Category Archives: Research Methodology

Finding Family at the Jewish Historical Institute

24 Sunday Sep 2017

Posted by in Archives, Family, Genealogy, Piwko, Research Methodology, Rotblit, Warsaw

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When my cousin Krysia and I first started searching for our Jewish roots, we barely knew where to start. Our Aunt Pat, a genealogist, had shared an impressive record of names, places, and even stories. Obsessive Internet searches yielded limited results–things like a notice in the Canadian Jewish Review from October 1963 that listed my grandmother’s sister Maria Weglinska among the out-of-town guests at Rochelle Pifko’s bat mitzvah in Toronto. Pifko/Piwko was my grandmother and her sister’s maiden name. But how were they related to these Canadian Pifkos?

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Notice in the Canadian Jewish Review on October 18, 1963 about Rochelle Pifko’s bat mitzvah.

How could we push beyond these tidbits? What more could we learn about our family?

Thanks to the Jewish Historical Institute (JHI, Żydowski Instytut Historyczny) in Warsaw we made some breakthroughs that have helped us piece together our family tree. Krysia’s husband Steve stopped in during a business trip to Warsaw and met Anna Przybyszewska-Drozd at the genealogical division of the JHI. She did a preliminary search on JewishGen, and found references to vital records of some of our ancestors. A few months later, Krysia and I went on our first roots trip to Poland. We still had no idea what we were doing so we stopped in at the JHI, meeting with Anna’s associate Aleksandra (Ola) Dybkowska-Grefkowicz who stayed after hours to help us with our search. She prefaced everything with her usual caution, “Don’t be disappointed if you don’t find anything” because so many records were destroyed and most Holocaust deaths were not recorded. Then, she showed us how to make use of the records in JewishGen and the databases of  the Polish National Archives, and suggested other places we could search for records.

I learned enough at that meeting to make some breakthroughs. I discovered my Zurich cousins through the Family Finder database on JewishGen, and shortly after my Israeli cousins through myHeritage.

On successive trips to Warsaw, Anna and Ola helped me learn more about my grandfather Jakob Rotblit. I was speaking with Ola about his automobile dealership in Gdansk when Anna walked in. A look of recognition flashed across her face; she pulled a book off the shelf about Jewish business owners in Gdansk between the World Wars. Sure enough, Jakob Rotblit was listed with information about his Ford dealership and with details about his wife and his parents. Another time, I mentioned that my mother and grandmother are on the list of Jewish survivors who registered after World War II ended. With a satisfied smile, Ola told me that the original registration cards are in the JHI archive. I walked upstairs to the archive and was able to hold those cards in my hand. The archivist showed me how the earliest records, from 1945, were handwritten on the backs of cut up prewar accounting records. Paper was scarce, so they used what they could find. By 1946, information was filled in on larger, pre-printed cards made especially for this purpose.

Once again, just a few months ago, the genealogical division helped me with my search. Anna e-mailed me that a woman, Ellen, had contacted her to find out about her Piwko ancestors. Anna thought we were related and asked if she could share my contact information with her. Of course I agreed, and since then Ellen and I have been in ongoing communication. She is an avid genealogist who turns out to be my 3rd cousin. Her great grandfather was my great grandfather Hiel Majer Piwko’s younger brother Urish. I knew nothing about him, maybe in part because he moved to Canada in the 1880s.

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3rd Cousins in Krakow, Poland in June 2017

Ellen and I had the extraordinary good fortune to be in Poland at the same time this June. She was on a once in a lifetime Jewish history tour of Eastern Europe with Professor Stephen Berk. Although I didn’t know anything about her or her great grandfather, I had an inkling about her branch of the family from that notice I found years ago about my Auntie Nunia’s (Maria Weglinska) visit to Toronto in 1963. Rochelle Pifko, the girl whose bat mitzvah she attended, was Ellen’s cousin and another descendent of Urish. So another mystery is solved. Some contact was maintained between my great aunt and her uncle who migrated to Canada shortly after she was born. And when Nunia/Maria came to the US in the 1950s, she renewed that connection and even visited. Ellen remembers when Nunia came to Canada some years later for another family event.

Anthropology, objectivity, and activism. Processing the field research experience.

19 Friday Aug 2016

Posted by in Anthropology, Fieldwork, Research Methodology, World War II

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Interesting reflections by my student Mirjam Holleman about ethics and anthropology. Is there a place for activist ethnography? This is something I’m grappling with in my own research.

Constructing Cultural Models of (Dis)ability and Society

There is this image of an anthropologists as a detached observer, who doesn’t let his or her own ideals or visions of how society should function or ethical views of how people ought to treat each other guide her research.  But sometimes it’s hard not to care.  Pressing issues of social justice challenge the border between scientific  disengagement and ethical activism, and “open up important possibilities for rethinking what anthropology is and does, and what contributions it can make to global activism concerning social justice “ (Merry 2005: 241).

While I was in the field, I was working, I was a researcher, and I didn’t feel personally affected by the things I was observing or hearing.  I was (and still am) supper thankful that my ‘informants,’ the people I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with, didn’t treat me with kid gloves. They spoke to me quite candidly about their, or their…

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Council for European Studies Conference

15 Friday Apr 2016

Posted by in antisemitism, Brześć Kujawski, Commemoration, Family, Fieldwork, Heritage work, Jewish Culture, Kolski, Memory, Piwko, Poland, Polish Culture, Polish-Jewish Heritage, Polish-Jewish relations, Research Methodology, Włocławek

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Yesterday, I presented a paper titled, “Reassembling Jewish Life in Poland.” It starts like this:

It is easy to get the impression that we have entered an era of retrenchment of exclusionary national, ethnic, and religious categories, making minorities of any kind suspect. Specific objects of fear, such as terrorists, raise suspicions about broader categories, such as Muslims; the economic threat attributed to immigrants extends to all Mexicans, Syrians, North Africans, or Eastern Europeans. And Jews have once again become the object of attacks in Western Europe, leading Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg (2015) to title his recent cover article, “Is it Time for the Jews to Leave Europe?” In the current climate of exclusionary politics, the quiet emergence in Poland of efforts to embrace the long history of Jewish residence is all the more striking. Recent studies have “revisited” Jewish Poland (Lehrer 2013) and documented the “return of the Jew” (Reszke 2013), challenging the common assumption that antisemitism rests at the heart of what it means to be Polish. I have been studying contemporary memory projects, including commemorative sites, museums, and cultural festivals that endeavor to reassemble the remaining fragments that provide a window into what Jewish life (and its destruction) was like in Poland. These fragments can reveal something about the past, even if it is just in an incomplete and shattered form. Perhaps of greater significance, they can point toward the future—the possibilities for reengaging with ethnic and religious categories in ways that acknowledge difference without encouraging exclusion. 

Placing a lantern at the opening of the Lapidarium in Wronki
The Atlantic, April 2015

The figure of the Jew remains a multivalent symbol in Poland, even after the destruction of Jewish culture during the Holocaust and further erasure of its traces during state socialism. My research on Jewish heritage asks what can be done with the fragments of Jewish culture that remain, sometimes hidden and sometimes in plain sight. And what value does such memory work have? It might appear that too little is left, or that any attempt to piece together fragments will just expose more horror, trauma, and death. Nevertheless, the steady growth of interest in Jewish culture in Poland can be seen in major projects like Warsaw’s Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, and in much quieter ways in smaller communities throughout the country. Even President Duda, whose Law and Justice Party tends to support nationalism and exclusionary practices, recently spoke against antisemitism at the opening of the Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jews. To set the stage for my reflections about reassembled fragments of Jewish culture, I first situate Jews within the disrupted history of Poland, and discuss the consequences of postwar trauma under state socialism. This is also a first attempt at integrating an ethnographic approach to the topic, through exploration of commemorative sites and practices, and a more personal one, in the form of interwoven stories about my own Jewish-Polish heritage. Building on concepts of postmemory (Hirsch) and absence of memory (Irwin-Zarecka), I consider what reassembly projects promise for the reconciliation of Polish-Jewish relations on both social and personal levels.

I focused on Włocławek for my case material: Places embodying the “absence of memory” such as the swimming pool in the Jewish cemetery in Brześć Kujawski, the crumbling buildings formerly owned by Jews in the center of Włocławek, and the monument to the Jewish ghetto in the schoolyard that used to be the Jewish cemetery. I discussed what such places communicate about the history of Jewish life (and death) in Poland, as well as the personal, emotional resonances of such places.

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Pre-World War II facade on Tumska Street, Włocławek

Then, I contrasted the impression left by the the Facebook page, “Włocławska Zapomniana Ulica (Forgotten Street of Włocławek),” in which students and teachers at the Automotive High School in Włocławek document “Places of the Holocaust close to us.” The site features historic photographs, brief histories, and excerpts from interviews with local historians and residents who remember the Nazi occupation of the city. This is heavy stuff, and yet the project reflects a different orientation toward the past than do the crumbling buildings on abandoned streets and the swimming pool in a burial ground. It is a public display of intangible heritage, a space for documenting the murder and destruction that occurred during the Holocaust in very personal, localized terms. The Facebook page announces, “These events happened here, on our streets.” It is all the more notable because the primary organizers and audience in this project are young people, probably in most cases the post-postmemory generation that was supposed to be too distant from events to feel any personal connection to them.

And the story doesn’t stop here. I am looking forward to visiting the high school students and their teachers in June. And now my cousins are also interested in the project and maybe even getting involved with it somehow. The ethnographic and personal strands of my work continue to become more strongly intertwined.

 

Memory in Fragments: the talk at UA

31 Thursday Dec 2015

Posted by in Brześć Kujawski, Buk, Cemeteries, Family, Heritage work, Israel, Jewish Culture, Lutowiska, Memory, Poland, Polish Culture, Polish-Jewish Heritage, Polish-Jewish relations, Post-World War II, Poznan, Pre-World War II, Research Methodology, Skierniewice, Synagogues, World War II, Wronki, Włocławek

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The lecture I gave at UA September 3, 2015 about my research during my Fulbright Fellowship is now available on vimeo. I’ve never seen myself lecture before. It’s a little unsettling. Still, here it is, flaws and all (for instance I know that Poland entered the European Union in 2004, even though I misspoke here).

I talk a little about the Fulbright Program–the kinds of grants available and some tips for applying.

It’s also a good introduction to my ideas about reassembling Jewish life: the strands that I’m following, what has been lost, what can be recovered, and how memory projects at sites throughout Poland intertwine with my own search for my family history. I hear echoes of some of the scholars I’ve read–Iwona Irwin Zarecka and Marianne Hirsch, as well as my sometime collaborator Malgosia Wosińska. There is no way to bring back what has been lost, but fragments of the past can be reassembled to form a new kind of life that allows for connection with what used to be and what yet might be.

Jewish heritage in Poland: Remembered pasts and imagined futures

17 Friday Apr 2015

Posted by in Anthropology, Heritage work, Memory, Polish-Jewish Heritage, Research Methodology

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Here is a brief summary of my research project in Poland:

My research on Jewish heritage asks what can be done with the fragments of Jewish culture that remain in Poland, sometimes hidden and sometimes in plain sight? And what value does such memory work have? It might appear that too little is left, or that any attempt to piece together fragments will just expose more horror, trauma, and death. After all, Poland’s numerous and diverse Jewish communities were destroyed in the Holocaust. The few survivors who returned after World War II were made to feel unwelcome by inhospitable neighbors and a political regime that demonized them. By 1968, nearly no Jews were left in Poland. A collective amnesia erased most remaining traces of Poland’s Jews. Physical reminders were torn down or repurposed, and even memories were pushed out of consciousness or silenced. Can anything be gained by revisiting all that has been lost?

I explore these questions on two levels. First, on the social level, I focus on what is actually being done with physical traces of Jewish culture. I have visited Jewish cemeteries and synagogues, including the places where no marker is left of their location. I have also gone to places where active memory work is being done, including commemorative monuments and websites. I have viewed museums and archives where some materials and records are collected. I have talked with curators, artists, historians, and others who engage with the objects of Jewish memory in various ways. From these explorations, it is clear that the silence surrounding Jewish culture in Poland has been challenged at least since the Solidarity period at the beginning of the 1980s, when rediscovering Poland’s historical ethnic and religious diversity was a way of protesting state socialist nationalism which limited all kinds of expressions of difference and freedom. The steady growth of interest in Jewish culture in Poland has been manifested most recently in major projects like Warsaw’s new Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, but also in much quieter ways in smaller communities all over Poland. I use ethnographic methods to examine the ways contemporary memory projects piece together the fragments of Jewish memory. If you know where to look, fragments of Jewish lives (and deaths) can be found even where whole Jewish communities and their most visible elements like synagogues and cemeteries have been destroyed. These fragments can reveal something about the past, even if it is just in an incomplete and shattered form. And they can point toward the future—the possibilities that might emerge out of traces of memory.

Second, I explore the fragments of Jewish culture on the personal level. Central to this is the archeology of my own hidden Jewish ancestry. I have dug up secret family photographs, pieced together the memories of living relatives, sifted through numerous archives and online records, and finally I discovered extended family I never knew I had—in Israel, the United States, and Europe. But not in Poland, where only scattered hints of my ancestors’ lives remain. In addition to tracing my own family history, I have been gathering the flashes of memory held by witnesses (and others who like me are witnesses of witnesses), as well as the efforts of contemporary Jews to revive the practice of Jewish culture and religion in Poland.

Three Minutes in Poland

17 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by in Jewish Culture, Memory, Pre-World War II, Research Methodology

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Glenn Kurtz’s book Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film (2014) recounts a project similar to my own, of piecing together fragments. Kurtz’s journey began with a film recorded during his grandparent’s visit to his grandfather’s native town in Poland. Seeing the places and faces on film inspired him to learn all he could about the town and its prewar inhabitants—what life was like in Nasielsk, how it was disrupted by World War II, the fate of those who perished, and what became of those who survived. It’s a fascinating story of discovery, tacking between information revealed in archival records and the stories recounted by survivors and their families. He makes use of the same archival resources I’ve been using—JewishGen, Ancestry.com, Yad Vashem, Warsaw Database, ship manifests of passengers, archival photographs. And extraordinarily, out of these fragments, he was able to find some of the people in the three-minute film, or find people who remembered them and could tell some of their story.

These stories bring the fragments, and the town, back alive. Still partial, still shadowy, but alive. I see this particularly in the words of Morry Chandler (Moszek Tuchendler), whom Kurtz found in Florida with his wife, children, and grandchildren. He appears momentarily in Kurtz’s grandfather’s film jumping out and smiling in front of the camera. For Morry, looking at himself and his town on film, and recalling the people he lived with in Nasielsk reminded him he ever had a childhood, and that he was happy:

It’s looking back and saying, Yes, there was a world. Other than what we have lived all these years, knowing what happened. It was a real world there. I mean people were going about their business. Kids were running, and doing all the things that kids do. And here I look at myself, and I see it was a happy face.

The book models two guidelines for my fieldwork: first, how to weave together fragments into a coherent story, integrating as well the gaps and inconsistencies that remain. Information is labeled along a scale of likelihood; the probable, the possible, and the still unknown outnumber what can be unambiguously confirmed. The book also provides a model for working with personal accounts. It corroborates Greenspan’s argument for ongoing contact with survivors, which provides the space for new stories to be recounted, for the revision or elaboration of past accounts, and for interviewers to ask questions that lead to new explanations and deeper insight into survivors’ experiences. (See Henry Greenspan’s “The Unsaid, the Incommunicable, the Unbearable, and the Irretrievable,” Oral History Review 2014, Vol 41, No. 2, pp. 229–243).

Kurtz writes, “Memories, like artifacts, are tightly wound bundles of information. Pull one thread, try to identify one figure, and the whole bundle unfurls.”