A Letter to My Grandmother

« Return to Poland

Dear Bobba, I am in Poland.

I thought it would be a grey, bleak, concrete-block kind of country, but here in Krakow, it is green and lush, with pretty parkways surrounding a large, charming town square. The largest medieval town square in Europe, they say. I never harbored any desire to visit Poland. Although you were born in this country, it is not like we ever had any affiliation to it. Partly because you moved with your family to South Africa when you were still young, building a life in your adopted country. Partly because, Poland is the home of the Holocaust. There were more Jews in Poland before the war than in any other country in Europe. Millions of them, including your family and relatives. Today there are just a handful, and holes in the ground where villages once stood. I understand why you have no love or feeling for this country. You were personally uprooted to a new land, but the branches of your family tree were cleared away in the old one. Maybe that’s why the fields are so green here. No roots, no family trees. Not for us, anyway.

Regardless, it was important for me come digging here. I’ve also been uprooted, from sunny Johannesburg to rainy Vancouver. Every time I meet someone, I can see his or her puzzlement at my accent. Thinking, or asking aloud, it runs a similar course. “England?” “Australia?” “Irish?” “New Zealand?” For some reason, South Africa is always last, if it comes up. It must be something to do with the fact that the country lies literally on the other side of the planet. I know that in my lifetime, this conversation will continue to take place, and while I might be a Canadian citizen, nobody who hears me talk (which everybody knows I do too much) will call me a Canadian. Interesting then, that I struck up a conversation with a guy on the train from Prague to Krakow. He was from Johannesburg too. He asked me where I came from. I thought it was pretty obvious, considering he grew up in Highlands North, just a few suburbs away from myself. He thought I sounded “American-ish”. Funny that, because nobody from North America does. So you can see how roots are suddenly becoming quite important to me. If it is our family’s fate to switch nationalities every second generation, than sooner or later we won’t know where we come from at all. I need to know where I come from to figure out where I’m going. And one quarter of me, your quarter, comes from Poland, and that’s why I am here.

Speaking of quarters, the Jewish Quarter in Prague was a fascinating prelude to Poland. Josefov, or Jewish Town, is now a major tourist attraction in a city that attracts tourists like ants to a castle of marshmallows. Its synagogues survived the war with minor damage, including the 13th century Old-New Synagogue, the oldest in Europe. Some, like the magnificent Spanish Synagogue, were converted into theatres or even warehouses, restored after the war, but mostly after the Velvet Revolution in 1989. As Prague became an international city again, and one of the most beautiful at that, the value of the Jewish ghetto was re-assessed, handed over the small Jewish community that remained, and turned into a living museum. Only three synagogues are actually used for prayer, the rest are museums about Jewish customs, the war, the resistance, the history. I looked at a siddur from the 16th century, and realized it had the same prayers as the ones we use today. It was a powerful moment for me, to see history spelt out like that, to see the legacy that I belong to. I could finally see something of myself extending back hundreds of years.

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