European Journey

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From Alan: Just to the south of the great castle at Krakow..Wawel..is the forner Jewish quarter, Kazimierz...with several synagogues partly restored, and numbers of restaurants featuring kosher meals and klezmer music. Eva: it's like going to your old aunt's house: a few tables, lace table cloths, dark polished furniture, quarreling waiters (among one another)--At lunch with a woman psychiatrist Maria Orvid whose name was given us by Fred Ford who knew her from teaching here, we talked about this and decided it was an example of the 'return of the repressed'. There is great curiosity and enthusiasm about prewar Jewish life: but without the Jews. So it is quite odd to go to a restaurant and order ( as we did) carp in jelly with raisins and nuts, brisket ( yes, cooked to the very end of cooking as my grandmother made it) and, as another exception to her vegetarianism, goose for Eva...and then listen to soulful klezmer music...The synagogues have photos and movies of the deportations, the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto...it was enough very soon..Maria Orvid suggested we read Eva Hoffman's book about the 'second generation' , those who are children of the Holocaust survivors ( and of survivors from other instances of genocide, called 'After Such Knowledge". A very sensitive and sometimes personal account.Eva: this book is particularly important to me both personally and from the point of view of Armand Volkas' and my work with survivors and victims of the holocaust and of other political oppression. Her discussion of the trauma carried by the second generation makes total sense and, though having survived the war is nowhere near as bad as having survived the camps, it makes me wonder what I have unknowlingly passed on to our children..

Meanwhile: and it is a big meanwhile...Krakow shines as a cosmopolitan, educated city. At night we hear Mozart in a church concert, eat well. Took a train to Czestochowa, where Jasna Gora is one of the world's great pilgrimage sites which displays a 'Black Madonna". It is unveiled at 1:30 pm with a huge sound of drums and trumpets.a silver screen slowly lifting to reveal the painting...awesome....The original is a fabulous iconic painting with a simple background , over which, sadly enough, the church dramaturges have overlain bejeweled robes and crowns so that the faces of mother and child barely peep out from diamond and pearl gewgaws.

We get CNN in our room and watch with amazed horror at the news..the endless spin...the careful way in which the really bad stuff is intimated between the lines...Eva: it's so sad and
apparently so inevitable that the world wishes to learn so little from one country to the other.
It seems that not only weren't we prepared, but we asked for no help from those who just
went through similar horrors. For myself, having lived through a very similar scene in Berlin where we also lost houses, health, and lived with corpses and makeshift buildings, it would seem to make so much more sense to send aid into the city and help those who can to
rebuild rather than make everyone homeless--alas, another one of those many situations where noone asked for my sage advice..

Today and tomorrow are our last days here before Vienna and one of our plans is to revisit
Gulliver's restaurant, where Maria Orvid introduced us to the most heavenly lemon meringue torte man has ever made... and so the contrasts continue. Horror and delight. Was it ever different?

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