Roots Tour in Galicia -- Part IV -- in which we prepare to set off for Przeworsk

Our third day in Poland, with our jet lag over and our bearings set, we visited my grandmother's ancestral town, Przeworsk.  For this we needed an actual guide; someone who could talk to locals in native-fluent Polish, someone familiar with the context of my trip, the lay of the land, and where to find parking.  I found such a person through the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.

I had googled my way to the JHI; it occupies  the same geographical footprint as the once (as you can tell from old black and white photographs) Great Synagogue of Warsaw on Tlomackie street, blown up with official German fanfare in 1943, right after the ghetto's liquidation. Today it's a blue Met Life skyscraper, towering over north-south tram lines.  Right next to it is the associated Jewish Genealogy & Family Heritage Center, which occupies the related building that survived; it had been the grand shul's library and appears in those same black-and-white photographs, looking just the same, from the outside, as it does today.  

Both institutions are named after Emanuel Ringelblum because he, doomed to die in the Warsaw Ghetto, succeeded in preserving the history of that mass murder by starvation and final liquidation.  He and his fellow witnesses buried thousands of documents under wrecked ghetto buildings in metal boxes and three Tevye-style milk cans. One set was found in 1946; another in 1950; a third has never been found. A lot of the quotes appearing in the Holocaust section of the new Polin Museum come from that Ringelblum Archive.

But I didn't remember about Ringelblum till later. Still home and planning my trip, what I saw on the JHI's web site gave me a shiver of recognition. The executive director pictured there, Yale Reisner,  was someone I had known 45 years before; we had shared a seven-week USY teen tour of Israel in 1970.  He had been the younger son of the Philadelphia rabbi-and-wife couple who had led that trip.  I had become good friends with his older sister, and remembered him as a friendly younger brother.  I also had visited Rabbi and Connie Reisner and their kids after the trip, in Philly, and when they moved to Bersheva, the year I lived there after college. Yale had been living in Warsaw for the past 20 years or so.  That is how small the Jewish world is, or at least the part interested in history and genealogy.

But the JHI web site was somewhat out of date. Today Helise Lieberman heads the organization.  I contacted her via email; we played master-level Jewish geography, we became Facebook friends, and on a visit to Bersheva that she was making just after I'd introduced myself, she remembered me to Yale's family, who did remember me.  Fate was coming along on my trip.

Helise hooked me up with Anna Przybyszewska, the associate director of the genealogy center. Anna took the information I'd been able to glean over the years at Jewishgen.org, Yad VaShem and ancestry.com, and improved upon it quite a bit with research in Geni (another genealogical site), archives in Polish, and others not available to the general public.  For example, she drew me a family tree that started from my grandmother Esther's grandparents, which revealed a couple more second- and third-cousin survivors living in Israel as well as lost distant cousins.  One of the newly discovered survivors had drawn a whole list of lost family members himself, with their fates, for Yad VaShem. Those survivors' documents and addresses dated all the way back to the fifties, however, so finding these people's descendants  may take quite a bit more effort, assuming they're interested. 

Anna P. also found documents created in the wake of the war, by the organization responsible for relocating and reuniting Jewish survivors -- the Centralnego Komitetu Zydow w Polsce, or Central Committee of Polish Jews.  These documented the survival of people we knew. One was my mother's first cousin Memel, born in Przemysl and hidden with his parents ("on the Aryan side," the document says). But Memel's father -- my grandmother's brother Meyer -- disappeared  when, the story goes, he went out to find food.  The documents showed an address in Przemysl, half an hour east of  Przeworsk, where he and his mother had been living in June 1946, before they made their way to France and finally New York.  (Today Memel/Michael is a retired federal lawyer and grandfather of five living in Silver Springs.)

Anna also found us the address of the tailor shop of my grandmother's first cousin Chaim, in Tarnow,  90-100 minutes west of Przeworsk on the same highway.  And possible relatives, other murdered people named Schopf, in nearby Kanczuga and Lancut and other places.

Jakub and Me

Helise also found me my guide, Jakub Lysiak. A 32-year-old Pole of Catholic origin, he spoke fluent English, Hebrew, some Yiddish, and had majored in Jewish Studies at Warsaw University. He had worked for the Israeli Consulate in Warsaw, in the new Polin museum, and lately was in near constant motion touring Jewish youth groups and people like me around Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, and back and forth to Israel.  We agreed to pay his fee for just the one critical day, and planned to hit three of the towns my grandmother used to mention; Przemysl and Jaroslaw in addition to Przeworsk.

Jakub met us in the lobby of the Hotel Bristol at eight that morning, in jacket, shirt and jeans. He drove a comfortable van, parked just off the Rynek.

All Jakub's clients, naturally, wanted to know the reason for his choice of career, and most suspected at least some Jewish ancestry. He could verify none.  His Jewish story, told while driving us east, started with an essay he wrote in high school for a nationwide competition started by Golda Tencer, today director of the Jewish Theater of Warsaw.   Jakub won first place. The prize was a trip to Israel.  He was also in the first group of exchange students in a Polish-Israeli exchange.  He had both an affinity for Jews and few illusions about the persistence of antiSemitism in Poland.  In some cases, he said, it was fear of contemporary Jews seeking ancestors' property, several generations after it had been stolen by Nazis and given to Poles at firesale prices or simply as rewards. But it was an attitude receding with each new generation. 

It was also useful to know, as we did from reading, how thoroughly the Poles also saw themselves as victims of Nazism.  They had lost three million of their own, as well as 20% of their clergy. (Just two weeks before we left on our trip, I had happened to be at the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, where I was visiting my daughter. I saw a WW II-era film strip there of a couple, a Polish (non-Jewish!) man and a German woman, being paraded through town and officially humiliated for defiling the Aryan race with their illicit relationship. Of course, the extent of their punishment was having their heads shaved,being paraded with signs and perhaps public shunning. Nasty enough. But survivable. And on the third hand, a clear demonstration of how Poles were regarded by Germans. Plaques blaming "German Genociders" and destroyers are all over Poland.) 

We had been emailing back and forth for many weeks.  

Galicia Roots Trip Part III, in which we visit Lancut Castle -- like regular tourists

On our second day in Poland we ventured beyond the town we'd landed in, Rzeszow, and beyond my immediate roots-seeking agenda. Like regular tourists, we went to see the Lubomirski castle in Lancut, an official historic site of Poland.  With the help of the hotel desk and map, we made our way to the Dworzec Autobusy and found the right platform.  A young woman waiting with us spoke some English. The driver, over 50, did not, but helped us figure out the fare and showed us where to get off.  We were very proud of ourselves, using my 100 words of Polish, and pantomime, to make ourselves understood.

At Lancut's bus station the platforms were all marked with the names of towns that were thrillingly familiar to the Jewish culturally educated: Chelm, Tarnow, Przemysl, and Przeworsk, too.  Just standing there, mythical places in big letters, like Summit, South Orange, Montclair, just bus rides of a few zlotys and an hour or less.

Towns famous to Chasidic and Yiddish folklore and literature, all short bus rides away -- the traces of their people sought by indirect survivors from later times and distant places

The entrance to the huge grounds of the castle was across the street.

We walked for about ten minutes through that park, past the greenhouses, the tennis court, the carriage house, to the fortified castle and its gardens, surrounded by an open tunnel that was once was a moat.  A young woman happened to be walking in our direction; she said something and I caught the almost-Russian word for weather.  Since the sun was shining and the temperature and humidity better than anyone could rightly expect for June in subCarpathia, I agreed. Grandmother... born nearby... I think I managed to say, in near-Polish.  She smiled.

We made it ahead of a school group. 

Lancut Castle, Lancut, near Rzeszow

While the castle compared favorably in grandeur with the ultimate  field trip of our youth -- to the American Museum of Natural History -- I can't imagine that the posh furnishings of the Lubomirski's castle compared in these kids' interest with dioramas of gazelles and eskimos in kayaks, not to mention the whale.  We geezers, however, enjoyed the displays of aristocratic wealth (the last owners, the Potockis, were among the richest people in Poland in the 20th century) the fabulous furnishings, portraits of noble ancestors, swords, china, brocaded wallpaper, rococo statuary and moldings, fireplaces, ceramic heating stoves that servants emptied through invisible openings to inner corridors, private theater, ballroom.  Comparable to any of your better Newport mansions, plus long aristocratic lineages and marital alliances all doomed to be forgotten within the hour.

You're not supposed to take photos in the Castle.
So this was early in the tour...

The man who took our tickets motioned us to a room off the entry lobby, with shelves of big shoes.  I figured, like bowling, I had to put these on. But someone stopped me from taking mine off and showed me that these went over shoes, to protect the flooring from our gummy, gritty soles. 

"One Grecian Urn"

Displays detailing the restoration effort -- especially interesting is the remake
of Potocki's Roman hallway, complete with painted shafts of sunlight. 

Attendants  in each room turned on the English-language narration for us. Stanislavs, Isabellas -- it's all in Wikipedia somewhere.  One name I do remember is Count Potocki; I think I did hear one of my grandmothers invoke that name on occasion, the way we Americans say rich as Rockefeller. 

Gardens, fountains, an orangerie where we met up with the school kids looking at rabbits and turtles.  

And right next to the park, very easy to find, was Lancut's synagogue, built in 1761. 

That's where we met Miroslaw, a curious Pole who was just finishing a tour with a Polish couple.  We'd been told about him by the guide we were set up to meet the following day. Miroslaw had left a sign on the door in Polish and Hebrew, with a phone number to call.  We called it and he opened the door.  Fiftyish, in appearance a tossup between Pole and Jew; blue eyes, a shy smile, a cap.  The anteroom we met him in had lots of Jewish gravestones in one corner of the floor, in pieces.

The clipboard hanging from the Lancut Synagogue's
door says "I'm in the building."
The Hebrew part says "Please call."

The plaque on the building's exterior 

Miroslaw  almost apologetically asked for the tour fee. He then asked, equally apologetic, if he could give us the tour in Hebrew; he said it was better than his English. 

Miroslaw was not Jewish himself, but he'd made a career of tending this place in recent years. His little anteroom displayed pictures of the droves of Hasidim who descend on Lancut by the thousands on the yahrtseits (death anniversaries) of beloved rabbis long gone, and daven in this space.  He showed us the Hebrew-Polish dictionary he was studying from, and some Jewish ritual objects.  He said that to townspeople, he was Jewish, although he also had a post-Catholic appreciation for Jesus. 

He said, almost apologetically, that "in a place where there are no Jews, you must be a Jew,"  paraphrasing Hillel's proverb,   "Where there are no (decent) men, you must be a man."  It also came out that the stone with the plaque we'd seen in Rzeszow had been erected by him and his circle of curious, Jew-bereft Poles.

Then he led us into the sanctuary itself, which was a beautiful restored example of the kind of primitive painting that used to cover the interior of many Eastern European synagogues: Hebrew scripture, animals, plants, signs of the zodiac... and all kinds of reliefs decorating bimah and ark.  There was a traditional velvet curtain covering the ark, and a Torah inside.  

We later saw the "surviving" bima in Tarnow; a sad ghost of this four-pillar artwork

 There was a bima, orthodox-style in the center, on which stood four fabulously decorated pillars supporting an inner dome.  There was a two-story women's gallery. And most of it had all been repainted in fresh color.  To get some idea, you can visit the Bialystocker Synagogue in Manhattan; it's become a regular stop on Lower East Side walking tours.

What there wasn't, was anything made of wood.  No pews; just a concrete floor, if I remember correctly.  The story goes (see plaque) that when the Nazis set fire to the synagogue, Count Alfred Potocki, in residence next door, appealed to the conquering thugs and got permission to let the fire brigade put it out.  So the building itself was saved.  From the outside, it's a quite nondescript yellow building, except for the signs and plaques on the door and the exterior staircase for women. 

I wondered if my grandmother had ever seen the inside of this shul; Lancut had been over 40% Jewish once and Przeworsk was a stop or at most two down the train line. Today we were clearly visiting a pilgrimage site; a place where the nearest living Jews were hours away, in Krakow, except for a Chasidic Brigadoon I didn't want to visit. Here in Lancut too, the Jewish cemeteries were walls and weeds. New pews might bring in destination bar mitzvahs. A start? 

When we were done we had some ice cream in the store across the street.  There was a cross on the wall behind the counter and a semi-scowl on the face of the woman who made the cones.  Maybe I imagined the scowl.  We walked back through the edge of the park, and picked up the bus back to Rzeszow.

The view from the ice cream place.

Roots Trip to Galicia, Part II

Our room at the Hotel Bristol gave out on a great view of Rzeszow's rynek/old market square and the old town hall.  The strange thing about the room, aside from a total absence of closets or drawers, was the bathroom: The walls separating it from the rest of the room were simple glass.  And outside of this glass there were floor-to-ceiling curtains. Two days later I asked our guide, who came up to check out the place for his clients, if this was a Polish thing or just weird.  He said it was weird. So maybe just avoid Room 205, depending how much you value the view.  Either one.

View of Rzeszow's rynek from our window

Room 205 also had a nice big flat-panel TV on the wall,  desk, free wifi, mini-bar, coffee maker, hair dryer, iron and ironing board.  And on the beds, duvet covers with blankets inside.  My grandmother used to make her beds that way. I don't know where we got top and bottom sheets from: the British, maybe?  Thank you, Brits, because a) it takes some practice to insert blankets into duvet covers and b) they were too heavy, even in the oddly cool June weather,  forcing us to waste energy  on air conditioning.  Or it would have wasted energy, had we had any real control of the air conditioning.  We didn't;  although we had thermostats, we discovered that they rarely worked, in any of the six hotels we slept in between roots tripping and guided tour. So we finally just shook the blanket down to the bottom and slept under the cover.

After a nap, we started exploring our neighborhood, armed with a map from the hotel desk.  There were several little Jewish star icons on it, marking former synagogues, right near the square.  So after checking out the square a bit, and taking pictures with Kosciuszko, we went off in the direction of those Jewish landmarks. Go to Google street View, and search on 6 Boznicza, Rzeszow; it'll put you there, right near some theaters. 

Of the two former synagogues, the white building was now a town archive, and a notice at the door advertised some workshops or lectures on Jewish history, given in the mornings.  I don't know what the other, pink-and-tan one was now; it was marked with a small mogen dovid and other plaques, in Polish and satisfyingly imperfect English.  These were home-made, if not home-funded memorials.  

Here's the view around the corner of the pink building

These are the plaques on either side of the front door.
This one, clearly older, is in Polish, German and English. 

There was no surviving Jewish insignia on the buildings themselves, which stood across the street from a park.   And in the near corner of that park -- if you just turn around in Google Street View you'll see it -- stood the first of many plaque-bearing stones we were to see, also with a Jewish star. 

The stone's plaque noted, in Polish and Hebrew, that this had been the site of a Jewish cemetery since the sixteenth century, and was therefore chosen by the Nazis as the "concentration point" i.e., the roundup point for Rzeszow's doomed Jews, in 1942.  This was the first of many somber and unsurprising monuments.  The only surprising thing might have been how recently that stone's marker had been put there.  We met one of the men responsible for mounting it there the following day.

In spite of our jet lag we schlepped ourselves perhaps a mile farther, past a hospital and other medical/therapeutical sites, through a rainbow-colored bridge over a small canal flanked by a bike path, to another marked site: a Jewish cemetery.  When we got there, we found high brick walls, plastered over; parts of that wall painted over, a tall iron gate, and through that locked gate, a partial view of a field of tall weeds. We knew the Nazis had destroyed most Jewish cemeteries, but Rzeszow's tourist mapmakers had put this one on its map anyway. I walked along the wall, seeing only old phone poles and their wires beyond and inside.  Perhaps there was an office in there once, perhaps it had a phone by 1942. Or maybe these were strung to other places, beyond the wall. There was another starred cemetery  further from our hotel; we skipped it.

In the same vicinity as the former synagogues, was "Ghetto Victims' Plaza," where this memorial stood.  In some places formerly Soviet-bloc countries allow a few Soviet-raised monuments to remain, acknowledging their role in liberating them from Nazi Germany.  

Back on the rynek we enjoyed a decent supper at an outdoor table, next to a table of young men speaking French.  The waiters gave the diners  blankets against the rare June chill.   

In checking some facts, I just came upon this site, which documents, with remarkably exact names and dates, the terrible fate of the Jewish third of Rzeszow, and the ghetto,which held Jews from around the area on their way to Treblinka, Auschwitz and mass graves in forests.

 Galician Jews had their own name for Rzeszow: "Reishe."

The shiny little airport we landed in, just north of the city, was probably once the military airport where slave laborers were sent during the war.  

Roots Trip to Galicia, Part I

The problem with telling the story of my trip to Poland is getting started:  Do I cut to the chase, my visit to my grandmother's hometown, Przeworsk?   That was day three after we landed.  There's too much that comes before.   And the visit itself -- is that the highlight?  Not necessarily.

Waiting for the first leg, Newark to Toronto.

 

Then there's the disconnect -- even if I expected it -- between the place in my head, with all its significance and history, and the places I actually touched: a minor monument with a weathered, barely readable inscription, in a corner of a bus station -- that one visits for a few moments, leaves a pebble on, takes a photo standing in front of, and leaves to make time for all the other plans in the itinerary.   A street that bears no sign of its historical Jewish inhabitants, nevermind my grandmother's home.  A wooden door around the corner on an old brick building that's faced strong morning sun for who knows how long, with the gouged-out hollow of a mezuzah on its doorpost.

First view of Rzeszow Airport

Was it a mistake to hope for a thrill?  Should I blame Google Street View for having seen it virtually before?  No. 

Now that I'm back home, Przeworsk resumes its historic, far-away quality.  If I can look at my visit there, the pictures I took, the people I met and the things I saw,  from the same great distance, then maybe the two conceptions will line up.  Actually, I wish I'd spent more time there, just walking around.  Just sitting in the park that now occupies the market square, imagining back a hundred years.  Perhaps finding the school my grandmother attended. Or the train station. Just trying to channel the ghosts...

Just like Google showed me, Przeworsk is a modern little town today.  Parking is a problem.  There's a park with lovely plantings and benches in the rynek, what every Polish town calls its original market square.  The town hall is on the square, recently repainted and mostly converted to restaurant.  But let me back up, and start at the beginning.

When I first asked my grandmother decades ago where Przeworsk was, she told me it was between Rzeszow ("Zheshov") and Jaroslaw (Yaroslav).  Easily found on the map, all three towns sit along the major Galicia A4 east-west highway, running east of Krakow. Then years later, on a trip to Europe 101 (Italy), I was very excited to see Rzeszow listed on an airport arrivals board in  in Munich.

Of course, it doesn't take much to be an international airport in Europe -- one-hour flights will take you across a good number of international borders.  But I think my grandmother would have been surprised to know you could fly there.  And that's what we did, after changing planes in Toronto and Warsaw.  The name of this mythical place was spread wide across the glass front of the terminal, for the amusement of the grandmother living in my memory.  We walked right through it after stepping  onto the tarmac from our LOT Polish Airlines puddle-jumper.

Marek, from the next seat on LOT Toronto-Warsaw

We'd spent most of our eight-hour flight, the Toronto-to-Warsaw leg, talking to Marek, a fit, grey-haired man in the window seat. Even though this flight ended in Warsaw, we had the same destination: he, a Rzeszow native, was going to his niece's wedding, and would see his brother and family for the first time in two years.  I was surprised when he told us he was 63. He lived with his wife, also Polish, in London, Ontario, and worked installing staircases.  He'd also lived in Spain and Germany, and had left Poland shortly after the fall of Communism. He was well spoken and had a recognizably amiable and ironic sense of humor. His family (at least the Drozd part) was originally Czech.

I told Marek the point of my trip without explaining that we were Jewish; I bet he'd figured that out, since he never asked, that I recall, if I would see any family there.  But we wondered if he had. There was this sense of traveling incognito, perhaps unsuccessfully,  for the first few days in Poland. 

We followed Marek like ducks off the plane; he had by now felt a little duty, or desire, to see us to our next location. We made it together through Warsaw's Chopin airport to our connecting flight to Rzeszow, and off the small LOT plane onto Rzeszow's tarmac. Inside the terminal, a shiny baggage carousel or two, car rental desks, an equally shiny  snack bar, rest rooms.  On the other side of the terminal Marek met and hugged his brother and introduced us.  We exchanged email addresses and got a cab.

The driver spoke almost no English and a little German.  Since I can only rudely approximate German by guessing at the vowel substitutions from Yiddish, we pretty much left it at "Hotel Bristol." Poles over 38 or so were schooled in Russian but don't care to speak it; people younger than that have studied English and are perfectly happy to use it. (The two generations have also been taught two different versions of recent European history, the older one learning of Soviets as liberators, the younger one learning of Soviets as occupiers. They've also grown up with different statues and monuments, economies, entertainment, mass media, and living standards.)

Rzeszow turns out to be a fairly big city, with big traffic circles, "Galleria" malls, billboards, ATMs, wireless stores and lots of banks and colleges. Also a lovely rynek, with a baroque town hall built in 1897, other Baroque pastel buildings, a statue of Kosciuszko dressed like George Washington (his brother-in-arms), a lit gazebo, a performance space, and hundreds of tables, chairs and umbrellas extending from restaurants on every side, just like an Italian piazza. The cobble-stoned square buzzed from afternoon to late at night with attractive young people.

Rzeszow's Rynek, Hotel Bristol in the center

Rzeszow's 1897 town hall

Kosciuszko. Everyone know's he's got a bridge named after him between Queens and Brooklyn. Few people know he fought in the American War of Independence.  The plaque there in the corner notes that the Germans destroyed the statue in 1940 and it had to be rebuilt.  Note me still in the same clothes I left Newark in.  

The Hotel Bristol is right on the rynek; the driver had to go from the streets behind the square into the hotel's dark basement garage, pointing us and all our bags at the even darker hallway to the elevator.  Which, we were relieved to see, went up to the lobby.  

Roots Expedition to Przeworsk

In a few weeks if all goes according to plan and, in my grandmother's words,  mechishem (God willing),my husband and  I will be in southeast Poland, walking around the town, Przeworsk, that she and her sister left in 1921.   My own private little March of the Living, without the marching.  More like a pilgrimage, perhaps.  Or, more narcissistically, the closing of a great mythic, cinematic circle.  As if the last three generations made up an epic saga that I get to conclude.

Practically speaking, I doubt I could possibly meet anyone there who would remember her family. They left for Rava Ruska, a town further east and now in Ukraine, a few months or years before being gassed in Belzec and shot in Kolomay, according to Yad VaShem documents.  So their presence in Przeworsk -- pronounced "Pshevorsk" -- could have lasted until 1941 at the very latest.  Using the address listed on her brother's entry on his immigrant ship's manifest, some years after she arrived, the Jewish street her family lived on has been completely transformed, from low-slung, rough-hewn wooden houses to neat, stuccoed, three-story apartment buildings.  And from early-20th-century Jews to contemporary Poles.

Przeworsk town hall, old market square

Who will even notice this return? You readers, I'm hoping. I imagine we'll simply be pedestrians in this town, one big enough for residents to not know each other.  Not big enough for tourism. I'll walk amid schools, parks, pharmacies, beauty salons, shoe stores, insurance agencies, churches. The churches and a few elegant buildings around the old market square may be the only things there my grandmother might have seen, back before 1921.  

Or perhaps Jewish American roots-travelers are a familiar sight in the more distant precincts of Galicia by now -- even as far from Krakow as Przeworsk.  Przeworsk has no surviving synagogue buildings, only pictures.  Przemysl, a bigger town further east, has two.  Przeworsk does have a historical museum, the web tells me, with perhaps a case of Jewish ritual artifacts, some photos and some facts.

Google's 360-degree Street View camera has made it to Przeworsk.  I've already virtually strolled around. Although their faces are blurred, the townspeople look perfectly ordinary, if consistently white.  Kids with backpacks. Mothers with strollers. I can copy the words on the store signs and paste them into Google Translate and poof, they turn into English. Shoe store.  Appliance shop.

Jewish street in Przeworsk before 1944

I can also search Google News for "Przeworsk" and "Zydowski," to see if the town has generated any news of Jewish interest in recent years.  And I can click to instantly translate whatever news items turn up.  What shows up only serves to show how thoroughly all traces of Jewish habitation have been erased. What shows up is an article about Hebrew writing that was found on the back of a child's gravestone.  Turns out the unfortunate child's name had been engraved on a rare, recycled headstone that hadn't been plowed under with the rest of the Jewish cemetery.  Such a rare artifact that today's Przeworskers found its finding newsworthy.  

Here is the Google- translated caption to this article on nowiny24.pl:

This Jewish gravestone stands on the grave of the deceased
in the sixties girls - says Natalia Figiela. This is a great rarity,
because the Nazis meticulously covered during the
 war all traces of Przeworsk Jews (Fig. Janusz Motyka)

It's been reported that young Poles are showing new curiosity about the vanished Jewish 10% of Poland that my grandmother left behind. If you can believe it, I've been told by reputable sources that more people are studying Yiddish in Poland than in the US and Israel combined. The young man who's meeting us in Rzeszow to drive us to the smaller towns, translate, arrange a visit to archives and guide is one such curious Pole.  We arranged to hire him for the day through the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.  He comes well recommended; I wonder if he's discovered some Jewish ancestor of his own.

Przeworsk's Jewish cemetery lies buried in the middle of town, right along the main road, under the bus station.  This fact is marked in Polish on a small, unobtrusive stone monument sitting on an out-of-the-way grassy corner.  When Google came by, one day in 2012, there were some flowers and a candle at its foot. They could have come from a sensitive Pole.  But perhaps not. I know I'm not the first returnee.  Others have left pictures of their visits online.

Leonard Nimoy and Me

Today there is finally enough material available to read about Leonard Nimoy. Back when I was an eighth grader at Hunter High School, I would have read my eyes out, every last Google News entry.  I would have saved  them all  to a folder on at least two devices.  

But 1968 being around 16 years before the arrival of personal computers and 32 before Google, back then I scissored out every printed article I could find, in the Times, Parade, and TV Guide, and kept them in a manila folder that still has to be in a box around here somewhere, five or six moves later. 

This was the 5x7 glossy that came in response
to fan letters

I memorized everything written about Leonard Nimoy's Boston childhood and early career, how his father was a barber and his mother worked at Filene's Basement there.  I loved the fact that he'd been born to immigrant Jews from Ukraine, with roots just like my family's.  Nimoy never took his success for granted, and was always happy to admit the humble origins from which his brave gamble on acting, talent, perseverance and good luck had saved him.  

I drew pictures of Mr. Spock in all the margins of my loose leaf sheets.  I practiced one-eyebrow-raising in the mirror. I made a clay bust of him in art class that still sits on a bookshelf in the family room; I think I was working on it in 1968 when news arrived of Martin Luther King's assassination.   I screamed at finding the phone number of his father, Max Nimoy, in a Boston phone book hanging alongside all the other phone books in Penn Station.

Mr. Spock was the alien, the intellectual, the observer, and (ergo, for me) the metaphorical Jew on board the Enterprise's bridge.  And for that, -- and the looks that tripped some deep-rooted programming -- he made my adolescent heart go pitter pat.  Add the unswervable integrity, the repressed but hinted-at emotion, the longing simmering beneath the surface, and you had the perfect bait for 13-year old girls of a certain cosmic sensibility. 

HCHS 8th-grade art project, 1968

I read today that Nimoy got more fan mail than William Shatner; I remember reading somewhere long ago that the writing quality of his fans' letters positively spooked him.  As Isaac Azimov wrote in TV Guide at the time, Leonard Nimoy had made it sexy to be smart.

Smart, yes, but also, in some alluring way, tortured.  I spent a whole semester debating with my friend Laura -- when we weren't trying to write Star Trek scripts -- whether Mr. Spock had emotions and couldn't let them show, or was even more hobbled by not having them at all.  I argued for the sexier first option, and I believe that history has proven me right.  Besides,  Laura felt that William Shatner was the more attractive  one.  Shatner!   That heavy-stock piece of cardboard! (Another Jewish boy, from Montreal yet, but not quick to publicize either fact...)

Then on March 2,  1967 they aired an episode -- This Side of Paradise -- in which the spores of an alien planet dissolved Spock's shell and freed  him to fall joyously in love with Jill Ireland. When Leonard Nimoy as Spock actually swung on a tree limb and laughed... I just about swooned.  And when he delivered the episode's closing line.. "for once in my life, I was happy." -- well, it was such a heavy dose of poignancy that I just dragged my heart around outside my chest for days.   I find it amazing that of all the series' episodes, that was the one the NY Times reporter cited in her obituary today.

For television, Nimoy was such a classy act.  He was the only celebrity to whom I ever wrote fan letters.  With pen and stationery and envelopes and stamps, (and maybe wax and seal, this being 1968) I begged him to prevent his character from appearing on lunch boxes and Halloween costumes. (I got back the usual machine-signed black-and-white glossy.)  Nimoy was also the last cast member to give in to the mercenary lure of Star Trek conventions.  You might see Majel Barrett or George Takei, but you didn't see  Nimoy at the one or two Star Trek Conventions I attended in my early twenties. (Met the absolute worst date of my life there.)

Maaaany years later, while editing a yearly Jewish Federation publication, I asked his office if he'd agree to be interviewed; I'm sure I wasn't the first to play the "Federation" card. He turned me down, but I was thrilled just to get a call from his office.

I bought Nimoy's  "I am Not Spock" book, where I learned how he was interested in his roots, like me. I was intrigued by his account of a visit to long-lost family in Russia, how he communicated in Yiddish, and how the old country family was oblivious to his fame and even nervously suspicious of his appearance in their midst. I even got his first album, probably in Alexander's on 63rd Drive in Rego Park, Queens. And while I regretted that purchase -- I wasn't totally blinded and deafened by love -- I felt good about my choice of idol years later, when I learned how he sponsored and promoted Yiddish language and culture.  And today, reading how much Obama loved Spock -- his fellow brainy, self-controlled half-breed -- I'm reminded why and how much I like Obama. (I must go look for the 2014 bumper sticker that came late.)

Except for a few Mission Impossible episodes, I never made a habit of watching Nimoy's post-Star Trek shows.  Leonard Nimoy the actor and his Mr Spock shared the title as my one and only teen idol -- even though the actor was exactly my mother's age. I have a soft spot in my heart for him still. That spot is tender today. 

 

Why Malls are Doomed

I think I've managed to avoid my local mall for months, straight through shopping season.  I've missed so many new things there! 

Like the takeover of digital displays. Big video screens now hang from the mall ceilings, designed to attract the attention of your seven remaining idle neurons.  I caught a flash of Joe Biden and John Hamm trying to tell me something on my way from Lord and Taylor's to Macy's.  Don't ask me what, but I think it was some kind of public service announcement.  Another time, on another screen, it was just more advertising; something to remind you of the shopping possibilities you were missing just ten stores away, down the escalator.

Be where you actually are?  So over, even in transit.

 

Retail marketers have to catch us on the run because they know that the second we stop, we're gone... into the rabbit hole of our own private little screens. (Where of course, micro advertising videos are also queued up...) I checked mine to review my text messages, and Lord and Taylor, with yesterday's "up to 75% off" offer, did its job, diverting me from my original objective -- Macy's.  Following the text's link to the mobile site, the store looked like it had the necessary selection.

So I started my hunt -- for men's winter pajamas  -- on the lower floor of Lord & Taylor's, or, as we like to call it in my house, Gott un Schneider's.  

Now I wonder if men even sleep in matching pajamas anymore.  All of L&T's men's pajamas, half off a week past Christmas, were sold by the top or bottom.  And all of them with downscaled upscale logos; Polo players and Nautica sails or Reebock and Calvin. 

Reverse snobs like my husband and me, we don't believe in logos; we don't like to buy ready-to-wear advertising.  Neither do we want winter pjs in fleece (too warm) or short sleeves (too cold). Nor are  we happy to pay twice for one pair of pajamas.  And finally, did all of northern NJ's medium-size dads get pajamas for Christmas or Hanukkah?  And did all of the smaller or larger guys sleep in their skivvies?  'Cause they left all their pajamas in the stores. Except for the fleece and the techie winter camping fabrics, that's all there was; smalls, large, and 2x, 3x, and 4x large. So I exit L&T.

I figured solidly middle-class Macy's would stock medium-sized pajamas, and maybe even in sets. Wrong. Same separate top and bottom Calvins and Ralph Laurens, same logos, at less discount. Same techie thermals and fleecy pants; a few hanging sets of plaid flannel pjs in two colors and all sizes but M.

I decided to abandon all hope of cool. I headed for Sears. 

Sears had the sets, by Hanes, in flannel.  But again, not the size.  Sears also had doors to the parking lot, where a sudden and blinding snow was now in progress. Panicking, I took a Large and resolved to take them in -- remember, I sew -- before coming to my senses.  Then I found and grabbed a flannel bottom in medium with a print I knew my husband would not be embarrassed to wear.  I found a non-techie shirt, also medium, that in a pinch could pass for sleepwear. 

I got on a short check-out line of retirees.  When it came my turn the cashier apologized for her point-of-sale terminals, which always slow down, she said, when it snows.  Then she asked me if I wanted a Sears charge card, for fifteen dollars off, and swore it would only take two minutes.  Name, address, phone, driver's license, do we own/rent our home, and estimated household income, please.  I still wanted to pay cash.  She forgot and added the 5% for using the new credit account; that took extra time.  Somehow I had to reenter name, address phone, driver's license, etc. 

I consulted my Android again, this time for weather.  Would it pay to wait for the white-out to clear?  In addition to the local weather, Google also took it upon itself to tell me how long it would take to drive home at that moment, show me my parking space on the map, other nearby attractions, and six other places selling men's winter pajamas.

The cashier apologized again, told me she could help me order a medium pajama set from another store, and it would be shipped home with no shipping charge.   She said she would take my cash and pay the credit card balance with it, in a few more minutes.  But the terminal was working very slowly, and I had reached the limit of my limited patience. She swore I would get my bill in the mail, with all the discounts. 

By this time, the snow had let up a bit.  And two ordering screens were on the floor right nearby, for the convenience and comfort (chairs and desks, back to back!) of frustrated brick-and-mortar shoppers. With free shipping, to boot. So I sat down and searched for the pjs myself.  The online system turned up sets of Hanes flannels, medium, in several colors.  It even accepted Paypal, just like home. Which all went to show me, shopping for a commodity I wasn't even trying on, the utter stupidity of driving to a mall in the first place.