traits are their best option for dealing with the world as it has been presented to them, rather than evidence of inferior blood. Further, Fran, Matushka, and the Jewish Doctor Dreyfus are allowed eyes and mouths. They are allowed subjectivity. They are allowed to see and comment on the others who see and comment on them; they are allowed to implicate those they see and those who see them. Thus, they are as human as the viewer; it is possible to identify with them. Matushka, Fran and Dr. Dreyfus are allowed to present the very qualities Baxter's slice of America needs to save its own soul. 143

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Fran disparages her own intelligence. She announces that she wanted to be a typist, but, “I flunked the typing test. I can't spell.” Fran, though, is not as dumb as she protests, and one suspects that she is presenting the face that she needs to in order to survive her fate. In working her miserable job she shows a graciousness and dignity the white-collar workers lack; Baxter crosses hierarchical lines in order to point this out to her. While dealing with the wandering hands of executive Mr. Kirkibee in no uncertain terms, Fran brandishes a rapier wit that defuses what might otherwise be a precarious situation for a woman in her relatively powerless position. She identifies herself as a “happy idiot” to Sheldrake during a painful moment, communicating that she knows more about what's really going on than he does, but that she is powerless to make Sheldrake, the powerful one, understand; therefore, it is to her temporary strategic advantage to play the role assigned her. When she has finally gained the insight she needs to break free from Sheldrake's power, she tells him, “I'd spell it out for you, only I can't spell.” With this sentence she rejects the cold profit-and-loss logic of Sheldrake's world and acknowledges the superiority of her kind of Bohunk logic, in which an unemployed shnook like Baxter is a better match for her than a wealthy and newly divorced executive like Sheldrake. Matushka advertises his low intellectual status through his job: cabby, and his non-standard speech: “My sister-in-law she runs”, and, “on account of ”, flat vowels and dropping of “R's.” Matushka's broad shoulders, athletic stance, and slight stoop offer an obvious visual contrast when he enters a glass-walled office of unmuscled, suited executives. He wears a hip-length leather jacket and leather gloves; other than his rugged, angry face, no humanizing flesh is revealed. That Matushka's personality is no one-dimensional stereotype, but that it is Slavic, multi-layered, potentially confusing to Westerners, and possessed of gender-crossing maternal, as well as stereotypically macho qualities, is hinted at in his last name. “Matushka,” or “little mother” is of course, one name of the traditional Russian doll, aka “matryoshka,” that stacks one within the other. In any case, Baxter's fellow executives immediately size Matushka up as a threat and sic him on Baxter to avenge Baxter's revoking of their apartment privileges. 144

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When he arrives at the apartment, Matushka's mere presence agitates Baxter into a comic tailspin of faux macho, expressed in the only form available to him: self-incriminatory verbosity. He, in shirt and tie, prattles on and on, while Matushka glares at him, arms crossed, silent, his sheer physicality statement enough. When he doesn't like what he thinks he sees, Matushka punches Baxter to the ground. As he watches Baxter silently, menacingly, he radiates the presence not of a man who can't speak, but who disdains the feeble verbal efforts at self-aggrandizement and femaledisparaging male bonding that Baxter produces as if they were Madison Avenue jingles. Matushka looks like a working man who's been lied to before, who knows when he's being lied to, and who will use what power he has, his body, to articulately and efficiently say what needs to be said when he needs to say it. His aware and communicative silence, apparently, says much to the better-educated, white-collar Baxter; it is what drives Baxter into his verbal tailspin. Unlike Stanley Kowalski, who affects elite speech when trying to coax ownership of Belle Reve, Matushka is too intelligent, dignified and self-satisfied to ape the vocabulary of another class. Rather, Matushka's very silence and physicality present the world through his eyes, and his class superiors as they look to him — that is, inferior. The sexual exploitation of Fran's working class, Bohunk body by an upper class WASP, and her own self-deprecation of her mind, could render a woman who is only her physicality. We are told in so many words, however, that Fran is the decent one. While higher ups carouse at a Christmas party, Fran is shown sober, dignified, and apart. Fran resists the rush and anonymity of elevator traffic to take note of Baxter's elevator courtesies. She gives him a flower for his lapel on an important day; she gently requests that Baxter not speak indiscreetly of her to other men in the office. Fran's body is sturdy like Stanley Kowalski's and other Bohunks: “I never catch colds.” But she is self-aware and witty about this: “If the average New Yorker catches two and a half colds a year and I don't catch any, some poor slob is getting five!” Her genuine love for Sheldrake, combined with the disempowered's wistful, wishful ability to see the reality she needs rather than the harsh, hopeless truth that confronts her, are what make the affair possible for her. Even so, she is never seen unclothed while 145

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with her married lover; she never kisses or embraces him; she attempts to end the affair and only continues because of his calculated seduction. Like Baxter, she temporarily trades the commodity over which she has power to a cold, powerful WASP's empty promises. Fran feels deep grief and disgust when her fantasy weakens and reality becomes evident. She persists in using a mirror broken during a fight with Sheldrake. “It makes me look the way I feel.” Even Fran and Matushka's relative poverty are positively valued. Baxter moves and lives in a frigid, amoral vacuum, where he can do what he wants because nobody cares. The poorer Fran, by contrast, must live in the same domestic arrangement as Blanche du Bois: with her sister and brother-in-law. This domestic setting is not a prelude to degradation and rape but to caring and protection of honor. Matushka goes to Fran's workplace to check on her when she doesn't come home; he travels to Baxter's apartment, collects her, and punishes the man whom he believes hurt her. In fact, it is Baxter's world, a WASP one of hypocrisy, anomie, and pointless dog-eat-dog competition, which must change. It is in the eyes of Bohunks and Jews that Baxter is informed that there is something wrong with his life. Protesting suspicious goings on in Baxter's apartment, Jewish neighbor Dr. Dreyfus warns Baxter that he won't live long, and exhorts him to become a “mensch.” (The uncommon name “Dreyfus,” of course, because of the historical Alfred Dreyfus, will always be associated with the outraged society-correcting cry, “I accuse!”) In Fran's broken mirror, Baxter sees the painful ridiculousness of his splintered reflection, as he models his newly-purchased bowler, the power hat he had bought to celebrate his hard-earned promotion. It is at that moment that he confronts the compromises he and others make to achieve “success.” Baxter's moment of truth, when he finally takes a stand for himself and for what he is discovering he believes, is made clear by Fran's irrational Bohunk sentiment and inspired by love for Fran. For the first time in nearly two hours of acting like a compromised doormat, Baxter says a firm “No” to a demand for his apartment. He takes this stand because he knows that Sheldrake wants to bring Fran there. When Sheldrake threatens to fire 146

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him for this, Baxter says, “I'm just following Doctor's orders. I've decided to become a mensch. The old payola won't work anymore.” The necessary ingredients for Baxter's redemption, and, by extension, his glass-and-steel America, are Ashkenazi philosophy and Bohunk love. In a baton-passing gesture, Baxter pauses in his escape to place his power hat atop the head of an African American janitor. This is a complex and sympathetic portrayal of Bohunks; how did it come about? Billy Wilder was a Jew from Sucha, Poland. Fran Kubelik's cinematic older sister is Sugar Kowalczyk, the sweet, sexy, conniving but self-advertised dumb blonde played by Marilyn Monroe in Wilder's 1959 hit, “Some Like it Hot.” Wilder's depiction of loving Bohunk women brings to mind Noble Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, through whose works parade a series of such Bohunk heroines: Wanda in The Slave, Jadwiga in Enemies, a Love Story, and Tekla, in Shosha of whom Singer wrote: These are the real people, the ones who keep the world going, I thought. They serve as proof that the cabalists are right ... An indifferent God, a mad God, couldn't have created Tekla ... Her cheeks were the color of ripe apples. She gave forth a vigor rooted in the earth, in the sun, in the whole universe. She didn't want to better the world as did Dora; she didn't require roles and reviews as did Betty; she didn't seek thrills as did Celia. She wanted to give, not take. If the Polish people had produced even one Tekla, they had surely accomplished their mission. (Singer 1982, 325)

Chapter Five

Bieganski as a Support for Jewish Identity

This work argues that Jews as well as non-Jews work hard to create and maintain a stereotype, Bieganski. A reader might well respond, “That's ridiculous. Why would anyone care so much about Poles or Poland?” Slawomir Majman typified this when he argued that Poland is so inconsequential that no one would bother to stereotype Poles, and that any concern over stereotyping is evidence of a diagnostic Polish mental deficiency, a “neurosis,” “complex,” or “hang-up” (Majman). This chapter will argue that those who create and maintain Bieganski are not concerned with Poland. Rather, they are, like most people, primarily concerned with themselves. Bieganski is a statement about his creators and maintainers, and their effort to develop and strengthen their own identities. This work understands identity as requiring an other for assertion. One must say, “I am not he,” in order to say “I am I.” Modern American Jews, according to many well-received authors, are experiencing an identity crisis. According to Jewish Studies Professor Jack Kugelmass, the crisis is caused by increasing intermarriage, a decline in religious observance, and the fear that a lack of overt anti-Semitism has made the boundaries between Jew and non-Jew permeable (424). Samuel G. Freedman stated the crisis starkly: “Jewishness as ethnicity, as folk culture, as something separate and divisible from religion, is ceasing to exist” (Freedman 338-9). Freedman, citing research from the late 1990's, observed that “every measure” of Jewish ethnicity had “plummeted.” “Friendships with fellow Jews, attachment to Israel, membership in Jewish institutions, commitment to social justice” were all down. 148

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The result? “Jews had little to hold on to that made them feel like Jews” (339). Paul Breines argued that Jewishness, as an ethnicity, was “dissolving” and needed shoring up with “new sources of identity” (Breines “Home Boys”). Peter Novick wrote that “These days American Jews can't define their Jewishness on the basis of distinctively Jewish religious beliefs, since most don't have much in the way of distinctively Jewish religious beliefs. They can't define it by distinctively Jewish cultural traits, since most don't have any of these either” (Novick 7). Outside of “protective” “intact” Orthodox communities, modern Jews, according to Jewish studies scholar Rachel Adler, feel as if “the ozone layer has burned off and waves of meaninglessness beat down on you” (Freedman 341-2). Even Israel's power to define American Jews as Jews is lessening. Powerful forces in Israel have worked to excommunicate many American Jews. This trend was summed up in two unambiguous New York Times headlines: “American Jews Grow Fearful of Being Cast Aside by Israel” and “How Do You Prove You're a Jew?” The lead paragraph of the former reported, “For 49 years, American Jews have looked to Israel as the anchor that held them steady against the powerful currents of assimilation in the United States. Now many fear that very source of unity is driving them apart.” Israeli religious and government officials have been codifying, in both civil and religious life, a Jewish identity that renders many American Jews as not Jewish at all, but, rather, “apostates,” “infidels” and “outsiders” (Goodstein, Gorenberg). According to many well-received recent authors, a sense of victimization has become essential to creating and maintaining modern American Jewish identity. Kugelmass, quoting Herbert Gans, argued that there is “a need for the threat of group destruction” to shore up Jewish identity. Freedman reported that there is “a perverse longing among American Jews for anti-Semitism ... just enough to bind the fragmenting community together” (343). “Without some common enemy we [ Jews] are hopelessly divided, incapable of defining ourselves” (Freedman 347). “The vital responsibility to remember the Holocaust ... has become ... more and more the basis of an identity based on victimization” (344). 149

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Eva Hoffman offered a virtually identical analysis (Shtetl 14), as did Jerzy Kosinski (“Second Holocaust”) and Peter Novick. Novick wrote: It may be [that] many Jews don't know who they are, except insofar as they have a unique “victim” identity, and because the uniqueness of the Holocaust is the sole guarantor of their uniqueness ... One could ... argue, as does Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, that it was not coincidental that interest in the Holocaust began “at the point when anti-Semitism in American had become negligible.” (198)

Israeli military prowess weakens the Jewish hold on the image of David against Goliath (Kugelmass 426; Novick 162-3; Freedman 27). Breines wrote, “The more brutal Israeli policies become ... the more American Jews ... need the Holocaust” (Breines, Tough 73). Kugelmass saw the Middle East's impact in increased American Jewish Holocaust tourism to Poland. “As long as Israel was perceived as a David against Goliath, there was no need for a ritual to convince participants and spectators of the vulnerability of the Jewish people.” Kugelmass described organized Jewish Holocaust tourism to Poland as a direct response to images of Palestinian boys armed with stones going up against Israelis equipped with superior weaponry (Kugelmass 426-7). Lauren, an informant for this work, spoke of the role of victimization in her understanding of Jewish identity. After describing her rejection of Jewish religious practice as too patriarchal, she went on to describe how the image of Jews as victims makes her feel Jewish. To this day, I still feel most Jewish when I hear Judaism being attacked ... The tragedy of “The Six Million” always loomed large. I was told you could never really trust “the goyim” because look what happened to German Jews; they had felt themselves to be Germans first and Jews second. Big mistake ... how can I turn my back on my family and The Six Million? Guilt, guilt.

What do American Jews' identity crisis and victim identity have to do with Bieganski? Israeli politician Zevulun Orlev outlined the connection in a 2007 essay. 150

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Many studies undertaken by “Yad Vashem” show that Holocaust awareness is the most significant fundamental element in formulating the Jewish and Israeli identity of teenagers - more so than serving in the IDF, the Hebrew language, Independence Day, and all other national symbols … I have no doubt in my mind that by the end of the journey to Poland, the teenagers return to Israel as better Jews and better Israelis … they undergo a difficult emotional experience when they see with their own eyes the fate of Jews that lacked sovereignty and political-military independence - butchered, burned, and murdered only because they were Jewish… The Mishnah says that in every generation a person must view himself as though he himself departed from Egypt - to that I add that in every generation, a person must view himself or herself as though they were the ones who came out of the cursed valley of death … A boy that steps on the cursed Polish soil and a girl that smells the ashes of her burned ancestors will forever remember that the Jewish people is an eternal people and that “never again.” Our generation, which connects the Holocaust and revival generation to the next generations, is tasked with the duty of telling the story of the Holocaust and its lessons when there is no longer anyone who can testify from personal experience and there is no substitute to the tools provided to that end by the visits to Poland.

According to Israeli politician Zevulun Orlev, who cites studies to support his position, Holocaust education is primary in creating Jewish identity. Poland is a sine qua non for Holocaust education. The Poland of the Statute of Kalisz, or even the Poland of Jan Karski, is not a player here. Rather, the Poland that is central to Jewish identity is the modern equivalent of that very Egypt, the villain of the book of Exodus, that enslaved Jews and played antagonist to no less a protagonist than Yahweh himself. Poland is also the 23rd Psalm's Valley of Death. Finally, Poland is “cursed.” It is necessary for Poland to be all these things, and nothing else, because “cursed” Poland is central to building Jewish identity. A recent study supports both Orlev's, and this chapter's, contention. In 2006, Social Psychologist Jennifer K. Bosson published “Interpersonal Chemistry through Negativity: Bonding by Sharing Negative Attitudes about Others,” an article with a self-explanatory title. Her research, 151

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she wrote, supports the theory that “Sharing a negative — as compared to a positive — attitude about a third party is particularly effective in promoting closeness between people … despite the apparent ubiquity of this effect, participants seemed unaware of it … there seems to be something especially delicious about the process of sharing our grievances about other people” (135, 148-9). While Bosson's work focused on individuals and small groups, in an email she wrote, I do think the findings might generalize to the macrocosm. A relevant theory is [Gordon] Allport's (1954) contact hypothesis, in which he proposed that two groups that dislike each other (or hold prejudices against one another, etc.) can overcome their dislike if they are confronted with a ‘superordinate’ goal that they must work together to accomplish. One example of such a goal would be having to work together to defeat a common enemy. So, this is similar to the idea of two groups ‘bonding’ over their mutual dislike of another group. (Bosson e-mail)

The project of deriving identity from victimization and shared negative attitudes faces obstacles. “Today if you are mad, who are you mad at? America is so inviting that the ‘enemy’ is a good,” opined American Jewish Committee worker Joseph Rackman (Freedman 346). Creating and maintaining Bieganski, and hating him, provides an answer to several problems of Jewish identity. This process isn't solely a product of modern America. The important Polish-Jewish author I.L. Peretz (1852-1915), according to David Roskies, “conjures up a world of wholeness” where there is peace and unity between Jewish factions that Peretz had previously depicted as oppositional: “husband and wife, hasid and maskil, sinner and saint.” How did Peretz create a convincing portrait of Jewish unity, in spite of very real Jewish rifts and rivalries? “The opposition between gentiles [i.e., Poles, as Peretz lived in Poland] and Jews ... is now intensified to strengthen group solidarity” (Roskies 133). The process of firming and defining fragile group identity and solidarity through victimization and over and against a posited ethnic other of choice has been described in American- as well as Eastern European-Jewish literature. Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint provides an example. Portnoy, 152

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the novel protagonist, “recalls something that his father often said to him: ‘A Polack's day ... isn't complete until he has dragged his big, dumb feet across the bones of a Jew’ ... My father is right, these people are direct descendants of the ox.” Alice Dembosky embodies the sensuality and stupidity of a stereotypical “dumb, blond, goyische beauty.” This “Polack's plan” is to steal away a Jewish boy and “ruin his life.” Uncle Hymie, using deceit and bribes, drives the threatening Polack away. Hymie's lies and bribery are justifiable; he is dealing with a Pole, an animal out to ruin Jews (Gladsky 196-7). Portnoy and his father agree on little else. On Bieganski, though, they can bond, and Portnoy, Roth, and his readers can experience the comforts of identity, whether they follow the six hundred thirteen commandments or not. Kugelmass opened his account of Holocaust tourism with a description of a group of Holocaust pilgrims: a Hasid, his son, and his daughter, a Jewish studies professor. The otherwise devout family greeted arrival in Poland by refusing to recite a Jewish prayer standard when experiencing something for the first time. Rather, they told a Polak joke: “What did the Polak say when his wife gave birth to twins? ‘Who's the father of the other one?’” Their alienation from Poland was expressed by their having brought enough food to last the entire trip (Kugelmass 395-6). Kugelmass noted, as have other observers like Tom Segev, the insularity of Holocaust tourism. Holocaust tourists tend to avoid Jews in Poland (Kugelmass 403). Living Polish Jews would complicate their picture of Poland as the Valley of Death. Jews living in Poland may be written off as “schnorrers,” or “beggars.” Poland is poorer than the United States, and chances are that Polish Jews, like any Poles, would be happy to receive gifts from far wealthier Americans. American Jews were embarrassed to see Polish Jews pocketing candies American Jews had seen as having a purely decorative value (408). Many of these tourists have not wanted to meet Jews who experience anything positive about life in Poland, or who feel intimacy with non-Jewish Poles (409). Since many Holocaust tourists know, and want to know, so little about Poland, “the experiences they remember are likely to be those that enhance an already existing negative opinion,” an opinion they bring with them. “American Jews are known to have very 153

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strong biases against Poland” (411). These Jews, according to Kugelmass, cement their own identity as Jews not by following the commandments or by engaging with Jewish culture. Indeed, some are people who are “‘totally disinterested in Jewish life at home’” (410). Use of Poland as an identity-cementing aid is an easier way to be Jewish than following Jewish calendrical rites (425). People rarely establish a chosen identity by presenting their audience with a set of charts, graphs, or test scores. Rather, they tell stories. Stories, the stuff and conveyor of identity, are not invertebrates, not jellyfish floating hither and thither with minimal form. Stories are structured in obedience to narrative laws. As freewheeling as storytelling may seem, successful tellers rearrange pre-existing elements in pre-existing models to achieve, in their audiences, pre-existing effects. Experimentation has repeatedly shown that people change stories in order to make those stories conform to convention (e.g. Cushing, Kintsch and Greene, Scollon and Scollon). Orality scholar Walter J. Ong put it this way: “All narrative is artificial … Reality never occurs in narrative form … To make a narrative, I have to isolate certain elements out of the unbroken and seamless web of history with a view to fitting them into a particular construct … Not everything in the web will fit a given design” (Ong 12). Since identity is constructed via narrative, narrative laws dictate identity. One of the foundational analyses of narrative form was Danish folklorist Axel Olrik's 1909, “Epic Laws of Folk Narrative.” Olrik described twelve epic laws to which successful folk narratives must conform. One such law was “The Law of Two to a Scene.” In folk narrative, Olrik wrote, “Two is the maximum number of characters who appear at one time ... The Law of Two to a Scene is a strict one” (Olrik 134-5). Another of the twelve epic laws, “The Law of Contrast,” mandates that each character be the opposite of the other. “The Law of Contrast works from the protagonist ... out to the other individuals, whose characteristics and actions are determined by the requirement that they be antithetical to those of the protagonist” (Olrik 135). The protagonist's character is established first, and peripheral characters' identities are determined by the need to be the opposite of the protagonist. Jacob Goldberg, hailed as the leading scholar 154

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in the field of the history of the Jews in Poland, publicly denounced the tendency to tell Polish-Jewish history in accordance with this law. “The history of these relations transcends the range of dichotomic stances” (Goldberg “Speech” 10). Marian Marzynski's 1996 documentary Shtetl created a black-andwhite portrait of a Polish town, Bransk, populated by powerful and evil Poles and powerless and virtuous Jews. Though the film covers World War Two, Nazis hardly appear. Viewers reported that hating Poles and Poland per se was the virtuous response. “This film clearly illustrates the basis for my prejudice toward the Polish People. For many years, I harbored feelings of guilt concerning my opinions of the Polish People. Upon viewing the film, I feel completely absolved” (PBS Shtetl “Feedback”). Marzynski boasted, “a running camera never changes the truth” (PBS Shtetl “Questions”). Conversely, American director Brian de Palma once observed, “The camera lies all the time. It lies 24 times a second” ( James). Zbigniew Romaniuk, a historian who had worked with Marzynski on the film, asked Marzynski why key data had been left out. Why did Marzynksi not mention that a Pole, in accord with Nazi edict, was executed for owning a radio? Why no mention of Henryk Opiatowski, the Polish priest killed for helping Jews? Why did Marzynski not mention the wider, and historically deep-rooted, German, anti-Polonist terror that these murders typified? Why did Marzynski not mention that Nazis were not Bransk's only invaders? When Soviets had invaded earlier, trumpeting, and acting on, an ages-old determination to wipe out Poland and Russify the area, Jews collaborated to the extent of supplying fifty percent of the Soviet police. Many such questions followed. All had one point. Why had Marzynski reduced a full-color reality to black-and-white (PBS Shtetl “Letter from Zbigniew Romaniuk to Marian Marzynski”)? Marzynski brushed off Romaniuk's many questions with a simple reply: “I didn't have a choice.” The alert reader will note Marzynski's declaration of his own powerlessness. One must follow the rules to create compelling narrative. “Without strong characters and a plot involving them, you and I would put our viewers to sleep” (PBS Shtetl “Marzynski's Response”). 155

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By “strong characters,” the reader can understand, “contrasting characters.” Marzynski gave his audience what it craved, what audiences have always craved: two opposite characters, in this case, one empowered and evil, the other powerless and virtuous. “Do Not Speak Ill of the Dead:” The Difficulty in Treating Polish Jews as Ordinary Humans Anne Karpf wrote of the difficulties she faced whenever she felt any discomfort with her parents. “Hating one's parents is a necessary stage of childhood, like becoming potty-trained. We bypassed it. How could you hate those who'd already been hated so much?” Whenever Karpf was a naughty daughter, others reminded her, “Remember what she's been though.” Karpf resented this. “I came to abominate what she'd been through no longer on her account, but on ours” (Karpf 38). Karpf 's parents' status as virtuous victims defined her as something else. “Their world had been split into good and bad: if you weren't one, you must be the other” (Karpf 40). And virtuous victims they had to be. It's hard to speak about Holocaust survivors in anything but a reverent tone or without turning their suffering into a sacrament. People expect of them abnormally high standards of behavior, as if a dehumanizing experience might somehow dignify and elevate, and along with their worldly goods, they should also have lost all worldliness. (Karpf 249)

One of the barriers to seeing Bieganski as a stereotype, rather than an accurate representation of reality, is the romanticization of pre-Holocaust Polish Jewish culture, typified by elite authors like Sholem Aleichem, source of the stories on which Fiddler on the Roof was based, and the postHolocaust, Margaret-Mead-inspired, Life is with People. In them, Poland's Jews are depicted as saintly. By extension, and through application of The Law of Two to a Scene and The Law of Contrast, these works militate against their large audiences seeing Poland's non-Jews as anything but Bieganski. David Roskies summed up this popular understanding. “Jews danced and prayed all day until the Cossacks came and burned the place 156

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down” (18). Antony Polonsky pointed out that “Examples of … elevated nostalgia could easily be multiplied.” He quoted that of prominent American rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel. The little Jewish communities in Eastern Europe were like sacred texts opened before the eyes of God, so close were the houses of worship to Mount Sinai. In the humble wooden synagogues, looking as if they were deliberately closing themselves off from the world, the Jews purified the souls that God had given them and perfected their likeness to God… Even plain men were like artists who knew how to fill weekday hours with mystic beauty. (Polonsky “Shtetl” 3-4)

Not all contemporary Jews have embraced romanticization of the shtetl. In arguing for a rescue of sexually successful Jewish role models, and against the “sexual shlemiel” stereotype, David Biale found fault with Life is with People. Biale saw in it an effort by “conservative theologies” to “efface the historical struggles over sexuality and leave an impression of Jewish purity and health” (222). Life, he wrote, conjures up a nostalgic image of the shtetl as a world in which marital and familial harmony reigned. In this mythology, the traditional world of Eastern Europe was a world without internal conflicts and tensions. The struggles that we have noted in Ashkenazic Jewish culture seemed too threatening to the assimilating American Jews in search of a usable past. (223)

Sander Gilman argued that Life popularized a nostalgic image that had first been created by émigré artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries like Sholem Aleichem who, along with the rest of the mass emigration, had escaped the religious orthodoxy and cultural limitation of the shtetl as soon as they could, and, “sitting in the south of France or New York City, these authors evoked, at the moment of its dissolution, a lost world of an integrated, authentic Jewish experience.” This picture, Gilman wrote, “was a constructed image that fulfilled specific ideological needs.” Life presents “myths about the idyllic nature of the shtetl that evolved retrospectively after [its] dissolution through urbanization 157

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and immigration.” This “idealized image” stressed “the virtuousness of such communities” (Gilman “Smart” 14-5). David Roskies pointed out that Sholem Aleichem was a wealthy urban stockbroker in a Russian city that otherwise refused residence to Jews. Aleichem had to move from “condescension to identification with the folk” (Roskies 153). While Fiddler contains a magnificent song, “Sabbath Prayer,” that celebrates the spiritual power of that day, Aleichem's own memories of the Sabbath were “a time of boredom and intolerable restriction” (167). Eva Hoffman wrote that “the shadow of the Holocaust is long, and it extends backward as well as forward ... for some descendants of Eastern European Jews, the lost world of their parents and grandparents has become idealized, sequestered in the imagination” (Hoffman Shtetl 7). Romanticization of the shtetl gained power after the Holocaust. Many 1880-1929 immigrants very much wanted to emigrate, not just to get out of Poland, but to get away from Jewish life in Poland. In theater, film, songs and poems, Jewish immigrants critiqued Jewish life in Poland as an oppressive nightmare that doomed people to lives — loveless, arranged marriages; rigidly defined gender roles; restrictions on what can be eaten, worn, said, done — that they never would have chosen for themselves. Life in America was, for many, not a teary exile from the lost Eden of the shtetl but a blessed deliverance from a Poland that had long granted Jewish authorities exceptional autonomous power, power that was used to maintain a theocratic hold on people's lives. The sons and daughters of orthodox parents eagerly abandoned a Jewish-ordered world in Poland and fled to America, the “Treyfe medina” or “unclean country” (PBS “Life”). They rapidly abandoned distinctive orthodox dress, language, eating patterns, social organization, and adopted “goyish” ways. Rather than fulfilling the age-old expectation that children carry on and valorize their ancestors' identities, immigrant Jews became like the goys from which Jewish culture had struggled so hard, so long, and at so great a price, to distinguish itself. Polish Jews were as human as anyone else. Jewish religious leaders were not, anymore than Christian ones, uniformly advanced spiritual beings. They were as capable of shaking down their followers for funds as any 158

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televangelist, while privately expressing disdain for their supporters, and as capable of living opulently thanks to their fundraising skills. In the same way that Catholic clergy gained funds through selling indulgences, Jewish religious leaders fundraised by selling charms (Assaf). Nor was Jewish family life the heavenly counterpoint to the debased, hellish family life of non-Jews, as claimed in both contemporaneous and after-the-fact Jewish folklore. Arranged marriages did not always climax with a rousing rendition of “Do You Love Me,” the “Fiddler on the Roof ” love duet sung by a couple whose marriage had been arranged. Mothers-in-law might beat young sons-in-law; fathers-in-law might force themselves on daughters-in-law. Melameds, traditional teachers, were expected to beat their students. A typical memoir reports that one teacher “knew how to beat children better than he knew how to teach them.” This melamed used a stove-heated poker to beat the memoirist till he thought he might die (Sorin 16). Folk beliefs that “Jewish men do not beat their wives” notwithstanding, “violence toward women was prevalent in all of the communities” of Jews. The folk belief contrasting violent, drunken, wife-beating goyim with non-violent Jews continues to present a problem to Jews trying to defeat wife beating (Boyarin 166). In 1860, one Eastern European Jew summed up traditional Jewish family life. “Only one in a thousand will derive joy from family life and even that will only be a façade” (Biale “Love” 62). Many émigré Jews in the pre-Holocaust, early twentieth century viewed shtetls as “out-of-date, parochial, and restrictive” (Morawska 290). Returning to his natal shtetl after a long absence, a Polish-born Jew reported with shock that he saw a man with a beard like those “you see in America only in the movies, on a wild man wrestling with lions in Africa … he had an abscess on one cheek and looked ancient.” These towns, another returning American remarked, “know nothing of ... the hot bath, the playing field, the automobile, the neatly pressed suit, the theater ... Americans couldn't live that way” (Morawska 306). Immigrants to America and their descendents came to view shtetl inhabitants as “‘other,’ more pathetic than comical” (Morawska 316). American Jews' rejection of their Old World roots and their enthusiastic embrace 159

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of foreign ways was dramatized in 1927's epochal The Jazz Singer, the first “talkie” that ended the era of silent films. This Al Jolson movie dramatized a cantor's son's difficult decision to abandon Old World religious and filial expectations and pursue a career in secular show business. Western European Jews also often rejected shtetl culture. The German term for Eastern Jew, “Ostjude” expressed prejudiced contempt. In 1895, British Jews hoping to reform their hopelessly Polish immigrant co-religionists made the astounding demand that a new “minister” (i.e., rabbi) had to be ready to “pull down the Cheder ... brick by brick” (Kaplan 269). The cheder was the school where Eastern European Jewish culture and Talmudic learning were passed from one generation of males to the next. This ill-will toward Ostjuden was strong enough to cause Jewish leaders to side with non-Jewish British ones against Jewish immigration from Poland to England (Kaplan 271). German and other Jews already in America similarly put space, both geographic and social, between themselves and newly arrived Polish Jews, who lived in separate communities. “These Polish Jews are indigestible for the American stomach as are the Chinese … We have enough and sufficient Polish Jews … and will thank the powers that be in Europe, to not send us any more” commented the Occident, an American German-Jewish publication. The Hebrew Standard wrote of “miserable darkened Hebrews” “The thoroughly acclimated American Jew … has no religious, social, or intellectual sympathies with the East European Jews” (Kapiszewski 21) “Poland” became a metonym for anything negative in the Jewish makeup. Both Poland and the Jews in it were denigrated. Both were accurately assessed as poor, religious, and less worldly. “They bring Poland to England and retain it while they stay here,” a Jewish newspaper in England railed. They “do in England as the Poles do.” “There is a great danger that the recent accessions to our ranks will not follow our example [of assimilation to English life], and will create, if they have not already created, a little Poland in the East End of London” (Kaplan 267-8). According to Anne Karpf, “In 1995, ‘Polish’ was still used as a pejorative term by young Israelis, as in ‘long boring Seders with Polish aunts and other nudniky (from “nudny,” 160

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Polish for “boring”) relatives’” (Karpf 212). For many Jews, “Poland” is not just the hated other. “Poland” is the hated self. A still photo from the 1923 film Ost und West offers a vivid illustration of the difference between the perceptions of the early twentieth century and perceptions seventy or so years later. The photo depicts a patriarch leading an ethnographically detailed Sabbath observance, complete with evocative touches like the father's shtrayml, a loaf of challah, and the mother's head covering. Scholar Jeffrey Shandler wrote: “this tableau is likely to evoke a wealth of nostalgic, sentimental associations — the virtues of Old World piety and familial communion.” But the photo dramatizes the main character's nightmare. The scene “is a young American Jewish woman's terrified vision of her future, trapped by comic mishap, in marriage to a Polish hasid” (Shandler 154). What to today's eyes looks like a cherished time capsule of a lost world around which one must verbally and emotionally tiptoe was in 1923's eyes a nightmare its main character struggled desperately to escape. Shandler quoted poet Moyshe Leyb Halpern, whom he assessed as the most potent and best known of the early twentieth-century anti-nostalgists. Satirizing contemporaneous nostalgia in Yiddish theater songs, Halpern began one poem “Yearn for home and hate your homeland.” Halpern parodied nostalgic poetry's forms to depict his “Galician hometown as one of poverty, dishonesty, violence, and family turmoil” (Shandler 176). Satire like Halpern's was murdered with Europe's Jews. In 1938, as Nazism loomed, Yankev Glatshteyn, who had previously produced scathing anti-nostalgic parody (Shandler 176-7), produced “an eerily reactionary work in which the poet renounces the modern world and goes ‘back to the ghetto’ and embraces the images — narrow, winding streets, Talmudic scholarship, Hasidic nigunim of ‘sorrowful Jewish life’” (Shandler 181). Seth Wolitz argued that in the late 1930's, Americanized immigrants used films about Sholem Aleichem's Tevye to gratify “the urge to reaffirm their solidarity with the Jewish condition” (Wolitz “Americanization” 521). That process of reaffirming solidarity with the Jewish condition was capped off by the 1937 American-Jewish film, Dem khazns zindl. The plot of this movie reversed the plot of The Jazz Singer. An American Jewish 161

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entertainer, son of a cantor, returns to Poland, abandons his American girlfriend, and marries his hometown girl. Segev described immigrants' turmoil: Many had rebelled against their “father's house,” as they called the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, and had abandoned them. Spiritually and ideologically speaking, then, the rebels had sentenced them to destruction. Now [in the Holocaust] that the home communities were in fact being destroyed, they felt terrible guilt ... [wrote one Jewish poet] “I have sinned, I have trespassed.” (Segev 77)

Life is with People is not the villain here; the Nazis were. But as Karpf stated so starkly, it is difficult if not impossible to talk about the victims of horrific genocide and their ancestors in any but the most laudatory of terms. Any tensions between Poles and Jews, or even between Jews and Jews, must be understood exclusively as the fault, not of sainted martyrs, but of Poles, who are not understood, in the Bieganski scenario, to have been anything but villains. Olrik's “Law of Two to a Scene” and “Law of Contrast” kick in: two characters inhabit the folkloric encounter. One is the opposite of the other. “Do not speak ill of the dead” is a proverb found in many languages. Since folk understandings of decency demand that the innocent victims of the world's most notorious genocide must be spoken of only in laudatory terms, their other of choice, Poles, who are, popularly, understood not to be the victims of genocide, must be evil. Two Characters, One Suffering, One Not I met Neil at a dinner party in the San Francisco Bay Area, the world capital of Political Correctness. After our hostess introduced us, Neil immediately began to tell Polak jokes. “Please stop,” I requested. Though I had not mentioned suffering, Neil angrily shot back, “It was the Jews who suffered! Poles were never lynched!” The Bieganski worldview: two characters, one suffering, one not. Poles have never been victims of prejudice, so they are fair game. Any offensive behavior Jews exhibit must be understood as the behavior of people fighting for their survival in 162

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a hostile environment. Neil, who justified his telling of Polak jokes with the indignant claim that “Poles were never lynched,” might be troubled to read one account of one of Poland's many notorious oppressors, the Russian Mikhail Muraviev, aka “The Hangman.” “Muraviev was too busy hanging Poles to worry too much about Jews” (Klier 100). There were never only two characters in Poland, Poles were certainly lynched, and Bieganski is not a valid method to understand Poles. What follows is an inelegant sketch of some historical realities that run through any informed person's mind when rationalizations like Neil's are used to justify Bieganski. In the late eighteenth century, after the preceding century of so many invasions it was dubbed “The Deluge,” Poland lost its political independence. Prussia's, Russia's, and Austria's goal was to erase Poland (Davies Playground I 542). Russification forbade the Polish language in public places; eventually students were forbidden from owning any book not assigned in class; this was just part of enforced, methodical educational stagnation (Porter 79, 81). One little Polish girl, Maria Sklodowska, who would grow up to become Marie Curie, experienced the terror and humiliation of being forced, by a czarist official, to pray before him in the Russian language (Davies Playground II 101). In the west, Poles faced Germanization, aka Kulturkampf and Hakata. Bismarck stated, “Personally, I sympathize with [the Poles'] position, but if we want to exist, we cannot do other than extirpate them. A wolf is not to blame that God made him as he is; which does not mean that we shouldn't shoot him to death whenever possible” (Davies Playground II 124). In order to justify the erasure of a European state, the partitioners generated and disseminated negative images of Poles. Some of the most important Western thinkers of the Enlightenment, Voltaire, for example, aided this effort. Western European intellectuals were beginning to establish their own identity as enlightened and superior by contrasting themselves with Eastern Europeans, who, they insisted, were debased specimens (Wolff). Even those who were revolutionaries at home, like Voltaire and Jean Paul Marat, argued for “discipline and domination” and “autocracy” over the “backward” and “primitive” Poles. Frederick the Great, writing to amuse Voltaire, reported that the partitions he was then 163

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planning were merely an effort to apply Western discipline to “drunken,” “shameless,” “crude, stupid, and without instruction” Poles, “all that multitude of imbeciles whose names terminate in ski.” Voltaire responded, “It is pleasant to destroy the people and to sing of them.” Of Catherine the Great, Voltaire argued that she had sent the Russian army to Poland “to establish tolerance” (Wolff 100, 211, 266, 264). In Prussian Poland, Hakatist spies reported on, inter alia, the nationality of post office and railway clerks, clerks who had Polish wives, and clerks who read Polish newspapers (Tims 42, 74). Hakatists ensured the presence and success of German, not Polish, jobholders on every level (Rosenthal 19). Even public socializing of a prominent German with a Pole might bring scandal on the German (Tims 67). “Touch not, taste not!” was a Hakatist motto regarding the interaction of Germans with Poles (Tims 137). Polish women were depicted as “attractive ... clever ... dangerous” (Tims 244); a Polish woman was “so slovenly like all Polish women, so shaped, so inviting, and so dirty ... [they show] a stronger sex drive than German females” (Wolff 335). According to Hakatist racial ideology, the wily Polish woman had to be avoided: “For the German who wants to preserve the German type against inferior races such as the ... Slavs, the first commandment is: no racial intermixing” (Tims 269). In the 1930's a Nazi author repeated the old idea that Polish women “by their powers of attraction made [German] men so forget their national task that these males were moved to enrich the quality of Polish blood” (Rosenthal 16). The “sinister Polish priest” was a frequent villain in the Hakatist worldview (Tims 257). Polish schoolchildren were whipped for resisting the demand that “not a single Polish syllable” be heard in school (Tims 83, 86). Jews were invited into Hakata (Tims 72). Philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte defined Germany, clean, rational, and progressive, against Poland, dirty, confused and bestial. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, German intellectuals, as they had during the partitions, argued for this move as the advance of a civilized nation benefiting an uncivilized one (Wolff 369, Tims 278). After the war, old racist ideas were refurbished to support the Iron Curtain and the Cold War (Wolff 370). 164

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A 1990 survey revealed that eighty-seven percent of Germans regarded Poles as “less desirable than themselves, Russians, or Turks” (Schlottmann; Dyczewski). On German television, Poles are presented as “ugly, ridiculously dressed, and drunken degenerates.” After communism ended and borders became more porous, Poles in Germany were sometimes greeted with stones, skinheads, and chants of “Polacken raus!” (Dyczewski 7). A 2000-2006 study concluded that the Germans' stereotype of a Pole, despite some recent improvement, was, still, significantly, that of a “backward outsider.” One of the primary German associations with Poles is religiosity, which contributes to the image of Poles as backward: “In German culture there exists a rather widespread opinion that [Poles' pronounced] Catholicism is an obstacle to modernization.” One in four Germans emphasized German “victimization” at the hands of Poles. 25% percent of respondents reported that relations between Germany and Poland would improve if “Poland symbolically admitted that wrongs have been committed against Germans during and after World War II.” 25 % of respondents complained about Poles' “lack of respect for national and ethnic minorities” (Falkowski). Those who argue for anti-Semitism being the worst hatred that Poles, or anyone else, ever felt often go on to argue that Christianity is the cause (Goldhagen, Michlic, Cala). To “evolve,” Bieganski must abandon his faith. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen summed up this point of view: “The main responsibility for producing the all-time leading Western hatred lies with Christianity. More specifically, with the Catholic Church” (Goldhagen “Jesus”). This work cannot prove or disprove Goldhagen's claim that anti-Semitism tops any “Western” form of hatred. It can only point out the sad fact that Poles murdered and oppressed Ukrainians (Snyder); in the postwar period Poles ethnically cleansed Lemkos. To outsiders, Poles, Ukrainians and Lemkos, neighboring Slavic Christians, might appear all but identical. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was multi-ethnic. Its population included Scots, Germans, Armenians, Ukrainians, Slovaks, Gypsies, Muslims, Arians, as well as Jews. In some areas at certain times, ethnic Poles were a minority. Given the religious freedom of the 165

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Commonwealth, Polish nobility were often not Catholic. Christian Mennonites faced many of the advantages and difficulties of their fellow minority group in Poland, Jews ( Jersch-Wenzel). Tolerance dropped in bad times, and various groups were targeted. The Arians were the only religious group expelled. Jews were not expelled from the Commonwealth. In comments on Protestant Sweden's invasion of Poland, “international Protestantism” was indicted for its actions “against Poland” (Weintraub 28). After wars with Turkey, Muslims became targets. Insulting pamphlets were distributed; a new law banned Muslims, who had previously intermarried with Poles, from so much as having Christian servants (Weintraub 32). Blood libel trials peaked during a period of turmoil, after numerous invasions. Women were victimized in witch trials. Both the blood libel and the witch trials came from the West, and did not take hold in Poland until a period of economic and political insecurity. Witch trials took many more victims than did the blood libels. During the same period, Christian German students were tortured and killed for alleged disrespect to Catholic relics (Goldberg “Attitude”). Germans have been subject to a great deal of hostile stereotyping in Poland, including a folk belief that the devil is a German (Weintraub 34). There was a folk belief that Jews are born blind; the identical folk belief extended to Poles born in Mazowsze (Bartoszewski “Other”). Poles were quite capable of massacring their fellow ethnic Poles, for example in Galicia in 1846. Between four and five hundred manors were destroyed; perhaps a thousand nobles were killed. Peasants sold nobles' decapitated heads to Austrian colonizers; at first they received ten florins, but so many heads were brought in the price was lowered to two florins, and then to mere salt (Hill 110; Davies Playground II 147-8). At a time when women's, Germans' and peasants' status as Poles was questioned, Jews were considered models of an ideal citizen in an eventually reborn state (Steinlauf “Geldhab” 103). It is frequently reported that in 1968 the Communist government of Poland exerted a variety of measures to coerce Jews into leaving the country. It is not often mentioned that the Communist government had previously mounted devastating campaigns against Poles of German ancestry, Ukrainians, clergy, Home Army soldiers, Polish Communists, 166

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and even windmill operators — yes, windmill operators — whom Communists sometimes sent to labor camps (Szymanski). Poles who had access to bananas — the alleged bananowcy — were set against self-described “partisans” who claimed to have no such culinary access (Steinlauf Bondage 75-6). Every group was manipulated in divide-and-conquer policies; on their own, Poles nurtured divisions. A central issue in every post-partition revolutionary movement was peasant participation. When, in 1794, Tadeusz Kosciuszko offered peasants better conditions, peasants joined with him and were able to achieve a military victory. In other movements, for example in the January uprising of 1863, the peasants remained conspicuously passive while nobles fought. Very negative images of peasants appeared in Polish literature after the January uprising (Korulska 128). On the other hand, the conspicuous support Jews gave to that uprising resulted in a flood of positive images of Jews in Polish literature (Opalska, Blejwas “Positivism”). In a virtually ethnically homogenized Poland in 1968, intellectuals rebelled and Polish workers and farmers conspicuously remained aloof. In 1970, workers rebelled and intellectuals stood passively by. Throughout their history in Poland, Jews debated where loyalties might best lie. In Lev Levanda's (1835-1888) Seething Times, set in the nineteenth century, Jewish characters living in Poland acknowledge being Jewish, and debate any secondary identity: perhaps they are German, French, Russian, or even Polish. One, summing up the attitude prominent among Jews, announces, “I am not Polish and I will never be Polish! … I am indifferent toward the Poles, their destiny, their interests, and their homeland.” This character reconsiders: “Can we indeed grow to love our motherland the way our ancestors loved Palestine?” (Shrayer 461-2; 464).Some argued that Jews were distrusted and disrespected by Poles, even when they participated, to the point of taking up arms, in the fight for Polish freedom (Bartal 81-2 “Loyalty;” Shmeruk “Jews” 183). To side with Russia or Prussia? Some combination? Neither? Some Jews felt linguistically, spiritually, and culturally closer to Germany; with time, others came to feel bonds to Russia. Others preferred identification 167

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with and empowerment of a supranational Yiddish or Jewish culture that transcended the boundaries of existing states. Some argued for an “ideology-free” loyalty to the powers that be, combined with continued efforts at autonomy for the Jewish community. Jewish communists would decide that class, not ethnicity, was the best organizing principle. At least one Jewish movement, Haskalah, specifically condemned Jewish participation in the Polish self-determination struggle as destructive of a desirable Jewish exclusivity. Maskilim, the followers of Haskalah, rejected the use of the Polish language by Jews, and argued for the use of German (Baker; Bartal “Loyalty”). Poles similarly rationed their loyalty. Noblemen became cosmopolitan and hobnobbed with their colonizers. Peasants turned on the nobles and sabotaged their interests. Peasants emigrated, and, within a couple of generations their descendents could not even name the Polish town their grandparents came from. But Jews were marked. They spoke a different language; they wore distinctive clothing. When a Pole saw what side his bread was buttered on and quietly opted for German identity (e.g., Blanke; Davies II 136-7), that Pole is not seen by other Poles as representative of all Poles, or of any typically treacherous or cosmopolitan Polish essence. Jews were judged differently. Wladyslaw Bartoszewski described how. “The Poles tended to notice a far-reaching willingness to compromise on the part of the Jews, a willingness to collaborate within the structures of the partitioning powers and with their authorities, tendencies in some Jewish circles to try to become German or Russian” (Bartoszewski “Thoughts” 280; see also Kieniewicz 118). It is not the position of this work that Poles' judging Jews more harshly than other Poles is justified. Rather, any assessment of Polish-Jewish relations must factor in the power of divideand-conquer policies in a continuously besieged population. Nazis flooded Poland with propaganda that strove to turn Poles against Jews. The notorious policy that any Pole who helped any Jew, even so much as to offer him a glass of water, faced death for himself and his family, further divided Poles and Jews. Poles living in the highlands were set against Poles living in lowlands (Simons 817). Szmalcownicy didn't only report Jews to Nazis for blood money; the first commander of the 168

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Home Army, himself a Pole, was also turned in by a fellow Pole (Steinlauf Bondage 40). Soviets also used divide-and-conquer during World War II, as well as after (Wrobel 13-5). Both the Germans and the Soviets carried out campaigns directed against Poland's best-educated persons, and those in leadership positions. The remaining subgroups were then set against one another. There is no “two to a scene.” There is no black and white. Bieganski works as an identity aid, but not as a reflection of historical reality. What does?

Chapter Six

The Peasant and Middleman Minority Theory

Bigotry's superficial rationalizations do not withstand inspection. Scientific Racists believed Nordics superior, yet promulgated the contradictory claim that inferior Poles were outbreeding those Nordics into race suicide. As exemplified by “Borat,” Bieganski exploits minstrel show stereotypes of peasants; it never depicts peasants with authenticity. In its account of Jewish employers bargaining with “desperate” Polish day laborers, and begrudging them three dollars per hour, the New York Times managed to depict those day laborers as fully empowered and deserving of harsh treatment: they were responsible for the Holocaust. In fact, those day laborers were neither empowered nor guilty. Many authors compare the status of Jews in Poland to the status of African Americans under slavery or Jim Crow. Scholars Jerzy Krzyzanowski, Thomas Napierkowski, and Thaddeus Radzialowski made mincemeat of William Styron's historically absurd equation of Poland with the American south in Sophie's Choice; far fewer people will ever read their scholarship than will read that bestselling, critically praised novel. NYU professor and World Policy Institute Senior Fellow, MacArthur Genius Grant and Guggenheim winner Paul Berman, in a frequently republished essay, claimed that Jews in “darkest Poland” were “almost the same” as Blacks in the US: “Mississippi is Poland.” Jews were a people uniquely devoted to liberty and equality: “Bigotry is bigotry…who I am is someone who fights on behalf of ” the oppressed (9). Thomas Laqueur, Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor of History at U. C. Berkeley, compared the development of jazz and the fruits of African American culture with the development of Jewish culture 170

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in Poland (Laqueur). Though, in this rendition, Jews occupy the lowest rung of society, somehow they are surrounded by peasants, who are themselves little more than animals; no mention is ever made of any effort to uplift them. The biological, political, economic and cultural reality of millions of human beings is erased in order to make the “Two to a Scene; Contrasting Characters” Bieganski stereotype believable. Christian peasants were enserfed. Serfdom ended in the early to mid-nineteenth century in Prussian and Austrian Poland; in eastern Poland, the eighteen sixties. Jewish arendators were given the power of life and death over Polish serfs (Pogonowski 283; Eban; Davies Playground I 444). The word “Slav” gave European languages the word “slave.” The Arabic word “sakaliba,” for “eunuch,” comes from “Slav.” In Polish the correct term for peasants, “chlopi,” comes from “kholopy,” a Slavic word for “slave;” the derogatory term, “cham,” comes from the Biblical “Ham,” who had been cursed to slavery. Leon Weliczker Wells reports “We looked down on the small farmer, whom we called cham” or “Am Haaretz (people of the earth), which to us meant simpletons” (3). In 1912, Booker T. Washington, who was born a slave, published a chronicle of his search for The Man Farthest Down. Mindful of parallels between the Exodus story and the African American liberation struggle, Washington studied Jews in Poland. He was surprised to discover that, while deferential to him, going so far as to kiss this visiting American's hand, his Jewish guide “looked down upon and despised the Polish peasants among whom he trades. He referred to them as ‘ignorant and dirty creatures’” (252). In Poland, seeing peasants living in “weather-worn and decrepit” huts like “gigantic toadstools” (268) where peasants lived with “cows, pigs, geese, chickens” (269) under three different occupying powers who agitated against Polish self-determination, and in a system where every exchange of cash seemed to be in the hands of Jews (267), Washington concluded, there was much the same life that I had known and lived among the Negro farmers in Alabama ... I should have liked to have gone farther ... and looked 171

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deeper into the life and learned more of the remarkable struggle which the Polish people ... are making to preserve the Polish nationality and improve the conditions of the Polish people ... I am convinced that anyone who studies the movements and progress of the Negroes in America will find much that is interesting by way of comparison in the present situation of the Polish people and that of the American Negroes. (291-295)

A character in the 1901 play The Wedding described Poles, even elite Poles, as of peasant origin. There are people who despise me Just because I'm peasant born. When they see a scythe, they scoff. How it makes me sad at heart. We're all in this Polish stable and we've all got peasant blood. (Wyspianski 35)

In 1900, eighty-two percent of Poland's population was peasant (Davies Playground II 192). In the 1960's, “fifty percent of the Polish population still lived in the countryside and about thirty-five percent had agriculture as its sole source of income” (Narkiewicz 265). In 1998, “fifty percent of farmers have no contact whatsoever with the marketplace ... They are attached to the tiny and bizarrely shaped plots their fathers and grandfathers saved from collectivization” (Snyder “Return”). In 2002, in the European Union as a whole, agriculture accounted for four percent of employment, in Poland, twenty-five percent. Poland's small farms were “inefficient, unsanitary, and perpetuate poverty,” according to EU officials. Polish farmers resisted change. “The communists tried to force us off our land and they failed. We are staying” (Farnam). Norman Davies wrote that “Polish peasants ... were the bearers of a separate civilization” (Davies Playground II 191). Polish scholar Ewa Korulska, in a study of the image of the peasant in Polish literature, wrote, “The countryside is an unknown, foreign and exotic land,” comparable to “the tribes of Africa” (Korulska 128). “The two civilizations, master's and peasant's, are completely strange and incomprehensible to each other” (Korulska 128). Korulska claimed that even the few 172

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well-received treatments of peasant life by canonical Polish authors were inaccurate romanticizations that, rather than creating intimate portraits of real individuals, relied on stereotypes. Korulska described two faces to the stereotype of Polish peasants to be found in Polish literature: on one side, one attributes to the peasant such characteristics as common sense, seriousness, dignity, deep faith, calm, love for the family and even greater love for his beasts; on the other hand a peasant is a cruel, ignorant, superstitious yokel, who likes getting dead drunk and treating every living thing sadistically. (Korulska 127)

In the United States, in 1920, William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki published an epoch-making sociological treatise on The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. Their work stressed the impossibility of understanding Polish peasants through the eyes of literate, free, urban, mobile people: Anyone whose attitudes have evolved under the influence of the rapidly changing American life, which is full of new experiences, anyone trained to look toward unfamiliar emergencies and to meet them by his own initiative, who is accustomed and ready to be influenced in behavior as much, or more, by the indirect stimulation of the written word as by direct human contact, anyone for whom the impersonal political, legal, social and economic institutions, with their general and abstract methods of dealing with human life are as real in their practical significance as immediately responsive personalities, can neither understand the Polish peasant in Poland nor deal with him as immigrant in this country. (Thomas and Znaniecki 287)

Even Norman Davies, Poland's expert chronicler, writes of peasants as fascinating strangers. Widely dispersed in isolated villages, they had little scope for concerted social action, but their powers of passive resistance were proverbial. Their imperviousness to the modern concepts of law and property, 173

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their inveterate addiction to pilfering, arson, and random violence, the inimitable rhythm of their work, where periods of backbreaking toil were interspersed with prolonged displays of idleness and drunkenness, their ambivalent relationships with their lord, the pan, whom they hated and loved by turns, their incurable beliefs in fairies, folk magic, incantations, ritual potions, faith healing, and all manner of so-called superstitions, and above all their ineradicable conviction that the land was theirs, irrespective of the technical details of its legal ownership; all these things made for an ultraconservative culture, whose values were obstinately preserved in spite of the disposition of well-intentioned reformers. (Davies Playground II 191)

Helen Fein coined the term “universe of obligation,” “that circle of persons towards whom obligations are owed, to whom rules apply, and whose injuries call for expiation by the community” (33). Fein argued that during the Holocaust, Jews occupied a separate universe of obligation. Peasants and gentry did as well. There was the conviction that an unsurpassable barrier exists between the world of the manor and the cottage ... [in a novel by Boleslaw Prus] The village women sympathize with the country gentleman's wife affected by many misfortunes and they would like to show her their sympathy in the misery; however, they realize that they cannot help her. The country gentleman's wife belongs to the world of other concepts. “You don't understand her, neither does she understand you. It's exactly like a pig talking to a shepherd.” ... [Author Maria Konopnicka wrote that] “our relation to country folk is a relation of the complete mutual opposition of two worlds: on one side is the researcher, on the other the object of research, hence somebody one has to be acquainted with, hence unknown, hence a stranger, hence a foreigner. This feeling of separateness appeared everywhere: in life and in poetry, in charity and in contempt, in care and in neglect. It was in turn an object of a political or social experiment, of ignorance or curiosity, but it was.” (Korulska 130)

A nineteenth-century novel that raised a clarion call to inclusion of the peasant in the elite's ideal of the Polish nation made sure not to include any actual peasant characters; a nobleman pleads the peasants' 174

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case. The peasants, for their part, don't want to be part of Poland; they want only revenge for centuries of oppression, for a world in which they were literally, not metaphorically, tied to the plough, where a nobleman could beat his peasants to death with impunity. “The noblemen,” the novel recounts, “want to spur their peasants to fight against the government, but they are slain by the peasants, and their houses and castles plundered and burned” (Nance). The Wedding asks a tension-producing question: will peasants and the elite unite, and save Poland? Or will their rubbing against one another result in conflagration? The tension inherent in this effort at détente is conveyed in a few stunning lines spoken by a noble groom who, for ideological reasons, takes a peasant bride. Referring to a past peasant uprising against nobles, the groom says, “We have forgotten all of that. They sawed my grandfather in two. We have forgotten all of that” (Wyspianski 73). Polish peasants were called “beasts” by Polish lords. Even after his election to public office, which he held between 1895 and 1930, Jakub Bojko was called “bydle,” that is, “beast” in the Sejm. He accepted this; as a peasant, he considered himself inferior (Narkiewicz 49-50). Ignacy Jan Paderewski was a pianist of international renown and Poland's ceremonial president. The lord of the area where Paderewski was born spoke of him as if he were property (Davies Playground II 183). In the 1990's, Eva Hoffman recorded a farmer addressing her as “Pani,” or “Madame,” “in its old fashioned, class-tinged way, which suggests the respect owed by a peasant to someone of a higher station.” “Pani, I'm stupid,” he said, and then, again, “I'm stupid and more stupid” (Hoffman Shtetl 76). In the play The Wedding, Polish and Jewish elite characters unite in their mixture of economic exploitation, fear, and, conversely, romanticization of, and contempt for, Polish peasants. In historical fact, Jewish writers copied terms that contemptuous Polish lords used to describe the peasants: “contemptible,” “base,” “good-for-nothing,” and “scoundrel” (Rosman 32, 39). “There is a clear distinction ... between the non-Jew who is a peasant and the non-Jew who is a nobleman and estate owner.” 175

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The nobleman was referred to by terms that “convey a feeling of awe.” There was a “mutual respect” between Jewish merchant and Polish lord. Peasants, though, were referred to with insulting terms that were the parallel of the Polish insult for peasants, “cham” (Shmeruk “Jews” 179). Jews, if they found anything in Polish society appealing, tended to identify with the nobles, not with the peasants (Hoffman 50; Hundert “Agency” 84-7). Polish-born Israeli chemist Israel Shahak reported a “hatred and contempt” for “peasants as a class.” “This is immediately apparent,” he wrote, “to anyone who is familiar with the Yiddish or Hebrew literature of the 19th and 20th centuries” (53). An international proverb, at least four hundred years old, asserted that Poland was the paradise of the Jews, heaven for the nobility, and hell for its peasants (Kot). Wincenty Witos (1874-1945) emphasized fear as a feature of this peasant hell. The peasant lived in daily fear and terror ... He got up in fear, lived with it all day, and went to bed in fear which tormented him during his sleep ... He was terrified of the gendarme, the headman, the official. He felt a constant fear of the forester ... did not dare to look up to the priest, the teacher ... fear of almost everybody and everything, lack of confidence in his own strength, and inability to change anything, made him into a mechanical robot, denuded of all will power. (Narkiewicz 34)

According to Jan Slomka (1842-1927), whose life spanned “From Serfdom to Self Government,” “No worse punishment could be found for men and women than serfdom. People were treated worse than cattle are today. They were beaten both at work and for the merest trifle ... It is unbelievable how men could thus torture their fellows!” “The lord of the manor was owner of everything. His was both land and water, yes, even the wind, since only he was allowed to build a windmill to grind corn” (Slomka 15). Peasants typically lived in black cottages, so called because the smoke from fires for cooking and heating pervaded the dwelling. “People were blackened and saturated with smoke” (17). Without clocks, people used the sun, roosters or stars to tell time (18). “No peasant's cottage in those 176

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days had a book or a newspaper — not even a prayer book” (167). Food was potatoes, peas, beans, buckwheat, cabbage, bread, fish and eels, and maybe a pig a year (26). Witos wrote, “there were months when we did not see a piece of bread” (Narkiewicz 53). Sugar, citrus fruit, cucumbers, and tomatoes were inaccessible (Slomka 29, 39). “There would be every year with rare exceptions pre-harvest famine” (45). Peasants often went barefoot (126). There were cholera outbreaks (129). There were few to no doctors; illnesses were treated by wise women (Narkiewicz 33). Peasants as young as five would be sent out to work for Jews (Narkiewicz 32). Polish women and girls “were at the mercy of the master, his son, or the laborers” (Narkiewicz 34; Davies Playground I 243). Need monopolized all ambition. “Every move, all the work and worry of the household, revolved around one thing — to get something to eat and to wear” (Slomka 53). In 1921, twenty-three percent of the population was illiterate; in the area formerly colonized by Russia, sixty-five percent of the population was illiterate (Narkiewicz 171). In 1921 two thirds of rural dwellings had only one room; one third had two rooms (Narkiewicz 180). Each dwelling housed an average of five occupants. “The majority had no sanitation, water, gas, or electricity” (Narkiewicz 180). In the 1930's, peasant children were often barefoot; peasant dwellings often had no light at all, not even oil lamps. Peasant dress was often limited to homespun. Matches would be cut into sections, or flints would be used to make fire (Narkiewicz 222-3). The interwar period, 1918-1939, included government and police “brutality and contempt” visited upon peasants so severe “that it would have been an example to the former foreign occupation.” Peasants were regularly beaten, arrested, and sentenced to death. In one instance three police officers ordered a peasant to strip and beat him till he could not walk; they beat his elderly father till he lost consciousness. They addressed their victims as “Ty chamie,” “You cham” (Narkiewicz 220-24). Peasants “feared the return of serfdom … confrontations between peasants and police assumed the proportions of a minor guerilla war” (Davies Playground II 412). In some cases, peasants hid their dead, 177

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fearing police reprisals if those killed by police were given a decent burial (Narkiewicz 233). Middleman Minority Theory Applied to Polish-Jewish Relations The Los Angeles Riots stretched over several days in April, 1992. Fifty-three were killed; over two thousand were injured; over a thousand buildings were damaged or destroyed. The riot's most gut-wrenching scene: black men torturing white truck driver Reginald Denny before a news camera. Korean Americans were special targets. Explaining away the L.A. Riots as a manifestation of a perverse, anti-Korean, AfricanAmerican essence had become, since the Civil Rights movement, impossible. Some cited the Middleman Minority Theory to help explain ugly behavior. A July 31, 2001 Nexis search found no articles making use of Middleman Minority Theory to understand the violence described in Jan Tomasz Gross's then much discussed Neighbors. In 1973, Edna Bonacich, the daughter of a Rabbi, offered an outline of Middleman Minority Theory. A variety of groups have fulfilled the role of a middleman minority: Indians in Uganda, Chinese in Thailand, Japanese in the Americas. Jews in Europe are “the epitome of the form” (583). Hoffman and Hertz, without using the term “middleman minority,” identify Jews as such (Hertz 68, 69, 100, 229; Hoffman 42, 43, 49). Scholar Anna Zuk's analysis corresponded with Middleman Minority Theory; she used the term “mobile class.” B.D. Weinryb summed up Jews' status in Poland as that of the “middleman” (Weinryb 10). Davies described the pattern (Davies Playground I 444). Not all Jews were in service to powerful lords; even so, even poor Jews were associated with such service (Davies Playground I 213). Middleman minority populations are concentrated in urban, skilled, and mercantile professions. Their socioeconomic status falls between elites and peasants. To some extent, they operate under their own code, and are not limited by the surrounding culture's taboos that impede business progress for those rooted in their communities (Bonacich 584). Middleman minorities have at least a ritual tie to another territory, and, 178

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if only in a mythic sense, experience themselves as “sojourners.” The sojourner mindset encourages the choice for easily liquidated professions and the amassing of capital, while at the same time it erects barriers to the forming of bonds with members of what Bonacich calls the “host” society. Bonds are formed with other members of the middleman group, even those geographically distant (585-6; 593). Middleman minorities, whether Jews in Poland or Chinese in Thailand, have a distinctive cultural profile. This profile includes strong group ties, and a resistance to forming intimate bonds with those who are not members of the group, as well as dress, language, and religion that differ from the majority population's. Observers have concluded that middleman minority group members are clannish and aloof, and have doubted the sincerity of any gestures they may make toward joining the host society. In all our examples, middleman groups are charged with being clannish, alien, and unassimilable. They are seen as holding themselves aloof, believing they are superior to those around them … and insisting on remaining different … the Chinese are seen as adopting Thai ways for “protective coloration” … In post-colonial societies this distrust was probably exacerbated by the fact that middleman minorities tended to be allied with the colonial masters. Indeed they have an interest in “law and order” for continued trade, hence tend to oppose disruptive political movements. (591)

Their neighbors often regard middleman minorities as economic exploiters who never commit to solidarity with the peoples they exploit. These feelings have been expressed in extraordinarily vicious outbursts. According to economist Thomas Sowell, for example, “On more than one occasion in the history of Southeast Asia, the number of overseas Chinese massacred within a week has exceeded all the blacks lynched in the entire history of the United States” (Sowell). Sowell described Sinhalese in Sri Lanka clapping and dancing as they burned a random Tamil woman. Transcripts of conflicts involving middleman minorities read, word for word, as do transcripts of conflicts between Poles and Jews. If only they 179

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produced things, if only they worked the soil like we do, if only they did something besides sell goods at exploitatively high prices, we wouldn't hate them so, an African wrote about Asians in Kenya (Sowell 34). His words could have been directly quoted in any given pamphlet by any Polish antiSemite. African American columnist William Raspberry wrote that when dictator Idi Amin Dada expelled Indians from Uganda, his friends in the African diplomatic service were secretly pleased — not because they admired Amin but because they hated the Indians. It wasn't a matter of race, they told me. It was their aloofness. If they had hired more locals, or lived among them, or intermarried with them, they would have been accepted. But they kept to themselves and sent their profits back to India. (Raspberry)

“Some members of your community have no interest in this country beyond the aim of making as much profit as possible, and at all costs,” Amin said of the Indians. In reference to Thailand, Richard J. Coughlin wrote The Thai are obligated to pay high prices to the Chinese for the very necessities of life, and on the other hand are forced to accept the lowest price for the rice they grow. Through deliberate profiteering, according to standard Thai thinking, this minority has driven up living costs. (quoted in Bonacich 590)

Jews were the agents of the Polish nobility. “There is hardly a magnate who does not hand over the management of his estates to a Jew ... and more zealously protects them against any wrong, real or imaginary, than he protects Christians,” wrote an observer in 1521 (Hundert “Safety” 38). Jewish Studies professor Gershon Hundert wrote, “the lynchpin of Jewish ‘foreign policy’ ... was the forging of alliances with the crown” (Hundert “Safety” 37). And, “Jews ... benefited from the virtual political impotence of the citizens of Polish cities” (Hundert “Characteristics” 32; see also Michalski). Patterns formed over centuries continued into the modern era. Wherever and whenever the Industrial Revolution arrived it wore an 180

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ugly face, as Charles Dickens and Upton Sinclair dramatized in their pages. In Poland, the filth, disease, child labor, and other nightmarish exploitation that ever accompany new industrialization were associated with Jews. “The idea of a Polish factory owner” was a “joke” (Steinlauf “Geldhab” 104). During the interwar period, “fifty-six percent of all doctors, forty-three percent of teachers, thirty-three percent of lawyers, and twenty-two percent of journalists were Jewish” (Bartoszewski Convent 4). Martin M. is a spokesperson for the National Campaign for Dalit Rights in India. Dalits are sometimes called “Untouchables.” One day, an upper caste woman came to him for help … M. listened impassively and then instructed one of his employees to give the woman a glass of water. She realized it was from an Untouchable … She held the glass trembling. His body language said, ‘You drink this, then I'll help you.’ She took a sip. M. has since made the water ritual a symbolic litmus test for others. (Weekend Edition Sunday)

This story dramatizes the importance humans accord the activity that is the root of the word “companion” — the sharing of food. Polish peasants emphasized sharing food. The rare peasant who ate apart was criticized (Slomka 124). Orthodox Jews could not share food or drink with their Polish neighbors (Shahak 14, 94; Orla Bukowska 105). Long before Jews arrived in Poland, rabbinic law had carefully worked out methods to keep Jews and non-Jews separate (Fraade). Jewish sexual teachings were fashioned around the effort to keep Jews from marrying non-Jews (Fishman). A recent American book claiming to delineate the essential Jewish character argues that separatism is an aspect, a desirable aspect, of that posited essential Jewish character (Hertzberg). Scholars cite two factors for enhanced Jewish separatism in Poland. Poland granted more autonomy, for a longer period, enabling Jews to establish a semi-autonomous theocracy (Weintraub 30). In the Commonwealth, Jews established separate legal, financial, and social norms. Jews opted out of certain taxes and civil defense duties (Goldberg “Rejection” 276, 281 see also Hoffman Shtetl 45). In the interwar period, 181

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Jews asked for, and were granted, guarantees for levels of autonomy that they did not request or receive in Britain or America (Black 18). Jewish contempt for their Polish neighbors contributed to Jewish separateness in Poland (Hundert 84-5). One Jew who lived in Poland in the interwar period, the scientist and Holocaust survivor Leon Weliczker Wells, described his own family's chosen separation. We lived in a self-imposed ghetto without walls. The Jewish religion fostered our living together in groups which separated us from nonJews … We young Jewish boys did not take part in any sports as this was considered goish ...We Jews even tried to avoid passing a church, and if that was impossible, we muttered an appropriate curse as we hurried by ... We Jews felt superior to all others, as we were the “chosen people,” chosen by God Himself. We even repeated it in our prayers at least three times a day, morning, afternoon, and evening … [to] The poor peasants, the majority of the population ... Jews represented the rich oppressors of the poor … The farmers, who, even considering their low living standards, couldn't support an entire family, sent their daughters to town to become servants in the Jewish households. I never knew a Jewish girl to be a servant in a Polish household, but the reverse was the norm. The gentile maid was referred to in negative terms as the “shiksa” … There was a repertoire of jokes about these girls. For example, there was the joke about how Jewish mothers made sure that the servants were “clean,” because their sons' first sexual experience was usually with this girl ... Since every meal on Sabbath and holidays started with the blessing of the wine, there was no possibility of a pious Jew sharing a festive meal with a gentile because the wine, once opened, became non-kosher if a gentile merely looked at it. The laws of kashruth prevented a Jew from eating at a gentile's non-kosher table. Thus, there was very little social intercourse between Jews and non-Jews. We never spoke Polish at home, only Yiddish. Polish was negatively called goish … The newspapers and books in our homes were in Yiddish...We lived in a strictly self-imposed ghetto, and it suited our requirements and wishes. (Wells 3-8)

Other Jewish memoirists also report that their only contact with nonJews was with Polish servants, and that maids were expected to perform 182

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sexually (Scharf 13-14). Yiddish poet Itzik Manger (1901-1969) retold the Biblical story of Hagar, Jewish matriarch Sarah's servant and mother of Jewish patriarch Abraham's firstborn son Ishmael, as the story of a Polish servant girl and her Jewish mistress and master (Roskies 252-254). Roman Solecki wrote a detailed response to Wells' memoir that emphasized his own Jewish family's and friends' integration into, and comfort with, Polish society (Solecki). Solecki, who spoke Polish and had Polish friends, represents an important population that includes international figures like Julian Tuwim and Bruno Szulc. This was a minority, though. In the 1931 census, twelve percent of Jews gave Polish as their mother tongue; seventy-nine percent named Yiddish and eight percent named Hebrew (Heller 68). Jan Slomka's description of Polish-Jewish relations in his village is typical of the middleman minority pattern. “Business in the villages, as well as in town, was almost wholly in Jewish hands. The rural taverns were held by Jews” (78). “We had no schools, and the peasant was not trained to do business — he couldn't reckon at all” (81). “It was the gentry, lords of the big estates, who gave the Jews their proper chance to get money and lands. They put them in charge of the village inns, and gave them license to sell vodka” (98). Peasants interviewed by Alina Cala assessed Jews and elites in collusion in a way that did not best serve peasants. “Jews informed against the peasants to the lords,” one reported. Proverbs encapsulated this assessment: “The peasant gleans, the lord squanders, the Jew profits.” “The lord plots the ruin of the peasants with the Jew.” “One mountain will not meet another, but the gentry will always meet the Jew.” (Cala 23)

Slomka reported that any transaction involving money required Jews. Jews would buy grain after harvest, and then sell that back “during the hunger period at huge profit” (46). “One never saw a well-to-do cooper,” Slomka wrote. “They went barefoot in the woods, or in winter with bark moccasins. They wore only a ragged tunic. They were poor — they, the makers of the wares, far poorer than the Jew who sold them when made” 183

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(70). Jewish moneylenders would strong-arm peasants who could not pay debts (85). All moneylenders strong-arm debtors. In the Poland that Slomka described, though, Jews were the only moneylenders, and so they were associated with greed and the economic ruin of the debtor. Booker T. Washington noted the pattern. “Wherever in Poland money changes hands a Jew is always there to take charge of it. In fact, it seemed to me that the Jew in Poland was almost like the money he handled, a sort of medium of exchange” (267). Jews who broke through such strictly defined roles and interacted with Poles faced criticism. In one instance, when recently liberated Polish serfs attempted to assume previously denied lives as economic beings, Jews combined to thwart their efforts. Buildings in the center of town, all owned by Jews, were off-limits to Polish renters attempting to open a business. One Jew finally sold to Poles. Windows in his family home were broken, and the family was not admitted to the synagogue (199). Even some modern historians read the liberated serfs' struggle to uplift themselves, not as a positive story of a previously oppressed people assuming a previously denied, fully functional humanity, but, rather, as nothing but an “anti-Semitic” trend that was bad for Jews (Bristow 92; Encyclopedia Judaica XIII 751; see Shahak 53 for a criticism of the insistence that peasant cooperatives were “anti-Semitic”). One Polish historian saw the situation quite differently. “The passing of the Jewish economic domination spelled the end of the near feudal system in the Polish countryside” (Narkiewicz 149). There are innumerable jeremiads, written up to the twentieth century, in which Polish reformers express exasperation with Jews as the middleman minority, nobles as hoarders of power, and peasants as drunk and disorganized. The 1790 quote, below, from Stanislaw Staszic (17551826) is representational. The Jews are the bloodsuckers of the farmer ... Every nobleman repeats incessantly that because the Polish peasant is so stupid, unindustrious, and lazy, he cannot be granted either justice or freedom ... The nobleman will complain that the Polish peasant is a terrible drunkard, yet every 184

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nobleman will establish five or six taverns in each of his villages or towns, just like a net for trapping that peasant. He then puts them in the hands of the most competent Jews he can find, those who would pay him the most, which is to say, those who would be most effective in deceiving the peasants and inducing them most to drinking ... It is only the peasants who bear the burden of having to clothe and feed several hundreds of thousands of Jews. (Segel 38-40)

Jews also noted the pattern; many assessed it differently. H. N. Bialik (1873-1934), frequently lauded as Israel's national poet, described his tavern-keeper father as the sole connection to God among profane, piglike, Slavic peasants. intersecting spheres of filth and light where sacred wallowed in profane, sublime in sickening abomination groveled. In sty of pig-men, in a tavern's squalor, in a steam of liquor, smoke of lewd incense above the barrels of adulterate wine … my father's head appeared, a martyred skull… eyes oozing tears of blood … Around us heaved hubbub of drunkards, flood of obscene speech, vomiting sots and monstrous dissolute faces… my ear alone a child's untainted ear, caught the soft stream of whispered syllables from my father's lips — pure prayer, and Law, the words of the living God. (translator Ruth Nevo, in Feinstein 11-12)

Not all Jewish authors saw the middleman in such an elevated light. Lion Feuchtwanger produced one of the most fascinating, and disturbing, depictions of a middleman, Joseph Suss-Oppenheimer, in his international bestseller, Jud Suss. Feuchtwanger's Suss is a brilliant, charming, cad. Mathematics and languages were child's play to him, and he had at his finger ends the pettifogging details of jurisprudence which cost the 185

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professor much theoretical labor to compile. He thought it of more importance to associate with the aristocratic students, and he gladly made himself their butt and lackey for a week if it procured his acceptance as a comrade and a gentleman for an hour. More and more he recognized that this was his vocation, to manage great gentleman, to be their associate, to be their parasite. Who understood as he did how to insinuate himself into the caprices and pleasures of princes, how to lie low at the right time, and at the right time to sink the seed of his will into them as an insect sinks its seed into ripening fruit? And who could so dexterously as he address himself to the ladies, and bend even the most disdainful to his will with sure and gentle hand? It burned in him like a flame: more lands, more people more women, more elegance, more money … He was driven, he was hounded on. New women, new speculations, new magnificence, new customs. Amsterdam, Paris, Venice. (Feuchtwanger 36-7)

In 2002, Yale Law professor Amy Chua published World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability. Chua does not cite Bonacich, but Chua's theory of “market dominant minorities” is similar to Middleman Minority Theory. Chua writes about ethnic minorities who control markets, and find themselves imperiled after democratization offers new power to previously disenfranchised “indigenous” — Chua's word, analogous to Bonacich's “host society” — populations. Chua's work was inspired by the murder of her aunt by the aunt's chauffeur. The murder was part of a pattern, not just in the Philippines, but in other Asian countries, as well. In Indonesia in 1998, riots broke out. Chinese women were raped and murdered in grotesque crimes calculated to maximize victims' suffering and humiliation (Mydans “Jakarta”). Chua did not respond to her aunt's murder by depicting all Filipinos or Indonesians as “pure, unregenerate evil” persons who had “excluded themselves from civilization itself ” — Professor Joan Mellen's description of Poles. Chua did not attempt to characterize Catholic Filipinos or Muslim Indonesians as obsessed with hatred for Confucian or Buddhist Chinese. Chua learned that Chinese, though one to two percent of the population of the Philippines, control a vastly disproportionate share of 186

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its wealth (Chua 36-37). Chua powerfully emphasizes that the humanity of those who are members of ethnic groups that have committed atrocities is not inferior to the humanity of the members of her audience. She asks her reader to imagine that all the billionaires created by Microsoft were Chinese living in America. She then asks her reader to imagine that seventy-five percent of the US population was dirt poor. “If you can picture this,” she writes, “you will have approximated the core social dynamic that characterizes much of the non-Western world” (Chua 19). Chua's widely lauded, and sobering conclusion: When free market democracy is pursued in the presence of a marketdominant minority, the almost invariable result is backlash. This backlash typically takes one of three forms. The first is a backlash against markets, targeting the market-dominant minority's wealth. The second is a backlash against democracy by forces favorable to the market-dominant minority. The third is violence, sometimes genocidal, directed against the marketdominant minority itself. (Chua 10)

Edna Bonacich, decades earlier, delineated a similar pattern: Middleman minorities are noteworthy for the acute hostility they have faced, including efforts to cut off their means of livelihood, riots and pogroms, exclusion movements and expulsion, removal to concentration camps, and “final solutions.” (589) Business conflict with emerging subordinate groups has increased in post-colonial times. As liberated nations try to gain control of their economies, they come into conflict with middleman groups. In Southeast Asia and East Africa attempts have been made to curb Chinese and Indian business, to establish native peoples in lines long dominated by these groups. The efficient organization of the middleman economy makes it virtually impossible for the native population to compete in the open market; hence, discriminatory government measures …have been widely introduced. (Bonacich 590)

The pattern Bonacich and Chua outline has occurred again and again. It happened in Poland in the twentieth century. The majority population 187

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of Poland gained new enfranchisement after over a hundred years of foreign colonization. There was a backlash against Poland's marketdominant minority, Jews. Germans and Ukrainians suffered as well. Roman Dmowski's Endek movement wanted Jews out of Poland. There was an economic boycott of Jews, and the numerus clausus in universities. Contemporary Polish apologists sometimes refer to the numerus clausus as “Affirmative Action,” arguing that Poles were attempting to reach proportional parity with Jews in business, education, and the professions. Poles carried out pogroms. Nazis invaded and committed a genocide. Application of Bonacich and Chua to Poland illuminates one of the ugliest expressions of anti-Semitism: the blood libel, which Jan Tomasz Gross labels a “medieval prejudice” and, in a quote from another author, a “medieval myth” (152, 260) to which the Jewish Times adds, of “vile Christian fantasies about Jews” (Rifkin). Gross' work is excellent and needed, but in his discussion of the blood libel, Gross reveals no knowledge of folklore scholarship. Gross proceeds, rather, from tunnel vision and from the concept of human progress — Poles are anti-Semitic because they are of the past; Poles are uniquely anti-Semitic because they, uniquely, believe in and act on the blood libel in the modern era, an era that has put away such things. The solution is for Poles to abandon their essential anti-Semitism, along with their nationalism and Catholicism, and to evolve — that is, to join the modern, secular, West. There are many things wrong with this picture. Poland was not a significant site of blood libel in the Middle Ages; the West — England and Germany — was. Blood libel increased in Poland during the Enlightenment, the era during which trends such as democracy, secularization and science increased, to reach their peak in modernization. The Catholic Church did disseminate the blood libel, in sermons, books, and art, for example in the notorious mural in Sandomierz Cathedral, but the motif is not Christian. Muslims currently spread blood libel. Popes repeatedly condemned blood libel (Innocent IV, Gregory X, Martin V, Paul III, Clement XIV). In the eighteenth century, Poland's Jews appealed to the Vatican for protection and Vatican officials interceded on behalf of Jews against Poles. This family of beliefs did not last inspire murder in Kielce. Innocents were 188

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murdered as recently as 2000, and probably have been since. Something other than an essential Polish, Catholic, medieval essence is at work here, and it must be understood. Blood libel is part of a family of related folklore items, involving charges of human sacrifice and cannibalism, that members of one group use to discredit, and express anxieties about, another group. This folklore family predates the birth of Christ. Pagans in the Classical World leveled blood libel charges against Jews, and then, Christians. Pagans reported that Christians drank baby blood as part of Christian ritual. In 1750, the French king was accused of bathing in children's blood. Chinese accused French missionary nuns of extracting liquid from Chinese orphan's eyes in order to make photographs. The Talmud cautions against a non-Jewish midwife attending the birth of a Jewish child, as she may shed the child's blood; it cautions against a non-Jew serving as wet nurse as she might rub poison on her breasts to murder the Jewish baby. The emphasis on bodily fluids — blood, breast milk, tears — reflects the folk belief that the essence of life is a liquid (Dundes “Wet”). Charges of blood libel, cannibalism, and the exploitation of human body parts are expressions of the teller's sense of being exploited, and of one group's alienation from another. In reference to blood libels in Africa, classicist James Rives wrote: When Arens began doing fieldwork in Tanzania, he found himself the object of some suspicion among the natives because of a story, remarkably detailed and widely believed, that Europeans consume the blood of Africans … [this story] could be taken as an essentially correct, if simplified and dramatic, assessment of the modern political situation. (Rives 66)

In his discussion of Pagan charges of blood libel leveled against early Christians, Rives wrote: There was a certain amount of justification for these attitudes. The Christians had after all ostentatiously set themselves apart from their fellows both socially and in religious usages. To all appearances, they had barbarized themselves, renouncing their membership in Graeco-Roman 189

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society. In fact, while the stories about child sacrifice were no doubt false, their underlying message was true: Christians were indeed people who had in many respects distanced themselves from their general cultural context. (Rives 74)

Veronique Campion-Vincent, writing of beliefs that Americans exploit Third World children's body parts, wrote: Even though it may not be true that the American USIA/CIA is involved in supporting an organ-theft ring, it cannot be denied that these American agencies have played a powerful manipulative role to the detriment of poor Third World countries…the narrative lore that finds resonance in a population does not have to be factual to be true. Even though the accounts are not factual, they nevertheless demonstrate symbolic truth. (Campion-Vincent 32)

The above excerpts are not adduced as correct or ethical interpretations of exploitation lore, but as examples of how this ugly lore is understood by many professional ethnographers. In fact, not just peoples an ethnographer might understand as oppressed can assess themselves as such, and express that assessment through exploitation lore. American organ theft legends often depict white American males, a relatively privileged group, as having been victimized by dark-skinned, ethnic-minority females, relatively disempowered group members (Goska “Kidney”). Obvious facts must be stated: Poles' victims in Kielce were innocent and defenseless Holocaust survivors. A better understanding of how ugly folklore arises, and the circumstances under which it becomes deadly, does nothing to mitigate the guilt of perpetrators. In recent years, Guatemalan villagers have circulated oral accounts of “Gringos” stealing Guatemalan children in order to exploit their organs. In 1994, environmental journalist June Weinstock was accused of having kidneys in her backpack. Villagers beat, stoned, and ultimately left her for dead. She never fully recovered (Torchia). A Japanese tourist and a bus driver were stoned to death in 2000. “At least 71 people … were killed by mobs in peasant villages in 1999” (BBC). To explain these horrors, journalists did not resort to a posited pathological Guatemalan 190

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essence, religious or cultural. Journalists pointed out that Guatemala had been the site of lengthy warfare and that the killers — Maya Indians — were a disempowered population (e.g. Bounds, Miranda). Applying that logic to Poland, one sees that blood libels became most frequent in the period after the “Deluge,” when Poland was attacked by Swedes, Turks, and Cossacks. The cathedral in Sandomierz features not just images of Jews, but of Swedes and Muslims killing Poles. Not only disempowered, ethnic minority villagers invest in this vile family of folklore. Highly educated persons in the West do, as well. Highlevel Government officials, including Communists (not Christian), arts' boards, adoption agencies, and humanitarian organizations, including those under UN auspices, have given full credence to demonstrably false legends of children being kidnapped and robbed of their bodily organs. Films claiming to document these legends have won prizes. In sharp contrast to Gross' characterization of blood libel as “medieval,” CampionVincent cites characterizations of organ theft legends as “sadly emblematic and exemplary of the horrors of modernity” (19). Both commit the error of tunnel vision — this folklore is neither medieval nor modern; it is timeless. It expresses a timeless aspect of human character. A decent person will experience anxiety around the application of Bonacich's Middleman Minority Theory or Chua's Market-Dominant Minority Theory, and will experience anxiety at Rives' and CampionVincent's implying that blood libel and organ theft, though demonstrably false, represent some deeper truth. Are these merely attempts to justify atrocity, from LA to Kielce to Jakarta? Are these new names for “anti-Semitism” or “class warfare”? In some hands, yes, they are. Hitler referred to Jews as “middleman” (309). Though Lion Feuchtwanger's anti-Nazi credentials were unimpeachable, his novel Jud Suss was made into the Nazis' most notorious propaganda film, a film still distributed by neo-Nazis. Khalid Abdul Muhammad referred to Jews' history as middlemen in his Kean College speech. Muhammad also referred to Jews' participation in the Civil Rights Struggle, and turned that noble participation into poison. Hatemongers distort and exploit everything. 191

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One must state unequivocally: the chauffeur who murdered Chua's aunt was wrong, should be brought to trial, and should feel the full weight of the law. Poles who committed violence against Jews were wrong, and should have faced legal retribution for their crimes. The men who beat Reginald Denny were criminals; their acts were evil. Further, the Poles who, in the interwar era, called for the expulsion of Jews were wrong factually and morally. They were traitors to Poland's best traditions. Jews had lived in Poland for centuries; that earth was theirs, as well as their Polish-speaking neighbors'. Jews, as individuals and as a group, made a vital contribution to the shared life of Poles and Jews in Poland. No Jew should have been compelled to speak a different language, practice a different faith, or adopt a different profession in his own homeland, any more than any Pole. The gift of Bonacich's and Chua's theories is not exculpation or justification for the guilty. Rather, these theories offer what insight always offers: better understanding, and a clearer path to the future. AntiSemitism, no more than any hate, is not “medieval.” It is of this moment. The gift of these theories is that they help us to indict anti-Semites for being anti-Semites, and to reject blaming peasants for being peasants, and blaming Poles for being Poles. The challenge of these theories is that Bieganski's creators and audience can no longer continue to exculpate themselves of hate simply because they are not peasants, they are not Poles, they are not Bieganski. The insightful reader will not assume an attitude of superiority to Poles, Jews, Chinese, Filipinos, or others locked in middleman or market dominant minority dynamics. We, too, know what it is to be locked into a deadly dynamic we did not create and cannot, singlehandedly, change, and yet to which we contribute with our every gesture; in 2010, as these words are written, all humans confront the devastation being wrought by environmentally destructive lifestyles. No one alive today initiated these changes. And yet we all participate in them, and struggle to know how to effect significant rescue. As we move toward the precipice, we know we are no better, and no worse, than a Jewish moneylender, or a Polish peasant, locked into a system that means both life and death.

Chapter Seven

The Necessity of Bieganski: A Shamed and Horrified World Seeks a Scapegoat*

Conditions in Poland During World War Two Poles and Poland were victims of the Nazis. Historian Michael C. Steinlauf, the son of Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors, wrote that Poles, “after the Jews and the Gypsies [were] the most relentlessly tormented national group in Hitler's Europe” (x). Auschwitz was built in order to destroy anyone in Poland who could lead Polish people, for example, teachers and activists. For almost the first two years of its existence, most of its inmates were arrested and detained as Poles. The best estimates of non-Jewish Poles killed by Nazis run between one and a half to two million. Approximately three million Polish Jews were murdered; their vital presence in Polish life was all but erased. One estimate of non-Jewish Poles enslaved by the Nazis puts that number at two million (Meier). Polish slave laborers in Germany had to wear a patch emblazoned with the letter “P.” By one estimate, 200,000 Polish children were taken from their parents and relocated to Germany, to be raised as Germans, because their allegedly German traits revealed German ancestry (Lukaszewski). Nazis killed almost twenty percent of Polish priests. Nazis erased Polish villages. Men were killed, leaders sent to concentration camps, houses * An earlier version of this chapter was published in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, Volume 19: Polish–Jewish Relations in North America, eds. Mieczyslaw B. Biskupski, Antony Polonsky, Littman Library of Jewish Civilization for the Institute for PolishJewish Studies and the American Association for Polish-Jewish Studies, Oxford and Portland, Oregon, 2007. 193

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burned. An incomplete post-war count put the number of such villages at two hundred and ninety-nine (Davies Playground II 455). In accord with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the Soviets invaded from the east as the Nazis invaded from the west. By some measures, the initial phase of the Soviet invasion was worse. “Very conservative estimates show that [between 1939 and 1941] the Soviets killed or drove to their deaths three or four times as many people as the Nazis from a population half the size of that under German jurisdiction” (Gross Revolution 229). The Armia Krajowa or Home Army is described as the third largest underground army in Europe. The AK played a vital role in communicating to Britain and the United States the reality of the Holocaust. AK intelligence provided the Allies with the location of Nazi V-1 bomb development and V-2 rocket development. Captured V-2 rockets were delivered to London. Poles made the first and necessary contributions to the decoding of Enigma, and the breaking of Nazi encoded messages. The Allies' ability to read Nazi messages has been cited as central to victory (Wrobel). In addition to the over six thousand Polish rescuers honored at Yad Vashem, the largest of any national group, more Poles than will ever be counted rescued Jews from Nazis, under the most challenging conditions in Europe. In spite of the above-cited facts, in many high-impact folk and popular culture Holocaust narratives, Poles and Poland are not victims of Nazi crimes, but, rather, are either their perpetrators or approving witnesses. This motif remains popular in spite of constant protest and attempts at correction by prominent historians and activists, Polish, Jewish, and other (see, e.g., National Polish American ­Jewish American Council). James Carroll's Constantine's Sword won the 2001 National Jewish Book Award; Beliefnet named it the best spiritual book of the year. In his back cover comments, scholar Garry Wills called the book “searingly honest;” scholar Eugene Kennedy identified it as “an astonishing work of historical research.” Poland is essential to Carroll and his book; Carroll announced that he would “remain” “at the foot of the cross at Auschwitz” “throughout the telling of this story,” the story of Catholic anti-Semitism. The cross is appropriate because “Polish Catholicism is particularly inclined to 194

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define itself around the idea of its victimhood.” Jews, in Carroll's text, are not “inclined to define themselves around the idea of victimhood”; in Carroll's book, Jews really do suffer. In order to support his use of a cross erected at Auschwitz as central symbol for his entire book about the genuine horrors of Catholic anti-Semitism, Carroll played with the facts of Polish history, Polish self-definition — presenting a skewed reading of the Polish Messiah image (60) — and Polish suffering. Through verbal legerdemain, Carroll lead his readers to believe that only one hundred and fifty Poles died at Auschwitz, compared to a million and a half Jews who died there (230). In fact, between 140,000 and 150,000 Poles were imprisoned in Auschwitz, of whom 70,000 to 75,000 were killed. 960,000 Jews were killed at Auschwitz. Bieganski is disseminated even in a popular book meant to be all about the bialy, a bread product. The Bialy Eaters purports to be a fond and heartwarming memoir of a food, the bialy, and “a lost world” — the life of the Jews who once lived in Poland. The book's cover features a sepiatoned photo of a pair of hands cradling a crusty, flour-dusted bialy. The jacket flap announces the book as a “tribute to the human spirit,” capable of “delighting everyone.” The book's author, Mimi Sheraton, self-identifies as being of Polish Jewish descent (9). Sheraton has written for the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and Food and Wine. The jacket flap announces that Sheraton found, in Poland, a place of “utter desolation.” On page two Sheraton reported that she found in Bialystok, a city in northeastern Poland, a “deserted town square,” a place of a “shadowy sense of loss ... empty streets ... ominously haunting.” Bialystok is not deserted; Poles inhabit it. The Poles Sheraton did see were uniformly debased specimens. She described “jeering and pillaging” antiSemites and “Polish punks” (16), a “grumpy, half asleep, half besotted man” who “grumbled” and “rumpled his hair, hiking up unbelted pants, and grunting” (24). This man went out of his way to help Sheraton; adjectives like “helpful” were not used to describe him. Sheraton's Poland is “dreary,” “drab,” “gray,” with “sagging carved wood cottages ... the only signs of human life were mushroom hunters at the roadsides” and “crudely built brick houses ... ramshackle wood cabins ... [a] grimy white warehouse” and 195

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bad smelling buildings (22-3, 24, 27). The buildings smelled bad because Poles were cooking in them. Elsewhere in the book, Sheraton made clear that the smell of Jews cooking Jewish food, using the same ingredients as the bad-smelling food being cooked by Poles, was “nurturing” (79). In stark contrast to the smelly, drunken, grunting Poles of Bialy Eaters are the book's Jews. Unlike Poles, who have never suffered, and only cause others to suffer, Jews have suffered, and yet are paragons who never cause others to suffer. The seventh word in the book's text is “Auschwitz.” This word, of course, situates every Jew mentioned in the book as a survivor of genocide. When Jews in the book speak of hating “Polaks” and never forgiving them, these Jews' hatred and bigotry, and their repeated use of the slur “Polak” (e.g. 82, 93, 125-6) are rendered understandable. After all, as the book tells us, Poland is a “cursed land” of cursed people. One must not “forgive” these Poles (149). The immediate invocation of Auschwitz serves to render these Jewish survivors' triumphs all the more impressive. These Jews are, indeed, part of, as the dust jacket puts it, the book's celebration of “astonishing endurance.” Poles, in Sheraton's narrative, are not understood to be victims; their survival is not a celebration of anything. Bialy Eaters tells its readers that Auschwitz was built in Poland because “the Poles were partners in our destruction” (149). The shabby Poles Sheraton disdained were not positioned as evidence of “astonishing endurance,” though they and their parents had survived three of the most devastating invasions and occupations of the twentieth century, the Soviet, the Nazi, and then, again, the Soviet. Sheraton was sure to mention anti-Semitic Poles; she did not mention Jews who betrayed their Polish neighbors to Soviet occupiers. Such Jews were not, in Sheraton's picture, “partners in destruction” as Poles who betrayed Jews were (149). Sheraton didn't even mention Jews living in Poland today who are merely, as are their Polish fellow nationals, “shabby.” Sheraton described only Jews who are paragons. One has “worldwide” financial influence (76). Another is a Nobel Prize winner (95). Another is a best-selling author, friend of Elizabeth Taylor and advisor to American presidents (98-9). Many informants for this work, while, as revealed in a questionnaire, knowing little about Poland, or even about the history of Jews in Poland, 196

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reported at least some of the following incorrect narrative details as if true: that Poland as a nation and individual Poles significantly accepted Nazism, significantly participated in the Holocaust, and significantly escaped suffering. In these folk histories, “Poland” is a metonym for “The Holocaust” and “Pole” is a synonym for “anti-Semite.” Often the same informant who associated Poland exclusively with the Holocaust spoke enthusiastically about possible travel to more desirable destinations, for example Germany and Austria, which do not suffer stigmatization. Paco, 33, a businessman, recounted this anecdote. “I found myself marching one time when I was in Washington D.C. when I was about 13 or 14 during Solidarity, when they were fighting for independence and whatever his name was. It was a school trip. I just went. I was dragged along. I did the march, but then I left because I was really not interested in the Poles having their freedom. I was a bitter thirteen-year-old at the Poles.” I asked him why he was bitter. “They turned in the Jews, and the concentration camps. The Poles gave in to the whole Nazi thing without a lot of fight. To save themselves, basically, the government and everybody. The concentration camps were set up there, and no one remembering them. Same with the Germans.” After being asked, “You're on a TV game show. You've just won an all-expenses-paid, round-trip ticket to Poland. Your reaction?” “Go to Auschwitz,” were the first words out of Linda's mouth. “I think of concentration camps,” this 49 year-old secretary said. Her response fell into the majority of responses, most of which associated Poland with the Holocaust, and little else. Jeff refused to go. “Who do I know who'd really enjoy having this gift?” As Jeff, 50, explained, he would want to give the ticket away. “I might go to Poland just to see if I could see where my mother's family were from. Probably horrify myself by going to look at some of the concentration camps. I don't know much about Polish people. Anybody complicit in the Holocaust is not on my most favorite person's group. But then again, the people who are responsible are probably already dead. But I have no great desire to revisit those horrible scenes.” Blue, 36, a social scientist, admitted that he had no positive information about Poland to counter his negative associations. When asked his 197

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likely reaction after winning a trip to Poland, Blue said, “It's not the kind of place that I would normally think of that I would ideally want to go. What immediately came to my mind was, ‘What am I going to see, what am I going to do, what's in Poland?’ I think of Poland and I think of ghettos where Jews were forced to, you know, were pushed into little ghettos and then these terrible things were done to them that I know too well about. Meaning, basically the genocide, the torture, the slavery, the forced work. The Holocaust. That's what I think of when I think of Poland.” Julius, 29, a student, was one of several informants who associated images of Poland in World War Two with stereotypes of Poles as stupid. He told this joke: “How did the Germans beat the Polish in World War Two? After the Polish threw grenades at them the Germans pulled the pins and threw them back.” Julius seemed unaware of the neutral term in English for a Polish person, “Pole,” and, to avoid using the derogatory, but familiar, “Polak,” had to resort to using the grammatically incorrect adjective, “Polish.” Niles, 57, a professor, said, “Did you hear about the guy who was half German, half Polish? He was anti-Semitic, but he couldn't figure out why.” Challenges Inherent in the Holocaust Narrative The Nazi genocide directed against Europe's Jews is one of the most nightmarish narratives its audience will ever encounter. The Nazis were compulsive record-keepers. Detailed descriptions of their tortures, and photographs of torture victims, are readily available. In the traditional response, and certainly the response most storytellers work for, confronted with a narrative, the audience identifies with the story's protagonist and anticipates his victory, and opposes the designs of the antagonist, and anticipates his vanquishing. Given the systematic attempts at dehumanization and isolation from human community to which the Nazis subjected their victims, audiences often have trouble identifying with typical Holocaust victims, who were often bald, cowering, skeletal, and vermin-ridden, and, of course, doomed. 198

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Steven Spielberg famously got around this dilemma in his critically acclaimed and economically successful 1993 movie Schindler's List. Schindler's List has been called Hollywood's first serious, mainstream, direct treatment of the Holocaust. Spielberg did not make typical Jewish Holocaust victims the protagonists of his groundbreaking treatment. His film was not built around hounded victims who died a horrific death. Rather, a sexy, wealthy, glamorous and kindly German Nazi, Oskar Schindler, was the protagonist. Audiences could identify with that protagonist. Even the child of two Holocaust survivors had trouble witnessing evidence of what the Holocaust was really like. While watching a film shown at Auschwitz that featured footage of actual victims at the time of their liberation, Julie Salamon reported: “One thought went through my head repeatedly: My father and mother were good people, decent people. I felt desperate, as though I were trying to believe what my parents had taught me despite what I was seeing — that decency was possible and they were proof ” (63). Any Holocaust narrative, and any audience that confronts it, faces the same dilemma. The normal audience member will desire to define himself as clearly opposed to the perpetrator, and, perhaps, even as thoroughly different from the victim. Those who unwillingly come to see themselves in Holocaust perpetrators or victims may be less likely to be willing to hear the Holocaust narrative, and this story must be told and heard. To accomplish audience member self-definition as other than a Holocaust perpetrator, a Holocaust perpetrator who is clearly opposite to the typical Holocaust audience member must be found. At least one concerned observer has guessed that popular marketers of the Holocaust have found a way to make that marketing go down a little easier for its American audience. Philip Gourevitch wrote, “It is not the Holocaust that is suddenly such a huge popular draw.” Rather, packaged versions of it, for example, Schindler's List, offer their audiences a surprisingly feel good experience: “an affirmative public response to representations of the Holocaust places today's secondhand witnesses firmly on the right side in the struggle of good against evil.” 199

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Who Did It? When a crime is committed, the community asks, “Who did it?” Follow-up questions focus on how guilt affects the life of the perpetrator: “Is he in jail?” “Has he made amends?” In the 1980's and the 1990's, a series of works explored Holocaust guilt. The questions these works hoped to answer were, in essence, “Who did it?” and “What are they doing about it now?” One answer was obvious: the Nazis committed the crime of the Holocaust, and some were tried at Nuremberg; however, the Holocaust was too notorious for that answer to suffice. Noteworthy explorations of these vexed questions included Israeli journalist Tom Segev's 1993 The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, historian Peter Novick's 1999 The Holocaust in American Life, Harvard student Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's 1996 Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Michael C. Steinlauf 's 1997 Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust, and PBS's 1994 documentary, America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference. Books had already come out in the 1980's inquiring into American Jews' contemporaneous response to the Holocaust. The message of these books could be summed up in the title of a controversial 1984 article by Lucy Dawidowicz: “Indicting American Jews.” The cumulative message of all of these works was shattering. Adolf Hitler could never have carried out the Holocaust had he not been allowed by millions of people who had the power to resist, and never used it. During the 1990's, American TV screens, newsstands, and new book tables were flooded with media that complicated America's heretofore spotless World War Two image. Movies like Saving Private Ryan depict America as having saved the world. The movie is probably right; American GIs probably did save the world. They didn't save Europe's Jews, though. In fact, as the new works suggested, American racism played a role in the Holocaust. The PBS documentary America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference presented an America that, in its first encounters with rising Nazism, was blinded and paralyzed by its own racism and isolationism. Anti-Semitism had been strong throughout the West in the interwar period. The anti-immigration movement had generated powerful images 200

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of Eastern Europeans, Jews and non-Jews alike, as threats to the United States who had to be excluded from American citizenship because of their racial inferiority. In the interwar era in the United States, anti-Semitism manifested itself by limiting job, housing, recreational and associational opportunities for Jews. Fields that excluded or limited employment by Jews included engineering, the telephone industry, insurance, the big three auto companies, schools and hospitals. In 1939, fifty-three percent of Americans polled agreed that “Jews are different and should be restricted.” When, in 1942, Americans were asked who posed the greatest threat to their country, Americans placed Jews third, after Germans and the Japanese. That Jews might be named third in alleged dangerousness after America's most intimidating enemies ever is remarkable. Interwar America produced several anti-Semitic newspapers and hosted more than one hundred anti-Semitic organizations, including a homegrown Nazi party. FDR sent the Nazis his best wishes when they gathered in Madison Square Garden. The anti-Semitic American radio star, Father Charles Coughlin, enjoyed a huge audience. Entrenched American racism was made policy by Assistant Secretary of State and FDR friend Breckinridge Long, who used his power to prevent racially undesirable immigrants “from Russia and Poland,” including Jews, from entering the United States. Long denounced Eastern Europeans as “entirely unfit to become citizens of this country … they are lawless, scheming, defiant, and in many ways unassimilable” Long condemned not “the Jew alone” but “all that Slav population of Eastern Europe” (Wyman 146). Policies designed to keep Eastern Europeans out of the United States were carried out even as refugees were trying to escape Nazi threat. America, including America's leaders, knew about the Holocaust; the response was muted. Coverage in newspapers was underplayed; war policy ignored it. In 1999, Blanche Wiesen Cook's biography of Eleanor Roosevelt revealed that nearly sainted first lady to be an anti-Semite. Her husband, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, is widely considered “the best friend American Jews ever had” (Cook 558). Cook “curled in agony” (6) as her research revealed that, again and again, when the Roosevelts and their friends, 201

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including their Jewish friends, had every reason, every bit of necessary information and power, and every precedent to speak out against the brewing Holocaust, and to act, they remained silent and passive, or indulged in anti-Semitism. In 2000, The Nation reported that Henry Ford supplied the Nazis with his own anti-Semitic publications, including The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem, and that Ford contributed so much to Nazi industrial might that a U.S. Army report characterized Ford operations as an “arsenal of Nazism” (Silverstein). In 2001, Edwin Black published IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation, exposing IBM's intimate and essential support of the Holocaust. America was still anti-Semitic after entering the war. As late as 1944, citing anti-Semitism, the U. S. Army resisted communicating the nature of Nazi atrocities against Jews (Novick 27). One propagandistic fabrication, “Jewish war mongering,” a central justification Hitler had offered for his plan to murder all Jews, was raised by American congressmen and used to intimidate Hollywood figures with “Jewish sounding” names (Novick 28). In the post-war era, American social service workers serving displaced persons struggled to communicate that DPs were not all Jews — if the image of the displaced person were to be associated with Jews, their campaign, they feared, “public-relations-wise” would be a “dead duck” (Novick 82). Historian David Engel, surveying the record, reported in 1986 that “the Allied Governments did little to extricate the Jews of Hitler's Europe from their mortal peril because they could see no compelling political, strategic, or legal reason to do so” (Engel 312). Imperiled Jews had asked these allies to help. Our entire people will be destroyed. A few may be saved, perhaps, but three million Polish Jews are doomed. This cannot be prevented by any force in Poland, neither the Polish nor the Jewish Underground. Place this responsibility on the shoulders of the Allies. Let not a single leader of the United Nations be able to say that they did not know that we were being murdered in Poland and could not be helped except from the outside. 202

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So spoke a Jewish leader in Warsaw in 1942 (Engel 300). According to Jan Karski, the Polish courier who delivered that message to Winston Churchill and FDR, the appeal was all but ignored. Julie Salamon pointed out that Steven Spielberg, maker of Schindler's List, has never made a film about American anti-Semitism. British journalist and child of survivors Anne Karpf pointed out that Claude Lanzmann, director of Shoah, though himself “A French Jew, remained silent on the wartime fate of Jews from France: though one of the film's dominant languages is French, Lanzmann nowhere brings in French witnesses to talk about the events on his doorstep” (Karpf 210). Perhaps most shattering of the explorations of Holocaust guilt are those that expose the indifference and inaction of Jews in the United States and Israel. Tom Segev's The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust indicted a Yishuv and then an Israel that often ignored the Holocaust while it was happening, and was contemptuous toward survivors — the “human debris,” the “sabon” or “soap” — who found their way to Israel afterward. Segev's book also provided a disturbing peek at conflict among survivors. Some had lived at the cost of others. During the Eichmann trial, at least fifteen survivors wrote to Eichmann's defense attorney, offering to testify as defense witnesses. They wanted the Jewish Councils to be put on trial (465-6). In 1983, “Indicting American Jews” by Lucy Dawidowicz caused great controversy. In this article, and in the outpouring of letters that followed, one finds the same rhetorical devices used against American Jews that would later be used against Poles. American Jews, some alleged, were passive and uninterested during the Holocaust. They could have helped, and they didn't. Books with similar themes followed: Haskel Lookstein's 1985 Were We Our Brother's Keepers? The Public Response of American Jews to the Holocaust and Rafael Medoff 's 1987 The Deafening Silence: American Jewish Leaders and the Holocaust, for example. The pain these accounts communicated is suggested by Elie Wiesel. While Mordecai Anielewicz and his comrades fought their lonely battle in the blazing ghetto under siege … a large New York synagogue invited 203

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its members to a banquet featuring a well-known comedian … The factories of Treblinka, Belzec, Maidanek and Auschwitz were operating at top capacity, while on the other side, Jewish social and intellectual life was flourishing, Jewish leaders met, threw up their arms in gestures of helplessness, shed a pious tear or two and went on with their lives: speeches, travels, quarrels, banquets, toasts, honors … If our brothers had shown more compassion, more initiative, more daring … if a million Jews had demonstrated in front of the White house … if Jewish notables had started a hunger strike … who knows, the enemy might have desisted. (Novick 30)

Even more devastating was a 1943 appeal to American Jews from their coreligionists in the Warsaw ghetto. “Brothers! The remnants of the Jews in Poland live in the knowledge that in the darkest hour of our history you did not help us. Say something. This is our final appeal to you” (Polonsky, Brother's 152). Novick argued that American Jews paid more attention to the Holocaust in 1993 than they had in 1943 (37). Holocaust survivor and novelist Jerzy Kosinski expressed bitterness about this. He wrote in 1990, “Almost as if trying to make up for their inaction toward the slaughter of European Jewry during World War Two, the Jews of North America turned to the canonization of the Holocaust long after the cannons of that war went silent.” One American rabbi did protest. Arthur Hertzberg's father preached this Yom Kippur sermon in 1940. “If we had any Jewish dignity, we would picket the White House. You hesitate because your sons and daughters have jobs in the New Deal and you are afraid that you are going to rock the boat.” Within an hour of the end of the Yom Kippur fast, the rabbi was fired (PBS America and the Holocaust). For some Jews, the sense of blame is pressingly intimate. “My boy, why are you leaving me?” a Jewish mother wept as her son left Poland for Palestine. He never saw her again. She died in Treblinka (Segev 492). “They Did It!” The Search for a “They” The urgent need for an antagonist that the Holocaust narrative generates has been complicated by massive, shared guilt. Millions of 204

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individual crimes, or merely missed chances, produced a glut of horror, terror, blame and shame. A guilty party, the traditional scapegoat who can take on others' guilt, real or imagined, and then die so that the important intellectual, spiritual, economic and military communities may be exculpated and then live on, has had to be found. Eva Hoffman floated one theory as to why Jews might focus rage and disgust on Poles, rather than on Nazis. A Jew told Hoffman her personal Holocaust story. The story included episodes of help extended by Poles. The teller concluded, “Now you see why we hate the Polacks.” “There was no word about hating the Germans,” Hoffman remarked. Hoffman speculated on why this might be. “It is hard to direct true, living hatred at an impersonal death machine, at the monolithic Nazis … German soldiers … existed at such a remove of power and terror that they were hardly individual; they were embodiments of an abstract force” (245). On the other hand, when Poles betrayed Jews, that betrayal felt more intimate. Perhaps so, but there were other issues at play. This work argues that Bieganski makes a likely target for important Holocaust audiences' urges for a scapegoat because of his difference from those audiences and because of the stereotype that has arisen from those differences. As numerous commentators have remarked, Germans are similar to the most important audience of the Holocaust narrative. Germany is seen as significantly Western, urban, educated, rational, literate, secular or Protestant, in a word, “civilized.” As a Harvard history professor, who was a student in the pre World-War-II era put it, “None of us had the slightest suspicion that the Germans, universally regarded as an outstandingly cultured nation, were preparing a massacre of the Jewish people” (Richard Pipes, quoted in Pogonowski 5). Germany is a central member of the European traditions and military and economic communities that are vital to the United States. More Americans claim Germany as the country of their ancestors than claim any other. This may partly explain why, as Mariana D. Birnbaum wrote in an article exploring ethnic slurs, “although they were enemies of [The United States] in two world wars … there exist far fewer anti-German expressions than the historical relationship would suggest” (Birnbaum 256). 205

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Status and power are attractive. Even Jews are susceptible to their allure. Sander Gilman quoted one German Jew who, in the 1920's, recorded the admiration that some Jews felt for “superior” Germans. I have known many Jews who have languished with longing for the fairhaired and blue-eyed individual. They knelt before him, burned incense before him, believed his every word, every blink of his eye was heroic, and when he spoke of his native soil, when he beat his Aryan breast, they broke into a hysterical shriek of triumph. (Gilman “Nose” 377)

Fania Fenelon was a French Jew who was imprisoned in Auschwitz. She survived by performing for Nazis in the camp orchestra. Her contempt for Poles is evident throughout her memoir, Playing for Time. Poles are “ineffectual” “brick faced” (19) “monstrous” (25) and “servile.” One is a “female mountain;” (28) others are “bitches” “pests” and “a real cow” (29). When Polish women remain “frozen at attention” in the presence of a Nazi, Fenelon reported that “it was an agreeable experience to see them locked in that respectful pose” (31). A Polish woman has “piercing little black eyes like two glinting gems of anthracite set in a block of lard; she was shapeless and gelatinous;” this woman does not speak Polish, rather, “she shrieked something in Polish” (40). A Polish woman “was big and fat and as strong as a man — a monster! One would have been hard put to find any human traits in her at all” (132). Poles are possessed of a “particularly disturbing” “bestiality;” they are “monsters,” “pigs” (42). There is one decent Pole. The decent Pole is not, like most Poles, a peasant at all, but, rather, an aristocrat. This aristocratic Pole joins the Jews in describing Polish peasants as animals. She is quoted as describing one peasant Pole as a “brute;” another is a “vicious,” “cunning,” “frightful creature;” one is a “solid peasant type” and “the worst of all”; another is “stupid and hysterical” (133). Fenelon knew that Poles were victims. She reported the execution of “Edek Kalinski” (sic). Edward Galinski was a Polish escapee who had consciously thrown in his fate with Mala Zimetbaum, the Jewish girl he loved. “Without her, he would give up, without her he couldn't live, even as a free man … he joined Mala and let himself be arrested.” Nazis 206

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tortured Galinski till he was a “swollen bloody mass.” His last words were the opening line of the Polish national anthem, “Poland is not yet lost while we are still alive.” Fenelon witnessed this, but, apparently, Galinksi's choice to surrender his life for the Jewish woman he loved, his torture and execution, and his Polish nationalism did not cause Fenelon to reconsider her overall assessment of Poles (166-7). In stark contrast are Fenelon's descriptions of Nazis. One is “very beautiful, tall, slender, and impeccable in her uniform … the SS walked ahead with long, flowing strides; she must have waltzed divinely” (31). On another occasion, “there was a holiday bustle; the SS were looking particularly dapper, whips tucked under their arms, boots gleaming” (191). Another elegant Nazi was none other than the most notorious sadist of the twentieth century, Josef Mengele. He was handsome. Goodness, he was handsome. So handsome that the girls instinctively rediscovered the forgotten motions of another world, running dampened fingers through their lashes to make them shine, biting their lips, swelling their mouths, pulling at their skirts and tops. Under the gaze of this man one felt oneself become a woman again. The elegance of Graf Bobby in comparison seemed affected. Dr. Mengele wore his uniform with incomparable ease and style, like a sort of Charles Boyer. A smile played over his lips. Insouciantly he laughed and joked, conscious of his charm. He was even civilized enough to fall silent when Lotte — Suzuki, and I — Butterfly — started our duet, and he showed even greater consideration in omitting to laugh at the unusual couple we made. (159)

Fenelon expressed an urge for revenge against her Polish fellow inmates that she never expressed against Nazis. “If I ever get out of here, I'll kill a Polish woman. And I'll see to it that all the rest die; that shall be my aim in life,” she recorded herself as vowing (Fenelon 19). In another Holocaust memoir, Bernat Rosner reported that, as a child, he sang folk ditties that characterized Eastern European peasants as low class, violent drunks (40). In another portion of his book, Rosner offered his description of his encounter with Adolf Eichmann. 207

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Seeing their elegantly tailored uniforms and neatly polished high jackboots, the boy immediately realized that these Germans were important people. They all wore the Totenkopf skull emblem of the SS on their hats. One displayed the four star insignia of an SS Obersturmbannfuhrer on his lapel. These uniforms impressed the young Bernie … and today Bernie is still able to draw for me the insignia of the top SS brass exactly … At one point [Eichmann] turned toward [Bernie] and said “Kleiner Bube,” (little boy). (Rosner, Tubach and Tubach 69)

Nazis assessed their own genocidal behavior as a mechanical carrying out of benign and necessary sanitation actions, dictated by the science typical of elites, not as an indulgence of the human passions or superstitions exercised by lesser races in their anti-Semitism. Norman Finkelstein wrote, “What distinguished Nazi anti-Semitism was the reluctant and mechanical, as against the gratuitously cruel implementation, of the Final Solution” (Finkelstein). One text that typifies this attitude is Heinrich Himmler's October 4, 1943 speech before SS officers in Poznan, occupied Poland. Himmler emphasized that the SS remained “decent” while “exterminating” a “bacillus,” i.e., Jews. Nazis managed their own image as neither “rough” nor “heartless” (Himmler's words), in contrast to “peasant” Eastern Europeans. The soldier had to “understand” this. If for any reason he was instructed to help the SS and Police in their task, he was expected to obey orders. However, if he killed a Jew spontaneously, voluntarily, or without instruction, merely because he wanted to kill, then he committed an abnormal act, worthy perhaps of an “Eastern European” … Herein lay the crucial difference between the man who “overcame” himself to kill and one who wantonly committed atrocities. The former was regarded as a good soldier and a true Nazi; the latter was a person without self-control … Rejecting “from inner conviction” the “Bolshevist method of physical extermination of a people as un-Germanic”, SS leader Heinrich Himmler resolved to implement the Final Solution “coolly and clearly; even while obeying the official order to commit murder, the SS man must remain ‘decent.’” (Hohne) “We shall never be rough or heartless where it is not necessary; that is clear” … Repeatedly professing profound disgust at the 208

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“malignancy, wickedness and brutality” of SS guards who did gratuitously torture camp inmates, [Auschwitz commandant Rudolf] Hoess muses, “They did not regard prisoners as human beings at all...They regarded the sight of corporal punishment being inflicted as an excellent spectacle, a kind of peasant merrymaking. I was certainly not one of these.” The Kapos — prisoner-functionaries in charge of the work detachments — indulging in orgies of violence aroused Hoess's deepest contempt: “They were soulless and had no feelings whatsoever. I find it incredible that human beings could ever turn into such beasts... It was simply gruesome.” (Finkelstein “Critique” 68-70, emphasis added.)

Finkelstein reported that Nazis had good reason to regard themselves as representatives of Western Civilization's elite. Of the twenty-one Nazi leaders indicted at the Trial of German Major War Criminals, six scored “superior” and twelve “very superior” on the IQ test. Truly these were the “whiz kids” of Germany. Or consider the Nazi elite murderers sitting in the dock at the Einsatzgruppen trial. “Each man at the bar”, recalled the Nuremberg Tribunal in its final judgment, “has had the benefit of considerable schooling. Eight are lawyers, one a university professor, another a dental physician, still another an expert on art. One, as an opera singer, gave concerts throughout Germany before he began his tour of Russia with the Einsatzkommandos” … No doubt the intellectual class singing Goldhagen's praises much prefers his conclusion that, unlike the crazed Nazis, truly “civilized gentlemen” do not commit mass murder. (Finkelstein 87)

There are economic, military, and geopolitical reasons for separating the popular image of Germany from the crimes committed by the Nazis. Historian Peter Novick worked out how and why, in the late 1940's and 1950's, American anger over the Holocaust was channeled away from Germany and toward the Soviet Bloc, including Poland. At first, Americans avoided discussion of the Holocaust. After the war ended, the Soviet Union, America's ally in defeating Hitler, became America's number one enemy. The Cold War would dominate world politics for the next several decades. Germany was loved back into the center of Western 209

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civilization through initiatives like the Marshall Plan, and a massive public relations campaign. Within one month of the liberation of concentration camps, TIME magazine warned against identifying them as “German” (86). Racist pre-war images of Eastern Europe as savage and alien were dusted off and reused to aid in this effort (Wolff 365, 370). During this same time period, Jews faced a public relations problem. A powerful American stereotype associated Jews with Communism. Jews were disproportionately represented in the American Communist Party. Communists and suspected Communists, in for example, the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, were persecuted in America. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a Jewish couple who were convicted of spying for Moscow, were executed in 1953. Germany was America's ally in the new, spotlightassuming war on Communism. Poignant images of Berliners besieged by Russians were an important tool in that war. American Jewish leaders wanted to find a way to publicly disassociate Jews from Communism. Plans were worked out to “control emotional Jewish responses” to Germany (Novick 97), and to re-channel Jewish hostility and grief toward the Soviet Bloc. If Jews were seen to be expressing anger against the Soviet Bloc, Americans would be less likely to perceive them as Communists. As Novick demonstrated, to disassociate Jews from Communism, and to depict Jews as loyal Americans who, like other Americans, were united against America's number one enemy, the Soviet Bloc, Jewish publications and organizations used Holocaust vocabulary like “Auschwitz” and “final solution” to portray the Soviet Bloc as the true perpetrator of the Holocaust — even to go so far as to make use of “grotesque fabrication” of Soviet policy in this effort (99). A post-World War Two process of de-stereotyping and embracing Germany also occurred in Israel. “It is doubtful whether bridges were ever built so quickly over so deep an abyss” (Segev 384). Israel found it counterproductive to boycott Germany. David Ben-Gurion, in a pragmatic move, insisted that Israel “make up with the ‘different Germany’” (191). The Cold War made it necessary for Israel to take sides with Germany against the Soviet Bloc. Too, there were financial reasons. Israel was a new and struggling country. It would have been unseemly for Israel to accept 210

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reparations from a country that was not seen as significantly different than the perpetrator of the Holocaust — thus Ben-Gurion's repeated insistence on the “different Germany” (305). Even the Eichmann trial was seen by one Israeli observer as a way to clear Germany's name. One captured Nazi, Adolf Eichmann, as opposed to a whole country, Germany, could be identified as guilty, executed, and eliminated (365). Today “great care is taken not to accuse the German nation” at Israeli Holocaust remembrance events, that typically include the German ambassador (439). This “great care” extends to a committee assigned to monitoring Israeli textbooks to ensure that they do not present a negative image of Germany (456). Their work has been successful; as of 1990, “Most Israelis no longer considered Germany an enemy” (457). Financial reparations came to be equated with reconciliation (252). “Awareness of the Holocaust no longer demands animosity toward Germany” (506). Israeli Jews, as well as American ones, came to associate the Soviet Bloc with Nazism, at least partly because Israel faced military threat from Arabs — equated with Nazis — who were allied with the Soviet Union (298). Segev pointed out that the Israeli-German détente coincided, not with a forgetting of the Holocaust, but, rather, with an increase in Holocaust consciousness (Segev 384). Indeed, the very Israeli newspapers that had ignored the Holocaust while it was happening, came, decades later, to place it on their front pages (412). Who was the antagonist of this Holocaust narrative? Poland. “Jew hatred is as natural to Poland as blue is to the sky,” Israeli schoolchildren are instructed. “The Polish nation,” wrote an Israeli author, “is the victor” of the war against the Jews. Poland “despoiled Jewish property and inherited it … it has made [the Holocaust] into a commercial venture.” Israeli students Segev visited “clearly identified the Holocaust with Poland” (491) These same students were trained to practice tunnel vision, to see, in Poland, nothing but the Holocaust (498). “Revenge, revenge, revenge,” was how one leader expressed what students could learn from their Holocaust tour of Poland. Revenge could be found in Poland's poverty and “gray and sad” condition (500). These students insisted that suffering belonged to them exclusively. They didn't care about, for example, the Rom, a.k.a. Gypsies, who died at Auschwitz, or 211

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the Cambodian genocide; they certainly didn't express any concern about Poles (501-2). “Someone, after all, has to be guilty of the Holocaust,” said an Israeli Holocaust tourist. “We have to hate someone, and we've already made up with the Germans” (492). Novick pointed out how the change of focus from those who actually perpetrated the Holocaust — Nazis — to the citizens of the country in which, for the most part, the Holocaust took place — Poles — served an ideological end (179-181). American Jews are having an identity crisis. Jewish leaders rely on the Holocaust, over and above less popular elements of Jewish identity, like obedience to the 613 commandments, to attract Jewish identification and support (7-11, 198). As long as the focus is on the actual perpetrators of the Holocaust, the Nazis, the usefulness of the Holocaust is limited. The Nazis have been militarily defeated, and most are dead. When the focus switches to an alleged group of “bystanders,” namely, Poles, that is, non-Jewish neighbors of Jews who, in this scenario, for no good reason, sat around and did nothing while Jews were being killed, the Holocaust becomes something that could happen at the drop of a hat. Its drawing power increases. Very few Jews have Nazi neighbors; many Jews live next door to potential “bystanders.” The new emphasis on “bystanders” promotes a “wary suspicion of gentiles” (180). Jews can now look at their non-Jewish neighbors and wonder, “Would you hide me?” or, might I entrust my children to you? (181). The emphasis on bystanders has a powerful appeal for an added group: today's Holocaust audience. As Philip Gourevitch pointed out, an event as gruesome as the Holocaust can be successfully marketed exactly because today's audiences can imagine themselves as “firmly on the right side in the struggle of good against evil” when they are invited to measure themselves, with their privileges, status, resources, and security, against World-War-Two era Poles who did not do enough to save Jews. In this narrative, Poles become necessary to afford Americans a sense of moral superiority, a sense that is pleasant enough to protect them from the horrors of the Holocaust. Novick described a variety of devices for the encouragement among Jews of a sense of victimization and attendant grief and rage, including 212

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a Passover Haggadah that encouraged expressions of “righteous indignation” (184). According to one Jewish leader, “The melting pot has succeeded beyond our wildest fears” (185). Many young American Jews show little interest in maintaining the faith of their fathers — but the Holocaust has proven “consumer appeal” (187). “The Holocaust works every time” one Jewish leader said (188). Jews on both the far left and the far right agree. “The status of Jews as … persecuted outsiders is at the core of what Judaism and Jewishness is all about” according to one Jewish journalist (191). One reason why some Jews refuse to acknowledge Polish suffering, and why some Jews express more rage against Poles than against Nazis, becomes clear. If it becomes more widely known that Poles were victims of World War Two, rather than its perpetrators, the new Jewish identity based on victim status, typified by the Holocaust, is threatened. Nazis don't pose that threat to this new Jewish identity. Rather, they support it. Nazis were certainly empowered and genocidal. That accurate image supports an image of Jewish victimization. That Jews and Germans “made up,” as Segev put it, supports an image of Jews as forgiving and rational. The image of the Polish victim, on the other hand, undermines the new Jewish identity. In addition to being victims, some Poles, the szmalcownicy, who betrayed, or threatened to betray, Jews to Nazis for financial gain, or those who participated in the massacre at Jedwabne, were either collaborators with Nazis or murdered Jews on their own. That reality — that persons who are themselves victims can turn on their fellow victims and cooperate with evil — introduces a fly into the ointment of the image of the immaculate victim whose very victimization renders him immaculate. Discussion of the szmalcownicy invariably leads to discussion of Jews who collaborated with the Nazis, like the Judenrat, or Jewish councils, or Jews who collaborated with Soviet invaders in sending Poles to their deaths. Examples of this can easily be found using Google. A search of the words “Jedwabne” and “Judenrat” turned up what is identified as a letter representing the position of the Federal Council of Polish Associations in Australia. In it, the author argues, “No one disputes 213

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that there were elements in the Polish community which participated in the atrocities. No one can dispute that such an element exists in any community, including the Jews. For example, the so called ‘Judenrat’, German established Jewish Councils, supplied on demand Jews for slave labor and ultimate extermination” (Rygielski). The Canadian Polish Congress responded to the press furor over Jan Tomasz Gross' book about Jedwabne with accusations that Jews murdered Poles in the village of Koniuchy (Canadian Polish Congress). It is not the position of this work that the Jedwabne-Judenrat or Jedwabne-Koniuchy arguments represent any final, transcendent ethical truth; rather, it is the position of this work that these are routes that human minds take when attempting to make sense of the complexities of victimization. There is yet further reason to equate Poland with the Holocaust. Teleology is a narrative worldview. It understands history as working as an expert historical novel works — each detail supports the novel's wellcrafted climax, denouement, and conclusion. Since most Jews in the world have some ancestry in Poland, since Jews established their longestlived large community in Poland, and since the Holocaust happened in Poland, in the teleological interpretation, Polish history must be a narrative designed to culminate in the Holocaust, and Poles must be Bieganski. This Holocaust narrative, one in which every event in Polish Jewish history rushes, like an arrow toward a target, in an undeviating path toward Auschwitz, serves important political ends. Rabbi Byron Sherwin put it this way: For [Israeli Jews] the fate of the Jews in Poland and the Holocaust are proof of the correctness of Zionist ideology … Jews who think this way are therefore interested in maintaining the negative image of Poland … Jews from Israel and America have a psychological need to maintain the stereotypes. (Nosowski 159-60)

If one does not single out Poles, whom can one blame? The answer is too terrifying to attract an audience. Given the world's response to the Holocaust, and to events since, like the auto-genocide in Cambodia, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski wrote, 214

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Humanity has failed, and continues to fail … the only people who did not fail and who completely confirmed their humanity were those who responded to this test by making the ultimate choice and who died helping their neighbors. No one living can say that of himself. No one living can — whether for political or polemical reasons — demand it of others. (“Thoughts” 286 emphasis added)

Polish journalist Jacek Borkowicz, reflecting on Halina Birenbaum's account of Holocaust survivors being mocked and shunned in Israel, wrote that “such reactions are typically human, and not, for example, typically Polish, Catholic, or Eastern European … the meaning of the Shoah is universal: Jews cannot count on gentiles, Jews cannot count on Jews, people cannot count on people … yesterday, [ Jews] were the victims. Tomorrow, it could be us” (91, emphasis added). Zofia Nalkowska, a Polish member of a committee that investigated Nazi crimes, wrote in 1946 one of the most frightening sentences ever written: “Ludzie ludziom zgotowali ten los,” “People prepared this fate for people.” Nalkowska provided no adjective that separated the audience member from the perpetrator. Nalkowska did not speak of “German people,” though she was studying crimes committed by Nazis, including their use of soap made from Polish corpses (Nalkowska 353, Neander). There is no adjective here that releases the audience from responsibility, or that elevates. Such a narrative will never gain a very large audience.

Chapter Eight

Interviews

In 2000, this researcher conducted interviews with American adults of Jewish descent. Forty-four interviews will be discussed. It was not the goal to create a statistically representational data pool, nor to present the definitive worldview of all Jews; rather, the goal was to discover if Bieganski was present, and, if so, what storytelling strategies supported his existence. Most informants were solicited via signs hung in public places in Bloomington, Indiana, a university town. Informants came from across the US and Canada. Interviews began with this question: “I'm asking informants to talk about any time in their lives that anyone communicated something about Jewish identity that made an impression. That something could be positive, negative, or neutral. It could be something that you believed, or that you did not believe.” The above question was repeated, with the word “Polish” plugged in where “Jewish” had been. Interviews became free form, with informants taking the lead, except for closing questions. These included: 1. Have you ever looked across a crowded room and said to yourself, “That person is Jewish?” If so, why? 2. You need brain surgery. You have a choice between a Dr. Smith and a Dr. Kowalski. Whom do you choose? 3. You're on a TV game show. You win an all-expenses-paid, roundtrip ticket to Poland. Your reaction? 4. Identify the following: Kalisz, Mickiewicz, Michnik, Katyn, Karski, Lattimer. These six words were chosen to test the database on which informants based their image of Poles and Poland. 216

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The Informants: An Overview Seventeen informants were male; twenty-seven were female. Ages ranged from 18 to 59. Occupations included student (16); university professor (4); I.T. (3); sociologist (3); self-employed businessman (2); secretary (2); attorney (2); housewife (2); musician (2); journalist (2); artist (2); rabbi (1) rabbinical student (1); corporate headhunter (1); communications consultant (1); film industry consultant (1); editor (1); administrator (1); craftsperson (1); psychotherapist (1); waitress (1); teacher (1); director of activities at a Jewish center (1); physician (1); and an informant who identified himself as “between professions.” Informants named the following ancestral homelands: Poland (21), Russia (21), Ukraine (14), Germany (12), Hungary (5), Lithuania (5), Austria (5), Latvia (2), Yugoslavia (2), Czechoslovakia (2), Belarus (1), Kazakhstan (1), Romania (1), Moldova (1). A Comparison of Informants' Experiences of Anti-Semitism in the New World and Informants' Awareness of Ancestors' Experiences of Anti-Semitism in the Old World Even with repeated prodding, informants recounted relatively few, mostly sketchy, and sometimes questionable accounts of their ancestors' suffering in Poland and Eastern Europe. Of 44 informants, 13 recounted incidents of anti-Semitism in Europe. Five of these stories involved antagonists identified as German, four Polish. Remaining accounts involved antagonists who were Ukrainian, Russian, or Hungarian. Karen, 45, was unique in several respects. She was the daughter of a Polish-born mother who left Poland in 1938 or 39, thus missing the Holocaust. Except for an informant who was a university professor who taught Eastern European history, Karen was the most familiar with Polish culture. She expressed the most hostility to Poles. Her accounts of her mother's experience of anti-Semitism in Poland were the most vivid. Karen sang a common Polish folksong, “Sto Lat,” and recited two very 217

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difficult Polish tongue twisters. She said, “I had Polish [folk] costumes, made by a woman in Poland. I still have parts of one or both of those, and I've shown them to my kids. I have a photograph of me wearing each of them … My mother and I have talked about going back to Poland together … She got a [Polish] chess set that was in the style of [matryoshka dolls]. She's gone back to Poland several times … I think being surrounded by the language makes her feel at home in a way that nothing else does.” I mentioned that Jews had once dubbed Poland “Polin,” translated as “here shalt thou lodge.” Karen was contemptuous. “I learned from Chaim Potok that Jews were invited in to fill an economic gap,” she insisted, even after I mentioned that other groups that did not fill the economic niche that Jews did, e.g. Muslims and Arians, found religious refuge in Poland. “‘Polin, here shalt thou lodge’ may have been a premature assessment,” Karen said. “I guess this is an expression of bitterness about the Holocaust … I don't have a feeling from [my mother] of Poland as a refuge for Jews when she was there. My mother's uncle planned the move, and he never made it. He went back for his mother and he got caught … My mother feels that Poles were very willing accomplices … Ambient anti-Semitism was sufficient that it was easily crystallized … It was easy for the Germans to find willing bodies. The Ei … whatever they were.” “Einsatzgruppen?” I asked. “Yeah.” “You understand Poles as having been a significant part of the Einsatzgruppen?” I wanted to know if Karen knew that Poles were also killed by the Einsatzgruppen. “I'm not even sure what was Russia and what was Poland,” Karen replied. Karen was certain of how Poles felt about the Holocaust. “‘We don't mind this part … The problem isn't what they're doing to the Jews.’” Karen reported that, “There was a tension for my mother. Growing up she felt very Polish. She didn't wanna be characterized as Jewish. She wanted to be Marie Curie. She was gonna be the next great Polish scientist. It was a great trauma and personal tragedy for her to be yanked out of that and thrown into absolute Nowhereville in Canada, in a one218

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room schoolhouse … Polish was her first language. She still reads Polish faster than English. My mother doesn't speak Yiddish. That was a decision on her part. She didn't wanna have anything to do with Jewish identity as a child. She was rebelling against something that was so Jewish. They were about as assimilated as you could get … She resented having to have this complication in her life … The Polish girls she knew who didn't know she was Jewish would casually say anti-Semitic things around her. Poland was a very anti-Semitic country. Her attitude toward the Holocaust as it happened in Poland was to blame the Poles more than the Nazis. She thinks the Poles were very enthusiastic executioners.” I asked Karen if she knew about Zegota. She replied that she did not. I told her that it was the only government-sponsored, underground group in occupied Europe whose express purpose was to aid Jews. Karen snapped, “Well, maybe that's what Polish historians claim.” Karen's account of her mother's experience of anti-Semitism and subsequent heartbreak corresponds with the historical record; the interwar period, 1918-1939, the time of Karen's mother's childhood, was a time of powerful anti-Semitism in Poland. Karen has allowed this truth to distort her own assessment of other historical realities: the commonwealth's very real commitment to religious freedom, Polin, Einsatzgruppen, Zegota, other historical facts not mentioned here, and, indeed, me. Karen surprised me at the end of our lengthy interview by suggesting that I had invited her with the surreptitious goal of converting her to Christianity. Molly, 32, told a certainly fanciful, but quite wonderful, story of her grandfather's experience of anti-Semitism in Russia. “As an army soldier, he had been assigned to the unit responsible for guarding the palace after Czar Nicholas and his family were captured. My grandfather in particular had some responsibility for guarding Nicholas' youngest daughter, Anastasia. At some point, she asked him to get her a drink because she was very thirsty. He knew he shouldn't, but he felt bad that she should be thirsty. When he went to fetch her a drink, he accidentally left the door unlatched and she escaped. This would make him the person responsible for the fact that for most of the 20th century, there were nearly a dozen women all claiming to be Anastasia. Fearing for his life, both because he 219

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had let her go and he was a Jew, he headed for the woods, firing at the soldiers chasing him.” Ruth, 52, reported, “My maternal grandmother survived pogroms … That's where some of the anti-Polish sentiment comes from … I think I did get the message that Polish Catholics were an inferior sub-population.” Ruth had a memorable experience that provided her with a different image of Poles. “When I was about five, my mother was asked to give a recital at a Polish-American friendship committee. She took me along. There was a dashing young Polish military man who was exceedingly gracious to both me and my mother. I don't know how I remember that, but I do.” Olivia reported, “I lived in Germany for four years. I loved it, but there were some experiences that were troublesome as well. It was disturbing to meet people that I liked that were fairly cavalier about the Holocaust. That couldn't just say, yes, this is one of the atrocities that we as Germans committed. They found ways to try to explain it. I just questioned, how could I like these people? It was minimizing. Looking at it as part of war. Not as a separate Holocaust. ‘These are things that happen in war.’ This particular conversation was with a man who had been in the German army. He was, at that time, you know, sixty years old. He was in it. He had to find ways of, um, living with himself. People say a lot of things to justify behavior. It was a challenge for me because you learn to care and like people in a context that allows that to happen and then something else occurs and it really shakes your sense of judgment. It just confirms how absolutely complex life is. I think there's something in the German culture, I don't really understand it, that made that possible. Maybe I would like to believe it would not be possible in every other culture. I'd like to believe that. But, what we saw in Germany at that time we also see in Bosnia … We see the neo-Nazis. We see part of it in the United States. It's everywhere. The degree to which it was allowed to flourish there must have had something to do with German culture itself. I don't know.” Jeff, 50, said, “My mother didn't disassociate herself from her Polish roots. She related to her family as having been Polish Jews. It sounded 220

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like the Russian Cossacks were the problem. There wasn't any negative stuff about Polish people in my house. There was a lot of anti-German sentiment. This whole Nazi deal was still real fresh when I was little. She had watched her father, who was here in this country, not that many years before I was born, during the Holocaust. He was getting letters from all kinds of family members who were still in Poland, and the letters were like ‘Please send us money, send us gold, send us anything, help us get out of here,’ and the government and the American Jewish organization intercepted the letters and told him he couldn't send anything. “The government knew what was happening to the Jewish people early on. Way early on. The rationale was that these people were forced by the Nazis to write the letters and anything that they sent would go into the Nazi war machine, and besides, after these people were forced to write the letters, they were put to death. My mother said first it broke his spirit, then it robbed his health. Then he died. So, when you're a kid, playing war, nobody wants to play the German, cause you have to die.” In an attempt at humor, I interjected, “No, you get the Marshall Plan.” Jeff gave no sign of finding this funny. “The Marshall Plan was something that really upset my father. He knew that our [American] infrastructure needed a lot of work … Our government did know what was going on. Saving the Jewish people was not the reason we got into the war.” Cathy, 44, naturally blonde and a practicing Christian, reported coming to realize how Nazis might have understood her to be Jewish. Her father's identity “didn't really sink in” until “after the [Berlin] wall came down.” “It's like you knew it, but you didn't know it, because — and I think part of it goes back to that thing where my Jewish friends would tell me that I wasn't really Jewish because my mother wasn't Jewish. Sort of like he's left it behind, so he's not really Jewish. “In 1992, after the wall came down, my father was able to reclaim property in Germany … The time it really hit us was when we went to the Jewish cemetery. And we walked through [my ancestors' graves] and saw all these Jewish stars. And it just hit me. My husband looking at me and going, ‘You are Jewish.’ You know, suddenly it hit. 221

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“I consider myself, like you wrote on the thing [the flier to solicit informants] ‘of Jewish descent.’ I've always had a real strong faith. My Christian faith has always been really strong … [But Jewish identity] really is who you are. It's not just something from the past; it's something that's part of the present. I'm an American, with an amazingly rich heritage. It makes me feel a real kinship. It's something that I really want my kids to be aware of. Recently Rabbi [name] came to [name of local Christian church] to talk about the high holidays. And I said, you know, ‘We're going to this. Because this is part of who we are, too.’ “When we asked why he left Germany, his answer was because Hitler didn't like him, or because his relatives were Jewish. He wouldn't say that he was Jewish … I grew up in a real Jewish area. When I did realize that my dad was Jewish, my friends would say, well, ‘You're not Jewish, cause your mom is your mom.’ So in a way I felt excluded. “They [my father's family] really were brought up as German. They had a really strong German nationalism. He really stressed to us that we were German. I remember going to school and saying to kids, ‘I'm German. I'm German.’ And they'd say, ‘Oh, well, you're a Nazi.’ And my dad told me, ‘If they ever say that, you just tell 'em, that that's not true.’ He wasn't a violent guy, but he'd say, ‘Well, I would just hit 'em in the nose.’ But he still never said, ‘You're not a Nazi because you're Jewish.’ He just said, ‘You're not a Nazi. We're German.’ He really saw himself as German first and Jewish second. He went to church with us. I remember saying the Lord's Prayer with him. He would say it in German. He wouldn't say it in English. He was married in a Lutheran church. When he lived in Germany he went to Lutheran schools. I don't think they were real practicing Jews so much as they identified with Jewish society. “It hit me in that cemetery. My children, who I feel, seem so far removed from it, are Jewish enough to have been destroyed by the Nazis. And that, you know, your kids. You just go, ‘Wow.’ That is amazing because I don't feel — so I guess I can understand why my dad didn't feel all that Jewish because he wasn't raised that way, and why are they suddenly coming after him? He's a German! Like me, I'm an American. But they'd see me first as a Jew and not first as an American, or all the other things that I am. 222

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“My dad is really an optimist. He has admitted that if he were told, if he had been one of those soldiers, he would have followed orders, also. He would have done what they were told to do. He says this, ‘I'm not proud to say this, but I would have done exactly what they did.’ And that's weird — to hear your own dad say that. Especially because he is such a gentle person. He understands where those people were coming from being German nationalists. I think it's helped me to see that these people were just following — and, in a way — that they were trapped. These people were swept into it, and found themselves almost victims themselves and in order to survive, they had to go along with what was going on because if they didn't, the Nazis would start persecuting them and they'd disappear as well. So that helped me to see that people may not have all agreed, but their own self-preservation was ‘We've gotta do this.’ One of his cousins says, ‘We're all half good and half bad, and it's what we choose to do with it.’ “I tend to look on the bright side of things. But you go to Germany and look at the people and think, ‘Mm. Some of these people bought into it.’ It's a scary thought. I remember walking down a main road in Berlin and seeing some kind of a flier denouncing Hitler. Just the fact that they had to do that. Sort of a weird realization that they're still fighting to keep any of that from re-emerging. “I don't think my father ever blamed the Germans. He was really good at blaming Hitler, but not the German people. He goes to his high school reunions. Their family has put money into rebuilding Dresden. He wants to say, to those people, ‘This is what Jewish people are like.’ When a German soccer team came to L.A., my dad wanted some of those German boys to come stay at our house. He wanted them to know that he was a German Jew, and whatever they taught them wasn't true and he was okay, and not any different than they were.” Informants reported many, and wrenching, accounts of anti-Semitism in the United States and Canada. A minority of informant accounts are quoted here. Frequent themes included informants being told that they had horns, that they were going to hell, that they killed Jesus, or that their peers would pray for them. All (save one) informants who recounted humiliating 223

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and even frightening experiences of American anti-Semitism insisted repeatedly that they had had almost no experience of anti-Semitism, and that America was a blessed and tolerant place. Accounts of anti-Semitism in America often came after I had asked at least twice, “So, you say you've had no experience of anti-Semitism?” They often came in an embedded form, as part of an answer to another question. Rumpole's school peers soaped a swastika on her garage and released the air from her parents' tires. In spite of this, Rumpole, 34, said at another point in the interview, “I'd be hard pressed to recount to you an incidence of any personal antiSemitism that I've ever experienced.” Informants often offered exculpatory comments about anti-Semitic incidents. John insisted that when his peers told him jokes about Jews being cheap that they were “making fun of the way that people used to treat Jewish people. In my own mentality I would never be offended by it.” Informants often reported letting anti-Semitic incidents pass unaddressed. Natasha's daughter was rejected by playmates at a summer camp because of her Jewishness. I asked if she had talked to anyone about this. Natasha, 39, replied, “No. I was going to. I was going to. And I never did. It just slipped — you know, it just went through the cracks, I'm sorry to say, but I surely meant to say something. I'm glad my girl didn't crumble under it. Or maybe she did and I don't know. You never know with kids. It could have affected her more than I know.” Paco, 33, said, “We were the first Jews. We had the biggest house. It sits on the highest point in [name] county. My mom and dad both have thick New York accents. There were these real white trash type people. Our dog went in her yard. She says she's gonna shoot 'em. I went down there. Then all the racism comes out. ‘You fucking Jew bastard. Nigger lovers.’ Then they would harass us on the phone. ‘Your Jew bastard dad is fucking a nigger.’ They threw trash in our yard, and had all the neighbor kids doing that. Throw rocks and eggs at the house. They had the phones traced and stuff and we went to court. And nothing happened. They knew she did it and everything.” This lasted for years. “We got used to it. It made me stronger. The family never backed down. This was not our first incident. We lived in [southern state]. We were Yankees and Jews. 224

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“There was an incident where the son of my father's nanny, who was black. And he was raised with my dad in the household and dad was very close to him, and still is. Word got out that he was invited. He was coming down to visit, or something, but anyways, they said, you know, ‘You have a nigger coming down. Don't say that he's your “friend,” say that he's your “boy.” And he's not to stay in your house,’ and this is my mom's private house, and they're giving her all these rules. The community. Her acquaintances, I guess. So, I guess, Dad was out at the plant, Mom was home. There was three of us home. Young kids at the time. And the Klan shows up.” They were wearing Klan costumes. “And they come out and they're yelling, ‘Nigger lover,’ ‘Jew bastard.’ Things like that. Mom opens the screen door. We always had animals and dogs. The dogs are barking. Before they could even say anything, she came out with big, huge brooms, and she's hammering the hell out of them, and cussing them, and chasing them down the road. And the dogs are barking and stuff, and really, after that incident, they really never bothered us again.” Paco's religion was mentioned when he adopted. “It was disgusting … It came up once in a psychological report they did on me, and it came up when they were discussing it. Because I was a single man adopting boys they try to make me out to be a pedophile, a monster. So they threw that in there. I was a fighter. It was a nasty battle. Mean, nasty.” Paco's friend told his son this joke: “What's the difference between a Jew and a pizza? A pizza doesn't scream when you put it in the oven.” “He's a sweet kid. He doesn't understand. We just talked about it. I didn't make him feel stupid, I didn't get mad at him, I didn't stop the vehicle, and, ya know, I didn't do any of that. I know the kid loves us a lot … I have never felt like a victim. Never ever, ever.” Jacob, 18, went out of his way to excuse the teller of the same joke. “He's a friend … I understand based on his character. It's a maturing process that happens at different times. Some people may catch it in their midtwenties. They wouldn't tell that joke ten years from now.” Noting that Jacob was focused on exculpating the joke teller, I asked him how he felt. “I guess I felt that kind of cringe. I'm okay at shaking stuff like that off. I didn't say anything. I don't know if I should have. It's not what I think 225

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about when I talk to him. I haven't thought about it till now, when you asked about something that made you cringe. I totally understand the cringing feeling. I understand that the motivation it came from wasn't antagonistic. He wasn't trying to spout an ideology. He was just telling a joke. I guess I can make that distinction.” Rosa, 42, was nicknamed “Crisp” in high school, a reference to Jews who were incinerated in Nazi ovens. “It was hurtful. But I was a pretty tough cookie. I kind of shut myself off from it and didn't let it bother me. You had to be tough to survive that whole situation … I had a friend in college, who, when she married, she married a guy with a very Irish, Catholic last name. She said to me, ‘When the Nazis come they're not going to be looking for the Mac-So-and-Sos.’ And I said, ‘I can't believe you think like that.’ And my cousin's wife, who's a very, career wise, very powerful woman, told me that as soon as each one of her three children was born, she got them a passport. And I said, ‘Why?’ And she said, ‘In case we needed to get to Israel.’ I said, ‘You have got to be kidding me.’ “When I finally dislodged [my husband] from New York City, we moved to a small town in [Midwestern state] and the house we moved in to happened to be across the street from a church. And the pastor came over and invited us to come and join the church. And my husband was very belligerent to him. ‘We're Jewish,’ and sort of shoved him out of the way. And I said, ‘Thank you very much, we appreciate it.’ Then my children were playing with a bunch of rocks and bricks that were in front of my house, and they were building things on the front stoop. My husband came back later on that night and he said, ‘What's this? What's this? Who's been disturbing our bricks?’ He thought it was some kind of gang thing, some kind of anti-Semitic thing.” In the late 1990s, a Bloomington resident distributed hate publications. Then, targeting Jews and others, he went on a killing spree, and finally he committed suicide. “A few weeks ago there was a [new] threat,” Sylvia, 41, reported. The dead killer's neo-Nazi group “had declared a day of violence against all Jewish agencies.” Sylvia was working at a Jewish agency. “I got it over e-mail … Instead of saying, ‘Let's go home,’ we did call the police and we had somebody watch the building all day. I wasn't about to close 226

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the building and go home. I don't think you can live your life that way. If anything I think you give people a victory by living in fear.” Sylvia does believe, though, that “It could happen again. There's been the element of, ‘You never know.’ I think a lot of Jews feel this way … Is that, um, I feel safe in America right now, but I always, I would believe at any minute that a Holocaust could happen. And I believe that that could happen here. At the same time that, um, because, I've seen it throughout history. That anywhere the Jews have ever lived, um, within periods of time, they've been kicked out and they've been persecuted and we've been purged and we've been murdered and we've been expelled and all that ... I think that there's some significant differences? In terms of other places that we've ever been? That make it safer? But there is something underlying there that I'm never a hundred percent safe. And that's one of the reasons now that it's so important for me to fight for diversity … And not just for me as a Jew, because I think it's the same for any minority in this country.” Bob, 59, repeatedly insisted that “anti-Semitism was not central” to his childhood, but he described an anti-Semitic atmosphere. Clubs and hotels were restricted. “I always had the impression growing up that you were in a hostile environment. One of the stories was that if a person had his house painted yellow, you were anti-Semitic. The older kids would tell you. ‘See that house? It's yellow. They don't like Jews. Stay away from them.’ It was just another one of these dimensions of, you're navigating a hostile environment.” Bob's home city was part Protestant and part Catholic. “They couldn't decide where to send the Jewish people, and the Protestants lost, so they got the Jewish people. Jewish people would tell this story in a self-deprecating way. There's building yourself up on the one side and self deprecation on the other.” In school, students were “ninety-seven percent Jewish, three percent not. Nevertheless, every morning we'd sing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers.’ You'd compete to lead ‘Onward Christian Soldiers.’ And there was a prayer from the second [i.e. New] Testament. There was a Christmas play. There was a Christmas concert, and all the Jewish kids would compete to be in the choir. Nobody thought anything 227

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of it. The parents never said anything about it. Then, when I got married to someone who wasn't Jewish, I would be singing all the songs and they couldn't believe that I knew all the songs. “Jews were definitely the outsiders. You knew you were the outsider when you went down to Quebec City, and the parliament buildings, and there'd be a huge crucifix on the wall. And you would say, ‘Huh. Well, maybe I'm not part of this. I don't know.’ In high school, for some reason, they insisted on teaching religious education. They would always say, ‘Okay, the Jewish kids can get up and leave.’ So, if you were trying to be part of the group, that certainly said that you were not part of the group … my high school was across from a synagogue … So I was standing there one day with some guys who I thought I knew pretty well. And they said, ‘Oh, here come the kikes out of the synagogue.’ And then they looked at me and said, ‘Aw, we didn't mean anything by it,’ but it really hurt my feelings.” “I can remember other occasions. I was kinda walking along the street, and some kids going by in a car making all kinds of anti-Semitic remarks. One gesture they would do is stroking beards, that kind of thing… You would feel uncomfortable going into a new situation where people didn't know who I was because people would say things. And then, you know, how do you respond to that? I don't know how people tell [i.e. discern whether or not their interlocutor is Jewish]. Or whether they tell. They may not tell; therefore, they feel comfortable saying anything they want to say … My philosophy of life is: ‘Denial is not just a river in Egypt.’ I can't remember [details of specific anti-Semitic comments] cause I deny a lot of stuff as to what they were saying exactly.” “There were certain parts of the city where my parents said, ‘Well, you don't want to go there.’ They don't go on the other side of Saint Urbain's Street. Saint Urbain's Street was still Jewish, but on the other side was French. There was fighting all the time.” “Oh, I forgot about this,” Marie, 39, said, long after she'd been asked if she'd ever experienced anti-Semitism. She went on to detail a frightening account of a student who harassed her because she was Jewish, her department chair's refusal to take the harassment seriously, and her 228

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enlisting other students as ad hoc bodyguards. “If you know it's a hornet's nest,” Marie said, “you can walk around it, or you can poke it with a stick. Maybe I'll just walk around it … It did make me a little wary. That he could do something crazy. And that's why I didn't pursue it any farther than I did.” Marie's story of hypocrisy in academia was echoed by Liz, 27, a graduate student. “Most of the negative stuff was attached to money and cheapness. ‘And then you'll go and you'll ask me for money in the next sentence. Think about what you're saying.’ I really make an effort to not be cheap and to put my part in to counterbalance the image. I don't want them to think I'm cheap, I mean, it's beyond not wanting them to think I'm cheap. But I feel that if I am, they'll think that Jews are. More recently I guess people have become more sophisticated in their putting down, but people called me a JAP … They'll be teasing me about the things that I like. If I like clothes, they'll say, ‘Oh, that's you. You're a JAP.’ One of my best friends, in talking about Jews from New York — they don't think that they're insulting me — they'll say, ‘Oh, these Jews are like that. And so, you know, she's a Jewish girl from New York.’ They don't have to say anything and I know that they're thinking something negative. I think they think that because I'm not like that, that that's not gonna bother me. And somehow I'm separated? “When I first came to graduate school, I had people tell me, later on when they did become my friends, ‘Well, I didn't know if I wanted to — you didn't look like the type I would hang out with.’ And I said ‘Why?’ and she's like ‘Cause you look like a girl from Long Island.’ Big-hair Jews. That was the thing. People in my department who are supposed to be all, oh, whatever they are — politically correct — even close friends of mine, my friend [name] I think she is prejudiced against Jews, even though she just married one. But I mean, that image. She even talks about her mother and father-in-law. ‘Oh, she's wearing this bejeweled outfit. It's got stuff all over it, and long nails.’ … An ex-boyfriend of mine. He's trying to be all, like, global-political. He would say stuff about, ‘Oh, they cover Israel too much in the media.’ In his mind, the Jewish media. It just hit me. He said it after we broke up, and then in a group he 229

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said that and I felt like it was aimed right at me. Like, ‘Oh, they create too much attention to the Jews’.” I asked, “When your fellow graduate students say ‘people from New York,’ or ‘Girl from Long Island,’ what qualities are they associating with those terms?” “Loud, self-centered, obnoxious, into money, clothes, a little bit on the — I wanna say, nouveau riche. Like, not dignified money. More ostentatious. Pushy. Whiney. I call them on it. And then point out the hypocrisy of graduate school in general. You say, ‘Oh, we're so liberated, we're so enlightened. Look at the peasants of the rest of the world,’ and I'm like, ‘You do the exact same thing. It's just more subtle.’ I have black friends who say that's the kind of stuff that scares them the most. It's not the white supremacists. They know what they're dealing with then. But it's the academics who cloak it in all this stuff. We think, ‘Oh, we're in this enlightened place’ and we almost forget that that could ever be an issue and then suddenly you're reminded. “You know what? Things aren't fair here. People aren't enlightened. It's the same stuff, just coming more subtly, just cloaked in academic language. What's interesting in my department is the whole view of religion in general. Christians who practice are chastised and made fun of. It's kind of like the ‘opiate of the masses’ kind of idea. It's kind of like, ‘It's not rational. It's hocus-pocus. That's what uneducated people think’ The funny thing with Judaism is people think it's sort of exotic. Even if they have all these negative stereotypes, I have a lot more leeway to practice. If I go to synagogue, I don't get the backlash. The boyfriend I was talking about was really anti-Catholic. Really, will like, tirades about — he wished Mother Teresa dead. I don't think he would have gone out with a Christian with the same amount of practice. One group of students was called the ‘Seven Hundred Club’ [a Christian TV program] because they went to church. They define [name], who is a wonderful person, as ‘Seven Hundred Club,’ evangelical, because they practice. They didn't take the time to really look at her.” A frequent theme was anti-Semitic comments heard because the informant's interlocutor did not think that he or she was Jewish. 230

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Olivia reported, “I'm a therapist and I was working with a couple … I wanted to bring in a co-therapist whose name was obviously a Jewish name. Both of them started squirming. And they said, ‘I-I don't think that's a good idea.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ and they said, ‘I'm just not comfortable working with somebody who's Jewish.’ And I said, ‘How have you been feeling working with me?’ ‘Fine.’ ‘Well, did you know that I was Jewish?’ And their mouths dropped open. And then they started backpedaling. ‘You know, you know, it's not that I feel uncomfortable, it's just that, I don't know.’ I think it was just an out-and-out prejudice. No real reason. Just that, for some reason, they don't think they could connect with a Jew. A Jew wouldn't understand them and their problems. I didn't wanna get into that with them … I felt judgmental. ‘You stupid idiot. You have no idea what you're talking about. Here I have been working with you. I have helped you. You have no idea that it's a Jew who's been helping you, so what are you talking about?’ In a way, I felt smug.” Jeff said, “I was at Mr. D's [supermarket] not that many weeks ago at the window and Alan Greenspan raised the rate a quarter of a point and there was some well-dressed, middle-class-looking white woman talking to people behind the counter about ‘That Jew bastard who raised the rate and he probably doesn't even own stocks, he probably has securities.’ … The decision was ‘Do I confront this? Or do I just live and learn?’ And I decided to live and learn. But that's happening all the time, everywhere. We're talking all day, everyday. I would like to put my head in the sand and pretend it's not happening, but it is.” Paco said, “‘I'm Jewing you down.’ I've heard that forever. I hear that everyday in my business. All the time. I think they're assholes. They say, ‘Oh, can you Jew me down the price?’ ‘Give me a good Jew price?’ or something … I can't piss off too many people, because I have to eat, still. But they're idiots.” Nate, 48, reported that in Canada, his Polish-Jewish immigrant greatgrandfather “was once attacked by some kids. He came to Canada from Poland in 1911. He was an orthodox Jew and wore a beard. He collected scrap metal and drove a wagon through every neighborhood and into what was then the suburbs or even countryside.” 231

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Nate continued, “[There was] a convenience store I used all the time and I had a pleasant relationship as a customer with the owner. Once, I brought a guy from my neighbourhood whom I had known in Hebrew school. He had a hooked nose, and a bit of a singsong voice, and frizzy blonde hair. I went into the convenience store with my friend and the formerly pleasant owner asked me what I was doing bringing ‘this fucking Jew’ into his store.” Jeff said, “My wife, when she was a little girl in [northeastern state name] she had a cross burnt on her lawn. I grew up in [northeastern state name]. The kids from the Catholic parochial schools were taught that the Jewish people had crucified Jesus and they would come up, get in my face, poke me in the chest, and tell me I was a Christ-killer. They believed it. And I had to deal with that. I hated them … Don't get me wrong. I had a lot of close friends from the Irish community, from the Italian community. But the basic Catholic understanding where I grew up at that point was that the Jewish people were Christ-killers … The Catholic kids who didn't buy into that, I got along with fine. There was a statue of Christopher Columbus. Every Columbus Day we had a mission to deface the statue. The Italian kids had a mission to stop us. It wasn't exactly West Side Story, but it wasn't that far from it. Yeah, I hated it … People find reasons to not get along.” Many informants reported incidences when non-Jews, in the heat of a fight, suddenly objected to the Jewish person's identity. Molly said, “I was in eighth grade. I had gotten into a fistfight with a girl with whom I had once been close. Isn't that always the way for girls? In the pre-incident verbal sparring, she asked me if my mother kept money in dictionaries. This was something I had never heard before and at first I wasn't really sure what she meant. I said my mother had invested in encyclopedias, but other than that. Anyway, I told her that her mother was shaped like a bowling pin, which was a stupid thing to say, even though she was, and she called me a ‘kike.’ Having never heard the word before, when I got home that afternoon, I asked my dad and stepmother why she called me a ‘kike.’ They explained … There were other offhand comments along the way, but the couple I remember were mainly about how being Jewish 232

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meant my family must have money. I always found this to be a baffling stereotype … My family, on both sides, had grown up urban-poor. My dad dropped out of high school when he was 16 and my mom graduated and got married at 18. Neither went to college … My grandparents had owned a fruit and vegetable cart and they worked long and hard.” Molly described her step-father. “He was good-looking, smart, and charming in a way, I suppose. He believed in me when it didn't feel like anyone else did. He was able to have such a strong influence on a part of me I now think of as unshakable. And, also, quite frankly, I'm ashamed of how much I allowed myself to be influenced by his hateful views. He was selling cars. Many of his clients, or potential clients, were Jewish, and he despised them. They were ‘beaters.’ Whom they were supposed to be beating, I'm not really sure. He would do impressions of them, individuals, couples, whatever. The thing is, for a while, we [my mother and I] laughed. After a point, though, the comments, the put-downs just got tiresome. He used to tell us that my mother and I were the only Jews he liked. But then, according to him, we weren't really Jewish — whatever that meant. Probably that we didn't do or buy things just because they were cheap. I don't feel like I'm doing his influence justice. It's so difficult to explain now. Or rather, it seems like we — my mother — shouldn't have stood for it. Yet we did. The point is, it took me years to get back a sense that being Jewish was a positive thing, that it should be cherished, celebrated. The part that makes me ashamed is that I let someone make me believe that my people really were just ugly.” Colleen, 42, raised Catholic, did not know that her father was once a Ukrainian Orthodox Jew. “When he was dying, he talked to my sister and I about how he had suffered discrimination when he first went out into the world to find work. This was during the Depression in New York. There were ‘No Jews’ signs in businesses and also prospective employers could and did ask religion and Gentiles refused to hire Jews. He finally felt he'd never work unless he lied and, interestingly, he asked the family rabbi if it was OK to lie, despite having renounced his religion. The rabbi quoted something from the Torah about it being OK if one's survival was at stake, and so my father began to conceal his Jewish origins.” 233

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Steven, 30, said, “I once walked into anti-Semitism. I got off the bus. I had to walk a couple of blocks to get to the house. These two high school kids walked up to me. Never seen them before. And, they asked me, ‘Are you Jewish?’ It just struck me, that's a very odd question. I don't know who these people are. That's also not the first question you normally ask a person. Almost automatically, I just said, ‘No.’ And they said, ‘Are you sure?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I'm sure I'm not Jewish.’ And they said, ‘Well, okay, but you really look it.’” Linda, 49, reported that during lunch, a fellow secretary said she would not have agreed to work for her current boss if she had known that he was Jewish. “‘That's an awfully bigoted thing to say.’ She looked at me and she was kind of dumbstruck. ‘Are you Jewish?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Oh, but you're not like that.’ I kick myself now. That moment was the moment I should have stood up and left. I'm a fool, and I'm a coward. I cannot stand to be at odds with my co-workers. This was a person that I had to deal with everyday. I feared so much offending her even after I was offended by her. I continued to sit and eat my lunch. I'm not a real brave person. But if I had to live it again, that's what I would have done. I would have stood up and left. I would have said, ‘To hell with lunch, and to hell with that girl,’ and I never would have talked to her again.” Ruth, 52, was at a party at home. An acquaintance of her husband's said to her, “‘Don't you think I can tell that you have chicken soup in your veins?’ I was absolutely aghast, and torn between — it was an uncomfortable situation because this is someone my husband really likes. I tried to keep my mouth shut. It made me really uptight. I thought, ‘What is it about my face that makes him think I'm Jewish?’ He didn't mean any harm. A lot of prejudices are like that. People don't mean any harm. I was extremely offended. I was so taken aback. It was totally unexpected. I was caught in a social situation where I didn't feel free to say what I really thought. I tried to make myself scarce.” Sid, 57, reported, “The non-Jewish people around us would always introduce us as ‘This is my Jewish friend.’ As if it made a difference. It never bothered me at all until I had a date with a girl and she introduced me to someone, she said, ‘This is my Jewish friend.’ And you know, I never 234

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saw her again. If you date a girl, and she says that, you know that that relationship is not going to get stronger. It's not going to become intimate, and the idea of a lasting marriage kind of thing, because they're putting you off as somebody different.” These accounts are merely a sampling of many and equally harrowing ones. They were told only after prodding; informants insisted that America and Canada are not anti-Semitic. One suspects a prototypicality judgment. The stereotype of an anti-Semite in the US today is an Eastern European peasant, or a German Nazi. It is not an American. When an American commits an anti-Semitic act in America, at least in the case of these informants, it is often trivialized, laughed off, immediately forgiven, or consciously forgotten. The Fluidity of Identity, and Identity Presupposing Alterity Interviews support the scholarly understanding of identity not as an inescapable expression of any spiritual or genetic essence, but, rather, as a changing and changeable result of human choices and a human cultural creation. Olivia rejected the Jewish soul theory. “I believe really, really strongly that we are who we are oftentimes as an accident of birth. I'm Jewish and I connected with that because I connected with [name of relative's] family. If I had been born in [birthplace of a non-Jewish relative] I would have connected with that family and I might be a Baptist. Who knows? So I just feel that, our identity, in a lot of ways, is accidental. And if it's accidental, then, doesn't it mean that we all have an assignment to partner with God? I don't believe that God somehow gave this assignment to Jews at Sinai or anywhere else. These are incredibly wonderful metaphors and stories. Every culture has a similar set of stories that are ethical that talk about how we are supposed to be.” John, 23, dramatized the fluidity of identity, and identity as a human creation. “When I was fifteen, we were sitting down for Passover, and my father was reading sort of a main thing that one reads at that situation. So, anyway, he starts reading it, and right in the middle of it, he starts 235

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laughing. And, um, I was — supposed to be a serious thing. And not just laughing like — this thing where he's just kind of like doubled over, like a totally silent laugh. Mom and I kind of looked at one another and looked at him and I seem to remember her making some comment like, ‘What are you doing?’ So he started back and he started reading again, and the same thing happened, where he broke out into laughter, and my mom is like, ‘C'mon, the matzo ball soup is getting cold. We just came home from work.’ My parents had just come home from work after a long day. Almost like, we have to get this Passover done with. So he tries it one more time, and he can't get through it without laughing. It's kind of this inexplicable thing. So, she goes into the kitchen and takes the matzo ball soup and kind of slams it into these dishes and she kind of serves it to us and we're kind of eating it. I kind of remember joking like, ‘Oh, man, you really blew it.’ … The next morning, my mom called up the temple, and just formally resigned our membership … Right now I'm an atheist. Something significant happened right about that time. I discovered rock music. That formed a big part of my identity.” Many informants expressly delineated Jewish identity in contrast to others' identities. Twenty-five informants volunteered a devotion to, or a gift for, intellectual activity as a quality of Jewish identity. Sid described his wife's conversion. “She had an open mind. She never, ever would have made a good Catholic, where there is a lot of Catholic dogma that you just sort of accept at face value and don't question. There was something lacking there. She never found fulfillment. Maybe because she was brighter than the average person in a small town. There aren't lectures. The sermon was sort of shallow. The things that revolved around the church were like baking and cookie socials or something like that. That didn't satisfy my wife's intellectual curiosity as a relatively bright kid. She saw that Judaism allowed — there were more professionals in Judaism, more education. Education is given a higher priority.” Josephine, 31, said her father “would say ‘religion is the opiate of the masses.’ Christianity is like a drug that people take and that Christianity is the negation of intellect … It was like we were in collusion against the masses of people that were ‘dead from the neck up.’” 236

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“‘Jews are the men of the books’” Josephine's father told her. Josephine reported that she “was made fun of by other kids. My father would tell me to walk all over them and leave my tread marks on their backs.” Josephine was to walk all over the teasers by superseding them in academic achievement. Linda said, “I've never meet a dumb Jew.” An image of Jews as funnier than non-Jews was related, in many informants' analyses, to an image of Jews as smarter. Blue, 36, reported that, “When I first moved to Indiana, and I didn't know any Jews, I felt, part of my manner and my conversational tone, and my sense of humor in particular, was very foreign to many people. I kind of seemed odd to them … a lot of puns and sarcasm. People didn't get it. They would look at me like I was serious a lot. My Jewish relatives and friends back home [would] say, ‘That's because it's Jewish’ … I've trained people here to get it, and I've also identified it explicitly as a Jewish thing. When they don't get the joke, I have to look at them and say, ‘No, I'm being facetious. I'm not serious here. This is a Jewish sense of humor.’ And now they kind of get it. But I've had to train them.” Julius, 29, said “Stuff that goes over here [in Indiana] I'm sure wouldn't fly amongst my friends [in the northeast]. I'm not the funny guy, by any stretch, among my friends at home. I'm the more quiet guy who goes along. Yet here, I'm Jackie Mason. Sometimes I'm not sure that my [Lutheran] girlfriend completely appreciates my sense of humor. I'm sure things go over her head. And that's frustrating, but I find it endearing also. I wish I had a little red light on my head that would go off when I was sarcastic so you would know. I mean, the fact that I can say something funny, or a little off color, and keep a completely straight face, is — is — people don't get it. All the time, ‘Are you funny? Or are you serious?’ It totally amuses me. These people just don't get it.” Eileen, 49, said, “All through growing up, I always heard about ‘the goyim.’ And so we knew we were Jews. They were derogatory. They weren't as good as we were. I remember one, this was probably in my high school years, this was typical. One cousin of my dad's said, you know, something like, ‘Jews would never keep their trashcans out in the open in the kitchen, 237

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they would always keep them under the sink.’ Just little comments like that all the time. I was for sure never to marry a goy. You wanna marry a nice Jewish boy who's going to become a doctor or a lawyer. Jews were smarter. Goyim were rough and blunt, heathen.” Liz mentioned a comedian “who does a whole bit about how — what Jews do and what they don't do. Jews don't farm.” Later she said, “I have been dating this guy whose parents live on a farm. My mom said, ‘You're a Jewish girl. You can't be on a farm.’ Sort of a Green Acres kind of thing. Perhaps maybe even a class thing, rural whites, white Christians. I think she was being snobby. ‘Jews don't farm.’ It's also snotty. We're more upper class and perhaps white-collar workers, and more sophisticated. My dad wanted to be a fireman, but he failed the test. And she said that if he had passed she never would have married him.” Five informants reported that Jews were either more sexually pure than non-Jews, or less sexually adept. Sid reported, “We always thought that Jewish girls were innocent. They were not ready to go to sleep until they were married. The scuttlebutt was if you're going to find anybody to have any kind of [sexual] relationship with, it would definitely be a non-Jewish girl.” Molly said, “We had a little song. ‘Don't kiss a boy if he's a Jew; he won't know what the heck to do.’” Leslie, 21, told this joke: “What happened to the Jew with an erection when he ran into a wall? He broke his nose.” Seven informants said that Jews drink less than non-Jews. After Bob's father got a job that caused his parents to interact “probably for the first time in their lives mainly with Gentiles, they always used to come home and have stories to tell about drinking. It was like they had entered a new culture cause they didn't know anything about that. They always had that concept of ‘shikker iz a goy’ [drunk is a Gentile].” Niles, 57, said, “To see a Jew drunk? Impossible. Unheard of. I mean, never, never. This was something Gentiles did. Beat your wife? Absolutely unheard of among Jews. Taking drugs? Wouldn't imagine it. But among Gentiles? Yes. I've never seen a Jew drunk or taking drugs. I don't go to bars, but were I to see a Jew coming out of a bar, I'd be agape. That doesn't 238

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happen. Also, smoking. I haven't seen a Jew smoke in years. That's part of being educated.” Eight informants identified difference per se as a diagnostic quality of Jewishness. Steven said, “One of the reasons I've been told that Jews do a lot of things or don't do a lot of things is because everybody else didn't do them, or did, respectively. So, the most obvious one, the reason we have the lamb bone on Passover, is because the Egyptians reared the lamb as a god. It's sort of a self-fulfilling — I don't wanna call it a curse — a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because we think of ourselves as different we end up being different. And since other people find us strange to begin with, they separate themselves from us and differences just seem to get bigger.” I asked Julius, who self-identified as close to atheist, if he wanted to raise any children he might have Jewish. “I can't imagine no. Though, when I think about it rationally, I figure, well, I'm not so sure why. It's only fair to give them a sense of their history and community. I'm actually kind of fond of how Unitarians do it. Give them the world religious structure. Is it fair to impose a religion? I mentioned [my and my mother's discomfort with the idea of a Christmas tree in the home] to my [Lutheran] girlfriend and she was taken aback by that. We had a nice long talk about that, actually. Try to think what it's like to be in the minority religion where this is all around you. You can't escape it. And you're trying to hold on to some sense of your own identity which is different than what you see on TV and hear on the radio over and over and over again. My mom would go crazy between Thanksgiving and Christmas with all the songs on the radio and all the lights everywhere. But then, of course, we would always plan a trip up to New York City, one of those weekends, specifically to see how the decorations — it's kinda funny, the mixed messages you get — go see the Rockefeller Center and the windows on Fifth Avenue. One time we went and saw the Nutcracker. It was wonderful. It was great stuff. But to have that in the house? I know I would feel uneasy. I know if I had any, like a cross? Hanging up in my house? Won't happen. That much I know. So as much as I say, I'm as rational as I can be, I know I'll end up being irrational about having symbols around. I'm not willing to let my 239

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kids grow up Christian. The cross is a symbol that makes me feel funny. I know it shouldn't necessarily. I guess you grow up your whole life knowing ‘That's them.’ It was definitely a ‘them and us’ kinda thing. There are special words for ‘goyim’ and ‘Gentile.’ Eskimos have how many words for ‘snow?’ We have how many words for people who aren't us? So, the cross. It's not like it approaches a swastika. It's not like a symbol of hatred or anything like that. It's just not us, not me.” Twenty-six informants volunteered victimization as a quality they associated with Jewish identity. Jeff said, “The world generally hates us. I mean, you might live in a Jewish generation where it goes okay. Like, my parents, no one came knocking on our door to drive them off into the night, but sooner or later it's gonna come around. It's coming around now. There's a predictability. People who survived the Holocaust are called survivors. In my mind any Jew who's still walking the face of the earth is a survivor. Mark Twain wrote something about how Jews have survived thousands of years while the nations and kingdoms that either took 'em into slavery, or killed them off, are gone, but we're still here … Anti-Semitism is a spirit and it doesn't go away. Been around for a long, long, long, long time. Even the Bible says that Jerusalem becomes a stumbling block to the nations … If you look at Genesis 12, 3, God's saying, ‘Those who bless you I will bless, those who curse you I will curse.’ And I think that God knew that the Jewish people were going to have a pretty interesting history from there on ... The Christian world wants to eliminate the Jews, either by assimilation or murder.” Aaron, 25, said that the Holocaust was “one hundred percent” part of Jewish identity. “I can't imagine any Jew that wasn't affected by the Holocaust. Remember everything. History has a tendency of repeating itself. Excluding when the Messiah comes, till the end of time as we know it, Jews will be persecuted.” Steven devoted great time and energy to recounting his spiritual journey after an acquaintance died the day before Yom Kippur. This untimely death caused Steven to conclude, “There is something wrong with God … I'm no longer Jewish … [it's] about time you stopped believing all those bubbe meises [grandmother's tales / fairy tales] they taught you in your 240

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parochial school.” But, Steven said, “I can't turn my back on five thousand years of history or six million deaths.” Olivia said, “There has always been something successful about Jews.” Olivia began to weep and stopped speaking for a moment. “As a people, there has been this longevity. Jews have this ability to succeed ... I don't even want to use the word ‘endurance’ because I don't see it as ‘endurance’ I see it as ‘success.’ Humanity feels threatened by that. When people don't feel successful themselves, they resent it in others. And my son said this; he said this to me. He said, ‘Mom, I really feel, um, I just feel superior in certain ways.’ And of course, the politically correct thing to say is ‘Well, of course you're not. Nobody is superior to anybody else.’ But he feels this. And I have to acknowledge that I — even without this religious training, there was a sense of superiority. But I knew that I couldn't express that. That would not be okay. But I sort of felt that. So, rather than feeling fearful of the outside world, I probably feel a little superior. Again, I'm like embarrassed to acknowledge this. I wonder if that superiority isn't a personal feeling of success. Maybe persecution has to do with an awareness by the outside world that in fact that maybe is true. I don't know. Why would people go to such great extents to make Jews look so bad if they themselves didn't feel threatened or inferior or couldn't measure up? I feel touched by the belief that there's this group of people that has been in existence for four millennia or longer that has given so much and I think is so misunderstood … Is it jealousy? Is it, ‘I have to find somebody to blame, when I myself don't feel successful, when I don't measure up?’ Certainly that was part of Hitler's whole thing.” Matt, 44, talked about high school. “The assistant principal made an announcement about ‘Please don't bring pennies to the bookmobile.’ A real jock turned to me and said, ‘That's right, Matt, don't bring pennies to the bookmobile.’ This kid was huge. He was having a joke at my expense. At a Jew's expense. The other kids in the class were on his side at that moment. I was the only Jewish kid in the class. They probably would have sided with him. “The messages I got, very frequently growing up, from my mother, was that the Jews — the Gentiles wouldn't come to the aid of the Jews 241

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… There was this repeating theme of the moral laxity on the part of the Gentiles. I would sometimes feel — I don't know if I still do this — that I would meet someone, that every Gentile I ever met, there's this little switch in my brain, I ask myself, ‘Would this person defend me if the Nazis came?’ “My mother lost a lot of relatives in the Holocaust … If the pope came on TV, guarantee, that would be a trigger for her to talk about that the pope didn't — that the pope was silent during World War II. ‘The Gentiles are against us, the Gentiles would not defend us, they have no moral strength, no moral backbone,’ that was something that I remember. Them against us.” Paco said, “We had family that died in the Holocaust. My mom was afraid that the Holocaust would happen again. Had an escape route planned to Canada, I guess. Was where she was gonna take us. Always hoarded food. She just always made sure we had umpteen billion cans of food in the house. She's passed that along to me. You can go to my pantry and I have a billion cans in mine, too. I was scared a lot as a kid. I was always scared. I was scared that the Nazis would come. It was just part of our — of who we were … They were white bread eaters. Mayonnaise. Wonder Bread people.” Lauren, in her late twenties, said, “I was told you could never really trust the goyim because look what happened to German Jews. They had felt themselves to be Germans first and Jews second. Big mistake.” Shannon, 22, said, “When I was in high school, my mom was more into my dad being Jewish than he was. We would celebrate the holidays — like my mom would go out and buy the menorah and the candles for it. And buy gefilte fish and things like that. My dad just sorta went along with it. But one time we were in a store looking for shoes, and I wanted the Doc Martens … And my dad … walked out of the store, and I followed after him and I was like, ‘Dad, what's going on?’ He just turned on me and he said ‘Those are the shoes that are used to kick my people to death.’ And that was the first time I ever saw my dad associate with being Jewish at all and it scared me, and I dropped the subject, and I never spoke of the shoes again. I just thought they were shoes.” 242

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Pepper, 20, said, “You need to do everything to make sure that that race is kept going. I don't believe in any of the religious beliefs. I don't believe in God … When I was younger … all I read were books about the Holocaust … All religions believe in morals; being Jewish wasn't making me different. Being persecuted made me different … It made me really care about Jews as a race instead of a religion. It made me feel like I was a part of Judaism because of that. Being able to say, ‘I'm a Jew and I'm proud of it and you're not allowed to do this to me anymore’ … It makes me feel bad that it had to take that to bring Judaism back into my life. I feel bad that it takes Jews being persecuted for me to say I'm Jewish. It bothers me that I didn't feel part of a Jewish community until I started recognizing that we were being persecuted, that, my sense of Judaism is based on defense. And I don't want it to be defensive. I don't want to have to defend myself at all. But then I feel that I'm a good Jew because I do defend. I'm a bad Jew because I don't keep kosher.” Sylvia resisted this point of view. “In the seventies, people were saying, ‘We have to be Jewish, because we can't let Hitler have a posthumous victory.’ We can't be Jewish for a negative reason. Judaism is a beautiful religion and there's so much about it that's wonderful and beautiful and positive and we can't allow Judaism to become this, ‘We have to be Jewish cause if we don't, the non-Jews are gonna get us.’ I think that's a stupid reason to be Jewish. And if that's the only reason we're Jewish, we might as well forget it all and leave. “The two cornerstone principals in Judaism are tzedakah, it means righteousness or justice, and it means making the world a more fair and a more just place. Tzedakah is a commandment from God. That means helping people who don't have, to get the resources that they need. It means, um, trying to make things more fair and more just and more righteous. And also tikkun olam which means to repair the world. We're partners with God in creating the world. We have to take care of the environment. There are so many beautiful traditions. How if you cut down a tree, you need to plant another tree in its stead.” Matt acknowledged that a sense of victimization might not be related to actual threat. “I was alone on a train. When the train crossed the border 243

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into Germany, I started feeling more afraid than I've ever felt in my life. Now, it was day. I knew intellectually there was nothing to be afraid of. There was something atavistic, something in me came up. The train stopped. I saw some, I don't know if they were soldiers, or what they were, some young guys outside the train. I'm not like, mentally unstable. I'm not on any medication. I don't hallucinate. I'm not on any drugs, mushrooms, anything, never done LSD. Then this man, this guard came on board. He had this very, very precise manner. I remember the way he would shut people's ID, and the way his eyes would flick from the picture of the ID to the person's face. I mean [snaps fingers] like a machine. I just felt terrified. I thought I was gonna go, like, in the ovens. It was totally irrational. It was the only time in my life I had a panic attack. And then the train pulled into the station. My friends were there. Everything was okay. I could tell you now I'd be fine if I went to Poland, but I never anticipated having that reaction. It was something truly out of my control.” Sid said that persecution is not a constant, that, rather, “It ebbs and flows. It's always with us; it always will be with us. You might not hear anything, and times might be great, and then, tomorrow night on the news, somebody burned down a big synagogue and there were several deaths. And then, a couple years from now, times aren't so good, it pops up again. It's always there. It stems from one or several people feeling cheated. I mean, if a Jewish business owner cheats the wrong guy, and that wrong guy is a gun owner, and goes off to the synagogue and then starts shooting everybody, that incident of being cheated by an individual becomes a major incident of people dying and all hell breaking loose. That's an isolated, anecdotal kind of thing, which may be the headline for the day. Or it could be something like the internet, and all these kids that are sort of on the fringe and don't have friends and don't have good parents, parents who aren't good role models, these kids get sucked up into neo-Nazi groups, and that might not be the headline of the day, but it might actually be much more dangerous kind of thing. But it's always there. There's always gonna be people who say, ‘We're better than you.’” 244

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“I feel safe and trusting [with non-Jews] because the part that's always there is a small little thing. It's not a big thing, like it was in Nazi Germany where all of a sudden times were so bad and this guy happened to be a good speaker and everybody else turned a blind eye and before you knew it people were agreeing with things that they knew nothing about and the Jews were the scapegoats for all of Germany's problems. “Here in the United States, there's a small fringe group for everything. There's a fringe group that's environmentalists that go and destroy anything and everything. There's a fringe black group against whites. And there's a fringe group against immigrants. And there's a fringe group against Jews because they think that we're Satan, or there's a Jewish conspiracy to take over all the land. God knows what. Every one of these people fills a niche for the disaffected ... I think we should move on.” Sid's daughter wanted a Volkswagen. She asked a rabbi. “The rabbi said to her, ‘I feel comfortable with you getting a Volkswagen.’ The bottom line is she got a Volkswagen … You really have to move on, or else you get nowhere. “Jews tend to think [their suffering is] unique, and it isn't unique … there were priests, there were Slavs, Eastern Europeans, Bulgarians, all of the Eastern Europeans that looked different from Aryan Germans, and Catholics, and homosexuals, and so forth, that didn't quite fit with the Aryan picture, was put in concentration camps. I wouldn't say downplayed, but it's not put in the proper context. I mean, we think of it as all these Jews, six million Jews, that got killed. Well, that's fine, and that's terrible, but at the same time we should recognize that the Nazis killed anybody that didn't quite fit with their agenda … And you don't get enough of that. You don't get enough of that. And we got genocide here just recently in Kosovo against the Muslims, you can get genocide in Africa, the Hutus and the Tutsis, we get religious war, the crusades, in Cambodia, so I think it has to be taught that it's been going on as long as there's been human existence. This is one major episode that occurred in modern times and it occurred in Western — this was Western. Germans and Italians and there were so many Germans and Italians living in the United States. And we looked the other way.”

Chapter Nine

Bieganski Lives — Next Door to Shylock

Forty-three of forty-four informants were familiar with the image of Poles as stupid; thirty-four of forty-four informants were familiar with images of Poles as anti-Semitic. Blue, a social scientist, said, “I have heard hundreds or thousands of Polish jokes. Polish jokes were known to be the quintessential, I mean, the normal joke. If you were going to put down anybody, it was normally a Polish joke. The stereotype was that Polish people were stupid. Any jokes about stupidity, by default, would include a Polish person. Polish people were the target for any kind of joke about stupidity. I mean you wouldn't tell a Jewish joke that way, because that wasn't part of the Jewish stereotype. If you asked anyone in the area where I grew up, if you took a random sampling, you would find that the vast majority of people would say in response to the question, ‘What ethnic group is believed to be the stupidest?’ they'd say clearly ‘Polish.’” Informants often initially stated that they had little to no idea of Polish identity. After being asked the brain surgeon or game show question, they went on at length. Steven exemplified this. Though he grew up in a city with a large Polish population, he reported, “I really don't know much about what Polish identity is. They of course have festivals. I would go down and eat kielbasa and eat too much and be sick for a couple of days. But it was just another festival. I never cared for sauerkraut.” When asked how he'd feel about winning a trip to Poland, this previously taciturn informant extemporized a three-hundred-eighty-word, vivid essay, quoted below. When asked their reaction to winning a trip to Poland on a TV game show, forty of forty-four respondents volunteered that they would visit 246

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Holocaust-related sites. Only four respondents mentioned anything other than the Holocaust. Forty-two of forty-four informants were unable to identity Kalisz, Mickiewicz, Karski, Katyn, Michnik, or Lattimer. Clearly, for the majority of informants, Poland is metonymical with the Holocaust, and, other than a place where allegedly stupid people come from, it has no other identity. These informants' image of Poland was not based on knowledge of Poland. Sally, 30, said, “I'll go to Jewish cemeteries, memorials, sit in cafes and meet people ... I would seek out some expressions of ... I would hope for regret ... Obviously, I would look for Holocaust related. Any memorials, or remaining structures. I understand there is a lot of Neo-Nazism.” At another point in the interview, Sally said, “I don't know much about Polish literature, if there is much.” Six Nobel Prize Laureates in literature were born in Poland or in a Polish-Jewish milieu. Ruth grew up in a city with a large Polish population. She reported that she had no Polish friends, because she was interested in reading and doing well in school. Toward the end of the interview, Ruth remembered, “Hey, you know what? I had a Polish Catholic friend. I've been sitting here and trying to think. She was a roommate in college. We shared an apartment for several years. She was from Pennsylvania. At least one of my other roommates used to make fun of her for being Polish Catholic. This other roommate was Jewish. She was really a jerk. She did it behind her back. She made fun of her for being fat, for her judgment about men. It's interesting. This woman suffered a lot in college from prejudice. My friend, my Jewish friend, who mocked her, was just one of many. She was working class at [name of prestigious university]. I went along with the malicious comments of the other friend. I wanted to find who was in the in-crowd and I wanted to be in there with them. This friend [the Jewish one] was from Westchester County, New York. Besides, she was really cool. [The Polish girl] might have been aware of it. I think her way to deal with it was to ignore it and just try to maintain her dignity.” Ruth's parents had been active members of the Communist Party and had imbued in their daughter a “typically Jewish commitment to fighting for justice.” I asked, “Did you ever look at the plight of the working class 247

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Polish girl being mocked and unwelcomed at a prestigious university and think to take her side?” Ruth replied, “The issue there was really one of status. I felt a little guilty, and, as the years went on, I felt more guilty. There was kind of an idea that this Polish Catholic girl was just kinda dumb. Of course, she couldn't have been dumb. She had a scholarship to go to [name of prestigious university]. And, um, she had this little, tiny black cat. One day her little, tiny black cat got up on her record player and sat on a record as it was going around and he just rode around on it as it was going around. It was the funniest thing. It proved how dumb she was. Actually it was really funny … Her father was a coal miner. She was actually an interesting woman. She was very jovial. She's really a lot more interesting than the prejudiced, snooty one. I can see that now, you know? But I couldn't see it then.” Rosa said, “I don't think I can shake that feeling that I had when I was growing up that Poles are somehow intellectually inferior. I mean, those Polak jokes go on and on and on and on.” Rosa did identify Poles as antiSemites. She guessed that Poles weren't smart enough to carry out the Holocaust. “In World War Two, of course, they got conquered. I think it's wrapped up in this view of Polish people maybe not being very smart. I really don't think that the Holocaust, I mean, Nazism, would have arisen in Poland ... I'm sure there were a lot of uninformed, uneducated people. But I look at them more as either victims or as just kind of going along with the flow rather than instigating it.” After being asked the Polish brain surgeon question, informants often looked pained. Cathy confessed, “I would feel more comfortable with a doctor who does not have a Polish name. It's the long-term effect of dumb Polak jokes, even though the more recent thing is Lech Walesa. It's a sad realization.” Bob said, “Polish aren't too bright. Just on the surface of it, I would not pick a Polish doctor.” Blue said, “I have to think. It's harder for me to say [long pause]. I would hate to think that it would make a difference, but I'm wondering if it would. If it made a difference, I'm sure it would be subconscious. I fear that I might choose the [WASP] name, even though I think that's 248

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a terrible thing, but I'm trying to be completely frank … I think just because of those subconscious stereotypes, the things that got in me as a kid and stick around in the back of my mind that are not up for examination.” Sid said, “Polish people, you know, are blue collar; because they're blue collar they tend to have dirt under their fingernails, and to be a little bit pot-bellied, you know, too much fatty — they don't have good diets, they don't have good lifestyles, you know, don't make a lot of money, a lot of them are first generation or second generation and speak with accents, and they can be the butt of jokes. The message of these jokes is that Polish people are somehow inferior and the person telling the joke is able to tell it because he or she and the friends are superior.” Karen said, “The sign language sign for ‘stupid’ is similar to a Polish salute. My mother found that very funny. My mother will tell a joke about someone telling a Polish joke. The listener says, ‘I'm Polish,’ and the teller says, ‘That's okay. I'll tell it very slowly’ ... I really don't know if it's a revenge joke.” Karen also said, “I think I tend to have a sort of cautiousness about Poles. It's part of the paranoid reaction. It's part of ‘They're in the other camp.’ It's a somewhat milder feeling of how I felt the first time I went to an Oktoberfest. ‘I'm surrounded. Get me out of here.’ I knew that was unfair, but that's how I felt.” Karen said that she was not sure that she's ever even been in the company of Poles. “My reaction is a general and secondhand one, and not one I consider rational.” In response to the game show question, Aaron said, “I'd probably go. I love traveling. I'd rather go somewhere else. I think of Poland, and I think of gray, dreary, cold ... I guess basically because of all the stuff that happened in the past. The Holocaust. Knowing that there is a lot of antiSemitism there … I think I would take necessary precautions. I wouldn't wear a gold chain with a chai on the end.” Four informants had associations with Poland other than the Holocaust. Shayna, 21, said, “I automatically think sausage. I wouldn't enjoy it. There are so many more places that I'd rather go. I guess it's not really cold and desolate there but that's kind of what I think of. Or, you know, large round women making sausages.” 249

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John said, “I have some preconceived notions. A friend of mine is there now kind of doing research. Environmental activists. So, I have a notion that there is a kind of scene going on there of environmentalists. On the other hand, she talks a lot about how she has a hard time getting around. Transportation might be a problem. It's not as efficient as America. The other thing I know about Poland is I've listened to a lot of modern music from Poland … But, when I was younger, in Hebrew school, we saw a lot of images of Poland as a place that had a lot of concentration camps … So, images that I had were images of 1940's Poland … obviously, this is a place that isn't just concentration camps, like, from brick to brick, that's all there is. I didn't really have that as a serious conception of what Poland was and I was aware that it was a fifty-year thing, but that is the only thing I could put in my mind.” Sid replied, “Hey, that's great. I'm gonna go see Warsaw, and I'm gonna see the ghetto, and I'm gonna see Auschwitz, and I'm gonna listen to Chopin, and, uh, see what was the name of the other [Sid made several attempts to pronounce this name, obviously a challenging one. He got it out, correctly.] Kosciuszko. And have the best time I can.” Bob said he would feel “Like it was the third prize ... I'd like to go to Poland because that's where my family is from and I'm very interested in finding out more about it. What I know is a history of anti-Semitism. I've read a fair amount about the Holocaust. The Painted Bird seemed to me to be about a very primitive folklife in Eastern Europe. I kind of used it as a way of understanding how people could be the way they were.” Jerzy Kosinski's 1965 The Painted Bird was initially presented as a Holocaust memoir of bestial, violent, sexually perverse peasants tormenting a Jewish child. It was praised by Elie Wiesel. In fact, Bird was fiction. Kosinski survived the war with the aid of Poles. Marie said, “Cool. I'd probably try to find some of the old Jewish villages and cemeteries. Probably, uh, probably concentration camps. My father, he's got such a morbid sense of humor. He and his wife took a trip to Austria, and they were trying to find a camp, or something. Some sort of sad, Holocaust-related thing. My father keeps a trip log. They ended 250

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up getting in a big fight, or something. And he's like, ‘Went to the gas chamber! It was the highlight of my day!’” Julius said, “I have this image of a very gothic or dark place. And I was recently reading a book which you need to get, if you haven't already, called The Bialy Eaters. She was describing ... everything's in black and white and very foggy, that's one of the pictures she's painting. Awful weather days. Then she's describing a town where there used to be all these Jews, fifty thousand, or a hundred thousand, you know, whatever it was and apparently there is still anti-Semitism there. But, I have no real sense of Polishness other than food with lots of sour cream, pierogies, borscht, no, that's Russian. I guess I get confused. All these Eastern European foods seem so similar. I don't know which is which.” Julius continued. “That's cool. I wouldn't be — I would be much more excited if it was Hawaii or Honduras, not Honduras, but Costa Rica, a little more exotic — I — much — not — well, eh — The thing is, I would be like, that's, I would, I would think it's wonderful. And, though, I would have this anxiety knowing the kinds of things I would probably do there. It would end up being to historical, um, to the camps. And seeing these towns that used to have synagogues ... It wouldn't necessarily be euphoria. But I would be very satisfied. I didn't know that there was this anti-Semitism still there till recently, from reading the Bialy book.” Natasha expressed a fear shared by many informants. She thought she might be murdered. “Thrilled to death to win a prize to Europe — but I must say that — what is Poland? When you say the word ‘Poland’ what comes to mind? And, uh, it's scary to me. It's real scary. And so does Germany. I'm a sensitive person and I know it's really dumb to feel afraid, but, you know, maybe because I'm so sensitive. I don't want it. I would feel like I'd have to be in disguise, or something to go there because I don't wanna be caught and murdered. But I would definitely go. I would steel myself. I would educate myself. I would really check out what is it that I wanna see there. I'd go in an instant. I'm just thinking back to the Holocaust.” Liz said, “When I think of Poland, there's a very, and, you know, associating it with hatred of Jews and not being, you know, a very safe 251

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or supportive place. [I learned this] going to Sunday school and learning about the Holocaust. In Sweden where all them wore stars, that portrayed sort of a positive in terms of Sweden's relationship with Jews. Poland, it seemed, much more negative. Sort of the country supporting the extermination.” There is a false belief that Danes (not Swedes) wore yellow stars in support of Jews (Lund). Steven said, “It's not the first place in the world I'd wanna go. Considering the history, I'd wanna visit the places, I'd wanna go to at least one concentration camp to see what it was like, Auschwitz or otherwise. I guess my biggest worry would be the fact that since there's a very small percentage of Jews in Poland there would be stereotypes that might be such common knowledge that they're almost gospel, so I might want to hide my Judaism as much as possible just so that I would look like an American tourist, but not a Jewish-American tourist. “When you said ‘Poland,’ an image popped into my head, which is it's gray, it's dirty, it's polluted. When I think of Hungary, for example, there's color. It's bright. Hungary was never invaded by the Soviets like Czechoslovakia was.” [It was.] “When I think of Poland I think gray. There's no color. Even the sky is gray. It's overcast. There's one complete cloud over the entire country. I would go with the idea that I've gotta prepare myself. It's not gonna be like the United States. It's not gonna be like the West. I'm probably going to be depressed at the condition of misery that people are living in. And it probably would be a safer bet if I just don't identify myself to too many people and my passport says I'm American, that's all the identification I need. I might as well go to [name of ancestor's birthplace]. Now, from what I've been told, the city was completely destroyed in World War Two. The city that's there now has nothing to do with the city my [ancestor] was born in. So, what would be the point? But I'd like to go and see what it's like. “I'd love to go back to Vienna. I loved it when I went there. We had a wonderful time in Vienna. We walked around and spoke German. It was a fabulous time. I would love to go back to Vienna. So. If I won the trip, I'd go to Poland. If you asked me would I ever willingly go to Poland, I don't 252

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think I'll ever get there. It's basically, I have to weigh the benefits of being a tourist there against the dangers.” Rosa said, “I have this feeling it's a very gray place. I don't know if I would want to go. I don't think that I will feel threatened, I just don't know how interested that I would be. But I really feel — and maybe this goes back to the Polak jokes of my youth. I really feel that the Poles are downtrodden ... I don't know that I would go. But I have been to Germany. We went to Austria as well. And I remember loving Austria. But the impression I have of Poland is of being gray weather-wise and gray in terms of buildings and streets. I have an impression of a lot of people being very nihilistic.” Aaron had “tons of friends who have done March of the Living. They would tell me all these things. The Poles didn't like Jews. They had guards guarding them so that the Poles wouldn't hurt them. The guards were Polish army, with guns. One of the guards turned around and said to one of the Jewish kids, ‘If I didn't have to guard you I wish I could kill you.’ They went to the hotel, and the faucet of the showerhead didn't aim into the tub. Getting on to a Polish airlines plane, and you have a ticket for row thirty-six, and there are only thirty rows.” I asked Aaron the point of these jokes. “I guess to perpetuate the belief that Polish people don't have a very high intellect.” Josephine reported that she would be “very afraid going to Poland.” When asked what she would do when she got there, Josephine said she would visit Auschwitz. When asked if she would ever choose a Polish doctor, she replied, “If he's a doctor, and he's Polish, he must be Jewish Polish.” Moses, 20, said, “If I went to Poland today I would not be afraid for my life, but I would definitely have my eyes open all around … I get this feeling that Polish people don't really have a full respect for Jewish people and that there is an anti-Semitism still lingering and the main thing that makes me think that is an article I read in the Washington Post a month or two ago and what happened was that some warehouse that was very near Auschwitz was recently turned into a discotheque.” I asked, “I know this will sound like a ridiculous question, but can you tell me what Auschwitz was?” My goal was to discover, without 253

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asking a leading question, if Moses knew that Poles had been interned in Auschwitz. Moses replied, “Auschwitz had been a concentration camp that a great number of Jewish people were brought to by train.” “Do you know about the history of non-Jews at Auschwitz?” “No, I don't.” In this absence of information, Moses can't know that a discotheque near Auschwitz has an impact on Polish, as well as Jewish, survivors. Danielle, 25, a Jewish religious school teacher, was unique among informants in the condescension she showed me. Danielle immediately asked my ethnicity. Throughout the rest of the interview, Danielle repeatedly asked, “Am I speaking too fast for you?” and, “Are you aware of ” this or that concept, and “Do you want me to explain to you?” Danielle informed me that through “March of the Living” she had completed a “comprehensive Holocaust education.” Both she and her father had been sent on trips to Eastern Europe to educate Eastern Europeans. Danielle could identify none of the words asked at the end of the interview; in spite of her “comprehensive Holocaust education,” she had never heard of Jan Karski. Danielle lives in a city with a large Polish population. It hosts a Polish cultural event that has gained national press. Danielle had never heard of it. Danielle had a Polish-Jewish friend with a typically Polish first name. Danielle had only recently come to realize that what she called this woman was her name, and not just something she called her friend “just to make fun of her. I mean, I had noooo clue.” When asked the game-show question, Danielle responded that she would only consider returning to Poland in order to “educate” Poles. “As a senior in high school, I participated on this trip called ‘March of the Living.’ Have you ever heard of it? And it was, mmm, still to this day it was the single most impactful experience on — I don't want to say on my Jewish identity. I don't want to define my being a Jew because I happen to exist post-Holocaust. As much as I say I don't want to define my Jewish identity because of the Holocaust, it's incredibly significant. Because it does give purpose when you think you can't withstand something or understand something in the year 2000. It's just silly 254

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to think that people fifty years ago in the camps survived, or didn't survive, but left with dignity. “When I landed in Warsaw, I was 18. Everything was in color. The only thing I knew of Eastern Europe was in black and white. Probably from movies. I'm thinking reels of Holocaust films. I pictured gray, cold, concrete. I wasn't aware that I was thinking this until we landed and everything was in color. “The first couple days were fine. I remember feeling ‘Hey, I have no right to hold anybody here responsible for anything that happened fifty years ago. Even if it was their father, or their grandfather, it wasn't them, and if they are anti-Semites today it's incredibly unfortunate, but I cannot punish these people.’” To prepare for the trip, Danielle “met weekly for months going over Holocaust material and started talking about things [we] were gonna deal with. My experience was every two weeks I received another two hundred pages of reading material. I had, you know, one of these seven-inch binders. It blows me away that I actually pored through this material, but I did. It was comprehensive Holocaust education. And I did it on my own. I just sat there and read. The material gave me an impression that Poland, fifty years ago, was extremely anti-Semitic. Some Poles were Nazis … Jews were visible and successful and intelligent. They were either wealthy and visible or religious and visible. Generally Poles weren't the most welleducated people, or maybe didn't interact with Jews, so, they had nothing to know anything different. “I left feeling like this country doesn't give a shit. They're actually annoyed that we're here. On a drive to Treblinka, there was a dirt playground, there was a chicken running, there was a dilapidated house, and as we drove by, one kid, not over the age of eleven, put his hand up with a heil Hitler, and the other put his finger across his throat. It feels like it was a dream. But I know it happened. I remember sinking back into my seat. ‘Did that really happen?’ Being at Majdanek, which was a death camp, and you can't help but feel — I'm feeling a little of it now — anger. That the camps can share property lines with neighborhoods. And I can see the windows, maybe they can see me. How can you look out that 255

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window everyday over smokestacks? Whether or not your grandfather had anything to do with it. Our leaders stopped us and pointed out antiSemitic graffiti.” [According to the USHMM, “Some 100,000 Poles were deported to Majdanek, and tens of thousands of them died there.”] “Even if there is a young, budding, Jewish community there now, and I'm sure there is, we just didn't interact with them. Very misgivings about it. I want them to be there because I don't want Hitler to have succeeded — but — I have misgivings about it. It's kind of futile. You know, what kind of community is it? But, they have every right to be there. This is the homeland that they're connected to? Wonderful, but, you know. Very misgivings about it. I was very ready to leave Poland, and go back to Israel. “I would go to Poland to educate Poles. Otherwise I have no interest in going there. There is nothing attractive about Poland. Even though I know it's in color my mind has degenerated back to black and white. I spent days in Berlin and I want to return. I want to return to Russia ... I don't want to sound full of myself but there is so much more to talk about.” Bieganski as a Bulwark against Shylock With most informants, images of Poles or Poland were not spontaneously volunteered; they were elicited with the brain-surgeon or game-show questions. There was a group of people informants were eager to critique. To this researcher's great surprise and growing discomfort, that group was Jews. These comments are disturbing. Some are presented at length. They must be. First, had these comments been collected by a researcher looking into Polish-Americans' stereotypes of Jews, academics and journalists would pounce on them as ironclad proof of Bieganski. That these narratives were spontaneously volunteered, with insistence, by American Jews, complicates Bieganski considerably. Poles are not the only ones wrestling with the temptation to think stereotypically about Jews — or about Poles. Jews are doing the same wrestling. It is time for people of good will to stop scapegoating, to stop insisting that one ethnic group, because of its “medieval,” Catholic, and peasant or working class essence, 256

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is uniquely prone to stereotypical thinking. It is time for people of good will to join together to find a way to address all stereotypical thinking, including that engaged in by stereotyped people themselves. Second, all stereotyping involves the same cognitive processes; these processes are modular and can be applied to any group. Nate said that his father says “virulent” things about other ethnicities. “If he weren't Jewish he could easily hate Jews.” Bob said, “It was de rigueur to be anti-Semitic as a Jew … Sort of like self-hatred almost.” Anyone could be inoculated against self-hate, as well as hate of others, using the methods to analyze stereotypes mentioned in this work's introduction. Third, Olivia observed, “Why would people go to such great extents to make Jews look so bad, if they themselves didn't feel threatened or inferior or couldn't measure up?” Olivia's insight is reflected in scholarly literature, as evidenced by self-explanatory titles like “Prejudice as Self-Image Maintenance: Affirming the Self Through Derogating Others” (Fein) and “Maintaining a Positive Self-Image by Stereotyping Others” (Collange). Bieganski is at least partly a defense against anti-Semitism and Jewish self-hatred. One example: “Relationships between Jews and Gentiles in Folk Narratives as Told by Polish Jews,” a scholarly article by Haya BarItzhak, of the University of Haifa. Bar-Itzhak wrote that Jews engaged in “deceit”; they “take advantage” of Poles. Jews express “hatred and contempt” for Poles. “Jesus was a bastard,” is the punch line of one story. Polish women have “easy virtue.” Jokes describe their seduction by Jews. These behaviors are excused because Poles are bad. “The Jew must resort to resourcefulness and cunning in order to survive; when dealing with the lower classes, he must take advantage of their ignorance and naïveté. The folk narrative reflects the legitimization given by Jewish society to this kind of exploitation.” “He exploits the credulity of the peasants ... Such conduct on the part of the Jew is not considered immoral, but rather as a legitimate means of survival in a hostile world” (Bar-Itzhak 9). Similarly, chauvinist Poles relied on negative images of Jews when Polish identity became burdensome. Poles who promulgated antiSemitism were not inspired by a positive and confident image of Poles and Poland; rather, they were driven by a view of a nation in thorough need of 257

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social engineering. Anti-Semite Roman Dmowski denounced Poles as an “incoherent, loose mob” (Dmowski). Several informants commented, often negatively, on physical appearance. Lauren said, “Jews seem to think of themselves as darker and coarser and in general less attractive, especially in comparison to the peaches-and-cream complexions of WASP-y Gentiles ... ‘Goyisha punim’ literally means ‘Gentile face,’ but what it implies is everything that is not associated with Jewish features, i.e., little up-turned noses, freckles, pale blue eyes, red to blonde hair, etc.” Natasha reported, “I was tortured with it growing up. We had curly hair and we always wanted to straighten it and look like the hippie chick. We despised our Jewish hair … it doesn't look like the girl on TV. I liked my Jewish radar thing because I never saw people that looked like us on TV, and of course I grew up in a TV culture, and I think that's why my dad pointed those out a lot. ‘You see? We are in this society. We do exist’ … I wanna know that we're successful. I wanna know that we are cool. I wanna know that we exist in a positive way … I did straighten it. And it was very important to me to do so. I had a whole elaborate system. My mom's friend would pass on beauty secrets … You put a really huge roller right in the middle, and then you take it and wrap your hair around it when it's wet, and then you sit under a drier and let it dry that way. It lasts a couple of days. “I've always been on the edge anyway. Always felt different anyway. I feel defiant about it, about being different. It's defiant good. Yeah, I'm glad I'm different. I was belligerently happy to be who I was. And just leave me alone because I felt so badgered. I'm very sensitive to societal cues and the way we're supposed to be. But, nonetheless, I'm sure I would have been happy to have been a straight-haired blonde with lanky limbs, in my preteens — if I could have woke up as Marsha Brady [An attractive female, teen character on the American television comedy, “The Brady Bunch” (1969-1974).], yeah, I probably would have enjoyed that.” Paco looked, to me, like any white male Hoosier. He could convey just that image in anything from a Broadway production of Oklahoma to an 258

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NRA commercial. “They would say, we can tell you're Jewish because you have a big nose.” “You don't have a big nose,” I said. Paco continued. “My sister got a nose job. She had a beautiful nose. I had issues with my big nose. I was thinking of getting a nose job.” “But you don't have a big nose!” I exclaimed. “When you're a little kid, people said to me, ‘We know you're Jewish because you have a big nose.’” “That's incredible!” I said. Several informants expressed discomfort about not being Jewish enough. Eileen said, “Israelis would tell me I looked like a shiksa, and I didn't like that … When they said it I felt like I wasn't one of them. I remember looking in the mirror and wondering if I looked Jewish enough. Wanting to look Jewish. Even up to now. I look at my children and I think that. I think, boy, this one looks Jewish and this one doesn't.” Marie said, “I was actually almost a little intimidated to come today … Oh, she's gonna ask me all the stories our family used to sit around and tell about people in the Old Country and what traditions have been passed down from generation to generation and I'm not gonna have anything to say … ‘I'm not Jewish enough to do this interview.’ [In synagogue] whenever people start singing something I'm supposed to know, I don't know it, I've felt alienated, and it's my religion.” Ellen, 18, said, “If I had decided not to go to college, and gone into farming, there would have been jokes. And they would have been disappointed. I would have been the only Jewish farmer. Country-western music is very popular where I am from. And if I ever sing along, my mom will make the joke, ‘Okay, you're going to be the first Jewish countrywestern singer.’ No Jews listen to country-western, or live in a trailer ... Part of that is the typical stereotype of the Jew as urban ... at Hillel, almost all of them are from New York or New Jersey ... [they think that] there are no Jews in [her state name], or if there are, they would all be in [city name], or a suburb of [city name]; they would not be in rural [her state name]; that's a stereotype that a lot of other Jews have about Jews ... they think that we 259

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can't be as Jewish.” Ellen demonstrated the body language she encounters when revealing her identity to Jews from the East Coast: she raised her eyebrows, and jerked her head back. “Jews are as bad as anybody else. So I tell them, [in teasing voice] ‘Yeah, I drive a pickup truck.’ The guy from Atlanta, yeah, he started talking to [a Jewish girl from the East Coast] with a fake Southern accent. ‘Yeah, I drive a pickup truck. It's a stick shift.’ ‘Yeah, mine is a stick shift, too.’ But there's a stereotype that Jews don't drive pickup trucks.” Blue reported, “I have cousins who emigrated to Israel and wear yarmulkes all the time and I guess when I've been around them at family gatherings I kinda feel less Jewish or less authentic or guilty because I'm not as Jewish or not as religious … I feel like, ‘Boy, am I being a bad Jew, God? I'm sorry if I am.’” Several informants referred in detail to tensions between Western European Jews and Ostjuden. Cathy said, “My dad … tells a story of when he came to New York City and being invited to a party and they [German Jews] were going, ‘Well, you know.’ And she [his date] was an Eastern European Jew. It was almost like she wasn't accepted. ‘Why are you bringing her?’ There's a real difference in their socio-economic level and also in their education level. In Germany they were trying to assimilate and in Poland they didn't assimilate. At home the message that got through was that Eastern European Jews were lower class.” Nate said, “The only Polaks my father ever complained about were Jews. He told me that when he met Polish Jews after the war he couldn't believe that they were Jews. He told me that Jews reflect the culture of the country they come from and since Poland was a poor country the Jews showed this in their behaviour. I guess he meant that they were uncouth in some way. This sentiment does not seem to have been uncommon … When my parents had ‘kitchen sink’ fights — those with everything thrown in but the kitchen sink — the Polaks came in for their share — but these were Jews.” Natasha said, “My dad would rib my mother about being Polish; my mother's mother's father came from Poland. I think what it was, was that, ‘Well your ancestors were Polish.’ And my mom would say, ‘Yeah! Yours 260

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was too! I'm sure yours was too. It was right there.’ And he'd say, ‘Oh, no, no they weren't’ … It was a put down. And my mom would say, ‘Well, you were right there too, boy’ and, uh, ‘Oh, no, they weren't.’ There was an edge to it that was unfortunate. They divorced.” Wolf, 51, said, “I've been to Israel twice. As the plane was landing, people broke into song and they were clapping. That was very strange to me. I use the word ‘creepy.’ … I'm looking at the people. These are not spiritual people. These are like big fat guys with B.O. blocking the aisle. You can be spiritual in a quiet way. It was a little odd.” “They're home!” I exclaimed. “Yeah, home, well, that's an issue. I have more questions than answers about that. I don't know why Britain was holding that land. I don't know why the United Nations felt they had the right to impose their will on people in that different part of the world. It's a totally different culture. And I don't know why, when Jewish people came to inhabit the state of Israel, what happened? Weren't there people living there before? Did they not displace a number of — did people have to move? I can see that as causing a little hostility right there. How was it done? Was it handled tactfully? Was it done with a belligerent attitude? “Which is another factor, because my sister, who is living there has become, has taken on that personality of the Israeli, the typical Israeli, and I didn't think that this existed, but I've seen it, which is a very belligerent, aggressive, pushy way of life over there … And I just don't know if they're always like that because they're surrounded by enemies and are ready to fight at any given moment. My sister said, ‘Gee, we could never have fourway stop signs [in Israel] cause people would get out of their car and shake their fists and yell, and fights about who was supposed to — ’ I didn't really believe it. But then I've seen it in her behavior. There is a certain arrogance, belligerence, like everything is, you're this close to a fight at all times. She came back for a visit and a friend hadn't seen her in a while. And when we were alone together the friend told me, ‘I think your sister's been living in Israel too long’ … She had become this, pushy, pushy … A way of life in a tiny country surrounded by your sworn enemies. Having to be tough and ready to fight at a moment's notice. I don't know what, if anything, it 261

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has to do with being the chosen ones; therefore, thinking you're superior, more entitled to live. I don't know.” Wolf described a Passover. “A whole entourage was coming. I was so dreading this Seder. This mockery of family. I was sick. An acupuncturist diagnosed mother issues, irritation with family … We [he and Trish, his spouse] were gracious as we could be. But it was all so painfully, obviously, phony to me. What is this? These prayers? What? There's no — no one cares about anyone here. There's no kindness, no compassion. It's just, ignoring, pretending, glossing over problems. During that Seder my sister took Trish, called her aside, away from everyone else, and really laid into her for no apparent reason. It was another example of hostility from nowhere. And said, ‘I've been working very hard on this meal all day long and you're gonna help me serve it.’ And anyone who knows Trish knows that all you have to do is ask. If it weren't for the kids, I would get up and leave. “Two days later, my sister had her belligerent, cocky, arrogant attitude. ‘So, am I supposed to call her to apologize, or is she going to call me? What's the big deal? Am I going to walk on eggshells here?’ ‘Yes, you should call her.’ So she called Trish and her apology was very perfunctory, ‘Look, I'm sorry about the other night, okay?’ Trish said, ‘I accept your apology, but no, everything's not okay, because people don't talk to each other like that, and when you do, there are consequences.’ ‘Oh!’ From that day on, it became ‘The Trish Incident.’ That was like a spit in her face. My sister uses this phrase. In her mind, she did no wrong. ‘Trish's the one who spit in my face.’ Trish said, ‘If you're going to talk to me about where those hostile feelings came from, I'll be happy to talk to you, but I can't just go back to the way things were before.’ Trish has a theory that my sister has some kind of resentment about the faith thing.” [Trish is not Jewish]. Wolf continued, “If you say, ‘I'm Jewish;’ therefore, you're not Jewish. Therefore there's a difference between us. Or, ‘I'm Lutheran,’ or ‘I have blond hair.’ Highlighting differences between people. For me, it barely registers on my chart as a factor. I've heard my mother talk about, um, talk to her friends about so and so, people they know. ‘Oh, is she Jewish? Yeah. Well, I didn't know. Oh, she married outside the faith. Oh, really? 262

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Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.’ And I would say to her, because my mother always stressed being liberal and how open-minded she was, ‘Listen to yourself! Substitute the word ‘Lutheran’ for ‘Jewish’ and wouldn't you feel uncomfortable if you were sitting at a table listening to someone say, ‘Oh, are they Lutheran?’ or ‘They're not Lutheran, or ‘They used to be Lutheran.’ What difference does it make? You're putting all this emphasis on what someone — someone you don't even know — what their religious beliefs are.” “Mark Twain, 1899, about Jews, he spoke about the Jew as a person who has been on the planet for eons of time and has withstood the Roman Empire and this and that. And he was speaking of the Jew as an entity. And I never really thought about it that way, the Jew as a special life form ... There are stranger theories still having to do with other planets and whether, it sounds like almost like we're from another planet ... That the Jew is the quintessential human form to which all humans should aspire. The chosen ones which — don't all religions think that they're the chosen ones? If the Jewish people are the chosen ones, what does that mean that everybody else is? The not chosen ones? The rejected ones? ... My spirituality has more to do — I'm thinking these days of identifying myself as a human being as opposed to exclusionary things. I want to be more inclusive.” Shannon said, “When my father wanted to marry my mother, my mother's maiden name was [name] and my father's parents immediately knew that she was German and they immediately wanted nothing to do with her. I think they even called her a Nazi. That went beyond even being a shiksa. My grandmother used to tell stories. There could be a man — she could be telling a story about a neighbor who beat his wife. And at the end of the story she'd be like, ‘Well, but at least he's Jewish.’ No matter what anyone did, as long as they were Jewish, that was a good quality. I mean, they weren't necessarily a good person, but they still had this good quality. And then that was sort of weird because I knew that that excluded my mom. And I know my grandmother loved my mom, but when things got bad, sometimes she wouldn't want my mom there. My mom said that one time she was sitting in a room with my dad and a bunch of his friends 263

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and they knew that she was not Jewish, but they started talking about how you could never trust a person who was not Jewish. And she was sitting right there and it didn't bother them to say that in front of her. They were engaged at that time, and they were telling him that he could never really trust anybody who wasn't Jewish. I think she took it as a direct attack … [Even now] when things would go wrong, ‘Well, if you hadn't married the shiksa.’ “I loved my grandmother. I know that she really liked my mom … I can picture my grandma saying, ‘She'd be perfect if only she were Jewish’ … And there was a girl who only wanted to hang out with other Jewish people. I guess when she realized that I wasn't into it she stopped calling me as much. She joined a Jewish sorority. I didn't realize that there were Jewish people like that who wanted to surround themselves mostly by other Jewish people and were a very tight-knit community. “I went to the Hillel center when I first came here, and some kids asked me if I was Reform, Conservative or Orthodox, and I said well I guess you could consider me very Reformed. I said my mom's [Protestant] and, um, then they started telling me how Jews who married outside their faith were starting the second Holocaust. I left. It wasn't like they accidentally said something offensive to me in front of me. But, they knew that my mom was [Protestant]. They not only put her down, they also put my dad down for marrying her. I've never gone back.” Pepper said, “I can remember the first time not liking being Jewish. We were in the car with my father, talking about weddings and stuff and famous people we would marry. My father was saying we could not marry somebody who wasn't Jewish or else we'd be disowned from the family. My mother feels the same way. They wouldn't really disown us; they just wanted to threaten us. He really favored my Jewish friends. He didn't like it when I had friends who weren't Jewish. My best friend in middle school, her family was Catholic. I went over there to help decorate the tree. He got very upset. My sister married a guy who's not Jewish … I talked to my mother when we were cleaning up [after the wedding]. She said, ‘I know everybody else is having a good time, but this is one of the worst nights of my life.’” 264

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Carol, 20, reported comments a rabbi made. “He said that Christianity was hocus-pocus and that Christians were womanizers and drunks ... I think it was actually pretty offensive. I was young at the time. People just made up a bunch of hocus-pocus about Jesus coming back to life and, uh, you know they said that he was God because they wanted to control the people.” Molly said, “My Aunt Hodel was a trip. She was the cheapest person anyone knew. Her antics still crack me up, to this day. Many I witnessed directly, or were things she did for me, in front of me, etc., and others were told to me. Some of it is rather ugly — like the fact that she wouldn't come to my grandfather's funeral because he died in New York and she was in Florida at the time and planning on coming back a month later. Therefore, she didn't want to spend the money for the ticket to turn around and come right back. Her husband, my Uncle Ned, did pretty well over the years. They had a house in Florida, one in the Catskills, and for a long time, a co-op in Bayside, NY. “I always said that if I were going to be a stand-up comic, Aunt Hodel would be my best material. She was notorious for never, and I mean never, throwing anything away. After her funeral, when we went back to the house for the shiva, I was helping clean up in the kitchen, washing some dishes. I picked up the little dishrag that was sitting behind the faucet. It felt funny, like not an absorbent texture or something. I un-wadded it and held it up. It was the armhole of a bra. She took an old bra, cut the cups off — lord only knows what she did with those! — and used the remainder to do dishes. When they were kids, her daughter told me, if they used Q-tips, she and her brother would have to break them in half. Otherwise, my aunt would grab them out of the trash, pull off the ‘used’ cotton, and put them back in the container. Ick! ‘The original recycler,’ my mother used to call her. Aunt Hodel used to steal, too. She told us — and anyone else who would listen — that she paid for the carpet in her house with all the money she didn't have to spend on Sweet 'n' Low over the years because she stole it from restaurants. Apparently, she's not alone. If you go to south Florida and you want Sweet 'n' Low or Equal, you have to ask for it. And they will only bring you two packets at a time. 265

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“I also am the proud owner of several sets of Eastern Airlines flatware. When I moved into my first apartment in college, Aunt Hodel asked me if I needed silverware. I should have known better, but I didn't have any, so I said, ‘Sure.’ The stuff she gave me was such junk that, if I left it in the stainless steel sink overnight, it would rust. So, the next year, I got ready to move into a new apartment. I was at her house over spring break, and she asked me again if I needed silverware. I must have made a face — thinking about the rust! — because, before I could say anything, she jumped in with, ‘Oh, no. This is not like last time. This is the good stuff. This is from the airlines!’” Every family has at least one Aunt Hodel, but the world doesn't present non-Jews with the Shylock image, an image that was used to catalyze genocide. Even humorous stories about one family's Aunt Hodel might raise alarms — because that family's Aunt Hodel is Jewish. Shannon said, “My employer was every stereotype that you can imagine about Jewish men. He was extremely, painfully cheap. We had to order the cheapest kinds of cups. We had to put only a certain amount of butter on each slice of toast. We had been throwing away coffee at the end of the night. So, he started — I found this embarrassing. He would always kind of do things behind the scenes and we would have to deal with the customers. Every time someone ordered a cup of coffee — and this was a restaurant — he would go back and brew one cup of coffee, so nothing would be wasted at the end of the night. He made me sift coffee so that we could use the grounds again. He had originally been a lawyer, but he was disbarred for shady practices. He complains a lot. Unbearably so. He complains about everything. He complained, once, for an hour. He reminded me of Shylock.” “My peers would be talking about the kind of deals their parents would get,” Bob said. “I saw my parents' friends who were involved in what I considered to be shady deals. It was sort of everything that a person who wasn't Jewish and had a stereotype of a Jew would suggest. To be slippery in business. They always talked about insurance fires. Whenever there was a fire you would assume that some Jewish guy was burning his building down for the insurance money.” 266

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Pondering the power of stereotypes, Matt asked himself, “Are Jews cheap? Well, God, you internalize it. We used to call my father cheap. My father grew up poor and he could be — this is a long, convoluted issue, but he didn't like spending money. I mean we never lacked for anything, but — the only time I ever saw him in a large group of Jews, was at an affair, you know, a bar mitzvah, wedding or something, and I seem to recall as a child looking at them and getting the impression that somehow they were cheap, or they were always thinking about money. “My mother told me that one of my father's siblings would go to a department store and somehow damage a garment, rip a hole in a garment, and take it to the salesclerk and say, ‘Now look, this one's damaged, can I have a discount?’… If it really did happen, who knows what really did happen … They were all comfortable, somewhat successful. I would not see this as a survival tactic. I would see this as some sort of a carryover from a really poor childhood, and some kind of a loathing to spend money. My father, I seem to recall him taking home toilet paper from the men's room of the [business] where he worked. I mean, he could certainly afford toilet paper. I think it could kind of come from ‘We up against them.’ If the salesclerk in a department store is a Gentile, well, who cares? It's almost a moral obligation. You have to screw the Gentiles. I think that's definitely part of it.” Rumpole reported, “I went to college. It was the first time in my life I was in an environment where there was a significant number of Jewish people. There is a large number of New York-, New Jersey- and Philadelphia-based students and very significant number of Jews. I'd never — it really was quite an eye-opening experience for me. In some sense it was also — a little bit of a cultural turnoff. It was the first time I encountered, either the term or the reality, of JAP, Jewish American Princesses … All of a sudden I found myself in college with kids from very wealthy families, many of them Jewish, many of them spoiled rotten, and otherwise just kind of distasteful … not necessarily related to their Judaism, but they were just, basically just rich kids who had had every single thing in the world and just kind of had the expectation that they would have everything in life handed to them … Part of this is just the New York tri-state culture. There's 267

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a real abrasiveness, harshness. There's just a brashness about it, and blunt. I appreciate bluntness. I really do. But it was, you know, it was kind of hard to put my finger on it. Part of it was they weren't very serious students. I knew a lot of people growing up who really had to fight to get into and afford college … I guess I felt like I was seeing a lot of people who weren't appreciating what they had. And they probably could have been rich kids of any stripe. “Before I even got there, I got a call from one of my four roommates that year. ‘Are you a JAP?’ We had never spoken. And then I got to school and, uh, I was walking down the hallway to find our room and there was a girl sitting outside with the phone, she'd sort of pulled the phone out of the room and was just sort of sitting down with it in the hallway and had the dragon lady painted fingernails, the big hair. This was the eighties, too, so it was all the neon clothing and all of that, and the hair up in those big clips, and she was saying in just the classic kind of nasal, New Yorker accent, ‘But Daddy, you said you were gonna get me a car! I want a car!’ I had to pick up my jaw with both hands. “I drove with three friends, all guys, all Jewish, all three of them were from, two were from New York, one was from New Jersey. We were going to the Kennedy Center and we were parking and one of my friends had this nifty red sports car. And a black attendant came out to park the car and as the driver, this guy, as he got out, he spilled a lot of change out of his pocket, just a lot of pennies, and stuff like that, and he looked at this attendant, and he said, ‘Hey, pick that up.’ And he walked away. It was just the most offensive thing. And, again, it was kind of part and parcel of that very arrogant, dismissive, elitist, attitude that just bothered me. It's painful to remember. I was mortified. “I guess I concluded that parents who worked and struggled to give their children a better life weren't always doing them the best service. You could see reflected the values that I had always heard discussed within my family as Jewish values. The emphasis on learning, and, you know, working hard to give your family a better life. There was definitely a strong emphasis on family, I mean, you could see that, even with these kids. They were clearly close with their families. There was a distortion there because 268

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their families were such a source of funds. I was thinking, you know, the generation that was clearly striving to do what they thought was such a good thing, to create opportunities for their kids to go to school and get a good education, might have resulted in something unintended. “I don't think it put me off any broader community. In fact, college was when I did study Yiddish. I was more interested in learning more about my own faith and started really being interested in others as well. I continued to strongly self-identify as a Jew. Not a part of that sort of Jewish community.” Ellen is from a small, rural town with few Jews. “I observe characteristics in other Jews at Hillel … They didn't have a loudspeaker there. They had a welcoming Shabbat dinner for freshmen. And it was so loud. I was like, Why in God's name did Hillel not have a loudspeaker knowing how loud Jews are? I would say, this person is the reason there are stereotypes. There's these two girls in my class. They're both named Rachel; they're both from New Jersey. They have very Jewish last names. I think they even went home for holidays. They won't shut up. Jewish American Princesses. They talk incessantly. It's okay for them to arrive late. They don't have to treat our A.I. with very much respect. Kind of this self-centered — I recognize that is where the stereotype comes from. Or even like the Jewish prince stereotype. Oh, he's the son. If I see a guy who's like dark complected, talking on a cell phone, walking out of Hillel, you know, with that swagger that a lot of young Jewish males have. It's economic, part of it. Or just confidence. That's what I would call the Jewish prince thing. ‘He's our son! He's the man who will carry on! He's gonna get what he wants!’ I can see why people have come up with some [stereotypes] when I look at people.” Bob freely expressed his alienation from what he called “JAP”s. “Spoiled! Ask a girl out, let's go for a walk, that would be impossible. They don't go for walks. You have to take them places. Their fathers completely indulge them. There is nothing you can do that would come close to matching that. They're gonna talk to you in some kind of a whiney voice. That will drive you crazy. And, there are a lot of girls like that.” 269

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Several informants, without prodding, told JAP jokes with relish. Asked about Polak jokes, Marie replied, “I hear many more jokes about Jews. And it's actually from other Jews. How to tell the difference between an Italian and a Jew. With an Italian, the jewelry's fake, the orgasm's real. How do you know if a JAP is having an orgasm? She drops her nail file. What does a Jewish girl make for dinner? Reservations.” Pepper said, “I make JAP jokes, not because the girls are Jewish, but because of the way they live, shopping everyday, talking about how great New York is. They make a big deal out of being treated like a princess, bowed down to, being always right. Maybe this is because I'm a waitress now and I notice this more, but you go to a restaurant, you should be nice to a waitress. But they'll be like, they'll yell and they'll scream. They won't leave a tip, or they leave awful tips. Just very demanding. But they dress nice, look nice. Usually the ones who make fun of JAPs are other Jewish girls. It's just a way to be catty to other girls. I don't really hate them, I just make fun of them. It's not really hate. It's just a stereotype. It's a character on a TV show. I find them amusing.” Rivka, 20, arrived in modest attire. She immediately described her clothing as an expression of her emphasis on God, not on the things of this world, and that emphasis' accord with Jewish tradition. Rivka was very critical of what she called “JAPs.” “A lot of these girls can get anything they want and they flaunt it. I don't understand how their family can allow this to happen. Because one of the main thoughts of Judaism is you have to be modest, and you can't be flashy in anything. But that's more of an Orthodox strict religion kind of Jew. A lot of these JAPs aren't religious at all. It's just, ‘Yes, I'm Jewish, I was born Jewish, I don't celebrate Christmas, but I'm rich and wear labels.’ … It just blows my mind that they can act like that. They don't keep Shabbas, they don't observe any of the laws, they will identify themselves as a JAP, not a Jew…A JAP won't go to high holyday services because she doesn't have a new outfit to wear. It's mostly just a fashion show for them.” Paco said, “When I was a teen I worked at a Jewish camp, and I hated it. Hated it, hated it, hated it … My mom says, ‘Don't go there. You're gonna see why I left’… It was probably one of the worst experiences of my life. 270

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They had a lot of Israeli Jews there and they were kind of high status cause they were Israeli. We would fly the kids in. Sometimes we were flying in in private Lears and stuff. They were just — arrogance is the only thing that comes to mind. I hate to say that. I'm not saying — in a sense it's racist, but — But there was an arrogance. They did this disgusting thing. I thought it was gross. Where they had a Holocaust night and they take these babies, I thought, seven, eight, nine year old kids and they had to pretend that they were going to the gas chambers. It was a culture shock for me. I was even thinking that I wanted to be an Orthodox Jew at one time. I thought it would even be cool to be a rabbi. That changed it all. And then I saw my mom, and she was like, ‘That's why I left. It's the money. The arrogance.’ “And the Israelis. Oh my God, were they direct. I thought my family was direct. I was sitting with some at a table. ‘Please, will you pass the salt. Thank you.’ And they were, ‘Why are you saying “please?” Why are you thanking me for giving you the salt and pepper? It was there!’ But that's survival, too, you have to be tough. The climate they live in. But at the same time, you know, it was interesting to be around that. I thought at one time I wanted to go live in Israel, be a soldier. But after that experience — it was just, a real, you know? “I'm still proud of who I am. I'm still proud of my people. I'm still very much, you know, would do anything to fight if it ever happened. I'd be the first one to fight, to stand up against it. But I don't know why there is a resentment there. I feel like they don't get it, these Jews that I met. They're missing something. They're locked in to the, um, the things. The things, not the spiritual thing. It's more of, ‘I'm a Jew. I have a bar mitzvah. I get lots of toys. I'm a Jew. I have entitlements because of my stature in life.’ The spiritual thing isn't there. The materialistic things. They're very proud. There was a Catch-22 to all of this. When they were sending the kids into the gas chambers — I don't know how to explain this. I left. It grossed me out. I remember them saying, ‘Turn around, put your hands behind your back.’ They tied their hands. Turned the lights down, and took them into this — it was awful.” Paco adopted two boys, and, when he told a local rabbi that he wanted to raise the children Jewish, the rabbi told him that they would have to 271

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be circumcised again. “So I said, ‘Screw you.’ That turned me off. How barbaric. These are my sons. I'm the only father they've ever known. I walked out of the temple and never went back. The God that I believe in could give a shit whether you bleed from your finger or your penis or you have a bloody nose. It left a foul taste in my mouth.” Bob expressed discomfort with Orthodox Jews. “The greatcoats, and the hats, and all that. I found those guys totally repulsive. They represented everything that was old, narrow thinking. Well, it's very, extremely conservative, and I always thought of myself as a man of the world.” Hasidim moved in to his neighborhood. “It was equivalent to a minority moving in to your neighborhood. ‘Oh, man, look what's happening here.’” Marie said, “Some of the stuff adapted to modern-day life seems bizarre to me … This [Sabbath-observant] gal could present a paper at a conference, but she could not take notes. Someone else had to take notes. Someone else had to carry her work for her. She couldn't take an elevator. This is not a beast of burden. It's a piece of machinery. And the same thing with your car. Your car doesn't need a day off. It's absurdity to me how bizarre some of these things that in ancient times made perfect sense.” Blue said, “My sister, a Jew, a Reform Jew, of course, took a photo and there was a Hasidic Jew in it. In other words, it was a street scene. We were somewhere, I think near the garment district. There was a Jew in it who saw her take the photo. She didn't even see him. She didn't point the camera at him. But, he saw the camera in his direction, and came up and grabbed the camera and smashed it on the ground and was screaming at her … It really, extremely frightened me, because I wasn't used to New York, which is big, you know, and kind of overwhelming; it was very busy, and people everywhere; I'm just a skinny little kid. It really scared me. I didn't know what to do. It seemed very violent and hostile. I didn't know if he was going to do more than smash the camera. I mean, I feared that someone was going to get hurt, mostly, my sister, was what I was afraid for. And I was also afraid because I was too small to do anything, and this guy was very big. I remember looking up and he was a huge guy and he was angry, really angry, and that was scary. And yelling. And I couldn't make out what he was saying. I don't know if he was speaking in English 272

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or not. But I remember I couldn't understand what he was saying. I was just terrified.” Rivka became more observant after a visit to Mea Shearim. “When I first started becoming more religious, [my mother] thought that I was attacking her views, and she thought that I was saying that her beliefs were wrong. She thought that I was condemning her for not keeping the Sabbath. When I tried to tell her that it's her belief, and if that's how she wants to be Jewish that's fine, that's perfectly acceptable. But she does feel that I think that I'm better than she is and that the way I practice Judaism is better, that I don't think that she's a real Jew because she doesn't dress a certain way and eat certain foods. I think if a Christian were to go up to her and point that out it would hurt just as much. ‘You don't dress like a Jew; you don't look like a Jew.’” Sally tried to be more observant. “My mother and I spent hours on the phone both of us crying that I could even be thinking of doing something that would have this kind of impact…it would force me to think of her as a non-Jew … I was miserable, I have to confess. I really couldn't handle it…Ninety percent of those words in the Torah is all about social impact, social influence and tikkun olam. Making the world a better place. It's not about ‘Doing this because God said so.’ It's about understanding why God said so.” Sally went through a period of being anti-religion. “It was definitely, ‘I cannot do this.’ I could not live a life where I was doing things because I was supposed to do them. It's a horrible thing to do…I'm a thinker. I have a philosophical mind. I have been trained to read. I've been trained to be aware, to make sure that I'm happy … Doing what somebody else told me to do — I have a very strong personality — just doesn't work. I was miserable, and I fought and I fought and I fought. I fought to be the kind of person who could just accept that this is what God wants me to do and I couldn't…I'm into an egalitarian, modern understanding…an understanding of what we've learned, and hope to continue to learn, about egalitarianism for women, blacks, everybody, in Western civilization…we need to read that, and interpret that, into Judaism. Unlike trying to live a medieval or Rabbinic Judaism that's written in a different context.” 273

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Pepper said, “I don't feel that it's a responsibility of mine to keep kosher … I kind of separate it, so I consider myself a Jew because of my ethnic background and family. I go to services to be with my family. It's for them. I don't say the prayers. Or, if I say the prayers, I change the words to fit my beliefs. If I were to worship something, I would worship nature. The gender thing bothers me very much. When my father would tell us about God, he would always use the word ‘he,’ just because it's in the Torah.” Lauren said, “To this day, I still have so many mixed feelings about being Jewish. As an adult, I deeply respect the richness of Jewish heritage and the intellectual emphasis that is so much a part of Jewish culture… However, as a religion, I find Judaism's patriarchal God unsatisfying. I find myself much more drawn to matrifocal and nature-oriented religions like Wicca. Yet, how can I turn my back on my family and The Six Million? Guilt, guilt. And Wicca never quite feels right either. Nature is so...goyish.” Bob said, “It was de rigueur to be anti-Semitic as a Jew. They'd all be laughing at things that Jewish people did. Sort of like self-hatred almost. The people I hung around with were trying to be integrated. They wanted to be just like the Gentiles. I don't know if I can analyze it completely, but it was sort of like, people don't like Jews. There are certain places you can't go. There's all these restrictions. I wanna be Canadian. Our family played a lot of golf. And there were all kinds of clubs where a Jewish person couldn't be a member, couldn't be a guest, and everybody knew it.” Bob said that though he now lives in an area with few Jews, “that whole idea of feeling uncomfortable to some extent still exists.” Hannah, 22, told a dramatic tale. “I still can't stand part of myself for marrying him. It's probably the hardest thing I've ever had to do. It was horrifying. The whole thing was. I was told when I was a little girl that if I didn't marry a Jewish man I'd be disowned. I will definitely impose that same idea on my own kids. Which is horrible, and they will call me a hypocrite, and I don't care. I will do it anyway. It's too important and there are too many things that — I miss out on a lot of things because my husband's not Jewish. He didn't know the prayers for Friday services. He didn't know why you had to fast. Even when he learned, it's not important to him. 274

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“I thought, well I can date people, but I'm not gonna marry them. By the time we go to college we'll break up and I can find somebody Jewish. He's hurt because he takes it personally. He's always assumed that Jesus is the son of God and he's never had reason to question that. I think at this point yeah, he probably still does [believe in the divinity of Jesus] and that's probably one of the reasons that's keeping him from converting, because he knows he has to give that up. And, um, it's very hard to explain that it's not him as a person, obviously, I married him. There are these things. That he just doesn't understand, just doesn't know how to care about them because he never did. It just means so much to me. “He told me that he thought that all Jews look down on people that weren't Jewish. Like they were more special and I don't remember what all he said. We had a huge, long, an all night long, conversation about it. And it basically just came to an issue of pride. The people he knew were so proud of being Jewish that they — not held it above other people? He used to. He used to think it was like that. But he was wrong. Your kids have to be Jewish. The big line in Judaism is that you can't consider yourself a Jew until your grandchildren are Jewish. I was another number doing the wrong thing. And I don't think intermarriage is a good idea. I am just the biggest hypocrite in the world, in a sense. I was ashamed of myself, marrying someone not Jewish. If I look at it that way. Me marrying my husband, I was very proud. Sitting back and looking at the numbers, I wasn't proud at all. And I'm still not. I just have a sense of my responsibility that I shirked and I let people down. But the kids will be Jewish. Absolutely. We wouldn't have gotten married if he didn't agree on that.” After I asked Deirdre, 25, only the first question about Jewish identity, she talked for three hours. “The reason I left [name of private Jewish school] was the kids were jerks. They were the stereotype of the spoiled Jewish child. You know, doctors and lawyers for parents. And my own father was an accountant and he did very well for himself, but I never considered myself to be spoiled … They were just really nasty and snotty and stuck up, and in the fourth grade [after a particularly egregious incident of abuse by another child] I said to my mom, ‘I don't wanna go there anymore. 275

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The kids are not nice.’ And so my elementary school experience told me that Jewish kids are kinda jerky. So I said to my mother, ‘I'm not understanding why Jewish boys are supposed to be better than nonJewish boys.’ Cause here my mom is telling me you have to meet a nice Jewish boy … In [the other, non-Jewish school], my mom kind of forced me to join [name of Jewish religions organizations]. I did not like the kids in the [organization name] either. I found them to be kind of shallow. I didn't really feel connected with that. Jewish people are supposed to be better, but I'm not seeing that. I made myself go to the Hillel service. And I was going in there expecting the same thing that I had gotten, just stuck up, snotty, and I didn't find that at all. There were two women who were really sincere. It really did help me reevaluate. I had a lot of good friends who happened to be Jewish and were nice. Deirdre began dating a Catholic boy. “I started having a lot of conflicts with my parents. My mom was really convincing me to break up with him. This was a cardinal sin to them … The conflict just kind of built and built and built. My mom and I had a huge fight. Jason has a tremendous respect for Judaism. After many long talks, after many years, he said it was okay if the kids were raised Jewish. He read the whole Jewish Book of Why, which I've never read. I try to communicate this to my mother, but she can't understand. I felt like I was expanding. Religion between me and Jason was never a touchy issue, like it became between me and my mom. My grades improved, my mood improved. I really enjoyed our relationship. It was so wonderful. So one day my mother said to me, ‘It's not going to work. You can't have inter-religious marriages. Your children are going to be confused. Does Judaism not mean anything to you? … I think that you two just need to go your separate ways.’ It was just kind of a spiral from there. She got upset, got really angry, made a lot of accusations. And I just got really angry at her. I just always saw our relationship as a beautiful thing that really made me grow. At the time I was starting to think, ‘If this is how Judaism…If Judaism is telling me that I'm not allowed to associate, or that Jewish people are the best in the world, or that I should only associate with Jewish people, well, I haven't had a lot of evidence of that in my life. The evidence I have says that I met a person where religion is only one 276

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dimension. And his religion has made him the person that he is which is a wonderful person.’ So it was just very illogical to me, and I just did not buy into this whole spiel that my mom was giving me. And I even said to her, I said, you know, ‘Jews of all people should not sit there and make assumptions about people that are not like them. Because Jews have had that happen to us! Have we not learned anything from the Holocaust? It's all about people from one group making assumptions about people from another group.’ “Jason goes to temple. He wants to learn Hebrew. He goes to services with me. Now they have a good rabbi. For a while they would have these students come who would say critical things about other religions. I was just so embarrassed. ‘Jewish scientists are better than other scientists.’ But, our relationship was comfortable enough that we laughed…I think of my uncle, at Passover, he just sits there with the Haggadah on his plate, and he waits for dinner. That's how my cousins were raised. None of them were religious at all … Jason has more respect for Judaism and engages in more Jewish ritual than do Jewish people in my family. And that was like a really interesting revelation to me. Here is a non-Jewish man who is more, quote, Jewish than most of the Jewish men that I've seen. “I went to mass with him. I wasn't afraid. I didn't have this fear, kind of like my mom, which I think is, I'd be interested to find out if you find out that this is a common Jewish fear, which is the fear that if you identify with anything Christian [snapped her fingers] you'll lose your Jewish identity. That's kind of what my mom was saying. ‘If you go to mass, all of a sudden you're just going to lose your Jewish identity.’ As if it's a disease or something. And, like, ‘Hello! I'm an autonomous human being. Don't you have faith in how you raised me?’ When I started going to mass with him, I realized that the constituents were like really friendly with one another and my own experience with nasty Jewish kids, and I was like these people are like really friendly and saying ‘Hi’ to me and shaking my hand. The people were like, ‘Hi, how are you?’ And the first time I was at mass I started to cry, actually. I had never been in a service where — First of all, the services are large. So, when I went to mass it was like this huge room. So, just the power of everybody singing together, singing these really nice songs, and 277

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also, I understood the songs cause they were in English. So I listened to the words and I was like, wow, this is a really spiritual experience going on here … I actually started singing, and I felt very like kind of sucked in, to this very spiritual, large experience, but halfway through the song I felt like I shouldn't be singing, even though it was very powerful for me, I was like, well, you know, this isn't my place. I felt like I was going too far … Like when people went up to take communion. I just started, like, crying. I was like, wow, look at this, this is a different religion and it's so meaningful to all these people. I felt like I grew as a person. My perspective of Judaism started broadening. My understanding of it. I learned to think about God in different ways. I learned to see people differently. “I told him, like, ‘Jews on Christmas are bored. Everything's closed. So you either go to the movies, or you eat Chinese food. So you call all your friends and hear about their totally awesome gifts.’ I would never be in anyone's home on Christmas. My place was with my family, not celebrating. And so I went to his house, and I was thinking I feel really guilty about that. My mom's voice in my head, I am betraying Judaism because I am opening a Christmas gift that's wrapped with Christmas paper under a Christmas tree on Christmas day! But, I just found that I loved it. It filled like a hole in my life, like Christmas day would be a hole. Everyone else is having fun but I'm sitting here with my parents who are watching Christmas stuff on TV. So I felt like it was a completion for me, or sort of a filling sensation. This was important to Jason. Just like he would participate in Jewish holidays, he would engage himself, he would like get in there, get excited, and ask questions. I wanna do that for him, participate and ask questions … I had a ball. I had so much fun. His parents were great. They've never had any issue with our dating at all. They bought me all these Christmas presents. I couldn't even believe that these people who weren't even my real parents were just giving me loads and loads of clothes and all this other stuff … Ever since I've started participating in Christmas, it makes the fall different. It gives me this heightened excitement about the holidays. “‘We love Jason! If only he was Jewish.’ That's a statement I've heard many, many times and it just misses the whole point. His religion 278

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hasn't made him a good person? And they actually said that to Jason. ‘You'd be perfect if you were Jewish, but, I guess we'll just have to take you.’ “Suddenly they were worried that I was going to serve bacon and pork at the wedding. My dad was like, ‘We would like it if it were a kosher wedding.’ My parents would not care if I had a kosher wedding if I married a Jewish man. So all of a sudden it's like a scoreboard. Which is ridiculous, cause if you look at the scoreboard: the kids are going to be raised Jewish, he goes to temple with me, he wants to learn Hebrew, he knows more about Judaism than my uncle who looks at his Haggadah. Come on! So, like, hello, the scoreboard could not be tipped any more toward the Jewish side. My mother and my grandmother eat at [non-kosher] restaurants all the time. I was starting to feel very resentful. And my mother was like, ‘Oh, you're going to have a priest? Well, he's just gonna stand there, right? He's not gonna say anything?’ And she was like, ‘How many minutes' worth of stuff?’ [At her cousin's, Jewish, wedding], They didn't even memorize the one Hebrew vow they had to say. The cantor had to break it down into one word at a time. That represents how Jewish they are. Meanwhile, my fiancé is wanting to learn Hebrew. He can say the prayer of the wine, like, I was like, oh, this just speaks many words. Does it matter that both these two people are labeled Jewish? “A big part of Judaism in ancient times was separateness from other groups. Well, is that the meaning that I want it to have for me? Do I want to be separate on the basis of food? Some of the most wonderful parts of my relationship is the integration of Judaism and Catholicism, which involves sharing. And do I want there to be a boundary, in that way? My understanding of Jewish faith is to stop these walls that Judaism puts up. I think that is a big part of Jewish identity, and it's a part that my mom holds dear to her. ‘We need to put up boundaries. We need to not associate ourselves,’ which I know is a classic part of Jewish identity. Her fear is that the Jews are all gonna disappear one day. She sees me as a contributor to that. ‘See? You're part of why there are no Jews anymore.’ I really feel like the spirit of Judaism, if we've learned anything from the Holocaust, is, um, to really start making peace with other denominations. 279

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“Walls were put around the Jewish people during the Holocaust by another group who was afraid and had assumptions like my mom had assumptions. You learn from differences. And you grow and you expand and you stretch yourself. This is what I said to my father. ‘You guys are missing out. You are missing out on the world. Christianity is a big part of our culture.’ I'm sure if you asked my mom, ‘Would you be interested to read about the New Testament?’ She'd be like, ‘Oh. My. God.’ For her, history ends. I didn't understand Christmas. I didn't understand Easter. I learned so much about our culture. And for my mom, that would just be appalling. If you really have faith in your identity, like I have faith as a Jewish person, you're not going to lose that faith if you learn about others.” Aaron told a similarly intense story. “The reason I went to [university name] was because it was important for me to date somebody Jewish. I didn't want to go back to [name of natal state] even though I knew I'd get state residency because there aren't many Jews there. At [university name] one third of the students are Jewish. There's a kosher meal plan. There are Orthodox Jews there. And the funny thing is I ended up dating a non-Jewish girl for two and a half years. “We watched Schindler's List together and I broke down and cried and I told her I couldn't date her anymore because I felt really guilty about what my ancestors had gone through with the Holocaust and persecution over thousands of years and it never will stop and it never will stop and I felt that I was cheating all my ancestors that had to go through that. Not so much my dating somebody who wasn't Jewish, but being with somebody that I loved, and could end up getting married to, that wouldn't perpetuate my lineage. “We broke up and got back together a few times. We both really loved each other but we weren't really sure what was going to happen. She said to me that she was gonna start taking classes to convert. While that should have made me happy, it made me sad. I could tell that she wasn't doing it for herself. I said to her, ‘If you're not converting one hundred per cent for yourself, you'll resent me later. We'll end up getting into fights. We'll end up getting divorced. Our lives will 280

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be terrible.’ So, we ended it right there. We had just been on a cruise together. “She was my best friend. I loved her, not just as a girlfriend, but as a friend. We shared everything … I said, ‘You know, I'm not really ready to get married right now anyway, and we really both enjoy being together, so why don't we stay together till something else happens?’ And she said, no, she didn't want that, she was tired of that. She lived that the past two and a half years. It kind of upsets me because one of my best college buddies is lost. “She would say things like, ‘I never feel like I'm good enough for you.’ And I would try to explain to her, ‘You know what? I wish you wouldn't say that because I love you so much and I care for you so much and it hurts me a lot to hear you say that … If I have kids by you, my son or daughter is not gonna be Jewish.’ ‘Well, what if we raise them Jewish?’ We'd go through this whole thing. I would always compliment her on how beautiful she was, how much I loved her, loved being with her. These are things that I expressed exactly, very clearly. It was just the fact that she felt like it was unfair that just because she wasn't Jewish, that I couldn't marry her. “I went out on a few dates with this other girl who was Jewish. Nothing ever happened. She ended up fooling around with this other guy, then, um, I went back to her. I said, ‘This is ridiculous. There's nobody, there's nobody here that I will ever find that I will love as much as I love you and that I will enjoy spending time as much as you. Even though we're probably not going to end up together, we have another six months together. Let's spend it and be happy. When the future comes, you're gone. It's going to be hard for us to have a relationship anyway … Let's enjoy the time we have left together. And not worry about it.’ “The lesson was, try as hard as you can not to get involved. Don't get involved again with somebody that you can't get married to. I want my children to be Jewish in the strictest sense of the word. Jewish children, in the strictest sense of the word, traditionally, have a Jewish mother … I really value where I come from. I want my kids to value and cherish that as well. In order for them to value and cherish that, they need to have it instilled in them at a young age what it means to be Jewish. I don't want 281

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to brainwash them, but then as they get older, definitely, have choices, but this is why we do this, this is why we feel that it's beautiful, hopefully instill in them the same values, but based on what I feel is good…I come from a heritage that is really rich in cultural and religious beliefs. Those kind of got dumped. My father wasn't religious or cultural at all. There are certain beauties in the belief of Judaism that are unlike anything I've ever seen or felt. Just because I don't do all of them doesn't mean that I don't believe in all of them. If I want my kids to grow up believing that Judaism is beautiful I think it's important to give them a strong fundamental base. “Sometimes I would walk through Mea Shearim, which is the most religious section of Jerusalem. And I would say, ‘God, I wish I could be like these people. How beautiful they see life. How restrained they are in terms of keeping their physical needs in check in knowing that everything they do is going to count on judgment day and they're so meticulous and careful.’ Me? I know some of the pleasures of the world and I don't know if I could give that up. Just some of the things — one of the purity laws when you get married is you're not allowed to have sex with your wife while she's got her period and usually for a week after. Some of the beauty I see in that is how old this tradition is but how much practical sense it makes, when you think of it just practically. People who actually keep those laws, I wonder if they stay married longer. Just because you never get tired of who you're with. Half your marriage you're not even having sexual relations with that person. It's a beautiful concept. One, being able to restrain yourself, and two, it makes so much sense it's beautiful. “I was in Israel. I figure, I'm in Israel, I'll meet a nice Jewish girl. Israel, for God's sake, of all places. I meet this girl, this gorgeous, beautiful girl. We start this relationship. She's sweet; she's nice; she's smart. Everything I could ever want in a companion. A few weeks into the relationship, she's like, ‘Aaron, you're going to hate me; I've got something I have to tell you.’ I got really scared. I thought she had some disease or something. I'm like, God, what is it? She's like, ‘I'm a Messianic Jew’ [a Jewish convert to Christianity]. She was like, ‘You don't hate me?’ I said, ‘Why should I hate you?’ She goes, ‘People hate us here. They hate us here. It's a very religious state. If some people knew, they might stone me.’”

Chapter Ten

Final Thoughts

Adam Szymanski was exiled to Siberia in 1878. Shortly after his arrival, Srul, who had been in exile longer, importuned him. “Will you tell me if those small gray birds are still there in winter? … When I prayed by the window, how they used to swarm all around! … I could never have believed that I'd ever think about them! But here, where it's so cold … but they are sure to be at home, aren't they?” Szymanski realized that “this old Jew” “was pining for his country just as much as I was” (Segel 190-97). • While he was in Palestine in the early 20th century, a Jew asked Antoni Slonimski, “Is there a fountain? At the entrance from Czysta Street. In the old days the confectioners had a shop there … When I'm better … I'd like to live in Warsaw … My son [is] very educated. When I talk about Poland, he doesn't know a thing” Slonimski catalogued the wonders of the Holy Land, and concluded, “Like in a village in Poland, flies buzz in Jerusalem” (Segel 293-4). • After World War II, Rafael Scharf, a Polish Jew who had spent the war years in London, was, at the time of this event, a British sergeant in Warsaw. In the hotel lobby a crowd of people were milling around, hustling and shoving, transacting business. In that crowd — a heart stopping moment 283

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this — I spot a familiar face, a former schoolmate of mine! We shake hands, embrace … he has just arrived from Palestine, in search of survivors. As we talk, feverishly, exchanging information about mutual friends, a Polish peasant who, I notice, has been observing us for a while, comes up to us. “You are Jews?” he asks. “Indeed we are,” we reply. He takes out from his breast-pocket a bundle of papers, pages from an exercise book, covered in Hebrew handwriting, in fading ink. With it a scrap of paper, scrawled in Polish. “Pious soul,” the message reads, “this is a man's life work. Give it unto good hands.” … We can hardly believe our eyes. It appears that this is the writing of Benzion Rappaport, which he threw out of the window of the train taking him to the death camp in Belzec, on to an open Polish field. A man, the one who now stands in front of us, finds it, deciphers the Polish message, safeguards the manuscript. When the war ends, he travels to Warsaw to look for Jews to hand it over to. They are hard to find, but in the crowded lobby of the “Hotel Polonia” he spots two Jews — two former pupils of Benzion Rappaport. We saw to it, of course, that the manuscript was published in Israel. (Scharf 176-77)

• In 1998, on Ulica Meiselsa, a street named after Krakow's nineteenthcentury rabbi, I ran into Avi Gross, an Israeli professor. “My mother was born in Bukowsko. I won't make it this trip. I will have to return,” he said. “Probably,” I said. “Disconnecting from Poland is hard.” Prof. Gross adamantly agreed. He asked if I'd been to Israel. “Yes,” I said. “I loved it.” “I will have to return to Poland,” he repeated. “I feel it.” • Had Rabbi Avi Weiss really eschewed dialogue with Poles? A spokesperson, Glenn Richter, responded to my e-mail. Yes, he told me, they had, indeed, rejected dialogue. I wrote to thank Glenn for his prompt and informative reply. But I wrote more — in an attempt at dialogue. As a Pole, I apologized for the treatment at the convent. I told Glenn that constant wars and invasions had hardened the population. I confessed to 284

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him that, as an American student dorming in Poland, I dreaded my weekly wrestling match with the irrationally hostile Kafka character in charge of providing clean bed linens. “There are more traumatized people in Poland than anti-Semites in Poland,” I said. Glenn was kind enough to respond to my attempt at dialogue. He sounded exasperated. On another occasion, a Polish priest had asked Glenn why he was protesting. “I responded for about an hour,” Glenn said. The priest's reply, “‘Your arguments are from the moon.’ To me, that was not dialogue … Polish citizens, most elderly, came to argue vehemently with us … We understood their concerns — they had survived the Nazis and the communists — but we felt our own position as deeply.” I could only nod while reading Glenn's e-mails expressing his frustrations with Poles, and while imagining Poles' frustrations with him. I was deeply touched by Glenn's final anecdote. “A few years after our 1989 actions at Auschwitz, Rabbi Weiss heard that a local Carmelite convent near his synagogue was in financial difficulty. Rabbi Weiss gathered funds and presented it quietly to the nuns.” • Poles and Jews have used each other to define themselves as opposites. Observers often assume me to be Jewish. Many informants for this project assumed the same. Julius asked me my idea of my own Jewish identity. “I'm not Jewish,” I said. “You're not? Oh. That's interesting.” Julius laughed nervously. “My father's Polish. My mother's Slovak,” I told him. “Huh,” Julius said. “When you asked me, if I've ever looked across a crowded room and thought, ‘That person is Jewish,’ the answer is you.” • I interviewed Polish Americans for another project. Excerpts below contain themes echoed in interviews of Jews: a heritage of overwhelming suffering; outsider status; a siege mentality; anti-social behavior that, if understood wrongly, could contribute to stereotyping; heroism; identity as a blessing and a burden; and a sense of mission. 285

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John Guzlowski's Polish Catholic grandmother, aunt, and cousin were murdered by Nazis and Ukrainians. They raped John's Aunt Sophie and broke her teeth; they stomped his cousin to death. With his bayonet, a Nazi sexually mutilated John's Aunt Genia. John's parents were Nazi slave laborers; his father was in Buchenwald. John was born in a displaced persons camp after World War II; his family immigrated to America. “I don't know why it's so hard,” John said. “Is it just because they come from a different place? That they never felt comfortable here in America? Would the karma have been as hard if we had all gone back to Poland after the war? Or is it all of that pain that they suffered during the war? “When I was a child, I thought that there were things that Americans could do and things that Poles could do. Americans could be happy. They could go to ball games, museums, movies. They could walk freely through the American world, whistling the song ‘Pennies from Heaven’ and believing every word of it: ‘Every time it rains, it rains pennies from heaven.’ “Americans could go to restaurants and order food and not get into arguments with waiters, or other customers in the restaurant. They could go to picnics and not lose their children or their children's balloons. They could go to weddings and dance waltzes without falling down, without getting into fights, without beating their children. Americans could laugh at the jokes on TV and know what they were about. They could smile and mean it, show love, concern, happiness, sorrow, sadness. And all at the right time. “Poles seemed to be hobbled. When I was a boy growing up in Chicago, I never knew any one who ever went to a professional ball game. It was as if there were written restrictions. Poles could not go to ball games. Or museums. Or fairs. Poles just didn't do such things. Only Americans did them. “And nothing ever seemed to go right. Washing machines would break down for no reason. Repairmen were always crooks or incompetent. Shirts — even brand new ones — would be stained or missing a button. I remember one time my mother going into a Woolworth's dime store 286

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and trying to bargain the price of a toy down. Of course, it didn't work. Nothing worked. “There was no one to tell you how to change the hard karma, make it a little more malleable, a little softer. Everyone was in the same boat and trying to find some way to survive, keep afloat. “We were outside our basement apartment on Hamilton Street in Chicago playing while our mother was inside sleeping. It was the middle of the day, but she worked the midnight to eight shift. We were playing outside so she would have some quiet, and a bully came along and started harassing us, and we were frightened and called for help. But we were so conscious of our Polish being the outsider's language that we called out in English, ‘Mother, mother, mother.’ “And of course, our mother didn't understand. And the bully knocked us both down, or took our ball, or frightened us even more. I don't even remember what he did exactly. But we were probably more fearful of appearing to be Polacks than we were of being beaten. So we shouted ‘Mother’ instead of ‘Mamusiu.’ Our shame was to be thought of as Polacks, and what was worse, DPs. Which children kept telling us stood for ‘Dumb Polacks.’ “If people don't initially see you as different, they look at you and make assumptions: you know the rules to baseball, your grandparents lived in New Jersey, you know what to wear when you go to church, your father doesn't eat pickled pigs feet with vinegar. “And then you do something that throws them off. Maybe you don't get a joke or you don't understand the nuance of a phrase. When I am teaching, a student will say something, and I just plain won't get it. Then they know that you're different. I laugh it off. I tell them I am a non-native speaker, and they are puzzled for a moment and don't know if I am joking or not. My difference is just a little too much trouble. And so they close themselves off.” On the other hand, “It's been fifty years since Polish was my only language. I'm unsure of the sound of consonants, and Polish grammar for the most part is beyond me. My vocabulary is that of a three-year-old. When I was visiting my mother, I said something to her in what I thought 287

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was Polish, and she winced and said, ‘Johnny, please don't try to talk Polish to me. The sound hurts my ears.’ “I write a lot about the Holocaust and the terrible things that happened to my parents, and when I read these things at poetry readings, it's inevitably the question I get. Why put myself through all of the painful remembering and then compound it by presenting it to others? It's not easy to get in front of a small group and tell these terrible stories. Sometimes I have to stop myself and always I'm wondering if I will get through the poems. I sometimes feel that Polish Americans would much rather forget the whole sorry Holocaust and the displaced persons camps and all of that suffering. It's all just another thing that accentuates the difference between them and real Americans. “I feel that I have to write just to make sure someone does. Imagine all of those millions of Poles and immigrants who came to this country. Who wrote for them? They couldn't write for themselves. I sometimes feel that I am writing for all those people whose stories were never told, whose voices got lost somewhere in the 20th century. My father never went to school and could barely write his name. My mother had two years of formal education. I felt that I had to tell the stories they would have written if they could. I sometimes think that I am not only writing about their lives, but also about the lives of all those forgotten, voiceless refugees, DPs, and survivors that the last century produced.” Guzlowski does not whitewash those to whom he is dedicated. “If my sister didn't wash the dishes when she was supposed to, my mother would threaten her with a broom handle and chase her until she caught her and could spank her with it. If my father came home drunk, my mother would knock him down and sometimes kick him till he fled the house to hide in the basement. When my mother was dying and my sister refused to come to the hospital to see her, my mother asked why. I told my mom that my sister had never forgiven her for all that abuse. My mother said, ‘What abuse?’ My sister also said that she hated me for never stopping my mother from beating her. I'm 61 and my sister is 63. I've seen her three times in the last twelve years.” 288

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Bill was a 33 year old graduate student. He hailed from “the heart of the anthracite coal region” in Pennsylvania. Bill illustrated with his hands and a saltshaker, on the table that divided us, his grandfather encountering “some of his buddies from Galicia” on the street. “They would take ten steps toward each other, and then stop, and then take ten more steps, and then stop. Eventually get close enough to talk. They didn't have enough air in them to cross the street. They all had black lung. I have it pretty good now, but if it wasn't for my grandfather coughing up blood ... My Uncle Stan. We used to keep a bag next to him for everything he coughed up. I make him out like a martyr. He was kind of a jerk. He used to hit my Ciocia Rose. “They never complained. They remembered funny things. My grandmother was cleaning a lawyer's house. He came home with a quart of ice cream. She'd never seen ice cream before. She put it in the closet. A lot of these kinds of stories floated around. They were told in a very good way. Not to demean the person. I don't wanna say ‘the dumb Polak.’ It was more the innocent immigrant.” Bill paraphrased early-twentieth-century school materials: “‘Children of Ukrainian decent will not be allowed to pray before class. If we hear a kid speaking Polish with his brother, we will make sure it never happens again.’ There was a guy named ‘Blank’. We used to think, maybe at Ellis Island they couldn't get his name, so they put it down as ‘Blank.’ “It's only since I've been researching it that I am getting a sense of how shitty things were. My mom'd say, ‘They had it rough.’ She wouldn't report that there were seventeen of them living in a room in a shack. At least in Galicia they weren't laying in a wet eighteen-inch coal shaft their whole life ... They worked like moles their whole lives. In many years more went back than came. At least there they had clean air ... That's one of the reasons I'm here, to learn my history. I'll talk to my grandparents in my mind and tell them what I'm doing for them.” Mary is an attorney with an impressive record of service to civil rights for African Americans. She left her Polish-American home young, “I felt, ‘Let me get the hell out of here.’” Mary married a WASP and kept his name even after divorce. “I didn't want one of those funny names.” She keeps her 289

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Polish ancestry secret, though she does believe that growing up a hated outsider inspired her struggle for civil rights. “All of them came steerage...The only common theme [about life in Poland] was poverty, hunger, and no opportunity. My grandfather would get drunk and abuse people. There were black eyes. In the season when they castrate the animals my father was told he was going to be castrated. He had to run away and negotiate his return. He said if they ever said that again he'd figure out a way to kill them all. My father would be willing to hit a cow with a board until the board broke, or the cow died. “It was not a culture of empowerment. Quite the reverse. The message was of disenfranchisement, of scraping on the edge of society. They used a divide-and-conquer method of power. My father's father was threatened by any aggregation of power or collaboration among his own children. Children were paired off against each other. Power was gained through intimidation. They used almost any means to an end. It was a culture of [lengthy pause] street rats. It was a very low class level of behavior that continues to this day. They would steal each other's property. Like tractors. The sheriff got tired of it. It was usually the result of a grudge. ‘I borrowed your hayfork two years ago; I returned it. You asked to borrow my wheelbarrow; you didn't return it, so I got your tractor.’ This was all said in an ugly tone. “They had to nibble on the sides of society. There's not much ethics. You survive however you can. Raising a few cows, a few fruit trees, moonshining, making sausages, making other different kinds of food, logging, trapping, cutting wood, selling it, dealing in iron and metals, knowing metals, knowing which metals are in batteries, knowing what's valuable, hauling gravel, knowing how to build a building, knowing how to make bricks. It if took soldering, shoeing a horse — a tremendously opportunistic culture. ‘There ain't anything we can't do. If we can't do it, we'll steal it from somebody. If we can't steal it, we'll watch it, and learn how.’ Can-do people. It's intimidating. I should know how to change a tire, the oil, rewire a house, fix windows. ‘Why should you have to bring somebody in? You can trust no one. Everybody will rip you off. The world is full of predators and they will take advantage of you.’” 290

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Mary was informally adopted by African Americans, and treats them as family. She wants nothing to do with anything Polish. She's been a successful escapee for decades. I asked her if she ever thinks of her roots. “Everyday for the rest of my life since I left, including today. It is something I'll analyze until I die.” Polish-Catholic-American Mary's account felt similar to me to PolishJewish-American Matt's take on his mother. Matt said, “My mother always struck me as having some kind of wound that she has not healed from. Still not. She's seventy-six years old. Just some kind of — it's so easy for her to get angry at, you know, if she sees a Polish guy. And the anger is a cover-up for some kind of hurt, some kind of pain. And so she — it was a recurrent theme — the goyim. You know, them against us. I've always felt that my mother is running away from something. She's almost like an abused — like she was abused as a child … She's always moving. When she would serve us dinner, she could not sit still. She was always getting up. She was always going out to the kitchen to get us something. She literally could not sit still. She was running away from something. It was almost like the Nazis [Matt rapped sharply on the table] were gonna come at the door. I know she lost relatives during the war. I always had that sense that something in her got hard. These people from Europe, those people knew hardship. It was a totally different — my guess, just from what filtered down from my mother. Survival was the big thing. ‘Zog gornisht.’ ‘Say nothing.’ That's how you survived. Say nothing. That probably was a very big survival skill in the pogroms in Russia. You know, you don't assert yourself as a Jew. “Okay. There is a joke my mother told me. I don't even know if it's a joke. It's the one about, something like, two Jews are being sent to be shot. One of them says, ‘Maury, my bandage is coming off.’ And he says, uh, ‘Sy, don't make trouble.’ That is like the one joke that comes to mind that my mother told. Her outlook was of this sense, you know, they destroyed us, that they tried to destroy us; they're gonna kill us any minute, this fear. It was almost as if my mother was in kind of a wind tunnel. Always — like there's something going, the motor is going. The parents from the Old Country had this totally different personality. Very hard, very survivaloriented, very different values and ways of being in the world. There was 291

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always this hardness about my mother. Almost like, ‘Don't feel. Don't let yourself feel. Don't be open.’ I'll make a confession. In fact I spent many years in therapy basically learning how to feel.” • There is a legend, perhaps true, perhaps only necessary, that the fourteenth century King Kazimierz the Great, who proverbially found a Poland of wood and left a Poland of stone, had a Jewish companion, Esterka, who, in spite his four other wives, was the love of his life, and the mother of his children. In Aaron Zeitlin's 1932 play, Kazimierz voices to Esterka the ineluctable bonds between Poles and Jews. “We shall die. But so long as your race and mine inhabit this earth, it is not ended” (Shmeruk 101).

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I N DE X

Addams, Jane

115, 120

Adler, Joseph

58

Adler, Rachel

149

Bartoszewski, Wladyslaw 103, 168, 214 Bell, Thomas Out of this Furnace

Alcott, Louisa May Little Women

Benga, Ota

200

180

Berman, Paul

Anderson, Kurt

69

Berman, Russell

Anti-Polonism

Telos

128-129

Anti-Semitism 16, 18-20, 25, 30-33, 35-36, 40, 45-46, 52, 57, 65, 68-84, 86-87, 90-91, 93-94, 98-99, 101104, 113, 148-149, 165, 188, 192, 194-195, 200-203, 208, 217-219, 223-224, 228, 250-251, 253, 257

99, 101

98 29-30

Biale, David

157

Bialik, H.N.

61, 185

Bieganski 15-19, 21-26, 32, 36, 39-40, 43, 46, 55-57, 62, 105, 125-128, 131, 134, 137, 141-142, 148, 150, 152153, 156, 162-163, 165, 169-171, 192, 195, 205, 214, 216, 256-257

101

Bielski

B

77, 79, 83, 87, 170

Beschloss, Michael

83-84, 89

Arendt, Hannah

52, 210-211

109-110

Amin, Idi Dada Aniston, Jennifer

Family

52

“ ack to You”

51

Bilbo, Theodore

Baldwin, James

73, 114

Birnbaum, Mariana D.

Barnett, Victoria

101

Bismarck, Otto

Baron-Cohen, Sacha Borat Bartal, Israel

115

Ben-Gurion, David

105

America and the Holocaust

10, 55, 89,

Black Book

15, 43-46, 170

69 205

163

34

Black, Edwin

59-60

IBM and the Holocaust 202 335

Index

Blagojevich, Rod

15

Carrey, Jim 127 Carroll, James 195 Constantine’s Sword 194 Catherine the Great 164 Cephalic Index 112-113 Chavis, Benjamin 66, 68, 71, 73, 75-76 Chaucer, Geoffrey 31 Chopin, Frederic 28, 62, 250 Chua, Amy 25, 187-188, 191-192 World on Fire 186 Cimino, Michael 134, 136, 138 The Deerhunter 127, 135, 137, 139140 Clinton, William 36, 96 Clooney, George 35 Codrescu, Andrei 97 Comte, Auguste 19 Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness 95 Cook, Blanche Wiesen 201 Coren, Giles 15 Coughlin, Charles 201 Coughlin, Richard J. 180, 201 Covert, Colin 44 Crowther, Bosley 129-130, 142 Cruise, Tom 35 Cultural Relativism 33, 111-113 Curie, Marie 62, 163, 218

Blood Libel 21, 25, 31, 69, 71, 166, 188-189, 191 Bloom, Stephen Postville 62 Boas, Franz 116-117

33, 111, 113-114,

Changes in Bodily Form of Descendents of Immigrants 112 Primitive Art 112, 115 Bojko, Jakub

175

Boleslaus the Pious

20

Bonacich, Edna 25, 178-179, 186188, 191-192 Borkowicz, Jacek

215

Bosson, Jennifer K.

152

“Interpersonal Chemistry Through Negativity” 151 Botticini, Maristella Brando, Marlon

57-58

127, 130-131, 133

The Break-Up

128

Breines, Paul

149-150

Brigham, Carl

119-120

Browning, Christopher Ordinary Men 100 Bruce Almighty Bruce, Lenny

Cala, Alina

127 18 19, 103, 183

The Image of the Jew in Polish Folk Culture 39 Campion-Vincent, Veronique 191 Canby, Vincent Carnegie, Andrew

Darnton, John

28 Darwin, Charles 19, 32, 111 Dawkins, Richard The God Delusion 32 Davis, Thulani 68, 74, 90-92

190-

135, 138-139 115, 123 336

Index

Jud Suss

Davies, Norman 25, 172-173, 178 Dawidowcz, Lucy “Indicting American Jews” 200, 203 Deak, Istvan 99-100 Defiance 52 Deloria, Ella 111-112 Dem Khazns Zindl 161 Dershowitz, Alan 56 Dewey, John 114 Dickens, Charles 31, 181 Dmowski, Roman 85, 188, 258 Duke, David 69 Dundes, Alan 106, 126, 141

185, 191

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb

164

Fieldorf, Emil August

51

Finkelstein, Norman Flanagan, Owen

208-209

26

Folk Classification Ford, Henry

30

115

The International Jew Foucault, Michel

26

Freedman, Samuel G. Frick, Henry Clay

148-149

123

Friedman, Mordechai Fry, Stephen

Eastwood, Clint

The Fugitive

Gran Torino 129 Eckstein, Zvi 57 Edelman, Marek 38 Edelstein, David 46 Eichmann, Adolf 203, 207-208, 211 Eisenberg, Gilla 54 Engel, David 202 Enigma 127, 194 Epic Laws 154 Ertel, Rachel 53 Essentialize 98 Eugenics 110

202

55

19 127-128, 140

Gans, Herbert

149

Garton-Ash, Timothy Gates, Henry Louis Genovese, Kitty

69, 95 69

Glatshteyn, Yankev Glemp, Jozef

19

161

80, 82-84, 87, 90-93

Goldberg, Jacob Goldhagen, Daniel 165, 209

154 33, 55, 98-102,

Hitler’s Willing Executioners 98, 200

Farrakhan, Louis

66, 69-74, 76-78 Federman, Raymond 49-50 Fein, Helen 174 Fenelon, Fania 207 Playing for Time 206 Ferber, Edna 107 Feuchtwanger, Lion

Goldstein, Baruch

69

The Good German

34

Goodman, Andrew Gourevitch, Peter Grant, Madison

77 97, 199, 212 111, 134

The Passing of the Great Race 337

33,

109

Index

Greenfield, Meg

Inglorious Basterds

35 Intelligence Testing 27, 119, 121 Isaacson, Walter 20 “Island at War” 34

29-30

Gross, Jan Tomasz 191, 214

33, 102-103, 188,

Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz 20, 101

Jackson, Jesse

Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland 21, 32, 36, 101, 104, 178 Guzlowski, John

Hakata

73, 79 The Jazz Singer 160-161 Jeffries, Leonard 67 Jenks, Albert Edward 108 John Paul II 55-56, 85 Jolson, Al 160 Jones, Tommy Lee 141

27, 38, 41, 286, 288

164

Halpern, Moyshe Leyb Hanczarek, Tekla

161

27

Harris, Dennis

20

Karadzic, Radovan

Hayyim Hayyke ben Aharon Sefer seror ha-hayyim Hertzberg, Arthur

60

150, 204

Heschel, Abraham Joshua Higham, John

31, 90, 151, 203, 216, 247, 69 194

King, Martin Luther

56

Why the Jews Rejected Jesus Koch, Sebastian

109

Hoffman, Eva 178, 205

Korulska, Ewa

69

Hoover, Herbert

109

117, 167

150, 204

The Painted Bird

18, 250

Kossak-Szczucka, Zofia Kovic, Ron

44 60, 180

37

Kronenberg, Leopold Krzyzanowski, Jerzy Kugelmass, Jack

111 338

31

137

Kozlowski, Dennis

Hurston, Zora Neale Mules and Men

172-173

Kosinski, Jerzy

179, 186

Hundert, Gershon

55-56

Kosciuszko, Tadeusz

Hollings, Ernest

58

34

Kolbe, Maximilian

21, 52, 150, 158, 175,

18, 155

Host Society

77

Klinghoffer, David

82, 124, 191, 200, 202,

Mein Kampf

Hume, Mick

53, 156, 160, 162, 203

Karski, Jan 254

Kennedy, Eugene 103, 208

Hitchens, Christopher

Shtetl

Karpf, Anne

Kahane, Meir

115

Himmler, Heinrich Hitler, Adolf 209

157

15

28 170

148-150, 153-154

Index

Kulturkampf

163

Lakoff, George

Markham, Edwin “The Man with a Hoe” 16 Martin, Tony 67 Marx, Karl 19, 117 Marzynski, Marian Shtetl 155-156 Maslin, Janet 140 Mayes, Frances Under the Tuscan Sun 127-128 Mazowiecki, Tadeusz 38 McLaughlin, Allan J. 15, 120-121 Mead, Margaret 156 Coming of Age in Samoa 111 A Rap on Race 114 Medoff, Rafael The Deafening Silence 203 Mellen, Joan 101-102, 186 Mengele, Josef 207 Metonymic Model 26 Michlic, Joanna 19 Michnik, Adam 38, 216, 247 Middleman Minority 179, 183-184 Middleman Minority Theory 25, 178, 186, 191 Mickiewicz, Adam 90, 216, 247 Milgram, Stanley 100 Millet, Jean Francois “The Man with a Hoe” 16-17 Monroe, Marilyn 147 Monster’s Ball 17, 127 Morant, G.M. 124 Morawska, Ewa 28 Mosdorf, Jan 31 Muhammad, Khalid Abdul 65-67, 6974, 78-80, 83-84, 87, 90, 92, 94, 191 Muraviev, Mikhail 163

26

Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things 25 Lamming, Bob Lane, Diane

48-49 127

Lanzmann, Claude Shoah

46, 203

Laqueur, Thomas

18, 170

Law of Contrast

154, 156, 162

Law of Two to a Scene Lemmon, Jack

154, 156, 162

142

Lerner, Michael 83, 94

68, 70, 73, 77-78,

Levanda, Lev Seething Times Life is with People Lindow, John

167 156-157, 162

22

Lipking, Lawrence Lodge, Henry Cabot Long, Breckinridge

31 112, 115 102, 201

Lookstein, Haskel Were we Our Brother’s Keepers? 203

MacLaine, Shirley

143

Madoff, Bernard 37 Magdziak-Miszewska, Agniezska 21 Majman, Slawomir 148 Manger, Itzik 183 March of the Living 53-54, 253-254 Market Dominant Minority 25, 186188, 191-192 339

Index

Nalkowska, Zofia

215 Napierkowski, Thomas 170 Nation of Islam 66, 68 Neeson, Liam 35 Novak, Michael 15 Novick, Peter 149-150, 204, 209-210, 212 The Holocaust in American Life 200 Nowak-Jezioranski, Jan 21

Pulaski, Kazimierz

Quindlen, Anna Quinn, Anthony

71 130

Race Suicide

122, 134, 170 Rackman, Joseph 152 Radzialowski, Thaddeus 170 Raspberry, William 180 The Reader 35 Reardon, Dennis 130 Reverse Assimilation 117, 119 Rich, Marc 36-37 Roberts, Kenneth 116-119 Romaniuk, Zbigniew 155 Roosevelt, Eleanor 201 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 201 Roosevelt, Theodore 109, 119 Rosch, Eleanor 25-26 Rosenberg, Ethel 210 Rosenberg, Julius 210 Roskies, David 152, 156, 158 Roth, Philip Portnoy’s Complaint 152

Obama, Barack

17 Olrik, Axel 162 “Epic Laws of Folk Narrative” 154 Ong, Walter J. 154 Orla-Bukowska, Anna Maria 29 Orlev, Zevulun 150-151 Osborn, Henry Fairfield 117 Ost und West 161 Ostjuden 114, 160, 260

Paderewski, Ignacy Jan

117

175

De Palma, Brian 155 Pearson, Karl 117 Peretz, I.L. 60, 152 Pilsudski, Josef 85 Pinker, Steven 11, 106-107 Poe, Edgar Allen 105 Political Correctness 48, 80, 126, 141, 162, 229, 241 Polonsky, Antony 157 Powell, Colin 72 Prototype Effects 25 Prototypicality Judgment 26, 30-32, 235

Sailer, Steve SAT

45, 107

119

Schindler, Oskar

34, 104, 199

Schmuhl, Robert

68, 73, 75

Scientific Racism

110

Scorsese, Martin The Departed Segev, Tom

43

153, 162, 211, 213

The Seventh Million 340

200, 203

Index

Self Hatred 113, 257, 274 Sendler, Irena 31, 104 Shahak, Israel 25, 176 Shakespeare, William 31, 131 Shamir, Yitzhak 83, 103 Shandler, Jeffrey 161 Sheraton, Mimi The Bialy Eaters 195-196, 251 Sherwin, Byron 214 Simpson, O.J. 23 Sinclair, Upton 181 Singer, Isaac Bashevis 29, 38, 41 Enemies, A Love Story 147 The Golem 16, 47 In My Father’s Court 62-63 Shosha 147 The Slave 46, 147 Shapiro, Michael 30 Shmeruk, Chone 59 Skarbek, Fryderyk 28 Slomka, Jan 29, 176, 183-184 Social Darwinism 110 Solecki, Roman 42, 183 The Sopranos 15 Sowell, Thomas 179 Spiderman II 128 Spiegelman, Art Maus 48-49 Spielberg, Steven Saving Private Ryan 200 Schindler’s List 34, 199, 203, 280 Stanley, Sir Henry Morton In Darkest Africa 87, 97 Staszic, Stanislaw 184

Von Stauffenberg, Claus 35 Steinlauf, Michael C. 193 Bondage to the Dead 200 Styron, William Sophie’s Choice 17, 170 Szulc, Bruno 42, 183

Tarnowski, Stanislaw Terkel, Studs

28

140

Thayer, William Roscoe

119

Thomas, William I. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America 173 Tierney, John

44

Titus, Edward Kirk

121, 128

Truly, Madly, Deeply

128

Trunk, Yehiel Yeshayahu Polin

37

Tuwim, Julian Tylor, E.B.

183 19, 111

Unilineal Evolution

111

Valkyrie

35 Van Brunt, Lloyd 17, 126 Vaughn, Vince 129 Voltaire, Francois-Marie 163-164

Wajda, Andrzej Man of Marble 139 The Wedding 139 Walesa, Lech 28, 81, 90, 93, 248 Walker, Francis A. 122 Wallace, George 69 341

Index

Waltz, Christoph

35

Washington, Booker T.

184

The Man Farthest Down The Wedding

171

172, 175

Weinryb, B.D.

178

Weinstock, June

190

Weiss, Rabbi Avraham 86-89, 92, 284-285

78, 80, 83-84,

Wells, Leon Weliczker

171, 182-183

Wiesel, Elie

101, 103, 203, 250

Wilder, Billy The Apartment Some Like it Hot Wilkinson, Doris Williams, Tennessee

126-127, 142-143 147

Wills, Garry

194

Yerkes, Robert Yezierska, Anzia

Zeitlin, Aaron

71, 73, 79 131, 133

A Streetcar Named Desire 126-127, 129-130, 134

Winslet, Kate 35 Witos, Wincenty 176-177 Wlodkowic, Pawel 21 Wojtyla, Karol 62, 90 Wolinska, Helena 51 Wolitz, Seth 42, 161 Worldview 19-20, 30, 32, 36, 60, 81, 99, 110, 162, 164, 214, 216 Wright, Richard 73

17, 30,

119 114

292 Zhironovsky, Vladimir 69 Zimbardo, Philip 100 Znaniecki, Florian 173 Zuk, Anna 25, 178