The suggested East European models of a useable past refer to two artifacts crafted in the Vilna ghetto. As Anna Lipphardt argues in her thought-provoking article, Jews designed two replicas of Nazi occupied Vilna: one for internal consumption, and one for the Nazi town authorities. The first, commissioned by the city Gebietskomissar, modeled Vilna as a late 1930s – early 1940s urban space with the Jewish ghetto area embedded in it. To be politically correct, Anna Lipphardt sketched only too briefly this replica stored in the dark distant corner of the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum. Yet her keen insight, plus additional outside evidence, helps to figure out what it looked like. Most probably this replica exhibited St. Ann Church and the Gediminas Tower; the old Jewish quarter and the city center; the Hebrew and Yiddish Jewish schools; local yeshivas and the Vilna cathedral; the house where the Jewish community greeted Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) in the early 1900s and the local University, the former center of Polish resistance to the Russian authorities; the buildings of the YIVO institute and the Strashun library; the Jewish cemetery and the Old Synagogue for centuries controlled by the Vilna kahal that Nicolas I dissolved in 1844; the prayer house whose services used to attend Elija ben Solomon (1720-1797), dubbed Gaon, the genius, the staunch opponent of Hasidism and one of the greatest 18th century rabbinic authorities; the Musar study house established by Israel Salanter (1810-1883), the founder of the ethical trend in Judaism; the Vilna Rabbinic institute that the tsarist authorities established to produce Crown Rabbis, governmental puppets in Jewish communities; the Mefitsei Haskalah School based on the principles of the Jewish Enlightenment; the Bloch hosiery factory famous for its 1900s women strike; the Opera Theater, the site of Vilna student demonstrations; the German Street with its fashionable Jewish stores, and, indeed, the ghetto, the last haven of the local Jewish population.^[1]
But there was also the second replica. It portrayed the ghetto as a city on its own. Vilna ghetto Jews designed it for themselves, pursuing both spiritual and pragmatic goals: to memorialize what they soundly considered the last dwelling of Vilna Jews, to better control the ghetto social network, and perhaps to plan with its help an efficient military resistance. This second replica exhibited residential buildings transformed into communal shelters; the Judenrat, the ghetto umbrella organization established by the Nazis in a former Jewish gymnasium and headed by the contradictory Yakov Gens (1905-1943); the public soup kitchen on Straszun Street 2, where Abba Kovner (1918-1987) discussed plans for the uprising with Ha-Shomer ha-Tsair youth; the Children’s House of Culture; the famous ghetto library that circulated more than one hundred thousand books under the Nazi occupation; the old building of the ghetto theater on Rudnicka and the new on Konska Street; the Swawelska Street communal kitchen where the Association of Writers and Artists organized public lectures for ghetto Jews; some Jewish prayer houses and the 17th century synagogue from where people were taken directly to mass executions; narrow ghetto streets leading northward from the Big Ghetto to the Little Ghetto, whose inhabitants were liquidated in the Ponary in 1941; and the guarded gates to the ghetto routinely closed after curfew.^[2]
While the Nazis, commissioning the first model, had in mind ways to circumscribe and control the ghetto within the Vilna urban environment, ironically they made Jews produce a replica that spoke many languages and embraced many ethnicities. Potentially, Lithuanians, Poles, Germans, and Jews could identify with it. On the contrary, designed for internal consumption, the second replica had hardly anything to do with what came to be known as Yerushalaim de-Lita, Lithuanian Jerusalem, Vilna lofty moniker. Although its streets were recognizably Vilna streets and its inhabitants Yiddish-speaking Lithuanian Jews, the boundaries of the ghetto coincided with the boundaries of the replica, as if there was nothing outside of it. The replica offered a vision only of the Jewish habitat between 1941 and 1943, no more and no less. While the first model epitomized five centuries of Jewish presence in Vilna, the second obliterated any traces of this presence, reducing it solely to World War II. The first replica seemed to be all-embracing: it emphasized the diversity of local Jewish culture with its Jewish orthodoxy and schism, yeshivah movement and Jewish socialism, Hasidim and maskilim (harbingers of Jewish enlightenment), Zionist hopes and economic modernization, institutions of Jewish cultural integration and manifestations of Jewish-Gentile economic symbiosis. On the contrary, the second replica underscored homogeneity and a slow sliding into death. The first epitomized Jewish life in the Diaspora whereas the second, the annihilation of the Diaspora. The first firmly placed Jews on the map of Vilna, whereas the second created a distinct Jewish realm that seemed to bear its Lithuanian and Polish street names merely due to some strange coincidence or vexing misunderstanding. The first replica embodied what the Bundists dubbed doikeit (“here-ness”): “We are still here! You have not made the city Judenrein!” The second, taking Lithuania into consideration, painstakingly elaborated the opposite version: “We do not belong here.” The first portrayed Vilna: the urban context that simultaneously enveloped, permeated, and shaped each and every manifestation of the local Jewish presence. The second entirely removed the Gentiles: like the crown towns in the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that boasted the privilege De non tolerandi Judaeos (“To not tolerate the Jews”), the second replica of the Jewish ghetto exemplified a world that finally obtained the macabre privilege De non tolerandi Goyim (“To not tolerate the Gentiles”).
In post-Holocaust East Europe both replicas merged with two influential models shaping modern approaches to Jewish history. For the purpose of pure convenience one might call the first model “integrated” and the second “ghettoized.”^[3] As appears from Jurgita Šiaučiūnaitė-Verbickienė’s essay, in post-1989 Lithuania the integrated model was considered unattractive, and was doomed to negligence and oblivion as if its mere existence was an affront to the inhabitants and scholars of the post-war, and much more so to post-communist Vilnius. To put it on display was to acknowledge the pivotal role of Jews, Jewish culture, and Jewish economy for the pre-war city. And such acknowledgment would necessarily trigger public discussion of the Jewish impact on the rise of the local urban infrastructure. Why underscore the predominantly non-Lithuanian character of the pre-20th century Vilna that would become Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital city? Paradoxically, as the reader of Verbickienė’s article might want to believe, what was a norm for Soviet Lithuania that sheltered and published such Jewish writers as Icchokas (Itshak) Meras and Grigorii Kanovich, in the post-communist Lithuania became non-acceptable. As if for post-1989 Lithuanians to raise the issue of an integrated and complex multi-culturalism was obnoxious and could generate a discussion of Jewish communal, let alone private property restitution. Who would want to mention the Jewish role in informing the urban space of that neat, pristine, and almost overwhelmingly Catholic Lithuanian city? And why on earth would Lithuanians want to share with local Jewish survivors their independent urban space finally re-constructed and imagined as thoroughly Lithuanian?
Apparently Verbickienė argues, or at least implies that East-European post-colonial memory constructed what they call in Ukrainian historiography a “state” concept (M. Hrushevs’kyi) of the national past: the Lithuanian state in its modern version was always there, and only Russia or Poland prevented it from being visible as such. The integrated model presented Jews as active social and cultural performers playing a significant role in shaping the Lithuanian historical narrative. In this model, Jews as a narrative on their own were rewriting themselves, changing both genre and style, and interacting with a variety of other narratives such as Russian or Polish. They were anything but a stable text. They were “becoming” and not “being.” And national narratives, especially those recently emancipated from the imposed communist meta-text, resisted the newly established form of the past. “Useable” implied first and foremost something that one knows how to handle or manipulate. The Russian term for “useable” should be not only “приемлемое” (acceptable) and “полезное” (useful) but also “управляемое прошлое” (manageable past). East Europeans were ready to handle the Jewish ingredient of their national narrative solely as an ossified issue. They could deal with Jews as a canonical “text,” easy to manipulate and control. They sought a “useable” past that would not be “changeable.” But this was not what the integrated model was about. First and foremost, it presupposed a shared national memory, if not a shared national property. While the Czech Republic, Hungary, and grudgingly Poland were ready to share, the post-Soviet republics were not. Therefore, the restitution of Jewish real estate after the collapse of communism, this paradoxical yet unequivocal litmus test for the readiness of a post-communist nation to create a multi-ethnic vision of itself, nowhere in Europe has gone as slowly as in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine.^[4] As follows from Anna Liphardt’s article, the “integrated” replica of Vilna was not compatible with an egotistic attitude toward national memory and patrimony. Hence the dramatic posthumous fate of the “integrated” replica of the Vilna Jewish community. It called to mind the Jews who were still there, still alive, and who aggressively demanded their share in the national memory. It referred to a slippery present and an unstable past. And for Jews it represented Jewish ubiquity on pre-1940s Vilna map: too pretentious, politically incorrect and dangerous idea to entertain. Therefore, it was hidden from the eyes of visitors as if it never existed. This was a peculiar way to construct a useable past, not entirely illogical.
At the same time the ghettoized model came to play an almost unchallenged role in East European writings about Jews (I do not take into consideration the latest western publications). There appeared synthetic overviews of Jewish and East European Jewish history one third of which was dedicated to Ancient, Medieval and Modern Jewish history and two thirds covered the Holocaust.^[5] There have been objective circumstances informing this trend, one of them the purportedly insurmountable obstacle presented by books and documents in Jewish languages, an obstacle precluding East European scholarly insights into the history of Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), Hasidism (revivalist pietistic Jewish movement), or the Bund (Jewish Workers Party of Lithuania, Poland, and Russia) that require an advanced level of Hebrew and Yiddish. The unfamiliarity with these languages left a narrow window for scholarly opportunities, the Holocaust research with its enormous amount of documents in Russian, Polish, or Lithuanian vernacular turning out the best way to study Jewish issues. However, three articles discussed here present a more complex problem. Agnieszka Jagodzińska, who knows Hebrew, has chosen to discuss Polish Jewish cultural integration, focusing on matsevot (tombstones). Why tombstones? There were some groups of young Jews in Warsaw who, for a scholar in the West, presented a fascinating object of study of national identity.^[6] But the Polish scholar preferred dead Jews from the Warsaw cemetery. Here is another example. Šiaučiūnaitė-Verbickienė apparently resides in the city that has a small Lithuanian-speaking Jewish community, the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum with its Lithuanian-speaking staff, the Judaica cataloguing program in the National library, young scholars offering Jewish studies courses in Lithuanian at the national university in Vilnius, let alone local amateur historians providing high-quality tours of the Jewish sites of Vilna. However, for unknown reasons she chose altogether to avoid integrating them into her own version of the national narrative, preferring to analyze the appropriation of the Holocaust in the works of modern Lithuanian intellectuals. These two examples are not exceptions. Local scholars in Poland, Belorussia, Lithuania, and to some extent Ukraine, prefer to discuss the Holocaust as the embodiment of local Jewish history and culture. Professor Henry Abramson from Florida Atlantic University while working at Harvard Windener Library on his comprehensive bibliography of the Ukrainian Jews, observed en passant that the overwhelming majority of sources he explored covered the Holocaust whereas Ukraine may boast ten centuries of Jewish presence! And as far as I know he worked with the secondary and primary sources in at least half a dozen languages.
I believe the problem lies not in the language barrier but in the reluctance to consider cumbersome issues while searching for a useable past. What do Lithuanian or Polish scholars do with Jewish-Lithuanian literary sources that ostensibly address the most challenging post-Holocaust questions? How do they treat those Russian-speaking war veterans of Jewish origin who fought Lithuanian war-lords? What do they think of nine elderly Vilnius Jews going to the synagogue who claim in their reports to the American Joint Distribution Committee that they still have a minyan (prayer quorum of ten men) and therefore deserve international charity, let alone a new synagogue building? How do they include in their narrative those young Lithuanians Jews trying to construct their self-identity by incorporating, say, Polish, Lithuanian, and Jewish elements? And how do they feel about a growing number of western publications on diverse aspects of Yerushalayim de-Lita, Lithuanian Jerusalem, this town with its multi-language Russian-Polish-Lithuanian-Yiddish alias, Vilna/Wilno/Vilnius/Vilne?
If I understand correctly the authors of the above published articles, their answer is simple: books belong in a footnote whereas Jews do not belong at all. Perhaps a received wisdom – not to be dismissed altogether – endorses the study of the victims, the Jews of the Holocaust, the Jews from the Warsaw cemetery, and the Vilna Jews equated with the 1940s ghetto Jews only because the Holocaust Jews can be easily manipulated as footnotes to the national narrative. As an “inserted novella” they can also be integrated into its text. The ghetto narrative allows expressing caritas and avoiding self-compromising inclusion of conspicuously “interactive” Jews into the grand text of national memory. Yes, Jews lived in Vilna, argues this inserted novella. Then Nazis came, put them in the ghetto, tortured and exterminated them. They, the Jews, are no more. The Lithuanian can only bemoan that irretrievable loss. Perhaps Lithuanians can also strive to incorporate a narrative on Jews into their useable past. For this narrative is horrible yet well-designed story with its beginning, its momentum, and its end. Not only does it seem true, but it also looks multi-cultural since it integrated Jews. In addition, it is ethically convenient, scholarly transparent, and easy-to-handle. Moreover, it is safe. The important part of it is to narrate the story. Once it is told, those inconvenient Jews are no longer around. The story is finished; Jews are dead; good Jews are dead Jews.
Now it is so easy to incorporate their story. Finally it presents no challenges to the national memory. Indeed, there still remain issues related to the involvement of the local population in the mass executions, yet these issues fall short of the challenges presented by the discussion of an operating modern Jewish community. Better to deal with collaboration problems than with issues related to local post-communist East European Jews. Ultimately, the Jew belongs to the ghetto. A dead Jew is better than a live Jew. Telling the Holocaust story, a college instructor ponders for hours on the Vilna ghetto, discusses cultural entrepreneurship of the ghetto Jews, analyzes their organized resistance, translates the ghetto poetry of Avrom Sutzkever, launches the slide-show portraying the deportation from the Little Ghetto to the Ponary region, and assigns an on-line search of web-resources portraying the liquidation of the ghetto. Then the students will go into the street and eat ice-cream. Everybody will be happy: the instructor who spelled out the subject matter; the students who heard yet another suspense story, though not very long; and those who write national history text-books, since they managed to tell a depressing tale without undermining the affirmative national narrative. They should be proud of their accomplishment: they created an all-encompassing version of national memory exempt from remorse. Is this the reason for an extreme popularity in Poland of Bruno Schulz (1892-1942), Polish-Jewish writer and teacher, killed in his native Drohobycz during the Holocaust, and a lack of popular interest in a romantic genius Maurice Gottlieb (1856-1879), one of the most illustrious Polish-Jewish painters whose visual images of Jewish-Christian dialogue are still part of modern thinking? Are these the reasons for the enormous popularity of Holocaust classes among students on American campuses? It is nice, after all, to study Jews who are forever gone and who never challenge one’s identity, one’s present and one’s future!
But why criticize scholars from Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland or Russia? Apparently they are doing their best: they turn received wisdom on Jews upside down; they learn to ignore scornful glances of their not infrequently biased colleagues; they bother themselves to study basic Jewish concepts, familiarize themselves with such a challenging matter as modern Jewish history, and make inquiries about major religious Jewish terms and concepts. Are they not trying to un-ghettoize their own national narratives? Indeed, Jurgita Šiaučiūnaitė-Verbickienė has written a curious review of ways to construct a useable past in modern Lithuanian culture. The reader, I think, would very much appreciate if the author elaborates her own understanding of Vilna Jews to contrast it with the ghettoized vision of the Jewish past she found in the works by Lithuanian scholars. Since the reflection over historical memory is on its own a construction of memory, the picture of the appropriation of the Jewish historical past in Lithuanian thought would become more nuanced if one considers also those Vilna Jews whose activities contribute to the making of a common Lithuanian and Jewish narrative, including such paradoxical figures as Immanuelis Zingeris who supported the Saudis, represented Lithuania in the Council of European Union, and became the head of the Vilna Gaon Jewish Museum; Larisa Lempertas, a Judaic scholar, who wrote her dissertation on classical Lithuanian (Litvak) nineteenth century commentaries on the Pentateuch (Ha-emek davar by Naftali Tsevi Yehuda Berlin, 1817-1793); or Genrikh Agranovskii, an enthusiastic researcher engaged in local history who wrote a book on Jewish sites in Vilna. It is only too well-known that Warsaw Jewish bakers, butchers, gangsters, beggars, drunkards, and prostitutes at the turn of the nineteenth century were volatile individuals yet firmly embedded in the urban social texture. I doubt that they learnt from Haskalah literature those flowery Polish and German epitaphs they wanted to have inscribed on their tombstones. They learnt about them elsewhere, apparently without any maskilic intercession.^[7] And once one starts answering the question wherefrom, following the insightful research of Agnieszka Jagodzińska, one would necessarily have to look not only at the tombstones but also, for example, at Polish contemporary newspapers that often reflected the urban street life of rank-and-file Warsaw Jews and Jewish integration into Polish urban life much more accurately than carmina sepulchra. Finally, Anna Liphardt at certain point might want not only to redefine the concept of the Jewish ghetto but also to revisit ghettoized concepts of modern approaches to the East European Jewish past.
Pondering on three Ab Imperio contributions, the reader should be reminded that Jewish studies are a relatively new phenomenon in post-communist East European scholarship. While newly emerging Judaica students were not able to catch up with their Western or Israeli colleagues, they made significant progress both in developing Jewish higher education and promoting scholarly research in the field of Jewish studies. Trends and schools emerged throughout the FSU territory. Local historians produced archival-based narrowly-focused studies of Jewish communities in Daugavpils, Grodno, Khabarovsk, Leningrad, L’viv, Moscow, Nizhnii Novgorod, Orenburg, Tbilisi, Zaporizhzhia, and many other locales.^[8] St. Petersburg, an old center of Russian Judaica dating back to the times of Abram Harkavy (1835-1919), the founder of Russian Judaic studies, saw creation of the whole plethora of studies on Jewish ethnography and folklore focused on the nineteenth-century history, art, and culture of the Pale of Jewish Settlement.^[9] A variety of University-based Judaica programs in Moscow have attracted students working on Yiddish, Biblical Studies, Jewish mysticism, and the philology of Semitic languages. Kyiv Instytut iudaiky (Judaica Institute) issued a number of important publications on early Soviet Jewish theater and cinema and published fourteen issues of Yehupets, perhaps the best FSU almanach on literature, history, and art of East European, mostly Russian-speaking Jews.^[10] A number of FSU scholars, such as Simon Yakerson, a preeminent connoisseur of the medieval Hebrew books and manuscripts from St. Petersburg, gained international recognition.^[11] East European scholars of Jewish studies, as well as numerous Judaica centers that dotted the map of the FSU higher education, inform a vision of Jewish historical past that surpasses the “ghettoized” narratives on history and memory. Engaging them into discussion, Ab Imperio might have crafted a more nuanced picture of an encounter between new national narratives and Jewish historical past. At any rate the reader is advised to believe that the essays by Anna Liphardt, Jurgita Šiaučiūnaitė-Verbickienė, and Agnieszka Jagodzińska present one of many existing historiographic approaches that should not be taken for a dominant trend in East European scholarship.
Ultimately, the ghettoized memory is not necessarily a prerogative of East European scholars who grapple with their new national historical narratives. One should not forget what Liphardt discovered: when the Yad va-Shem Museum staff decided to epitomize Vilna Jewry they chose not the “interactive” and “multi-cultural” but the “ghettoized” model of the town. Reaffirming the Jewish presence in the city, they in fact obliterated the most important feature of Vilna Jewry. Instead of visualizing Jewish integration into urban space, they again cloistered the Jews in the imaginary ghetto. Sixty years after the Holocaust the scholarship consistently casts East European Jews in a ghettoized mold. Quousque tandem? Back in East Europe recent publications demonstrate serious changes in approaches to Jewish history: Polish students turned to the study of Frankism, Hasidism, and particularly rich legacy of Polish-Jewish literature;^[12] Ukrainian pundits issued a number of ground-breaking studies integrating Jews into multi-ethnic Ukrainian (in fact, old Polish) historical narrative;^[13] and Lithiuania published a formidable volume on Vilna Gaon looking at him through various ethnic, cultural, and intellectual angles.^[14] It is an unequivocal attempt to reverse a “ghettoized” approach, or, metaphorically, carefully to integrate the “ghetto” into the replica of Vilna urban space. Should one dismiss the integrated model only because a Gebietskomissar commissioned it? Vilna must be portrayed as a multi-cultural urban environment with all its cross-cultural tensions. And while reconstructing Vilna’s Jewry one should keep in mind that the 17th, 18th, and 19th century Vilna Jewish merchants, kahal elders, cantors, proletarians, socialist-revolutionaries, doctors, store-owners, distillers, musicians, apostates, seamstresses, and rabbis did not necessarily end their lives in 1943 in the Vilna ghetto.