RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Klezmer Music and the Ghost of Germany's past

Here's my latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column on JTA -- about Punk Cabaret klezmer danse macabre in Germany... namely, a concert by Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird, which I heard in Freiburg at the height of the controversy over the pope's rehabilitation of a Holocaust-denying bishop....It was a terrific concert, and the band's latest CD -- just released -- is also great. Partisans and Parasites.

Me and The Painted Bird in Freiburg.

Feb. 25, 2009

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

FREIBURG, Germany (JTA) -- At the height of the recent uproar over Pope Benedict XVI's rehabilitation of a Holocaust-denying bishop, I attended a klezmer concert in the pontiff's native Germany.

The timing was coincidental. I didn't deliberately set out to counter the pernicious folly of denying history by listening to music rooted in the culture the Nazis sought to destroy.

Still, the concert started me to thinking -- about what and how we remember; about what and how we forget; and about the role contemporary cultural expressions play in determining how we think about things.

I had been to many klezmer concerts in Germany in the past. The traditional music of East European Jews has had a wide following here since the 1980s, when American and other artists began to tour. Scores of homegrown klezmer bands have been formed, and several leading American Jewish music performers settled in Berlin or elsewhere in the country.

Germany's particular history, of course, played a role in the music's popularity.

Some Germans, especially those from older generations, became attracted as part of the manifold process of dealing with the Nazi legacy that is commonly known here as "working through the past."

For more youthful musicians and fans, however, the baggage of guilt is mostly absent. For some, the klezmer sound simply forms part of the eclectic exoticism of world music. For others, its rich cultural contexts provide stimulus for their own creative interpretation.

The group I saw this time was The Painted Bird, a Berlin-based band pointedly named for the Holocaust novel by Jerzy Kosinski. Known for making music with a sharp political edge, the band describes itself on its MySpace page as "Punk Cabaret + Radical Yiddish Song + Gothic American Folk + Klezmer Danse Macabre."

Its leader is Daniel Kahn, a 30-year-old Detroit native who forms part of the current wave of American Jewish musical transplants to the German capital.

The concert I attended was performed before a standing-room-only crowd in Freiburg, a university town in the southern part of the country.

Spotlighted on the stage and dressed in black, Kahn sang through a megaphone and switched between accordion, piano and ukelele as he chewed up stereotypes and spit them out in an almost in-your-face challenge to the audience.

Most of the songs were from the band's new CD, "Partisans and Parasites," a collection of original pieces and reworked Yiddish songs that deftly juggles genres, styles, epochs and languages.

Kahn's song "Parasites" tells of species that live on others who then sometimes kill them. His "Khurbn Katrina" mourns the destruction of New Orleans with a soulful mix of Yiddish and Bourbon Street. A beautifully reworked version of the Yiddish classic "Borscht" employs English translation to reveal a rollicking love song.

About halfway through the show, the band launched into its most notorious number, a deliberately provocative tune about the power and folly of revenge.

Called "Six Million Germans/Nakam," it recounts how East European Jewish partisans formed a group called Nakam -- Revenge -- that sought to avenge the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust by poisoning Germans’ bread and water.

The plot was foiled, and Nakam disbanded. Its leader, Abba Kovner, went on to become one of Israel's most noted poets.

"Six Million Germans! 6 Million Germans!" goes the chorus, chanted against the background of bouncy klezmer riffs combined with a spirited oompah march.

The audience seemed to love it.

"Ultimately, it's not about the absence of justice or victims," Kahn told me when we sat and talked after the show. "It's not about Jews and Germans; it's about revenge. It's about the sense of vengeance and whether or not that really has sense."

Kahn told me how history provided an inescapable background for his work.

"I think we're all doomed to repeat history whether we want to or not," Kahn said. "The question is, what part of history are we going to repeat? Even if you don't actively remember the past, the past is going to come and remind you of itself."

There was something "naively sort of quaint" about Holocaust denial, he added. But other forms of deliberate amnesia can also be destructive, Kahn said.

"It would be nice if we were the kind of animal that can't do these things to each other," he said. "But to deny that we did it then is to deny that we're doing it now. It's to deny a very real problem that humanity has to deal with, which is the problem of racism, fascism, dehumanization, collective punishment.

"We sing songs about this, about memory, about memory politics. But ultimately it's not only about do we remember or are we remembering or is there something to remember. It's what exactly are we supposed to not forget, what does 'never again' really mean.

"Is it 'never again' to us?" he asked. "Is it never forget this? We need to look again at what it is we're supposed to remember."

A few days before I saw The Painted Bird, the music critic of The Jewish Chronicle of London, Paul Lester, raised hackles in the Jewish music world by slamming what he called "the fake roots music of the klezmer brigade."

"The best Jewish music -- or rather, the best music by Jews -- reflects the moment and is somehow a response to the times in which it was made," Lester wrote. "And if there is a 'Jewish voice,' it is not to be heard in klezmer, maybe because it is being drowned out by all those clarinets, violins and accordions."

The "Jewish voice" he was seeking, Lester wrote, was "urbane, witty, sharp, smart, savvy, often satirical and thoroughly contemporary. It also has an American accent."

To my ears, that's a pretty good description of The Painted Bird.

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Farewell to a Pintele Yid

Here is my latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column, a farewell to my old friend Henryk Halkowski, who died in Krakow on New Year's Day.

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

BUDAPEST (JTA) -- The Yiddish expression "dos pintele Yid" is often translated as "the Jewish spark" -- an indestructible core of Jewishness that lurks deep within even unknowing or alienated Jews, ready to spring back to life at any unexpected moment.

The Forward's language maven, Philologos, once devoted a column to the term, describing it as an almost mystical notion.

"It posits that all Jews, even if they are unaware of it or have been raised so un-Jewishly that they do not know they are Jewish, have within them a Jewish essence that can be activated under certain circumstances," Philologos wrote.

Henryk Halkowski, who died suddenly on New Year's Day in his native Krakow, Poland, may have been one of the least mystical people I ever knew, but in many ways he embodied this concept.

A writer, translator and local historian, Henryk was like a pintele Yid for an entire city -- a city whose Jewish population of more than 65,000 had been all but wiped out in the Shoah. A city where only some 200 or so Jews live today.

To my mind, Henryk was one of the most noteworthy personalities in the new Jewish reality that has emerged in Poland since the Iron Curtain came down nearly 20 years ago.

"He was a guardian of Krakow's Jewish legacy," said Joachim Russek, director of the city's Center for Jewish Culture.

Born in 1951 into the echoing vacuum of post-Holocaust Poland, Henryk was haunted by the ghosts of Krakow's Holocaust dead and the generations of Krakow Jews who went before them.

He, in turn, haunted Jewish Krakow, learning its secrets and becoming so intimately attached that he seemed to have real, psychological difficulty leaving the city even for a few days.

"He was a character," said Stanislaw Krajewski, a leader in Poland's Jewish revival and the American Jewish Committee representative in Warsaw. "He was so Cracovian -- a Krakow curiosity."

With his encyclopedic knowledge of Krakow's Jewish history, culture, legend and lore, Henryk became a touchstone for me and other Jewish foreigners who began trickling in to Krakow in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

"For many of us, Henryk Halkowski was one of our first significant encounters with Krakow, and for all the years thereafter he remained a fixture of its character as much as any other person or institution," said Michael Traison, an American lawyer who has worked for years in Poland and sponsored many projects aimed at preserving Jewish heritage and fostering Jewish revival.

A stocky figure with thick glasses and a gray-flecked beard, Henryk was a familiar figure in Krakow's Jewish quarter, Kazimierz, where he roamed the streets with a restless energy.

"Wherever one walked in Kazimierz, regardless of the time of day or night, you couldn't help but run into him, then have a drink, then have a meal," recalled the klezmer musician and filmmaker Yale Strom, who met Halkowski in 1984 and featured him in several of his documentaries.

I first met Halkowski in the early 1990s.

Back then Kazimierz was a slum, a dilapidated ghost town that still showed the scars of Nazi mass murder and communist oppression.

Henryk, as head of a Jewish club, had formed the nucleus of a group of younger Jews who had attempted to revive Yiddish culture in the 1980s.

He recalled to me how foreign Jews often seemed uncomfortable meeting younger Jews in Poland -- how they couldn't understand their desire, or need, to remain.

"American Jews have a stereotype about Polish Jews who stayed here," he told me. "It's as if we are seen as 'traitors' to the nation."

In the years since then, Kazimierz has grown into a lively tourist center, with Jewish-style cafes, renovated synagogues, kitschy souvenirs and constantly milling tour groups.

The district has a resident rabbi and a Chabad center, and there is a plethora of Jewish cultural and educational institutions -- even a local Jewish publishing house, which has brought out Henryk's own books.

Henryk was an acute observer of the transformation, even as he became one of its protagonists.

"Disheveled and in disarray, he never disappointed as he cynically critiqued the absurdity of the Disneyland display of Jewish heritage and tragedy," Traison said.

"Orally and through his writings, he offered a sincere and unique insight into Cracovian culture and specifically that special Kazimierz life created since the fall of communism.

"Henryk remained and remains a genuine part of that milieu," he said. "And if one word is needed to describe him that is it: genuine."

In 1997 I took a picture of Henryk, a wry grin on his face, as he posed a trifle awkwardly at a Krakow souvenir stall selling T-shirts and carved wooden figures of Jews.

"Shall I tell you my obsession?" he asked me once, as he tucked into a bowl of chicken soup and kreplach at one of Kazimierz's trendy new Jewish-style restaurants.

"What we need in Kazimierz is some sort of institution that presents Jewish life as it really was here. What an apartment was like, for example; what a cheder was like, what a workshop was like. How the people here really lived. Something to inject a bit of reality into the gentrification."

Henryk was buried in Krakow's Jewish cemetery. Some 300 people braved the snow and bitter cold to pay their last respects. Rabbis and cafe keepers alike mourned at the graveside.

I could not make the trip to attend. But I remembered what Henryk had told me years ago, during one of our earliest conversations.

"Kazimierz," he said, "can be a place where meaning can be materialized."

That still holds true. But it simply won't be the same without him.

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Letter from Rome: The Expatriate Vote

Here's a link to my latest "Letter from Europe" for the New Leader. It's a"Letter from Rome" on how Americans abroad lived the presidential election.

I'm linking to a PDF of the piece, as unfortunately the New Leader does not have an interactive web site.


The New Leader

November/December, 2008

ROME

In early September I had lunch with Mr. and Mrs. X, American acquaintances who live year-round in Italy. They are a well-off, well-educated couple who retired some years ago to a beautiful home in the rolling hills of Umbria. It was still two months until November, but as for most Americans (and many non-Americans) I know, the upcoming Presidential election weighed heavily on my mind.

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IHT Article -- Zhovkva, Ukraine

Here's at link to my article for the International Herald Tribune on Zhovkva, Ukraine.

FOR A FORTRESS TOWN, A SECOND RENAISSANCE

BY RUTH ELLEN GRUBER

Jan. 12, 2009


In Renaissance Italy, artists and master architects theorized that the ideal proportions for a city could be derived from those of the human form. Some even made drawings superimposing town plans onto the bodies of men.

Half a millennium later, Lubomyr Kravets, the director of the tourist office in the little town of Zhovkva, just north of L'viv, unfolded a local map to show me how that theory had been put into practice here in western Ukraine.

"See" he said, pointing. "Zhovkva looks like a human body. The castle here is the head, and the big church over this way is the heart. The four entrance gates in the town walls were the arms and legs."

Zhovkva was founded in 1594 as a private fortress town by the Polish military commander Stanislaw Zolkiewski. It was one of several fortified towns in what was then the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that were conceived as "ideal cities" and built by architects and master masons from Italy.

The most famous, and best preserved, is Zamosc, across the border in Poland, which was founded in 1580 by the powerful Polish noble Jan Zamoyski and designed by the Padua-born architect Bernardo Morando. It is included on Unesco's roster of world cultural heritage as "a perfect example of a late-16th-century Renaissance town."

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RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Just Being (Jewish)

Here's my latest R-C column, about Facebook (of all things....)

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Dec. 22, 2008

ROME (JTA) -- Not long ago, a Facebook friend of mine wrote that she had had a great time at a Shabbat dinner even if there had been "a wee bit much talk" of religion.

"Why all this American obsession with Jewish identity?" she wrote on her profile page on the social networking site. "Just BE!"

Her comment got me thinking.

Defining Jewish identity, refining Jewish identity, reclaiming Jewish identity, reinforcing Jewish identity -- these seem indeed to be constant concerns among many Jews, and not just in the United States.

"Jewish identity" has been the subject of endless conferences, surveys, books, articles, analyses and movies -- not to mention comedy routines. A Google search for "Jewish identity" gave me 573,000 matches!

What impact, I wondered, does this all have on who we are -- or at least on who we say we are?

I decided to carry out an unscientific study to find out -- a very unscientific study.

My methodology was simple: I used Facebook to see how Jews, or at least Jews I know, define themselves in terms of religious identity.

For those unfamiliar with Facebook, a site that has 120 million users around the world, its software permits you to connect with lists of "friends" who are in turn linked with friends' lists of their own.

Upon joining you create a profile, including information you want to make public about your age, sex, location, profession, personal views and even your sexual preference. You pick and choose what you want to post. Some people post only their name; others provide the whole megillah.

One of the choices is to state your "religious views." You can choose whether or not to post anything at all about your religious beliefs and, if you opt to post, you choose how you want to define yourself; there is a blank space you can fill in with whatever you want to say.

For my study, I simply checked how my Facebook friends I know to be Jewish chose to respond.

I have more than 200 Facebook friends, and as it turns out, the overwhelming majority are Jewish. They include several rabbis, a cantor, klezmer musicians, Jewish scholars and leaders or staff members of Jewish organizations, as well as friends and family who have nothing to do with the Jewish institutional world.

About half of them chose not to fill in the "religious views" blank. Some clearly wanted to keep their religious beliefs personal; for others it was unimportant to define them. For others still, filling in the blank would have been redundant.

"It would be stating the very obvious," Herschel Gluck, an Orthodox rabbi who for more than 20 years has done Jewish outreach work in East-Central Europe, told me in an e-mail.

All of his other postings on Facebook, he noted, including pictures that show him in a long beard and black hat, made his religious identity clear.

"EVERYTHING is naturally and unashamedly proudly Jewish!" he said.

Of my more than 80 Jewish Facebook friends who did choose to state their religious views, only a minority went the standard route. Barely a dozen wrote simply "Jewish," and only another dozen or so identified themselves as some traditional formulation of Reform, Conservative or Orthodox.

The others produced a cornucopia of qualifiers, inventions, political statements and imaginative shadings that demonstrated a vast and colorful spectrum encompassing the widest range of belief, observance and nuanced sense of self.

They include: Jewish atheist; Absolute atheist; I love being Jewish; The Golden Rule; Incoherent; That's between me and my imaginary friend; It's all good; Eclectic; Panoramic; Anything I Can Cling To; Ignostic; Resolutely Secularly Jewish; Neo-tribalist, neo-pagan of Zion; "Still haven't found it" Jewish; Spiritual Jewgayism; Whirling Dervish; Rationalist; Jewishjewishjewish; I can see a church from my window; Jewish but not obsessive; All; Post Pigeon-Holistic; Waiting for UFOs to Take Me to Hawaii.

Some of these are frivolous or funny; others tweak stereotypes. Most, though, even if outlandish, are at heart thoughtful expressions of complex contemporary IDs that go far beyond the usual definitions of who (or what) is a Jew.

One friend summed it all up by stating his religious views as follows: "A simple Jew (who am I kidding? Is there such a thing????).

I asked a few of my friends why they chose to define their views as they did. The klezmer musician and filmmaker Yale Strom, for example, called himself a "Yiddish pagan."

"Yiddish is the tongue I relate to most as in my second tongue," he said in an e-mail. "My pagan beliefs come from me not believing in a typical omnipotent god figure sitting on a throne but a more amorphous one as in 'Mother nature.' "

Strom said he felt connected to Mother Nature, "as did the Baal Shem Tov who lived in the forests, studied the plants and was a known herbalist among the Jews and non-Jews."

"I am not an atheist," he added, "because I know there is something greater than myself -- or there better be or we are all doomed -- in fact there has to be, why else be born, put into this life?"

Bruno Bitter, in his early 30s, coordinates a popular Jewish blog and online community in Budapest. He described his religious views as "opiate of the few."

Why that?

"Marx wrote that 'Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkes,' " he told me. "This is often referred to as 'religion is the opiate of the masses' in English. But the Jewish religion is for no 'masses,' as we are a small minority."

In Philadelphia, meanwhile, Michael Seifert, a retired technical writer, described himself as "Secular Humanist Jewish."

"I call myself a secular humanist because I put my faith in civic, political, charitable, and educational institutions not affiliated with any religions and follow the teachings of the Western humanist tradition, which emphasizes the rights of man and the dignity of the individual," Seifert told me.

"Oh yes," he added. "I was born Jewish, so I have certain traditions and beliefs that come from my Jewish upbringing and education, as well as a birthright and familial alliances with Jewish people."

Two of Seifert's siblings are also Facebook friends of mine -- one, a musician, calls himself a "spiritualist," and the other, a professor, is "indifferent."

Members of my own extended family described themselves as "Jewish of the Reform and secular sort," or "Jewish-ish," or simply wrote "yes" after the words "religious views."

Myself? I chose not to say anything.

If anyone wants to know, they can ask.

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RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Living Like Anne Frank?

At the Golden Rose cafe, L'viv, Ukraine, October 2008. Photo (c) R. E. Gruber

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Living Like Anne Frank?

Nov. 19, 2008

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

ROME (JTA)—An online accommodation agency I came across recently used one of the most tasteless slogans I’ve ever seen to advertise a holiday rental in Amsterdam.

"Amsterdam Stay Apartments present the Anne Frank apartment," read a banner across the top of the apartment’s Web page. "Live like Anne Frank during your Amsterdam stay," it promised, "with the keys to your own roof attic apartment.

"Live like Anne Frank?"

What on earth could these people have been thinking? The apartment, said the Web page, occupies the top floor of a building "just opposite the Anne Frank house" in a "lively and picturesque area known for its restaurants, night life, specialty shops and cultural attractions."

A converted garret with a steeply sloping ceiling, it comes complete with high speed Internet, a private terrace and a full supply of bed linen. Though "ideal for two," it can sleep up to four.

"Live like Anne Frank?"

The Web page made her sound like some bohemian celebrity, not a teenage diarist who for two long years hid with her family and friends in a cramped "secret annex" until they were betrayed to the Germans and shipped off to Nazi death camps.

Anne died in Bergen Belsen at the age of 15. The Anne Frank House is now a museum that draws as many as a million visitors a year. The "secret annex" has been preserved, and exhibits tell the tragic story that unfolded in that hidden space.

"Live like Anne Frank?"

What does it mean, this transformation of World War II terror into a market-driven synonym for trendy charm? Is it just another form of "Shoah business?" Or has Anne’s name become a talisman so abstract and disembodied that it can be cut and pasted and used without reference to the totality of its meaning? You know—Anne Frank, a pretty young girl living tucked away in a cozy attic apartment, sweetly dreaming of movie stars and confiding in her diary.

"Live like Anne Frank?"

"Commercializing Holocaust suffering (or stoicism or heroism)—through ignorance or malice—cannot be condoned," my brother, Sam Gruber, the president of the International Survey of Jewish Monuments, wrote in an angry response to the apartment ad.

"Even when done in a way that is meant to celebrate the victim, such exploitation actually belittles her," he wrote. "Maybe the apartment owner figured if Broadway, Hollywood and publishers around the world could make money selling their version of Anne Frank, ‘Why not me, too?’ After all, the Anne Frank House is a big Amsterdam tourist destination. Why shouldn’t the neighbors cash in?"

Actually, Anne Frank does enjoy protection, and by the time you read this column, the "Anne Frank Apartment" Web page already may have changed its wording or even be off-line.

I informed a friend at the Anne Frank House about the ad and he assured me that the Anne Frank Foundation, which oversees the museum, would be taking action. The foundation has legal control over the Anne Frank name, he explained. No one can name anything Anne Frank without its permission.

"This is to prevent Anne Frank from being used for commercial or touristic purposes," he told me. "Otherwise we would have the whole neighborhood filled with Anne Frank cafes and the like."

For many years I’ve written about how abstract ideas of Jews and Jewish culture can become commercialized commodities in European countries where few if any Jews live today. Clearly there is a correlation between the attempt to use Anne Frank to rent an apartment and the ways that Jews, Jewish symbols and Jewish stereotypes are used in other types of Jewish-themed tourist promotion.

This is particularly evident in Eastern and Central Europe, where a growing number of "Jewish-style" cafes project an increasingly standardized ambience of kugel, candlesticks, klezmer and kitsch.

I’m not as squeamish about the phenomenon as some people I know, but I do wince at the excesses. Lately I have found myself wincing more and more. Maybe it’s because there are more excesses to wince at—or maybe because the excesses are becoming, well, so excessive.

It’s complicated, though. There are still charming Jewish-style cafes, where the atmosphere is understated and attitudes are sincere. In Krakow, the proprietors of one cafe, the Klezmer Hois, even use their profits to finance a Jewish publishing house and well-stocked Jewish bookstore.

More and more, however, I see "Jewish" becoming a brand, where codified accessories and sometimes toxic cliche provide the parameters. There’s a little chain of "Anatewka" restaurants in Lodz. The Ariel cafe in Krakow sells refrigerator magnets of caricature Jewish heads. A big image of a Jew counting money stands outside the Tsimmes restaurant in Kiev.

The most recent example is a new Jewish cafe in the derelict old Jewish quarter of Lviv, Ukraine. The cafe overlooks the ruins of the Golden Rose synagogue at the edge of a vacant space where one of the city’s other main synagogues once stood.

As a cafe it is not unpleasant; its decor includes dark wood and pre-war photos that bear witness to the world destroyed. As part of its gimmickry, however, patrons are encouraged to don black hats equipped with long, fake peyes (earlocks). And no prices are written on the menu—customers are supposed to "bargain," like Jews, over what they should pay.

It’s creepy, but as I said, it’s complicated. Jews themselves often use these very same caricatures in playful reference or self-ironic self-identification. (Think Heebster, JDub, HeBrew the Chosen Beer.)

I visited the cafe with a group of Jews from Israel, North America and several European countries. Nearly all of us professed discomfort but, in a slightly schizophrenic moment, we also almost all tried on the hats.

(Ruth Ellen Gruber’s books include "National Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe," "Letters from Europe (and Elsewhere)," and "Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe." She blogs on Jewish heritage issues at http://jewish-heritage-travel.blogspot.com/.)




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New Ruthless Cosmopolitan column: Jewish Spaces and Places

My new Ruthless Cosmopolitan column is online -- a bit late because of the Jewish holidays...


RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN
Places and spaces: Exploring
what makes up the Jewish tapestry

Ruth Ellen Gruber

Avner Gruber, the first cousin once removed of Ruth Ellen Gruber, visits a Jewish cemetery in Hamburg, Germany.

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

ROME (JTA) – We’ve all played the “Jewish geography” game – you know, questioning someone we’ve only just met in order to discover common Jewish connections, friends or even family.

In doing so, we are mapping out our experiences, delineating a sort of Jewish topography of interlinking backgrounds, histories and far-flung mishpocha.

Somehow I feel a sense of profound satisfaction when I discover an unexpected link with a stranger. It’s like a gift, an almost magical sense of communion with the densely woven tapestry of Jewish life – or at least with an individual or a place that helps make up that tapestry.

The idea of Jewish topography and the spaces and places – physical and metaphysical – in which Jews live, dream and interact forms the basis of a fascinating new book.

“Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space, Traditions of Place” (Ashgate Publishing House, 2008) is a collection of essays by a score of international scholars who participated in a six-year research project at the University of Potsdam in Germany.

Called Makom, or “place” in Hebrew, the project aimed to explore the relevance of space and place in Jewish life and culture.

In my own writing, I have dealt frequently with “Jewish space” in the way that the Paris-based historian Diana Pinto framed it. She coined the term in the 1990s to describe the place occupied by Jews, Jewish culture and Jewish memory within mainstream European society, regardless of the size or activity of the local Jewish population.

“There is a Jewish space in Europe that will exist even in the absence of Jews,” she said. “The ‘Jewish thing’ is becoming universal.”

Pinto’s thesis was a spark for my own explorations of the often intense relationship between non-Jews and Jewish culture in Europe. I coined the term “virtually Jewish” to describe how non-Jews often “fill” Europe’s Jewish space with their own ideas and operations.

“Jewish Topographies” takes a much different approach.

It regards Jewish space from within the Jewish world rather than from the virtually Jewish perspective of outside interaction. It sees Jewish spaces as actual environments that are shaped by Jews, where Jewish life may be rooted and where Jewish activities go on.

“Jewish things” happen there and often, in turn, define the identity of the physical places where they are happening.

One of the goals of the project, the book’s editors write, was to counteract stereotypes that long have conveyed “the pervasive impression that the Jewish experience – except the Israeli one – is one of profound displacement, lacking not only a proper territory but also a substantial spatiality or attachment to place.”

They mean stereotypes such as the description of Jews as the “People of the Book” and of the book itself as the Jews’ “portable homeland,” not to mention the widespread cliche of the “wandering Jew.”

I must admit that I myself actually fulfill some of these stereotypes. I have lived in seven or eight countries, and even now I spend a good deal of time on the road. Yet I generally feel comfortable wherever I am, usually wishing I could stay longer in almost every place I visit.

Rarely do I feel “homesick,” yet I have deep attachments to place and certain places. Despite living overseas most of my life, the United States, in all its grandeur, remains my homeland.

And perhaps it’s a variant of the Jewish geography game that I do feel a special affinity for the landscapes, climate, food and even architecture in East-Central Europe, from where my ancestors came.

“Jewish Topographies” goes far beyond geography. Its chapters examine very different, and sometimes unusual, places where Jewish experience is strongly linked, physically or emotionally, to specific environments.

Most deal with concrete settings: Jews defiantly (and astonishingly) cultivating gardens in the midst of World War II ghettos. Jews hiking and kayaking through the pre-war Polish countryside to gain connection with the land in which they live. The architectural and spatial symbolism of the eruv in contemporary Germany. The impact of what Jews eat, and the creation of definable Jewish “foodscapes.” A “map” of the new alternative Jewish subcultures that have emerged recently in Budapest.

The book also includes an epilogue that expands the concept of Jewish space into areas that only recently opened up for exploration. Called “Virtual Jewish Topography,” it chronicles the creation and growth of Judaism in the online cyberworld known as Second Life, starting with the creation of Beth Israel, the first Second Life synagogue, in August 2006.

Its author, Julian Voloj, tells a fascinating story of avatars, screen names and self-selected identities as he charts the development of synagogues, Jewish institutions, Jewish cultural activities and Jewish neighborhoods – even anti-Semitic incidents – in a world that in a sense is real but also quite imaginary.

“How does one describe a place that does not ‘really’ exist and that can be changed by a simple mouse click?” he writes. “And how does one describe a culture in transition?”

I’ve known the German-born Voloj for several years. He is a writer, photographer and former Jewish student leader who now works for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. We’re Facebook friends and generally stay in touch online. But in addition to his expertise in novel Jewish topographies, he’s also adept at playing classic “Jewish geography.”

Indeed, I was pleased to learn not long ago that Voloj’s grandmother turns out to be a close friend in Hamburg of my own first cousin once removed.

(Ruth Ellen Gruber’s books include “National Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe,” “Letters from Europe (and Elsewhere),” and “Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe.")

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