What Shall We Tell Miriam? A Tale for the Present

Summary

THERE must be many Miriams and Sarahs and Shulamiths and Samuels and Benjamins and Daniels all over the world where Jews have set foot. They are, or will soon, be asking their parents and grandparents questions about what life was like in the country where they,_ were born in that incredibly distant past before the Second World War, I And even before the First World War. What were the people like, our grandparents and greatgrandparents? How did they live, what did they do, what did they think, what did the places look like, how did they smell? In the words of the historian Ranke: ‘Wie es wirklich gewesen.’ Posing such questions is a part of a natural cyclical process: indifference, then curiosity. It is important to tell them about these things, for our sake and theirs. Who will if we won't? Ours is the last and vanishing generation of living witness. But how to do it? The young have little patience. Of course, it would be simple enough to use the precept of Hillel, tsé ulemad-send them to the library to read and learn. How realistic is this counsel? Perhaps one might recommend a specific reading list that could be tailored to the particular circumstance. Nothing would give a better picture than some of the works of Mendele, Sholem Aleykhem, Peretz, Opatoshu, Sholem Asch, Agnon, the Singer brothers, and later Stryjkowski. On the Polish side, there is Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, Józef Korzeniowski, lgnacy Kraszewski, Syrokomla, Gomulicki, Konopnicka, Orzeszkowa, and Klemens Junosza.

There is, however, a more personal way, by describing life in that long ago world through the story of one's own family. My family, for example, is not untypical of the many aspects of Jewish life around Kraków in western Galicia, the ‘Austrian’ part of Poland at the end of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth.

On my father's side, I am descended from a long line of rabbis or melameds. My father was the youngest of fifteen children, not all from the same mother and not all surviving to adulthood. To give a thumbnail sketch of the family, one would need a very large thumb indeed.