Poles together and apart
Andro Linklater
SHTETL by Eva Hoffman Secker, £16.99, pp. 269 Laziness can kill. When a peasant in the market-place of Bransk, a small town in Poland 100 miles from the Russian border, tells Eva Hoffman how he helped dispose of Jews who had been murdered by the Nazis, carrying so many corpses in his cart to a mass grave that he had to wash the blood off in the river, the story triggers a chain of associations. Poland after all was where anti-Semitism became most deadly, where the word pogrom was invented, where a population of about three million Jews in 1939 was reduced to around 300,000 by 1945, and, since the war, to less than 10,000. Evidently, the peasant must be part of the national collusion in that holocaust. It is Eva Hoffman's provocative thesis that not only is this lazy thinking, but the ignorance it displays is what makes today's neo-Nazi racism possible.
Herself a Polish, now American, Jew, she has set out to examine the nature of Polish anti-Semitism or, to quote one of many eloquent phrases, `to remember strenuous- ly' what happened to the Jews living in its small towns. Bransk serves as a template, and especially its Jewish shted (the word is Yiddish for little town), the self-contained community which ran most of the shops and markets, and was governed by a mix- ture of rabbis, tradition, and argument. Such was the setting for the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, and more widely for the humane, quarrelsome, schmaltzy image of the Ashkenazi Jew.
Her conclusion is an eye-opener. That the peasant disliked Jews was evident from his pleasure at their absence from a town where they had once constituted almost 20 per cent of the population. But as a boy, in the 1940s when they were starving in their Nazi-created ghetto, he had also taken them food through the barbed wire. A similar pattern of contradictory impulses appears repeatedly in Hoffman's broad sweep through Polish history.
During the 19th and 20th centuries, the number of attacks on Jews, verbal and physical, grew to the point where in the 1930s Jack Rubin, who emigrated from Bransk to America, could say, 'Oh we always knew the Poles were anti-Semites.' Yet for 600 years, until the disintegration of Poland during the Napoleonic wars, the Jews had in fact enjoyed a level of tolera- tion unknown in other European countries; laws protected them from libel and physical attack, and tradition allowed them a degree of independence which amounted to self- government. 'Here they hold those who do ill [to Jews] responsible and punish them severely,' wrote the 16th-century Itzhak of Trok; 'here, they even support Jews with favourable privileges so they can live happi- ly and peacefully.' So conscious were they of Polish attitudes that some Jews conflat- ed 'Poland' with the Hebrew word polin meaning 'here thou shalt lodge', and thought of the country as their promised land.
Much of this toleration may have been the consequence of old Poland's chaotic, mixed (scarcely half the population were actually Poles) clanlike society, and follow- ing its partition in 1815, Jews faced harsher treatment. Bransk, now within the Russian sector, felt the influence of the conquerors' anti-Semitic legislation, but more signifi- cantly the stateless Poles themselves clearly began to take out their humiliation on neighbours who did not share their nation- alist yearnings. Even so, it is a sobering realisation that the incidents, noted in the records of the Bransk shied, are not much worse than those suffered by many West Indian and Asian communities in Britain.
Only in the 1930s, this book argues, when newly independent Poland was racked by unemployment, did organised racism arrive, but then it came with fright- ening violence —• aided by the mutual igno- rance which the shted's inturned existence had fostered. Yet even during the Nazi occupation, Hoffman finds many instances of Poles protecting Jews, among them the Pole-hating Rubin who owed his life to a Polish farmer who sheltered him from the Germans for months.
It is Hoffman's argument that the exclu- siveness of the shied, crucial though it was to Jewish identity, encouraged latent anti- Semitism, and in consequence both Pole and Jew were defenceless against a system- atic racism which played on their strangeness to each other. And because neither now wants to think clearly of the circumstances in which the Holocaust occurred, each remains equally vulnerable to neo-Nazis determined to exploit their ignorance.
Her argument clearly applies to other multicultural societies, and has particular import now that British Muslims have begun to follow the example of educational separatism set by Anglicans, Catholics, and Jews. Ethnic identity bought at the price of isolationism serves neither the smaller nor larger society.
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