The memory of ordinary, everyday intercultural or interreligious relationships, in brief
Before 1941, Brańsk’s population was a vibrant mix of Polish Catholics, Yiddish-speaking Jews and Belarusian Orthodox Christians. Though political conditions often pressed hard on the relationships across these communities, the memory of a range of social and intercultural connections – brought to an end by the Nazi Holocaust has been shared with an international readership in the 1997 book by Eva Hoffman, Shtetl. During the interwar period, children played with each other, and many of the townspeople and residents from surrounding villages developed longstanding relationships through meeting at the market and in other social and political contexts. Hoffman’s book shows how friendships developed between girls at school, and – through work and through socialising – between curious individuals and families who learnt each other’s languages, music, and cultural lore. Difference also coexisted with the opportunity to share culture: children performed in orchestras together, at Jewish and Christian events, and Christians are remembered to have attended the cantorial concerts put on within the Jewish community during this interwar period.
The context in which these relationships made a difference at the time
Across a succession of historical periods, the residents of Brańsk have been pressed into reconfiguring their inter-relationships, by political pressures as Brańsk passed from the control of one regime to the next, and by economic conditions, as waves of change meant pressure on employment and on living standards. Because Brańsk has repeatedly been at the margins of the territories ruled by successive governments – Polish-Lithuanian, Prussian, Russian, Polish, Soviet, and again Polish – its citizens have often (not always) had some freedom to create a multicultural accommodation where tensions and norms creating separation were greater at the centre of a political territory. Hoffman’s book shows how Catholics and Jews could come together through a patchwork of economic and cultural organisations, highlighting in particular the role played by the Firemen’s Association, which was the organisation in which she found they most freely collaborated (not taking into account the relationships within business contexts, in which relationships could be more hierarchical) – in 1928, its orchestra also played the Polish national anthem and HaTikvah, the anthem of the Zionist movement, at the celebration of the Jewish New Year of the town’s Craftsmen’s guild. With the onset of antisemitic intolerance in the second half of the 1930s, local Christian residents were reported to remain loyal customers of Jewish shops and market stalls – against pressure from extremists who reportedly came mostly from outside the town and the villages of its surrounding region. With the Nazi invasion, Jews were enclosed in a ghetto – but some were saved by courageous families, and a range of other Christians continued to support the town’s Jews, or to continue to trade with them where there was scope.
What has happened since, which makes the memory valuable
The town’s Jewish population was wiped out by the Holocaust. Conflict narratives pitting Christians or Poles against Jews make the stories of the town’s multicultural relationships seem difficult to hold up as normal, or as significant at a social or a historical level. In the decades after 1945, some individuals corresponded and even visited each other, and eventually a set of 14 families who hid Jews were recognised as Righteous Gentiles by Yad Vashem. Alongside the civic elements which have sought to commemorate the place of the Jewish community in the town’s life, there has also been pressure which Hoffman describes as creating a forgetfulness. She discusses the challenges of talking about those memories as decades of Communism and the subsequent challenges of the post-Communist period make talking about social solidarities across difference more difficult, unfamiliar, politically charged, or the subject of prejudices. Hoffman underlines the value of understanding how Polish multiculturalism worked in a small town like Brańsk – arguing, too, that there are parallels in many other locations in other parts of Poland, where conditions were historically different in many ways, and internationally, where the complexities of local multiculturalism are often just as difficult to uncover, let alone to address in public.
How might the memory be used in bringing people together in practice now?
The Memory Bank was created in the hope that individuals and groups would find inspiration for new acts of solidarity and understanding through exactly such rich and complex cases as this town’s historically multicultural and interreligious relationships. The Memory Bank team call on anyone with an interest to suggest ways in which the memories can be made practically relevant and/or educational. In Brańsk, there were many practical respects in which ordinary, everyday multicultural relationships made a difference to Brańsk residents in the past, and across in Poland today, they can do so again, not least thinking of the large Ukrainian population which will now begin to integrate here. The political uses of narratives of conflict and grievance today make stories of ordinary people’s mutual tolerance and curiosity a valuable resource: as Eva Hoffman puts it, the instinct for tolerance is as basic as any instinct for prejudice. The historical record in Brańsk also provides some examples of multicultural relationships which made a difference in the building of civil society and in the provision of inclusive services – the celebrated example of the Firemen’s Association, for instance; the shared schooling and the range of mutually-crucial commercial activities which long sustained the town and its region in trade and employment.
Additional context/Some additional reading
Eva Hoffman, Shtetl: The History of a Small Town and an Extinguished World, 1997, provides information about the political contexts in which Catholic-Jewish relations changed over time, as well as many insightful reflections on the ways in which relationships developed, the ways in which they were understood at the time, and the nuances in the emotionally and politically difficult construction of memories of these relationships after the fact.
The book Shtetl was written in response to the filming of a PBS documentary, Shtetl: Frontline, in 1996, which may be seen here: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shtetl/Excerpts from Hoffman’s book may also be read at the website.