Marrying Bert & Ernie: I don't get it

At the risk of being unpopular, I have to say I really don't connect with the campaign to have Bert and Ernie get married.

​Sesame Street's Bert and Ernie have been living together for 40 years. And now, an online petition demanding that Sesame Street allow Bert and Ernie to wed is circulating. As of this posting it has almost 4,500 signatures. "Let us teach tolerance of those that are different," the petition's description reads. "Let Sesame Street and PBS Kids be a big part in saving many worthy lives." Admirable intentions, but are Bert and Ernie even gay? And even if they are, why should two puppets on a kids' show get married? 

We called up the creator of the campaign, Lair Scott, for his perspective on the push to make honest puppets out of Bert and Ernie. 

...Scott was inspired to launch the campaign after noticing a friend's Facebook post about how long Bert and Ernie had been living together in sin. He decided to do something about it. When I asked him whether he was sure Bert and Ernie were in a relationship, he said, "Are you sure?" 

"It's been implied for too long," Scott said. "And especially for the gay community. Even when I was nine years old, I knew that Bert and Ernie weren't just roommates." 

PBS doesn't share Scott's stance on the issue. They would only issue a statement via the Sesame Workshop, which said: 

Bert and Ernie are best friends. They were created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from themselves. Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics (as most Sesame Street Muppets™ do), they remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation. 

​Scott said "they might be best friends, but best friends get married. You live with a guy for 40 years -- come on, Sesame Street." According to Scott, "we're talking about educating children and parents on a new kind of marriage. That's all I can tell them. It's that simple." 

...Elsewhere, the campaign has been met with a mix of bemusement and suspicion. At Videogum, the petition is called "misguided" -- same at Jezebel. And there are a number of counter-petitions springing up at change.org, like "Preserve the Innocence of Sesame Street- Keep Bert and Ernie As Friends!". It's true that Bert and Ernie are merely felt puppets, and probably don't even have sexual organs. Videogum's Gabe argues that "There is...absolutely no reason to brush a patina of ACTUAL SEX onto this relationship." Well, duh.

Here's my thing: it's one thing for someone to come up with their own openly gay characters and have them get married. For me, though, it really comes down to an intellectual property argument. PBS owns the characters, PBS says they aren't gay (or even have a sexual orientation), so therefore, I'm sorry, they're not gay. Yeah, the fact that they've been roommates for forever is, let's say, interesting, but that doesn't make them gay (as plenty of same-gendered roommates can attest, I'm sure).

I'm also a bit uncomfortable with the degree to which a children's show is being politicized (and counter-politicized) by this discussion. By and large, I think kids can handle a lot more than most people give them credit for, so it's not like I think that a 4-year-old's head will explode if B and E come out as gay. By the same token, just because Lair Scott has decided it's "obvious" that B and E are gay doesn't make it so.

From where I'm sitting, this isn't really about preserving innocence or advancing tolerance: it's about who should have control over cultural icons: their creators and owners or the public. Yeah, it's always nice to have public input, but at the end of the day, its PBS' decision to make. Saying B&E should get married because "you think so" is no more legitimate than me demanding that George Lucas make a new Star Wars movie where all the Ewoks are Jewish. (I mean, come on, short, hairy, and living on a place named Endor? Clearly Wicket is long overdue for his Bar Mitzvah. Hop to it, George.)

I wonder if this is at least partially a trickle-down effect of fandom-culture reflecting back on mainstream entertainment. Slash fiction has existed for decades using popular characters ranging from Harry Potter all the way back to Kirk & Spock. While some writers and franchises have encouraged or at least been open to fan creations using their characters, many haven't. I don't know how many instances there have been where fans have (seriously) demanded that creators of a character write the fans' own interpretation of relationships or character dynamics into the canonical material. But maybe I'm just over-thinking this. And given that we're debating the romantic lives of two puppets who don't even have lower torsos, that could be entirely possible.

Alyssa Rosenberg said the same thing a few days ago but clearer, more concise, and without a single Ewok joke or reference to Slash fiction. If only I was that talented.

Meeting the family

Day 10- Cousins!

We had been very anxious that everything go well for meeting our Polish cousins. Initially we had wanted to take them out to a restaurant, but then we decided we didn't want to seem too flashy (and besides, Abbot Yid's food allergies kept rearing their annoying heads). So instead we offered to feed them at our apartment.

We met Mama Yid's third cousin, who I'll call Paula, her son Janusz and his wife Zofia. Paula was around 60 and only spoke Polish. Janusz spoke some English but mostly Zofia did the translating for everyone. They stayed about four hours, telling us all about their lives, their family, and their past. They said that before I had contacted them a few years ago didn't know they had any family outside of Poland.

Paula said her father's family had considered themselves very Polish before the war. They had gone to Polish schools, had Polish names, spoke Polish at home, etc. An uncle had even been an officer in the Polish army. They had known they were Jewish, of course, but it had been a part, rather than the sum, of their identity.

Paula's father Feliks had been in his early twenties during the war. His two brothers were killed-- one was shot and another may have been deported. His father died of a heart attack and he never found out how his mother died. He and his sister Eva had been hiding when the ghetto was liquidated and then they spent two years in one of the local slave labor camps. Conditions there were very hard. Once his sister got sick with typhus, and he stole an apple to give to her. Her was caught and severely beaten for it.

Janusz mentioned that he had been told a story when he was young about Feliks: during the war he had spent time hiding in a sewer. As a result he suffered from permanent claustrophia: anytime he came into a room he would open all the doors and windows.

Only Feliks, Eva, and their uncle the army officer survived the war. They came back to their homes but Poles were living in them. They moved to a nearby city and found jobs. The uncle died soon after the war ended from cancer, possibly caused by chemicals they were forced to use in the labor camp.

One of the things I was most curious about was why Feliks had stayed in Poland. So many other Jews survived the war and decided to leave, either for Israel, America, Canada, Australia, etc. But not him. Why?

Paula said he would have liked to leave Poland, but that her step-mother didn't-- she felt Poland was their home and that they should stay (I never found out whether she was Jewish or Catholic). Feliks and his sister were very close, but she wanted to go to Israel, and moved in 1956. She wanted to come back and visit but the Polish government wouldn't let her in. When Paula went for a visit in 1967 the war broke out and she flew back immediately. The Polish authorities were suspicious and interrogated her three times to make sure she wasn't a spy. They only stopped after her father paid them a visit and had "harsh words" with them. After Communism ended Eva visited several times. Paula proudly told us she had been on seven trips to Israel.

I asked the family about Jewish identity, but they seemed confused by my questions. They saw no difference between themselves and any others Poles. Yes, there was some antisemitism, they said, but nothing significant. Paula said she hadn't known she was Jewish until she was a young adult, but that it didn't make her feel different. Janusz agreed.

I commented that in America, people often felt like they had an epiphany when they found out something important or hidden about their roots, but that maybe things were different in Poland. Abbot Yid later suggested that maybe this had something to do with the cultural legacy of communism, under which people were encouraged not to stand out or to focus on things that made them different from each other-- the common culture was what was important.

While it was wonderful to see all three of our relatives, Paula was a real hoot. She immediately invented pet names for both my parents, and when I commented on the similarity between her and Mama Yid's haircuts and that they had both worn red shirts, she harrumphed and smiled. "Of course we look alike," she said in Polish. "We're cousins!"

We told them that the next stop on our trip would be Krakow and that this would include a visit to Auschwitz. I said that even though I knew it would be hard I thought it was important that we had spent time understanding how the family had lived before seeing how they had died. I added, "And something we have, which I am so grateful for, and which I know most people don't have, is the first-hand knowledge and perspective that this was not the end, that both the family and Jewish life did not end at Auschwitz. I know that we are still here, in Poland."

To see the family right in front of me, to meet meet living, breathing cousins on Polish soil, made the years of dry research in archives and on computers really come alive. I wouldn't have traded it for anything.

Talking around a subject

I came across an interesting news article at Ynet this morning:

The Romanian Academy will alter its definition of an anti-Semitic slur in a dictionary to make it clear the word is pejorative. 

The academy wrote to the Center for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism on Wednesday, saying it should have described the word as pejorative. The DEX dictionary says the term is used in a "familiar" sense but omits that it is an anti-Semitic slur. 

The academy said in a letter "we will do all we can to make an immediate and permanent correction of its definition".

The center had protested the usage of the word, saying it was "heard by Jews when they were put on the trains of death," referring to the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Romanian Jews in World War II.

Slurs are bad. Makes sense. But, I was curious, what exactly was the slur?

There was a link to another Ynet article, so I tried that. It had more details, but still no slur.

A prominent Jewish group on Monday called on the Romanian Academy to change its dictionary definition of an anti-Semitic slur to make it clear that it is a pejorative. 

Maximilian Katz, director of the Center for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism, told the Associated Press in an interview Monday that the commonly used Romanian word is offensive, but that is not explained in the official DEX dictionary. 

He says the word was "heard by the Jews when they were put on the trains of death," referring to the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Romanian Jews in WWII.

"The Romanian Academy have taken a deeply anti-Semitic expression and transformed it into a legitimate word," he told the AP. The dictionary explains it is used in a "familiar" sense but omits that it is anti-Semitic.

The two-page letter said that the slur "is racist, it shows hatred toward the Jewish race, hatred toward the Jewish religion, it defames Jews on ethnic grounds and incites violence against them."

It says that usage of the word is illegal in Romania because it falls under a law banning symbols with a fascist, racist or xenophobic character. Breaking the law is punishable by fines and prison. 

...The word is the most offensive that exists in the Romanian language for a Jew, but it is also used colloquially by mainly elderly Romanians who would not consider themselves anti-Semitic. 

...Csaba Ferenc Asztalos, the director of Parliament's National Council for Combating Discrimination who also received a copy of the letter said he agreed with the Jewish group. "Their request is justified," he said in a phone interview. "The word must show the real sense, that it is pejorative, that it is racist for both Jews and Gypsies."

Man, this word is one terrible bastard. But what is it?

Seriously, media. I get that the word is offensive. I really do. But since most people reading this story aren't octogenarian Romanians, you may want to actually tell us what the word is. Now you're just forcing us to use our terrible and inappropriate imaginations.  At least give us a hint! Beardies? Goldpinchers? Hemosexuals? Help me out here, my racist Romanian slur knowledge is quite poor. Not to mention that repeating "the word"and "the slur" fifteen times makes your reporting sounds downright silly.

To Google!

...Lame, Google, very lame.

Ok, what about... this?

Fine, you don't want to help. I get it. Everyone just keeps ripping off the two AP articles. Be that way. Maybe there's some original reporting somewhere.

... After ten minutes of clicking links, I finally found it, courtesy of JTA:

JTA- Romania's highest cultural forum, following a request by a watchdog group, agreed to make clear in the definition of an anti-Semitic slur that the word is a pejorative. 

The Center for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism on Tuesday had urged the The Romanian Academy to change its definition in the official DEX dictionary, or The Explanatory Dictionary of the Romanian Language, of the word "jidan."

Thank you. Was that so hard?

(I wonder if this is what it's like trying to read frum newspapers...)

Reflecting

Cross-posted to my quasi-defunct Too Cool for Shul.

It's been almost a whole year since my shul-angst post. In that time the job situation has mostly stayed the same, Shiksa Girlfriend has become Mrs. Yid, and we probably haven't been to shul more than a handful of times.

So what to make of this?

For starters, I think we've been very busy with the wedding and family stuff and so shul took a backseat. The other thing is that we spent a lot of time thinking about, and talking about, explicitly Jewish things we wanted to include in our marriage and present/future household and so I think neither of us were necessarily feeling particularly Jewishly deprived.

We also have been trying to be slightly more machmir about doing Shabbat regularly, which is nice.

Still, I think we are going to try to pick up the shul-reins some more and keep plugging away. This last Shabbat we went to Evil Minion again and it was perfectly nice. We haven't decided where to go for High Holidays this year, though we're leaning towards Temple GLBT (particularly since the rabbi that married us is a quasi-regular participant there). At some point we will finally bite the bullet and either try very hard to make some friends, or take a class or, heaven forbid, actually join a shul and see what it's like. Just because we feel like a super awkward special case doesn't mean we actually are.

And anyway, at least now that she has a ring on her finger, Mrs. Yid won't have to worry about people thinking she's only at shul for the (kosher) meat-market.

...Strangely enough, I never have this problem.

Do not pass go, do not collect anything

Sorry to be trading in frum-bashing the first day after Tisha B'Av (hope those fasting had an easy time of it), but I've got to say something:

The recent murder of Rav Elazar Abuhatzeira is many things. It is horrible. It is shocking. It is, perhaps, yet another wakeup call to the fact that frum communities are not immune from mental illness, emotional instability or violence. It may also highlight the dangers of groupthink, yes-men, and of people whose charisma overwhelm both their own common sense and the ability of their family and friends to help protect them from themselves and their own perhaps unhealthy tendencies.

However, there are some things the Baba Elazar's murder is most certainly not:

1- It is not "Divine punishment" for Jewish sins (Haredi singing, in Amnon Yitzhak's case).

2- It is not, not, a "sacrifice" to spare collective punishment for those aforementioned sins (the gay pride parade in Jerusalem, in Lazer Brody's case). The fact that "leading rabbis," including the Baba Elazar's own family members, are even engaging in this kind of thought experiment is quite disturbing and, frankly, sick. I wish the Abuchatzeira family support and strength as they work to move on from this tragedy, but suggesting that the rabbi's brutal death was a message from God as a wake-up call or a sacrifice to save world Jewry is nothing short of disgusting. If it's a wake-up call about anything, it should be that there are dangerous people in all sorts of communities, and that putting all of your faith and mental sense in the hands of a single leader, be they spiritual, political or whatever, is at best a bad idea and at worst can lead to terrible disillusionment.

Extra awful points to Lazer for stepping even further past the boundary of good taste and including another murder victim, 8-year-old Leiby Kletzky, in the most obscene bit of theodicy he's come up with since Hurricane Katrina. (Lazer also includes the recently-deceased Spinka rebbe and Lithuanian Rav Michel Lefkowitz as a proof that tzaddikim from all segments of world Jewry are being "sacrificed." In this reading, there's no substantial difference between a 79 or 97-year-old dying in their bed surrounded by loved ones and a terrified rabbi or child being viciously murdered by a crazed knife-wielding maniac. Go figure.)

I don't have a grudge against frum people, I really don't. But reading things like this, it's very hard to see or feel very much of a connection between my Judaism and Lazer's. To be honest, it feels like we're on different planets. The one bright side is that I found at least one frum woman (who seems pretty Haredi to boot) who seems to not trust Lazer and his pals farther than she can throw them. I guess there's hope?

Hat-tip: Failed Messiah.

Going with the Flow

Day 9- Taking it easy.

It rained the whole day. Up until now we had been running full throttle, but the bad weather combined with the exhaustion from the previous day took their toll. I was also discovering the challenges of traveling with sixty-year-olds (not as much stamina as their son half their age) as well as the unique issues of being in a country where you can't speak the language.

Case in point: Washing machines. In Warsaw we had a washing machine with English instructions on it. There was no dryer, though. Instead there were a couple of drying racks. This seemed a little odd but we ran with it. In Cz we were staying in a pretty new apartment building, with one small washing machine for the whole building in the basement. Again, no dryer, just a drying rack. This time, things were a little trickier, though. For one thing, the directions were in Polish. For another, everyone in the building's default mode seemed to be to both unplug and turn off the water flow to the washer after each use.

The last detail is extra fun: European washing machines lock once you turn the wash cycle on.

Have you guessed the problem yet? Yeah. So the first night I spent a couple of hours pressing random buttons until my clothes finally got washed. The second night Mama Yid encouraged me to put Abbot Yid's clothes in for a spin. Even though I had downloaded English instructions off the web, the darned thing still wouldn't work-- and so Abbot Yid went to bed with his clothes "trapped" in the basement overnight. (I'd say he suffered in silence except that would be a huge lie.) By the amazing power of Polish laundry gremlins (or maybe the kindly building super who also helped us work the automatic gate opener), the washer finally turned on in the middle of the night and by the morning his clothes were clean and accessible, albeit very wrinkly. It turns out that in Europe most people don't have dryers, so the clothes tend to be lighter and the spin cycle of the washing machine can be set higher to get more water out (one of the ones we saw went up to 1400 rpm).

After all that misheggos, we were ready to take it easy, especially with it pouring buckets outside. However, just for fun, the powers-that-be decided that this would be a great day for some construction workers to install a giant air conditioner in the apartment next-door, something which they first had to saw through the outside wall to do. Poland, where nothing is easy! Combined with Abbot Yid's residual irritation from the trapped laundry the night before, we were all a little on edge.

We were supposed to spend the afternoon with Pavel and his family looking at castles in the area, but I knew that my parents weren't up for that, particularly in the rain (for reasons never explained, Mama Yid neglected to bring any shoes that weren't open-toed...) It was frustrating that things were taking so long to come together. There were a bunch of things I wanted to do and it seemed like time was running out. Besides the castles I had also really wanted to see the Old Town where the Jewish quarter had been. Instead my parents said they wanted to go to the mall to get groceries to entertain our relatives the next day. I had waited years to come here, had no idea when I'd get a chance to come back and they wanted to go to a mall? I was pretty peeved.

We finally got into the car and Abbot Yid asked for directions. "The mall is past the end of the Avenue," I said. "We're not going there," he said. "We decided Old Town would be more interesting, and it has some markets, too."

Moral for me: spend less time pouting and more time listening!

Despite the bad weather, the outing wasn't bad. Mama Yid wanted to buy jewelry-- something I normally had very little patience for but since she had been such a good sport so far, it seemed only fair. Besides, it happened to be next-door to a family address I had read about for years: Number 12 Aleja street, a huge apartment building that had held more than 20 Jewish businesses, a Yiddish theater, a cinema, and a cafe/tea house run by my mother's relative, Dr. Lolek's father. That had been in the 1920s. Now it had been gutted and converted into a mall. I still felt like I needed to look through, though.

There were five floors including the basement, all full of small to medium-sized shops: clothes, electronics, furniture, etc. The top floor had an English school. The basement had, among other things, a Polish sex shop (pretty tame by US standards, mostly bachelor/bachelorette party stuff). It felt surreal that so much could be packed into such a small space-- but then again, that seemed like a good metaphor for Poland and our trip in general: there was a lot to unpack. I left feeling happy that I had made it to Number 12 but sad that, other than the outside facade, there was nothing left of its history (another metaphor?)

My parents continued on to the covered open-air market and I said I would run around Old Town for 20 minutes and meet them. Old Town was separated from the newer part of the city by the train tracks, and I decided to follow them to start off. Most of the buildings looked depressingly grey, a feature emphasized by the rain. The newer buildings looked run-down, the ones positively decrepit. I ducked into a few courtyards just to see the layout, then ducked out quickly in case anyone thought I was being creepy.

Check out the street name. Peek-a-Jew.

I tried to find the New Synagogue (more Reform-oriented) which was now the city Philharmonic but it was surrounded by scaffolding since it was being renovated. I walked on trying to find the mikvah-- a long, orange rectangular building, mostly closed down with quite a few broken windows. Some plaques near the far end announced that this was the future site of the Jewish Social Club. I smirked. Dina had very bluntly contradicted me when I said there were a few dozen Jews still in the city according to the landsleit organization online. "There's one," she had said. "One one woman, and maybe another guy, but it's hard to tell. He says he found out his heritage late in life, but she says he's lying. When there's two Jews in town they're bound to argue, right?" I had deferred to Dina though I had seen pictures of the opening of the social club online. Now it seemed like maybe the truth was somewhere in between.

Time was running out so I ran back to meet up with my parents. There were other things I had wanted to see: the Old Synagogue (Classic Orthodox), or the Jewish hospital where Lolek worked, or the monument for the labor camp where about fifteen of Mama Yid's cousins had worked during the war. But even if I couldn't seem them with my own eyes, I knew they were there-- or had been there. After the miracle at the cemetery, everything else seemed like a bonus.

Later I met up with Pavel and his family, explaining that my parents were too tired to go castle-hunting with us but that they would meet us later. Even though it was pouring, Pavel and Olga were determined to be excellent hosts and take me where I wanted to go. We arrived at the small town of Olsztyn and walked out towards the small mountain where the ruined castle stood.

Pavel explained that Olsztyn was not built to be grand or fancy like the castles for kings or bishops but something simple designed for defensive purposes, a garrison for soldiers. The ruined keep loomed on top of the hull with the tower standing tall and lonely. Far off on the other side of the plateau, one last square structure held fast against the whipping wind and rain.

We walked up for a bit until it got too steep and muddy and then headed back down. I told him the stories about Jacob Frank, the messianic leader of a quasi-Jewish sect, part Shabbetai Tzvi and part Rasputin. Frank had been allies with several high-ranking Polish bishops and had helped give support to various anti-Jewish persecutions, including denouncing the Talmud and supporting the blood libel. Eventually Frank converted to Catholicism, though this was then followed by his arrest by the church after it was reported that he still engaged in cultist practices. For thirteen years, he was a prisoner in the monastery at Czestochowa. During this time, he continued to conduct his own rituals and was given permission to receive visitors. While it's not known whether the city became a Frankist "hub" per se, there were certainly prominent Frankists who settled in the area.

In the surviving writings of the sect, it includes several mentions of Olsztyn and the caves under the castle. Not only were Frank's wife and son buried there after their deaths, but supposedly one of his followers (though perhaps just a "spirit") lived in the cave and guarded the group's treasury.

While I was disappointed not to be able to see the caves, the bad weather certainly added to the spooky atmosphere!

Driving back, I told Pavel and Olga the story of the cemetery the day before. Pavel was both happy for me, but also a bit upset. "As a Pole, I ashamed that students from Israel must come to Poland to clean up Polish graves. Our leaders often talk about Polish graves in the East that are mistreated by the Russians and how we must protect them, but here we have graves right in our faces and no one does anything." He went on, "I grew up in this city and learned about our history, but the only real contact I had with the Jewish history was a student trip to Auschwitz. I have learned more about the Jewish history of the city from you than I ever did in school."

I said it was a shame that all the focus of the area was centered on the monastery. Not that it wasn't important, but that it wasn't the only thing that happened there.

"Exactly!" he agreed. "You have Jewish history, Catholic history, political and cultural sites, not just Jasna Gora!"

"The irony," I said, "is that if the city would put some money into restoring and promoting some of the other sites it would bring more visitors. Instead all people know about is the Black Madonna."

They came back with me to dinner and we had a great time, discussing history, culture, the smashing of stereotypes and the complicated nature of family. Pavel mentioned that many Poles of his parents' age had been stuck between the failed system of Communism and of trying to chase the American dream of uber-capitalism, sometimes with pretty mixed results. It was a fascinating glimpse of how culture and cultural desires, such as acquisitiveness, is spread globally.

After lots of group pictures, I told Pavel, Olga and Yulia that we truly felt like they were a part of our family and that we looked forward to seeing them again soon.

Making Connections

[Although I've been back home for a few days, I will be continuing to post excerpts from my trip journal.]

Day 8- Cemetery Day!

We woke up early and Abbot Yid and I headed into town to try to find a better map of the area at the tourist center. This became its own adventure as the major boulevard of the city (which runs west-east from the monastery) was undergoing renovation work, and most of the north-south streets are either tiny or have a bad habit of suddenly becoming one-way streets or dead-ends. We finally got to the tourist center and got a better map. Coming out of the center, we ran smack-dab into a statue of a famous Polish poet, next to the high school named after him. This school was where Pavel had attended as a student, along with several of Mama Yid's distant relatives in the early 1900s. Looking at the school was bittersweet. On the one hand, it was nice to see that some traces of our family were still there in the town-- that some of the places they had touched and spent time had lasted. At the same time, I couldn't look at the building without thinking of what happened to those cousins:

One of them, Lolek, had done quite well in school. He graduated from high school with a certificate in Biology, then attended the University of Vilna in Lithuania as well as the Sorbonne in Paris, eventually graduating as a Surgeon. Lolek had easily been the most educated of anyone in his family, and was the first to enter the medical profession before Mama Yid many decades later. Had he stayed in France, or immigrated to America, who knows what might have become of him? Instead, tragically, he returned to Poland, to work in the Jewish Hospital in Cz. He lasted most of the war in one of the labor camps in the town making munitions, but was transferred to Buchenwald in early 1945 when the Nazis liquidated them ahead of the Soviet advance. He died just a few months before Soviet liberation, and his widow died in Los Angeles a few years ago.

So much promise, so much potential... a healer, a man who had devoted his life to helping people... and it hadn't mattered.

The big goal for the day was to find the Jewish cemetery and to see if we could find my great-great-great-grandfather Hirshel. GoogleMaps had made it sound like it was a straight shot once you were on the right road, but once we were driving out of town we realized it was a little more complicated than that. We drove until the road ended, in a mud slick by the outskirts of a small suburb. I checked the map. The problem was that the cemetery was in the middle of the forest, and the forest was growing between the road and the cemetery. I said it looked like we could just walk from there, but Abbot Yid wasn't interested in leaving the car in the middle of nowhere. So we got back in and tried again, this time sticking to the paved road. We took that road as far as we could until it dead-ended by an aluminum shop next to the river. According to the map the cemetery was on the other side.

Abbot Yid and I got out and chatted up a worker who had come out from the shop to see what we were up to. He looked like Wilford Brimley in overalls and a trucker hat. Using my extensive Polish skills plus the fine art of pantomime, I asked if we were close to the Jewish cemetery. He nodded, and proceeded to give me a two-minute animated speech in Polish. (Since I couldn't understand a thing I just watched him for body language.) We established that the cemetery was walkable from there, and also asked if we could leave the car there. He nodded and waved cheerfully.

To cross the river, we had to duck under gigantic water pipes (Pavel later explained that these pipes took water from the river and heated it to provide steam to the apartments in the city) and cross a railroad trestle. Abbot Yid remarked that only I would consider something like this a vacation.

We came to a clearing and saw a young Polish man walking from the left with a wheelbarrow with some wood stacked in it. I said Dzien dobry but he ignored me and just kept walking away, whistling to himself. We followed the way he had come and after a minute the trees gave way into another clearing, this time with a stone wall. We had found the cemetery! There was a small bus by the gate and I said Dzien dobry to the driver, who responded, "Hi!" He said he was there with an Israeli tour group that was there cleaning up the cemetery. I said we were looking for a grave. A number of years ago I had the good fortune to find part of the cemetery data online. It had been recorded by a researcher from Israel named Binyamin. He had the grave number and even a picture of Tzvi Hirsch's grave. I had been amazed and excited-- though this diminished slightly after I showed the picture to a friend and he pointed out that I had been holding it sideways the whole time and that the tombstone was on its side.

I had printed out a picture of the tombstone along with a map of the cemetery. I figured since we had the number of the stone and we knew what it looked like, it couldn't be all that hard. The driver pointed us in the approximate area where it might be, and went back to his bus. "Good luck," he said doubtfully.

As soon as he left us, I realized what he had meant. I had been in cemeteries in New York and they were challenging to walk through, but it was nothing like this. The forest had literally taken over the grounds. In places the trees were so dense you could barely see the sky. Still, I started hunting. I knew we were looking for a distinctive grave that had a round top but pointy side-corners, with a three-petaled flower on the side. And we had the grave number, that would help, right?

As we started looking, though, I started feeling a small pit in my stomach. There were no numbers on any of the stones. Only about a third were left standing. The others were  jutting out at impossible angles from the ground, if they weren't lying face down and being grown over by weeds and grass. It looked like a hurricane had whipped through the place. There weren't even any paths. You could only get from one place to another by walking on the toppled stones. Every step I took, I was either stepping on someone's tombstone or their grave itself. It wasn't creepy as much as sad-- that this was all that was left.

Mama Yid's family were Kohanim, so I tried to look for Kohan hands extended in Vulcan-salute. But even then, I realized there was no way this was going to work. There were just too many graves, and too much forest. The pointy-cornered stone was not much help-- the style had been a popular choice, as had the three-petaled flower. We found some Kohanim, but none were inside the distinctive shape-- curved but with corners, almost like a policeman's badge-- that was on Hirshel's stone.

"I didn't realize it would be so hard," I said. I felt embarrassed. We had come so far to do this, and I hadn't had any sort of plan for finding the grave! I just thought it would happen. It had been stupid of me. "You'd need a miracle to find him here."

Mama Yid said she was going to ask the students for help. I was resistant, at first. It sounded like some of them were speaking Polish. Maybe the Israelis were working with local Poles? But in any case, it was good they were cleaning up the place, but that didn't mean they could help me find a grave. And if the Polish kids couldn't even read Hebrew, how could they even know what was there? It was hopeless. Part of this was also that I felt embarrassed that we couldn't find it ourselves and that I hadn't thought about how hard it might be. I was also a little nervous about talking to the Israelis. What if they didn't want to help?

Still, Mama Yid went and asked. We went up to a student and said hello. They weren't super confident in English so they went and got their teacher, Dina. She was in her early 50s and was direct and brash in a way that made her both slightly intimidating as well as immediately likable. She said they were from a high school in Jerusalem and had been coming to Poland to clean up cemeteries and to archive the data. My ears perked up.

I told her we were looking for a grave that had been catalogued by Binyamin years earlier. She sighed. "He had no system. You'll never find it that way. No chance. But, if you're lucky, we might have already documented it. Let me get my laptop."

As she fired it up, Abbot Yid said this was an incredible coincidence. Dina shot back immediately, "I don't believe in coincidences." As we made some small talk I mentioned my involvement with different genealogy organizations focusing on the Cz area.

Dina nodded. "Yeah, I have some problems with them. Then again, they have some problems with me. They charge people to look at cemetery data, and I think that's wrong. How it a 90-year-old lady looking for her family's tombstones supposed to pay that? So I do the same work and give it away free, and they don't like that very much." She also had some harsh words for the landsmanschaft organizations. "I've asked them for donations-- this whole project is all run on donations. The kids raise money in Israel to get here. This is their break before they go into the army, this is what they want to do. And so when someone tells me they'll give me 50,000 dollars, and then I call them ten times and never hear from them again, yeah, it's frustrating. I'd rather they give $100 and follow through on it." I made a mental note to send her a check when all this was over.

Dina asked me to repeat the name and found a match. "I've got him." She read off a plot and grave number. "He's in the Kohen section."

We followed her back to where we started, but this time went much further left from the main path. As we walked I stayed close to her with my parents following behind. She told me more about Binyamin and his methods. "He just started from the front and numbered every stone he saw. There was no organization. Before he died he gave me his blessing to continue his work, but this time in a systematic way, so future generations could come back and find them again."

Dina started walking into the tall grass. She hunted for a while and then came back. "There's no way we're getting in there. It's just too dense. But that also makes me think it's not the right spot. If I have him recorded on my computer then it has to be an area that we catalogued a few years ago." She and I retraced our steps a little and then tried branching off again. I felt my whole body clench. The thought that after all this we still might not find him was too much to think about. We had to see him. I had to see him.

Dina stopped by a stone. She and I were far ahead of my parents now. "What number did you have on that picture?"

"702."

"Well I have 703 here."

I perked up. "So it should be nearby, right?"

As always, she wouldn't give an inch. "Maybe. With Binyamin, who knows?"

We searched near 703-- there was one grave to the right and another to the left, but both were too small to be Hirshel's. I again began to wonder if we would ever find the grave. I tried to stay positive without getting my hopes up.

We had come from the left, so I decided to take another look to the right. The trees were very dense there, so low I had to crouch. The ground was covered in brambles and thorns. On my right there was grass taller than me. I kept trudging. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a shape-- a stone lying on its side. With a corner. The stone was leaning against a tree, just like in my picture.

Somehow, I knew it-- I knew that this was Hirshel. Waiting for us.

"I think I found it!" I ran over, ducking under trees, hopping over roots. I could only see the back of the stone. I was totally focused on getting to the other side. Nothing else mattered now-- not the trees, not the mosquitoes, not the cloudy sky above us.

I came around the side of the stone and scanned it: the left corner with the small three-petaled flower we had seen on so many others; the angle of the stone against the tree; the symbol of the Kohanim with the fingers arranged into a V-- but unlike all the others, placed into a spiky sideways oval, like a policeman's badge.

Despite some lessons with a tutor, my Hebrew was still extremely basic, but I could sight-read enough to confirm the inscription: "Tzvi Hirsh ben Meir Hakohen." My ancestor.

"I found him!" They all came running. Dina read off the tombstone and confirmed it. We had him. I got to work scraping off the moss with a wireless card we had gotten from the airport. Dina had said I should have the honor of the mitzvah.

It took about thirty minutes. My parents made small talk with Dina but I stayed totally focused. I scraped and scraped and when the card couldn't do any more, I used my hand, rubbing the sandstone until my fingers were raw As a finishing touch, Dina gave me some chalk to rub on the inscription, making the iconography and lettering pop out.

I stood there with the stone, speechless. Dina said she had to get back to her students but that they would be there if I wanted to say Kaddish. I nodded and said we would meet them back at the gate.

Abbot Yid asked me how I felt and I honestly there were no words. I had gone from such highs to lows and then back again that I was totally overwhelmed. There had been times that I thought it was hopeless and impossible, that I would never get to Poland, never make it to Czestochowa, never cajole my parents to coming to the cemetery, never find the stone. And yet, now, amazingly, we were here, with Hirshel. Exactly where we needed to be. It was seemed so hard, and yet now it was incredibly simple. I ran my fingers along the edges, feeling the chisel marks on the edge.

Hirshel was the only one from my mother's family with a grave. The only physical proof that her family had lived on this soil, in this place, for over one hundred and fifty years. He couldn't bring any of them back, of course. Not the ancestors who died long before the war or the relatives who had been murdered during it. But he could testify to their history. They had existed. That had been there. They had lived, right there. A legacy people had tried so hard to erase from the earth, so fragmented and limited, but here he was, right in front of me. My roots, brought to life.

I wanted to say Kaddish for him right there, as a personal link between us. But the words wouldn't come. I leafed through the bentscher I had brought from home but it wasn't in there. I stood there and tried over and over, "Yitbarach v'yishtabach...", but couldn't continue. I was ashamed at my ignorance. We had come so far and achieved so much, but this simple act of saying Kaddish for my ancestor at his grave was something I didn't have the tools to do. I wanted so much to honor my ancestors and their heritage, was respected (if only begrudgingly) by the rest of the family for being "so Jewish" but was still lacking basic Jewish literacy. What would Hirshel think of me, a descendant so ignorant he couldn't even say Kaddish for him? For the first time, I felt like crying. Not for Hirshel, but for myself.

My parents tried to make me feel better, pointing out that it would still be respectful to say Kaddish at the gates. I nodded. Before we left, I said the only thing I could: the Shehecheyanu: "Baruch Atah Adonai Eloheinu Melech Ha Olam, Shehechayanu, V'Kiyimanu, V'Higianu Lazman Hazeh." Blessed are You Adonai our God, King of the Universe, who has granted us life, sustained us and enabled us to reach this  moment.

We walked back to the gate. The kids were gone, back working with the Polish men, who were collecting the chopped trees to take back to their homes for firewood. Yet when Dina called them back, they all appeared out fo the forest, like mythical creatures conjured up; Jews sprouting from the stones and trees to make a minyan, to do one more mitzvah, to try to make things a little better in the world.

Dina gave me a yarzeit candle. I lit it while she opened her prayer book and her kids made a wide circle. She handed me the book. "I can't read it," I whispered, too embarrassed to look her students in the eyes. "I'll lead and you follow," she said, without a trace of judgment.

That was exactly what we did, line by line, in the minyan of young Israelis, my middle-aged American parents, and one old Catholic Pole. Though I had wanted so much to say it alone, it also felt right to do it this way. In a minyan, as part of a community. The way Kaddish is supposed to be said.

We finished and I was so choked up I could barely speak. My embarrassment of my lack of Hebrew, my apprehension of being judged, all of it was gone. All that had mattered in that moment was the idea of family, of doing the decent and kind thing. It was incredibly powerful.

"Thank you," I said, wishing desperately I knew how to say the words in Hebrew. The kids nodded, as if it had been nothing and went back to work, doing on last mitzvah for those who could never say thank you.

We walked back with the students, some of whom were making a film for their class. Dina said they'd like to talk with us on camera. She remarked, "Just yesterday they were asking if anyone really cares about this stuff, if it really matters to anyone. And I told them, every trip, there's always someone who shows up looking for someone. They didn't believe me, but now it happened to them."

While the kids were setting up their shot, Dina explained their itinerary. "This is our last day here. Tomorrow we head to Lodz for Shabbat." I felt goosebumps popping all over my neck. Earlier that morning, when it had looked like it might rain, we had talked about going shopping that day and saving the cemetery for tomorrow. If we hadn't been there that day, they would have been gone, and I was sure now that we would never have found the grave.

We spoke on camera a little: I told them, "My mother's grandfather was from Czestochowa and his grandfather and namesake is buried here. What you have done for us-- what you're doing here-- is incredible." Before we left, Dina mentioned that were just five days away from Hirshel's yarzeit. One hundred and thirty-four years and we happened to come right before the anniversary of his death. We weren't the kind of epople who believed in fate of coincidence, but as Dina said, "Sometimes the separation between their world and ours is not so big."

As we left, we told Dina they had friends in San Francisco and that we would try to do what we could to help them continue their work. We couldn't explain what had happened, exactly. It wasn't logical. But someone or something had wanted us to find Hirshel's grave that day, and it happened.

The rest of the afternoon was relatively uneventful. One thing we did was find the monument at the Umschagplatz-- the site where the city's Jews had been deported to Treblinka. We drove until we found a spot near the end of town by the river and train tracks. The monument had been designed by a survivor from the city and paid for by the global Landsmanschaft. It consisted of a massive brick wall, with a large star of David on one side and a set of train tracks on the other, both made of iron. A giant crack broke the wall in two, symbolizing the destruction and trauma of the Holocaust. The plaques below, in Polish, English, Hebrew and Yiddish, spoke of the deaths of the 40,000 Jews of the city and concluded with, "Their memory be honored!"

I thought it was interesting that the plaque spoke of singular, communal memory, and that it was not phrased as a request, but a command, or perhaps, a commandment? (It made me think of Fackenheim's '614th commandment'- "Do not give Hitler posthumous victories.") Before we left, I had Abbot Yid take a picture of me at the monument. I stood right in the gap, one hand on each side, bridging the divide, re-establishing the connection. Yes, the break had happened, and we could never go back. Things could never be like they had been before (isn't that always the way of history?), and in some ways, that was a good thing. But to use the break as a rationale to shun the past, to denigrate our history and our ancestors along with it, was a mistake. If enough people took the time and made the effort, like me, like Dina, and even like my parents, we could be a bridge, a conduit between the Old the New Worlds, between the past and future. That was what my work in genealogy, and really the whole trip, was about.

We were supposed to spend time with Pavel and his family that afternoon, but after an emotional day we were all feeling drained. We had Polish-style spaghetti and meat sauce for dinner and went to bed early, exhausted. We all felt like we had been in a movie or something. The day had been incredibly powerful. We had started that morning optimistic and naive, not realizing how daunting the task would be. Then, faced with the reality of what we were trying to do, we had needed a miracle, and somehow, incredibly, we had gotten one. What else could we say.

A million thank yous to Dina, her students, and their ongoing project to clean and catalogue Jewish cemeteries in Poland. The only thing I can think of to sum up is to say this: They are doing holy work, and anything anyone can do to help them is a profound mitzvah.

Face-to-Face

Day 7- Our first day in Cz, a city I've been curious about since age twelve. It felt amazing to finally be there. Our apartment was near the famous monastery so we spent part of the morning walking around and exploring it.

It was interesting but also very hot and crowded. The highlight had to have been going into one of the many museums on the monastery grounds (this one was devoted to the many kinds of musical instruments that had been played as part of religious ceremonies there over the last 600 years) and getting yelled at by a nun.

Yes, that's right. A nun came up to your humble Friar and began castigating him in Italian. Sensing a perhaps surprising lack of shame or contrition, she checked to see if I even spoke Italian, then testily got someone in her tour group to translate into English. "Your camera-- need be closed." I looked down. My camcorder? Which was turned off, had the lens cap on, and was turned backyards facing my chest? Just how badly did this woman think I wanted to document their 14th century French horns? I smiled and said it was already off, even showing them that the lens cap was covered, but the nun was uninterested in such minor details and continued to harangue me. Luckily, however, it turns out it is quite hard to yell at someone who doesn't speak your language and refuses to react to you. I smiled and nodded about 20 times in the course of a minute, totally unperturbed, until the nun grew bored with me and took off with her tour group. Hooray for cultural exchange!

Did I mention it's really, really Catholic here?

I had a friend in town who I'll call Pavel. Pavel was from Cz and had attended the same high school as some of Mama Yid's distant relatives before WWI. Back in high school, many years ago, I had googled the name of the school in question and some student webpages had popped up for kids to practice their English. I had picked the one whose English was best and who said he liked history and asked him to help me learn more about the city. Pavel had been a wonderful sport and we had kept in contact ever since. He met us with his 5-year-old daughter Yulia and took Abbot Yid and I on a quick tour around town and to the mall to get some supplies. Cz is a small city by US (and even Polish) standards but this mall was gigantic, three stories and at least a few miles across. Everything there was very slick and modern, including a Polish version of Whole Foods (a sad must for those of us with food allergies) and of course McDonald's. Pavel said lots of Poles spend their time chasing the American dream, whether they can afford it or not.

A little later my parents and I met Pavel at his home for dinner with his family-- him, his daughter Yulia and their wife Olga. Olga was a teacher by trade and quit when their daughter was born but was now that she was about to start school had started looking for work again, with mixed results. Pavel worked in the communications department for a nearby city doing promotions and event planning. Their apartment building looked ancient, Soviet and utilitarian from the outside (lots of concrete and harsh corners, a style quite popular in town) but the inside was warm and homey, with lots of bright painted colors and attractive modern furniture. Though Olga's English was shaky (she understood much more than she could speak), we all had a lovely time. One highlight was me using an English fairy tale book to learn Polish vocabulary from Yulia and Olga and in turn teaching them the English words for the same objects, animals and colors. Another was getting a chance to discuss some Polish politics and history with real, average young people and get their thoughts.

I said I was very pleased to be in Poland and to get a chance to see how my ancestors lived and not just focus on how they died. Pavel and Olga said they were glad to see people like us were in America and that we had helped smash some stereotypes of theirs about Americans, particularly the idea that we were all rich and never had any problems. While it was clear our standard of living was light-years beyond theirs, we agreed that people were people and all people had problems. Toward the end of the evening, Olga commented (through Pavel) that I reminded her of a friend of theirs, a priest interestingly enough, who also has a beard as well as a "very kind heart." As we left, my parents said, without exaggeration, that the evening had been the highlight of the trip.

Though randomly seeing this in the middle of a traffic circle was also pretty awesome.
(I was going to make a joke about how this must be St. Christopher, patron saint of drivers, only then I actually read the inscription and it turns out reality beat me to it.)

On the Road

Day 6- Lame road trip

What a day. We traveled about 150 miles from Warsaw to Czestochowa and it took forever. Abbot Yid ordered a GPS with the car but it never got there, so I got to be the only navigator. Yay?

Getting out of Warsaw was a little tricky. We accidentally made a wrong turn and went across the Vistula river into Praga. That took a while to get out of. On the plus side, we didn't think we'd get a chance to see Praga, so, there's that.

Driving in Poland is challenging for a few reasons. There is relatively little signage except at intersections, and the bigger avenues can go on for quite a while until you find out what street you're on. For some strange reason, the intersecting street signs are often facing away from you when you approach them in a car, which means you can drive for several blocks until you finally figure out you're going the wrong way.

The same thing happened once we got onto the highway-- it turns out in the first town after Warsaw there are two highways, both going South but rapidly diverging into an upside-down V. Guess which one we took? After I figured that out, we had to get off the highway in a small town and figure out how to cut over via a smaller road-- which we initially went the wrong way on, as well. All of this was very stressful because I had given a rough guess of when we would get into town to our apartment rental guy and I was having trouble reaching him, and I was worried if we were too late he wouldn't be there.

Once we were finally on the right highway, the real fun began. Did you know Poland is undergoing major highway renovation? Which looks like it's going to take a freaking decade to finish? Causing large stretches of their highways to be condensed to a single lane? Interestingly enough, though the guidebooks caution you not to speed lest you be stopped by police (and note that "ignorance is no excuse"), we probably saw over 100 people speeding on the road (including gigantic semi-trucks) and not a single police officer. Abbot Yid was probably going 10-20 km over the speed limit, and almost every 5 minutes someone would be tailgating us trying to pass.

Ah yes, Polish drivers love to change lanes while speeding down their not-very-good highway (in some parts it was literally a dirt-and-gravel road) which they somehow think is the Autobahn. I have no idea where all these folks are going, but they've got things to do, apparently.

Things picked up after Piotrkow Trybunalski- different highway, better roads, 2 whole lanes, still crazy drivers, though. We finally got into town, and then we were lost some more, so I had to go into a Polish 7-11 for help. To the gangly Polish kid with the death metal hair and the passable English, many thanks.

Time to drive according to Google Maps: 3.5 hours.
Actual time from apartment to apartment: about 6 hours.

Lame, Google. Very lame.

Wrapping up Warsaw

Day 5: Abbot Yid was on the mend, now it was Mama Yid's turn for Pilsudski's revenge. I decided, being the reasonably competent city dweller I am, that I could take on Warsaw and see the sights for myself. So I did.

First stop was I.B. Singer's house, which was back in Mirow. I decided to forgo the bus and walk, since I am a pretty fast walker and I'd been chafing to walk at my regular pace since we got here. I managed to get there in about 40 minutes from Old Town. All the old buildings around there are long gone, replaced by square and rectangular Soviet-style apartment houses and unfortunately there wasn't even an address plate for number 10- but I took a picture anyway, just to have.

I.B. Singer's old street intersects with John Paul II Avenue. I can't make these things up.

I ate lunch in a park across the street and then tried to find I.L. Peretz street. It took a while but I finally found it- Perec, as it's written in Polish, is a tiny alley between the Westin Hotel and Deloitte headquarters, near a store that sold high-end telescopes.

From there I checked out Nozyk synagogue. In typical Polish style, the original classic building is connected with a pretty gray, square, utilitarian one that serves as the front entrance. Old and New, pretty and... not. It started to rain and so I ducked into the Judaica shop in the basement, where I got a couple of souvenirs.

After that I wandered around the neighborhood a little-- the problem with the old streets is a lot of them don't connect or dead-end randomly, and meander around, rather than going right through, to the large avenues. I got a little turned around (bonus- did you know that Warsaw has the first Erotic Museum in Poland? I do now.) Finally I made it to the last spot on my itinerary, Prozna street.

Prozna is the last standing block of the Warsaw ghetto, and the dilapidated brick buildings are totally dwarfed by the modern high-rises all around them. Adding to the eerie ghost town feel is the fact that the buildings are covered with giant blown-up sepia pictures of Warsaw Jews.

 One side of the street, strangely enough, has a bunch of working businesses on the bottom floor-- cafes, shops, etc. At the end of the block, the last brick building had several satellite dishes coming out of apartments-- which I suppose means that one of them is occupied. I wondered how much of the place's history the residents know about and how much it affects their lives. What does the Warsaw ghetto mean to the people who live and work on Prozna street? To kids who grow up looking at giant pictures of ghosts outside their window? Is it traumatic? Or, even worse, do they become jaded and immune to it? How do the parents explain it to their children?

On my way back through the city to our flat I decided to go through the Saxon Gardens. They were very pretty and very European-looking. Lots of very manicured lawns and some really awesome statues. It's interesting that while the popular image of Poland is of being culturally located in Eastern Europe, we've also been learning about and seeing a lot of French and Italian influences, too. The Gardens reminded me quite a lot of the Champs Elysses. I keep having to re-adjust my brain to everything that I'm seeing and processing that all of this is Poland-- the crumbling pre-war buildings, the towering and harsh Soviet architecture, and the super-modern condos and skyscrapers made of glass. Its all Poland, and it signifies that its all very complicated.

In some ways, seeing the pretty stuff is harder than the sad stuff. Being in the Saxon Gardens was lovely, but also haunting. How could a place of such beauty also be the site of so much death and misery? I've realized while here that Poland has a "black-and-white" problem, and I don't just mean that people see it in a simplistic, good guys and bad guys way. When a lot of people think of Poland, I think their image is of black-and-white news reals from the Holocaust and WWII. Or it's Schindler's List.

Behold, colors!

But either way, it's never of Poland in color, never of it being a real country part of the 21st century. For them, that's all Poland is. That's an unfair view and I think eventually it will change, just like it presently is changing. However, at the same time, sitting in that beautiful park, thinking of my family, who walked and played there-- I couldn't help wondering how, and why, fate and men could be so cruel as to deny them the right to live.

Yes, Poland is beautiful. Which makes it all the more tragic that so many Polish Jews were not allowed to enjoy it. Why were so many Polish Jewish children never allowed to walk where I walked? That should have been their birthright, as Poles and human beings. While I'm happy to honor their memory by learning more about where they lived and the lives they had here, I can't enjoy it "with a full cup." They should have lived. They should still be here.

We should have more than a single remnant here. They should be here, enjoying it with me.

Truding back home I was pretty happy. I had spent a whole day by myself in a foreign country, totally self-sufficient, and everything turned out fine, thanks to good planning (food, water, map) and some willingness to follow my gut and explore a little. If I hadn't ducked into the synagogue shop I wouldn't have found those fun souvenirs and if I hadn't decided to go through Saxon gardens I wouldn't have found restrooms or some quiet green space.

After going back to the apartment Abbot Yid and I went out foraging. We grabbed some cash and other essentials at a small shop and then passed an Asian market I had forgotten to tell him about. Boy was he excited! We popped in and got him some gluten-free stuff.

For my fifth dinner in Poland I had the extremely traditional home-made Pad Thai. Go authenticity!

A long day and some reflection

Day 4: Mirow District. Mama Yid and I left Abbot Yid at home to recuperate and set out for another formerly Jewish district on the West side of town, but this time south of where we had been previously. I managed to get us some bus tickets (yay pantomime and a notepad!) and we got on a bus which took us across town. Our first stop was the last fragment of the Warsaw ghetto wall that's still preserved, which was pretty sobering in its size. I knew it was tall, but until you see its scale and realize this was a cage to keep people inside it's hard to wrap your head around. After that we walked down some side-streets to find the Ghetto Evacuation Monument. This is the spot that commemorates where the Ghetto fighters came out through the sewers (the monument says "canals," which I suppose does sound nicer) onto the Aryan side of the city to escape.

The area was fascinating; it's in a pretty grungy part of town with a lot of dilapidated buildings and abandoned factories. At the same time there's a huge urban renewal project going on and there's a ton of construction happening in the area, with lots of modern skyscrapers, high-rise condos, and corporate parks popping up everywhere. The contrast was a bit bizarre; sort of like if you remade Silicon valley next to Blarney castle. As another example of this contrast between old and new, the monument is directly in front of the entrance to a condominium. The monument is a little surreal, being covered with disembodied hands, but I think I still prefer its (relative) understated-ness to the over-the-top HEROES! theme of the Ghetto Fighters Monument at Zamenhof.

After that we were pretty hungry, so we wandered around until we found, of all things, a Vietnamese restaurant. We were looking for I.B. Singer's childhood home at Krochmalna street, so in his honor, I had grilled goose. It was quite hot, and once we had finished lunch Mama Yid said she actually thought she might be done for the day. I was a little disappointed that we had only managed to get to two out of the four spots on my itinerary for the day, but she had also been a really good sport (even if we hadn't left the house until 11:30). The tricky thing was that the bus route I had planned to get home didn't run near where we were, since I had been thinking we would have made it further west towards the City Center. So we walked back. Luckily it was starting to get somewhat cloudy so the sun wasn't quite as bad. On the way home Mama Yid talked about how proud she was that I seemed so street-smart and self-sufficient here, which she wouldn't have said about me a year ago. The compliment was nice, though it also made me realize how much I've grown in the last few years since still living with them. Walking added up to 5.7 km (3.5 miles).

We finally got back to the house and ate dinner. Abbot Yid was up and about trying to make arrangements for Krakow and London. Mama Yid and I headed out again to go check out New Town. She still hasn't really had a chance to do much shopping so I left her there and went west to see the town battlements. The walls are very cool; the old moat has been filled in with a dirt-and-gravel path so you can walk in the moat as well as along the inner and outer walls. The Poles seem to be incredibly cavalier about the whole thing, though. To them the wall really just seems to be a place to hang out; like a park. I saw merchants selling paintings, surly teenagers playing guitar, couples holding hands on benches-- but while they were sitting on turrets and lounging on castle walls! In some ways, it kind of takes away from the effect of being in a "Castle"-esque environment, because the modern world is so emphatically blending with the old world.

Old and New Town, including the battlements, are interesting because they're almost entirely reconstructions, but reconstructions done as carefully and accurately as possible. It creates a slightly surreal effect where you're walking around thinking, "Wow, this is so old, this thing must have been here for centuries--" and then you remember that actually it's probably only 50 years old or so. It's a bizarre dissonance shift, which is sort of appropriate for the trip in general. It's a well-known cliche, but I'm definitely getting the feeling that Poland is a "land of contrasts"-- some people here are really nice and friendly, while some seem on the surly side. Poland seems to be committed to honoring the horrors that happened on its soil, but at the same time is highly motivated to be a modern country and move forward with its future.

Being here has made me re-think some of my previous assumptions and feelings about Poland's responsibility as guardian (or co-guardian) of Jewish history and memory. I've often been somewhat miffed by the fact that a lot of former Jewish sites which were destroyed during the war haven't been restored (for instance the Tlomackie synagogue which is now a car dealership) except for a token plaque here or there. It feels like there should be more respect and acknowledgment, in a real way so people can understand that the Jews of Poland weren't mythical or make-believe, but real, present, and in a lot of ways, omnipresent in Polish society, and certainly in the larger cities like Warsaw. I want Poland to make sincere efforts to include the Jewish experience within the larger history of their country. At the same time, after coming here, I realize that it would be impossible for every site to be reconstructed. There has been so much suffering here, so much death and misery, that there's no way you could rebuild or memorialize it all; you'd have no city left. Honestly, that's not a realistic-- or fair-- position to take in a real country full of real people, most of whom weren't even alive when the war happened. What I've seen suggests that Poland is trying to find a compromise between honoring its history while not becoming victims to it.

While there may be more things Poland can do to make sure contemporary Poles understand Jews and Jewish history, as far as memorializing the past, I feel like they're doing a pretty good job. I've walked past dozens of museums, plaques and monuments in the few days we've been here and it feels like the Polish people, or at least government, understands the need to pay respect to history, while still working towards the future. I can't fault them for that, especially when most Jewish communities and individuals' involvement and engagement with Poland seems to be fairly minimal. If Jews abroad want Poland to understand Jews better, they might need to step up and actually do something to make it happen.

Back-tracking

Between jet lag, acclimation issues and yes, some actual sight-seeing, it's been hard to find time to blog. Here's a run-down of our first few days in Warsaw.

Day 1: Flew out from the US to Frankfurt. The flight was fun (first class sleeper suites, what's not to like?) Despite the totally cool fold-down seats, though, I couldn't really sleep, since the plane was pretty loud and hot. From Frankfurt we flew into Warsaw in the early afternoon-- since none of us had slept, we were total zombies. We wandered around looking for food and settled for some not-very-good pirogi. Mother Superior Yid fell asleep during the meal several times. After returning to our apartment in Old Town, I finally fell asleep after being up for 28 hours straight.

Day 2: Muranow district. We walked out of Old Town to the City Center and visited the Jewish Historical Institute, which is housed in the Jewish Library building that survived the war. It stands next to what used to be the Tlomackie Synagogue (now a Peugot dealership). The museum was very interesting with a lot of information about the Warsaw Ghetto. Since I knew that the Institute is the clearinghouse for lots of Polish records, I had made sure to print out a short list of family records I wanted ahead of time. The archivist was very nice and made copies for me while I looked through some books. After lunch me and my parents walked up to Pawiak prison, the Warsaw Ghetto monument and saw the future building site of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which will probably look fantastic once it's finally finished. (Right now it looks like a Star Trek space dock.) The day's walking added up to about 8 km (5 miles).

The JHI and Pawiak prison were the first real Holocaust sites we'd seen, and I think my parents were pretty shaken by them. In the JHI things feel safe because you know you're still in a museum, but Pawiak is basically one long rectangular bunker sunk into the ground, very little light, and it's just you and the museum pieces-- oh, and the reconstructed jail cells. Definitely a bit of a head trip if you're not prepared.

It's been very interesting to look at Holocaust monuments and museums with my parents. In some ways they seem to be experiencing it in a more visceral way than I am, which I attribute at least partially to the fact that I've been studying these things on my own since I was fourteen. They seem to be encountering a lot of this stuff for, if not the first time, then really understanding it for the first time. For me, on the other hand, none of the information is really new. The experience of actually being there is, and that's been very interesting and sobering, but it's not like I didn't know what happened in the Warsaw Ghetto, for example. I even knew a little about Pawiak prison from Uris' Mila 18, but neither of my parents had ever heard of it.

Day 3: Worst. Day. Ever. Abbot Yid got sick with Pilsudski's Revenge(TM) and at one point even lost consciousness. We were very close to calling an ambulance but luckily he's since recovered. Mama Yid and I spent the day running around relying on my extremely limited Polish, Google Translate, and a tiny phrasebook to get medicine, money, and groceries. About the only good part was that at least it stopped us all from getting on each other's nerves and demonstrated to my parents that I am in fact a reasonable competent adult. (In related news, apparently my many years of taking a foreign language-- though not Polish-- have come in handy.)