Unsettled Heritage: Living next to Poland's Material Jewish Traces after the Holocaust by Yechiel Weizman (review)

Reviewed by: Unsettled Heritage: Living next to Poland's Material Jewish Traces after the Holocaust by Yechiel Weizman Geneviève Zubrzycki Yechiel Weizman. Unsettled Heritage: Living next to Poland's Material Jewish Traces after the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022. 289 pp. We know quite a bit already about the property stolen from Jews during and after the war; about damaged, neglected, and vandalized Jewish cemeteries throughout Eastern Europe; of synagogues turned into cultural centers, cinemas, or even into swimming pools. Photographs of these sites have come to symbolize the disappearance of Jews and Jewish life in the region, seemingly confirming narratives of declension and absence, that "there are no Jews left there." Nowhere has this trope been more forcefully expressed and poignantly felt than in Poland, where Europe's largest Jewish population lived for centuries and was almost completely annihilated by the Nazis during the Second World War. While decayed remnants of Jewish material culture were left to quasi-oblivion until relatively recently, how could they be "forgotten" in the first place? How could Poland's Jewish past be erased from memory after the war, given the omnipresence of historical markers and material remnants dotting the local and national landscape? How could images of broken maẓevot become a cliché both in Poland and abroad? These are the key questions that animate Yechiel Weizman's Unsettled Heritage: Living next to Poland's Material Jewish Traces after the Holocaust. In this deeply researched and richly illustrated book, Weizman examines why and how traces of Jewish material culture slowly disappeared and were forgotten in postwar Poland. The study is primarily based on archival research of small towns and former shtetlach rather than the better-known and oft-studied sites of Warsaw, Kraków, and other major Polish cities. Weizman convincingly shows that "the persistence of largely abandoned Jewish sites throughout the Polish interior became one of the most urgent municipal concerns of the communist era, and was the main vehicle by which Polish society implicitly and explicitly interacted with its memory of the Jews and their annihilation" (5). Even more impressive than the sheer number of cases Weizman manages to document is his careful revelation of the institutional and cultural work required to erase Jews from Poles' memory. Forgetting, Weizman eloquently shows, does not happen on its own. It is an active process involving many social actors, institutions, and practices. Unsettled Heritage brings all of this arduous discursive, legal, symbolic, and material work to light. A key step in forgetting, Weizman explains, was to hide or transfigure Jewish material sites. Linguistic practices—such as speaking of a "former" synagogue, or the "old" Jewish cemetery—as well as the creation, shortly after the war, of the legal category "abandoned property" to apply to sites and objects without apparent owners, made it possible for municipalities to request the legal transfer of Jewish property to other entities. Speaking of "abandonment" while silencing the reason behind Jewish sites' "ownerlessness" also implied the former owners' lack of care, and the pitiful states of most Jewish sites in turn served to legitimize plans for their appropriation and repurposing, or destruction. At times, the language End Page 256 used to describe Jewish property was more virulent, tapping into old antisemitic discourses about public health and a lack of sanitation that threatened the Polish body. The result was the near total disappearance of Jewish material heritage, hidden, renamed, or built over. Weizman complements that archival research with ethnographic visits to many of the sites he analyzes, adding further nuance through vivid descriptions of encounters he has with current small-town inhabitants. Why, he asks, have locals he meets never been to the overgrown, hidden cemeteries he's looking for, yet know precisely where they are? Where do the modern ghost stories and superstitions involving Jews come from? Weizman views these gaps as revelatory of Poles' nonmemory: while Poles now may not know the (former) Jewish sites in their towns, they nevertheless know of them. And while the available historical knowledge of these sites is often thin, it is sometimes enough for memory activists to attempt to restore the complex Polish Jewish past to full memory. Unsettled Heritage...