Museum of the History of Polish Jews – From Under the Fig Tree

Bits and pieces

joselitApril 21, 2013November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Within our increasingly futurist orientation, there often seems to be little room for the past. But if this week’s events are any indication, yesteryear casts a very long shadow on contemporary life. Between the flap regarding the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and the opening of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, you’d be hard put to avoid history’s long reach.

Lukasz Baksik — In a cemetery in the town of Topczewo, in northeastern Poland, a Catholic gravestone has been primitively carved out of a matzeva. Source: Tablet, credit: Łukasz Baksik

While visiting Amsterdam, Justin Bieber, like so many tourists before him, made the obligatory pilgrimage to the Anne Frank House. At the conclusion of his visit, the teen idol innocently expressed the hope that had Anne Frank survived, she would have been a big fan: a “belieber.” In no time at all, his remarks generated quite the hullabaloo, placing the story of Anne Frank and her family once again within our sights.

Several days later, the debut of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews made front page news. In the works for several years now, the museum not only chronicles the Polish Jewish experience but also seeks a form of closure. “You can’t put the pieces back together again, but you can build bridges,” explained Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who’s responsible for the core exhibition.

Another arena in which the past intrudes on the present is most painfully and soberly apparent in the stunning photography of Łukasz Baksik, which was featured in this week’s Tablet.

For several years, the Polish photographer traveled throughout Poland with an eye towards finding and photographing Jewish tombstones (matzevot) that had been incorporated into the landscape as building blocks and cobblestones. His work gives a new, and entirely sinister, meaning to the practice of recycling.

In one photograph, a tombstone, turned on its side, is “repurposed” as the cornerstone of a storehouse of farm equipment. In another, fragments of tombstones are patched together, helter-skelter, as the exterior wall of a cowshed. In a third photograph, a Hebrew name or phrase peeks out amid the smooth cobblestones of a neat and tidy town square.

Baksik’s work packs quite a wallop. It unsettles. At first glance, you’re not quite sure what you’re meant to see: An urban street scene, perhaps? A pastoral setting? In the absence of people, these images don’t give you too many helpful hints. But the longer you look at them, the more details accrue, until you realize that what you’re seeing are pieces of the Jewish past. Quite literally.

It’s the fragmentary, elusive nature of things that makes Baksik’s photography so compelling. A visual metaphor for history’s relationship to the present, it reveals an unvarnished reality in which the past makes itself felt in bits and pieces.

Word play 1

joselitNovember 14, 2011November 16, 20171 Comment

From last Monday evening through Sunday afternoon, my week has been of a piece. That usually doesn’t happen: Most of the time, Monday bears little relationship to Tuesday and even less relationship to Sunday.

But if upbringings have ‘themes,’ as Calvin Trillin once put it so beautifully in Messages from My Father, this past week had one, too, and that was the power of language.

On Monday evening, the Polish Embassy was the scene of a dazzling presentation by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett on the creation of a museum in Warsaw that will chronicle and interpret the thousand-year-old history of Polish Jews. The images that she brought to bear were splendid, but what really packed a wallop was the passionate and resolute prose that accompanied them.

Much the same could be said of Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s campus talk on Tuesday evening, where the subject at hand was the fate of objects in an increasingly virtual world. Once again, her artful words and lively cadences compelled the audience to sit up and pay close attention.

And then, on Sunday afternoon, at Politics & Prose, the beloved author and GW professor of creative writing Faye Moskowitz read selections from her book, And The Bridge is Love, which enjoys the good fortune of being reprinted some twenty years after its first release.

All of us in the standing-room-only audience hung on each and every one of Faye Moskowitz’s finely wrought sentences, finding in them the kind of wisdom, humor, affirmation and solace that only words can bring.

A good week, then, for prose and those who keep it afloat.