From Building a City to Demolishing Homes
2018; Duke University Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/08879982-7199391
ISSN2164-0041
Autores Tópico(s)Urbanization and City Planning
ResumoIn his vast posthumous biography of Buczacz—his hometown and, as he depicted it, the symbol of East European Jewry—the Hebrew writer and Nobel Prize laureate Shmuel Yosef Agnon spins a lengthy tale of the town’s mythical origins: “When was our city founded, and who was its founder?” he asks. “Long have all the chroniclers labored to find this out in vain. But some few facts have been revealed to us,” continues Agnon, possibly tongue-in-cheek, since he was famous for his fine sense of irony, “and I am herewith setting down a faithful record of all I know.” 1What, then, is the story of the town’s origins? Here is how Agnon relates it:There was once a band of Jews who were moved by their own pure hearts to go up to the Land of Israel, together with their wives and their sons and their daughters. They sold . . . all their property that could not be transported. They obtained permission from the authorities to leave their city. They bought provisions and set forth on the road.They did not know the road to the Land of Israel, nor did anyone they met along the way . . . They only knew that it was in the East; so they turned their faces eastward, and that was the way they went . . . They set out at the beginning of the month of Iyar, when the highways are merry and the fields and vineyards full of people, but as they proceeded, people became scarce, vineyards and fields vanished, and all the roads led through forests that never seemed to end, with birds and beasts . . . They made a halt and set up camp for the month of holidays: Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot.They made their camp in a place of forests and rivers, with no sign of habitation . . . In those regions, as in most of the lands of the Slavs, winter comes on early . . . At the holiday’s end, when they ought to have set forth, the snow began to fall . . . until the roads were blotted out and they could not distinguish land from water . . . Like it or not, the pilgrims had to linger in their camp.One day . . . they found themselves surrounded by strange people who seemed to them like animals, with huge and fearsome dogs at their heels and great trumpets to their lips. But these people had not come to them with evil intent but only to hunt animals. They were great and distinguished noblemen, and it is the way of noblemen to go to the forests to hunt game.One of the noblemen asked them in Latin, Who are you and what are you doing here? They told him their whole story . . . in such detail that the noblemen were struck by their cleverness and eloquence. So enchanted were they that they forgot the game and gave up the hunt and began to urge them to come with them and to live with them, arguing that winter is very hard in that land, that many people fall sick from the great cold, that not everyone is built to bear it, and that these Rhine-landers would certainly never survive . . . The Pilgrims . . . agreed to go and live with them until the end of the winter season . . . Each nobleman took with him an individual or a family and brought them home . . .The noblemen who had taken the Jews into their homes enjoyed prosperity in whatever they did. They realized that their success was due to the Jews . . . They began to urge them to stay, saying, The whole land is yours; make your home wherever you like. If you want to engage in commerce in the land, better yet, for no one here knows anything about commerce . . .They thought about it and began to discuss what to do. To leave where they were and to go to the Land of Israel was out of the question; for by now, they had acquired property in the land and built houses and were in favor with the nobility. As for the women, some were pregnant, some were nursing, some were worn out and weak. And the elders were even older than before, so that traveling would have been hard on them . . . After much discussion, they agreed unanimously to establish a permanent house of prayer . . . The building in which they had been holding their services on the festivals they designated as the synagogue . . .Little by little, the entire place came to be settled by Jews . . . The place acquired a reputation; people began to come from far and wide on the days of their festivals, both to see and to be see . . . Then the local nobleman built himself a stone house; eventually, he built a castle up on the mountain facing the River Strypa . . . That is how Buczacz began . . ..There they dwelled for many generations in security and tranquility, except for years of war and revolution. Their first protector was the kingdom of Poland, and later Austria; then Poland reestablished its kingdom and engaged in conquest and destruction, until the Enemy came and eradicated them all.May God return the remnants of His people from wherever they are; may He assemble our Diaspora from among the nations; may He bring them to Zion, His city, in song, and to Jerusalem, His temple, in lasting joy; may no enemy or foe enter the gates of Jerusalem from this day forth. Amen. 2The story told by Agnon is more than a legend; it is, in many ways, the distilled version of what generations of Jews living in the vast territories of what was once the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—stretching from the German lands and the Carpathian Mountains to east of the Dnieper, and from the Baltic almost all the way to the Black Sea—had told themselves about where they had come from and where they were heading. Polin, as the Jews called Poland, was interpreted as the Hebrew words “poh lin,” or “here we shall dwell,” or “stay overnight.” There is an inner logic to this tale, for it both establishes origins and indicates the goal. Just as the Jews had founded Buczacz, or rather the civilization of all of Eastern Europe, so too, after their destruction, their remnants were to be naturally gathered by God in the Land of Israel, their eternal object of pilgrimage and their final resting place. 3Agnon’s 1939 novel, Ore’ah Noteh Lalun, translated as A Guest for the Night, describes the author’s last visit to Buczacz. 4 He is now a guest in his own hometown, and while in reality this visit, which occurred in 1930—22 years after he left Buczacz at age 21—lasted only a week, in the novel it stretches for an entire year. He did not just stay overnight, but nevertheless did not return. The title, of course, refers to the entire conceptual edifice of temporality: the unresolvable conflict between home and temporary abode. How can one think of the landscape of one’s youth as a site that one had merely passed through, as the child of refugees born en route from the ancestral home to the new place of refuge would imagine the sights its eyes perceived when they first opened? Can one reimagine one’s place of refuge, then, as a homeland, even if its sights were foreign and exotic, its smells, sounds, people, and language strange and unfamiliar? Can one in fact leave one’s homeland, one’s hometown, or just one’s home, and ever come home to another place and be at home there?Agnon, who made his home for a while in Jaffa, and then, after a long sojourn in Germany, finally settled down in Jerusalem for the rest of his life, did not write about the origins of Jerusalem, or the land of Israel, and definitely not of Jaffa. 5 The tale of origins was about Buczacz, the real hometown; and yet, a hometown imagined as a transitory space, a stop for the night on the way to Israel that lasted four centuries and ended up in the massacre of its entire Jewish population. He writes:This is the chronicle of the city of Buczacz, which I have written in my pain and anguish so that our descendants should know that our city was full of Torah, wisdom, love, piety, life, grace, kindness and charity from the time of its founding until the arrival of the blighted abomination and their befouled and deranged accomplices who wrought destruction upon it. May God avenge the blood of His servants and visit vengeance upon His enemies and deliver Israel from its sorrows. 6This is how Agnon opens his book and how, some 700 pages later, he closes it, recalling the day he heard of the destruction of his hometown. Living in Jerusalem, the holy city, his destination, and where indeed he had made his home, he is beset by endless sorrow for the universe, the town, the home he had lost, and feels completely alone and cut off from his roots. He tries to remember the words of a poem whispered to him in a vision by the apparition of Rabbi Solomon Ibn Gabirol, “each line of which began with one of the letters of the name of my town.” He thinks: “Were it not for remembering the poem, I would have been like all my townsfolk, who were lost, who had died at the hands of despicable people, those who trampled my people until they were no longer a nation. It was because of the power of the poem that my soul went out of me. If my town had been wiped out of the world, it remains alive in the poem that the poet wrote as a sign of my city.” Yet the words are lost:To whom shall I now turn who can tell me the words of the song? To the old cantor who knew all the hymns of the holy poets? I alone remain to shed their tears. The old cantor rests in the shadow of the holy poets, who recite their hymns in the Great Synagogue of our city . . . But here—here there is only a song of mourning, lamentation, and wailing, for the city and its dead. 7Agnon filled that void of forgetting with his vast collection of stories about Buczacz. In the wake of the destruction, as the modern State of Israel was being built over the remnants of Palestinian civilization, Agnon engaged in another act of construction. Asked by the critic Baruch Kurzweil what his new literary endeavors were, Agnon replied: “I am building a city.” 8The city he built, a literary edifice that has taken long to be recognized as a masterpiece and is still unknown to many Hebrew readers familiar with his prewar works, was not merely a monument to the Jewish civilization of Eastern Europe encapsulated in his hometown and destroyed by the Nazis, it was also an extraordinary mélange of historical fact and fiction, fantasy and imagination, deep research and erudition, and keen psychological insight. One central insight was that while Buczacz, as representative of the Jewish Diaspora in Eastern Europe, was the heart of Jewish existence, at the same time its own heart was elsewhere. It was there in Poland that it was formed, yet part of its very being was a profound sense of not-quite-being in place. The Jews—who did not in fact build the city of Buczacz—come as guests of the noblemen on their way elsewhere and are delayed merely by practical matters, which keep them there for close to half a millennium. 9But when they eventually get to where they were going, even though they are not welcome guests and are as foreign to that new landscape as they were to the old, they know that they have come home. Yet that home is inhabited by others, just as the home they left behind is taken over by others. The indigenous populations of the lands of the forests, the Poles and the Ukrainians, had always seen the Jews as guests, indeed increasingly less welcome guests with the rise of nationalism. The Jews never made claims on that land, although they did assert their role in developing and enriching it. Now, as they come to their home, they declare the indigenous population of that land foreign to it, and themselves, the newcomers, as its rightful owners. As a people that had spent much of its historical existence in a state of imagined transition, they can imagine the Arab population too as transitory, in the land but not of it, no matter how long it has actually lived there. Its origins, like those of the Jews, lie elsewhere, and it is to that other place that they belong. 10Yet, for the generation of such men as Agnon, the heart of Jewish civilization remained behind in that world destroyed by the enemy. It remained there, on the margins of his consciousness, like the words of the poem that bring the city back to life but which he cannot remember. As for the generations that come after, those born into the new land, their literal homeland, they have no memory at all of that other world and are thereby normalized as the indigenous population of the land. Having forgotten not only the words of the poem but its very existence and all that it symbolized, they are bereft of the civilization that made their own existence a hope and a dream. They do not know that they are the last link in a long chain and imagine themselves as newly made, as the originators of it all. They reside in their own myth of creation oblivious to the origins of their very existence. They thus claim a right to a place based on a history of faith and tradition of which they know nothing; all that is left to them is their indigeneity, which is by definition newer and more tenuous than that of those they had displaced. Hence it must be backed up with fire and sword. 11Agnon’s own creation myth of Buczacz is, of course, largely divorced from the historical record, and he must have been as aware of that as anyone who has studied this complex interethnic world subjected to many rulers and regimes. The city, in brief, was not founded by Jews. But in another sense Buczacz, and innumerable cities like it, did become a city because of the Jews, and ceased to be one when they were murdered. The violence that made for the destruction of those cities was just as deeply embedded in assertions of origins as were the fantastic tales of pristine beginnings. The Jews were hardly alone in seeing themselves as the originators of it all. In this imaginary genealogy of origins, the local peasants, later known as Ruthenians and later still as Ukrainians, lay claim to being the indigenous population, trampled upon, oppressed, and exploited by their colonizers. The Poles, for their part, who literally owned the city, and for that reason long determined its history, imagined themselves as those who transformed a universe of savages into civilization, whose contours could not help but be Polish. As for the Jews, they confidently saw themselves as those who made it all happen, the commercial, managerial, financial engine that made medieval castles and estates into cities and constituted the bourgeoisie that put an end to the feudalism of nobles and serfs. But if the Ukrainians said the town was theirs because they were there first, and the Poles said it was theirs because they had built it, the Jews then conceded that they had not only wandered in from elsewhere but were also, in fact, on their way to another destination. Hence they did not belong in their town, even though they were the majority of its citizens. 12Agnon left Buczacz in 1908 and settled down in Jaffa. David Ben Gurion, the founding father of modern Israel, came to Jaffa two years earlier. He did not stay there but moved right away to Petah Tikva, which was populated by Jews. He did not like Jaffa because he thought there were too many Arabs there. Reportedly, he always thought that it should be torn down. 13 Agnon wrote some of his early stories there and describes it with much more compassion and eventual nostalgia. Unlike his fellow townsfolk, who served as grist to his literary mill for many years thereafter, he continued on that mythical journey to the East and reached their original destination. But like Ben Gurion, for Agnon the Land of Israel was a place of origins in the sense that it was naturally and indisputably his to settle in (although he ended up later living many years in Germany). He eventually built himself a house in Jerusalem and lived in that city for the rest of his life. He was never troubled by the relationship to that land. In this mythical tale of origins, which he never told, he had come home and was part and parcel of the great return of the Jewish people to their homeland. In his writing, however, the soul and spirit of Jewish civilization was elsewhere: in Buczacz, Podolia, Galicia, the land in which the Jews had stopped for a rest on the way to their place of origins and where they remained until they were murdered. For Agnon, the extinction of East European Jewry was the assassination of the essence of Jewish existence.The Jaffa in which Agnon lived in his early years, and the Jerusalem in which he spent the rest of his life, were cities filled with Arabs. But for Agnon, with his European clothes and Galician mannerisms, his coming home to Palestine, to the land of the birth of the Jewish people, had nothing to do with the presence of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian townspeople and villagers. The claim of origins here did not need a mythical tale spun by an author—it was in the Bible and the myriad texts and prayers, poems, and lamentations that followed it. It was, essentially, ours. But as that home was built, as modern tenements went up and cities sprouted, that other population was pushed out ever more to the margins of awareness and existence. The Jews in Pales-tine imagined themselves as the majority even though they were a minority, just as the Jews of Buczacz were seen as a minority even though they were the majority. Long before Agnon began building his city—the Buczacz whose Jews had been murdered—other concrete cities were displacing the Arab population that surrounded him in Israel. Within the span of a few years, Jews were no longer the majority or substantial minority in Eastern Europe’s cities; indeed, in most cases they were entirely gone; and almost simultaneously in historical time, the Jews of Palestine were transformed from a minority into a majority: their own population tripled thanks to mass immigration of survivors from Europe and refugees from the Middle East and North Africa, and the Arab population was reduced by three quarters with the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948. 14Yet, traces of that other tale of origins remained, visible to anyone who wished to look, in abandoned villages, untended groves, cactus fences, and neglected cemeteries. These concrete, tactile origins of the land challenged the Jewish story of return home, the home that was said to be indisputably the origin of it all, the very beginning of everything, entirely and absolutely theirs, by covenant with God and through the sword of Joshua. These troubling reminders of another story, of other origins, had to be removed. And so they were demolished, 400 villages pulled down, planted over, and erased from maps and memory. 15 And in Buczacz, in 2001, the last remaining Jewish house, beit hamidrash in which Agnon used to pray as he looked out to the Fedor Hill, where in 1943 half of the Jewish community was murdered and buried in mass graves, was also demolished and replaced by a modern shopping mall. There is now a street in Buczacz called Vulitsa Agnona, where a new plaque and bust of the famous writer stand. It boasts that this little provincial town had produced a Nobel Prize laureate, but it never mentions that he was Jewish and wrote in Hebrew. In this story of origins, Agnon has become Ukrainian, just as Bruno Schulz, the great writer and artist of nearby Drohobycz, was claimed decades after his murder to be a Polish writer by the Poles, an inhabitant of Western Ukraine by Ukrainians, and a Jewish victim of the Holocaust by Yad Vashem. 16To each his origins and oblivion; and yet, even as the cold wind howls over the mass graves and through the skeletons of synagogues in Ukraine, and as the sun burns down upon the scars left by Israeli bulldozers and demolition crews, the scattered sabra fences and broken terraces, the tales and myths, the memories and remnants of the past refuse to go away, each claiming their right to have once existed, to be remembered and respected. For all these tales of origins appear to have always had deep within them the seeds of their own ruin and erasure:I belong there. I have memories. I was born as everyone is born.I have a mother, a house with many windows, brothers, friends, and a prison cellWith a chilly window! I have a wave snatched by seagulls, a panorama of my own.I have a saturated meadow. In the deep horizon of my word, I have a moon,A bird’s sustenance, and an immortal olive tree.I have lived on the land long before swords turned man into prey.I belong there. When heaven mourns for her mother, I return heaven to her mother.And I cry so that a returning cloud might carry my tears.To break the rules, I have learned all the words needed for a trial by blood.I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: Home.17
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