My Tykocin Talk

One of my favorite authors, W.G. Sebald, a German expatriate of my generation, had the following to say about the relationship between the past and the present in coming to terms with the Nazi period in his own country.

Might it not be,” Sebald writes “ …. that we … have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and for the most part is extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak?”

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Sebald’s words describe better than I the kind of journey I have taken to Tykocin, passing through an imperceptible threshold to a past once unknown to me, as I come to terms with the hazy fragments of a world that I can only glean from the present.  I visited Tykocin quite a number of times between 2014 and today.  This is what I came away with.

My mother’s mother, née Chaya Kurlander, was born in 1893 in a place she called Tiktin, the Yiddish name for Tykocin, which as far as I knew as a child was somewhere in faraway Russia. She left for America in 1907 at the age of fourteen all by herself, never returned, and never again saw her mother, father, and a brother who stayed behind in Tiktin.  She travelled on her own all across Europe to Rotterdam where she boarded the Ryndam, a Dutch ocean liner that arrived in the Port of New York on 26 August 1907 after a ten-day crossing.  Chaya had never left the Tykocin-Bialystok area before that. There were no other family members listed with her in the ship manifest though she may have been under the watchful eye of a family friend. She settled in New York not with her brothers who had preceded her, but as a boarder with a family from Minsk named Horowitz.

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In 1917 she married one of the Horowitz boys, and henceforth was known as Ida Horowitz, having some time before that taken a more American first name, Ida. I knew her as Grandma Ida and had never heard or seen her maiden names until just a few years ago.  When I discovered that, it was as if my grandmother were two different persons with two separate lives, two separate identities: one from the past in that remote place called Tiktin and one in the present time in New York. The past for her was described as Russia, not Poland, as when she was a child there was no autonomous state of Poland.

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My grandmother described Tiktin to me as a poor backward shtetl, and the impression I had was that it was just inhabited by Jews.  Her mother, named Lebe, who came from the large Piekarewicz family, ran a small business dyeing fabrics, and grandmother describes her mother’s hands as indelibly stained with the dyes she used.  Chaya’s father, Arie, was a very religious man and worked as a beadle in the synagogue. In trying to conceive of grandmother’s shtetl the only reference points I had were the kind of idealized bitter-sweet accounts of shtetl life from fictive places like Anatevka in “Fiddler on the Roof,” portrayed as a tiny, poor village, and presumed to be the kind of place in which most Jews in the Russian Pale of Settlement lived.

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As I began to learn about her birthplace, I came to understand that grandmother’s description was wrong, and that Tiktin, Tykocin that is, did not at all resemble Anatevka.  When my grandmother was born the town had a population of about 5,000 inhabitants, double that of today, and more than half of its inhabitants were Jews.  By the 1920s the Jewish population had diminished somewhat as many families left for Palestine as well as more distant places. Tykocin was a small town, but not that small, and supported a modest urban economy of trade, commerce, and small-scale crafts and manufacturing.  It may have been poor, but it certainly was not a tiny backward village. I later learned that the town had quite a distinguished history both for its Jews and its gentiles, a major center of commerce and of Jewish scholarship and a place with royal status prior to the nineteenth century. I also learned that most Jews in pre-World War I Russian Eastern Europe lived in towns more like Tykocin than in the kinds of villages portrayed in Fiddler.

 

My mother died in 2010. Going through her papers I discovered an old document in the Cyrillic script that I presumed to be my grandmother’s Russian identity papers along with some Czarist Russian bills and coins.  This finding stirred my interest and I decided to try and find out what this far-away town where people like my ancestors once lived is like, and if any traces of “my past” remained.  When I set off for Tykocin for the first time in 2014 I took a copy of my grandmother’s identity papers with me. Those papers were her passport to America in 1907, and now became my passport back to her birthplace over 100 years later.

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I had never given much thought to Tiktin or Tykocin until the discovery of grandmother’s identity papers, nor to things relating to Jews, Judaism, or Jewish history. I was, and still am, a secular person with no connection to the religion of my ancestors. I have spent most of my adult life living in Turkey, engaged in research, writing, and teaching there as an anthropologist. Now, at the age of 75, I am trying to learn a little about the still obscure years of my family’s past and in consequence about the part of the world from which they once came.

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Poles and Jews:  “Do you know what makes every town Polish?” the ninteenth century Polish writer Jozef Ignacy Kraszewski once asked. “The Jews. … When there are no more Jews, we enter an alien country….”  Jews and Catholic Poles were bound together over many centuries and in intimate space, abiding in parallel worlds both very familiar and yet profoundly unknown to each other.  The fabric of Tykocin over the centuries was made from an inseparable weave of Jews and Christians. Tykocin was almost always half Jewish and half Christian.  That means that one in every two people on the streets was Jewish and perhaps more than that, as most businesses and the weekly market were dominated by the Jews. People had Jewish neighbours, presumably some of them Jewish friends, and their kids often played with Jewish children.  

 

After several visits I had come to feel at home in Tykocin.  I walked around the town visiting the solid seventeenth century synagogue that survived the Holocaust at one end, and the impressive eighteenth-century church at the other.  I ate at the “Jewish” restaurants, the restaurant in the reconstructed Lithuanian castle, and at Alumnat, once a hostel for retired Polish officers of noble descent, now a hotel-restaurant.  I walked street by street through the town noting the large number of old wooden houses still in use. I walked along the river, the Narew, and was enchanted by its beauty and the beauty of the countryside. I walked the streets and paths my grandmother may have walked 110 years ago.  Tourists, Jewish from around the world and gentiles, mostly from Poland, came and went in large groups.  I remained behind in the town, now with its familiar streets, homes, and even a few familiar faces.  I had come to know my way around.  

 

I walked over to the old Jewish cemetery lying in a neglected field of clumpy grass at the edge of town. The few extant gravestones strewn here and there at that time poking through the grassy field were damaged, no doubt intentionally.  I thought of earlier ancestors, the ones lucky enough to have been buried there.  At one time there was sign at the entrance with the “birth” and “death” dates of the Jewish community indicated: 1522-1941.  I never understood why such meaningful information was taken down.  I visited, with deep pain and sorrow, the site of the slaughter by German invaders in the nearby Łupuchowo forest of all but a handful of the 2000 Jews of Tykocin on August 25 and 26, 1941.  My great-grandmother, Lebe, and her son Josef and more distant relatives unknown to me were among those murdered. My great-grandfather had died in 1915.

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I contacted the owner of the little apartment I had rented about something I needed.  She didn’t speak English and since my Polish was very primitive she had to call her son, who could speak the language.  He said he would get it taken care of. Then, out of the blue, he told me that his family had saved a Jewish girl during the war by hiding her under their bed, and that she now is an old lady living in New York.  Why did he feel the need to tell me his family were righteous Christians?  Was it because he sensed that I was a Jew?  Was what happened in Tykocin two generations ago before he was born on his mind?  

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There is little locally available upon which to build a Jewish past in Tykocin. For the gentiles of Tykocin, the past is embodied in their living selves, and their community regularly re-imagines itself at mass week after week, at weddings and funerals and holidays and family occasions throughout the year.  In schools they learn about Polish history and come to identify with the nation. For many Jews with family roots in Tykocin memory requires a leap of imagination across a chasm of sorrow.

 

One Sunday I attended mass. I wanted to get a sense for the church as a living institution in Tykocin in contrast to the synagogue, which only looks to the past. I wanted to feel the pulse of the congregation. The church was packed to capacity with people standing in the back and in the aisles.  The priest recited prayers and the church reverberated with the voices of the congregation. The power of the clergy over their flock was palpable.  I sat transfixed.  There I was a Jew, anthropologist, Chaje’s grandson, at mass in the church in her old shtetl.  Perhaps she had passed by the church, though I imagine she would never have dared peek in.  I felt self-conscious in the presence of the children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren of her old neighbors. Several glanced at me. I was not genuflecting or kneeling or singing in Polish.  I took a few photos as surreptitiously as possible.

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I was looking at a scraggly bearded man carving and selling figurines of old-time Jews outside the former synagogue, now renovated as a museum.  My first impression was one of antipathy.  The stereotyping of Jews – moneylender, fiddler, at prayer -- was offensive to me.  I personally couldn’t connect with such a past.  But later I began to see the display of characters from a very different perspective. That he carved mock Jews and sold them to tourists was a phenomenon in itself worthy of some anthropological thought.

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I walked over to the adjacent museum building, the old besmedresh, the religious study center, and bought a couple of plastic magnetic Jews from the museum shop located there for two American Jewish anthropologist friends – for a laugh.   One of the Jews was carrying a money bag, and the other a purse and a Star of David, timeless Yids, distinctive in their exoticness.  I walked around the building looking at an exhibition of photographs then on display, mostly pre-war depictions of the local Polish leisure class, enjoying their privileges I presumed.  The strangest photo was the only one of a Jew among them.  A full-length portrait of a bedraggled, quite obviously mentally unbalanced man, a meshuggener. “Ubogi Zyd,” Poor Jew, was the Polish label. Why was that photo selected for the exhibition? What do we “see” when we look at that photograph today?

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I returned to the carver and decided to buy a couple of the figurines, one of a Jew reading the torah and bedecked with tiffilin, another holding a moneybag.  As I walked to lunch a bit later, it occurred to me that three Jews would be better, so I returned and bought a fiddler.  Now I had the three stereotypical Jews in hand: the moneylender, the Talmudic scholar, and the fiddler.

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I compared the figurines I bought with a small wooden one of a Jew on display in one of the cabinets of the synagogue.  The one in the temple does not carry the ugly stereotyped visage that the tourist icons have, and seems to be a man seriously engaged in prayer unconcerned about who’s looking, rather than putting on a buffoon-like show for observers. I think about the photo of the Jewish madman in the museum. Why are such disturbing images being perpetuated even today by presumed well-meaning people at such a site of remembrance of Jews?  

 

Does all of this mean something different for Polish Christians as opposed to visiting Jews. I came to see that it most likely does. I learned that the figurines embody not only timeworn stereotypes, but also traces of history, a kind of memory, and an unspoken nostalgia for many Poles. They are also considered talismans bringing good luck to the holder. Almost every money-changing shop in Poland has a print depicting a bearded old Jew with purse in hand – no offense intended! 

I was thinking about the so-called “Jewish” food offered at two of the restaurants in Tykocin.  An almost life-size carved accordion-playing Yid sitting on a bench at the entrance welcomes diners at one of the restaurants.  The interior is bedecked with Hebrew words and menorahs, and the photos of bearded Jews on the walls “blessing,” so to speak, the restaurant with their presence.   The menu offers “Kuchinia Zydowska w Tykocinie,” Jewish Food of Tykocin.  The orthodox Jews in the photos couldn’t have eaten there.   The food is not kosher.  The other restaurant advertises “Kuchina Zydowska i Domowa” translated in their brochure as “Traditional Jewish and Polish [actually domestic] Kitchen” and promises a touch of nostalgia: “if you want to continue your journey to the past” the tourist is reminded.

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Tykocin has become a kind of memorial to the Jews no longer there, the site of an active display of “remembering” in progress.  This remembering gravitates between sentimentalized shtetl fiction and graveyard memories.  The in-between, the normal life of the former Jewish inhabitants of the town, is just beginning to be pieced together.  As with so much of everyday life anywhere in the world, even where lives have not been violently destroyed, there is most often little left to memorialize.  

 

Much of what we know about the local Jewish past is from the Sefer Tiktin, the memorial book written by the few survivors after the war. Other than that almost everything is lost.  There yet may be records to be discovered in local and other archives. The possessions of the Jews of Tykocin have passed onto other, mostly non-Jewish, hands in town and these objects have over the years taken on new meanings for them, and now tell different “stories,” stories alien to those which they possessed while in the homes of Jewish families.  

 

One forgets, in light of the unfathomable trauma of the extinction of the Jews during the war, that Jews lived relatively well in Tykocin for hundreds of years, and that the war years were a radical exception to the norm.  It is true that there was increasing anti-Semitism in the late 19th century and especially during the interwar period in the region, but despite the negative attitudes toward Jews of some,  the destruction of the Jewish community would certainly not have taken place if the Germans had not been there in wartime.

 

What is “remembered” when we remember the Jews of Tykocin? Of course, almost nothing is any longer remembered, since there is almost no one alive to do the remembering.  And even if there were, their “remembering ” would have been a construction prey to memory deterioration of over 75 years of time, continually tempered by the interests and perspectives of the present.  For those who attempt to memorialize the Jewish past in Tykocin the question we must ask of them is what of all the possible things from the past that could be memorialized have they chosen to present publically?  This holds true for the museum and its buildings, its exhibitions, and its various activities. The recent museum exhibition “We the Jewish People Came to Tykocin Ages Ago” is very important in this respect. This  also holds true for the restaurants serving Jewish food, the places selling Jewish trinkets and individual efforts of memory shared with the public such as the current innovative, thought-provoking “133 Stories” exhibition at the Markiewicz house.

 

The local museum presentations that I have seen over the past few years on occasion carry highly charged, sometimes diametrically opposite, meanings for locals, and for Christian and  Jewish visitors. That is to be expected.  An example: An exhibition of drawings of ghetto scenes during the late 1930s from a nearby town by Józef Charyton, a gentile, can be viewed as a collection of sympathetic portraits of Jews in their home setting, as I think was the intention of the museum.  The same drawings were taken as very offensive by some visiting Jews with whom I spoke, who viewed the portrayals as repugnant caricatures, perpetuating many negative bodily images of “the Jew,” big hooked noses and all. But not all Jews saw the drawings that way. My first impression was that this was an important and well-intentioned attempt to provide some insight into the everyday life of ordinary Jews in the past and at the edge of destruction, reminiscent of many photographs of the time.  

 

One day I walked into the Villa Regent Restaurant and Hotel and spotted a man with a big bushy beard and yarmulke on his head sitting in one of the easy chairs in the lobby.  Curious, I walked over and asked him if he spoke English. It turns out he was from London.  As we were talking another man smartly dressed in traditional garb, wide-brimmed hat, beard, side-locks and all, came over and joined us. He looked just like the large figurine sitting at the entrance to the restaurant. It was as if he were there in Jewish costume, an actor in a town play about past times, like the local actors dressed as “Jews” in the purimspiel, the Purim play until recently performed in front of the synagogue by local Christian townspeople, or the local Polish extras in Jewish costume in Tykocin for the shooting of a feature film about Tadeusz Kantor set in the 1920s.  Tykocin has been used as a film set many times, with the locals donning old Jewish garb for the performance.

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I learned that the two men I encountered at the Villa Regent, living Jewish figurines, were in Tykocin to slaughter Polish cattle for the English kosher meat market. They stay in a “Jewish” hotel, but since the food it serves is not kosher they only eat the kosher food, the “real” Jewish food, they bring with them all the way from London. I asked if they had visited any of the Jewish sites in Tykocin. They had not.  Unlike all the other Jewish visitors to the town they had no interest in shtetl tourism or death sites.  They were just ordinary Yids doing their job as would have been the case one hundred years ago.  

 I had heard that there was to be a performance at the synagogue on the night before I was to leave Tykocin on one of my visits: “Fiddler on the Roof,” by the well-known Warsaw Jewish Theater. Again the association of Jews of old with the misty, stereotyped, make-believe shtetl world. It is as if the wooden figurines somehow had come to life in Tykocin imagined as Anatevka.  That is not surprising as Tykocin is often presented as a “fairytale town” or as a living example of the idealized shtetl of the past.   

 

I visited the synagogue again on another day, and observed a large group of elderly Polish tourists being taken on a tour of the premises, photographing the temple and posing for group pictures in front of the walls covered with oversized Hebraic and Aramaic writings. I did not know what to think.  It was good that they were there, they were very respectful, yet this shell of Jewish existence was only further marked as standing for something no longer there, something missing by their almost ritual visitation.  Some of them may have been small children during the war.  Might they have memories of Jews?  What did the synagogue mean to them that day?

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I was invited to join a group of schoolteachers from the area on a trip to Knyzyn, where there is a very interesting Jewish cemetery set in a dense copse of trees.  There were about twenty teachers in the group.   As the only living Jew around, I quickly became an active focal point of the event.  Once we arrived at the cemetery, standing amidst the gravestones I was introduced to the group as a descendent of a Tykocin Jewish family by the guide, a Polish anthropologist friend whose family is from Tykocin.  Everyone turned, and all eyes were upon me as I was, in turn, gazing back at them, wondering if I fit into their image of “the Jew.”

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As we walked through the cemetery I asked one of the teachers what subject she taught.  History, she said.  I asked her if she taught anything about Jews in Poland.  “Yes, I tell them about how many Jewish people were in business and crafts, but there were also doctors and lawyers.” I asked her if she herself had met any Jews.  “Oh, yes” she offered, “in England.”   As we continued talking I came to understand that I was the only Jew she had ever really met in Poland. Sadly, she told me that when she and other people describe Polish Jews it’s as if they’re talking about ghosts.

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How will people learn that Polish Jews 75 years ago, 100 years ago, even in a small town like Tykocin, were quite diverse in their lifestyles and cannot be fitted into any easy stereotyped mould?  I would suggest a visit to POLIN, the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews located in Warsaw as the best place to start.  And I would hope that the local museum here combined with the efforts of individuals from the local community would continue in their important work in this regard and that they would be joined by descendants of the old Jewish community.

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“The past is never dead.  It’s not even past” were the astute words of American novelist William Faulkner on the subject of past and present.  The past or some unstable version of it, is very much with us today, and as individuals and as a society we are constantly recreating it as we change our needs and interests over time and encounter new information.   Moreover, as Sebald reminds us -- as unlikely as his observation may seem --  “we have appointments to keep in the past ...  on the far side of time.”