Poland misses its Jews

Or so they say.

“Jewish style” restaurants are serving up platters of pirogis, klezmer bands are playing plaintive Oriental melodies, derelict synagogues are gradually being restored. Every June, a festival of Jewish culture here draws thousands of people to sing Jewish songs and dance Jewish dances. The only thing missing, really, are Jews.

“It’s a way to pay homage to the people who lived here, who contributed so much to Polish culture,” said Janusz Makuch, founder and director of the annual festival and himself the son of a Catholic family.

[…] “Imagine what it would mean for the culture of New York if all Spanish-speaking New Yorkers disappeared,” said Ann Kirschner, whose book, “Sala’s Gift,” recounts her mother’s survival through five years in Nazi labor camps.

Sometime in the 1970s, as a generation born under Communism came of age, people began to look back with longing to the days when Poland was less gray, less monocultural. They found inspiration in the period between the world wars, which was the Poland of the Jews.

“You cannot have genocide and then have people live as if everything is normal,” said Konstanty Gebert, founder of a Polish-Jewish monthly, Midrasz. “It’s like when you lose a limb. Poland is suffering from Jewish phantom pain.”

Interest in Jewish culture became an identifying factor for people unhappy with the status quo and looking for ways to rebel, whether against the government or their parents. “The word ‘Jew’ still cuts conversation at the dinner table,” Mr. Gebert said. “People freeze.”

The revival of Jewish culture is, in its way, a progressive counterpoint to a conservative nationalist strain in Polish politics that still espouses anti-Semitic views. Some people see it as a generation’s effort to rise above the country’s dark past in order to convincingly condemn it.

It reminds me of nothing so much as the joke I heard years ago, when Sirhan Sirhan was up for parole yet another time, and told the judge that if Robert Kennedy were still alive, he’d have pardoned him. “Talk about bad luck!” the comedian said. “The one guy in the country who would have pardoned him, and he killed him!”

Yeah. Color me extremely suspicious about Poland’s fad for things Jewish, because this is still the country where Lech Walesa was “accused” of being Jewish when he ran for president, and the nation which has a Catholic Priest whose radio station regularly makes anti-Semitic statements.

Sorry, but this sudden fondness for Jewishness rings hollow. The enmity runs so deep that I felt it growing up, from the second- and third-generation Americans of Polish descent who lived in my neighborhood.

I’m betting that if Poland suddenly got an influx of actual Jews, instead of these faux Jew festivals, the enmity would show itself pretty damn quick. I’m thinking, also, that Poland will never have a large Jewish community again. Too little, too late.