RE: [Cz-L] The making of the Powidla

Hedwig, I'm sure you're right. I've twice encountered Czech Jews married to Bohemian/Moravian German ladies, obviously none of the classic hate there! With the minority of them who were self-conscious liberals or socialists, I'm sure anti-Semitism was felt to be as horrible and reactionary as it was. And my parents never really learned to think of German-speakers as 'foreigners' (as might well have been nearer to the facts of how those people felt themselves), even though they were both native Czech speakers. My experience of Sudetendeutsche included the shock of hearing a woman teacher of my own age, accompanying a party of German schoolchildren on a language-learning exchange visit with an English school where a friend was German teacher, laughing out loud at the ridiculousness of expecting her to continue to talk to me once she'd learned I was Czech (I'd volunteered this after she'd said her family was "aus Böhmen"); she merely turned away!

Unfortunately, it is on record that 97.2% of Bohemian and Moravian Germans voted for Konrad Henlein's "Filiale" of the Nazi party, and that they had a particularly "distinguished" record in concentration/extermination camps, Einsatzgruppen and death marches. The reason may be that they especially resented being a minority in a majoritarian democracy where the majority were Slavic Untermenschen, and suddenly having rights exactly equal to theirs and to those of the even more untermenschlich Jews may have particularly stuck in their throats. The 1920s-1930s were the worldwide high-water-mark of racism, and Lord Runciman's 1938 report to the British government on the status of the Czech Germans was fully sympathetic to this very point of view and therefore recommended that the "Sudetenland" be stripped from Czechoslovakia without a plebiscite - more even than Hitler had been asking for Chamberlain's government to approve!

The Czechs never produced a pro-Nazi militia - as the Ukrainians, Romanians, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians all did; nor a bona fide collaborationist government, like neighbouring Slovakia (which has a near-identical language but a very different nationalist tradition). Travelling to Kyiv/Kiev 2 years ago and having quite a lot to do with expatriate Ukrainians, I've found that wartime collaboration, fascism and antisemitism are things that a lot of Ukrainians rather agonize over: a vulgar deviation which many of their compatriots have pursued, unworthy of their national ideals. Unfortunately, Dovid Katz has found that in the Baltic countries, antisemitism is a middle-class thing too, a reassertion of what some quite well-educated people think of as their national ideals; and in Hungary, the Jobbik fascist party (definitely with the connivance of the purportedly respectable centre-right government!), though full of vulgar thugs, does seem to have won a wide audience for an equivalent point of view. I don't know Romania at all; no one could admire its wartime record, but you Czernowitzers are good at giving credit where credit is due.

I can read German, though not easily. I'm sure that you have a very interesting story to tell! Please send me any link, if you've got it on-line.

[Charles Polak]

-----Original Message-----
From: hedbren_at_zahav.net.il [mailto:hedbren_at_zahav.net.il]
Sent: 25 August 2012 23:05
To: Charles Polak
Subject: Re: [Cz-L] The making of the Powidla

Hi, Charles Pollak,
Not all the Sudeten-Germans were antisemitic...My late husband and me, both
born in Czernowitz, came one day before thr North-Bucowina became a part of
Soviet Empire to Czernowitz, ..and could not return to Bucarest...so, after
a year, when the german SS entered Czernowitz, my husband was arrested with
all the Jews from this street, going with the ucrainian housekeepers from
house to house... by the SS, and 2 german officers from the Air Force,
rescued him, one was an officer, an engeneer from Sudetenland..My husband
was engeneer too, from the Deutsche Technische Hochschule, Prague...Do you
read german??if yes, and if you are interested in this story, I wrote
about, I will send you..
Regards from Haifa
Hedwig Brenner

-----Original Message-----
From: Charles Polak
Sent: Thursday, August 23, 2012 11:07 AM
To: Czernowitz-L_at_cornell.edu
Subject: FW: [Cz-L] The making of the Powidla

I live in SW London, and about 1 mile/2 Km away, 'Halušky' (a sub-section of
a local Bengali-run tobacconist/corner store!) sells good Czech food,
including Povidla.
(http://www.halusky.co.uk/czech-slovak-foods/plum-jam-320g.html.) I also
drive to Prague or Olomouc at least twice a year, and basic supermarkets
like Billa always carry it.

However, I don't know what to recommend nostalgically povidlophile
Czernowitzers based in the US or Israel.

Charles Polak
mailto:charles.polak_at_bbc.co.uk
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Received on 2012-08-26 05:25:00