BOOKS
ANTI-SEMITE AND JEW
ON THE EDGE OF DESTRUCTION: JEWS OF POLAND BETWEEN
THE TWO WARS.
By
Celia S. Heller.
Columbia University Press.
$14.95.
Before the Second World War Poland was the home of more
than three million Jews (about 10 percent of the country's
population-not the only thing that reminds one at certain points of
America's blacks), members of a community that had been there since
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, achieving a history and cultural
autonomy unique among Europe's Jews. After the war, about 50,000
Jews survived on Polish soil, but along with the effects of twentieth–
century Polish nationalism and brutal Nazi extermination, and a 1968
coup
de grace
by the Communist regime sealed even this surviving
remnant's fate. Today there are perhaps 10,000 Jews left in Poland,
most of them aging and dying, many "passing" and hoping for
invisibility. The goal towards which the Polish government and large
portions of the population-supported by the Church and the
universities - so clamorously yearned between the wars - a Poland free
of Jews-has become a reality, as Celia Heller notes grimly in her fine
study. That the Poles and the Polish nation are no better off than they
ever were is an irony lost on none but the Poles themselves, perhaps–
the sickest Polish joke in history.
Utilizing a rare knowledge of both Yiddish and Polish sources,
Professor Heller invokes the spirits of Weber,
C.
Wright Mills and
E.
H.
Carr by combining an account of this bitter history with
sociological analysis. At its best her work recalls and might well be
accompanied by a reading of Singer's
Family Moskat:
both writers
work from within a deep knowledge of the people, and neither
sentimentalizes nor backs away from the disturbing implications for
Jew and non- Jew of their fate. In doing so, they allow us to experience
that doomed community in all its reality-the profoundest tribute they
can pay to it.
