Roots Tour Part IX; In which we drive ourselves to Tarnow and meet the last Jew born there. Or so he said.

Jakub drove us home from Sanok in the Carpathians; it was dark by the time we made it back to Rzeszow's rynek.  We found an ATM to get the additional zlotys needed to pay him for a long, full, memorable day.  He promised to send us the pictures he'd taken and see about forms for further research in Przemysl's regional archives.  He also came up, at our invitation, to check out the hotel for other clients.  I asked him if the glass-walled bathroom was something Polish, or merely weird.

He said it was weird. We're Facebook friends now and I'm following his career; a NY Times writer of 30 years recently wrote in the Sunday Magazine about his roots tour into Poland and Ukraine, with the "resourceful" Jakub. (The Jewish reporter also met a lot of the same people we met on our travels.)

After our third night at the Hotel Bristol, on Thursday, we undertook the most adventurous part of our independent journey in Galicia. This involved renting a car and driving it west along A4 to Tarnow ("TARnov"), our biggest Polish town yet. People back home still carry the last name, Tarnower.    

The prospect of driving a car in a foreign country had given my husband pause.  But we had already observed our guide driving; the rules of the road looked the same and the names of towns were easy enough to read on roadsigns. We had maps and we'd already navigated public buses and ticket windows. Besides, I'd already paid for it on the web before we left home. Extra, for automatic transmission.

The only place to pick up a rental car in Rzeszow seemed to be back north at the airport, so the hotel got us a cab; the driver spoke no English at all. The man at the airport car rental counter spoke it fluently, though. In a gesture of extra hospitality, he threw in an English-speaking GPS system at no extra charge.  This completely changed my husband's attitude; we were as good as guided.

Except that the GPS' directions made no sense. We knew that all we needed was to get on progressively bigger west-bound roads till we got on the major highway to Tarnow. But the GPS didn't, somehow.  Its British voice was taking us to progressively smaller, more local roads, and we were not, as far as we could tell, facing west, but east. Every time we did face west, it told us to turn around.

Then we learned that the disadvantage of driving in a country where you don't speak the language; you can't understand such warnings as "road under construction, keep left." So we wound up following another presumed tourist right up to the navigable end of some right lanes. This forced us to turn around and drive in the direction of oncoming traffic, until we could quickly turn sharply around into the lanes we would have known to follow had we been Polish speakers.  

We wound up lost in a residential neighborhood, with no sign of the highway, cursing the complimentary schizoid navigator. Luckily, the residential neighborhood in which we gave up on the GPS had a corner deli, where nobody spoke English but someone remembered the same amount of high school French as I did.  A couple a droits, a couple a gauches, and we were on the main road to Tarnow.

We drove into town -- following signs for the old city -- the stare miasto -- and parked right off Krakowskiej street -- the same street where my grandmother's cousin Chaim had had a tailor shop, at number 51.  We lucked out yet again when a meter cop, using Polish and smiling pantomime, helped us figure out one of those newfangled parking machines, the same kind that confuses us in New York.  Did he recognize our purpose?  Did he recognize American Jews?

Tarnow had had a big Jewish community, and its current city fathers seemed to know it.  We soon came upon a poster on the way into the old part of town that advertised a week of Jewish culture.  Lectures, movies, concerts, sing-alongs.  The poster was all in Polish, so this was not just for my eyes, but natives'.  The information center on its rynek was well prepared for Jewish roots seekers, too, with a separate self-guided Jewish heritage tour map and experienced, bilingual help. 

The first place on that tour was the Bima -- the surviving piece  of a 17th-century synagogue the Nazis had burnt down.  Its four pillars, skinned to its bricks, and the dome above them stood in a pocket park dedicated to this ruin. Remnants of painted wood were visible inside the dome, and on a brick wall opposite this bima were panels, in English and Polish, describing the lost world of Tarnow's Jews. 

   

On the cement wall of the side of a building behind the bima, some young people were painting a mural of doves.  These may have been from the storefront just across from the park entrance, the local headquarters of a Polish organization dedicated to restoring local Jewish spaces.  The organization's name was written in Yiddish letters, transliterated from Polish, over the door.

Then three English-speaking people appeared; one fifty- or sixtyish man in a Tevye-style cap, his slightly younger wife, and a fit grey-haired man dressed in artsy black, carrying professional-weight cameras.  Jews!  Tevye/Jerry was from Vancouver and had come for the annual bike ride from Auschwitz to Krakow. The camera carrier was indeed a professional photographer, a Jerry/Jerzy? Bergman, and "the last Jew born in Tarnow."  In 1948, to parents from among the surviving ten percent -- before they, too, left for more receptive places. 

Jerry Bergman had grown up and gone to school among Poles, who were apparently none too happy to have him in their midst.  He could point out his grandfather's ironwork shop off the rynek, and other personal and public landmarks of Tarnow's Jewish history.  He'd taken pictures for all kinds of international media outlets and currently lived in Denmark, but came back to Tarnow for Jewish events; he has a standing reservation for a room over the Tourism Information Center for whenever he comes.

We immediately fell to easy joking, as if we'd been friends for weeks, at least.  That traveling- incognito feeling, though it had faded over the past three days, disappeared in the company of these other Jews.  The four of us followed Jerry around through the rynek to a few blocks of Tarnow, him pointing out exactly where the Jewish streets began and ended, the rising value of property, the present owners and their trouble funding renovation, where his relatives had lived and other historical insider tidbits.  

Although Jerry Bergman spoke and gestured in a tone of understandable cynicism, he was actually quite active in the preservation and restoration of Jewish artifacts and in particular, cemeteries.  He explained how the Jewish cemeteries we'd seen had no stones because if they hadn't been destroyed and pillaged by Nazis, they'd become defenseless quarries for the local population, who helped themselves later.  Many photos of Jewish gravestones, in abandoned cemeteries or abandoned in fields, appear among his online photographs. Many wound up sanded down, re-engraved, and repurposed in Christian graveyards.

While he showed a typically Jewish, rueful sense of humor, Jerry  didn't broadcast any malice toward contemporary Poles. He seemed pleased by local efforts of organizations like AntiSchematy2 and Mezuza to restore local Jewish cemeteries. He was certainly not traveling incognito. He said he hoped we'd come to the concert at the bimah that night, and went off to his place in town to get some sleep.