{"id":451,"date":"2019-05-19T20:31:51","date_gmt":"2019-05-19T20:31:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.wp.odu.edu\/holocaust-landscapes-studyabroad\/?p=451"},"modified":"2019-05-20T04:19:56","modified_gmt":"2019-05-20T04:19:56","slug":"krochmalna-street","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.wp.odu.edu\/holocaust-landscapes-studyabroad\/2019\/05\/19\/krochmalna-street\/","title":{"rendered":"Krochmalna Street"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cEvery Jewish street in Warsaw was a town of its own.\u201d \u00a0\u00a0So said Isaac Bashevis Singer who grew up on Krochmalna Street in Warsaw, and made the street come alive in his novels. \u201cShosha\u201d is my favorite.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The inhabitants starved; disease became rampant, especially tuberculosis which was more serious than the typhus epidemics one hears about so often.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 World War II ended the rich Yiddish culture that had existed before the war\u2026what Singer wrote about.\u00a0 Today, virtually nothing exists excepts some monuments put up to commemorate what was.\u00a0 I exhausted my students today walking them around the former ghetto where there is nothing to see. Everything was destroyed.\u00a0 I hope they realize that \u201cpresence of absence\u201d and what it means.\u00a0 Even my beloved Krochmalna Street exists only in my imagination.\u00a0 It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cEvery Jewish street in Warsaw was a town of its own.\u201d \u00a0\u00a0So said Isaac Bashevis Singer who grew up on Krochmalna Street in Warsaw, and made the street come alive in his novels. \u201cShosha\u201d is my favorite.\u00a0 When I was a teenager, I devoured Singer novels, and I could well image the courtyards of Warsaw … <\/p>\n

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