"My Vistula"
Ukraine:
I step back
blood on the face, I've acted on the masses
everything requires something special now
and with each action the artist in me dies more so.
Warsaw:
no more the hand basket of tyrants
but no more a contender to Paris.
we purloined an auto and through the devastation
we went like we were trying to make amends
with the continent by the kilometers we drove;
ruins, and muted wolves.
New York:
I'm still new to this -
that's the price of flight, right?
but I like the delis of the Lower East,
though I suppose the guilt is in order,
the same when I listen to and like Bob Dylan.
all about me is assumption, and my work still
demolition, as I have a hand in the black and white
metro makeovers.
I am the Vistula fugitive,
the decades I but ooze through
while I try to ignore the memorials
Old Poland. Tashlich prayer on Vistula River -- Eduard Gurevich
From the founding of the Kingdom of Poland in 1025 through to the early years of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth created in 1569, Poland was the most tolerant country in Europe, home to the largest and most significant Jewish community in the world, the center of Judaic culture. The most prosperous period for Polish Jews began with the 16th-century reign of Zygmunt I Stary (Sigismund I); Zygmunt II August continued his father’s tolerant policy and granted them autonomous communal administration. This period led to the creation of a proverb about Poland being a "heaven for the Jews" (paradisus judaeorum) and the country becoming a shelter for persecuted. By the middle of the 16th century about 3/4 of all Jews in the world lived there. But with the accession of the Saxon dynasty the Jews’ position began to deteriorate, especially since the Sejm (parliament), composed of szlachta (aristocrats) and Catholic clergy, blocked all attempts to levy taxes on themselves, so only townsfolk and Jews were taxed; the Jews were represented by the Va'ad Arba' Aratzot (the Council of Four Lands: Greater Poland [Poznań], Little Poland [Kraków], Ruthenia [Kiev],and Volhynia [parts of Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus]), who had authority of taxes, but it was discontinued by the Sejm in 1964 due to its failure to deliver taxes collected. As public hostility increased, in large part due to the religious strife fomented by the struggle between adherents of the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation, the Jewish intellectual output was also reduced; Sabbatianism and Frankism became popular messianic movements, and many intellectuals turned to the study of the Kabbalah. Israel ben Eliezer, known as the Baal Shem Tov, or BeShT, and his disciples taught and encouraged a new, fervent brand of Orthodox Judaism based on Kabbalah known as Hasidism.
ReplyDeleteAfter the partitions of Poland of 1772, 1793, and 1795 resulting in the destruction of Polish sovereignty, Polish Jews became subject to the laws of the partitioning powers, Austria, Prussia, and the increasingly antisemitic Russian Empire, which established the Pale of Settlement (“cherta osedlosti” in Russian, “tkhum-ha-moyshəv“ in Yiddish) as a region in which permanent residency by Jews was allowed but beyond which Jewish permanent residency was generally prohibited; it comprised about 20% of European Russia and largely corresponded to the historical borders of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (much of present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Moldova, Ukraine, and parts of western Russia). The pale’s boundaries changed over time, so different areas were variously open or closed to Jewish residency, such as the Caucasus. At times, Jews were forbidden to live in agricultural communities or certain cities such as Kiev, Sevastopol and Yalta; settlers from outside the pale were forced to move to small towns, thus fostering the rise of the shtetlekh, small towns with large Jewish populations which later became romanticized in the works of Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and others, including the musical “Fiddler of the Roof.” When Poland regained independence after World War I, it was still the center of European Jewry. However, at the start of World War II, Poland was again divided between Germany and the Soviet Union; 1/5 of the Polish population perished during the war, half of them Jewish. Although the Holocaust occurred largely in German-occupied Poland, the site of Auschwitz and other death camps, fewer than 0.1% of Polish gentiles collaborated with the Nazis, and the largest number of people who rescued Jews during the Holocaust were Poles. In the postwar period some 200,000 Jewish survivors left the People's Republic of Poland (the only Eastern Bloc country to allow free Jewish immigration to Israel without visas or exit permits) for the Americas and Israel. Most of the remaining Jews left Poland in 1968 as the result of a Soviet-sponsored "anti-Zionist" campaign, though after the fall of the Communist regime in 1989 people who were Polish citizens before the war were allowed to renew their citizenship.
ReplyDeleteBy the 1950s Jews constituted ¼ of the population of New York, making it the world’s largest Jewish community; by 2002 the proportion of the city’s Jewish population had halved, but the city contained the headquarters of the Chabad, Bobover, and Satmar branches of Hasidism, as well as other traditional orthodox branches of Judaism. Many "Yiddishisms" entered New York City English and then spread throughout the language especially via the American entertainment industry, often used by Jews and non-Jews alike, and include the names of foods (bagel, blintz, lox), bupkis (emphatically nothing), chutzpah (audacity), dreck (worthless, distasteful, nonsensical material), gelt (money), goy (gentile), kibitz (to gossip or offer unwanted advice), kike (a derogatory term for a Jew), klutz (clumsy person), kosher (legitimate), kvetch (to gripe), maven (expert, know-it-all), mazel tov (congratulatory greeting), mensch (an upright person), meshuga (crazy), nebbish (nonentity), oy (a interjection indicating pain), putz, schlong (penis), schmuck (a jerk, but also a penis), schlemiel (bungler, dolt), schlock (cheap, shoddy), schmaltz (excessively sentimental), schmooze (chat), schnoz (nose), shamus (detective), shtick (comic routine or defining habit), shtup (make love), spiel (sales pitch), spritz (spray), tush (buttocks), yarmulke (round cloth skullcap). In the later part of the 20th century, many Hasidic Jews moved out of New York City and founded new communities in the US; they often use the term "shtetl" to refer to these enclaves.
ReplyDeleteTashlich ("cast off" in Hebrew) is a customary Jewish atonement ritual performed at a large, natural body of flowing water on the afternoon of Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish new year), though it is not uniformly acceptable among Jewish communities. In new York it is generally performed from the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges.