A Jewish renaissance in Poland

MAARS News ^ | April 7th, 2011 | Jeevan Vasagar and Julian Borger

[Cronos]

Even worse -- how could the Germans believe him? That's one thing that troubles me as a human being. The Germans were the source of a lot of high culture whether in arts, literature, music, philosophy, etc.

how could they fall for this guy? If they could, doesn't that mean that within each of us is a nut lurking?

I think the roots for this lie in a few events -- one is the peace of Westphalia. As part of this, the local lords had utter control of their little state and the state's church. The people who earlier could appeal to the emperor or the church, were now reduced to serfs having one lord as temporal and spiritual ruler. This isn't so bad when the Lord is far away, but when he is right next door and there are so few subjects it gets bad...

Then you have the rise of Prussia -- and this is where the Polish Kings should have crushed and conquered that state in the 1500s as Stańczyk said instead of letting it fester. Prussia was a place where the serfs were like cattle and the Junkers were slave lords

And these people conquered Germany.

BEfore this unifircation the Prussian King also forcibly united the Lutherans and Calvinists into a union church that was just a govt department, so making the people's ties to govt stronger.

With the unification of Germany, Bismarck set out to destroy the power of the Catholic Church, but instead he destroyed the Lutheran, Calvinist and Union Churches instead by pushing his form of secularism and heightened nationalism (worship of the state).

Marx.....the protocols....

And yet in 1932, the Nutzis won 37.8% of the vote -- at least that shows that 62.2% disagreed with them. In 1930 the NSDAP won 18.3% of the vote -- between 30-32 the Great Depression hit its nadir

Of course the Nutzis took Bismarck and the Prussians state control of the churches to the next level creating "German Christianity" denying the entire Jewish basis of Christianity.

this closed the last reasoning for them.

So, the centuries of being told by their rulers what to do had disastrous effects

[Eleutheria5]

Ah, Leon Uris. He writes some good novels, but his facts are usually wrong. Like relying on Shakespeare (not that Uris is that good) for history.

[Eleutheria5]

“how could they fall for this guy? If they could, doesn’t that mean that within each of us is a nut lurking?”

Yes. It does. Precisely.

[Cronos]

Hey, I was 12 or 13 at the time!

but, on a personal note -- where did you say your grandmother was from?

And, are you learning Polish in Israel? I'm learning it here and just moved to the mid-intermediate level and I find it crazy.

Uczę się po polsko na uniwersytecie warszawskim - dwa razy tygodnie. Wczoraj na lekcji uczyliśmy się bezoosobowe czasownik i było ża trudno! Nie rozumiem dlaczego chodzic ma chodzono i bawic ma bawIono!

crazy, and the numerals... aaagh

There's a koleżanka of mine in the class (Szwajcarka) whose learning Yiddish here in Warsaw and there's another (Ukraińka) who's working for the Jewish memorial.

[Eleutheria5]

Studied Polish briefly when I was about 15. My grandmother, from Mizrycz (spelling?), however, became surprisingly furious at me. She wasn’t a survivor, having left Poland in 1927, but I never ever saw her like that before or since. So I dropped it.

She passed away some time ago. Maybe I’ll take up Polish again after I restart and master Arabic, and learn Latin (very fun language, looks easy). Yiddish, I already know, along with Aramaic, Hebrew, and Ancient Greek. I’m friends with so many French speakers, I might just learn surrender-monkese (just joking).

[Cronos]

I speak French, Italian, some Spanish and German and a little Farsi. French is quite beautiful (learnt it while young).

Latin is easy enough as it has strict rules, Polish has way too many :)

[Eleutheria5]

If it’s anything like Ancient Greek, I’ll pass.

[Cronos]

As I don't know ancient Greek, can't comment :)

But the beauty of learning polish is that it opens you up to a world of lovely literature and poems (Sienkiewicz for one author) like Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz

Litwo! Ojczyzno moja! ty jesteś jak zdrowie;

Ile cię trzeba cenić, ten tylko się dowie, Kto cię stracił

[Ludwik Kowalski]

The Polish film “Aftermath” is worth seeing and thinking about. It is fictional, probably based on what really happened in Jedwable. Two Polish brothers (ages about 40) discover evidence that their own deceased parents participated in an atrocity (killing 26 families and appropriating their property). The younger brother thinks it would be better to keep quiet; he is afraid foreign media will use the evidence to darken Poland’s reputation. The older brother feels morally bound to share the discovery with the entire world.

Several days before seeing the film I faced the same dilemma, after finding three racist documents on Polish fora. After some hesitation I translated them and posted them at my university website:

http://pages.csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/racism/racism3.html

I hope that by translating and posting these documents
I am not helping racists to spread the ideology of hatred.

Ludwik Kowalski, Ph.D.

http://csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/life/intro.html