A Chosen Few (68 page)

PG: You said you never set out to write a Holocaust book, but did you end up feeling that this is a Holocaust book?

MK: That’s a tough question. Because I so wanted it not to be.

PG: But then the Holocaust permeates the territory you chose, and it comes to permeate you when you immerse yourself in that territory
.

MK: It does. One of the truly horrible things about the Holocaust is that it doesn’t end in 1945. It keeps affecting our lives in the way we think, and it will affect the way our children see the world. Sixty years later. And so yes, it is a Holocaust book. It is a book about survivors and how they dealt with being survivors. It taught me things that I will always remember. Listening to that CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald after the World Trade Center attack, I knew what was getting to him was the fact that he had all these people who died and he didn’t. He survived. In
A Chosen Few
I spent hours and hours listening to the pain of people of who had survived wondering why they survived and what their life means and what right do they have to survive. Yeah, this has to be a Holocaust book, because for it not to be a Holocaust book you would have to have survivors in 1945 saying, “Oh, thank God that is over, and now onto something else.”

PG: You write that if you want to find Jews in many parts of Central and Eastern Europe you go to the graveyard, because that’s where they go—the three or four surviving Jews in the town—to be with their people and meet visiting Jews from elsewhere. That is an extremely powerful image. So it’s not a metaphor to call Europe a cemetery of Jews, even as Jews continue to live there. And I felt that the impetus for your book came from your desire to examine that tension: “How could any Jew want to live in Europe at this point? Let’s find out. Let’s see how they think about it.” I wonder how you found attitudes toward the Holocaust past—and toward its continuing presence—to differ in the communities you visited from the attitudes one finds amongst American Jews, who have become so steeped in the legacy of the Holocaust that at times you almost feel like the extermination of European Jewry has come to be one of the cornerstones of Jewish identity
.

MK: My big fear is that we will become—almost in a Christian way—a culture of martyrdom.

PG: Have you ever thought about writing another book on a subject that is as deeply personal to you?

MK: Personal issues, yes, but not necessarily so personal a setting. But I am working right now on a novel that is very Jewish. It’s set in New York and as I write, it keeps getting more and more Jewish. In fact, in seven books from
Cod
, to my books about the Basques to the Caribbean, to
Salt
, I have never written a book that does not mention the Jews. It always comes up because it is part of my view of the world. I think when you are Jewish, your Jewish concerns have a life of their own and keep coming to the surface whether you want them to or not.

PG: At the same time, as you say, Jews have been a diasporic people for two thousand years, and the way that one’s Jewish concerns surface and are expressed is distinctively colored by where you live. A French Jew and a Russian Jew may feel their common Jewishness strongly, and not only when Hitlerian push comes to Stalinist shove, but their national identities may exert at least an equal and opposite sense of difference between them. Consider how Primo Levi was acutely aware of and perceptive about the manifestations of national character among his fellow inmates at Auschwitz
.

MK: A lot of Jews don’t like to think about this, but the truth is that the nationalism is not an unimportant part of my book. That is why certain Jews wanted to go back to Germany—because they were Germans and they liked Germany. The Jews I know in Poland are a very special group of people not only because they came back but because they stayed through all the anti-Semitic campaigns. They were a small minority of the Jews who were there in 1945. After the pogrom in 1946, many left. Things kept happening and Jews kept leaving. These were the hardcore people who stayed. They stayed because Poland is their home and they love Poland. There is this tremendous tension between the Jews in Poland and Jews in the United States because Jews in the United States hate Poland, and they know it in Poland and both Jews and Poles there resent it.

PG: That makes sense, especially when you consider that among the Jews in Poland there must be a great many who were protected—or whose parents were protected—through the Holocaust and since by their Catholic neighbors. In fact, many who were hidden in this way as children are steeped in Polish Catholic culture, and a good many Jews have continued to live as Catholics, or at least as non-Jews. This is something one finds in the Czech republic and Hungary, unrecognized or unacknowledged Jews
.

MK: Madeline Albright is a classic story.

PG: Yes, and it remains awfully hard to believe that she was as shocked as she claimed to be to learn of her Jewishness. I suspect that many Jews who were raised as Christians in Europe do know, at least vaguely, about their ancestry, and of course these days especially there are Jewish groups coming around seeking them out and trying to win them back
.

MK: In a lot of these countries—Germany and Poland are two outstanding examples—it is practically a vocation to be a Jew. And not everyone wants to spend the rest of their lives in this vocation of being one of the 7,000 Jews in Poland. But in the time I was researching this book, the Jewish population of these places, especially in central Europe, was growing dramatically.

PG: You mean because Jews were coming out of the closet, so to speak?

MK: Yes, a lot of people, and this was very exciting.

PG: And now?

MK: I was back in Warsaw recently and some had gone much deeper into Judaism, but others say, “This was an interesting experience, but now I want to get on with my life.” But sometimes their children have done a lot of Jewish studies there, and even in Israel, to the point where parents are getting concerned that perhaps they are doing too much.

PG: It’s the eternal question for Jews: How Jewish—or assimilated—is it okay to be?

MK: Exactly. It’s always too much or too little.

Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussions

1. The book both opens and closes with Passover. What is the significance of this holiday to this story?
   
2. What has been the impact of the Holocaust on subsequent generations of European Jews? How does this differ from the impact on subsequent generations of American Jews?
   
3. Was it reasonable for Jews to return after the war to the countries where they had been betrayed?
   
4. After the fall of Communism, very few Jews were left in Eastern Europe who had any experience with the practice of the religion. What does it mean to rebuild a Jewish community with secular Jews?
   
5. Explain the difference in motivation between those Jews who returned to East Germany and those who returned to West Germany after the war.
   
6. Should the Zionists who returned to postwar Europe have gone to Israel instead?
   
7. Would it have been easier to rebuild a religious community or an assimilated community in postwar Europe?
   
8. Has European Jewry since 1945 undergone a resurrection, as implied in the subtitle of this book, or is it something less than that?
   
9. What impact has the state of Israel had on European Jews?
   
10. What does it mean for American Jews that these communities in Europe still exist?
    
11. Throughout European history, France was always thought of as a haven for Jews, until the twentieth century. As the country with the largest Jewish population in Europe, will it be a haven or a dangerous place for Jews going forward into the twenty-first century?
    
12. Why is the survival of European Jewry so crucial to the Jewish people throughout the rest of the world?
    
13. In countries with some of the worst records of treatment of Jews, it has become fashionable to embrace everything Jewish. Is this philo-Semitism another form of anti-Semitism, and is it dangerous?
    
14. Three million Polish Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and most of those who returned were subsequently driven out. In the current political climate of Poland, is there a future for Jews, and are there enough to build a real community?
    
15. Why do survivors in Holland appear to be in more pain than in most other countries? Is it because Holland never came to terms with its war history? Is it that as a society, Holland is more open to discussing psychological problems than other countries in Europe?
    
16. What has the impact of terrorism been on Jewish communities in Europe?
    
17. Russian Jews have been immigrating to Western Europe, especially Germany, most of them with very little knowledge of Judaism. What will be their impact?
    
18. What has been the role of the Hasidic movement in modern European Judaism?
    
19. Following the Six-Day War, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and even deGaulle’s France shifted their policies toward Israel. What was the impact on European Jewry?
    
20. Are the communities described in this book merely vestigial or is there a future for Jewry in Europe?
    

Other Books by Mark Kurlansky

Salt: A World History
The Basque History of the World
Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
A Continent of Islands: Searching for the Caribbean Destiny

The White Man in the Tree and Other Stories
(fiction)
The Cod’s Tale
(for children)

Mark Kurlansky
is the author of
Salt; The Basque History of the World
; the
New York Times
bestseller
Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
; A
Continent of Islands: Searching for the Carribean Destiny
; and a collection of stories,
The White Man in the Tree
. He is a regular contributor to the
Partisan Review
. He has also written for the
International Herald Tribune
, the
Chicago Tribune, Harper’s
, and
The New York Times Magazine
, among other publications. He lives in New York City.