Review Once There Was Warsaw by Ber Kutsher, transl. Gerald Marcus

Ber Kutsher’s memoir, Once There Was Warsaw, begins with a fantastic scene from the Muranów neighborhood of Warsaw sometime in 1909. Ber Kutsher summons a reminiscence from the depths of his past: a great celebration held in a park for Di naye velt, a Yiddish-language daily newspaper printed in Warsaw. He paints a scene that’s almost unimaginable today, one in which Jews from around the city enjoy a feast set at buffet tables, children play on swings, and adults delight in confetti and balloons tied with colorful ribbons. A well-known Russian police officer was in attendance as well and while he was typically known for his brutality towards Jews, particularly at the market, on this day, he was calm and even playful at times. A Russian military orchestra provided entertainment for the crowd, stunning the audience when it began to play Yiddish folk music. But this was also a gathering for a Yiddish newspaper and so, when our narrator was planning his attendance, he did so hoping to see several very influential Yiddish writers, including Peretz, Reyzen, Frishman, Sholem Asch, Tsaytlin, Dinezon, Nomberg, Yushzon, etc. As Kutsher wrote in the memoir, “Everyone in place…Everyone in Muranover Park…You have to go. You mustn’t miss an opportunity like this” (2).

Kutsher’s memoir is not just a memoir of his life but a memoir of a city long gone. Written originally in Yiddish in 1955 after Kutsher survived the Holocaust and left Poland, it reads more like a yizkor book than a personal memoir. Yizker-bikher typically recall events, people, and places of Jewish communities from specific towns, often in Eastern Europe, by those that survived. The title of this memoir, then, is apt; the memoir records some significant moments from Kutsher’s life, but it more so memorializes a Jewish Warsaw that was forever destroyed during the Holocaust. For Kutsher, after the Second World War, Warsaw was no more. The goal of this memoir, it seems, is to memorialize prewar Warsaw, like many Holocaust survivors would go on to do for their own towns postwar through yizkor books. Unlike other yizkor books, Kutsher does not attempt to give historical background to the city, paint portraits of specific spaces within it, nor provide detailed accounts of what happened to the Jewish community during the war. Instead, he utilizes his memories, showcased here through his remarkable quill, to demonstrate the character of the city, and the people within it, that he cared for so deeply.

Kutsher’s prose is choppy, filled with short sentences bracketed mostly by snippets of incomplete dialogue. Most writing in this manner leaves much to the reader’s imagination; in Kutsher’s case, it is an essential part of his style. Though there are many blanks in the stories he tells, the images conjured are full. When describing scenes on Warsaw’s streets during the First World War, one can almost hear the tumult at hand. Kutsher quotes individuals on the street selling goods: a man cooking small potatoes on a blackened stove, a boy selling candles for Shabbat, a woman carrying small children while begging for money. In Kutsher’s words, “Life becomes more constricted. Life becomes more difficult. Hardship grows. A huge, thousandfold ‘oy’ hangs in the air” (44). His pen is uniquely skilled at being able to communicate so much through few words.

Reading Once There Was Warsaw is like stepping back in time into prewar Jewish Warsaw, only through the mind of Kutsher, dominated by thoughts and concerns over the world of the Yiddish press. A writer for Yiddish-daily periodical Haynt, Kutsher observed and chronicled everyday life in prewar Warsaw, attempting to expose injustices imposed on the ordinary Jewish workers and artisans. He was skilled at utilizing dialogue to create irony and humor as a means of capturing these injustices, a proficiency that is also deployed throughout his memoir. Certainly, the dialogues captured within this memoir, then, are not remembered precisely, word-for-word from Kutsher’s memory. Instead, his recollections are presented here in the same manner as his art from before the war. Kutsher employed his native language, Yiddish, and the skills he learned from decades as a professional writer to invoke humor when called for, but also irony and despair.

The memoir is divided into nineteen chapters, each devoted to a specific memory or event from Kutsher’s life in Warsaw spanning from around 1909 to 1946. While some of the events covered in the memoir include important moments from the First World War, including the first rumors of its end in the city, or significant moments for Eastern European Jewish history and culture, such as the death of I.L. Peretz, the memoir also portrays of Jewish everyday life in prewar Warsaw. For historians, especially those that work on interwar or early twentieth century Poland, this memoir could serve as a valuable primary source. Though the focus of the memoir is the Jewish literary universe, it also inconspicuously shines light on issues of class, religiosity, and politics in this prewar community. For the literary scholar, this memoir would be invaluable, as Kutsher unveils the everyday, behind-the-scenes world of the prewar Jewish press. Kutsher’s memoir, then, could prove an essential resource for elucidating the aims, methods, practices, and complex social and political atmosphere of the Jewish press in Warsaw before the Second World War.

“Dor holeykh vdor bo – a newspaper dies and a newspaper is born…” wrote Kutsher after congratulating the publishing of the new Orthodox newspaper, Dos yidishe vort, which replaced the paper, Varshever tageblat (64). Throughout the memoir, Kutsher detailed both the public and private moments surrounding Warsaw’s Jewish newspapers, including the establishments and liquidations of various papers, the first Haynt writers’ strike, the “marriage” of two Yiddish newspapers as a solution to financial woes, and when bombs were planted at several Yiddish newspaper editorial offices. These stories are, on the one hand, Kutsher’s personal memories that demonstrate his friendships, goals, and values in various moments across his young life. But they can also be read through an analytical lens. The world of the Jewish press comes alive in Kutsher’s pages, a world he evidently cared greatly for but also one that was unquestionably flawed.

But Kutsher’s memoir also provides incredible insight into how ordinary Jews handled extraordinary moments in history. One example of this comes from Chapter 7: The Three Sisters, when three young women and a soldier arrive to the Haynt editorial office late one evening. Kutsher situates the reader in the moment: “This is not a tranquil time for Jews. Poland just recovered her independence” (89). The presence of a soldier in their office invokes immediate fear in the writers, as a young, undisciplined Polish army has been known to cause Jewish populations much trouble as of late. Their immediate assumptions of the situation were incorrect, however. The soldier is Jewish, as are the young women with him. The soldier had found them disguised as peasants near the Polish border and wanted to help them in some way. So, he brought them to Warsaw. In fact, he took them to a Jewish newspaper so that the writers could share the horrifying atrocities taking place in Ukraine. In the end, the three sisters, who had been orphaned after gangs killed their parents, were sponsored by HIAS to emigrate to America. The inclusion of an entire chapter on the three sisters opens many possibilities for historical inquiry. For one, it demonstrates the very earliest moments of the Polish state and the turbulent end of the First World War, in which violence in Eastern Europe did not end when independence began. In this case, many ordinary people came together to help three, young women in a time of crisis. This story also demonstrates how institutional networks in Warsaw functioned in this period, as the editorial board collaborated with a variety of other institutions to help the young women, including, as just one example, the Jewish community’s Women’s Defense Association. These relationships, while professional, are also fraught — as Kutsher does not fail to note in this chapter — as the arrival of the young women spurs disagreement and hostility among some of the important characters. Finally, Kutsher is also able to perform some compelling editing, as the chapter ends with almost a post-editorial note; just prior to publishing the memoir, Kutsher wanted to find out whatever happened to the young women after they emigrated. Thankfully, he was able to get in touch with them after so many years.

For the first time, Ber Kutsher’s memoir is available to an English-reading audience, thanks to the reflective and deliberate translation by Gerald Marcus. In the translator’s introduction, Marcus provides the reader with helpful remarks on translation choices as well as historical and biographical background. Marcus notes here that often Kutsher’s sentences lacked verbs or even subjects, a characteristic of his writing that made the translation into English particularly challenging. While striving for clarity, Marcus’ translation seems to retain much of Kutsher’s original style, even if some verbs are added here and there. The translator also added an introductory “paragraph” at the start of each chapter, which gives brief highlights of the main events of the chapter to come, a feature that helps guide the reader through some of the more obscure sections. Marcus skillfully balances maintaining Kutsher’s style and providing clarity for the reader.

In the final chapter, Kutsher recalls his return to Warsaw after the war. In what is certainly the most powerful chapter in the memoir, Kutsher returns to Warsaw to find a city of ruins. He tries to find the streets of his past, even asking non-Jews for help when there is little recognizable with which to orient himself. The ruins make him panic: “There is nothing…Nothing! Jewish daily, weekly, and monthly papers. Writers, journalists, builders and spreaders of the Yiddish word, of Jewish thought. A huge, colorful, creative Jewish life – Gone! Nothing!” (266). The pain Kutsher felt witnessing Warsaw’s demise was not just due to the destruction of the city he called home for so many years, but also, or even more so, because of the decimation of the world of the Yiddish press. It is fitting that Kutsher’s memoir ends here; even though he returned to the city of his past, that Warsaw — the Warsaw of Haynt, of editorial offices, of typesetters and writers — no longer existed.