Poland’s Jewish Traces: Spirits, Synagogues, and Mass Graves
On a heritage trip to Poland with my parents and sister in 2017, I was struck by the traces of prewar Jewish life that we found woven into the landscape. There was a synagogue that teetered on the grounds of Pińczów, the town where my great-grandparents lived before relocating to the industrial city of Łódź. Teenagers loitered in the trash-strewn courtyard, enclosed by a wall which—a closer inspection revealed—was constructed out of fragments of Jewish gravestones; embossed were mythical creatures and hands forming Kabbalistic symbols. I wondered whether my desire for these fragments—portals to the world of my grandparents and our relatives—was throwing into relief traces that might otherwise go unnoticed.
It was on my return to Poland a couple of years later, for pilot research for my dissertation, that I realized just how diffuse the effects of traces may be: traces did not only affect people who shared my particular family history. Alicja, a young volunteer at a Jewish Cultural Centre in Kraków who grew up in a Catholic family, told me she first became drawn to Jewishness at the age of seven, when her father showed her an abandoned Jewish cemetery sequestered in a forest by her village. She’d thought, “I need to know more.” Jakub Czuprynski—whose job as a genealogist centers on helping Poles and foreigners trace their Polish-Jewish roots—said that, growing up in small-town Poland, he’d “felt their presence”: Jews called out to him from the walls of buildings. And when I asked the director of the Jewish Historical Institute, Paweł Śpiewak, why he thought so many Poles were drawn to Jewishness, he suggested we couldn’t rule out the possibility of a kind of spirit possession: people are continuing to feel Jews’ presence.
Image I: In the New Jewish Cemetery in Łódź, genealogist Jakub Czuprynski helps my family uncover the grave of my great-grandmother, who died shortly before WWII (Lucas 2017).
In what has come to be known as Poland’s “Jewish revival”—comprising Jewish-themed cafés, museums, cultural centers, and genealogical projects proliferating throughout the country—traces such as those I encountered during my trips have been instrumentalized by various actors, according to their politically-infused motives and desires (Hackmann 2018; Kalmar 2020; Meng 2011; Zubrzycki 2016). On the one hand, there are Poles at the helm of the Jewish revival, most of whom do not identify as Jewish. These more Western-oriented Poles participate in and create projects implicating traces of prewar Jewish life—from museums to sign-posting initiatives—in order to stretch the boundaries of the Polish nation. That is, since World War II and the subsequent expulsion of minorities from its borders, Poland has become extremely homogeneous, with 95% of the country declared Roman Catholic. Scholars have argued that Poles of the Jewish revival seek to make Poland more cosmopolitan through recourse to a longstanding Other. They mythologize their cosmopolitan past, epitomized by the figure of the kindly Jewish neighbor (Holmgren 2019; Meng 2011; Zubrzycki 2016 and 2017).
At the other end of the spectrum are more conservative Poles—represented by the ruling Law and Justice Party—who seek to marginalize these ruins or stage them in such a way as to cast former Jewish inhabitants as tolerated or ungrateful neighbors to the “real” Poles who saved and protected them during World War II. In 2016 in South-Eastern Poland, the Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jews in World War II opened its doors: this museum reflects the right-wing process of inaugurating sites commemorating Righteous among the Nations; by only erecting monuments consecrating such exceptional Poles, these actors obfuscate a sometimes amicable, but other times violent, history of Polish-Jewish relations (Hackmann 2018; Kubica and Van de Putte 2019; Michlic 2017). Rather than outright anti-Semitism, such conservative undertakings are superficial expressions of deep and complex concerns. Briefly, since 1989, Western Europe and its formal and informal ambassadors have treated Poland and other post-communist countries with economic and cultural paternalism. These ambassadors claim that, along with being economically lagging, Poles have not adequately dealt with their wartime crimes against Jews. Resentful of such representations and their material impacts, conservative Poles take up Jewish traces to emphasize the Catholic purity, innocence, and strength of the nation (Blatman 2014; Kalb 2018; Kalmar 2020).
Image II: A tradition in the city of Warsaw: a “milk bar,” where Polish food is served, cafeteria-style, for cheap (Lucas 2019)
So, Poles on both sides of the political spectrum mobilize the different meanings of traces in order to advance or bolster their ideals and desires. While these motivations undoubtedly have determining effects on sociality in Poland, scholars of new materialism, and affect and actor-network theory urge us to examine what other dynamics and configurations may arise when we shift attention onto how sociality is shaped from below, by non- or other-than-human actors, including traces of the past (Barad 2003; Bennett 2010; Deleuze and Guattari 1987).
Famously, anthropologist Bruno Latour (1996) disparages the idea that “agency” only applies to human actors. He proposes the idea of the “actant,” “something that acts or to which activity is granted by others” (1996, 373). That is, there is no “essence” to action that can be located in the human; multiple connections give rise to shifting networks and happenings. Latour’s Actor-Network theory has influenced anthropologists studying the effects of traces of the past (Joyce 2019; Napolitano 2015; Navaro-Yashin 2009). Particularly generative for my research is an ethnography by Aimée Joyce (2019) on Biała, a town on the Polish-Belarusian border. Joyce describes how traces of Jewish life—in the form of a mass grave and an abandoned cemetery—create “loud silences” (2019, 226) that disrupt widespread ethno-nationalist narratives about Polish-Catholic purity and innocence with regard to their wartimes pasts and, especially, their former Jewish neighbors. These traces introduce ambiguity and ambivalence into these villagers’ day-to-day lives and memories.
Image III The entrance of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. On the ground can be seen traces of a fire from the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when prisoners rose up against their Nazi oppressors. (Żydowski Instytut Historyczny; Lucas 2019).
My project is invested in enriching understanding of non-human actors, with a particular interest in traces of the past. My goal in this isn’t simply to “celebrate” and expand what being human can mean, by exploring certain actors’ affective entanglements (Massumi 2002, 13). Rather, I am looking for what Elizabeth Povinelli (2012) calls the otherwise. As I see it, this otherwise refers to alternate ways of being and thinking that are “immanent” to the world, which have the potential of disrupting and shifting existing socio-political configurations and categories (Bergson 1988 and Deleuze 1994). To actualize this otherwise, dialectical opposition might not be entirely effective or desirable. Poland’s Jewish revival illustrates this point. Qua dialectical response to ethno-nationalism, this revival perhaps unintentionally confirms conservative opinions: ethnicity and religion re-emerge as the boundaries of the nation (Kalmar 2020; Singh 2018; Zubrzycki 2016 and 2017). Shifting attention onto the effects of non-human actors, my project seeks to know how traces and the politics they intersect with may re/configure trans/national boundaries and affinities in less readily perceptible ways (Hirschkind 2021; Joyce 2019; Navaro-Yashin 2009). Might we find, lurking in Poles’ interactions with traces, an otherwise both subtle and potent enough to weave through “Polish”-”Jewish” dialectics, blurring the distinctness of these categories?
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