MICHAL GOVRIN
The Journey to Poland
In
late October 1975, when I was in my early twenties and completing my
doctorate in Paris, I went to Poland. An almost impossible journey then for
a young woman, alone, wi th an Israeli passport, at the time when there
were no diplomatic relations between the Eastern Bloc and Israel. (It was
only because of a French-Jewish friend, who turned me into a
"Representative of France" at the International Theater Festival in
Wroclaw [Breslau], that I received a special visa for a week.)
The night before the trip, when everything was ready, I called my par–
ents in Tel Aviv and told them. I asked my shocked mother for the exact
address of her family home in Krakow. Only later that winter, when I visited
Israel, clid I understand what profound emotion took hold of my mother's
few surviving friends and relatives from Krakow when they heard of the trip.
A week later I returned to Paris. For twenty-four hours, I closed myself
in my student apartment in the Latin Quarter, far from the Parisian street
scenes, and feverishly wrote to my parents. A letter of more than twenty
pages. First thoughts, a summary of the rapid notes taken on the trip. Even
the words groped for another language, for a clifferent level of cliscourse.
That year, as every year, a commemoration for the Jewish community
of Krakow was held in the aucli torium of my high school in Tel Aviv. News
of my trip and of that letter reached the members of the community, and
they wanted to read it aloud at that commemoration. I agreed, and after it
was commandeered from the family circle, I submitted it for publication to
the literary supplement of the newspaper,
Davar,
with the title, "Letter from
Regions of Delusion" (the expression "Regions of Delusion" borrowed
from the title of a parable attributed to the Ba'al Shem Tov). Aside from
some peripheral changes of style, that text appears here.
Travelling to Poland in '75 was not part of the social phenomenon it
is today. The group definition of "second-generation Holocaust survivors"
hadn't yet been coined. You had to find out everything by yourself. How
to plan the trip and how to feel, how to talk about it. The letter to my par–
ents began a long process of formulation. Even the choice of parents as the
addressees of an intimate cliscourse was not the norm then.
Today, that trip seems like a geological rift that changed my emotional
and intellectual landscape, and placed its seal on my writing. Yet the
