Kahn-Harris Everyday Jews

Why The Jewish People Are Not Who You Think They Are
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-83773-212-8
Verlag: Icon Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

Can Jews be allowed to become boring? With Israel and antisemitism constantly in the news, it seems as though the Jewish people - a fraction of a percentage of the world's population - have become synonymous with controversy, drama and anxiety. But what if there was another side to this persistently interesting people; one that non-Jews often don't know about and Jews rarely talk about? This is the stuff of 'everyday' Jewishness; the capacity to be ordinary, mundane and sometimes just plain dull. Keith Kahn-Harris lifts the lid on this surprising world in a book for Jews and non-Jews alike. Arguing that his people's extraordinary public visibility today is harming their ability to live everyday Jewish lives, he celebrates the mundanity and mediocrity of a people before it vanishes completely.

DR KEITH KAHN-HARRIS is a sociologist and author, based in London. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Jewish Policy Research and a Senior Lecturer at Leo Baeck College. He also makes time for pursuing other interests outside the community, including extreme metal music and the warning messages in Kinder Surprise Eggs. The author of nine books, his most recent publications are Strange Hate: Antisemitism, Racism and the Limits of Diversity, The Babel Message: A Love Letter to Language (Icon) and (co-authored with Rob Stothard) What Does A Jew Look Like? Find out more at kahn-harris.org.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kahn-Harris, Keith

Leseproben

Chapter One Baseball in the bloodlands A question of survival How am I going to survive this? That was the question I asked myself as I boarded the coach at Warsaw Airport. I’d been in a foul mood since my flight landed and I was in a foul mood as I got off the coach at Warsaw Airport a week later. In fact, I was in a foul mood for much of the time I toured the land of my Polish ancestors. I didn’t expect that I would feel so angry. This was, after all, my chance to get a taste of the good stuff, that addictive morbidity of which Jewish writers’ careers are made. Here I would – finally! – become part of the story. I would walk the streets where my family, the Rojers of Kutno, once lived. I would mourn the ghost of their presence in the traces that remain of Jewish Poland. I would visit the extermination camp where they were murdered. And I would grieve. But it all felt wrong from the start. The first warning sign was the convenience store in Warsaw Airport. I’d popped in to buy a sandwich and was distracted by the other Polish products on sale. There was Polish kombucha! When I visit a country I adore exploring convenience store products, particularly strange and wonderful soft drinks. I realised that I was going to enjoy this trip … Until I remembered what I was actually here for. I bought a cheese sandwich and trudged off to find my group at the designated meeting point. I sat alone on a double seat on the bus, surrounded by excited and nervous Jews (mostly older than me) getting to know each other. I plugged in my earphones. Tonight was the night of the Eurovision Song Contest, the first time I would be separated from my family for the event since my wife and I had children. I tried to join in by listening to the show on streaming radio and texting my kids on WhatsApp. It wasn’t the same. And when I tried to tell a new acquaintance that I was missing Eurovision, she was only interested in how the Israeli entrant would do. The memorial tour was organised by a group of Jewish descendants of central Poland. Our group included Jews from the UK, USA, Canada, Australia and Israel. Most people were lovely and the organisers had put together a packed itinerary, with the help of local Poles who were keen to commemorate the vanished Jewish presence in their towns. The people weren’t what annoyed me about the tour. And I couldn’t fault the programme. So what was it that was triggering me? On the trip from the airport I gazed out the window at the Polish branch of IKEA, at road signs, gas stations and adverts, and tried to work out what I was feeling. As the tour progressed, I felt myself yearning for something I couldn’t quite name. I kept being intrigued by shops, the countryside, the forests and rivers, together with the urban fabric of the towns we visited. I kept having to remind myself what I was here to do. On the day we visited Kutno, I tried to focus as we toured what remained of Jewish life – the cemetery the Nazis destroyed, the dilapidated ruins of the ghetto. Halfway through the week, I took a day off and hired a car. On that beautiful spring day, my heart soared as I drove parallel to the wide Vistula through sun-dappled woods, and onward to the picturesque town of Plock (the hometown of a different branch of my family). I walked around the Jewish district, bought a Polish kombucha and a Polish Kinder Surprise Egg. Then I drove on to Kutno, this time alone. As I drove into the grounds of the campus on the outskirts of the town, I realised that this was it. This was what I was really here for, even if I couldn’t admit it to anyone else in the group (or to my mother, who had desperately wanted to join the tour but was unable to due to my father’s advancing dementia). I was here to find out about Polish baseball. The diamond gleamed in the spring sunshine, awaiting the new season with intense anticipation. The grass was perfectly cropped, the pitcher’s mound neat and tidy, the bases had not a single scuff mark. The stands, soon to be filled with cheering supporters, were silent. There were five diamonds at the Europejskie Centrum Malej Ligii Basebolowej. Two of them were adult-sized, used by the local club Stal Kutno. The rest were smaller, designed to host the European Little League baseball championships every July. I was given a tour of the complex by Waldemar Szymanski, the man who was instrumental in bringing to the town a facility that any American city would be proud of. I wanted to know how baseball came to Kutno, but he also wanted to know how I came to Kutno. In 2013, I was invited to give a talk at a TEDx event in Krakow. My topic was ‘small worlds’, how little communities are spaces of quiet heroism and meaning. I suggested to the audience that if you were to choose a small world at random, you’d inevitably find interesting stories. I challenged them to find something out about a small world I assumed existed but knew absolutely nothing about – the baseball scene in Poland. A few weeks later a journalist who had attended my talk got in touch to tell me that Polish baseball was a bigger deal than I’d thought. In fact, he’d written an entire article on the subject, focusing on the European Little League Baseball Centre in Kutno. My interest in small worlds collided with my family history. When I arrived at the baseball centre I suddenly got what it was that I was yearning for, the absence of which was making me furious with frustration. It was life that was missing. Life in all its mundanity and strange beauty; life as ordinary, routine, yet somehow extraordinary; the sort of life that we only notice when it is absent. I found that life in the form of Waldemar Szymanski. An old man with health problems, his passion for what he had built shone through nevertheless. He almost cried with pride as he showed me his legacy. Baseball has been played in Poland as early as the 1950s. It was brought to Kutno in 1984 by a Cuban, Juan Echevarria Motola, who had married a local woman he’d met when they were at university together in Prague. In the late 1980s, Waldemar fell in love with the game at a demonstration event; too old to play himself, he started umpiring, encouraged his son to take up the sport, and soon became a significant figure in the national baseball association. Aided by the support of the Polish-American Major League player Stan Musial, Waldemar managed to attract the European Little League Centre to the town in the mid-1990s. Baseball has been good to Waldemar. He travelled the world, attended matches all over the US and became a member of the Polish Olympic Committee. And the world came to Kutno, to his town. I wasn’t supposed to be here for the living, for baseball stadiums and nice old Polish men. I was supposed to be a temporary sojourner in a Poland that was long gone, where millions of Jews once lived and sometimes thrived. A place from which Jews were ripped with extreme violence; hundreds of years of life destroyed in just six. And while it was not Poles who perpetrated the genocide that wiped out the Polish branches of my family, that didn’t mean Poland was a place of innocence. The lengthy history of Polish antisemitism, particularly the post-war campaigns that saw most of the Jews who had survived the Holocaust leave the country, makes many Jews uneasy with Poles. While the local contacts we met seemed to be enthusiastic about commemorating Jewish life, our group debated their sincerity and possible ulterior motives. Although some of the Americans in the group were intrigued by the existence of Polish baseball, most of the time Polish everyday life was only a backdrop to the real story, our story, an extraordinary and terrible story, a story that marked us out and made us irreducibly different. I don’t mind being different. In fact, I love my Jewish difference. But on my trip to Poland I felt an almost physical aversion to this kind of difference. While I felt proud and honoured to be the first family member to return to Kutno in order to remember those who had been murdered, I resented my new identity as ‘Holocaust-obsessed Jew coming back to the old country’. Sometimes I felt like what has been termed a ‘stuffed Jew’, a living museum exhibit, visiting a place of lifeless relics.1 Being part of the story As a writer, it would be quite helpful if I was that kind of Jew. I am acutely aware that the Holocaust is hot stuff. It is the font of an endless torrent of stories: of murder, of suffering, of resilience and escape. Jews and non-Jews alike are drawn to the life stories of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Anne Frank and to any number of other accounts. I had always assumed that I could never be part of that story. My grandparents were all the children or grandchildren of those who got out of Poland before the First World War. I was brought up knowing that some of my distant ancestors never made it out and were never heard from again. In retirement, my mother started to fill in the blanks of our family history. In the process she discovered the group who were to organise the memorial tour I participated in. The more I found out about my ancestors, the more I became aware of what we would never know. When I visited the Polish addresses we had managed to find, at which family members had at some point lived, I felt a certain sense of satisfaction, but it didn’t make them come to life. I don’t have enough to build a story out of. My Polish family lived and were murdered. That’s it. I will never get to write a Holocaust book...