The current movement of Poles and Jews towards some sort of dialogue inevitably confronts an obstacle of nearly insurmountable dimensions: the incommensurability of Polish and Jewish memories of the Nazi occupation and its aftermath. Poles and Polish Jews both inhabited the geographical centre of the Nazi hell, but their experiences were profoundly and irreducibly different. Yet too often, the attempt to understand founders before the assault of ‘facts': comparing numbers of Polish and Jewish dead, the relative prevalence of szmalcownicy (who blackmailed Jews) versus ‘righteous gentiles’ (who sheltered Jews), the proportion of Jews in the security apparatus of post-war Polish governments, and so on. Efforts are further thwarted because in the intervening forty years, Poles and Jews, for the most part geographically separated, have developed vastly different world-views rooted to a large extent in their disparate memories of the war and its aftermath.

Hanna Krall, born Jewish, survived the war as a child concealed in a succession of Polish homes, then remained in Poland through all the difficult years since, an active participant in Polish cultural and intellectual life. She is therefore a Jewish survivor in a double sense: of the war and in contemporary Poland. She is ‘Jewish’, however, if her books are any indication, purely by virtue of her war-time experience, that is, by virtue of having survived; Jewish history or culture are terra incognita to her. There are some others like her in contemporary Poland, but none, to my knowledge, who have chosen to write about it. Her previous book, about Marek Edelman, Łódź cardiologist and last survivor of the leadership of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, assaulted our conventional notions of heroism;1 Krall here reaches not for the ‘facts’, but for the deeper truth of her own life, and in so doing touches some of the darkness at the root of contemporary Polish-Jewish relations.

This is a difficult book to read; from all indications it was certainly a difficult one to write. The narrative spans a period beginning with the author's concealment during the Nazi occupation (hence the title), and ends on 13 December 1981, the day on which martial law was declared in Poland. It is far, however, from being a chronological account, nor is it an autobiography in any conventional sense.

IN PRE-MODERN TIMES

TRADITIONAL Judaism, as frequently noted, is less concerned with doctrine than with practice. The practice is defined by Jewish law, halakhah. Originating in the Talmud, adapted by religious authorities from generation to generation for 1,500 years, halakhah (along with the associated system of minhag, or custom) made it possible for Jews to maintain an absolute distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish ways of doing nearly everything in life. Halakhah, in other words, is a kind of script for the observance of traditional Jewish life, and this life was richly performative. This was obviously true of the complex liturgy of the synagogue, but it also applied to the Jewish home, where sabbath meals and Passover seders were only the more obvious examples of densely detailed, carefully enacted ritual performances, and it also applied to the Jewish life cycle. All such ritual, whether part of the life cycle, the annual cycle, or daily life, was also linked to music, above all to the chanted melody, or nign. The taking of wedding vows, the benediction over food, the burial of the dead, the study of Torah, and countless other activities were all performed to characteristic nigunim: moreover, everyday Jewish conversation and gesture were punctuated with nigunim and cannot be imagined without them.

The centrality of performance in traditional Jewish life inspired the development of a class of specialized performers. They included the khazn, or cantor, who sang prayers on sabbath and holidays; meshorerim, singers who accompanied the khazn in larger synagogues; the magid, or travelling preacher, whose livelihood depended on the charisma of his sabbath sermons; klezmorim, the instrumental musicians who played at weddings and other celebrations; the badkhn, or marshelik, a professional jester and master of ceremonies at such celebrations. But the very specialization of such performers, their existence as a class apart, led to tension with normative Jewish society. Often itinerant, the Jewish performers were frequently not responsible to local religious and communal authorities. They were also not averse to practising their craft in secular contexts. Khazonim entertained in private homes and taverns, and frequently wove non-Jewish material, such as folk songs and opera arias, into their singing; klezmorim performed with non-Jewish musicians and such mixed bands often played at both Jewish and Christian celebrations.

SHMUEL HURVITS, whose pseudonym was A. Litvin, was born to a poor family in Minsk in 1862. He educated himself in both Jewish and general subjects, and began to work as a teacher. But an ideological attraction to manual labour led him to give up teaching and work at paving streets, and then to take up such occupations as carpentry, woodcarving, and printing, as well as bookkeeping and peddling. He began to publish articles and poems in the 1890s, first in Russian and Hebrew, then in Yiddish. He moved to the United States in 1901, where he worked in a shoe factory, distributed newspapers, and wrote for the radical Yiddish press such as the Forverts, but in 1905, at the time of the first Russian revolution, he returned to eastern Europe, where he lived in Warsaw and then in Vilna. From 1909 to 1912 in Vilna he edited the left-wing nationalist monthly Lebn un visnshaft (‘Life and Knowledge’), in which he published well-known Jewish writers such as Linetski, Mapu, Shomer, and Bialik, as well as translations from Dickens, Tolstoy, Byron, Shelley, and Lagerlöf; studies in Jewish history and folklore; and works by young Yiddish writers such as Dovid Eynhorn, S. Niger, and Leyb Naydus.

In 1911–12 Litvin began to publish articles based on his travels throughout eastern Europe beginning in 1905. After returning to the United States in 1914, he published these articles in a six-volume anthology entitled Yidishe neshomes (‘Jewish Souls’). In scores of sketches of badkhonim, purim-shpilers, wandering preachers, and musicians; healers and holy men; beggars, pickpockets, and thieves in towns and cities throughout Poland, Lithuania, and Galicia, Litvin constructs an extraordinary panorama of the life of the Jewish masses at the moment when centuries-old traditions engaged modernity and either changed or vanished. He documents this world in the interests of a new generation of Jews who, he believed, needed such knowledge to build a secular yet authentically Jewish modern culture.

Litvin was also a dedicated political and social activist, one of the pioneers of the Po'alei Tsion movement, first in eastern Europe and then in the United States. He was a founder of the Jewish co-operative farming community Harmonya in Plainfield, New Jersey. He continued to contribute extensively to the Yiddish press, focusing on issues such as Jewish education and consumer and credit co-operatives.

When Israel saw how its sufferings were constantly renewed, oppressions increased, persecutions multiplied, and how the evil authorities piled decree on decree and followed expulsion with expulsion, so that there was no way to escape the enemies of Israel, they went out on the road and sought an answer from the paths of the wide world: which is the correct road to traverse to find rest for the soul? Then a piece of paper fell from heaven, and on it the words:

Go to Polaniya (Poland)!

So they came to the land of Polin and they gave a mountain of gold to the king, and he received them with great honour. And God had mercy on them, so that they found favour from the king and the nobles. And the king gave them permission to reside in all the lands of his kingdom, to trade over its length and breadth, and to serve God according to the precepts of their religion. And the king pro - tected them against every foe and enemy.

And Israel lived in Polin in tranquillity for a long time. They devoted themselves to trade and handicrafts. And God sent a blessing on them so that they were blessed in the land, and their name was exalted among the peoples. And they traded with the surrounding countries and they also struck coins with inscriptions in the holy language and the language of the country. These are the coins which have on them a lion rampant from the right facing left. And on the coins are the words ‘Mieszko, King of Poland’ or ‘Mieszko, Król of Poland’. The Poles call their king ‘Król’.

And those who delve into the Scriptures say: ‘This is why it is called Polin. For thus spoke Israel when they came to the land, “Here rest for the night [Po lin].” And this means that we shall rest here until we are all gathered into the Land of Israel.’

Since this is the tradition, we accept it as such.