On Becoming Jewish

...You mean the Jews," she says...

...Then we joined the slow-moving caravan of wagons, cars and trucks heading southeast towards Lublin...

...We'll spend time in Warsaw...

...Jews," the customs inspector tells his colleague, "yids...

...Perhaps they don't know we were born in Warsaw or that we're Jews, but they do know we read the New York Times on Sunday and that our children, who once boarded the yellow school bus daily along with their neighbors, are now away at private schools and colleges...

...Polish musicians and writers were our parents' friends and Polish aristocrats their customers...

...we have to stifle the impulse to hide...

...Then a breezy young woman in spike-heeled sandals whisks the children away, and we sit on the bench like middle-aged child-watchers the world over, smiling foolishly at the empty water's edge...

...She knows everyone and tells us their stories...

...We would have fought tooth and nail...

...We turned north, groping our way along a narrow unoccupied corridor, the Germans pushing from the west, the Russians from the east...

...But they were German planes...

...Whatever we're going to find there, we need it...

...All through the night, while we stuffed underwear and favorite toys into our suitcases, these relatives sat around the huge dining table with our parents, smoking, shouting, drinking tea from glasses, trying to decide who would stay, who would go, and where...

...We've visited both countries as informed and interested guests rather than as seekers after ethnic roots...

...We don't need this...

...During the second battle of Warsaw in 1944, the Germans dynamited the city, building by building...

...We feel cowardly...

...If your cow died, you could come to him and he'd buy you a new one...

...Ignoring the gifts we've bought for our families, the customs inspector pulls out all the printed materials we carry...

...We add dignity to our vocabulary...

...She's enormously relieved to see us...

...Gently, we try to keep each other from overdramatizing, but in our hearts we feel Anna was right...

...The next day, we continue to Wilno...

...In this city, a third of whose population was once Jewish, Folk-Sztyme claims two thousand subscribers...

...We are meeting people— journalists, university professors, an engineer, a translator, some old family friends who tell stories about our parents and grandparents predating our own births...

...At the poverty-stricken Institute of Jewish History, where we are the only visitors, we come to realize that the Jewish heritage is faring no better than the few remaining Jews...

...Tracks are sunk into the concrete floor in front of the oven doors, and the wheels of the metal carts which brought bodies from the gas chambers thirty-five years ago still run smoothly on them...

...If not for his energy and determination, we might well have ended our lives here, at Treblinka...

...We make modest but respectable contributions to our professional fields...

...We'll follow our escape route through Lublin, Wilno, Riga . .." "Boring places," Anna assures us...

...We don't belong to a synagogue, we're not Zionists...

...photos of thousands of murdered inmates which line the walls of the dormitories remind us of our father, of Aunt Eva, of the kids we played with in the Saski Gardens, of ourselves...

...Though we've been in America forty years and speak English without accents, we're still outsiders to our Vermont neighbors...

...It is as intricately inlaid as the parquet in the throne room of the Hermitage...

...Our compartment door slides open and our documents and books are thrown in to us...

...The feeling of loss is strong for both of us, but there's some compensation for it: we've come closer to one another than we've been since childhood...

...Then, without warning, the train lurches forward...

...To rubble, we add the words for martyrdom and despair...

...We traded a sapphire ring for bread, a mink coat for a tank of gasoline...

...The Holts and Batchelders would be ashamed of it...

...Anti-Semitism...

...When the planes returned, we crouched there, our parents trying to quiet us with words and caresses and, finally, with drops of valerian...

...They were rich and generous...

...Of those who had sat up through the night, only our immediate family had decided to go...

...Knew them...

...As our children leave home, as we begin to count up time left, we have each come to want some larger sense of belonging...

...We had never even seen the Warsaw Ghetto...

...Rubble is the first new word we learn on arriving...

...Over there...

...we had everything...

...We'll start in Wieliszew...

...A few miles from Bedzin, in the ancient Jewish cemetery of Krakow, amid great spreading trees and tangles of wild ferns, we discover more family history...

...Only the new section, added by grandfather Solomon in 1914, still stands intact...

...And here, where the road opens onto a sloping field— which might be the field where we flew kites and learned to ride bikes—is the foundation of what was probably our house...

...We are finally surrounded by a nation of our own kind: survivors of the war who welcome us among, their ranks...

...It's about the nature of art, and we haven't had such a fight since college...

...In 1938 our family had built a summer home in Wieliszew so we could all breathe good air in a beautiful place, just 40 kilometers from Warsaw...

...The iron locks on the massive metal doors of the gas chambers still fit perfectly, though a million hands have scratched and pulled at them...

...Moments later, the air whistled and exploding bombs shook the ground...

...Like everyone else, we learn to stand on the endless queues at food stores, banks and railroad stations with the proper mixture of irritation and resignation...

...Why haven't we gone back sooner...

...We would like to place flowers now and then by the graves of our grandparents, but even to us, their names—Theophilia, Leon, Paulina, Solomon—have become foreign...

...As in Vermont, we're still neither Jews nor Poles, the strands of our heritage won't knit together...

...We were claimed as kinsfolk by the dead and the living...

...They were good little yids...

...Nothing here suggests the pleasures of our last peacetime summer, the horror of the first morning of war...

...funds are lacking to acquire books for the library...

...It's beautiful and the air is good...

...And our own feelings...

...We accept the epithet as belonging to us...

...We imagine ourselves students at the University of Warsaw, drinking beer with comrades in the student cafes on Nowy Swiat instead of at Morey's or the White Horse or the Dome, which were in fact our youthful haunts...

...We walk up a dreary street in an industrial suburb, and the old man points: "This is where the railroad came with the coconuts, the corn and peanuts...

...We are statistical anomalies...

...We look closely at his face: it is suffused with nostalgia and good will, there is not a trace of malice...

...We argue about abstraction, accessibility, the legitimacy of various art forms...

...displaying in turn our copy of Folk-Sztyme, the literature we picked up at the Institute of Jewish History, several books and pamphlets from Auschwitz, a Jewish history book in Hebrew which we're bringing to friends in the Soviet Union...

...They take our passports and visas and begin to search our luggage...

...Patiently, the editor explains the post-war emigrations, precipitated by the government's identification of Jews first with Stalinism, then with Zionism...

...Low flying aircraft still alarm us...

...She comes every day to tend the graves of her own family: they died in the Ghetto, in Treblinka, on the streets of Warsaw, pried out of hiding by informers...

...In our dim compartment we try to open a window, but it's sealed shut, as are the hall windows and the lavatory door...

...Where did the furriers from Warsaw live...

...Our spacious apartment was filled with relatives from Bedzin, Krakow and Lwow...

...We go to Bedzin in Silesia where the Potok side of the family lived for generations...

...Only our nightmares remain ominous...

...These: At Auschwitz, the blown-up i.d...

...At war's end, there was nothing left but rubble...

...It's hard to define what we've lost—the million dead who lay under the rubble...

...We are surprised, too, We did not expect to be drawn to the hearts of ancestors we never knew...

...At Majdanek, as at Auschwitz, the weird beauty of the instruments of death astounds us...

...Death...

...Back in Warsaw now, we realize how badly we had wanted the summer house to be there...

...The only living person here is an old women who serves as our Virgil...

...It is half buried under fallen earth and obscured by burnt branches...

...She is genuinely astounded...

...Gladly...

...What will you find there...

...In 1939, we were among thousands of cars trying to cross, inching forward, desperate to make it through before the border closed...

...The hum of planes mixed with the receding thunder...

...We're in the frying pan," he'd said bitterly...

...She sweeps her hand across the table...

...As we circle it in hopes of finding evidence of family ownership, an old man in T-shirt and suspenders approaches us...

...By Vermonters, we are easily identified as foreigners, but it's harder for us to identify ourselves...

...Our U. S. passports aren't marked with Stars of David, but they are taken away with the books and papers which confirm our crime: we are Jews, enemies of the state...

...It is now called Vilnius, capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic...

...At home in the States, Anna has kept our student sketchbooks which are filled with floor plans-of our apartment and drawings, of the lovely, quiet neighborhood with its gray ?ansarded houses, shrubs and flowers growing on balconies along arched and shuttered facades...

...At the Institute, we can read the sepia-inked cards tacked next to the familiar photographs of the destruction of the Jews of Poland...

...When we reached it in 1939, Wilno was a Polish city...

...she wants to know everything...

...Before leaving Bedzin, we ask if anyone knows what became of the family, how they died...

...We live with our own families on opposite sides of the Winooski River, and when either of us walks along our lovely back roads, we invariably come to one of Vermont's beautiful old cemeteries...

...Not going back to Poland was part of their strategy for forgetting...

...Over there was the waterfall that powered our generator, and over here a restaurant...

...It's a shock to be identified as Jews...

...All along the way, the endless procession of refugees was bombed and strafed...

...We were progressive and cultured, we had so much to offer them," Anna told us once, "but they turned their backs on us...

...It's a graveyard," she tells us...

...We're aware, as I.F...

...And what did you learn...

...When we left Warsaw in 1939, the city was in flames...

...We learned about being Jewish...

...But in the Saski gardens, we come upon children sailing their boats, as we used to, on the familiar willow pond...

...In our fantasies, we were Resistance fighters, like those brave men and women whose pathetic dispatch cases and frail guns we'd seen with so much pride in the museum in Warsaw...

...For a moment we watch them as one might watch a home movie of one's childhood...

...We spend a morning with the lively, intelligent editor of Folk-Sztyme, the Yiddish paper which, like us, is an anachronism...

...What," he asks, "are these...

...He'd driven like this all the way to Kaunas, in the same light summer suit, his fine-woven straw hat crammed on the back of his head...

...For years, we have read the names of our neighbors—the Batchelders, Holts and Bartletts—on the granite tombstones and, as we grow older, our desire to know our own family has increased...

...We're moved by his dedication, but we understand, with an anguish which is difficult to express, that in fact a day will come when there are no more Jews in Poland at all...

...He'd refused to give up his right to fresh air...

...We hoped to find a convoy which was rumored to be bound for Rumania, but by the time we reached Lublin, the roads south had been destroyed and the Russian army stood poised to occupy Lublin itself...

...Our guide doesn't know about the others, but Solomon was shot down in the street by the Gestapo...

...I will show you everything...

...We urge each other not to panic...

...Lazienki, where we used to play as children, surprises us by its strangeness...

...For Polish Jews, there never was a choice, long before the Germans came...

...Our mother, Anna, lives in New York City, and, at eighty-two...

...Our uncles had been lawyers, doctors, engineers...

...We attended good schools and did well...

...Accustomed as he was to a luxurious life, he had dealt on that trip with deprivation, hardship, countless near disasters...

...They had gone to Polish schools, had spoken Polish, not Yiddish, in their houses...

...Polish is spoken all around us, and we happily find ourselves becoming fluent in our native language...

...And here we stand in our walking shoes from L. L. Bean's, canvas tote bags slung over our shoulders, struggling unsuccessfully to accept our involuntary Jewishness...

...membership is down to ninety...

...Standing on the reconstructed corner of these streets, we remember having crossed them, holding our governess's hands, to be shown to our parents' favorite customers who sat in Louis XV fitting rooms surrounded by mink and sable...

...We find graves of Solomon's wife's family, the tombstones predating, by centuries those of our Vermont neighbors...

...We stand among the endless markers, we hold one another and, for the first time in forty years, we cry...

...Like ferrets, we begin hunting down our Jewish heritage...

...The first time, our parents tried to hide the dead from us by covering our eyes, but we were curious and, after a time, indifferent...

...When at the end of the second day, no help came, they decided to return to Warsaw...

...Gratefully, we accept the comradeship...

...Blood ran in the street," he tells us, "no one came back alive...

...Like ourselves, everyone we speak to—Poles and Jews alike—has lost family and property...

...He uses the word zydki, which we've never heard before, but we know its meaning as if we'd been born knowing it...

...We ran screaming into the woods...

...You needed to go all the way to Poland to learn about being Jewish...

...Of three and a half million Jews, after German extermination, Polish pogroms and forced emigration, there are six thousand left in Poland...

...And here the wagon with sunflower seeds...

...What can happen to us...

...Something less definite than indignation or outrage, something more dangerous than shame: the beginning of acknowledgment...

...Anita Landa teaches Human Development at Goddard College, Plainfield, Vermont...

...As we drive through the heart of Poland, following our escape route towards Wilno, Latvia and Sweden, death camps lie on every side...

...But we do...

...I played with all of Solomon's sons, my father sold them milk...

...The caretaker has lent us an umbrella, but we're too excited to shelter under it, and the rain splashes over our happy faces...

...Polish insignia shone on the silver wings and we jumped with excitement...

...As we follow her along narrow paths through acres of undergrowth, we understand that this is the only Jewish community left in Poland...

...We'd come to consider ourselves voluntary Jews, acknowledging Jewishness as we might acknowledge socialism or feminism...

...Ugly...

...The camp no longer exists...

...The Germans administered 5877 prisons and camps on Polish soil and even though only a few are preserved as memorials, it is not easy to avoid them...

...He continues putting out the paper to serve the few Jews who remain, and assures us he intends to serve the remnant even if there are only ten left...

...It occurs to us that now, forty years after our escape from Poland, we can perhaps reach back beyond the Holocaust...

...We remember the masses of retreating Polish soldiers, rainsoaked, their weapons abandoned...

...There was just a sea of rubble...

...In fact, after long debate, we've agreed not to avoid them...

...He had been hidden in the cellar for a while, but he wouldn't remain there...

...One of us is a writer and the other teaches human development at a small college...

...But having escaped the war, the pogroms and gas chambers, our parents and their friends were determined not to remember...

...But neither had those other Jews done anything, the ones whose pictures we saw at Auschwitz and among whose stones we walked at Treblinka...

...As the woman with the scythe in Wieliszew was quick to remind us, we are Jews...

...Nor does the building on Mar-szalkowska where the family business was housed...

...Like ghosts, we wander through Warsaw's lovely parks, looking for the past...

...But it is hard for us to relate to the extinct people whose once diverse culture, rich in scholarship and spiritual longing, is so tenuously preserved here...

...The train stands endlessly in the station...

...Following the directions we've been given, we drive through a scrubby pine forest, planted years after the remains of our forest were cleared away...

...we found graves in Krakow...

...The words are close enough to Polish so there's no mistaking them...

...But, like most survivors of disaster, we're careless of personal safety, we have a sense of living charmed lives...

...We had come back from Wieliszew at night to find the dimly lit streets clogged with milling people and the church opposite our apartment house collapsed in its own cobbled courtyard...

...Anna has often repeated a snatch of conversation she heard that night: "We may have lost Poland," one soldier said to another, "but at least we'll be rid of our Jews...

...At 2 A.M...

...But in fact, we've never felt less American in our lives...

...Driving through Poland now, we take several detours before beginning to retrace our escape route...

...But, in fact, we are not like everyone else...

...Finally, an old woman holding a scythe points the way...

...Twenty-five buildings, for canning and bottling, pressing and refining...

...If we knew how to say Kaddish, we might recite it as we leave the Institute, but neither of us can pray in Hebrew...

...It's raining when we read these tombstones, engraved in Polish and Hebrew...

...Then we saw them flying over the tree tops, so low that we could make out the pilots' faces...

...The stones, put here in memoriam to the lives of 800,000 Jews, stretch to the horizon...

...They're facts, they may some day be important, but they exist below the surface of everyday life...

...Nowhere else in Warsaw are we able to catch that magical glimpse of urban landscape, the one which connects to a fragment of memory and unlocks the secrets of the past...

...We left Warsaw early in the morning, before the day's bombings started...

...Small, elegant, firm-featured, she's a courageous woman...

...We come home from Europe through New York and stop at Anna's for the weekend...

...But the old lady in her farm apron has left us no choice...

...ONBECOMMG JEWISH ANDREW POTOK AND ANHAIANDA she walks daily to work at Maximilian Furs, the family business, reestablished when we arrived in the States in 1940...

...Through rows of wide French doors we could look past the stone terrace to the little fountain splashing in the garden...

...The sun rises, and we peer out into the countryside we'd driven through in our battered van forty years before...

...These pictures are closer by far to our prewar lives than the wide modern streets, the already shabby post-war buildings, the hectic traffic of contemporary Warsaw...

...But to the Poles, they were only Jews...

...The Polish friend who accompanies us stops at farmsteads asking for people who might remember where our house was...

...Between raids, they huddled around the radio, waiting for declarations of war from England and France...

...That's the only place where Jews lived...

...It's the only satisfaction we're to have for some time...

...Everyone on the street will tell you—good little yids...

...And where did they live...

...Whatever we've lost, we've gained an old sense of intimacy, much like the closeness we felt when we were leaving Warsaw the first time...

...We interrupt each other answering: the house at Wieliszew was destroyed...

...Border guards patrol the platform outside...

...The wheat has been harvested and stands in the fields in small conical stacks, like witches' hats...

...Scholars cannot be found to translate and catalog the documents in the archives...

...We yell, wanting to hurt somebody, we hurl quotes from Conrad and Heidegger...

...We've been politically active since the presidential election of 1948, when we campaigned for Henry Wallace, and if our left-wing activities haven't produced the desired effect of significant social change, they've earned us the usual honors of tapped phones and bulging FBI files...

...He had made one correct decision after another, and gotten us out of Europe...

...There weren't any buildings," we're told, "you couldn't arrange to meet a friend at the corner of Marszal-kowska and Moniuszki because there weren't any streets...

...Partly, we'd come to feel that the past was taboo, something you were supposed to forget...

...That day, the gardener dug a shelter, covering it with pine boughs...

...The ovens are expertly crafted, their custom-made angle irons neatly tying the fire brick in place, the masonry skillfully laid...

...But here," says the caretaker, opening the door into a room which to us looks like all the others, "you can still see how it used to be...

...We've been excited and saddened by Warsaw, but most of all, we experience a sense of loss...

...When each raid ended, those left alive got out of roadside ditches, pushed disabled vehicles out of the way, and continued...

...Andrew Potok has just published Ordinary Daylight: Portrait of An Artist Going Blind (Holt Rinehart and Winston), a Literary Guild Alternate, to be published in paper next spring by Bantam...

...We've put in asparagus beds and planted fruit trees around our commodious Vermont houses, but in our hearts we know nothing is permanent...

...Without much trouble, we built self-images which rested on our personal interests and attainments...

...Everywhere on the reconstructed buildings we find plaques commemorating the war dead: forty were shot down here, there a hundred...

...One set of photographs has particular meaning for us—portraits of the Jewish Resistance Fighters, the young people who took up arms against their murderers...

...We both seem to have missed the traditional adolescent identity crisis...

...Our apartment house, Moniuszki number 4, no longer exists...

...We'd always assumed that the Germans couldn't have taken us away without a struggle...

...The illusion that visiting our birthplace would illuminate our lives...

...We come to feel we could have lived here...

...Whatever we had known of ease and security ended that day...

...We look at the shaven heads, the terrified eyes, the occasional grotesque attempt at a smile, and we see family portraits...

...Continued on page 56 We're tired and ashamed...

...Soon our governess will come into the picture and warn us to keep our toes out of the pool, the narrow leaves will fall from the willow branches and cover the pond's surface like little fish and we'll grow up like anyone else...

...After all, we assure each other, what surprises can these places with their awesome names—Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka—still hold for us...

...We've finally reached back beyond the war to those who died of natural causes...

...We haven't done anything...

...We're Americans, we assure ourselves...

...We do not fight for our lives," one of them wrote, "none of us will survive...

...He'd lost his father there...

...There, we find the remains of the vegetable oil refinery which our great-grandfather built in the 1860s...

...When we travel down to the city to tell her we want to go to Poland and ask her to come with us, she is shocked...

...It seems clear that what stands between us and the sense of a group identity is the war, the bombs and death camps, a wall of fire which separates us from our childhood and our heritage...

...Growing up, as we came home for vacations from boarding schools in Connecticut and Massachusetts, we asked for facts about our early childhood, for news of family left behind, for details of our history in Poland which we knew went back several hundred years...

...You don't need it...

...The murdered Jews we can't relate to...

...Our guide fetches the caretaker, and the four of us go in...

...Here a machine shop and a blacksmith...

...Each of us has tried to recreate that amplitude and security in our adult lives...

...its form and content are familiar and comforting...

...We're Polish Jews who have become Americans, but all those words carry an abstract quality, like having type ? positive blood...

...We spin out our fantasies about living in Warsaw to each other, and each arrives at the same dead end, the wall of the Ghetto, the gates of the death camps...

...eight varieties of wood were used in each square, some of the carefully fitted pieces no wider than a birch twig...

...For us, it is just beginning...

...We are Jews, and as Jews we feel imperiled...

...We shouldn't have come...

...No food, no gas, and now I can't see a goddamn thing...

...If you need a vacation, go to Switzerland...

...she asks finally, as she used to ask when we came home from school...

...When we ask a taxi driver to point out Aleja Szucha, where we sometimes came on Sundays to eat dinner with our Aunt Eva, he tells us that is where Gestapo headquarters had been...

...Stone has pointed out, that the fate of Jews everywhere is tied to Israeli politics, but Israel is as much a foreign country to us as China...

...We need to know who we are, to understand what we sprang from and what displaced us...

...It is huge and unkempt...

...When our father was alive, he traveled to Western Europe and to Russia, but he avoided Poland as though it were plague-ridden...

...We fight for human dignity...

...She draws our attention to the floor...

...Now we're not so sure...

...No one has been spared, and no one has forgotten...

...And Wieliszew is the first place we visit on our return to Poland...

...We ask if he knew our family...

...we went to the factory in Bedzin...

...we're awakened in our train by a Soviet customs inspector and a large officer in a beige uniform...

...no one we ever knew owned a prayer shawl or studiedthe Torah...

...For the Poles, the Jewish question is long settled...

...Warsaw is rebuilt and looks different...

...The early morning of September first was clear and wet from an all-night storm, and we'd gone out to ride our bikes on the slippery grass...

...Finally, we go to the Jewish cemetery...

...Soviet regulations forbid us to drive there, and we cross the border by train...

...The large stucco building, painted two shades of pink, is now the regional planning commission...

...We imagine ourselves participating in the Poznan uprising of 1956, serving on the editorial board of the underground newspaper which is currently circulated in Warsaw by dissidents...

...Neither hard work nor death frighten her, but she hasn't dared go back, either...

...This is what we've come for, this simple assurance that in our family history there are those who died in their beds surrounded by grieving children, that their graves can be visited four or five centuries later...

...The details of our dreams are personal to each of us, but the themes are the same: we are being pursued by deadly enemies, we are guilty of an unnamed crime, the landscape is devastated, there is no place to find shelter...

...Solomon was generous and proud, and we are proud to have gained knowledge of his life and his end...

...She feeds us smoked salmon and cold chicken and plies us with questions...

...Preparing to leave Warsaw, we realize that nothing has come clear for us...

...On the high crest of this discourse, having almost missed it in its woodsy seclusion, we stumble onto Treblinka...

...In September 1939, the war found us there...

...It's a wonderful fight, it takes us away from Poland, ourselves, death...

...And we acknowledged the claim...

...The summer house had been ample and orderly, preserves gleaming purple and crimson on sway-bottomed shelves in the pantry...

...On our way from Majdanek to Treblinka, we start an argument which lasts several hours...

...Our family had been assimilated for generations...

...We can identify ourselves as radical intellectuals, but it now seems important for us to seek a broader identity...

...Again, we are told what used to be: the curving staircase has been removed, the balcony cut off, these partitions added...

...Right there, in that house...

...Its shadows are darker, its spaces divided into smaller parcels than we had remembered...

...There is nothing here but stones and granite slabs set into several vast meadows...

...It's a long time since we've experienced the same feelings and been able to share them so directly...

...We had hoped to meet ourselves as children, to erase forty years of history, to pick up our lives where they'd been broken off...

...Our suitcases and a few valuables were packed into the Citroen van which belonged to the family business, and Aunt Eva, dressed in black, stooped on the sidewalk to kiss each of us goodbye, her tears hot on our faces...

...he asks over and over...

...Still, as we learn to ride the busses, cancelling our tickets in the little punch boxes along with the other citizens, we begin to feel at home...

...We remember our father, driving desperately along a rutted track somewhere in these woods, squinting through the bullet-shattered windshield of the Citroen, his thick spectacles askew on his face...

...This is where Solomon received people," the man in suspenders tells us...