Returning to the Shtetl: Differing Perceptions

Summary

THE longing to ‘return’ to one's past, to the sights and smells of one's childhood and youth, is as old as human culture. The yearning for paradise lost, the homecoming of Odysseus, and the artistic return of Proust to his childhood are some of the most appreciated versions of this universal phenomenon. When speaking of modern Jewish ‘returns’ in particular, Shmuel Yosef Agnon comes immediately to mind. In his autobiographical novel Ore'aḥ nata lalun (‘A Guest for the Night’) he dwells on the protagonist's return to his invented home town of Shibosh—the actual Buczacz in eastern Galicia. Agnon made his own return to Buczacz in the summer of 1930, more than twenty years after he had left it. Not surprisingly, what he encountered there was quite different from what he remembered.

Agnon's stay in Buczacz was both euphoric and traumatic. On the one hand, he experienced the excitement of revisiting the sites of his childhood, and on the other, he endured the trauma of witnessing the disintegration of the Jewish shtetl. Indeed, Agnon's description of Shibosh–Buczacz captures above all the deterioration of Jewish life in Poland on the eve of the Holocaust. One can also sense in the work the vague and strange presence of an impending catastrophe. Emuna Yaron, Agnon's daughter and the compiler and editor of many of his works, visited Buczacz sixtysix years later. When she arrived, there was nothing left of the bustling Jewish life and culture that had once existed there. Of the thousands of Jews who had lived in Buczacz, only two or three were left, and these were not keen to be identified as Jews. For Emuna, as for her father back in 1930, it was both a sentimental and a depressing experience. However, she did find some solace in locating tangible traces of her ancestors’ lives there; she was satisfied to walk down the streets and recognize the sights that her father had so eloquently described.

Czesław Miłosz has noted that ‘An enormous exodus of populations from East to West occurred as a result of the Second World War.’ Indeed, no previous period in modern history has witnessed such a massive displacement of people from their homelands and birthplaces.