MICHAL GOVRIN
561
is in the squares, in the churches, in the ideologies that allowed what hap–
pened? Prepared it? Didn't prevent it? What inflamed the hatred? What
repressed it under pious words of morality? What fostered it in the heart of
religious belief? What prepared it in the tales of God that man told himself
to justifY the outbursts of his evil instincts under the disguise of
Imitatio Dei?
And what still exists right before my eyes? Keeps on happening?
How to draw the borders between good and bad with a thin scalpel
under a microscope? How to distinguish anew, here and now? All the
time?
And what is the terrorizing persuasive force of tales and of their meta–
morphoses into theologies, ideologies? How to struggle with forgetting,
with denial, without whitewashing, but also without reiterating the same
stories, without inflaming the same evil instincts? How to tell responsibly?
Jarring questions that filled me, that nourished my research, my the–
atrical productions, my literary writing, but did not yet touch Mother's
hidden place.
I spent the summer of '75 between Princeton and New York, collect–
ing material for my doctorate, reading the works of Rebbe Nahman of
Bratzlav in the old JTS library, and in the evenings, swallowing the plethora
of fringe theater, jazz and transvestite clubs, and the international bohemi–
an life of Manhattan. And thus I met that young violinist from Krakow
who had fled Poland, and was working as a cabdriver. A handsome young
man from Krakow. Krakow? A place where people live?! The summer
romance was a way to confront the profound seduction of the depths of
the past stamped in me, as well as the depths of my femininity.
One day that summer, my aunt, Mother's sister-in-law, came to my
apartment in midtown Manhattan. I knew her vaguely from a visi t she had
made to Israel years before, and after the death of Aunt Tonka in Tel Aviv,
my aunt from Queens, the widow of Mother's second brother, who per–
ished in the camps, was her last living close relative. She had survived
Auschwitz and her young son was hidden by a Christian woman. After the
war, my aunt and her son emigrated to New York.
That day, on the balcony on the thirtieth floor, facing the roofs of mid–
town Manhattan, my aunt spoke in broken English only about "then" and
"there," as if here and now didn't exist, as if we had never left there. She
and the Polish pop music at night melted the last wall of resistance. Now
I had no excuse not
to
translate my preoccupation with the subject into
action, no excuse not to go to Poland.
In late October, after the administrative alibi was concocted in Paris, I
left. Ready. And not ready at all.
