Poland, as Geneviève Zubrzycki explains in the opening paragraph to her new book, finds itself divided over what kind of national community it wishes to be. Does it want to be a Catholic, traditional country closed to others, or does it want to be a secular, progressive country open to others? If this question obviously relates to the present and future, it also refers to the past because in Poland, as in many other nation states, battles over national identity tend to revolve around battles over the past, as Zubrzycki astutely shows not only in Resurrecting the Jew but also in The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland (Chicago, 2006). While in Crosses of Auschwitz Zubrzycki analyzes the Catholic, traditional, and closed understanding of the nation in the context of Polish debates about Holocaust memory at Auschwitz, in Resurrecting the Jew she analyzes the secular, progressive, and open view of the nation in the context of recent efforts among mostly non-Jewish Poles to remember Poland's rich history of Jewish life. Hence, Resurrecting the Jew should be read alongside Crosses of Auschwitz as constituting a pioneering two-volume exploration of Polish nationalism after the collapse of Soviet communism.
Resurrecting the Jew is divided into seven chapters. The first chapter introduces the emergence of “Poland's Jewish turn” in the post-communist era (8); the second chapter examines the commemoration of Jewish absence in the urban landscape; the third chapter offers an overview of nostalgic, romantic longings for Jews; the fourth chapter discusses the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews; the fifth chapter identifies different kinds of engagement with the Polish Jewish past, including such registers as “crude cultural appropriation,” “casual engagement,” “romantic engagement,” “critical-introspective engagement,” and “political engagement” (157); the sixth chapter looks at the revitalization of Jewish life in Poland since 1989; and the seventh chapter summarizes the book's main conclusions, suggesting that Poland's Jewish turn has “lessons and implications well beyond Poland” (197). As to the latter, Zubrzycki poses a question of considerable breadth at the end of her book: “How do we represent that which remains lost? How do we reincorporate that which is no longer?” (200).
This is a large and important question, one which I would like to reflect on briefly by considering one of the most ambitious examples that Zubrzycki discusses, the Polin Museum. Polin aims to narrate 1,000 years of Jewish life in Polish-speaking Europe. As a commemorative museum, it strives to remember the dead by presenting aspects of Jewish cultural, economic, religious, and intellectual life. Though this commemorative imperative to remember the dead reflects a seemingly axiomatic response to death in contemporary Europe, if not in western history more broadly, it is ultimately, as Zubrzycki's concluding questions intimate, a fragile response, or, in more ancient Greek terms, a tragic response; tragic in the sense that remembrance cannot heal the painful wounds of loss and death, no matter how beautiful or poignant a particular act of remembrance might be.
A beautiful building houses the Polin Museum, and its exhibition reflects beautiful work by many dedicated scholars. Yet, when reflecting on the museum after reading Zubrzycki's brilliant chapter about it, I could not help but think about the fragility of memory, about the fragility of history; I could not help but ask: can memory, can history, respond adequately to loss? For what is an adequate response to death in the first place?
These are large and important questions indeed but perhaps ones that can easily be avoided amid all the battles about history in Poland and elsewhere, including here in the United States. I might even hazard to say that such debates attract and hold our attention partly because they turn us away from recognizing and confronting the fragility of memory as a response to death: perhaps we prefer to argue about what should be remembered and how it should be remembered rather than think about the limits of memory since, after all, memory can achieve its goal of overcoming death, of resurrecting the dead, to borrow from Zubrzycki's title, only in a metaphorical sense. By prompting such thoughts and questions, Zubrzycki has written an excellent and thoughtful book that deserves to read by a wide range of scholars and students in sociology, history, and European studies.
