• The top-ranking U.S. general called a military strike on Iran “premature.” [National Journal]

• Peter Beinart shows that the way to understand the Jewish vote is the same way to understand the vote of other religions: look at levels of observance. [The Daily Beast]

• There’s nothing Mel Gibson doesn’t deserve, but the southern California synagogue trying to shake him down for being an anti-Semite is gross. And as if shame would work on this guy! [TMZ]

• The Republican Jewish Coalition’s Matthew Brooks argues that last night’s debate showcased why Jewish voters may flock to the Republican nominee due to his staunch support for Israel. [RJC]

• James Fallows found the same exchange extremely troubling. [Atlantic]

• As Massachusetts governor, Mitt Romney nixed state funding for kosher meals at nursing homes. What won’t he do?? [NY Post]

• H&H’s obituary is officially written. [WSJ]

• “It’s the case of the missing mezuzahs.” [NY Post]

• At Jewish Theological Seminary, Justice Stephen Breyer presented a jurisprudence not unlike the Conservative movement’s driving philosophy. [JustASC]

• Evan Osnos updates us on Ai Weiwei’s status. [New Yorker News Desk]

• Leave your thank you to departing Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. [DNC]

• First in war, first in peace, last in good Jewish delis: the tragedy of D.C. (We miss you, Krupin’s!) [City Paper]

Birthright LOL.

Israeli parody of Taglit-Birthright Propaganda Trips from Eretz Nehederet on Vimeo.

Ronn Torossian, the New York-based founder of 5WPR and public relations guru, is not unpracticed at expressing distinctly right-wing views of the Israeli-Palestinian situation. But his latest op-ed, published in the Jewish Reporter, goes further than just condemning President Obama for allegedly trying to force the Israeli leadership to accept unacceptable concessions (“Its [sic] only extreme self-hatred or praying at the altar of liberalism which could make any sane Jew vote for Obama”). It also references “[t]his administration which called for a return to the Auschwitz borders.”

Leaving aside the fact that this is not an administration which called for this—last May, Obama called for the 1967 borders to be a starting point for negotiations that would include land swaps—the term “Auschwitz borders,” originated by Abba Eban and brought out of the attic last May by the Zionist Organization of America, are fightin’ words, to say the least. More to the point, they compare the Obama Administration to the West that watched passively as European Jewry was slaughtered, and the Palestinians to the Nazis.

I asked Leonard Stern, a businessman and philanthropist who underwrote an excellent recent history of anti-Semitism called A Convenient Hatred, what he thought of the remark, given that a company he owns is represented by Torrosian’s 5WPR (he no longer owns it). “I think any reference to Auschwitz in connection with the State of Isreal is inappropriate,” Stern emailed back. “There are much better ways to frame issues that would not be so inflammatory.” He did not respond to a follow-up question of whether he still feels comfortable being represented by Torossian. (Again, this is my fault: He isn’t represented by Torossian.)

I wanted to reach several of Torossian’s other clients who might be offended by such a remark. But contacting them for this through their publicist seemed to be a prohibitively tricky proposition.

Bibi, Peres, Barak Support for Obama? [The Jewish Reporter]

I was giving a guest lecture on the subject of Primo Levi at a synagogue in Houston, presenting Levi’s masterpiece, Survival in Auschwitz, to a crowd of 50 or so. I spoke about the nature of Levi’s experience at Auschwitz: his relationship with fellow prisoners, the camp’s makeshift economy and pecking order, the reasons he thought he survived while so many others died, and the narrative strategies he adopted to describe something that could not be described. In particular, I dwelt on Levi’s notion of the “gray zone”—the ways in which death camps blurred the frontiers between guilt and acquiescence, persecutor and victim. By way of conclusion, I revealed to the audience that the title of the book in its original Italian was If This Be A Man. With that abrupt flourish, I slowly closed my lecture binder and looked down at my hands.

I was superb.

An elderly and energetic man in the audience, however, did not agree. He raised his hand, gave his name—I’ll call him Siggie—and announced he was a survivor. A respectful hush fell over the audience, and all heads craned toward the small figure. Siggie declared that Levi didn’t know what he was talking about. “Gray zone, schmay zone,” he declared, more or less. As I stared at him, Siggie then launched into a long and polished account of his own experience at Auschwitz, one that drew fast and sharp lines between victim and victimizer. Moreover, Siggie suggested, anyone who tried to offer a literary or theoretical account of Auschwitz was little better than an interloper. This applied not only to Levi, but even more so to academics like me, who had never been in a concentration camp.

I tried to respond but soon gave up; as a survivor, Siggie commanded not just the moral high ground but the ontological depths, too. What could I say? He was right: I had not been there. Normally, being “there” is not an issue for a historian. Only a lunatic would repudiate an account of, say, the fall of the Bastille or Battle of Marathon because the historian had been born one or one hundred generations too late to savor the sulfur or participate in a phalanx. In fact, historians have long assumed that not being there is a professional advantage. In an odd phenomenological twist, we have always claimed that the distance provided by time and space, along with the accumulation of documents and data, permits us to know the past even better than did an event’s contemporaries, who were stuck in the chaos as they happened. Anyone can make history, but it takes a historian to understand it.

But Auschwitz was different. This, at least, is what Siggie reminded me as he gesticulated with his branded forearm. The grim tattoo was an infinitely more powerful sign of authority than the leather patches on my tweed jacket. With a wince, I recalled Elie Wiesel’s claim: “Any survivor has more to say than all the historians combined about what happened.” As a historian, I knew Wiesel’s statement was nonsense; but as a Jew facing a survivor, I knew it was irrefutable.

Did I even dare suggest that, after nearly half a century and countless retellings, Siggie’s own experience had crystallized into a story—a story whose relationship with the event was perhaps even more problematic than Levi’s or my own? Where, I asked myself, did the scales tip between my doctorate and Siggie’s experience? As I looked at Siggie and the audience, all of these questions were no-brainers. Hiding my elbow patches as best I could, I ceded the floor to Siggie. Apologies to Adorno, but I concluded that, after Auschwitz, history—at least the sort where historians do what they are trained to do—was certainly possible, perhaps even necessary. But, most important, it was irrelevant.

***

There is a sense in which Emil Fackenheim was right to say that for Jews to forget Hitler’s victims would be to grant him a “posthumous victory.” But it would be an even greater posthumous victory for Hitler were we to tacitly endorse his definition of ourselves as despised pariahs by making the Holocaust the emblematic Jewish experience.

These are the concluding lines from Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life. Published slightly more than a decade ago, shortly after my encounter with Siggie, Novick’s book provided me with an epiphany about the oddness of my vocation. A historian at the University of Chicago, Novick was attempting to explain how the Holocaust—an event that had happened more than a generation earlier on a different continent and affected a mere fraction of those living here—became by the late 1960s the central experience in the American Jewish historical narrative. Novick suggested that this sudden communal awareness of the Holocaust, far from being the result of deep trauma, instead resulted from a series of political events that prodded American Jewry to embrace the destruction of European Jewry as its defining narrative. The rise in racial tensions in the United States, the existential character of the Yom Kippur War, the growth in “identity politics” and its dark side of victim culture: These are some of the factors, Novick suggested, that led to American Jewry’s belated discovery of the Holocaust.

Continue reading: Seduced by being a Holocaust expert

• Republican opposition to a motion that would prevent a London-based company with ties to Iran from having a stake in an American mining company raises questions about the Republican position on sanctions against Iran. [Washington Jewish Week]

• Poland has reopened investigations, abandoned while the country was under Communist rule, into crimes committed at Auschwitz during World War II. [AP]

• An investigation by the pro-choice organization NARAL into “crisis pregnancy centers”—which are not medical facilities—reveals, among other things, that a Jewish woman who visited five different centers was encouraged by volunteers at each center to convert to Christianity. [Think Progress]

• Oprah visited Crown Heights, Borough Park, and Brooklyn Heights for her new show. Her visit to Brooklyn Heights included a tour of a mikvah. [Chabad]

• Photos (with recipes!) of the most intricate bite-size reproductions of Jewish deli food you’ve ever seen, ever. Borscht bite, anyone? [The Polymath Chronicles]

• Ten members of the so-called Irvine 11, who disrupted Israeli ambassador Michael Oren’s speech at the University of California-Davis, were found guilty by a jury of two misdemeanors. [JTA]

• More (since we first linked Wednesday) on how John J. Mearsheimer, of The Israel Lobby fame, has blurbed a book by an honest-to-God, self-proclaimed self-hating Jew who has some particularly troubling things to say about the Holocaust. [Adam Holland]

• Meet Shelly Yachimovich, the new leader of Labor, who has her work cut out for her. [NYT]

• Prompted in part by the Emergency Committee for Israel’s campaign, several Jewish leaders have cautioned that Israel ought not to be turned into a partisan wedge issue. [Forward]

• Last year, at his press availability in New York, President Ahmadinejad served bagels and lox. [The New Yorker News Desk]

• President Clinton major-league disses Prime Minister Netanyahu. [FP The Cable]

• Peggy Noonan praises President Obama on Israel and chastises Gov. Perry. Wait, what? [WSJ]

• A new study found that younger Conservative rabbis may be more politically left than their elders, but are still staunchly pro-Israel. [Forward]

• Prominent Jewish journalist Ruth Ellen Gruber was honored by the government of Poland. [JTA]

• Israel has pledged $1 million to Auschwitz’s upkeep. Which, read the wrong way, comes off sounding pretty ironic. [AP/WP]

• The German fashion company Hugo Boss has formally apologized for its onetime ties to the Nazis. [Imprint]

• What are you doing next Wednesday? You’re watching Rush Hashanah on VH1, of course. [The Daily Swarm]

• Did Germany’s reunification in part lead to a neo-Nazi resurgence? [Jewish Chronicle]

Happy 62nd birthday to a man who is frequently mistaken for a Jew but is always accurately captured when deemed the Boss.

As is often the case with inchoate rage, I needed my friends to help me focus. Thankfully, Todd Gitlin did. Having just returned from a visit to Serbia, he noted how that nation was still actively and passionately commemorating the Battle of Kosovo, in which the armies of the Turkish Sultan Murad I, despite heavy losses, subdued their opponents and turned many Serb principalities into Ottoman protectorates. That was in 1389.

Growing up in Israel, I saw this foul force at play on both ends of the conflict. My Palestinian friends were commemorating the Nakba—the establishment of the state of Israel—and my Israeli friends were traveling to Poland, eagerly visiting the fields where their ancestors were shot, gassed, burned, and buried. I joined one such delegation, and was appalled not so much by the ominous piles of shoes and the ghoulish photographs—I’d seen these before—but by the particularly potent combination of humiliation and nationalism. In the barracks of Auschwitz, many of my classmates were reborn: They wrapped themselves in Israeli flags, spoke a bit too loudly to every Polish bystander, sang “Hatikvah” until they were hoarse, and vowed to join the army’s most elite units. In their young and impressionable tongues, “Never Again” sounded like, “Again, but with us winning this time.” Which is no different from the defiant annual demonstrations on Nakba Day.

And now, a defeat of America’s own. Those who lost loved ones, of course, will never forget that day, nor would any of us who were here that morning. Let survivors and New Yorkers continue to mark the day in a communal, painful, and deeply personal way, alone and together. But collectively, nationally, for our own good, let us forget all about it. No more ceremonies, no more anniversaries, no more solemn newscasters retelling, like in a dream, the moment of terror and defeat.

If we have to commemorate 9/11, let us do so on 5/2, the day our cheerful emissaries dispatched Osama Bin Laden to another state of being. Let us celebrate each May the Second; we can chant “U.S.A!,” bump fists, listen to loud rock music. It’ll be a joyful occasion. And oddly, for all of its bravado and machismo, such a celebration is much less likely to lead to catastrophe. The strange, inverted logic of tragedy’s aftermath dictates that commemorating defeat usually leads to revenge and violence, while celebrating victory usually involves barbecues and fifteen percent off at the mall. We must choose the latter. Otherwise, really, the terrorists win.

Speechless in the Face of Massacre [Chronicle of Higher Education Brainstorm]

In a 3-hour interview, Youlus is unable to provide a single name, date, place, photograph or document to back up the Auschwitz stories or any of the others. He says that until Save a Torah was founded in 2004, he kept no records. He refers all requests for documentation since then to the foundation’s president, investment banker Rick Zitelman of Rockville.

But in a late December meeting at The Washington Post, Zitelman, 54, shows no documentation for any of the scrolls, despite requests. Zitelman says the only paperwork he gets from Youlus is an invoice the rabbi himself writes up for each Torah. He says Youlus does not submit any airline tickets or hotel receipts for overseas missions. So where does he think Youlus finds the Torahs? “It’s my understanding these Torahs come from various locations, including monasteries, museums, antique shops, private owners and other places like that,” he says.

Menachem Rosensaft, a New York-based lawyer and vice president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, has been crying foul about Youlus for some time now. In Februry 2010, Rosensaft disputed Youlus’ accounts, specifically a story that involved piecing together portions of a Torah hidden separately at Auschwitz and receiving the final piece from a local priest:

It gets worse. There are no records of any such priest ever having existed, and Youlus refuses to identify him by name. Youlus could not have come across a Torah scroll, or anything else for that matter, in the barracks of Bergen-Belsen, where both my parents were liberated, for the simple reason that all the barracks of that camp were burned in May 1945 in order to contain a raging typhus epidemic. And Youlus peddled the “Ukrainian mass-grave” scrolls to five separate congregations, assuring each that it was buying one of two, to use the art world term, limited editions.

Rosensaft got serious about Youlus owning up to his actions, asking politicians to take action. “He and Save a Torah,” Rosensaft wrote in the Huffington Post in March 2010, “which shamelessly continues to solicit funds on its website, must now be held accountable, both legally and morally.”

Over a year later, it seems that process has finally started.

Rabbi who claimed to rescue Holocaust Torahs arrested on fraud charges [JTA]
Rabbi Fabricated Swashbuckling Tales of Saving Holocaust Torahs, Prosecutors Say [NYT]
Two Torahs, Two Holocaust Stories and One Big Question [NYT]
Earlier: Save a Torah Controversy Prompts Deal

“We try to do the least amount of conservation on an object,” Bisaga, 31, says in Polish, describing how she approaches her daily work. “They are damaged, and their state is telling of their history.”

Bisaga, who lives in Oswiecim, Poland, is one of 11 conservators who work meticulously to preserve the past at the former concentration camp established by the Nazis in occupied Poland during World War II. Bisaga has been working at Auschwitz since 2003.

At the museum, and particularly in this conservation department, which handles fragile items like prisoners’ artwork and thousands of documents, shoes, and suitcases, preservation is seen as an ethical as well as a practical issue. But these conservators must also wrestle with questions about the proper role of restoration. “People who come here don’t want to see a replica of how something might have once looked,” says Ewa Cyrulik, another conservator. “They are looking for the original condition, as if the objects exist as guardians of history.”

Conservation work at Auschwitz is unique; while some basic rules of conservation do apply, others defiantly do not. And threading that needle is an ethical conundrum the conservators face daily. “It’s an experiment in doing something unbelievable, but we have to guide ourselves this way, and work in an orthodox way,” Cyrulik says. “Then we have a chance that these objects will affect the people who come here, that they’ll see these original, historical objects.”

A new conservation department, with new workshops, opened at Auschwitz in 2005. Its budget last year was 11.3 million euros, around $15 million. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation is seeking to raise an additional 120 million euros in a two-year campaign ending this year for an endowment to fund future preservation work. So far about 85 million euros, or $122.5 million, has been committed, according to Pawel Sawicki, a spokesman for the museum and a Polish radio journalist, including a subsidy from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and a grant from the European Infrastructure and Environment Operating Program.

When Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet army in January 1945, it covered 40 square kilometers, with three camps, sub camps, and an additional area that was supervised by SS administration. “There were some voices [saying] that it should be completely dismantled because this memory is so difficult,” says Sawicki. But a group of former prisoners began talks with the local government to keep the former concentration camp intact as a memorial. The Polish government began initiatives to preserve the site, giving the Ministry of Culture and Art the authority to preserve parts of it. The ministry named former prisoner Tadeusz Wasowicz as the head of the Protection Board, and in 1946 work began on creating a museum.

Since then, the fragile future of artifacts in the museum’s possession has been constantly discussed. Among the artifacts are 110,000 prisoners’ shoes, 3,800 suitcases, 6,000 works of art, and, often most harrowing for visitors, the pile of hair collected from the heads of 30,000 murdered women.

Beyond the artifacts, one of the impending projects is the preservation of 45 brick barracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau’s former women’s camp. Environmental conditions are viewed as the biggest barrier to preservation. “This is very difficult because protecting a standing building is relatively easier than protecting a ruin from all-natural conditions, atmosphere, rain, and cold, which is the biggest threat here,” Sawicki says.

The foundations themselves are also fragile. “The structures in Birkenau were built by prisoners and were not built to last 70 years,” he says. “They were built from weak materials; these are weak constructions. And the fact that they are still standing today is a miracle, and this is more and more difficult to upkeep them and preserve them.”

For all the rigorous ethical standards that guide their everyday work, conservators believe they have a bigger mission than daily preservation. “We need to conserve objects that speak of the many histories of this place,” says Cyrulik. “We maintain that history for the future. Maybe in some way, with our work, this will protect someone, and in the future, these things won’t happen again.”

Suzanne Rozdeba, a freelance journalist and graduate student at New York University, was a 2011 participant in the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics.

• That said, the P.A. also expressed willingness to enter talks even without a settlement freeze, a recognition of their weakened position. [AP/WP]

• The Hamas-Fatah honeymoon really does seem to be winding to a rapid close. [JPost]

• Secretary of State Clinton said the flotilla that plans to sail for Gaza soon is not “necessary or useful.” [Ynet]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu’s son, 19, has posted fairly nasty things about Arabs and Muslims on his Facebook page. At least there were no crotch-shots! [AP/WP]

• Glenn Beck will visit Auschwitz and broadcast from nearby. This will end well. [TPM/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Harold Bloom, Michael Cunningham, and others are returning their CUNY honorary degrees in protest. [Facebook]

• Though I’m not sure I share all his conclusions, Daniel Levy makes valuable points about how reconciliation represents a heightening of contradictions on all sides and about Egypt’s centrality to all this. [Guardian]

• Considering Dr. Gisella Perl, an Orthodox Jewish obstetrician who performed over 3,000 abortions … in Auschwitz. [Failed Messiah/JI Daily]

• A Haredi newspaper Photoshops Hillary Clinton out of the famous Situation Room photograph. [Circus Tent]

• Dan Snyder is the Devil, in cartoon form. [D.C. Sports Bog]

Again, R.I.P. Arthur Laurents, who wrote the dialogue in this scene, and directed it to boot.

But Ya’akov Arbel, an Israeli tour guide and an old Poland hand, has been around long enough to know that hasn’t always been the case. “Before Spielberg made Schindler’s List,” he told me on a recent visit to the city, “there wasn’t a dog coming to Krakow.”

***

On a rain-soaked Friday morning late last year, Arbel led three dozen Israelis visiting Poland. He was in a rush—the group was headed to Auschwitz and Birkenau, the highlights of the tour—but some of the visitors were enjoying the rain, a refuge from the Israeli heat. One by one, they climbed aboard the bus. Arbel, counting and recounting, was still two people short. Finally, the stragglers arrived. It was an elderly couple, and the wife, an Auschwitz survivor, had gotten cold feet and had to be persuaded to join.

A few minutes after the bus pulled out, Arbel took the microphone and started talking. He talked about Jews and Nazis, Poland and Germany, concentration camps and death camps. To ease the tension, he spiced his speech with bits of trivia, even the occasional joke.

“I must do all the talking here,” Arbel told me during a rare moment of rest, sipping tea to soothe his throat. “One of the most important attributes for a tour leader to Auschwitz is the understanding that he should talk as little as possible inside the camps, because the eyes tell the story there.”

Arbel’s bus joined another 30 in the huge parking lot outside the camp, and some of the visitors wrapped themselves in Israeli flags as we headed toward the entrance. There, in accordance with Polish legislation aimed to protect the local workforce, the group was handed over to a Polish tour guide, one of the 250 men and women employed by the Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau. Arbel was there only to translate. Mostly silent, he followed his group, looking and listening.

***

Arbel was born in Germany. His parents, Holocaust survivors, fled to Israel when he was a year old. He is a banker by profession, and 10 years ago he decided to devote himself to his love of history and geography and become certified as a tour guide. “I love doing it,” he said, “and it’s a cheap way to go places.” In the last three years, he has mostly been accompanying groups headed to Poland, visiting that country three or four times a year. As we walked through the gate leading into the camp, Arbel paused for a moment. “Every time I come here I want to cry,” he said. “But I can’t cry. I must be professional and separate myself from the place, and one of the tools is to use humor. But you must be sensitive to the component of the group. Sometimes humor can’t fly here.”

The breakdown, he added, comes often after the tour. “When you are walking in Auschwitz, you are on a mission, a mission to tell the story of a foregone Jewish life. But once you are done, and you let it decompress, you get back to your hotel and just wrap yourself in depression. And since every tour is different, and unexpected things happen here, this depression goes home with you. I have many horrible flashbacks in my sleep long after I return from here.”

I commented that such a lifestyle, consisting of repetitive visits to this dark place and the bouts of depression that are bound to follow, was somewhat masochistic. Arbel shrugged. “It is the least I owe to my predecessors, to the history of Jewish life,” he said, before heading into one of the prison cabins.

***

Arbel is in the minority among Israeli tour guides specializing in Poland. Most of them are graduates of programs run by Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust museum and research facility, and sponsored by the Ministry of Education to train guides to lead groups of high-school students and soldiers.

There are 300 such guides currently working in Israel. To join their ranks, one must respond to a newspaper ad inviting people to enroll in the program. Each year, said Dorit Novak, the director of the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem, 50 people apply. “We pass the names and résumés to the Ministry of Education, where the first selection is processed,” she said. “Then, we invite the final candidates to one day where we conduct interviews and psychological assessment, and we usually end up with 20 finalists.”

The Yad Vashem course lasts almost six months and includes many seminars and workshops. The candidates then go on a tour of Poland, followed by two more tours on which they serve as guides. If they receive positive feedback they must take one final test, which examines the depth of their knowledge of the Holocaust. The drop-out rate is 15 percent.

“The guide is a key figure in the educational experience young students and soldiers go through while traveling in Poland,” Novak said. “A good guide must have great knowledge and even greater sensitivity for the group as a whole and to every group member. He or she must deal with an age group where the people are very sensitive and about to be exposed to a shocking experience.”

The challenges are part adolescent psychology and part crisis management. (The museum makes an exception to its Polish guide policy for these specially trained leaders.) “A good guide shouldn’t tease,” Novak added. “He shouldn’t manipulate and move people from one experience to the other, but let every experience sink in with the kids. Understatement is the most important thing, because words can never match the visuals.”

This being a delicate undertaking, it calls for a certain sort of person. The average guide is between 30 and 50 years old, has another job or has chosen to become a tour guide as a mid-career change of vocation, and is committed and knowledgeable. While the guides vary in gender, socioeconomic backgrounds, and places of residence, many are children of Holocaust survivors, Novak said.

Hanni Efrimov, 40, graduated from the Yad Vashem program in 2003. In the last few years she’s been to Auschwitz 12 times every year. “It is not normal,” she said. “I must admit that I am a little bit addicted.” But, she added, the tours are not “a pornographic journey into the Holocaust. We deal mostly with Jewish life in Poland, because in order to understand what we had lost, we must first learn what we had. The death camps are not the most important part, and it’s also the shortest trip. It is more important to see how people lived in the ghetto, what choices they have made in a world with no choices, to learn about the thinkers and writers. We must teach about the forces, because suffering doesn’t teach you anything.”

Another important part of the guide’s job, Efrimov added, is to tailor the experience to suit the sensibilities of young men and women who are either in the midst of, or are about to enter, their mandatory military service. The Holocaust, she said, is the quintessential lesson of the dangers of using force and the importance of preserving one’s humanity. “We teach them about the thin line between being a human being and a monster,” she said, “but also about the inspiration of true friendship, where you are starving but still willing to share your 20 grams of bread.”

***

Ya’akov Arbel’s tour group is now midway through its tour of Auschwitz. Their Polish guide, Magdalena Adamczyknycz (pronounced adam-chick-nitz), is a 36-year-old local woman, married and the mother of a young girl. She first visited the camp in the eighth grade as part of a class trip. “It was the first time I heard about the Holocaust,” she told me when we were standing outside cabin 27. Like most Israeli groups, this one had decided to hold a small, private candle-lighting ceremony and to share their personal stories about Auschwitz and the Holocaust. Adamczyknycz was waiting for them to be done, standing in the chilly fall breeze.

“I traveled a lot after school,” she said as she waited, “and I realized that when I say in Polish the name of the place where I was born, Oswiecim, no one recognized it, but when I was saying the name in German (Auschwitz) then everyone knew about the tiny place where I come from. That made me realize about the history of my birthplace and of my history and how I am part of it.” Like her Israeli counterparts, Adamczyknycz, too, had to pass a series of exams to obtain her position. With 1.3 million people visiting the camp last year—a steep increase from 2004’s record of half a million visitors—the demand for tour guides is only growing.

Adamczyknycz got her certification in 2005. “I felt that it is my mission to try and tell the story of every person who perished here, more than a million stories,” she said. She used to work full time but now works only three or four months a year. This, she said, was a necessary step she had to take after becoming a mother. “It is a huge conflict,” she said, “because you are facing a trauma, sometimes live testimony of a survivor, and then you must go home and switch it off, play with your daughter, switch immediately from the complete gloom into a shining mother. It made me very pessimistic about life and about human nature, and that’s why I decided to decrease my rate [of work].” Instead, she found part-time employment as an English teacher in the local school, but the camp, she said, is always on her mind. “The ability to keep the memory alive,” she said, “to educate kids about Auschwitz and one year later see them coming back here with their parents, I miss that.”

Not, she added, that being employed by Auschwitz was without its downsides. Apart from the psychological toll of constant immersion in such grim subject matter, Adamczyknycz said, identifying oneself as an Auschwitz employee kills all chance of small talk and makes sharing work stories with friends deeply uncomfortable. “But it is still worth it,” she said, “especially when we get a group from Israel, where you really don’t know what will happen.”

Such impromptu outbursts of emotions are common with Israeli groups, and one occurred when the group I had joined visited the second floor of cabin 16. Walking between a glass-encased display of suitcases and another filled with hair and shoes, someone let out a terrible shriek.

It was Yehudit Barnea, 72, from Tel Aviv, the Holocaust survivor who earlier that morning had had her doubts about joining the tour. Shaking, she stood in front of a photograph on the wall, pointing at two little girls. “This is my sister and I on the day the Russians liberated the camp,” she said in a broken voice.

Barnea arrived to Birkenau in 1944. She was 6 years old. “Usually, they killed kids my age,” she said after we finished walking in Birkenau, where she had to revisit the memories she struggled to forget. “But we were twin sisters, and we were immediately led to Mengele’s cabin.” She has strange memory about the place. “I remember that everyday he was taking blood from us and he was experimenting with our lungs, and I remember that we were his favorite kids. I was actually very disappointed to see him in a movie, because I remembered him as a very tall and blond and beautiful man who had nicknames for us. But after walking here, I can’t believe that I was here, that I got out of here. It is just a story, it’s not really me.”

***

The drive back to Krakow was long and silent. At the hotel, a much-needed rest awaits, followed by Shabbat dinner. Outside the door of my room, someone had hung a silhouette of an old Jew holding a Bible. From my window, I could see the old Jewish cemetery. And yet there is no real Jewish life in Krakow. The reality of Jewish life here oscillates between the cemetery and that silhouette, a kitschy object the likes of which clutter many stores and cafés. Drivers for hire offer a tour of the Schindler factories or the ghetto. Even the toilets in Auschwitz are a commercial enterprise, costing 1,000 zloty (about 30 cents) per use.

I was musing about commercialization, memory, and authenticity as I walked to dinner, passing on the way a steakhouse that featured a klezmer house band. But as I reached the restaurant, I was dismayed to find the other members of the group in a decidedly different mood. They, too, could see the Holocaust business and the profits Krakow gathers from exploiting the memory of its dead Jews, but it was a price they were willing to pay.

They came here to look for something that is long gone, to run after a metaphor, to see and forgive and forget. They had come here hoping to get lost in the past. For that, they needed good guides.

“A guide in this kind of tour, he owns great power over the people he guides,” Arbel told me after we finished the emotional prayer for the wine and challah, and waitresses were serving traditional Jewish food to the table. “You don’t show them here tourist attractions, but you guide them through their past, their purpose, you go through what could have been their alternative life.”

Ze’ev Avrahami is a writer living in Berlin.

“I’ve asked them to be consistent in using the appropriate German names of the camps and this applies also to the Internet,” Zdrojewski said. “At the moment the .pl is misleading and might make people associate the camps with Poland.” Luckily, we now have the Internet to help us correct such faulty notions as a history of murderous Polish anti-Semitism.

Poland Wants Auschwitz Website To Drop .pl Suffix [The Telegraph]

• 400 Rabbis are marking the occasion with an ad in the Wall Street Journal calling for Rupert Murdoch to sanction Glenn Beck for “literally hundreds of on-air references to the Holocaust and Nazis when characterizing people with whom you disagree.” [WaPo]

• Lebanon’s new Hezbollah backed Prime Minister assured the US Ambassador that good ties with Washington will be maintained. [Canadian Press]

• As Egypt’s protests enter their third day, they are spreading from Cairo, and taking a toll on the country’s economy. [Haaretz]

• Meanwhile, over 10,000 protestors have taken to the streets in Yemen. [NYT]

• Tullia Zevi, leader of Italian Jewry and journalist, is dead. She was 91. [NYT]

• Daniel Bell, public intellectual, is dead. He was 91. [NYT]

• Auschwitz drew a record 1.38 million voluntary visitors in 2010. [Haaretz]

• Secretary of State Clinton forcefully accused those threatening to topple Lebanon’s government of trying to subvert the U.N. tribunal investigating the former prime minister’s assassination. [Laura Rozen]

• Israel is quietly but actively supporting Sudan’s Christian south in its efforts to secede, while essentially the entire Arab world backs the unionist regime in Khartoum. One reason for Israel’s support for independence? Trade opportunities. [World Tribune]

• Pro-Israel groups are finding it is most effective to be cruel only to be kind. [JTA]

• Newly released documents purport to show that West Germany knew of Adolph Eichmann’s whereabouts eight years before Israeli agents tracked him down and captured him in Argentina. [Der Spiegel]

I think I’ll try Alaska.

This particular appointment represents a bit of poetic justice: As Eisen explained during his confirmation hearings last summer, his mother, Frieda, was born in Czechoslovakia, but deported to Auschwitz. She survived, and eventually found her way stateside, along with Eisen’s Polish-born father, who died when Eisen was 14. “Neither had a formal education, but our home in Los Angeles was rich in conversation, culture, and memory,” Eisen, now 50, testified. He became the first in his family to graduate from high school, and went on to Brown; after a stint working for the Anti-Defamation League in L.A., he attended Harvard Law, where he became friendly with a classmate who went on to run both the law review and, later, the United States.

President Obama Announces Recess Appointments to Key Administration Posts [whitehouse.gov]
Obama Makes Recess Appointments, Taps Robert Ford As Ambassador to Syria [WP]

• Community board approval of the Ground Zero Islamic center in May was followed (caveat: Correlation does not prove causation!) by a significant uptick in local U.S. governments’ alleged discrimination against Muslims trying to build mosques. [Ben Smith]

• Holocaust denier David Irving was denied permission to conduct a tour on the Auschwitz grounds. [DPA/Haaretz]

• Remnants of a 1500-year-old Samaritan synagogue were uncovered in the Jordan Valley. [JTA]

• The New Israel Fund has modified donation guidelines so as to try to avoid supporting groups not seen as sufficiently Zionist. [JTA]

• Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak, unleashed on midtown Manhattan. Look out, ladies! [Page Six]

Mayor Bloomberg announced the winner of the Sukkah City competition. Jewcy was there.

• An Israeli court decided Israel was responsible for the high-profile gunfire death of a 10-year-old Palestinian whose father is a militant-turned-advocate. [AP/NYT]

• Profilee Aaron David Miller predicts that building Park51 will end as well as his inviting Yasser Arafat to the Washington, D.C., Holocaust Museum 12 years ago did: Not well at all. [WP]

• Former Bush speechwriter Pete Wehner takes to Commentary’s blog to condemn “ugly and unfortunate” anti-Islamic bigotry among Park51 opponents and stresses, “we have to be very careful not to equate American Muslims with al-Qaeda and Wahhabism.” [Contentions]

• Here is what happens when “a blond, tough-talking former gun-toting Texan” gets involved in one of those quintessentially complex Israeli-Palestinian quarrels. [LAT]

• Phillip Weiss pulls a Lee Smith and implies that New York Times blogger Robert Mackey exerts significant influence over commenters, or at least attracts commenters who agree with him. [Mondoweiss]

Pegged to his new Atlantic essay on anti-Semitism, Christopher Hitchens discusses with Tablet Magazine contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg why he was pleased to discover his Jewish heritage.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft, a lawyer and activist, wrote to Maryland’s attorney general earlier this year alleging fraud and/or misrepresentation concerning Save a Torah rabbi Menachem Youlus’ contention that the Torah in question had been salvaged from Auschwitz by a Polish priest.

While Youlus had made this judgment in 2008, Rosensaft, who has taught legal classes on war crimes trials, disputed the provenances of the Auschwitz Torah and another authenticated by Save a Torah, this supposedly from Bergen-Belsen:

The original buildings at Bergen-Belsen, he said, were burned to stop a typhus epidemic and the survivors were moved to a former German military installation nearby in May 1945. Mr. Rosensaft said that he was born in that installation in 1948 and returned many times to visit.

“The brick barracks to which the survivors were moved did not have wooden floorboards,” Mr. Rosensaft said, “and they’re now a NATO base, populated by British military personnel, so there is no way Youlus could have gotten there, either.”

Deal Over Claims To Rescued Torahs’ Provenances [City Room]
Related: From Auschwitz, a Torah as Strong as Its Spirit [NYT]

• South Africa is sending its ambassador to Israel, whom it recalled in the aftermath of the flotilla raid, back to the Holy Land. [Haaretz]

• J Street cuts an ad defending Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pennsylvania), a Senate candidate, implicitly picking a fight with Bill Kristol’s new outfit, the Emergency Committee for Israel. [Ben Smith]

• Berlin’s Jewish Museum received approval to buy the necessary land for a $13 million addition, also to be designed by architect Daniel Libeskind. [JTA]

• A Greek-born Israeli had a doctor treat him for the first time in 65 years after having a heart attack. Why had he avoided medical professionals? Because he had been one of Josef Mengele’s “patients” at Auschwitz. [Negev Rock City]

• Woody Allen is predictably curmudgeonly (at best) explaining why he recorded audio versions of his four humor books. [Arts Beat]

Seinfeld goes the thriller route.

• The U.N. General Assembly has backed off plans for an emergency meeting regarding Israel’s response to the flotilla. [Haaretz]

• Meg Ryan and Dustin Hoffman canceled appearances at the upcoming Jerusalem Film Festival, apparently because of the flotilla, although both actors deny this. [Arts Beat]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu and Secretary of Defense Gates discussed Israeli military matters today in Washington, D.C. [Ynet]

• James Franco appears in the trailer for Tablet Magazine contributing editor Gary Shteyngart’s forthcoming Super Sad True Love Story. [NY Mag]

• Icelandic authorities exhumed chess legend Bobby Fischer’s body in relation to a paternity suit. Grody. [LAT]

Three Weeks followers, cover your ears, but here are three generations’ worth of a family at Auschwitz—including the oldest, who did time there—dancing to, yes, “I Will Survive.”

• A large number of Israeli Holocaust survivors are indigent. [LAT]

• Rabbi David Wolpe movingly praises Christopher Hitchens, whom he frequently debates over the existence of God. [WP]

• “Is there anything left to be said about anti-Semitism?” A different daily magazine of Jewish life and culture finds plenty. [NYT]

• Word has Lindsay Lohan involved with a female IDF soldier. [New York Daily News]

• The United States is donating $15 million toward the preservation of Auschwitz. Since it’s the government doing it, in a sense it, too, is tax-exempt. [CNN]

A group of IDF soldiers uploaded a video of themselves dancing to Ke$ha to YouTube, and now face disciplinary action. For those not observing the Three Weeks, it’s below; for those observing the Three Weeks, click the sound off and watch.

Leslie Buck, who designed the Anthora in 1963 while working at the Sherri Cup Company was, as you’ve probably guessed, not Greek. He was born Laszlo Büch in modern-day Ukraine. He survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald; his parents didn’t.

Buck designed the cup to look Greek—he had precisely zero formal art training—because he knew who owned many of the city’s delis. He used Classical-esque lettering, and drew a group of lines that look like something from an ancient marble column. And he also put a picture of an amphora, a classical Greek vase, on the cup’s side. “ ‘Anthora’ comes from ‘amphora,’ as filtered through Mr. Buck’s Eastern European accent,” the article reports. That’s the kind of detail that makes my job easier.

Leslie Buck, Designer of Authentic Coffee Cup, Dies at 87 [NYT]

• David Kimche, a longtime Mossad member who rose to Foreign Ministry Director General, and who in later life backed the two-state solution and J Street, died at 82. [Laura Rozen]

• They’re planning a major-studio, 3D version of the Book of Genesis. Title: In The Beginning. Adam and Eve will be blue (just kidding). [Jewcy]

• Three suspects in the theft of Auschwitz’s “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign pleaded to up to three years’ jail-time. [Krakow Post/Vos Iz Neias?]

• The Egyptian government will fund restorations of local synagogues. [AP/Haaretz]

• Elinor Burkett, the Golda Meir biographer who made a Kanye-like splash at the Oscars, took her new schtick to Letterman (go to the three-minute mark). [ArtsBeat]

We’ll begin with the discipline with the least modifiers: concrete poetry is poetry whose appearance has been made integral to meaning; poetry whose typography, not always justified to the left margin, is at least as important to comprehension as word-meaning, rhythm, and rhyme. The best examples are the worst classics from grade-school English: the poem about the word “and” in the shape of an ampersand; the poem about a jug shaped like a jug; the poem about a boy’s blue eyes printed in blue font. I’ve fantasized about writing a positive, even effusive review of a book that would be arranged on the page into the outlines of a toilet or to form the word “NOT!”

Of course, concrete poems also exist in situ, or in nature—they can be found, or discovered, and this process of discovery, the founding poets tell us, is the most moral way “to write.” This process gets at not what can be made, but what is. And so, a stop sign says stop but take that sign off a streetcorner and hang it on a museum wall and the meaning has changed with context. A celebrity’s signature is “an autograph,” and is worth something; its provenance gives value, and its connotative appearance means more than the denotative content of that appearance, which is, after all, only scribbled with pen. These fetishistic concerns come into play particularly on occasions for which traditional verse seems inadequate: the most moving tribute I’ve encountered to the victims of 9/11 was hearing their names read over a loudspeaker on a windy anniversary in downtown Manhattan—doomed name after name without pause, the sheer mass and the mass of their different heritages overwhelming; and it’s glib but accurate to say that Auschwitz, that deathcamp that has “inspired”—a terrible verb—so much of the most inferior poetry of the 20th century, is itself a sort of concrete poem (which is to say: a poem in concrete, and in wood and wire).

CREDIT: round and round by ratterrell / Robert Terrell; some rights reserved.

But if, as Theodor Adorno maintained, after Auschwitz poetry was immoral (though he later repented of that statement), what were writers of the 1950s to write? Novels that avoided mentioning anything that happened in occupied Poland? Radio dramas of Nazi apologetics? Tens of millions were dead, cities were razed, and German-language literature was somehow corpse and city at once: a corpus first killed, then looted of its vitals, defiled. Also, it didn’t help that many of Germany and Austria’s finest writers were Jews. In the wake of that loss it became apparent that no ideal literature could reconstitute culture because it was just such literary idealism that had collaborated in culture’s destruction: Hitler was a noted memoirist; Goebbels, a literature Ph.D. from Heidelberg, wrote novels and poetry; and good Nazis were supposed to read Goethe between bouts of Jew-killing under the shade of Goethe’s oak tree at Buchenwald.

The 1950s and ’60s avant-garde decided to aid that destruction by destroying the destroyers, and what that meant, especially, was giving them their say—again. By changing context one changed content, as Bäcker and the writers published by neue texte, the name of the journal he edited and publishing house he led (writers comprising the Vienna Group, including Friedrich Achleitner, H.C. Artmann, Konrad Bayer, Gerhard Rühm, and Oswald Wiener), “wrote” by quotation and juxtaposition. Bäcker called his technique “System nachschrift,” literally the system of writing-after, or after-writing, but a word commonly used to mean “postscript.” His transcript is made only of documents pertaining to the Nazi regime and the Holocaust (other texts, like nachschrift, nachschrift 2, and EPITAPH, occasionally have recourse to visual material). At the same time that Günter Grass was trying to write a future for Germany by repoliticizing the novel, at the same time Peter Handke was denouncing Grass’s outward approach to politics and was instead writing inward, Bäcker invented a terminus for both: the personal and political. His genre, which would be called Dokumentarliteratur (documentary literature), or dokumentarische dichtung (documentary poetry), signaled a formal contribution as original as Thomas Bernhard’s unbreakable paragraphs, but it is as moral contribution that it remains incomparable.

Here the banality of evil becomes the sublimity of a poem; here Bäcker incriminates by verse:

if jews required to wear the insignia live in an apartment whose owner is not required to wear the insignia, then they are required to have a separate nameplate on the apartment entrance and the insignia immediately next to it
if persons not required to wear the insignia live in an apartment whose owner is required to wear the insignia, then they are entitled to a separate nameplate without the insignia
the affixation of nameplates and insignia is to be completed in such a way that every doubt is eliminated and so that it is clearly evident that

That is a quotation from an announcement “concerning official assignments,” from Vienna’s Jüdischen Nachrichtenblatt of March 3, 1942. Other pages of transcript make more explicit use of concrete, or spatial, properties, such as the excerpts below, which turn the list-poem, that repetitive staple of modern verse, back into the functionally repetitive list, or into something rhetorically between:

auschwitz telephones

no. 18
no. 45
no. 17
no. 33
no. 21

no. 41
no. 76
no. 16
no. 74
no. I
no. F III/2
no. 32
no. 62

no. 315
no. 55

***

7/1 19 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/3 25 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/4 13 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/5 32 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/6 12 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/7 14 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/8 17 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/10 22 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/11 17 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/12 25 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/13 15 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/14 21 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/15 13 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/18 17 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/19 29 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/20 30 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/21 23 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/22 21 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/23 1 prisoner in hartheim reported as having died
7/24 30 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/25 23 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/26 21 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/27 21 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/28 23 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/29 19 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/31 26 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died

Reading this list is arduous but typing it, retyping it for this review, is even worse. If the most moral way to write about the Holocaust is to quote it, perhaps the most moral way to read about it is to copy the quotations, and so Bäcker, like Victor Klemperer, author of The Language of the Third Reich, and like America’s Charles Reznikoff, who performed a similar palimpsest of testimony with Holocaust, might be best understood as a reader who wrote. In my own reading-writing of this passage, I had the following thoughts: do the days skipped, such as July 2 and July 9, represent Sundays, or other “days-off,” and what did the executioners do then? Also, why was only one prisoner executed on the 23rd, and who was that singular man? He had a name, certainly, and perhaps a family, etc. This type of questioning leads to the type of writing Bäcker sought to avoid—we ask, and because the dead are dead we can only, but barely, imagine the answers. Only if we flip to the back of the book, because Bäcker never clutters the pages of his poem with notes, do we find some brief jot—a true postscript—that this list of Hartheim prisoners was obtained from prosecutorial documents in the possession of the state attorney in Linz, dated 1948.

Casual appreciations of Bäcker’s achievement often forgo the terror while embracing technique: certainly there are a number of websites that compare the quotation method—“appropriation”—to the Web itself, and discourse on the ease with which writers today can ape postmodernity with just a click of the mouse, copying ‘n’ pasting “poems,” or arranging Google results into verse. From the pecia system of the Middle Ages, which broke manuscripts into sections, or peciæ, assigning each to a different scribe, to the highlight and drag I’ve used to rearrange the very sentence you’re reading now, we’ve lately arrived in the time of the home use version, the no-muss, no-fuss version, of monkish copying; in which one makes a text one’s own not through holy transcription but by impulsive download. Bäcker was no mere technician, however, and his almost religious transcription was necessary for reasons of renewal: not so much literary as of the soul. Bäcker, born 1925, dead in 2003, was active in the press and photography office of the Linz Hitlerjugend, serving ultimately as a cadre unit leader (Gefolgschaftsführer), and joined the Nazi Party as soon as he turned 18. He spent the rest of his life atoning for this, forcing himself to read his moral failure into every sentence he quoted, into every word he excised from primary sources as if they were his own, his primary, flesh.

]

Please consider giving to the American Jewish World Service’s Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund, here. Alternatively, you can text “Haiti” to 90999 to automatically donate $10 to the American Red Cross’s relief efforts.

Relatedly, this letter to the editors of the New York Times appeared today:

The lack of security protecting Auschwitz is unlikely to be “perplexing” to anyone who has visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. Visitors are far more likely to be perplexed if not appalled by the utter disrepair of the Birkenau site and the snack bar selling hot dogs and ice cream at Auschwitz.

Poland Questions Two Thieves Over Auschwitz Sign Theft [Haaretz]
Auschwitz Draws in Record Number of Visitors in 2009 [Ynet]

Nazi Mystery: Twins From Brazil [Explorer]

One stat has us sincerely hoping that the children being surveyed were showing off their senses of humor: “77 percent of the children aged 9-15 recognised Hitler as leader of the Nazi party, but 13.5 percent thought he invented gravity in 1650 and seven percent thought he coached Germany’s football team.” Another seems oddly revealing about how the Holocaust is treated: “Auschwitz was correctly identified by 70 percent—but 15 percent thought it was a WWII-based theme park.” A third is simply baffling: “61 percent knew who Goebbels was but 21 percent thought he was a ‘well-known Jew who wrote a diary in the attic.’” Perhaps we’re biased, but it’s hard to imagine anyone not having a pretty clear idea who Anne Frank was, what with the constant media attention given to the girl and her diary.

Of course before proceeding to mock the sad state of education in the United Kingdom, consider the fact that more than 90 percent of respondents know who Winston Churchill is. We’re not sure the same can be said about school children on this side of the pond.

Kids Think Hitler Was German Football Coach: Poll [AFP]

Right now accessing the page is proving impossible (and for those us who want to see it, incredibly frustrating); though it’s gained more than 1,300 fans since launching, the page has been temporarily disabled. But if you’re hellbent on finding out what kind of presence that particular concentration camp has on Facebook, know that the search term “Auschwitz” currently yields 699 unofficial pages.

Auschwitz Launches Facebook Site [BBC]
Auschwitz Lauches Facebook Page [Guardian]

And now, naturally, Poland is pissed. A spokesman for its embassy in London said that for Fry “to imply, however vaguely, some form of collective responsibility of the Polish nation and Poland for the notorious death camp which came to symbolise the horrors of the Holocaust, is utterly misleading, and quite frankly, slanderous.” And a historian has pointed out the error of Fry’s “border” reference—after all, under Nazi occupation, “there wasn’t really a Poland to speak of.”

Complaints: Fry ‘Slandered’ Poland Over Auschwitz [Channel 4]

Nazi Survivor, Guido Brinkmann, 90, Slain on Upper E. Side [NY Daily News]

Fertility Clinic Suspects’ Homes Raided [JPost]
Is Romania Human Egg Scandal A Case of Anti-Semitism? [Haaretz]

The Krakow Jewish Culture Festival is a crazy, magical scene. A mixture of Eastern and Western Europe, music and culture, Jewish and not. The closest thing the Jewish world has to Glastonbury, the giant English festival that had ended just days before. The program is a carefully curated, loose yet contagious mix of Jewish sound, ranging from the infectious Sabbath chanting of the Benzion Family, who are like the Jonas Brothers but old and Hasidic, to The Other Europeans, a troop of klezmer and Roma gypsy musicians who spar with their instruments to explore the connectivity of their respective musical cultures.

The only shame is that the festival is such a well-kept secret in the United States. Young Jews in particular would flock to this creative cacophony if only they knew it existed and there are no doubt thousands obliviously Eurorailing in the vicinity. In their absence, the festival is left to an audience of predominantly young Catholic Poles who lap it up voraciously. The majority were born four decades after the atrocities of the Second World War, coming of age in a post-communist Poland. Faced with myriad identity issues, they appear to be using the festival to work out their questions one song at a time.

Krakow is a town in which the Holocaust is everywhere—thanks to the battery of brightly colored wagons, little bigger than golf carts, that litter the streets, energetically competing to lure visitors onto a series of niche tours they market via menus emblazoned on their sides. Trips to Auschwitz, “Kazimierz Ghetto,” and “Schindler’s Factory” are advertised alongside “Pope’s Krakow” and Wawel Castle as if they are all great days out for the whole family, despite the fact that while the last two are national jewels, the former are scars that stretch across the heart of the city. 65,000 Jews lived in Krakow before the war, amounting to 25 percent of the population. They now number a mere 200. Their absence hangs heavy, and if these tour carts were the sole custodians of their memory, they would surely soon be forgotten. But over the past 19 years, the Krakow Jewish Culture Festival has provided a critical public space for its audience to grapple with the stains of their history. This tangled phenomenon has been well-documented by the remarkable Ruth Ellen Gruber in her book Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe and our first encounter with it on this evening served to underline just how complex a task it can be.

In the club, the crowd was baying for the band to take the stage, eager to see the musicians ply their trade at close quarters in this intimate setting, but in their stead, a lone American emcee stumbled on, sporting a curly-haired-yet-balding look, like a younger, leaner, less successful Richard Simmons. His attempts to foster witty banter with the crowd fell on deaf ears, as the audience was largely Polish-speaking. This ersatz Simmons floundered until an anonymous American voice from the back of the club reminded him that it was music they had come to see. Relieved to have an English-speaking foil, albeit a hostile one, Simmons relentlessly baited his heckler, demanding he “come up here and tell us what kind of a bad day you have had that gives you the right to be Mr. Rude and bring us all down like that!” The crowd split as the mystery American was goaded to the stage. With the microphone shoved suddenly in his face, the interloper took a deep breath, calmly leaned forward, looked his nemesis straight in the eye and with measured words intoned: “I have had a bad day…because…I went to Auschwitz.”

The room turned still and silent. The scrawny emcee, flustered, was frozen for a beat as his quarry slipped back into the audience, leaving him alone in the spotlight. He staggered to one side and attempted to segue into an awkward monologue about how harsh trumpet playing can be on both your lips and cheeks before limping off, crushed, to exit stage left.

If that performance was appalling, we did not have to wait long for the innate beauty of the festival to reveal itself. Daniel Kahn, the Berlin-based purveyor of Radical Yiddish Song ambled onto the stage armed only with a well-worn ukulele and his low-affect, mischievous charisma, effortlessly using both to make the sorrows of the past speak to the turmoil of the present. He wasted no time in calling New York based songstress Judith Berkson to duet with him, even while confiding that the two had only met an hour before. As he framed the song they had chosen to perform, a Yiddish ballad called “Dem Milners Trehren” (The Miller’s Tears), a lamentation sung by Jews who had been driven from the land they had lived on and farmed for generations, he added that its message felt especially pertinent in the light of the grinding economic woes we face today. The duo launched into a simple yet haunting rendition of the song, conjuring a sound which would not have been out of place on a Jens Lekman album. As they traded harmonies and verses, Kahn occasionally switched into English to lull the audience with the song’s lyricism as well as its tenor, reaching back into the past and hauling it into the present with a ferocity and an emotional power that silenced the room once more. This time, for all the right reasons.

Roger Bennett visited the festival as part of a delegation from Reboot and the Idelsohn Society For Musical Preservation.

Chantal Akerman

Akerman’s most famous work, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, is more like the silence before the bang. The three-hour 1975 film, which begins a week-long revival run at Film Forum in New York City on January 23, is usually dubbed a landmark feminist film but is actually a landmark film of any stripe. It’s simple, really: Akerman attentively chronicles three days in the life of a widowed Brussels homemaker, including her turning tricks to provide for her son (discreetly, not Belle de Jour style). It’s action-packed, but for the most part not with the sort of action you usually see: prepping a chicken breast, scrubbing a bathtub, quiet dinners, reading—all shot, lit, and framed with care. There’s still nothing quite like it, and most amazing was Akerman’s age: at 24, she had written and directed a mature work that seemed to contain a lifetime of experience.

In a sense Akerman does carry several lives within her, like many of her generation, through the experiences of her family. Born in 1950 to Polish Jews who had resettled in Belgium, she belongs to the ranks of second-generation survivors: her mother lived through Auschwitz; her grandmother and other relatives were killed there. (Her father spent the war in hiding.) In Brussels, her parents were shopkeepers, and, caring and hardworking, they took the position of trying not to “burden” their children with the past. But the trauma of the camps filtered down. Her mother, for example, pushed food on her daughter, believing that her normal-looking daughter was anorexic.

In her films, Akerman works out this transmitted sense of phantom memory, and the weight of inherited autobiography. Yet the range of films she has made in the past three decades includes a mall musical (Golden Eighties), a hypnotic Proust adaptation (La Captive), a romantic comedy (Un Divan à New York), and a revue of jokes and stories performed by actors, amateurs, and Akerman (American Stories/Food, Family, and Philosophy). For her 1993 documentary D’Est (“From the East”), she traveled through several countries in the former Soviet bloc. She consciously avoided a “back to roots” approach—she’s said she simply felt “drawn to ‘there’”—and instead filmed a dense, unannotated album of disparate faces and places—men walking down a deserted twilit road, bundled-up crowds in a Moscow train station, a child rolling a toy car at home. Despite the historic period of transition, there’s not a whole lot going on, strictly speaking. As the title of Ivone Margulies’s monograph on the filmmaker puts it, Nothing Happens. And yet the stuff of life is happening, and, increasingly in Akerman’s recent work, we also sense the tectonic forces of History with a capital “H,” too, underneath it all.

Akerman’s style here and elsewhere—keen yet hands-off, with an overarching yet internally flexible conceit—shows the influence of the ominously dubbed Structuralist filmmaking that had its heyday in the 1970s. Ground zero was New York, where Akerman visited and lived several times; over a seven-month period in 1972 she worked as a waitress, a model for New School sculpture classes, and even a cashier at a midtown porn theater. She admired the diary-like films of Jonas Mekas, himself a Lithuanian refugee, which she compared to “homemade cooking”; La Région Centrale, an improbable work by Structuralist heavyweight Michael Snow involving a programmed camera on a mountain peak, also stuck in her mind. Teaming up with cinematographer Babette Mangolte, Akerman conducted her own austere experiment in observation and lighting, Hotel Monterey, at a since-demolished welfare haunt on the Upper West Side.

Yet as critic Amy Taubin has succinctly observed, Akerman ultimately took such impersonal constraints and combined them with an open, humanist heart. News From Home (1977) elegantly and poignantly punctuates the picturesque worn-out streets of Manhattan with readings from her mother’s sweetly concerned letters from Belgium. (“It was nice to get your note…I am sorry that it was so short.”) That Akerman does the voiceover, speaking for and through her mother (both exiles of different sorts), demonstrates the layering of experience in her films. In an interview on a recent Belgian DVD of the film, her poised and engaging mother (who puzzles over the lack of get-up-and-go among like-aged friends) puts it best. “It’s funny, all her films have a bit of me in them,” she observes, puttering about a kitchen very similar to the one in Saute ma ville. “Just like Hitchcock…I also have a part in all of her films.” It is Akerman, by the way, who conducts the interview.

In Jeanne Dielman, the sense of the past that seeps through can be complex. The film is commonly held to show the drudgery of woman’s work while according to it the dignity of being shown at all. (There’s more drama to a cooking mishap at one point than a visit from a john.) And for Jeanne Dielman, who is played with increasingly robotic serenity by Delphine Seyrig, busywork keeps the anxiety away; if nothing changes, everything must be okay. But in Akerman’s interview with her mother, as she draws her out on the subject of life in the camps, the practice of routine emerges as something terrifyingly vital, a desperate goal. As she recalls, so long as she and her companions were forced to work, purges might not occur; any departures from this routine were final ones.

Delphine Seyrig in Jeanne Dielman

At the same time, the routines shown in Jeanne Dielman—like Dielman wrapping a scarf around her teenage son, or unpacking his sofa bed each night—are what make up a sense of home. And so it is that Akerman can describe the film as “an act of love for those gestures that you are surrounded by as a child.” Elsewhere, she has also connected this routine with the comfort of religious ritual, and recalled the pleasure of praying alongside her grandfather as a small child. With his death, her religious schooling stopped, and though she says her lack of belief makes a return impossible, she always missed the rituals and meaning of prayer. (In Nothing Happens, Margulies quotes Akerman as searching for “rhythms of psalmody” in some of her lilting voiceovers.)

From her grandfather’s generation, it is her maternal grandmother with whom Akerman feels a special bond. An artist, she painted “big canvasses,” according to Akerman’s mother, none of which apparently survived her death. But a text did survive: her diary, which Akerman’s mother preserved and inscribed with her own loving memorial. (Her daughters would in turn add their own.) Excerpts from this diary are central to a 2004 work by Akerman, one of the several installations she has started creating in addition to filmmaking and writing. These reflect an ever-stronger interest in opening up multiple perspectives and voices; for instance, To Walk Next to One’s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge features projected text from the diary and a video of Akerman and her mother discussing the camps. (The curious title refers to both a French idiom and food neurosis.) From one daughter to the next, to the next, a lineage of stories and reflections is maintained. Akerman’s creation builds on the unfulfilled aspirations of both her grandmother and her frustrated mother.

Akerman’s installations have allowed her a new way to revisit and retrace both the past and her own works. (They’re also easier to fund than films.) A recent traveling compendium exhibition, scheduled to appear next at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, reconfigures her old works, including D’Est, into multimonitor installations. Besides two films looking at the American South and Mexican bordertowns, a third had appeared in film form as recently as 2006: Là-bas (“Down There”), a largely housebound rumination in Israel during her ambivalent stay there as a visiting teacher. (The title refers to her family’s term for where those who left Europe for Israel went.) Akerman has also employed a gallery space to perform a previously published monologue about her father’s death, A Family in Brussels, written in the overlapping voice of both her mother and herself.

It’s also possible the installations are an extension of Akerman’s preoccupation with the Second Commandment, which crops up in the D’Est installation and elsewhere. “Jews have a big problem with the image,” she said to Godard in a 1979 interview. “You do not have the right to make images, you are transgressing when you do, because images are linked to idolatry.” Akerman uses the stricture to explain the head-on frontal perspective she often uses when shooting: in her view, watching on a one-to-one level, face to face as it were, banishes the possibility of idolatry. Hence the tableau compositions in Jeanne Dielman and elsewhere. And so, too, does her use of triptychs of monitors in the installations prevent a submission to the flickering images. The aim isn’t a studied remove or a passive resignation; it feels like the view of a sensitive observer, somehow between two worlds but belonging to both. Fittingly, her films are full of shots from doorways, and her camera position often seems coincident with exactly where a fourth wall would be.

Some of these “dedramatizing” techniques might well express her experience growing up as a second-generation survivor: surrounded by the inescapable presence of a story that is not always elaborated upon and so remains to be broached and understood for oneself. Yet even as these experiences shadow so much of her art, Akerman, who today lives and works in Paris, has always resisted categorizing her films. “I’m not making a cinema for women. I’m not speaking to anyone specifically,” she told a French interviewer last year. “I’m not even trying to reach Jews.” But if Akerman is cautious about the meaning and reception of her films, they breathe the many facets of her identity—as a Jew, as a woman, as an artist. Her multilayered works speak for her, and for themselves.