MK: You’ve said repeatedly that Jews are distinguished, above all, by their shared historical experience.
PP: The lack of extended family, the loss of historical continuity, the shadow cast by the Holocaust, relatives abroad, the experience of catastrophe. The feeling that only a few relatives or friends survived and that Jewish culture and identity are somehow floating in the air. To be clear, I’m not talking about competing claims to greater suffering or comparing martyrologies. The pain will always be incalculable. So let’s just say, carefully, that we’re talking about a different sort of experience than the Polish experience. An ethnic Pole has a statistically far greater number of living relatives than a Jewish Holocaust survivor does who stayed in Poland. That kind of existential experience changes a lot. It seems to me that that’s exactly where we differ – the feeling of belonging to a tiny group powerfully affected by history.
MK: You once called Poland ‘a post-Jewish wasteland’.
PP: I have a very powerful feeling of erosion: that people are disappearing, especially the older generation, customs, language and even certain manners of speaking are fading away. It’s a fact that the Jewish community in Poland has a tendency towards decline: people are leaving rather than arriving. And Yiddish culture also has a tendency towards decline, despite the many attempts to resuscitate it.
Poland came out of the war to a great extent as an ethnically homogeneous country, which was the dream of the Polish right wing – on the borders of the Piast dynasty, with no more Jewish petty bourgeoisie, without shtetls, without the [once ethnically mixed] Eastern borderlands. Over the next decades, due to consecutive waves of Jewish, German and Masurian emigration, Poland actually became a culturally homogeneous land, although, of course, there remain regional distinctions at least in the form of some local customs. And it seems to me that the current government, though it likes to hearken back to the legacy of the multi-ethnic interwar Republic, actually affirms that national uniformity.
MK: And will the globalisation of culture today speed that process up? For the most part, we want to be like the people from Western advertisements – we want to look like, talk like and carry ourselves like them. When we’re abroad, we don’t want people to see right away that we’re from East-Central Europe.
PP: There’s another phenomenon, too. I can see at once that a varied and diverse identity has stopped being viewed as an asset and it’s now seen as a burden. A return to national, ethnic and cultural homogeneity is quite strong today and it’s seen as a plus. Be that as it may, the fact is that the conviction that everyone in Poland is a Pole, that everyone’s the same and that that’s good comes from the Gierek era of the Polish People’s Republic. In those years, Poland did in fact became homogeneous as the last of the Germans and Jews emigrated. The Jewish question – and the Holocaust – simply became absent from the Polish scene. That homogeneity – independently from one another, of course – was praised by figures as diametrically opposed as the general secretary of the Polish Communist Party Edward Gierek and Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński.
An undertaking like Midrasz was a private and community-based attempt at sustaining a certain identity and culture for one more generation. But it was also an effort, I think, to unseal that homogeneity. The idea was to show that Poland isn’t unitary, sealed in a nationalist, ethnic immanence, that we are here and our presence, our two cents’ worth, tossed into diversity makes some kind of sense. Did we succeed? I don’t know.