long trip 4 - Vienna

What can I say about Vienna? It was big, rich, ostentatious, under construction. The buildings were newer than Prague's, due to imperial money and rebuilding after bombings. The Euro is bank-account-cripplingly strong, and I've always liked modern art more than classical museums. So I sought, in 2.5 days, to find the people who occupied this large, glossy place, and enjoyed most deeply the market and the coffeehouse.


The Naschmarkt is an enormous market in the city center, full of restaurants, fruit stands, and bustling people. It was here I noticed the city's diversity, people of color in much greater number than mostly homogenous Prague. It seemed cosmopolitan and metropolitan. I tasted hummus and baklava, both out of this world, and marvelled as smells of curry and schnitzel intermingled. It was here, not the old, grandiose buildings, that people lived and fought and joked. It was divine to be in the midst of it, chatting with friends in English and Czech, hearing German and Turkish and the language-free joy of children with chocolate.





For a more traditional Viennese experience, my friends and I went to Cafe Hawelka, a coffeehouse in a grand tradition, with newspapers in half a dozen languages on wooden dowels, affectionately rude waiters,, and sugar cubes. We were surrounded by various eccentrics cutting paper, smoking, having vivid discussions. The walls were papered with a colorful pastiche of posters, cultural events and advertisements, a little charmingly run down. It was great to just relax and talk in a room charged with creative energy of so many years of coffee and conversation.

long trip 3 - Moravia

My lingering tastes of Moravia (the eastern region of Czech Republic) are wine and potato pancakes. In Olmouc, I sat with Czech students and practiced the language over fried cheese stuffed into potato pancakes. They called me "almost a real Czech girl" and I was flattered, digging in with no nonsense into my greasy food, attempting sentences, laughing and enjoying the college town atmosphere, the flush of youth and possibility.
In Mikulov, the potato pancakes were equally plentiful, all of us stuffed in a dark wine cellar, the crystallized sexism of the vinter awkwardly translated to a room of tipsy, angry women. The wine with dinner was nice, but I was too claustrophobic to go in for the tasting. I heard screams at flaming drinks, peals of drunken laughter, and felt the fuzziness of a countryside wedged into a bygone time.

We learned about a painting in art class called In Chlumetsky's Wine Cellar, which was considered revolutionary for its fuzziness, for its emphasis on something mundane, friends meeting for drinks. I felt like I was in such a painting, something lovely especially for its mudaneness. Moravia felt like a place where people lived -- sometimes extraordinary, but often just relishing the oily and the sweet, crude jokes, good food, and good company.

long trip 2 - aushwitz

I experience childlike delight when I see my bed at the hostel -- up a ladder, tucked in an alcove, up by a window looking over a roof and garden. On the roof, beer bottles, snack wrappers, signs of life -- but the window looks a little too small for me, and getting wedged in a window in Oświęcim (the town outlying the ruins of Auschwitz) is not my idea of a good time. But the air is fresh and I feel like a kid. I've always had a treehouse thing, a longing for the adventurous, boyish childhood I avoided inside books, and the experience of ascending a ladder and looking out over the world activates a primal, primate thing in me. It's a weird feeling to have in Oświęcim, a town still fully populated with people and pizza restaurants, but any feeling is weird because all you're supposed to feel is fear and sorrow.



It was a cold, wet day, mud on my boots and gloomy clouds, as though the weather adjusted to the visit (how inappropriate would sunshine and songbirds be!). As we passed through empty barracks, bombed gas chambers, rooms full of hair and children's shoes, all with the visceral narration of a tour guide, I forced myself to feel nothing but clouds and mud. It is impossible otherwise. Every thought, feeling, song that passes through my head is cruel, ironic, wrong, and I choose to feel nothing. I look at things. I shelve them. I supress. Should I prostrate myself in the mud, shouting to G-d about injustice? Should I sing with the Israelis bearing flags and guitars, AM YISRAEL CHAI, a triumphant shout of survival?

I eat soup, later, in the hostel. I am sensitive to the complexity of the taste, the warm salty broth, the texture of noodles, the recollection of the all-purpose Jewish medicine, chicken soup. I feel the warmth restored spoon by spoon, the thawing of a blank body, and by the time I see the room, I'm a kid. I play to reconnect with the self I left on the bus, anything to make looking at a boneyard bearable. I did not experience profound catharsis. I did not weep. I looked and I learned and I struggled to understand. What can a person do next?

Later that evening, we met a survivor, Helena Birenbaum, who lived through the physical denigration of concentration camps and the dissolution of her family. She was an amazing speaker. An old woman well-versed in several languages, with just 36 hours of English instruction, she used her hands and simple evocative words -- a misstep was especially touching: she called her sister-in-law her sister-in-love, then smiled at the mistake. Sister-in-love was closer to the truth. I found my numb muscles and bones further reawakened by her words, drawn as I have always been to a good story, and by the hope in her eyes and hands and words, her extraordinary survival. I listened for 2 hours rapt, caught in the voice, and here I felt the heartpound heartache heartwarmth.

I am amazingly blessed to live at a time when Holocaust survivors still live to tell their stories, stories I will tell my own children, lest anyone ever forget. The boneyard will last forever, those feelings of dull pain and misery and frustration, but life is what is delicate and temporary and beautiful. Meeting Mrs. Birenbaum was a revelation. That night, I climbed the ladder, got in bed, opened the window, and breathed in the clean, clean air.

long trip 1 - krakow

My memory of Krakow, a week since, percolating in my brain, is gray and sweet, funny in a topsy-turvy way. My favorite professor at Smith, Len Berkman, can't speak about Poland without strange gestures and racuous laughter. He speaks of Poland as a liminal space, everywhere and nowhere, where anything can happen. I felt this intense strangeness while there, as though I've been in another dimension. Prague is a realer world, and Krakow requires pixie dust and imagination to be summoned into existence.

We toured with a tall, sarcastic student, who informed us the city was once destroyed by flaming walnuts, and that a trumpet player sits in the clock tower 24 hours a day - 4 men in shifts - playing a regal, clipped tune in four directions several times an hour. The greyness enhanced the mystical feeling, neither light nor dark. The pigeons were comically fat, and we ran into the same old gentleman with a dog in a sweater over and over. A sign on the tram proclaimed you couldn't play the trumpet while riding. I ate rose ice cream.

We encountered a store called "More than a Cookie" - the "more" turned out to be Jesus. The cookie-seller, a pudgy Minnesotan with eyes begging trust a little too much, accosted us with Messianic Jew literature and asked us to raise our hands if we believed in G-d. "You guys are like celebrities to me," he said, gaping at curly hair and Mogen Davids. "The Jews are the Chosen People." As we left, he asked us if we wanted to be buddies with Jesus. We, noshing on cupcakes, politely ran away.

We went to Friday night services in an old Orthodox synagogue dedicated to Rabbi Remuh, and had to sit in the women's section, wood paneled and under construction, broken chandeliers and wobbly benches and droning Hebrew and an adorable baby wearing fluffy bear ears cooing during silent meditation. I always feel alienated by this sort of services, but the dinner at the JCC was awesome. The Prague JCC is under heavy security, and inside is somber, quiet, empty. In contrast, Krakow's JCC was full of light and song, happy people reconnecting to Judaism in a place that was once a terrible ghetto.

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A man stood and spoke in expressive Polish, a tale of surviving the Holocaust, building the synagogue benches, marrying a wonderful Gentile woman, and having lots of beautiful children. The rabbi, a jovial youngish man with a long beard and sparkling eyes behind glasses, preached emphatically about life, the first Torah portion of the year, to be fruitful and multiply. He engaged more song, more stories, more laughter. He reiterated the importance of taking responsibility for where you are.

The Krakow Jews are reclaiming a place, infusing it with music. I got an opportunity to speak, and I spoke about being where you are, a lesson I have been deeply focusing on in my own life. In the story of the burning bush, G-d calls Moses, and Moses says "Hineini -- here I am." And in that room in Krakow, I felt quite profoundly that I was there, in this strange, liminal, fantastic place. It rekindled a wavering dream about maybe become a rabbi someday -- or at least, creatinga table with food, song, people, and learning. That, to me, is Judaism. That, to me, is the sweetness of life.

hello darlings!

My computer and I have been reunited after a break up (the separation was not amicable), just as my camera took its final bow. I am going to attempt to find another one in Praha this weekend (cheap electronics are hard to find here) because next week is our lonnnnng trip to Poland/Vienna/Moravia and you're not gonna wanna miss this.

First of all, let me talk about a subject close to my heart: the theatre.

the happy finale to Czech opera "The Bartered Bride"

Last Thursday we CET-ers went to Narodni Divadlo, the National Theatre, which is, typical to Prague, a cavernous, beautiful building. It was built in the mid to late 19th century and was meant to be a point of intense national pride. I'd say that worked out.

yeah, that's an intensely gorgeous building

We saw a Czech comedic opera called "The Bartered Bride" which included songs about the greatness of beer, lots of romantic subterfuge, a circus scene with acrobats, trapezes, and a guy in a bear costume, and fun songs. We all dressed up in our Sunday best, looked through fancy binoculars, and altogether felt very chic and cultured, as well as having a good time. That picture up there is the big finale; after about 2 hours of VERY FRUSTRATING MISUNDERSTANDINGS, the happy lovers waltz into the sunset. (Fellow student Rebecca and I realized we both have a low threshold for awkwardness, making sitcoms and romantic comedies difficult.)

site of a former church in the empty village

Then came the weekend of Very Sad Things, starting with Lidice, a town that Hitler arbitrarily chose for total destruction - all the men shot, women sent to work camps, and children gassed. Then the SS bombed and levelled every building in the village, making it as though Lidice had never existed. There was something devastating and humbling, but also beautiful about the empty town, which has been replanted with trees (in the glory of autumn), artful monuments, and a rebuilt town not too far from the original site. We spoke to a survivor, who, despite the terror of what she'd been through, maintained humor and energy, and recently celebrated her 60th anniversary with her husband.

a monument to the children

My camera broke two days later in Terezin, the concentration camp, and perhaps it's best that there aren't too many photographs. Every time I took one, it felt...weird, maybe disrespectful. It was a relentless day of tragedy and disgust, and I was extraordinarily depressed, seeing the inhuman conditions and children's paintings captioned with dates of their murders in Auschwitz.

The thing about learning about this stuff is that you can either let it get you so down you don't get back up, or you live your life with more passion than before. I'm writing a paper on children's theatre in Terezin, and I've been reading a lot about this production of the children's opera Brundibar. The title character was played by a vibrant little boy who was, according to all testimonies, brilliant, nuanced, intuitive, and always put a smile on the younger kids' faces. Though everyone was constantly sick and malnourished and supported by understudies, Brundibar was too perfect. He did every performance and struck every audience member with awe. Once he was transferred to Auschwitz, the production stopped.

The survivors who participated in this production report absolute joy, friendship, pride, and hope. Despite the terrifying world they lived in, they were able to band together to make theatre, and it enriched and inspired their lives.

I am blessed to be free to be who I am, to practice any religion I choose, not to be ashamed of my heritage, free to travel and create and spend time with people I love. Life is something to be cherished and never squandered.

the group at Terezin