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Reconciling Memory And Reality In Poland
The pages of “The Pages in Between” trace Einhorn’s encounters with contemporary Poland. by Carolyn Slutsky Einhorn’s mother, Irena, was hidden by a Polish family in her native city of Bedzin as a young girl during the Holocaust, and when she finally arrived in America, she never looked back. Her daughter Erin grew up knowing little of her mother’s story, and in 2001 she went to Poland to “fact-check folklore,” as she put it, to disentangle the truth about her mother from the myths handed down for generations. What she found in Poland comprises this elegant, well-researched, moving memoir: a messy legal issue surrounding the ownership of the family home left to the Poles who saved Irena, a confrontation with the haunting bond between Poles and Jews and the attempt to reconcile memory and reality. Tragically, Irena died just as her daughter met the family who saved her, and so never had the chance to revisit the home and the truth of her earliest years. Einhorn, a reporter for the New York Daily News, spoke to The Jewish Week from Los Angeles, where she was on one leg of a national book tour, about history, memory and storytelling. Why did you feel compelled to take this journey, and not your mother, or your brother? Are you the family storyteller? I had an interest in it from an early age. In writing about it for my high school newspaper I sort of cast myself as the storyteller. My mother never wanted to be the storyteller because she hated the story and spent the bulk of her life trying to escape the story. I sometimes think about what my mother’s or grandfather’s memoir would look like. Survivor memoirs are really powerful and really painful — searing accounts of brutality, cruelty and betrayal, and extraordinary tales of survival — but focused on the past. My mother’s memoir would have been intensely focused on the future because she didn’t want any part of her past; she thought, ‘Why dwell on the past? What happened before doesn’t matter as long as we’re focused on the future.’ My memoir, in the third generation, is able to reside in the present; it’s an exploration of the past with an eye toward the future, learning from the past in order to move into the future to reach reconciliation. What were you hoping to find in Poland? I had gone there looking for the past, gone there looking for old stories and a better understanding of my mother. I wanted to know what happened to her and what happened to my family. I went looking for World War II and it never occurred to me that the past would still be there, still demanding things. Not just the legal aspect, but all of the emotional issues that had gone on, for people like my mother and my grandparents, and even people my age, born decades after the war and still coping with what that means — inheriting that legacy at this point in history. Is there enough we can do to remember, to prevent it from happening again, to Jews and other cultures and countries? All these different things are still affecting people, guiding people, intervening in every conversation on so many different levels. What was most surprising about what you found in Poland, on a Jewish level and in general? I didn’t expect to find anything Jewish there, and in fact I found Jewishness everywhere. [There are small towns] where there’s not any kind of [philo-Semitism] but you walk down the street and see Hebrew letters etched into stone and places where mezuzahs used to be; you can always find where the synagogue used to be and find the cemetery, either in good condition or in ruins. Then you have Krakow, this unexpected celebration of Jewishness and Jewish culture, which I wasn’t expecting. The country is at once coursing with Jewish life and devoid of it. How have readers responded to the book? You’re given a certain idea about Poland when you’re Jewish in this country. I’ve been giving speeches, I’m showing them photos of the [Krakow Jewish Culture] Festival with 10,000 people dancing in the street and the Jews in the audience shake their heads and say it isn’t true. During the Q&A they’ll stand up and say, “You’re wrong, anti-Semitism is in their mother’s milk.” That’s hard to answer; you’re not likely to have anti-Semitism if you don’t have Jews; it’s hard to hate somebody you’ve never seen. If they actually had to interact with Jews it might be a different story, but maybe not. Maybe the next 60 years would have been banner years in Polish-Jewish relations. It’s one of those things we’ll never know the answer to. How do you feel about Polish-Jewish relations today? I never reached a conclusion about it. My Polish friends will often say, “Is it true that the Jews think the Poles are anti-Semitic?” They’ll say, “Go tell them that’s not true. But I don’t think I can say that; I’m not sure it’s not true. They cite the fact that Poland was the only country with a death penalty for sheltering Jews, they talk about Righteous Gentiles honored by Yad Vashem. They have this perspective that Poles have wrongly been painted as anti-Semitic. On the other side I have people in my family who say [Poles have] always been, always will be anti-Semitic. I think they’re both wrong. It’s a lot more nuanced and a lot more subtle than that. It’s like making a statement that white people are racist: it’s both not true and not untrue. Race in America is a difficult question. My family had nothing to do with it, we weren’t even here — but as a white person I have to confront racism just as Poland has to confront anti-Semitism. But I think it’s a fascinating landscape and I’m trying to share that with people and broaden that perspective a little bit. What did you learn about memory in writing this (auto)biography? One of the more fascinating aspects of the research I did was how much memory didn’t align with truth. My mother’s only memory of her childhood in Poland turned out to be probably false. The way my grandfather always said my grandmother died may not have been accurate. There are all these places where memory fades, memory fails. People have reasons for not telling the whole truth and that changes everything. As we talk about not just the Holocaust but other periods of history we’re trying to bring to life, it’s an important reminder that memory is not the same as truth. The fascinating thing about history and memory and narrative, even, is that it’s all kind of subjective. The balance to that is I was astounded by how much I was able to find: I found my mother’s child welfare file, dental records. My mother never knew what her mother looked like; she had a void in her life and I was able to change that for her. That’s the most important thing people have to realize, especially as we lose the last of the survivors, as we lose direct memory, there’s this extraordinary trove of documents ready to step up and fill that space. Memory is increasingly becoming less available, but at the same time resources and documents are becoming more and more available. What do you think your mother’s reaction would be to the book and the story it tells? It’s impossible to know and I think that’s the greatest grief about losing my mother at the time that I did. I came so close to understanding her and getting to know who she was as this more complex and interesting person beyond the authority figure she’d been to me as a child. Just as I was on the verge of cracking the code of my mother, I lost her. On one level she’d just be proud of the book, but she was so private, she might feel violated. She might object and say, “That’s not how it happened.” It would have been a different book — I’d have struggled to write candidly about my mother if she were still alive. There’s a part that thinks she was secretly proud that I was doing this. I think in a lot of ways she had cast me as the storyteller. When I asked her what she thought of my going on this journey, she said, “Well, you’re a writer, I can see why you think it’s interesting.” |
 
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