Every day before the pandemic hit, Jews shuttled in and out of Poland on heritage tours, and the moment they reopen, you can bet, the camps will be swarming with Jewish tourists. My family’s memories of the old country are not of a jovial hardscrabble community who put faith over everything. Like many Ashkenazi Jews, our history is fractured, much of it chosen to be forgotten. For most of my life, I couldn’t identify the town my family came from. My father, or my father’s father, opted to scrub the name from memory. By the time I was a teen, I had absorbed enough second-hand trauma that when asked where my family was from, I swiftly boasted that we were never Polish, always a buncha Jews.
What I do remember is my great uncle’s tales of escape. He told me that, as the Nazis filtered in, he Br’er Rabbited tricks around idiot policemen hot on his trail, escaping over the Soviet Union’s border. There, he was crammed into a refugee camp and sent to work in a factory where he met his wife. After the war, he rushed back to Poland, still a Yid.
Nothing had changed.
His story mirrored many others. Before the Holocaust, 3.5 million Jews lived in Poland, 10% of the population. Only a half million survived, some by hiding, some by crossing the border. Once the war ended, around 280,000 Jews attempted to return to their lives, but they were met with new waves of pogroms. Thousands upon thousands flooded out. Then Poland turned communist, requiring the remaining Jews to give up their faith or leave. Later, in 1968, a surge of nationwide student protests against state censorship led the government to purge the country of over 15,000 more Jewish citizens, accusing them of being Zionist—therefore anti-Polish. By 1970, barely 30,000 remained.
But many Ashkenazim still yearn to visit. We support the economy of a land with barely any Jews left, a country that made it illegal to refer to the Polish death camps as the “Polish death camps,” because the government wants the issue settled for good: Poland has always been innocent, getting blamed when the whole ordeal was entirely the Nazis’ fault. With America amid a new civil rights movement, this is the moment for its Jews to question why some are holding Europe on a pedestal. Many of my loved ones march with Black Lives Matters signs aloft, protesting police brutality and systemic inequality, yet they’ve gone on heritage tours and glorify vacations to Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin.
Cultural racism is infused throughout American society. As historian and the New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist Ibram X Kendi writes, “Whoever creates the cultural standard usually puts himself at the top of the hierarchy.” The infrastructure of America was built by the enslaved, yet the power is held by people of European descent. They’ve dictated respectability related to how we walk, talk, and dress. It’s in the literature we read, the history we study. Anything that waivers from the norm is ghettoized, ethnic, tossed off—like my ancestors once shunned Yiddish. But why are Ashkenazim still grasping for fragments of Europe when Europe wanted us dead?
My cousin told me she knows there were happy moments for her family because she has pictures of her visiting the zoo. Framed in photos, she wears a smile, but any buoyant memories were drowned by all the times she was frantic, worried her parents wouldn’t make it home. She told me about a classmate promising to sic a dog on her. Every day, surviving school was a gauntlet. Her family left for Israel in 1957. She was eight.
When my Aunt Sadie came to New York traveling in steerage, she discovered speckles scurrying through her luggage. Afraid the insects would undermine her immigration, she jettisoned the thing. Nothing from the old world held value to her anymore. The same way she abandoned her baggage, my grandfather ditched his, leaving behind much of the religion. Anytime my dad heard his father whispering in his native tongue, he’d ask what he was saying. “Nothing,” his father would reply, in perfect English.
In Cohoes, New York, my grandfather started a wallpaper business. His progeny became teachers, artists, and social workers. We were still Yids, and that meant, sometimes, growing up in the surrounding upstate towns, we were pelted with a penny or two, but we never got choked out by police officers. White Christians supported the family business, we knew how to find choice loans, and the cops came quickly when we called.
During college, I studied the Jewish history we’d lost. I enrolled in Yiddish classes. I questioned my cousins and learned the name of the town we were from. I traced a circle around it on a map—Rodomsk, the home of a Hasidic dynasty, a town that once had a socialist bund, with Jewish schools and temples and craftsmen guilds and a self-defense league that successfully averted a couple of pogroms. I learned about the immigration laws implemented by the United States in 1924, walling my great-grandparents out, leaving them for the camps.
After graduation, I moved to Jerusalem for nine months, studying in yeshiva. I moved back home and met a girl, a Nigerian-Jamaican beauty from Brooklyn named Annie who was spiritually searching. She wanted to learn to drive, so I taught her, and soon she told me I drove too slow, so I always rode shotgun. In no time, she knew more about Judaism than I did, speaking better Hebrew, and we merged tribes under the chuppah, stomping the glass and jumping the broom. Together we danced, we spun, we clapped. Baruch Hashem—so alive. She told me she loved to travel. She wanted to go back to Jamaica and to Nigeria and to Israel and back again.
I had one request, never Eastern Europe. Never Poland. I told her we had enough roots in places where the family tree was still flourishing, where there weren’t just burnt stubs.
In our eleven years together, my wife and I’ve kvetched in jammed Jamaican taxi’s zipping down dirt roads. We’ve stopped to haggle with shop keeps like we were in Israel. We’ve joked about saying hamotzi, the prayer over bread, over a piece of breadfruit. In Jerusalem, we purchased our wedding bands and I taught Annie the bus system, which she quickly learned better than me. After we had our son Avishai Olamilekan, we visited her grandmother in Nigeria, who was ninety…or one hundred something, no one’s really sure. We welcomed Shabbos in her sister’s Lekki apartment, Annie waving her hands before candles, me holding grape juice high. We celebrate, everywhere but Europe.