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of the day concerning war and peace, race, dictatorship and democracy were
being discussed in Yiddish. Sojourning in Vilna, she came to love much of it
(though she was not unaware that the Jewish way of life one could still lead
in
the ghetto rested on a rotten foundation). Had she remained in Vilna for
even one more week in September 1939, she might have paid with her life
for having visited the ghetto city, as Halevi paid with his just to behold
Jerusalem. To point out the comparison, let me cite this fact which I take
from the author's text: Napoleon once dubbed Vilna the Jerusalem of
lithuania.
So there is something romantic about this book which some of its re–
viewers missed. This memoir is the story ofa quest, of the author's search
for her real identity, and in a place where people spoke Yiddish all of the
time, not once in a while as her parents had done in New York. And it was in
Vilna that she first began to formulate somewhat vaguely what her field of
study was to be. With hostilities still in the wings, and the Jews of Eastern
Europe still in their homes, shops, and shuls, she was preparing herself to
write the story of their destruction:
The
War Against the
Jews.
With a scholar's knowledge of Eastern Europe's Jewry which I simply
cannot match, and also a scholar's nagging impulse to find faults others have
not seen (a trait I am rather glad I do not have), David G. Roskies, in his
review of the book
(The New Republic,
July 10, 1989), begins by listing the
itinerary "for Jewish travellers in the Polish city ofVilna in 1939." The list,
covering places of historic interest, corresponds rather closely to the very
places in Vilna Dawidowicz took care to see and study, but on the regular
itinerary Roskies has chosen (for some reason or other) to cite, these places
are located in what Max Scheler in a great word called "heartless space"; in
the author's text these same spots are in a very different space, where her
heart sometimes told her she was at last at home.
Certainly she did not fully understand when she visited Vilna why she
had gone there. Roskies has it thus:
A red-diaper baby who precociously lost her faith in Stalin, the young
Dawidowicz was trying to reclaim what little was left of American Yid–
dish culture once its radical politics had been stripped away.
If
she
couldn't believe in the Yiddish revolutionary paradise, the only thing
left was the dream of forging a new, Jewish-language culture on the
foundations of the old.
The banality of this explanation tells us more about Roskies than about
Dawidowicz. And I must note here, that it is perfectly proper to explain a
person's past actions in the light of future deeds, as Merleau-Ponty did with
cezanne, citing the latter's late paintings as the reason for his early oddities of
