Re: [Cz-L] review of the Hirsch-Spitzer book

On 07/07/2011 18:00, Miriam Taylor wrote:
> Thanks Jim, for telling us of these two reviews of Marianne Hirsch and
> Leo Spitzer's book "Ghosts of Home". The first review-abstract is meant
> for specialists in memory studies and is not particularly interesting.
> But I very much enjoyed reading the second review from "Shofar",
> written by Markus Bauer.
> I would recommend this review to all members of the Cz.-List.
>
> Mimi

You're very welcome. In case people weren't able to get from the
abstract to the actual review, I will include it here in (what, like the
rest of this message, I hope, is) plain text. It does contain some
interesting description of Czernowitz and the project (e.g. why
German-speaking Jews are the focus; the character of life under KuK and
subsequently, etc.) that relate to recent or earlier conversations on
this list.

Jim

Memory Studies

http://mss.sagepub.com/
Book review: Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer Ghosts of Home: The
Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2010. 392pp. $39.95. ISBN 9790520257726
Judith Friedlander
Memory Studies 2011 4: 336
DOI: 10.1177/1750698011403118

The online version of this article can be found at:

http://mss.sagepub.com/content/4/3/336

Downloaded from mss.sagepub.com by guest on July 7, 2011

Memory Studies 4(3) 336–352Book reviews © The Author(s) 2011 Reprints
and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI:
10.1177/1750698011403118 mss.sagepub.com

Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer Ghosts of Home:The Afterlife of
Czernowitz in Jewish Memory. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2010. 392pp. $39.95. ISBN 9790520257726

Reviewed by: Judith Friedlander, Hunter College, CUNY, USA

Ghosts of Home reconstructs the memories of Jews who survived the Second
World War in Czernowitz (Cern••u••i), a city located in Northern
Bukowina, which belonged to Romania during most of the war. Known as
Chernivtsi today, the city now is part of Ukraine. Generally speaking,
the Jews of Romania survived the war in greater numbers,
proportionately, than did Jews in most other parts of Eastern Europe,
but not in borderland regions such as Bukowina. With the singular
exception of 20,000 Jews in Czernowitz, the Jews of Northern Bukowina
suffered the full impact of Hitler’s genocidal campaign. As Hirsch and
Spitzer put it:

[D]espite an elaborate plan announced in Bucharest in August 1942 to
make Romania entirely judenrein by sending all Jews to Belzec, and
despite a longstanding history of virulent Romanian anti-Semitism, a
majority of Jews who inhabited the Romanian Regat – the heartland –
survived the war … The Jews of the border regions, on the other hand,
especially those living in Northern Bukowina that had been annexed by
the Soviet Union under the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1940-41, suffered a
much harsher fate. (p. 172)

The Jews of Czernowitz owed their relative good fortune to the
courageous intervention of the city’s mayor, a remarkable man by the
name of Traian Popovici. Against extraordinary odds, Popovici protected
at least 20,000 Jews, including Marianne Hirsch’s parents, the
experiences of whom the authors describe in vivid detail throughout the
pages of this fascinating book. Carl and Lotte (née Gottfried) Hirsch
grew up in the city during the interwar period. As the authors describe
Carl and Lotte’s Czernowitz years, they offer a rich and nuanced
portrait of the wider community of assimilated Jews to which Marianne’s
parents belonged, using excerpts from historical docu•ments, memoirs,
novels, poems, photographs and interviews conducted in the city during
the late 1990s and the early years of the 21st century. Marianne Hirsch
and Leo Spitzer made four visits to Czernowitz between 1998 and 2008 –
the first time with Carl and Lotte.
Inspired by writers as varied as Eva Hoffman and Art Spiegelman, Hirsch
and Spitzer have made a new and significant contribution to a large body
of literature by and about ‘children of the Holocaust,’ more
specifically to works by children who travelled back to the places where
their parents grew up and/or survived the war. In making these symbolic
‘returns’ Hirsch and Spitzer wanted to walk the streets with Carl and
Lotte, to see the buildings and touch the tiles of places Marianne had
tried to visualize over the years as she listened to her parents
describe the city before and during the war – as if ‘being there’
herself would give new meaning to the haunting memories she had
inherited. Hirsch and Spitzer call memories such as Marianne’s and those
of other children of survivors ‘postmemories’.

As Hirsch puts it:
My ‘memory’, is a ‘postmemory’. Mediated by the stories, images, and
behaviors among which I grew up, it never added up to a complete picture
or linear tale. Its power to overshadow my own memories derives
precisely from the layers – both positive and negative – that have been
passed down to me unintegrated, conflicting, fragmented, dispersed. (p. 9)

Ghosts of Home is a clear must for scholars and general readers
interested in studies of individual and collective memories. This review
will focus primarily on the book’s contribution to a large body of works
published since the Second World War on Czernowitz and on the various
ways people have recreated the collective memory of the city. Hirsch and
Spitzer compare and contrast these different representations as they try
to make sense out of what they call the ‘idea of Czernowitz’. In a
recent review by Aharon Appelfeld of another book about Czernowitz, the
Israeli novelist noted:

It is doubtful that another small city in the world has inspired so many
books and articles as Czernowitz … In Germany, Austria and other places
in the world, among Jews and non-Jews alike, the name Czernowitz evokes
great amazement, as though possessing some captivating charm … The Jews
were the yeast that created the ferment; about 50,000 of them lived in
Czernowitz before World War II, approximately one-third of the
population. They led a vibrant public life – and included among them
assimilationists, Zionists, Bundists, Yiddishists, and a large Hasidic
Community. There was a splendid Reform-style temple but also many small
synagogues. The press, theater, and the literary music worlds were all
in the hands of Jews. They saw to it that their children attended the
best secondary schools and that on completion of their studies attended
university. Many would leave for Vienna, Berlin or Paris, but a
considerable number returned to Czernowitz upon earning their degrees.
(Appelfeld, 2008)

In the early years of the 20th century Czernowitz defined the northeast
border of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the last frontier, in the eyes of
many at the time, of civilized Europe. Called the ‘Vienna of the East’
the official language of the city was German, but the vast majority of
the inhab•itants spoke other languages as well: Yiddish, Romanian,
Hungarian, Polish and Ruthenian (Ukrainian) to name the most common.
Czernowitz was the kind of city, to quote Tony Judt (2010), ‘where
cosmopolitanism [was] not so much an identity as the normal condition of
life’. And the list of such urban centers, Judt reminds us, was
impressively long. Some of these cities were large, such as Sarajevo,
Alexandria, Tangiers, Salonica, Odessa, Beirut and Istanbul; others
smaller such as Czernowitz and Uzhhorod. Whatever the size, each one of
them had ‘multiple communities and languages often mutually
antagonistic, occasionally clashing, but somehow coexisting’ (Judt, 2010).

After winning the war in 1918 the allies dismantled the Austro-Hungarian
Empire and gave Bukowina to Romania, one of the 13 new states created by
the Versailles Treaty. For people like the Hirsches and Gottfrieds, this
new political reality did not alter their cultural allegiances. Lotte
and Carl may have gone to Romanian-language schools in the interwar
period, but their families continued to speak German at home and
identify themselves with the literary and artistic fashions emanating
from Vienna.

According to the map of interwar Europe, the inhabitants of Czernowitz
now lived in the Romanian city of Cern••u••i. The streets all had
Romanian names too, but young assimilated Jews like Carl and Lotte made
dates to meet friends on what they still called the Herrengasse. It
mattered little to them or to members of their parents’ generation that
the street sign now read Iancu Flondor. In June 1940, several months
after Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a non-aggression pact and
divided Europe between them, Cern••u••i became part of the USSR and its
name changed again to Chernovtsy (written in Cyrillic script) – at least
for a year. Twelve months later the Nazis declared war on the Soviet
Union, invaded Chernovtsy and returned the city to their Romanian
allies, who immediately changed its name back to Cern••u••i. And so the
city remained until 1945, when it became part of the Soviet Republic of
Ukraine and assumed once again its Russian identity. Finally, when
Ukraine declared its independence from Russia in December 1991,
Chernovtsy’s name was translated into Ukrainian. Contemporary maps now
identify the city as Chernivtsi, and locate it within the borders of the
new state of Ukraine. Today the official language of the city is
Ukrainian and the names of the streets mark Ukrainian historic places
and heroes.

For the most part, ‘the idea’ of Czernowitz described on the pages of
this book is the German-speaking city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a
place remembered lovingly by assimilated Jews who remained faithful to
the language and culture of Franz Josef. It was almost as if the culture
of the old empire protected the Jews of interwar Cern••u••i from the
wounds of anti-Semitism inflicted on them regularly in the Romanian
language, not in German. The culture with which they identified was
represented by poets such as Paul Celan who continued to write in
German, even after the Second World War, in contrast to novelists such
as Aharon Appelfeld, who aban•doned German for Yiddish and Hebrew.
Although they both wrote bitterly about the world they had lost, their
languages and inflections were different. When Appelfeld wrote
nostalgically about Bukowina, he remembered the ‘premodern rural,
maternal world in the countryside, the Yiddish shtetl life of his
grandparents that offers warmth and joy, and a small degree of
protec•tion from the ruins of the cosmopolitan diaspora that surround
his child protagonists’ (quoted in Hirsch and Spitzer’s book on p. 292).

The Jews of Czernowitz, Appelfeld reminds us, had different ways of
identifying themselves as Jews and these differences had an impact on
how they remembered the city. Hirsch and Spitzer carefully describe this
diversity, pointing out, for example, that even Marianne’s father had
joined Hashomer Hatzair, the Socialist-Zionist movement that urged Jews
to speak Hebrew, but paradoxi•cally, Marianne observed while
interviewing her father, ‘“the Hashomer seemed to consolidate your
allegiance to German language and culture.” (He) did not disagree’ (p. 85).

In the case of Appelfeld, however, who was orphaned during the Second
World War, he rejected the German language that his parents had also
taught him and their world of assimilated Jews. For people like him, the
idea of Czernowitz evoked the multi-lingual Jewish community, chosen as
the site of a famous conference in 1908, where Jewish intellectuals and
political activ•ists gathered to determine whether Yiddish should become
the national language of the Jewish people. The participants in this
historic gathering came from many different provinces and states; the
most prominent of them were from centers of Jewish culture in Czarist
Russia. After heated debates the assembled agreed to recognize Yiddish
as only one of the possible Jewish languages, along with Hebrew.

Why did Jewish nationalists hold their meeting in Austria-Hungary?
Because Franz Josef was more tolerant than Nicholas II on questions of
cultural diversity, even though he refused to recog•nize Yiddish as a
national language. Debates were raging across several ‘national’
communities in Austria–Hungary at the time. According to the eminent
sociolinguist Joshua Fishman, ‘many seg•ments of [Austria–Hungary’s]
hitherto significantly Germanized Jewish intelligentsia were already
struggling to revise their attitudes toward Yiddish – a struggle that
was particularly crucial for that period in Austro-Hungarian cultural
politics vis à vis Germans, Poles, Ukrainians/ Ruthenians, and Jews in
the Bovina and in Galicia as well’ (1983: 375). But why hold the meeting
in Czernowitz, rather than in a better known center of Yiddish culture?
Because the main convener of the conference, Nathan Birnbaum, had
decided to leave Vienna and make Czernowitz the center of his
political/linguistic campaign.

Aside from the obvious personal reasons, Hirsch and Spitzer defend their
decision to concen•trate on Czernowitz’s German-speaking Jewish
community, because, they claim, these Jews were the most significant
group in the region in the early years of the 20th century:

For the majority of Bukowina and Czernowitz Jews until the end of the
[Austro-Hungarian] empire, German remained the predominant language of
choice in communication and the acquisition of cultural capital. Ranging
broadly across the political and social spectrum, these included
political moderates, who believed that anti-Semitic upsurges, exclusions
and brutalities were passing aberrations, as well as democratic
socialists and ‘Golus’ or ‘diaspora nationalists’ – those who opposed
assimilation and wanted Jews accepted as a culturally and religiously
self-directed, if not self-governing, distinct national group within the
framework of the Habsburg multinational state. (pp. 42–3)

Demographers might want to challenge the authors’ claim that German was
the predominant lan•guage among Jews in Bukowina at the time, even if
the census supported it. As Yiddish was not recognized as one of the
national languages spoken in the empire, the Jews were forced to
identify themselves on the census form with one of the languages that
was. On the other hand, it is generally agreed that the leaders of the
various Jewish nationalist movements spoke predominantly Russian (in
Czarist Russia) and/or German (in Austria–Hungary) among themselves. In
many cases the Austrian champions of Jewish national languages spoke
Yiddish and/or Hebrew poorly, if at all, including Nathan Birnbaum. What
is more, in promoting language nationalism, intellectuals like Birnbaum
also embraced the philosophical traditions of German Romanticism that
justified the exclusion of the Jewish people from Austrian and German
society. As Hirsch and Spitzer aptly put it: ‘Even in their opposition
to German and other national languages of assimilation, Zionists and
diaspora nationalists had absorbed German Romantic notions about the
indelible spiritual bond between language and Volk – the very same
assumptions indeed that were used by German-exclusivist nationalists to
keep out “others,” especially Jews, and to draw a circle of inclusion
around their own’ (p. 43).

The authors of Ghosts of Home did not set out to write a complete
cultural history of Czernowitz, but to reconstruct the world inhabited
by Marianne Hirsch’s family. This they do beautifully, in much of its
cultural and political complexity, enhancing the personal narrative with
material writ•ten by and about other assimilated Jews such as
themselves. The book also explores the ways the children of Czernowitz
survivors appropriated, interpreted and transformed the memories of
their parents, both shared and imagined, as they tried to understand
what their mothers and fathers had experienced. In Ghosts of Home,
Hirsch and Spitizer walk the streets with Carl and Lotte and see the
places they had heard about many times before, but had never experienced
with the same level of intensity. The visit was deeply moving for everyone.

Many will welcome this work as a significant contribution to memory
studies and the literature of return; others as providing little known
details about the lives of some of the 20,000 Jews of Czernowitz who
escaped the fate of tens of thousands of Jews throughout Northern
Bukowina, thanks to the city’s mayor. Traian Popovici succeeded in
saving these particular Jews by claiming to the authorities that he
could not run the city without the skilled labor of its Jewish
population. He could not, however, stop the deportation of 30,000
others, half of whom died in camps located nearby in Transnistria.
Hirsch and Spitzer visited Transnistria as well with the hope of finding
traces of these internment centers, which they eventually did, despite
the efforts of most of the people they met to deny that the camps had
ever existed. Even by the shameful standards of the time, living
conditions in the camps of Transnistria were horrifying.
Marianne Hirsch’s family – parents, grandparents and other members of
the extended family – spent most of the war years living in their own
apartments. In October 1941 they were forced briefly out of their homes
and into the city’s hastily constructed ghetto, but a few weeks later
they returned. While living in the ghetto, Carl and Lotte received
permission from the Romanian police to go to Cern••u••i’s City Hall to
get married by a judge in an official civil ceremony.
Marianne’s father was an engineer, a much needed profession in wartime
Cern••u••i. He had work; the family had food, not in abundance to be
sure, but they did not starve. Life was terrible and gratuitously
humiliating during this time, but virtually all members of the Hirsch
and Gottfried families managed to get by. Carl and Lotte walked freely
in the streets, wearing the hateful yellow star, but they lived openly
as Jews. Although they had several close calls, their daily lives by and
large had little in common with the reality of the vast majority of Jews
struggling to survive in Eastern Europe. At times Carl and Lotte
delighted in defying the laws that discriminated against Jews, or so it
seemed on a photo, taken of the couple on the streets of Cern••u••i in
1942 by a profes•sional photographer, in which neither one of them was
visibly wearing the yellow star (p. 165).

Carl and Lotte Hirsch were clearly very lucky, but what makes their
story particularly compelling is that they were not alone. Hirsh and
Spitzer report that there were between 60,000 and 70,000 Jews in
Cern••u••i before the Second World War. After the Hitler–Stalin Pact,
when northern Bukowina became part of the Soviet Union, Romanians fled
in both directions. Some went south, into fascist Romania, including
some Jews, who feared communism more than fascism; others fled north,
par•ticularly those committed to various forms of socialism. People such
as Marianne’s father welcomed the communists with enthusiasm, but Carl
soon changed his mind, after living in Czernowitz under Stalinist rule,
during which time he witnessed the deportation of Jews and Gentiles to
Siberia. When Hitler declared war on the Soviet Union the following year
and ‘liberated’ Cern••u••i in June 1941, thousands of people fled once
again. Many retreated with the Red Army. Carl would have gone too,
despite his reservations about Soviet Communism, but Lotte’s family
wanted to remain.

According to Traian Popovici, on whose demographic information Hirsch
and Spitzer rely heavily, by August 1941 there were about 50,000 Jews
left in the city. Approximately 30,000 Jews were deported in October and
November of 1941 and an additional 4,000 in 1942. Half of them perished.
Using census figures and ration-card records Popovici estimated that he
succeeded in keeping 16,000 Jews in Cern••u••i legally and another 4,000
illegally.

In 1945, after the Soviet army liberated Czernowitz, Carl and Lotte
moved to Bucharest, in an effort to escape living under communism again.
Two years later Romania became a communist state as well. Eager to move
either to western Europe or the USA, the Hirsches began the endless
process of applying for exit visas, which they finally received in 1961.

Marianne was born in 1949 in Timi••oara, a city located in western
Romania. A few months later, the family moved back to Bucharest, where
they remained until they left the country. Marianne attended school in
the Romanian language, but following the tradition of assimilated Jews
from Czernowitz, she spoke German at home.

The book is organized around the four visits the authors made to
Chernivtsi between 1998 and 2008. On the first trip with Marianne
Hirsch’s parents, the authors accompanied Carl and Lotte back to the
famous streets whose names Marianne had learned in German, to hear once
again about the events that took place on this corner or that under
Romanian street signs. By the time she and Leo saw these very same
streets the signs, of course, were in Ukrainian. The authors visited the
apartments where Carl and Lotte lived – a few things were still the
same, a stove here; some tiles there. They saw the corner where Carl
made the split-second decision that saved the family from deportation,
which was no longer a corner; and the bridge over which the survivors of
the camps in Transnistria returned to Cern••u••i. They also met a few
cousins who had never moved away and were still living in the city.

During the later trips without Carl and Lotte, Marianne and Leo did
archival research, walked the streets again, and conducted more
interviews. In 2000, for example, they went to the offices of the
Registry of Marriages and Births, located on what the authors still
stubbornly called the Herrengasse. There, with the help of a Ukrainian
employee, they found the entry indicating that Marianne’s parents had
married on 18 October 1941 in City Hall (casa comunal••). The document
gave the home addresses of the couple’s parents, even though their
families had just been evicted and were living in the ghetto at the
time. It also gave their ages and occupations – Carl Hirsch 29,
construction engineer of the Mosaic faith and Lotte, 23, student of the
Mosaic faith. Mentioned as well were the names of the couple’s parents
and those of Lotte’s sister and brother-in-law, who had been witnesses
at the marriage. Hirsch and Spitzer returned triumphantly to the USA
with the document (prepared for them in a Ukrainian translation!). To
their amazement, however, Carl and Lotte did not share the same sense of
excitement:

[W]e were taken aback by the fact that they hardly looked at it.
Obviously, this official corroboration of their history – signaling
their continued documentary presence in today’s Chernivtsi – meant a
great deal more to us than to them. And, in fact, when we later looked
through the documents they had brought along with them from Romania, we
found an official marriage certificate, not from 1941, but a copy issued
on December 30, 1950 in Timi••oara, stamped with Romanian Socialist
Republic stamps’. (p. 179)

In 2006 the authors attended a reunion of survivors and their children;
in 2008 they returned for the 600th anniversary celebration of what was
now the Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi, during, which the history of the
city’s Jews was virtually forgotten, even though 2008 was also the
centenary year of the famous Czernowitz conference. Throughout the
different parts of the book, Hirsch and Spitzer seamlessly weave
together their historical reconstruction of the city, with evocative
literary pas•sages, memoirs, interviews with survivors and the
‘postmemories’ of their children.

For this reviewer the least successful sections of the book are the
authors’ theoretical reflections on ‘postmemory’. They interrupt the
power of the multi-layered narrative Hirsch and Spitzer have so
beautifully constructed, the compelling details of which seem to defy
this kind of theorizing. Hirsch and Spitzer are more effective in their
use of theory when they talk about poetry and fiction. Their discussion
of Appelfeld’s work is particularly interesting; for example when they
describe how ‘Appelfeld has inherited the “idea of Czernowitz” – the
multicultural and cosmopolitan humanism that defines the assimilationist
aspirations of Czernowitz Jews – only to the extent of exposing the
false sense of promise to which Jews have turned out of naiveté,
perhaps, or out of a sense of ignorance’ (p. 292).

What conclusions have Hirsch and Spitzer drawn? Writing this book seems
to have shaken their ‘idea of Czernowitz’ as well. Had the war never
happened, the city might have lost much of its importance in the
collective memory of assimilated Jews of the interwar generation, many
of whom had already been eager to get out in the mid-1930s. As Lotte
Hirsch put it: ‘I could not wait to be old enough to leave. It was not
to happen until after the war, but we traveled a great deal dur•ing my
youth, and after visiting Vienna, Paris, and Berlin, Czernowitz seemed
like a backwater.’ Her father and his friends would have most likely
lived elsewhere as well: ‘By the mid-1930s … Carl and many of his
friends had left to study and work in Romania. Would they have returned
had the war not broken out? Perhaps the “idea of Czernowitz” which is,
after all, largely an effect of its loss, tells only one side of a much
more contradictory story’ (p. 291).

References

Appelfeld A (2008) A city that was and is no longer. A review of My
Czernowitz, by Zvi Yavetz. Haaretez, 6
March.
www.haaretz.com/news/a-city-that-was-and-is-no-longer-1.240681-cached
Fishman J (1983) Never Say Die: A Thousand Years of Yiddishin Jewish
Life and Letters. The Hague: Mouton
Publishers. Judt T (2010) Crossings. The New York Review of Books, 25
March, p. 15.
Downloaded from mss.sagepub.com by guest on July 7, 2011

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
This moderated discussion group is for information exchange on the subject of
 Czernowitz and Sadagora Jewish History and Genealogy. The opinions expressed
 in these posts are the opinions of the original poster only and not necessarily
 the opinions of the List Owner, the Webmaster or any other members
 or entities connected with this mailing list. The Czernowitz-L list has
 an associated web site at http://czernowitz.ehpes.com that includes a
 searchable archive of all messages posted to this list. Please post in "Plain
 Text" if possible (help available at:
<http://www.jewishgen.org/InfoFiles/PlainText.html>).

To remove your address from this e-list follow the directions at
http://www.cit.cornell.edu/computer/elist/lyris/leave.html

To receive assistance for this e-list send an e-mail message to:
owner-Czernowitz-L_at_list.cornell.edu
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Received on 2011-07-07 19:49:04