שלום...Witam...Hello!
Jeżeli dwóch kłóci się, a jeden ma rzetelnych 55 procent racji, to bardzo dobrze i nie ma co się szarpać. A kto ma 60 procent racji? To ślicznie, to wielkie szczęście i niech Panu Bogu dziękuje! A co by powiedzieć o 75 procent racji? Mądrzy ludzie powiadają, że to bardzo podejrzane. No, a co o 100 procent? Taki, co mówi, że ma 100 procent racji, to paskudny gwałtownik, straszny rabuśnik, największy łajdak.
- STARY ŻYD Z PODKARPACIA
When someone is honestly 55% percent right, that’s very good and there’s no use wrangling. And if someone is 60% right, it’s wonderful, it’s great luck, and let him thank G-d. But what’s to be said about 75% percent right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100% right? Whoever says he’s 100% right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal.
- AN OLD JEW OF GALICIA
As quoted by Czesław Miłosz in “The Captive Mind”
I first came across Miłosz’s Captive Mind in Kraków’s Massolit Books, which, if you haven’t been, is one of Poland’s great English-language bookstores. They’ve also got a Szarlotka to die for. I vividly remember opening the book and seeing the epigraph above on the first page. I was transfixed and read half the book that afternoon and devoured the rest the following day. I was new to Poland. I had never heard of Miłosz and I had little sense of the deep entanglements between Polish and Jewish life over their winding 1,000 year history.
A week earlier over dinner in New York, I explained to my family that I was moving to Warsaw to work as a freelance journalist. Why? Why not. For how long? Until my money runs out. They stared at me blankly until my grandmother, speaking with the license of a woman who knew things I couldn’t, asked, “why go to a cemetery?” I didn't know how to respond and I stayed quiet. This is from her memoirs:
“Then we approached some town, it was probably Crakow in Poland and an hour later I saw a square large chimney from which flames and black smoke came out. The train stopped. I am not sure how long it took to get there. I had lost track of time. We heard German shouting, opening of the doors which made much noise and outside were German soldiers and some men in striped pyjama-like clothes. We had arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau. They started shouting at us in German RAUS! RAUS! and beat us with sticks.”
Nevertheless, I went. I was unsure and perhaps a little terrified of what I might find. I arrived on a Thursday. On Friday, I found Nozyck Synagogue, a building in the center of Warsaw’s old Jewish Ghetto ten minutes from one of the world's richest archives of underground life in the Ghetto. A few weeks later, I discovered the writings of the dissident Adam Michnik, who described Polish-Jewish relations as a paradox: “on occupied Polish soil, a person could be an anti-Semite, a hero of the resistance and a savior of Jews.” I met the Jewish-Polish thinker Konstanty Gebert who told me Poland’s contemporary Jewish revitalization “has little to do with actual Jews in Poland. It’s mainly about the imaginary Jews. It’s not a Polish-Jewish thing, but a Polish-Polish thing, to which Jews are central, but as a part of Poland.” I went to Oswięcim 70 years after the liberation of Auschwitz where I transcribed the words of Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz: “What does God think of this? Where was he when this happened?” A few hours later, I listened to a recitation of El malei rachamim with guard towers stalking in the distance.
On it went like this for over a year until before I knew it, my money had run out. But the knot of Polish-Jewish life, past and present, was starting to untangle. The Jewish history of Poland culminates in a catastrophe that resists description. You won’t go broke betting against reconciliation. All this I knew. But I had also found depth, complexity, and — improbably — life. There were inroads to be made.
Miłosz’ Galician Jew sharply encapsulates, perhaps only in the way that apocryphal Hasidic wisdom can, an entire way of seeing the world. But Captive Mind, a wise, disquieting book about the seduction of intellectual certainty, is not about Polish-Jewish relations. It’s not really about Jews at all. Yet Miłosz clearly saw a link between the skepticism of the Galician Jew and his own philosophical project: things are complicated, things are messy, and those who promise neat, unthinking simplicity are never to be trusted. This resonance is what moved me that day in Massolit; it’s what kept me fascinated with Poland long after I’d left, and it’s the reason I’m writing this to you now.
Bałagan, or בלגן, means “chaos” or “mess”. It has nearly identical definitions in Polish and Hebrew. The word is likely rooted in old Turkic or Persian and found its way into Russian and, by extension, into the Yiddish-speaking Jewish communities of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. As a testament to the proximity between Polish and Jewish life and their porous linguistic borders, Bałagan eventually hopped the shtetl walls and became a common Polish word. Finally, around the turn of the century, it arrived in Israel during the First Aliyah when many immigrants from the Pale of Settlement, including Eliezer Ben Yehuda, the father of Modern Hebrew, settled in Mandatory Palestine. Yehuda, a Russian, was born in the empire’s Vilna Governorate, part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth only a century earlier.
There is an elegant harmony between the etymological history of bałagan and its meaning. It’s confusing, niejaśny, לא ברור. This messiness is, to me, the essence of Polish-Jewish history and this project. To provide a neat narrative of Polish-Jewish relations is to fall into the trap the Old Jew of Galicia — and Miłosz — warn us of.
Such complexity also serves as a surprising point of contact: if a Pole were to say "bałagan” to an Israeli, the two would briefly, intuitively, understand each other. That such a moment of clarity is based upon the word for chaos is both poetic and funny. The historical, political, and social entanglements between Poles and Jews are inescapable, but they do not have to be incomprehensible.
For over a millennium, Polish and Jewish life was defined by uneasy but durable coexistence. After the Shoah and the destruction of European Jewry, this relationship was shattered. Today, Poles and Jews are separated more than ever before by space, language and historical consciousness. From a diplomatic perspective, Polish-Jewish relations are at a critical low point. Yet, despite this distance, they remain both fascinated and unsettled by each other. As these diplomatic rifts between Poland and Israel show, Polish-Jewish relations are not a dynamic of the past but a rapidly evolving one that demands our attention in the present.
Bałagan will be a public forum for independent coverage and analysis of Polish-Jewish relations. In structure and spirit, Bałagan will serve as an open space for constructive debate and discussion between two communities that too often speak past each other.
As Poles and Jews increasingly talk about each other rather than with each other, Bałagan seeks to bring these disparate conversations under a tri-lingual roof. To this end, Bałagan will publish in Polish, Hebrew, and English to reach community members, academics, journalists, and policymakers in Poland, Israel, the United States, and beyond. Coverage areas include political analysis, cultural commentary, interviews, book reviews, and argumentative essays from a wide range of voices.
I hope you’ll join me by subscribing for free:
Who Am I?
Balagan is written by me, Gabriel Rom. I’m a freelance journalist based in New York City and New Haven, Connecticut. I spent four years working as a municipal beat reporter in New York City and its suburbs. Before that, I lived in Warsaw, Poland. My work on Eastern Europe has been published by the Los Angeles Times, Jewish News, Poland Today and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. I’m currently studying at Yale University where I’m working towards a masters degree in European and Russian Studies.
Polish and Hebrew translations of this post are forthcoming.