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differences were supposed to have disappeared under the benevolence of
Socialist Internationalism. Indeed, after decades of silence about the fate of
Jews as individuals and as a people, Polish writers nowadays include Jews
in their fiction as a rite of passage, no doubt overcompensating for what
Jaroslaw Anders has called "a black hole in Polish letters." Displaying a
passionate empathy for Poland's murdered Jews has become the politically
correct, even kosher, thing for a Polish writer to do, as reonfirmed most
recently in Jaroslaw Rymkiewicz's novel
The Final Station: Umschlagplatz,
a dizzying patchwork of fact, time-travel, and postmodern fiction, includ–
ing a deft Isaac Bashevis Singer imitation. Rymkiewicz's fictive stand-in
acknowledges that both Jews and Poles will pounce on him because he is
offering "Christian testimony" about "a Jewish topic" - Warsaw's
Umschlagplat z
(Debarkation Square), a "special realm of the spirit ... a
specific human destiny" from which three hundred and ten thousand Jews
were deported to death camps.
The preoccupation with what Anders has dubbed "the forbidden
zone of collective consciousness" arose in the late 1970s when Polish in–
tellectuals realized that to fully understand themselves as Poles, they
needed to confront and investigate the truth about their own history, for
eight hundred years intertwined in complex ways with the history of the
Jews. Nostalgia, remorse, and shame over the loss of its three million Jews
has evidently been passed on to Poland's generations born after the war,
some of whom have never met a living Jew, but who sense a palpable yet
amorphous loss. Young Polish writers have had to concoct imaginary
Jews, having few left as real models. Unsurprisingly, most have not man–
aged to do more than invoke the cliche ofJews as history's holy or hapless
scapegoats, "magical Jews" or idealized martyrs-to-be bent over a
Talmud. Szczypiorski's depiction ofJews is certainly one of the inherent
weaknesses in both of his novels, but in
A Mass for Arras
he has raised sev–
eral provocative issues. When he writes of desire for unanimity seeming
stronger than desire for truth, and when, at the novel's end, he asks:
"What kind of faith can those on the bottom and those on top have in
common? Those who judge and those who are judged?" we realize that
his despairing cynicism is even more justified today than it was five cen–
turies after those dire events of
1485.
Two new, luminously translated novels,
Annihilation
by a young
Polish journalist, Piotr Szewc, and
The Little Town Where Time Stood Still
by the Czech master Bohumil Hrabal, nostalgically evoke those vanished
worlds of pre-war Poland and Czechoslovakia that in retrospect burst
with color and zest, painfully innocent of what history holds in store for
them. Published to ecstatic reviews in Europe,
Annihilation
was originally
graced with an introduction (omitted by the book's American publisher)
