From Lars: Poles Need to Shape Up

Just received a post from a blog reader named Lars. It's provocative. I welcome civil responses: 

Off topic or maybe not.. I have been travelling all over Central Europe on bike. 5 month/9000 Km. Also mountaineering/climbing/skiing/ice climbing. Lived and worked as craftsman in East Germany. My impression is there are huge differences between Central Europeans. The most kindly people was in Slovenia and Czech Republic. The most brutal in everydaylife situations was Croatian and then people in Poland. (like it or not..) In my home country Denmark we have a lot of workers from Poland. They have no good reputation. I have the impression they like to see them self as some sort of innocent victims and being as aggressive as many second generation immigrants from the Middle East. On a Mountain Chalet in Slovak Tatra i was hit very hard in my back. (I've trained boxing & martial art, making me familiar with sudden pain..) I turned around very upset and ready for anything, until I realised the one hitting me so stupidly was a man with whom I had spoken friendly and openminded up in the mountains! Now smiling and showing how satisfying it was to meet up again! -Guess which nationality..?! He's teenager daughter looked quite embarrassed. Another situation in a Polish chalet; a schoolteacher simply kicked his student in the back while being unsatisfied with a minor issue.

You have personal and on a larger scale issues to deal with in Poland. Start working with your own responsibility and stop blaming others for your hard time and tough history.

I still do travel a lot (sailor) and to be honest I still don't find much in Polish everyday character to be impressed of.

You should talk about and accept these issues from WWII. Lots of Jews were killed while they weren't accepted and had a great(..er) sense of making business. (Greed and envy are strong feelings..) An honest shipsofficer and an established merchant (both from Poland) separately told me about this topic.

Czech people have an admirable attitude with lots of humour. Generally stoic and relaxed working their way through hard times. I wish Poland could learn of them ..

A Biological Take on Identity Politics

From The Association of Crypto-Jews

One summer when I was a grad student at Indiana University, Bloomington, I sent an email out over the folklore listserve: would anyone like to watch the annual, August, Perseid meteor shower with me?

I proposed a trip to Morning Glory Farm on Bethel Lane, owned by my friend Charley. The farm was off the beaten track, away from city lights, and I hoped we'd see many Perseids there.

A fellow folklore student responded to my email. Her name was Judith Neulander. We met, drove out to Charley's farm, and sat on a hillside, watching Perseids streak earthward.

Later I mentioned this outing to friends.

"YOU went stargazing with JUDITH NEULANDER!!!???"

"Um … yeah … "

"MY GOD! She's even more hated than you!"

At the time I was working on my dissertation, which became the book, "Bieganski." Thus the hate I was confronting.

What about Judith? A petite, charming, mature woman. She seemed pretty harmless. I was so naïve!

Why was Judith hated? Her work was fascinating, essential, brilliant, honest, and unique.

Long story short: In the 1980s, New Mexico State Historian Stanley Hordes claimed that he had discovered cypto-, or hidden, Jews in New Mexico. These crypto-Jews had been raised religiously Catholic and culturally Spanish, aka Hispanic or Latino. These apparently Hispanic Catholics approached Stanley Hordes and confessed to him that they were really Jewish. They had been hiding their Jewishness all their lives. They had been hiding because their ancestors were Jews who had been persecuted in the Inquisition, and in New Mexico they had been burned at the stake for being Jewish.

They preserved their identity by naming their children "Adonai," by hiding stars of David in the design of their ostensibly Catholic churches and tombstones, and by saying prayers in Hebrew.

Some had less appealing ways of asserting their hidden Jewishness. "I know I am Jewish because most Hispanics are not very smart and my family members have always read books." "I know I am Jewish because we are good with money."

One man, Juan Sandoval, told a poignant tale of the persecution he faced as a crypto-Jew. His neighbors shot at him and he took financial losses. He devoted his artwork to his ancestry, traveling the country.

Judith, an eager grad student and researcher, traveled to New Mexico. Her mission? To become the "Queen of the Crypto-Jews."

What Judith discovered in New Mexico derailed this ambition. Hordes' work was rife with basic ethnographic errors. Stars of David are not unheard of in many artworks of many faiths, and are proof of nothing. One tombstone featuring a Star of David was selected by a visiting Irish priest. Jews do not give their children first names like "Adonai." Rather, this can be compared to the Hispanic custom of naming a child after Jesus. Records show that no one was burned at the stake in New Mexico. Juan Sandoval was a phony exposed by his own family members. As he traveled the country with his Jewish-themed art (a Rabbi chia pet), he conned money and other favors from naïve Jewish women.

In short, the crypto-Jews were not really Jewish at all. Why were they insisting that they were? Judith suggests it might be a way for Hispanics, often with Native American ancestry, to overcome prejudice they face among fellow Hispanics, for not having pure European ancestry, and among Anglos.

What's really interesting about this story is reaction to it. Jewish audiences ate it up. The NPR coverage of Stanley Hordes' claims became the most requested NPR story ever. His claims were covered on PBS and in mainstream media. University presses rushed to cover this story.

Why?

Some argue that the crypto-Jew story, in spite of its being thoroughly debunked by Judith Neulander's scholarly work, became so popular because it fed a desire among some Jews, obviously not all, to romanticize and emphasize identity as be-all and end-all. The crypto-Jew narrative reinforced many desired aspects of identity. It depicts Jews and non-Jews as essentially different, non-Jews as perpetually persecuting Jews, from the Inquisition to the burnings at the stake in New Mexico to the neighbors who shot at and robbed Juan Sandoval, and Jewish identity as so potent it can survive all this.

This is not a narrative that emphasizes an alternate take on Jewish identity, one in which faith in God and fealty to God's covenant are primary. It's often said by Jewish commentators (many of whom are quoted in "Bieganski") that religious Jews are less likely to engage in identity politics. I don't know if that is true, and I don't know if anyone has done the research to back it up.

But those Jews for whom Jewish observance is part of daily life, it is argued, require less identity politics to shore up their own identity. They know who they are: they are people in a Biblically-mandated relationship with God.

In this critique, increasing secularization has increased the need for identity politics. Eating pork, not keeping the Sabbath, etc, have vitiated a desired sense of Jewish identity. Other sources of identity are needed. Bieganski the Brute Polak is one source. The crypto-Jew narrative is another.

***

I thought of Judith's work today when I read an article in the New York Times. In the August 17^th, 2012 New York Times, in the article "On the Trail of Inherited Memories," Doreen Carvajal identifies herself as a former crypto-Jew. She reports that her goal is "to take new stock of my identity by reclaiming ancestral memories, history and DNA." It's that last term, "DNA," that rouses my concern.

Here are some quotes from the article:

"The history of our ancestors is somehow a part of us, inherited in unexpected ways through a vast chemical network in our cells that controls genes, switching them on and off. At the heart of the field, known as epigenetics, is the notion that genes have memory and that the lives of our grandparents — what they breathed, saw and ate — can directly affect us decades later …

I’m intrigued by the notion that generations pass on particular survival skills and an unconscious sense of identity that stands the test of centuries…

The French psychologist Anne Ancelin Schützenberger, now in her 90s, has spent decades studying what she calls the ancestor syndrome – that we are links in a chain of generations, unconsciously affected by their suffering or unfinished business until we acknowledge the past…

In the 1990s Dina Wardi, a psychotherapist in Jerusalem, worked with the children of Holocaust survivors and developed the theory that survivor parents often designated certain children as memorial candles who took on the mission of serving as a link to preserve the past and connect the future. The children of survivors who actively struggled against the Nazis, she found, had a compulsive ambition to achieve…

My fantasy, of course, was that I could somehow tap these ancestral memories. I have recently made the acquaintance of another Carvajal in Spain, an actor who remembers that even though he was raised Catholic he always insisted to his mother that he was Jewish. He said he started making the claim when he was about 6 years old…

Reality is even stranger. Dr. Darold A. Treffert, a psychiatrist in Wisconsin, maintains a registry of about 300 savants who through a head injury or dementia acquire skills they never learned. Conceivably, he says, those skills, like music, mathematics, art and calendar calculating, were buried deep in their brains. He calls it genetic memory, or “factory-installed software,” a huge reservoir of dormant knowledge that can emerge when a damaged brain rewires itself to recover from injuries…

In the red leather folder where I keep my reporter’s notebook and business cards, I always keep a photograph of the old Inquisition jail in Arcos de la Frontera…I found out that Aunt Luz sometimes dreamed about Andalusia."

***

These excerpts give me the creeps. I don't feel like I'm reading a poignant essay about rediscovered identity. I feel like I'm reading dystopic science fiction.

I think of three men who have had a big impact on this blog: John Guzlowski, Arno Lowi and Otto Gross, of Polish Catholic, Polish Jewish, and German Lutheran ancestry. Each one of these men suffered because of the deification and the biological concept of identity.

I want these three men, and me, and everyone else, to have tomorrow. To have a world where you can walk away from your identity if you choose to. Where you don't have to relive the Inquisition in order to feel alive.

Me? I'm proud to be Polish-Slovak-American. And I'm happy not to be Polish when it isn't called for. I lived in Nepal and spoke and Nepali and ate Nepali food and wore Nepali clothes. I don't have to be Polish 24-7. I don't have to keep reliving Katyn, Warsaw, the invasion of the Swedes, the Turks, the Kossaks, the Battle of Grunwald.

I do not believe that my grandfathers' suffering in the coal mines is in my genes. I do not believe that the Hungarian lash on my serf ancestors' backs is in my genes. As Jan Lechon said, "In the spring, let me see spring, not Poland."

I have to wonder what has brought Doreen Carvajal to the point where she wants to believe that her presumed ancestors' presumed suffering is inextricably located in her genes.

And why does it have to be her ancestors' suffering? Maybe one of her ancestors really, really enjoyed an ice cream cone once. Or a sunny day. Or a soft kitten. Could that not be in her genes? Heck, even that idea gives me the willies.

Essential ideas of identity are behind some of the worst atrocities humans have ever committed. I've read the intellectual, cultural, and moral foundations of Nazism, going back to Herder and the Grimms and up to Madison Grant. All these thinkers insisted on an inescapable, biological basis for identity. Can we at least just remember that if we are to proceed with this new attempt to locate identity in genes?

***

In other news:

I am more grateful than I can say for your prayers for me. I have meditated on your prayers again and again: during the tests (which can be terrifying), just before surgery, and during lonely moments when the dark forces seem insurmountable. Your prayers make a very positive difference in this world, and if you care to, I hope you will keep them coming. I will let you know when I am out of the woods, but, let's face it, when have I not been in the woods?

And much gratitude to Otto for helping with the blog when I was otherwise indisposed.

                                                               Polish Eagle



Hello everyone.
I wanted to post an update on Danusha.
She's out of surgery and in post-op recovery. She's awake and doing well.

Keep those thoughts and prayers coming! They mean so much to D.

I'll post comments and updates as I can.

Otto

Post on another blog that may interest readers here.

Here is a blog post of a more personal nature about what's up with me. Link here. 

"The Believer" 2001

The 2001 film "The Believer" is worth seeing for Ryan Gosling's riveting performance as Daniel Balint, a violent, mentally disturbed American, Jewish, neo-Nazi. Unfortunately, the rest of the film is not anywhere as good as Gosling's central performance. Gosling is onscreen throughout most of the film, though. I rarely watch movies at home in one sitting and I sat through this entire film, almost afraid to look away, Gosling was so intimidating and fascinating.

"The Believer" was inspired by Daniel Burros, (1937-1965) a Jewish man who became Grand Dragon of the NY Ku Klux Klan. After the New York Times revealed Burros' ancestry, he killed himself.

"The Believer" opens with Balint menacing a wimpy Jewish student on the New York City subway. The Jewish student cringes, cowers, and attempts to scurry away. Balint menaces him before he gets into the subway car, on the subway car itself, and on the street outside the subway, where he finally pounces, beating the student into a bloody, broken mess. It's a horrible scene to watch. The soundtrack expertly wrings the scene for all the tension and terror it is worth.

As brilliantly manipulative as this scene is, there's a problem with it. As much as you hate what you are seeing, you end up identifying with Balint. The Jewish student is weak and cowardly and refuses to defend himself. Balint at least has the integrity to act on his vile ideals. Even if you didn't know that Gosling is playing a self-hating Jewish character, you would be able to read that from his facial expressions. He sneers as if smelling something foul. He begs the student to defend himself. You know that he is beating the student because he hates the despised potential Jewish victim inside himself.

That theme – the theme of Jewish self-hatred as a reaction to the Holocaust – is one of the movie's big ideas, and it is not a worthy one. After committing one of many hate crimes, Balint is forced to undergo sensitivity training. He is lectured by three elderly Jewish Holocaust survivors. One describes the Nazis bayonetting his son, peeling the corpse of the son off the bayonet, and dropping the corpse on the ground at the man's feet. Balint turns the table and lectures these survivors. Why didn't you fight? He asks. At least then you would have had your dignity. You were going to die anyway.

The film allows that question to go unanswered, and that is not right. Jews *did* fight. Jews fought in the Polish Army when the Nazis first invaded Poland, and in the Anders Army at famous battlegrounds like Monte Cassino. Jews fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the first urban, civilian uprising in Nazi-occupied Europe. Jews fought in the forests with the Bielski Brothers. Jews fought in the Treblinka concentration camp uprising. Jews fought in non-martial ways, as well. There were poetry readings in the Warsaw Ghetto, and Sabbath commemorations in concentration camps. To remember your own culture in the face of death is also a revolt against death. It isn't the responsibility of "The Believer" to provide viewers with this detailed history lesson, but it lessens the value of the film to allow Daniel Balint, a Jewish neo-Nazi, to go unrefuted.

Other than Gosling's performance, there isn't much to recommend the film. There are shadowy scenes of fascist plotters meeting in New York City apartments, strategizing ways to take over America. Billy Zane is pretty much wasted in his few scenes as a fascist theorist. Summer Phoenix, River's little sister, has a gratuitous, exploitative, topless scene. She plays the part of a depressive, masochistic fascist sex toy. Through Balint, she becomes obsessed with Judaism, and begins to practice, lighting Sabbath candles and attending synagogue services. This is the movie's second big idea: if you look at it through the right kaleidoscope, being a member of a Jewish community is in some ways comparable to being a member of a hate group like the Nazis. This is just simple-minded, undercooked, grandiose thinking, and this is why, outside of Gosling's performance, I can't recommend this film.

There is some incoherent, implausible plotting: fascists meet in the woods and beat each other up; there is a bungled assassination attempt; there are a couple of synagogue bombings. None of this goes anywhere.

There's another problem with this film. It is very much in the cinematic tradition of Sexy Nazis like "Inglorious Bastard's" Colonel Hans Landa, "Black Book's" Ludwig Muntze, Oskar Werner, Maximilian Schell, and too many others to mention . Ryan Gosling is a very attractive man and in this film he is shown shirtless, lifting weights, and masterfully beating other men. In real life, Daniel Burros was not so omnipotent, not so sexy. In fact, journalist William Bryk said of Burros that he "was an inept paratrooper: overweight, poorly coordinated and slow. He wore thick-lensed glasses that made his eyes look larger than they were. The other guys in the barracks laughed at him. He had no friends. Finally, he made three phony suicide attempts: a few shallow razor cuts on the wrist; an overdose of aspirin; and again the razor … The Army discharged him 'by reasons of unsuitability, character, and behavior disorder.'"

In short, Burros was mentally ill, as is Daniel Balint in this film. Given that the film is about a man who is not processing reality accurately, it is unfortunate that the film provides no coherent counter voice to the flawed conclusions Balint lives by.

Thank you to "Polish friends"

I received a very touching note the other day and I am grateful for it. The full text of the note is below:

"To all friends and supporters,

On Sunday, September 16, 2012, at 11 am, in St. Dorothy Parish in Markowa, the Holy Mass will be celebrated for the intention of the recovery of prof. Danusha Goska, with a special prayer request to the Servants of God the Ulma family.

Please join our prayers – wherever you are.

Polish friends"

NPR, Romney's Poland Trip, and Bieganski

"Bieganski" shows that the Brute Polak image is pervasive in American culture. It is disseminated by elites like President Barack Obama; it is disseminated by average, everyday folks via social media like Facebook.

The Bieganski the Brute image is so pervasive and so accepted that it can be disseminated almost wordlessly.

Yesterday morning I was listening to NPR coverage of US Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's visit to Poland. Renee Montagne and Eric Westervelt, two NPR stars, were chatting with each other about the visit. Montagne asked Westervelt why Romney visited Poland. Westervelt implied that he had no idea, that no one had any idea.

Nothing overt was said. Neither Westervelt nor Montagne told a Polak joke, or referred to "Polish concentration camps."

What happened? The tone was dismissive and baffled. The overt message was that there is no good reason why any serious, decent person would go to Poland.

Montagne referred to Solidarity leader, former Polish president, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Walesa as "someone who might seem very important." Yes, she really said that.

Montagne asked, her voice strangling with feigned confusion, "Why [pause] was [pause] POLAND [pause] part of this three-country trip?"

Westervelt responded in a tone that implied that what Romney said was not valid. Romney, Westervelt said, praised Poland as "an important US ally and economic success story." But Westervelt quoted a Pole as saying that it was "Impossible" that "such an important person" would visit "such a small country." Westervelt cleverly placed his own contempt for Poland in the mouth of a Polish person.

Is this Bieganski? Yes. Again, nothing overt, just a dismissive, snarky undertone, which becomes overt only in isolated phrases that segue back into polite prose whose snarky tone is audible but not replicable in a written transcript.

Sometimes, of course, NPR's play of the Bieganski card is more overt, as mentioned here and here.

Breitbart reads NPR's treatment of Romney's trip to Poland as much more inflammatory. You can read Breitbart's coverage here.