We, the Jews of Dobre

WE TALK AT NIGHT. IN THE BARBED FOREST NEAR Malkinia, in the groves near Dobre, in the pine trees above Giger's filled pits. Close to the filled pits--everything is close there--stands, tautly, a monument in honor of the dead of 1918-1920, while here only the pine trees bow down. There honor, here nothing. When I mentioned this to the Jewish Historical Institute, they spread their arms in a gesture of helplessness: they have too much history.

The Jews of Dobre no longer expect anything, but they still reproach me. You are not a Jew, they say. But I am, and such a Jew that everyone knows about. You do not keep the Shabbat, the essence of human life (and of psychic hygiene). You are not married which is contrary to the Jewish way of life (and unhealthy). You have not brought up any Jewish children who are so badly needed. You have not fulfilled your duty, you have broken the chain, you have failed. So many generations carried you for so many centuries, such a long road of torment up to here. And you? You gave up, gave in, surrendered, fell away like so many others, you turned out too weak. Do you know where Jewish strength comes from, the strength that troubles the sleep of our enemies? It comes precisely from this selection. Do you understand now where the Jewish wisdom comes from? I do, the fools fall away. But I do what I can, every day with all my strength, like a real Jew. A fantashist! they say. Not that I fantasize or have too much imagination but that I think too much of myself. I know that my strength is failing but I still have enough anger, I say to them, I can always count on my anger. Such a year on Hannah Kostek! they say. I do not know who Hannah Kostek was, but I understand. The Jews of Dobre had their own language that only I understand today. "Azoy vert fun a katschke a indyk," doctor Zygmunt Bychowski wrote on his photograph in the garden of memories of Joanna Olczak-Ronikier, where he stands in an army fur hat and coat just before marching out to the Russo-Japanese war. Apt condensation--azoy vert--shapely Hebrew handwriting, faultless spelling. Who still knows what it means to "change from a duck into a turkey" and who can still laugh at that? Each town had its language the way each African village does. Linguists have counted that every year 25 languages disappear from this world. And how many disappeared just in the year 1942? Just in Poland?

My stepfather told me that someone from Dobre went to Warsaw for the first time and came back amazed: Shtibn gehen in die gasn! Apartments walk in the streets. This was after the Russo-Japanese war. In Radoszyna--seven kilometers from Dobre, sixty from Warsaw--there was no electricity even in 1966. I don't know when they finally pulled it over but in February of 1992, when we were filming Birthplace, I looked in vain for an outhouse. "We're planning to build an outhouse next year, but for now go behind the barn," our host said. I still remember clay floors like in Africa and children with black feet. One did not see cars. Who would drive on such roads? Sometimes an airplane appeared--and then no one was sure whether to run or not.

On a warm April day Miss Pola took us out onto the flowering meadows and asked: "Do you remember those who did not live to see this spring?" When later the same day she sat us down in the day-room and told us to write about our impressions from this outing, I wrote about those who did not make it. The page was placed on the board on the wall and everybody read it. This was spring of 1946 in Helenowek near Lodz, in the Jewish orphanage built before the Flood by Chaim Rumkowski, who became the head of the Lodz ghetto and really tried to save the children of the ghetto. His color portrait still hung in the hallway. This is how I became a writer.

The subject was given to me, assigned to me and it has never left me. At first I tried to run away--into writing like Hlasko, like Hemingway, into writing satire. But no way, it followed me like a shadow. Miss Pola, who had been a student of Janusz Korczak, hit the right string, gave me homework for life, and so I still write about those who did not make it. I look for them, I persuade them, and sometimes they return to exist a while longer on my lonely pages. People say this is Holocaust, I say it's antisemitism. People say antisemitism, I say cannibalism--an old, universal subject.

I took my first summer internship with Folks Shtimme--People's Voice. My instinct drew me toward the people who were no more, but I didn't know their language and someone had to translate what I wrote. Miss Pola would reproach me every day on the stairs: "Why don't you write in Yiddish?" But that she couldn't ask of me. I. B. Singer had stubbornly claimed that Yiddish was seriously ill. I knew it was murdered.

I was taught my language by a Jewish beauty from Dobre and it is deeply embedded in me. She spoke Yiddish to my father but to me only Polish, as if she had known. The children whose mothers spoke. Yiddish to them didn't stand a chance. My Polish saved my life. It would be much better to write in English, French, or Spanish, and I would be much happier writing in Hebrew, and much better off if I wrote in German. But my medium, my main ingredient, are the words I received from the lips of my mother. An engineer can be born from a test-tube, but a poet comes from a mother. It is because of her that I am who I am.