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ABSTRACT
This essay engages performative writing to enact a scene of metonymic remembering in the New Jewish Cemetery, Lublin on the Catholic Feast of Corpus Christi. In 2019, I traveled to Poland to write about empty shoes, metonymy, and Holocaust memory and found myself caught off guard by a destroyed pre-war Jewish cemetery. This essay traces my excessive, defamiliarized remembering as I spun out past metonymy and back again, grappling with remembering in(to) a landscape of emptiness. As it marks both my contemporary remembering and the scene of the cemetery, defamiliarization expands metonymically to encompass the ontology of performance itself.
Acknowledgements
Parts of this essay come from my dissertation work, and a previous version of the full essay was presented at the 2021 National Communication Association annual convention. I am grateful to the NCA anonymous reviewers as well as panel respondent Jake Simmons for their comments on that earlier version of this work. One reviewer in particular helped me to continue thinking about the relationship between the cemetery’s emptiness and my own Catholicism; the essay is better for it. I am grateful to Jake for his continued engagement with this piece in his role as TPQ editor, and to the helpful comments from the anonymous reviewer. I would also like to thank Della Pollock for her generous and generative feedback, and Stacy Bell McQuaide for bringing me to the New Jewish Cemetery, Lublin in 2019.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 See for example Saul Friedlander; Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer.
2 In Majdanek, a portion of this road has been preserved, and a placard notes that it was built using tombstones from the Jewish cemeteries in Lublin.
3 My designation of the “now” and “not now” is a play on Schechner’s discussion of the “me,” the “not me,” and the “not not me” of performance (Between Theater and Anthropology 109–13).
4 Now, after the fact, I can point to the salience of Michael Bowman’s writing about his own tourist experience “searching for Stonewall’s arm,” where a tour around Civil War sites shifted to become a surprise (futile) search for the tombstone marking the resting place of Stonewall Jackson’s arm. Bowman ends his piece by writing that his “distractedness” from his original goal “enabled [him] to map a new relation to the U.S. Civil War, rather than follow the maps [he] had been following [his] whole life” (128). The same will become true of my experience in the cemetery, both in terms of my relation to Holocaust memory, and in terms of my understanding of the relation between performing and remembering.
5 For more information about the wartime and postwar fate of Jewish cemeteries in Poland, as well as restoration and commemoration efforts, see for example James Young; Michael Meng; Yechiel Weizman. For contemporary preservation efforts, see Thorbjorn and ESJF: European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative. For detailed information about the history of the New Jewish Cemetery, Lublin, see Teresa Klimowicz. (This essay is available only in Polish. I rely on a machine translated version from Google.)
6 Lublin native Sara Bass, later Sara Frenkel, was one of only two members of her immediate family to survive the Holocaust. She and her sister obtained false papers that allowed them to work as Polish Catholic laborers in the Volkswagen factory in Germany. She and her husband, a fellow survivor whom she met following the war, ultimately settled in Antwerp. In her memoir of the war, Sara mentions spending a night hiding in the cemetery – “we saw people being shot there,” she remembers (Shen et al. 50–63).
7 Sara Ahmed discusses the “metonymic slide” or the “slide of metonymy” in relation to affective economies (see 119, 131).
8 While some Jewish residents returned to Lublin at the end of the war, most emigrated due to antisemitic violence in the late 1940s; the remainder left Poland during another wave of antisemitism in 1968 (see Krakowski; Kirschner; “Lublin’s Last Jews”). The number of Jewish residents currently registered with the Lublin Jewish community has ranged from 22 in 1999 to approximately 50 in 2009 (“Lublin’s Last Jews”; Kirshner).
9 Klimowicz similarly notes – and photographs – the presence of dog walkers in the New Jewish Cemetery, which suggests that their presence during my visit was not an isolated occurrence (352–53).
10 During the war, an additional 1.5 million Poles were conscripted for forced labor, and hundreds of thousands were displaced to make space for ethnic Germans (“Polish Victims”). Meng notes that the Polish experience during World War II fits a historical self-understanding of “victimization [as] at the very core of what it means to be Polish” (27).
Contemporary debates continue over Polish complicity in the fate of their Jewish neighbors (exemplified by Polish reception of Jan Gross’s Neighbors). In 2018, the Polish government passed – and then “backpedaled” – a law that threatened “criminal penalties” for referring to Poland as complicit in the Holocaust (Santora). In early 2021, two historians were found liable for defamation after writing about a Polish man who betrayed Jewish individuals to the Nazis (Gessen).
But, as noted, there are also ongoing cultural efforts to memorialize or mark Jewish absence in Poland – see Zubrzycki; Betlejewski; Pietrasiewicz (who works specifically in Lublin). Weizman notes that abandoned synagogues and cemeteries are particularly salient in the felt presence of Jewish absence in Poland; while the relationship between Poland and its absent Jewish population remains marked by “enduring ambivalence” – the title of the concluding chapter of Weizman’s book – “preserving and renovating crumbling Jewish sites, mainly cemeteries, has become a mass movement nowadays” (217).
11 In The Psychoses, Lacan draws on Freud to explicitly name displacement as the work of metonymy (221).
12 Unfortunately, the emptiness of the New Jewish Cemetery is not exceptional. While material representation is a common strategy for staging Holocaust memory, it is important to note that haunting absence is also a representational commonplace for Holocaust memory in Poland (see, for example, Clark’s discussion of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka, p. 22). Cole and Zubrzycki discuss this absence in terms of tourist and local memory in Poland. What I am marking here is my own experience, which derived from the site’s destruction as well as my own lack of advance knowledge about what I would find there.
13 Clark asks us to consider the following: “If we were to agree that we have an ethical obligation to use trauma sites commemoratively, then one of the biggest challenges we face is a question of limits. What is our responsibility to violated spaces? Is there an extremity of violence that is not recuperable? What is the level of violence at which it is permissible to reclaim space? After all, we live within a world of violence. Many (possibly even most) places are former battlegrounds or graveyards” (19-20). I bookmark these questions for another time. What draws me to this site, now, is that it is marked as a site of atrocity; its markings simply do not seem to delineate it from the world of the everyday around it.
14 As Clark points out, sites of trauma “tell us how to behave by invoking other spaces for which behavioral norms are established. The most widespread mimicry is of cemeteries, but trauma sites also frequently look like places of worship or museums, all of which imply solemnity and reverence. Trauma memorials also frequently look like parks, which is one of the reasons why the prohibition of park-appropriate behaviour (music, barbeques, pets) needs to be specified through signage” (12). What I experienced at the New Jewish Cemetery was a space where the looks like blurred into “has become” – the trauma memorial has become, for all intents and purposes, a park for some who visit it.
But Clark’s point about the borrowing of appropriate behavior in these spaces also underscores the slippage between my performance of remembering those who were buried in the New Jewish Cemetery and the latent, embodied rememberings of Catholicism that troubled me as I stood in this space and looked at the immaculately kept cemetery across the street.
15 Klimowicz relatedly refers to the New Jewish Cemetery as a “palimpsest of memory.”
16 Weizman draws on the play of presence and absence as a space of possibility for local relations between Poles and their murdered Jewish neighbors by referring to abandoned synagogues and cemeteries as themselves “material metonyms for the lost Jews” through which Polish communities “negotiated their collective past through their daily encounters with the physical traces of their neighbors” (11–12).
17 I am indebted, here, to Craig Gingrich-Philbrook’s reflection on performance as an aesthetic and epistemic enterprise that “troubles the conceptual boundary … that draws a line between an experiment in a laboratory and the published reporting and interpretation of that experiment in an article after a period of reflective evaluation” (304). My performance of remembering in the New Jewish Cemetery, Lublin iterates in writing as a performance of remembering my remembering, the scene and my remembering as they were on Corpus Christi blurring into the again of the scene as it is remembered.