Berlin, Warsaw, and Krakow, part 4 - the Jewish quarter

The Jews had a long history in Krakow. They came in 1380-ish and through the early modern period they had a small area with a synagogue and a wall around it. After a couple of hundred years the wall came down and they were allowed to expand their area. Gradually they acquired more synagogues and more businesses and graveyards.

Then the Nazis... In Krakow the Jews amounted to up to 25% of the citizens! according to the museum in one of the old synagogues. This means that they had deep roots here and considered themselves Polish, and contributed to political and military life. They weren't in danger until the Nazis occupied ... and then the Poles seemed to have been "enforcers" of the Nazi rules... You need to come and see the old pictures and photographs to see how strange it was. It was the same in the Czech Republic. For example, Franz Kafka was a Jew and he lived a very integrated life in Prague, utterly unremarkable. Had he lived any longer, the Nazis would have murdered him and his family nevertheless.

When Spielberg wanted to film the story that became Schindler's List, he came to the original Jewish quarter, which was run down. Well, it isn't now. After the famous film, with its final captions saying that fewer than 400 Jews live in Poland today, Jews came back to Krakow, to start again in the Jewish Quarter. Some came from Israel. Hebrew is spoken here (I heard a waiter). I don't know what the Poles think about the Jews coming back. It is bizarre that this tragic area should be a magnet to tourists. But in the evenings the restaurants put on Klezmer bands,  and the music gives the place atmosphere. They do great trade. Our room is three floors up from a restaurant in this quarter. The tree outside our room is a willow, blowing in the breeze. Cars and mini-buses are parked down there on the cobbles. Tours come to visit the memorial to the Jewish community. Tourists come in little private taxis, like milk floats.

Outside the violinist and a cellist are playing "if I were a rich man". They vary the speed of the verses. I can hear the sound of cutlery on plates. A little tiny bit of applause for the musicians. Earlier they played the theme from "Schindler" and it was beautiful, but got no applause. None for "Air on a G string" either. The musicians have a very large repertoire and are very talented - I hope the restaurant owners pay them well.

One night we heard the theme from Schindler's List 4 times.

Schindler's factory building survives, and is a tourist attraction - a long queue for it. We nearly went  - then decided to go to the art gallery next door, because it is weird to go on holiday and visit a site of mass murder as though it was just another thing. "So! That was Auschwitz? Bad! Let's have lunch!" No. These places need more thought, formal clothing, special trips as pilgrims, more respect.

Synagogue

Jewish quarter, morning, synagogue at the end.

Book Club : Austerlitz

Tom, whose choice this was, did not attend the book club, and our numbers were depleted. The Very Annoying Man was at last away on his cruise, which he had been talking about for the previous three meetings. Some of the book club could not understand the book at all, and everybody found it gloomy. But one - new - lady had read an introduction by James Wood, and this had moved her to consider the book more carefully. She asked, in a roundabout way, if Sebald was actually writing for other academics, and whether this is an example of high art, as opposed to commercial art, to which I was able to reply, Yes. The book is a challenge; it makes you work; you don't have to agree with it all; the whole purpose of it is to put the Nazi operation at Theresienstadt into some kind of context and to present those events to an audience, to deny the desire to forget.

I thought of my friend Debbie's Dad, George. He came over from Prague on the kindertransport. He was not in the least like Austerlitz - he seized the day. Right up until his final illness he shopped, cooked, played classical pieces on the piano, listened to cool jazz and played bridge. His great enjoyment was seeing his family tucking into some great casserole he had cooked up. I believe in his professional life he had been a very successful engineer. He had married and had four children, who had travelled far and wide and also been successful in creating good lives for their own children. Georg didn't spend any time being bitter about things in spite of the fact that he had no family left, apart from one cousin in America. The rest  - their names are written on the wall of the memorial synagogue in Prague.

We should really think about this in view of the fact that the UK has been asked to find places for  3,000 unaccompanied child refugees from Syria - and the government has said No!!! I can't believe it. I would take two. I wonder if there is a petition I can sign.

Oh I forgot to say: we voted on the book and gave it 5 out of 10; so much for high art! I gave it a higher score as it was, at least, interesting.

Maus, a survivor's tale by Art Spiegelman

I re-read this work which I first read I think in 1989. It's brilliant. It tells one Jew's story of being deprived of his comfortable life in Poland, fighting the Germans, being rounded up into a ghetto, people being taken away batch by batch, hiding away from the Nazis in desperately cramped conditions and finally being betrayed and taken to Auschwitz. It tells a terrible tale of loss.It also tells the tale of a son who finds his old father very irritating and irrational, especially in his fixation with money, but from the story of the father's traumatic experiences we find out how much, in the end, money does really matter. It bought them time.

All the Jews are drawn as mice, and yet... we understand their emotions from their body language. We also understand from the drawings who are the virile young mice and who are the elderly.

"a remarkable work, awesome in its conception and execution ... at one and the same time a novel, a documentary, a memoir and a comic book. Brilliant, just brilliant." 

Jules Feiffer 

 From the Guardian: 11th June 2009

Art Spiegelman has found it difficult to produce another long-length work since Maus.

Spiegelman, 61, looks just as he draws himself - a waistcoat, a constant cigarette; he is self-mockingly neurotic but infinitely wise, still carrying the heavy burden of guilt that plagues survivors' children. His vast career has ranged from the grotesque Garbage Pail Kids, to In the Shadow of No Towers, his comic-strip journal about September 11, and last year's reissue of Breakdowns, a graphic memoir described as "the Citizen Kane of modern comics".

Despite the awful details of his life, Spiegelman's confessional style makes his works almost impossible to put down. His parents were forced into the Polish ghettos in 1941, reluctantly handing their eldest son - Spiegelman's brother - over to relatives to hide him. The little boy was poisoned to death by his aunt during a Nazi raid; she thought it better than letting him go to the camps, and killed herself, too. His grief-stricken parents ended up in Auschwitz, which they survived. Spiegelman was born after the war and raised in New York, an only child with a "ghost brother". His father was brutalised and damaged; his mother took her own life when Spiegelman was 20 and didn't leave a note. All this is laid bare in his work. To him, Maus, published in 1986 and 1992, was, "as a blues musician would say, my crossover hit"; but he sees all his work on a continuum, "made from the same fractured psyche".

..What he calls his "efficiently casual" drawings in Maus took 20 to 30 drafts. He is so paralysed by the pressure of creating the perfect sketchbook that he prefers to draw while on the phone, on Post-It notes or envelopes, which he usually throws away. If he is drawing on a newspaper scrap, it is easier to shut down the left side of the brain, so the right side is free to move around; he won't know what the drawing is until it is finished.

Spiegelman tells me this in a stream of rapid-fire, Woody Allen-style self-deprecation as we walk down a Paris street. "I have too much respect for books, so to make a mark in a blank one seems like a violation," he says. "Then the neurosis compounds itself, because if you make a good drawing, you don't want to screw the book up by making a bad drawing after. So I have a lot of sketchbooks that have one drawing in them - a whole shelf full. And then if you make a bad drawing, you never want to look at the book again. So I have a lot of sketchbooks that have one page torn out that I never went back to. It's very rare that I can just get myself engaged and overcome all these strange inhibitions I've set up for myself." Still, he loves these drawings for their quality as "electrocardiograms, recording thought very directly". Publishing the sketchbooks has been liberating, he says. "When you've been revealed in all your pathetic nakedness, there's nothing else to lose. So yes, finally therapy that worked!"

... This was an experiment in forcing himself to sit down every day and draw in a sketchbook in 2007. The self-analytical sketches include bloodstained "finished" drawings on a battlefield. "It was a kind of, 'What's your problem, Jack?'" he says. "And what the problem has tended to be over many years now is that ever since Maus resulted in this bright Klieg light always aimed in my direction, which has its benefits, it has also created this discomforting sense of always being observed, as if I had little eyeballs sitting on my shoulder with arms and legs, and all the eyeballs are saying, 'Oh look, look, he made a line!' That's not the best way to make lines." Will he ever escape the shadow of Maus? "It's even worse than that," he says, lighting a cigarette. "Most other cartoonists are afraid of the same thing." He means that every graphic novel is compared to Maus. "As a result, it's sort of a curse on me and all other cartoonists I know."
...
Spiegelman worries that this makes him sound like one of his drawings ("megalomaniac with an inferiority complex"), but he hates critics using Maus as a measuring stick for new work. "The thing is, Maus was not made to teach anybody except me anything. I knew I had a story worth telling. But it wasn't like, 'I know, I'll take the heaviest subject I know and turn it into a comic - that'll show the bastards.'" His aim was to "build the damn thing to last", by making a well-structured comic. Now, he feels, structure has been eclipsed by subject matter. "On the other," he says, "I realise I'm very fortunate. Maus has given me a licence to kill. I can even publish my sketchbooks."

Spiegelman, who prefers the spelling "comix" (a nod to the underground comics movement he emerged from), remains the champion defender of the form. His third sketchbook in this collection, Nose, was made when he and his wife, the French art editor Françoise Mouly, ran the 1980s comix magazine Raw, when comics were at their nadir of respectability. The underground comics explosion of the 1960s and 70s had come to an end, and even mainstream comic books were dying off. Spiegelman argued that when a mass medium, such as the comic, stops being so, "it either has to become art or die". He is currently compiling a vast anthology of American children's comic book literature from 1938 and 1961; this has meant unearthing the comics put on bonfires in the 1950s "when comics were the Grand Theft Auto of their moment", seen as causing delinquency.

With Maus, Spiegelman says he wanted to make "a long comic book that needed a bookmark and would have the density I associate with novels"; but he never used the term graphic novel. "I kind of like the unsavoury roots of the form," he says. "It's not like I want it all dressed up in a tuxedo so it can be in public. Comics are the hunch-backed dwarves of the arts and they should be proud of the fact." Recently, he was reading Posy Simmonds on a plane and a man said, "Oh I've heard of that graphic novel, is it good?" Spiegelman grins. "Ten years earlier, people would have given me a wide berth: that guy's a moron, he's reading comic books and he's a grown up. So I realise things have changed and as long as you call them graphic novels, it's OK to read them. If that's the case, so be it."

He has just had three sketchbooks published, exquisitely tied up with an elasticated leg band (at least, it was too small for my head). I've never met anybody as painstaking as Spiegelman, nor anyone who has come close to producing a sustained masterpiece like Maus. These sketchbooks may explain why it is so good: he took infinite pains to get it right. It also explains why he has done nothing like it since: he just takes so long to do anything.

...
Drawing comics (as Spiegelman puts it, "make boxes - fill them - cartoonists and undertakers - same business") is one of the most constraining art forms. "By pencilling and inking my comics," writes Spiegelman, "I cover my traces, dressing up my demons before they reach the public. The rehearsed snap of a 'professional' line replaces raw and intimate seismographs of thought." I couldn't have put it better myself. Drawing has to question, to record, to speculate - but above all, it has to breathe, free from the pressure to perform. Whether it's bound in books or not, that's what happens in sketches.