I see that I haven’t written anything here for a couple of weeks after writing furiously for a while. We were in Savannah for several days after the first of April. Spring had come there, sort of, and the effects of Georgia’s terrible drought were beginning to disappear. But the bloom was definitely off the city in more ways than one, though the lines are long at Paula Deen’s and Mrs. Wilkes’ Dining Room. We took a tour billed as the Book Tour, because it was the best way we could see to get to Bonaventure Cemetery, which we wanted to visit.

Savannah has a substantial Jewish population and a synagogue which claims to house the nation’s oldest reform Jewish congregation (a contrary view is expressed here). The imposing gothic revival building, sits ajacent to Monterey Square and backs up to Wesley Monumental Methodist Church (an un-Wesleyan name if ever there was one). Of course, Savannah remembers the Wesleys as visitors to the city in 1736.

Bonaventure Cemetery includes a large Jewish section, where one can see the same class divisions one sees in the Protestant cemetery next door. We also noted that other visitors had often left stones on the graves as reminders of their visits. As we were viewing the grave of Johnny Mercer in the Protestant section, our guide noted a pile of stones on the flat marble monument. She swept them away inperiously with a comment about inappropriateness and ignorance, while leaving a couple of appropriate dead and decayed lilies to decay further. Poor Mercer. When you’re dead, you have no control over what you may become a site for.

This same tour guide told us that there were persons of African descent buried in the Protestant cemetary, but that citizens of Savannah didn’t talk about that. She also repeated what we took for a mantra, since we heard it from three other persons who drove us around. As we passed a public housing development, she told us that bad and dangerous folk lived there and that one shouldn’t go there at night. Savannah has some authentic civic beauty, and it’s central area has unique architectural importance. It’s appropriate that much of the historic district is now owned by the Savannah College of Art and Design. The historic preservation movement, which has saved much of our country’s architectural history from being buried underneath kitsch, has deep roots in Savannah; but the place seems a cultural backwater today.

It’s a backwater in another way too, subsisting on the tourist trade, much of which comprises rowdy youth from area colleges and military establishments, who come to the city to drink and carouse. We may go back to Savannah, but I doubt we will. And there are at least two Savannahs. The city maintains a free shuttle, which we often heard described as “for the tourists.” But its ridership is working class African Americans, as we learned when we rode it all around town one morning and encountered some of the most open and friendly people we met on our visit. We also had lunch that day at a great barbecue joint, the Sweet Leaf Smokery & Eatery. They don’t have a web site, but it might be worth going back to eat there again.

It’s early afternoon on Sunday, June twenty-fourth of this year. I am in Prague walking along a well-kept gravel path down a long wall from the entrance to The New Jewish Cemetery. I find Franz Kafka’s grave just opposite a memorial to his friend, Max Brod, snap a few forbidden pictures hoping that God will forgive me and thinking that some pilgrimage has now ended. Earlier in the day, my beloved and I visited the Old New Synagogue and walked down Maiselova Street where the day before we had struggled through a tour of the other old city synagogues and the Old Jewish Cemetary in a pouring rainstorm that made it difficult to orient oneself geographically.

We were at the end of our tour and had by this time seen a good many things that evoked the memory European Jewry, but neither of us was quite prepared to find that the synagogues of old Prague are mostly museums. The Old New Synagogue is still in use as a house of prayer, but when I asked a docent there how many were in attendance at the Saturday service, she told me apologetically that she didn’t know because she isn’t Jewish. Then she speculated that mostly visitors had attended because the congregation is very small. “There aren’t many Orthodox Jews left in Prague,” she sighed ruefully.

Brooding over these perceptions is the memory
of our visit to Auschwitz, in Poland, almost two weeks before. Here’s the main gate at Auschwitz I, the first part of the camp (formerly an army barracks), with the infamous inscription Arbeit Macht Frei that was used throughout the Nazi system of concentration camps. And here’s a picture of some of our group entering the room where so many were murdered. Inside this bunker-like structure is a large room with openings in the ceiling, used to introduce Zyklon B gas, and a smaller room housing two ovens that were used to burn the bodies. This relatively small facility at Auschwitz I was used before (and after) the killing factory was built at Auschwitz-Birkenau, or Auschwitz II, a few miles away. The Nazis blew up the gas chambers and ovens at Auschsitz II when they abandoned the camp. It’s very hard to be at Auschwitz. Our program director, a lovely polish man named Marek Gajewski, told us that he has special respect for the people who work as guides at the death camps.

Marek’s father had spent time in the Soviet Gulag. He was a concert pianist, so his tormentors broke all his fingers. The most important thing I learned in Eastern Europe, I think, is that the memory of the Nazi terror and the Soviet terror that followed are vivid and contemporary. It is as though they happened only yesterday. I will never forget Marek’s account, as we drove along a now beautiful bridge across the Vistula from Warsaw to Praga, Poland (where much of the film, The Pianist was made), how the Soviet army had watched the almost total destruction of Warsaw by Hitler’s departing forces (when they could have prevented it) and walked into the city to take control afterwards.

Here’s a picture of part of the memorial to the Warsaw Uprising at the end of World War II. It was this uprising that so angered Hitler that he ordered the total destruction of the city. Poles are understandably proud of this event in their history, when a small irregular army of fighters held off the Wehrmacht for some two months, especially since the Soviets would not allow them to celebrate it. It’s now honored not only by this large monument, but by a fine new museum in Warsaw.

Back to Prague. Here’s the Old New Synagogue, completed in 1270 by most accounts. Small as it is, it has a feeling of loftiness and amplitude inside. The entrance now after centuries is well below street level. Its tiny reading desks suggest that it was built for humans much smaller than we moderns are on average. But it’s lovely, simple and clean and cozy, nothing ostentatious, nothing too much. I wasn’t allowed to photograph the interior, but you can see a couple of nice interior shots at Wikipedia and here. I’ve read with some dismay accounts of violent disputes at the Old New Synagogue recently. Though I don’t entirely understand what I read it appears that identity politics is everywhere, even in this venerable place.

It was the law in most of Europe for centuries that synagogues could not be taller than churches. Here, The Church of Our Lady Before Tyn utterly dominates the old town square, its haughty towers a reminder of the fate of Jan Hus and his followers. Last summer the statue of Hus in the center of the square was being
refurbished, so that one saw this wrap instead. The guys in the band here were playing dixieland, not badly either.

Prague is seriously crowded with tourists. This band in the middle of the square was surrounded by a pretty large crowd of folks listening or on their way, as we were, somewhere else.

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Heres a shot of the present-day memorial at Mila 18 in what was once the Warsaw ghetto. Only a single section of wall remains of the Ghetto, itself. The uprising began April 19, 1943 and ended May 16 of the same year.

Here’s the entrance to Warsaw’s only surviving synagogue. It’s sort of hidden behind a Yiddish theater across the street from an imposing church which features a memorial to Pope John Paul II.

Here’s John Paul. Many of the Polish monuments to him feature signs and banners that read ‘Sainthood Now!’ The church seemed to me to be an industry in present-day Poland, much as it was until very recently in Ireland, much as it is in parts of South and Central America, enjoying great political power and broad popular support.

My Impression of Poland was that Poles are religious. Czechs are not, but I think Poles are. I saw multitudes kneeling at Czestochowa, even though we were not there during a season of pilgrimages, and I heard again and again how John Paul had ended the cold war.

Here’s a shot of the interior of the synagogue, the Nozyk Synagogue it’s called. I took this from the balcony (the women’s section). When we first arrived there was nobody in the office who could let us into the main level, but while we were there the rabbi came in and opened the doors for us.

The synagogue balcony also features several panels with photos like this one of old Warwaw at the time the Ghetto was being created. Before the ghetto uprising in 1943, over 300,000 Jews had been deported to Treblinka. There is now a monument at the Umschlagplatz, the site of the railway assembly point from which Jews were transported.

Finally, for now, this picture is a teasure of a kind, a piece of serendipity, true and sad, and something else all at once. I took this on the main level of the synagogue, looking towards a south window. There’s absence in it, perhaps nostalgia for a time that can never come again, or maybe somebody just forgot his hat . . . .

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