Poland, a Green Land, by Aharon Appelfeld, tr. Stuart Schoffman

This book was fascinating to me, because it approached a topic that I have read a fair amount about — second-generation memories of the Holocaust — from a perspective that was totally new to me, that of an Israeli Jew traveling to his family’s village in Poland. This is a protagonist for whom Poland is totally foreign (though mercifully not highly exotic!), but also vaguely familiar from family stories. Part of the work of the novel is probing that feeling of familiarity, considering what it means. But meanwhile, it’s also a story about the individual search for meaning. Yaakov Fine has arrived at the midpoint of his life, and finds that it was not what he had hoped it would be. His family relationships are hollow, his job seems meaningless. What is missing? Is Poland the key to his problems, or a way to distract himself from what really bothers him?

Yaakov’s sense of connection to Poland gradually takes the form of a claim: this village is also ‘mine,’ my home, my homeland, my history. What is the nature of this claim? This is one of the novel’s core questions, and it ranges from metaphorical or symbolic to more literal. For instance, well into the novel, Yaakov notices that the central square of the village is paved with fragments of Jewish gravestones, including those of his own family members. Should he buy them and take them back to Israel? If so — at what price? The town’s sleazy mayor, sensing an opportunity for lucrative gains, protests that they are part of the village’s cultural heritage, and an important historical marker. Though the argument is obviously insincere, it is not necessarily incorrect. 

One of the most haunting, difficult things that the novel illuminated for me was that the villagers, many of them rabidly anti-Semitic and vile, are nonetheless keepers of history and memory of the Jewish community that lived there for generations. If some Poles shared the fantasy of ridding the nation of Jews entirely, and even collaborated in the process of murdering and expelling them, they are also people who remember what pre-War life was like, who have a knowledge of daily life and its rhythms, smells, sounds, that is difficult to record, or pass on, in history books. 

The book illuminates the mutual relationship of Polish Jews and Gentiles throughout the centuries as one of both intimacy and distrust, even contempt (for a nonfiction work that also explores this relationship in nuanced ways, see Eva Hoffman’s Shtetl). What is particularly significant in this version is that Yaakov is a physically strong man, trained in combat. When he encounters anti-Semitism, he is not afraid — indeed, at times, he is actually itching for a fight. It is jarring (especially now) to observe that nearly every Pole he meets, upon learning where he has traveled from, comments on the might of Israel’s military. And the novel skillfully juxtaposes the anti-Semitism of the villagers with Yaakov’s own ideas about their backwardness, greed, and bigotry. 

This is a marvelously subtle and probing book, one that delves into incredibly painful and difficult topics in searching and profound ways. These are subjects so difficult that even writing about the book feels impossible, because any description of the novel could be mistaken as polemical in the polarized terrains it navigates. I actually read it several months ago (I am so behind on blog posts…) but I still feel totally stunned by it. It’s an incredible testament to the powerful ways that fiction can contribute to historical reckoning.