Moreover, in the case of the holocaust and its related artifacts, not only the curatorial-preservationist role of museums but also their memorial role must be considered. Yad Vashem, after all, is both meant to document one of the greatest crimes in history, and to offer a memorial to the victims of that crime. It is especially appropriate and necessary that Israel be the center of the commemoration and study of the Holocaust, since Israel is (for many) the only possible answer to that culminating event of the condition of exile.

In contrast, memorials where the murder happened are ambiguous at best, as illustrated by the notorious incident of the erection of a Cross at Auschwitz. There is nothing inherently wrong with crosses: I am a specialist in Armenian studies and love the lacy stone crosses, called khachkars, that ennoble and sanctify the Armenian highlands. (In recent years, the authorities of Muslim Turkic Azerbaijan have destroyed literally tens of thousands of khachkars, principally in the region of Julfa.) But Armenia is a world away, a Christian island in a Muslim sea: in Europe, of course, the cross very different connotations. Moreover, the ingrained demonization of Jews did not end with the Holocaust, which inspired very little shame and contrition in the places where the mass exterminations took place. Numerous Jewish survivors who returned after World War II to Christian Poland were killed in pogroms; and most who remained thereafter were hounded out of the country in the purge of 1968. In the context of Poland, a cross placed where millions of Jews were murdered is at best a callous offense; at worst it is an intentional desecration. But at the sites of the Warsaw Uprising, where Polish Catholics died bravely, the cross is sacred and deserves proper reverence. It is a matter of context.

Obviously, we cannot dig up Auschwitz and move it to the outskirts of west Jerusalem, and I cannot imagine anyone would want to. It must stay where it is; but the character and proprietary issues of any memorial there raise inevitable problems.

2.     Is Bruno Schulz Polish?

Let's focus on Poland, where Bruno Schulz is now being claimed as a Polish writer. My paternal grandmother had left Krakow in 1906, and almost everyone of our family who stayed was killed by the Nazis. When I was a boy I was walking on Marszalkowska street -- the Fifth Avenue of Warsaw -- one day in August 1969, reading a book in English about the Warsaw ghetto that I had just purchased at a kiosk. An old man came up to me, spat in my face, and growled Psa krev zhid, "Kike blood of a dog!" When our group visited Auschwitz, the government guide told us Poles, Russians, Dutchmen, and Frenchmen had been killed there. "Anyone else?" I asked. "There were also people of other nationalities," she hissed, tight-lipped, glaring.

Years later, as I was riding on a bus to Moscow airport -- this was in the early months of perestroika- a Polish colleague asked me whether I enjoyed modern Polish literature. When I replied that I had been reading the stories of Bruno Schulz, he interrupted impatiently that he meant books by Poles, not Jews. Those who now speak of Schulz as a Polish writer are at the very least woefully myopic. But I think there is more of deliberate forgetfulness, and also an all-too-human eagerness to cash in on someone else's success.

Supposedly, much now has changed for the better, not least because Polish democrats can speak freely. But some of the present interest in Yiddish, in klezmer music, and so on in Poland seems to me a kitschy, comfortable nostalgia. It is comfortable because its objects are safely dead and gone and cannot speak for themselves. Feeling sorry for them now is unearned katharsis, cheap melodrama, an ersatz substitute for the authenticity of human tragedy. As a pupil and friend of mine from Prague once remarked, "We really love Jews in the Czech Republic, now that there aren't any." And besides, Kafka and the Golem bring in tourist dollars and euros. So do "kosher" restaurants in Krakow.

Bruno Schulz did in fact write in Polish, but he was no Pole. Except for a very few trips of no importance to his imagination or experience, Schulz spent his entire life in Drohobycz, a small town in the region of Galicia, where the population then was mostly Jewish, Polish, and Ukrainian. For more than a century it had been a remote province of the Hapsburg Empire; the educated classes knew German. After World War I, Drohobycz wound up in Poland, and then in 1939 the Soviets conquered the region and integrated it into the Ukraine. It remains under Ukrainian sovereignty now, though it lies only thirty miles from the present-day Polish border. Jews from the region call themselves Galizianers, and it is plain that with so many shifting borders and languages, no other geographical designation would make much sense to a Jew - even though a Pole, an Austrian, or a Ukrainian might include Drohobycz in his own country. But none but a few Jews would have identified with those other nations. The vast majority considered themselves simply as Jews, regardless of their language(s) of discourse and cultural production.

Meanwhile, Poland and the Ukraine are countries that suffered under the Nazis and produced their share of heroes. One feels reverence for the fighters of the Warsaw Uprising, and grief for the victims of the Holodomor - the "genocide of starvation" against the Ukrainians in the 1930's. I'd rather not carry on a formal dialogue about Jewish history with my friends from those countries, but the point is that they are my friends: I love them and feel comfortable with them. They have sorrow and pain within, too. However the circumstances to be outlined in the latter part of this essay force one to ponder the judgment of Gershom Scholem, when he excoriated Hannah Arendt for inviting him to participate in the solemn foolery of a "German-Jewish dialogue." He reminded her of how unidirectional and self-delusional had been the belief held by Jews that they had ever enjoyed a relationship with Germany in the first place. There was nothing to talk about now.

[1]       2       [3]       [4]       [5]       [next->] Top image: Bruno Schulz, 1932 Lower image: Bruno Schulz, Self-portrait