Travelling to Poland to play klezmer music at a “Festival of Jewish Culture” is a strange and fraught undertaking. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that the mere five days we spent there contained, well, the best of shows, and the worst of shows. This is longer than most of my blogs, but this trip was pretty much the longest five days of my life.
I didn’t realize this before going, but Warsaw was almost completely destroyed during and after World War II. First by the Germans, and then by the Soviets. I still don’t really know the history, but I learned that about 85% of the city was leveled by the Germans, and then rebuilt by the Soviets in that kind of gloriously depressing, now-crumbling communist architecture style. The light is luminosly gray and yellow – it reminded me, actually, of that feeling in the Polish poetry that I love, patient, weighed-down, yet somehow glowing.
We were there to play at the Warsaw Festival of Jewish Culture. The festival took place in the one surviving block of the Warsaw ghetto – a haunting block of old brick buildings which were probably lovely once, or at least regular, and a courtyard or two. Apparently no one knows quite why this particular block survived – I heard that it was probably outside of where the Jewish ghetto line was drawn as they forced the Jews further inward.
Here begins the creepy part. For the festival they had decorated it with stage-signs in Yiddish ("books! bagels!") and had vendors selling pierogi and Jewish-themed gifts. Perhaps the highlight were the little Jew-dolls, quite reminiscent of the little Colonial-era doll in a yellow dress I got when I went as a child to Colonial Williamsburg with my family.
Adding to the local flavor were the (non-Jewish) Poles the festival had hired to dress up like “Jews” (meaning Chassidic Jews) and cheerfully sweep the street, play violin, get the crowd dancing, etc. This was made even darker by the fact that Warsaw had been a great comopolitan center, and although there were Chassids there, as there are in New York, there were also plenty of assimilated Jews there—regular people who looked like the other Poles, just as I look like the other New Yorkers. Warsaw wasn’t some little shtetl, it was where people went when they wanted to leave the shtetl!
We, the imported Americans, couldn’t stop making up analogies – if there were an “American Indian Festival” where white people dressed up like Indians; and of course the inevitable comparison to blackface. What is the odd compulsion of a people that has, to some degree, been complicit in destroying another culture, to dress up as the people of that culture?
But, alarming as the scene was, I understood it a little better when I learned about the Polish psyche. They were invaded by the Germans, who killed Poles along with the Jews (not that there wasnt a strong history of anti-Semitism there, but it wasn’t like the Poles initiated the Holocaust, and of course some Poles hid Jews at the risk of their entire families being executed.) And then they were taken over by the Russians, and only recently regained control of their own country. So they have been victims on a massive scale as well—something that I did not realize before. Still…….walking down that street with the fake Jews and the klezmer music blasting and the Jew dolls……..
To be clear, I am not passing judgment on Poland here. I have loved Polish poetry—Milosz, Zagajewski, Szymborska—for years; they have written some of the most exquisitely humane, compassionate, wise words I have ever read. All I can do here is report on my own experience, seeing one slice of the country through a very bizarre lens.
The morning after we arrived in Warsaw, we flew to Stockholm and played there – which was amazing. Not heavy and traumatizing like Poland; we didn’t feel like imported Jews on a stage, we just felt like ourselves, a band playing in a club to hundreds of ecstatic dancers. And then back to Warsaw with a thud.
We played that night for five thousand Polish people (very few Jews among them, of course, since there are very few Jews in Poland). They clapped and yelled politely, but I didn’t really feel like they got it – it was a free outdoor concert, and we made good music, so they clapped. Meanwhile, we were on a huge stage, with TV cameras filming us, and as we played, we were looking at the wall of the Warsaw Ghetto, illuminated by candles.
I am generally aware that a lot of the songs we play are from places that no longer exist; but here that awareness was acute. I felt like the air was full of ghosts. I’ve never been as close to crying onstage as I was while we played that song, looking at the wall of the Warsaw ghetto, imagining the people who lived in the rooms, and the souls that had been held in that place.
My own family has been in America for generations, but the mother of one of my bandmates was born in Poland, hidden by a Polish family while she was a little girl, and made it to America after the war when she was still a child. She is the only remaining member on that side of the family – no aunts, uncles or grandparents on his mother’s side. They weren’t from Warsaw, but it made the whole experience that much more immediate.
The grimness of the situation was compounded by how the festival treated us. Perhaps it was cultural, but I’ll just give a single example and leave it at that. The day after our big show, when we showed up for the rehearsal of the “final concert” (in which the dozens of musicians who had played at the festival were all going to present two songs), and the office told us, “Oh, you’ve been cut from the concert – no one told you?” This was not out of the norm. Needless to say, we were not in a great mood when we had our last meal of the festival, at “Menorah,” the Jewish-themed restaurant, which had menorahs on every table and a Polish accordionist playing songs from Fiddler on the Roof.
But THANKFULLY, there is a counterbalance to all of this. We had some pen pals in Warsaw – young Jews (which, in Poland, means having one Jewish grandparent) – who had googled “klezmer punk,” ordered our CD, and begun a correspondence with us a couple years ago. They turned out to be these wonderful kids between 18 and 25, who took us under their wing, took us out at night, helped us understand what was going on. They brought us to the bars in the old Soviet Ministry of Culture which now houses bars full of young hipsters – to the coffee shops and old streets of the Praga district across the river, where people like us hung out. And when we were kicked out of the final concert, they set up an impromptu street performance for us. They set out tea lights in plastic cups, in front of a bar with a huge furry sculpture of a spider hanging from the wall.
They couldn’t find drums, so Tim was playing on upside-down buckets; they found an electric bass for Taylor and a small sound system, with a couple speakers and a couple microphones, and we set up in the dark cobblestone street. Our friends brought their friends, and more and more people people gathered around, mostly our age, dancing like crazy, giving us vodka, yelling, taking cell-phone pictures……until it started to rain, and we ducked under a large umbrella til it passed, then started again on the wet cobblestones.
That show was perhaps the most incredible Golem has ever played. It was the perfect antidote to the couple days that had preceded it. We felt so grateful to be playing these old songs on the wet cobblestone streets for the young hipsters of Warsaw; not as some exotic foreigners, but as new friends. We got to spend some time actually sitting and talking with them over the next couple days, and it turned out that their perspective on the festival—not to mention the rest of the world—was just like ours. It felt like we were witnessing were two distinct Polish cultures, one utterly unfamiliar and uncomfortable, and the other just the opposite.
Needless to say, we all outdid ourselves celebrating that night, hanging out with our thirty new friends, moving from bar to bar. I will spare you the gory details, but getting back to the hotel that night was not pretty.
We had been planning to stay a few extra days and travel around, since we were there anyway, but we were all so messed up by that point that we decided to change our tickets and leave two days early (something I’ve never done before!) But we did go to Krakow and Auschwitz. This also filled out the experience from two sides. Krakow: the beautiful old Jewish cemetaries and synagogues from the Renaissance (since it was not destroyed in the war), with graves of some of the great Jewish scholars, whose words I first encountered years ago in Jerusalem, so far from imagining this trip. And the tour groups at Auschwitz, and the grim silence at Birkenau (the much less-visited death camp 3 km away from Auschwitz). The barracks at Birkenau were built of wood and had decayed, but each had a chimney of bricks, (not crematoria chimneys, just oven chimneys). So there was line of brick chimneys stretching as far as we could see, out to the woods.
Seeing the memorials for the Poles who were killed, I mourned for them too, not just the Jews. I hadn’t realized how many Poles were killed by the Germans. And I thought about how hard it is to acknowledge one’s victimhood and also identify oneself as oppressor; but how necessary too, or else we are doomed to continue the cycle, being oppressed and then oppressing in turn. In Poland, in Israel, in America.
I couldn’t sleep that night in the Krakow hostel, so I sat on a bench outside and comforted myself with “Lava,” a poem I love, by the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, about how the world is full of irreconcilable opposites which nonetheless coexist. This is how it ends:
Youth dissolves
in a day; girls’ faces freeze
into medallions, despair turns to rapture
and the hard fruits of stars in the sky
ripen like grapes, and beauty endures, shaken, unperturbed,
and God is and God dies; night returns to us
in the evening, and the dawn is hoary with dew.
