Arrivederci, Milano

“No matter how well you think you know someone,” my mother used to say, “You don’t really know them till you’ve lived with them for 24 hours.”

So we’ve had the opportunity to get to know this country of charming people, great food and wine, and artistic creativity in many, many ways, some of them not so charming. 

Espresso.  I am not a chronic coffee drinker.  My routine for most of my adult life has been a half-cup of my homemade brew (black) for breakfast, another half-cup mid-morning, and a full cup with lunch.  I didn’t discriminate, and when my young coworkers went out every morning for a Starbucks, I was happy to drink the coffee in our office kitchen.  After dinner:  a little decaf, also black.  Here I have found myself growing increasingly fond of the Italian habit:  a normali (one shot of espresso) or caffe doppia (two shots) with a packet of brown sugar (canna).  We are fortunate to have 20 steps from our front entrance a gelateria that has been featured in the papers for its Sicilian cannoli.  They are good, but resistible.  Dropping down there for a coffee around 11 after we pick up a newspaper, however, is not.

Similarly, I have never been a sweets eater, but I have never seen as many attractive and delicious dolci as I have in Italy. Perhaps it is because Italian sweets are not so sweet. Every holiday has its unique pastries (e.g. panettone for Christmas, deep-fried or baked chiacchieri for Carnival); every city has its specialty (Bergamo’s polenta e osei); and each pasticceria tries to outdo its neighbor.

Public transportation.  Except for last week’s strike of Milan transport workers, public transportation is remarkably easy to use and accessible.  For three days we rented a car with friends to show them the area around Lake Como; otherwise, for six months, we have depended on trains, buses, and our feet.  No complaints.

Small specialized shops.  We quickly learned that you have to know where to go to get what you want.  A panificio has bread and fresh pasta but not many dolci:  cakes, biscotti, and other dessert items.  A pasticceria (see above) has everything sweet you could possibly dream of plus, usually, a place to eat it with a cup of espresso . . . but not much bread.  A farmacia has prescription medicine, toothpaste, some over-the-counter medications like aspirin, skin creams, gluten-free foods, and petroleum jelly; a supermercato has toothpaste has toothpaste and cosmetics, and so on.  It can drive you crazy.  Or you begin to appreciate the fact that people really know their merchandise.

Flower stands on almost every corner.  They cheer you as you walk by and mark the changing seasons even if you don’t buy anything.

Produce.  I’ve written before about the joys of going to the produce markets.  The proliferation of varieties of fruits and vegetables always available is truly overwhelming.  Good things to eat come from all over Italy, all over Europe, and all around the Mediterranean.  It is fresh and inexpensive.  While it’s common for Americans traveling in Europe to complain about high prices, the fact is that we can buy produce for a fraction of what it costs in a farmers market at home.

Primi piatti.  Consequently, pasta and risotto dishes are also inexpensive.  Risotto with porcini mushrooms, a first course in thousands of neighborhood ristoranti, costs 6-7 €, or about $8.  In Washington, such risotto might appear on the menu of an upscale restaurant and cost $15-20.

That’s the good news.

In the wake of more disgusting disclosures about the not-so-private life of Italy’s premier, Silvio Berlusconi, I ask myself yet again how and why the general population supports and even adores him.  One expatriate suggests that the Italian view is:  “You are born.  You die.  You might as well have the best time in between that you can.”  Berlusconi embodies that attitude and is admired for really knowing how to have a good time.

Rachel Donadio, writing in last Sunday’s New York Times, gives what I think is the most accurate analysis I’ve seen yet:  “Italy is a survival culture, steeped in that most time-honored survival mechanism: fatalistic resignation.”  That explains a lot of what we’ve observed.

* why we rarely see a young person offering an older person a seat on a bus or tram.

* the short hours that businesses are open, the long mid-morning coffee and prosecco breaks, the two-hour lunches, and the famous happy hours (“aperitivi”).

* why people park their cars in every inch of space:  on sidewalks, in crosswalks, in the middle of the street, and in other people’s driveways.

* dog poop, everywhere, and almost exclusively on the sidewalk.  While it is a law in Milan and elsewhere, only in Bergamo have we seen a sign that you are required to clean up after your dog.

This is not a third-world country.  Milan justifiably calls itself the “design capital of the world.”  Yet Italy is in 80th place in the World Bank’s “Ease of doing business” survey, down four places from 2010.  A friend told us it took five weeks from the day he bought a new car to the day he could drive it home:  that’s how long it took to switch his insurance from his old car.

In today’s Washington Post, Nina Burleigh notes, “[Berlusconi’s] attitude toward women is the official version of the national norm in Italy, which ranked 74th out of 134 countries . . . in the World Economic Forum's 2010 global index of gender equality."

The “national norm” includes an obsession with one’s looks and clothes.  I have never seen so many parrucchieri (places to get your hair done) for women and men, plus barber shops for men.  Street markets and commercial areas, always packed with buyers loaded down with shopping bags, respond within hours to the latest fashion trend.  Fur coats abound.  The newspapers and television commercials focus almost exclusively on “the beautiful people,” and never mention anyone – in any context – without noting their age.

We have had a wonderful time, we’ve made new friends and, yes, eaten a lot of delicious food.  We’ve appreciated anew the pleasures of small personalized shops, neighborhood bakeries, and walking.  We look forward to returning home and, eventually, to returning to Italy.  As we pack our bags, we stand with one foot in each culture, and each enhances our appreciation of the other.

Debbie Friedman: A Tapestry of Memories

If you have traveled to Italy or fantasized about traveling to Italy, you picture sunshine, fields of sunflowers, a lazy lunch in the shade of a leafy pergola with a glass of wine, a plate of pasta, and a bunch of lavender on your table.

If you have spent winter in Northern Italy, however, the picture in your mind’s eye is foggy.  It is raining hard, or misting.  Your shoes are wet and the cuffs of your pants are wet.  Your umbrella is dripping all over you and the person next to you.  You are cold, chilled to the bone; your toes and fingers are freezing, no matter what you do.

We have now endured seven consecutive cold rainy days. They do not offer a hope of a green spring (though that is their inevitable result). We work around them, running our errands and visiting friends and going to museums, but they make it hard to get up in the morning.

Especially the last few days, when the illness and then death of Debbie Friedman and the shootings in Arizona surround us like the fog and the chilling rain. 

I cannot say I grew up with Debbie Friedman, but I certainly grew into Reform Judaism with her.  I cannot claim friendship or even a personal acquaintance, but she and her music meant so much to me.  She represented the openness of Reform Judaism to new ways of praying and exploring and understanding how people relate to one another and to God.  I grew up in Orthodox and Conservative synagogues, and I never attended a Jewish camp until I worked at one when I was in graduate school.  I was an instant convert. 

Eventually, I married a man who had known Debbie from early days at Olin-Sang-Ruby Camp; many years later, I envied our son, who took a class with her when he was a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. 

Up close, I was in wonder at her humility; awed by her sensitivity and vitality; worried about her delicate condition.  From afar, she filled a room, controlled a hall, kept us holding our breaths and singing at the top of our voices.  I often thought in those moments that I could understand what it felt like to encounter Hildegard of Bingen or Joan of Arc.  She would have laughed.

The eulogies at her funeral emphasized all those human qualities.  The overriding metaphor was the tapestry of memory.  Debbie wove that tapestry, and we are all threads.  And even as we are threads, we all have our own tapestries of memories.  For some, Debbie herself is a part of those memories; for others, it is her music that makes the cloth.

Two Views of Tykocin

My father’s cousin, Morris Biales, was raised in the town of Tykocin (“Tiktin,” in Yiddish).  He emigrated at age 13, became a vice president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and died in 1997 at age 100.  He lived longer into my adulthood that anyone else in that generation of my father’s family.

Tykocin, about 105 miles northeast of Warsaw and 45 miles from the Russian border, was the town where almost everyone in my father’s extended family lived and left around 1900.  In the Pale of Settlement, it was part of the lands that were contested by the Russians, the Prussians, and the Austrians.

In a 1994 oral history, Morris Biales described the relationship between Jews and Gentiles:  “In Tiktin, we lived in peace with the goyim.”  He recounted his memory of the annual Kol Nidre service.  Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Tiktin’s Jews would mow the cemetery, carry the clippings into the synagogue, and spread the sweet-smelling grass on the dirt floor.  Then everyone – including the non-Jewish town officials – would stand side-by-side and listen to the beautiful chanting of the chazzan.

Tykocin is visited today by thousands of young Jews from the U.S., Israel, and South Africa who go on the “March of the Living” and other programs designed to nurture a love of Israel.  Tykocin’s great synagogue, a beautiful baroque structure built in 1642, remains much as it was:  prayers are painted on the walls because not everyone had a prayerbook. 

It is a destination today, however, for a different reason.  In September 1939, the German Army invaded Poland and captured the land around Tykocin; a few weeks later they passed it into Soviet hands.  In June 1941, the Germans invaded again and encouraged the non-Jewish residents of the town to loot the Jews’ property and give it to the Germans. 

On August 25, 1941, the Germans ordered the Jews to gather at the market square for resettlement in a nearby ghetto.  Instead 3,000 men, women, and children were taken to a forest, forced to dig their own mass graves, and then executed by SS firing squads.  The Tykocin massacre was the first of many that the Germans were to repeat in other area towns.

The March of the Living visit to Tykocin is preceded by a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau.  The narrative of these teen trips is that Poland was a killing ground and Israel, where they go after Poland, is the land where the Jewish people was reborn out of the ashes.

This is not my narrative, and it is the reason I have been involved with the Forum for Dialogue Among Nations.  The Forum has had some success in arranging opportunities for Jewish and Polish teenagers to engage in dialogue about their shared history, but it’s not a high priority for those bringing groups to Poland, because it is not in their narrative. 

The Forum’s Schools for Dialogue program that I described in a previous blog at least can help Poland’s teenagers – and their parents and friends and relatives and fellow townspeople – grow in understanding.  Learning in depth about the role of Jews in their communities will help them become educated and compassionate citizens of the world. 

Why should we care?

Poland’s economy is growing:  it was the only member of the European Union to avoid the recent recession.  Poland’s college and high school students are part of a global workforce that will be encountering others and shaping their communities wherever they settle.  Poland is a democracy and an important strategic partner of the United States and Western governments.  Poland is a loyal supporter and partner of Israel. 

Based on the narrative of my family, I believe that it is possible for Jewish and Polish people to stand together and listen to beautiful music.   It happened in Tykocin.  It has been happening for 20 years in Krakow at the Jewish Cultural Festival.  With the help of the Forum for Dialogue Among Nations, it can happen throughout Poland.

Snow on Sunflowers

Those who have been to sun-washed Tuscany, close your eyes.  You see the sunflowers, the fields of lavender, the grape arbor where you had lunch.  You wandered around Florence, drinking in the art and savoring the gelato and were so grateful to return at the end of the day to your air-conditioned room.

I know that when I say we are spending one weekend a month in Florence while we are living here in Italy, that’s what you’re thinking.

Change your mind’s eye instead to Chicago in January.

Imagine that your train gets into the station and there is chaos.  One hundred smokers are lined up waiting for taxis that do not appear.  All the city buses have gathered at the station with their LED signs blinking “Fuori Servizio” (out of service).  All flights are canceled.

The wind is whipping in your face.  The snow is falling at a rate of more than one inch an hour.  It started as rain mixed with snow; then everything froze. You have no choice but to tramp carefully through the slush and ice for the two miles to your hotel with your luggage.  Between stopping to wipe your nose, clean your glasses, and re-up the balance on your cellphone, it takes you 75 minutes.

There is not a plow to be seen, nor a shovel.  People are cleaning their windshields with index cards.  Restaurant owners are fighting the snow with cookie sheets.  The cobblestone streets are filled with 4” of slush.  Abandoned cars, motorcycles, and tourist buses on all the bridges have paralyzed traffic.  The road to Sienna is closed.  Later you learn that in beautiful sunwashed Tuscany, people spent 20 hours in their cars waiting to be rescued.

So when “Biggest snow since 1985 blasts Florence, Italy,” mio marito and I felt fortunate that our hotel was in walking distance, that our room was warm, and that we had dry clothes.  Unfortunately, congregants who lived out of town couldn’t get in, and congregants who lived in town couldn’t get around.  Most of the museums and even the churches closed.  The restaurants were open.  After all, this is Italy.

I'm Jewish? Now what?

The opportunities I had to meet with young Polish Jews were highlights of my recent trip to Poland with the Forum for Dialogue Among Nations.

On our first full day of meetings, we met with Karina Sokolowska-Folwarczny, Country Director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.  (Karina is married to Andrzej, who directs the Forum; they met after both were involved with their respective organizations.)

The “Joint,” as it is known, is the primary funder of many of the Jewish communal activities in Poland, as it is in the FSU and many other areas.  In addition to supporting traditional programs – primarily social services and kosher kitchens that provide meals for elderly and needy Jews – it also helps the growing community of young Poles who are discovering and/or want to learn about their Jewish backgrounds. 

Karina herself is an example.  She grew up knowing she was Jewish; her grandparents had met in camps and returned to the German area of Poland.  During the Communist era – from the end of World War II until 1989 – Judaism became an underground religion like others.  In college in the 1990s she joined a Jewish student organization, and that was the beginning of her public identification. 

How many other Jews are there in Poland? 

No one knows for sure.  Michael Shudrich, the chief rabbi of Poland, with whom we also met, notes that 350,000 were left in Poland at the end of the Second World War, and 5,000 are now registered with the community. 

On its website, the Joint estimates 12,000.  Karina Sokolowska-Folwarczny told us that an organization of “hidden children” now numbers 1,000+.  In addition, Sochnut, the Jewish Agency, sponsors an annual trip to Israel for Polish youth between the ages 18-26.  For 7-8 years, two trips each year have taken 60 young people who have had to prove a connection to Judaism.

The phenomenon of “hidden children” was fascinating to our group.  Deathbed confessions by people now in their 60s and 70s are common.  There are many versions of very similar stories. 

• An elderly person – more often a woman, because girls were easier to hide and “pass” – was adopted by a non-Jewish family, and raised as a Catholic but told at some point she was born Jewish.
• Even with that knowledge, the person either continued to practice Catholicism because it was their religion or – in the face of Communist anti-Semitism – hid their roots from their spouses and children.

In addition to the descendants of hidden children are Poles whose ancestors survived because they themselves hid or disguised or denied their Jewish roots.

Yale Reisner, a researcher at Warsaw’s Jewish Historical Institute, also spoke to us of this phenomenon.  On the average of once a week someone calls or comes to the Institute with a similar story.  “My mother has only a few months to live, and last week she told me that her parents were Jews.”  They want to know what to do next.

Some Poles make the discovery themselves and then confront their relatives; this was the case of a young journalist who found his family’s unique name and town on the popular Jewish genealogical website, www.JewishGen.org while he was browsing the Internet late one night.

(This is not only a Polish phenomenon.  Last week, we spent five days in Brussels as guests of the International Jewish Center, Belgium’s only English-speaking Liberal Jewish community and a member of the World Union for Progressive Judaism.  At the Jewish Museum of Belgium, we learned about the constantly increasing number of Belgians who learn late in life that their parent was one of the enfants caches.)

We met that young Polish journalist who found his family on the Web not because of his past, however, but because of the choice he has made about his future:  to live a Jewish life in Krakow.  Much of that active life is focused around the Centrum Spoleczności Żydowskiej w Krakowie, the Jewish Community Centre of Krakow, in Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter.  Dedicated in 2008 by Prince Charles, the Centre is directed by incredibly energetic New Yorker Jonathan Ornstein, who also has become a permanent resident.

A few blocks away, at the Żydowskie Muzeum Galicja – the Jewish Museum of Galicia – our guide was an educational specialist from Nashville, a young Jewish woman whose father I know, coincidentally.  She too plans to stay in Poland.

We met many, many other Jews like these, from Poland and other countries, who are building active communities in Warsaw, Krakow, and Lodz.  Poland’s annual Limmud – an annual adult education program that has been spreading throughout Europe from country to country for 30 years – attracted 640 eager learners to Warsaw in November.

An American expatriate I met in Brussels commented, “When you live in the U.S., you tend to think of everything in Europe in terms of past history.  When you live in Europe, you realize that history is part of your life every day.”

And this is the message of the Forum for Dialogue Among Nations.  Our history as Jews, and/or as Poles, is very much a part of today.  How we respond has the power to shape tomorrow. 

* * *

As I write, Garrison Keillor is telling me that today is the 151^st anniversary of the birth of Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof, inventor and advocate of the use of the international language Esperanto.  He died in Warsaw on April 14, 1917.  I photographed his grave when we were in Warsaw’s Jewish cemetery.

A Venetian Giorno del Ringraziamento

Several months ago, when we knew we would be in Milan for Thanksgiving, we invited friends from London to visit us for the holiday.  They countered with a suggestion that the four of us meet in Venice.  Why not?

So we made our plans to stay at a hotel near Piazza San Marco that was included in their package.  I didn’t expect to find turkey and all the sides, but I did discover a restaurant named Osteria La Zucca – “The Pumpkin” – where I thought Thanksgiving dinner would be an interesting experience.

A few weeks ago, I began to read in the paper about flooding in the Veneto – the Italian region where Venice is located – and that’s when I learned about alta acqua, “high water.”

I should have learned more.  While it was a pleasure to be in Venice when relatively few other tourists were there, the high waters did impact us.  When I asked at the hotel desk on the first afternoon if alta acqua was coming soon, he said that if we returned to the hotel by 10:30 p.m., we’d be fine.  About 10, we walked to Piazza San Marco and found it filling up like a formerly empty swimming pool.

 

The next morning, when we assumed the waters would have receded, we instead found our way blocked in several directions by standing sewer water that was as much as 8” deep in places, depending on the pitch of the sidewalk.

What we also didn’t know was that the time of alta acqua changes daily. Our friends were leaving on Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, around 2 p.m.  We took a long walk in the morning and stopped on the sunny shore for a snack. 

On the way back to our hotel so our friends could pick up their luggage, we had to walk on the gangplanks that the city sets up for people to make their way over the water.  When the gangplanks came to an end, however, our path was blocked by deep water.  I led everyone back and tried another route:  also blocked.

Finally our friend, claiming she had been raised in a boarding school where conditions were far worse, gave me her shoes and long coat (it was quite cold), and waded through water up to her knees; about 10 minutes later she returned with the luggage in hand.

At that moment, two other Englishwomen on their way out of town offered our friends their waders.  If you don’t want to buy boots, Venetians will sell you bright blue plastic bags with soles.  Thus our friends could reach the quay where their water taxi would take them to the airport.

We continued our sightseeing and had dinner without confronting any more acqua alta that day.  On Friday morning, the concierge assured us that if we left our hotel by 10 a.m. we would be fine.  When the siren went off about 9:20 a.m., however, we headed immediately to the train station.  My caution was not in vain:  water around the hotel was already about 2” deep, and it was raining.  We had a long wait at the train station (no benches) but we felt like lucky refugees when we finally got on the warm dry train and headed west toward the snow-capped Dolomites on our way back to Milan.

The meal

We knew that La Zucca emphasized local fresh vegetables, and we were not disappointed.  The highlights were two primi piatti:  tagliatelle with gorgonzola and pistachios, and divine roasted artichoke hearts; and the contorni:  leeks baked with a crispy parmesan crust, an eggplant and pepper flan; and the dolce:  pear mousse with chocolate sauce.  Though we were in the first seating, the lamb chops were gone, so I ate my first guinea fowl and decided I prefer roasted turkey, and not just for Thanksgiving.  

A Week in Poland Is Not Enough

For nearly ten years, I have been involved with Forum for Dialogue Among Nations, an NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) founded by Andrzej Folwarczny, a former member of the Polish parliament, to promote Polish-Jewish relations.

Andrzej, who is not Jewish, is painfully aware that many Jews blame Poland more than Germany for the Holocaust.  Much of his adult life has been devoted not only to demonstrating this blame is not justified, but also to encouraging both Jews and Poles to understand that the histories of the two peoples are inextricably intertwined.  This is my belief:  that contemporary and recent Jewish history cannot be understood without an understanding of the history of the Polish people, and vice versa.

My involvement enabled me this month to spend a full week in Poland as a guest of the Forum and Poland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.  While I went knowing that my personal narrative had shaped my positive feelings, I wanted also to understand the negative feelings on both sides as well as what I could do about them.

I was not disappointed.  Our six days were packed with presentations by government officials and academics; we met over lunch and dinner with young Poles – Jews and non-Jews – who have chosen to make their lives in Poland.  We examined the history – what several scholars referred to as “the two narratives” – and we looked to the future.

One of the high points of my week in Poland was a visit to the regional high school in Chęciny, a participant in the Forum’s impressive “School of Dialogue” program. 

Chęciny was a shtetl town before World War II:  in 1939 Jews represented about 60% of the population, but now there are no more.  As a School of Dialogue, administrators and a team of teachers from the school – as well as the regional officer responsible for education – have made a commitment to educate their students about Jewish life in Chęciny.  The implications of this commitment are wide and deep.

The Forum initiated its program in Warsaw schools and selected university students to be prepared as trainers.  The trainers go to cooperating schools to work with teachers and one class of teenagers who explore the Jewish roots of their town.  A school must agree to devote four full days of classroom time to research and study; at the end, students make a presentation to their families, classmates, and town officials. 

In Chęciny, as in most towns, the students have produced a “walking tour” of the former Jewish sites in the town as well as profiles of people who lived there.  Reality demands that they also research what happened to the Jews of their community in the 20th century and before.  In the cemetery, they found a 13^th-century stone that predates the earliest records of Jews in the town. 

Chęciny has gone beyond that:  in addition to an annual three-day festival of Jewish culture, the high school has a relationship with a high school in Israel and students and teachers had visited two weeks earlier, so the Israeli flag still was flying.

Town leaders want to turn the former synagogue, used by the Russians as a stable but now a community center, into a Jewish museum and cultural center.

“Propaganda,” you may be saying.  Nevertheless, the evidence is that dialogue is always more effective than no dialogue! 

The required research includes asking one’s parents and grandparents about their personal histories relative to the Jewish community.  Parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents of today’s 16-year-olds were born during the 1945-1989 period of Soviet rule of Poland, an era marked by official anti-Semitic policies.

This 44-year Russian occupation of Poland is just one of the facts that shape the Polish narrative. 

• Another is that when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939 they captured and killed 20,000 Polish intellectuals. 
• The Soviets “finished” the job at Katyn, a massacre for which the Russian parliament just took responsibility a few days ago. 
• Hitler’s plan for the Polish non-Jews – leaderless and mostly uneducated peasants – was to create a slave labor force of untermenschen (sub-humans).
• More officially designated “Righteous Gentiles” are from Poland than any other country in Europe.

While Jews were killed primarily by the Germans, the Polish people accept and share responsibility.  Their atonement has taken many forms over the years, both public and private.  Studying the Holocaust is part of the required curriculum; cities and towns have given land and erected memorials; countless exchange programs, including the Forum, have been funded by the government. 

The issue of reparations remains unresolved largely, the Poles maintain, because decisions made by the post-War Soviet government complicated the issue.

The implications of the School of Dialogue program are huge.  As Polish students learn about the contribution of Jews to their own communities, their participation reshapes their communities for now and for tomorrow.  “Never again” is not an abstract promise. School of Dialogue – with the Forum’s ambitious goal of expanding the program throughout the country – will ensure a future of mutual understanding. 

Are there Jews in Poland to benefit?  Read my next installment!