“Every Jewish street in Warsaw was a town of its own.” So said Isaac Bashevis Singer who grew up on Krochmalna Street in Warsaw, and made the street come alive in his novels. “Shosha” is my favorite. When I was a teenager, I devoured Singer novels, and I could well image the courtyards of Warsaw with all the joys and sorrows of that life, the center of Yiddish culture in the prewar environment. That world is long gone, destroyed by the Nazis in World War II. On October 12, 1940, the Nazis ordered that a ghetto be established in Warsaw, and it eventually included 400,000 people in 1.3 square miles. The inhabitants starved; disease became rampant, especially tuberculosis which was more serious than the typhus epidemics one hears about so often. During the summer and fall of 1942 most of the Jews in the ghettos were deported to Treblinka although some were killed in the ghetto. The well-known ghetto uprising began on April 19, 1943 and lasted until May 16, 1943 and during that time the remaining Jews were either killed in their bunkers or eventually captured and deported, but they had put up heroic resistance. World War II ended the rich Yiddish culture that had existed before the war…what Singer wrote about. Today, virtually nothing exists excepts some monuments put up to commemorate what was. I exhausted my students today walking them around the former ghetto where there is nothing to see. Everything was destroyed. I hope they realize that “presence of absence” and what it means. Even my beloved Krochmalna Street exists only in my imagination. It’s just a dirty street today with nothing but a plaque to indicate what it was, what it had been to a young Isaac Bashevis Singer.
2 comments
Thanks for this. I, too, devoured all of I.B. Singer in my 20’s, and am revisiting his works now (at age 70), starting with The Family Moskat. In it, Leah’s rather progressive daughter, Masha, felt they lived “too far from the tram car, and too near the Krochmalna.” I googled the name and found your site and appreciate seeing the lovely memorial to Mr. Singer. His writing in this novel is brilliant, giving life to so many niches and corners of a destroyed civilization.
Thank you for this article, I also love the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, especially the autobiographical episodes included in the volume ‘In my Fathers Court’. As an Irishman from a Christian background I am apalled at how much the culture of Europe was diminished by the genocide of our Jewish brothers and sisters, how much our humanity was sundered by their death and destruction. The ‘Shtetl’ has many similarities to the Irish ‘Clachán’ in terms of shared ways of life and community.