A poet, writer and columnist for a Polish-language newspaper in Israel, Natan Gross represents the dwindling but vivid band of Cracow Jews, or Jewish Cracovians, who grew up before the war, were educated in, and still fix their identity in both cultures.

Gross's parents owned two successful chinaware, crystal, and ceramic shops on the Rynek in Cracow. He describes his father as a man with the soul of an artist, not a merchant, who made these shops into a work of art. His mother had the managerial and people skills to ensure commercial success--and, when the time came, to guide her sons through the inferno of the German occupation and the Holocaust. That tale of survival on "Aryan papers" took place outside Cracow, mostly in Warsaw. It makes up three-quarters of the book. However, as Gross says in his introduction, he could not write about the burning down of a house without first describing what that house had been like. Thus, the book opens with a loving description  of the family's life, intensely and in nearly equal parts both Polish and Jewish, in prewar Cracow.

An excerpt gives the flavor of Gross's memoirs:

"My parents were modest people. Success never went to their heads. They never went out dancing, they never hit the night spots, they did not lead an extensive social life. Their life consisted of their home and their shop, and everyday hard work. If they went to a restaurant, they usually took us along. We went to Weisbrot's on Starowislna Street for tripe with black pudding or for veal 'crumbs.' Or we might go, for a change, to Weisbrot's 'milk bar' for chulent with black pudding. Those stuffed black puddings were as broad as plates! Never since have I seen the like, anywhere. For us children, a visit to Weisbrot, whom we nicknamed 'Wajsprod,' was a holiday. In my mind's eye, I can see the large arch-shaped dining room with a vast number of tables covered with snow-white tablecloths. I recall the obliging waiters with pencils behind their ears. I met one of them, Leon, in Tel Aviv, and he remembered me. At 'Wajsprod's' he might have been a busboy of the second category; in Israel, he rose to the rank of head waiter at the Acadia, one of the most elegant hotels in Herzliya. He remembered our whole family well. What he regretted was the decline of the profession of waiter in Israel: 'It's not the same as back home in Cracow, Mr. Gross!'" (p. 55). 

As with this waiter's recollections, Gross shines many of his Cracow memories through the prism of life in Israel, where he immigrated in 1949. 

His most extended section deals with his Cracow school: 

"How did the Hebrew school differ from Polish school? In Polish school, a Jew had to be a good student, perhaps better than the others, whereas in Hebrew school he could allow himself to be a poor student, to assume an attitude of indifference towards lessons and teachers, to goof off to his heart's content, and to cut class. It was an oasis, an island isolated from Polish reality--and yet Poland and Polishness, in all their manifestations, were better represented and conveyed in our Hebrew school than was Jewishness. . . . it was a Jewish school, although perhaps due to the strength of some sort of complex, nobody paraded that Jewishness. Everyone called it 'Hebrew.' Nor was Yiddish heard in the corridors. The truth is that Hebrew was not heard either, unless a student was talking to a teacher from one of the Hebrew subjects. The prevailing language was Polish. As opposed to the schools in the Tarbut network--where Hebrew was the language of instruction and even mathematics, biology and history were taught in that sacred language--we had only four subjects in the language of the forefathers: Hebrew (language and literature), the Bible, religion, and Jewish history. Everything else was taught in Polish. Those Judaistic subjects meant that we had ten more hours of lessons each week than our counterparts in Polish school. That difference aside, we had all the other accoutrements of a Polish school: branches of the Anti-Aircraft Defense League and the Maritime League and of the Red Cross, along with literature, history, philosophy and drama clubs. There was a school military training unit with Polish commanders, a Hatzofeh scout organization, a sports club, Student Government (I was the last president before the war...), Student Aid society, and the orchestra under the direction of the Czech composer Karas, who was later replaced by the Jewish musicians, Schleichkorn and Wendum" (pp. 68-69).

Gross provides individual sketches of his teachers and classmates, and then follows their fates. All too many, of course, perished--sometimes heroically, sometimes in circumstances that had almost unbelievable sequels. Gross concentrates especially on the fates of two of his professors, or rather of their books. Juliusz Feldhorn was already a successful writer before the war; Gross tells he story of how the manuscript of his History of Art ended up being found long after the war and published in Poland in 1962. More astonishing is the fate of a philosophical work by Gross's religion teacher, Benzion Rappaport. A Polish peasant found the manuscript along one of the rail routes leading to the death camps. Able to tell only that it was written in Hebrew, he preserved it and then set out as soon as the war was over to find a Jew to give it to. He made his way to the one hotel still functioning in Warsaw and sought out a Jewish member of a foreign mission -- who turned out to be one of Rappaport's former students. 

Others survived, and Gross details the changes of identity and the twists of the careers that they later pursued in Israel, Poland, or as far afield as Australia. 

Although the shadow of unparalleled historical tragedy hangs over this whole lost world, Gross brings his extended family and the Cracow they lived in back to life. He starts with the simplest facts, about how Jews got their names, or about how special it was for a child to grow up in a city with a castle and fairy tales of its own. Jewish Cracow had its own legends which sometimes corresponded with the non-Jewish ones. Just as the hejnal melody played from the tower of St. Mary's Basilica breaks off in commemoration of the day a Tatar arrow pierced the throat of a trumpeter blowing the alarm, so also "[o]n Simchat Tora . . . the Jews joyously and ceremoniously read out the final chapter of the Bible and begin reading it from the start. . . Traditionally, all those at prayer join in dancing a circle around the prayer house with the Tora in their arms. There are seven such circles--hakafoth. In only one prayer house in the world, in the Old Synagogue of Cracow, do the people suddenly break off the waves of joy and celebration in the middle of the fourth circle and begin reading the Psalms. This tradition is associated with a tragic event. The Tatars burst into the synagogue in the middle of the fourth circle and slaughtered all those at prayer" (p. 17) No one prays in the Old Synagogue at the end of ul. Szeroka now, he reminds us. It currently serves as the Jewish branch of the City Historical Museum. 

Mostly, however, Gross's memory-portrait of Cracow focuses on his family, their shop, and the way they fit into the city. Both his parents' staff at their shops, and their customers, were predominantly non-Jewish. The maids at home were inevitably Catholic, even if the cook not only learned to cook Jewish from Mrs. Gross, but ended up preferring the Jewish dishes. Gross and his friends flirted through gaps in their backyard fence with the girls at the Ursuline nuns' school; one of the pupils there in those years was Wislawa Szymborska.

A shopping trip illustrates the diversity of interpersonal contacts: 

"I sometimes accompanied Mother to New Market Square, where she selected a chicken that was then subjected to ritual slaughter and plucked on the spot--a rather horrifying sight for a child. Later in my life, I would see a few more things that were even more horrifying. Aunt Rifka--Mother's Aunt--had a shop with dried mushrooms at this Square. The aroma! . . . Mother bought her butter and cheese at Lesniak's on the Small Market Square. She went there evenings, once the china shop was closed. . . . Mrs. Lesniak offered samples of butter on the tip of her knife, praising her merchandise and then whispering a tidbit of gossip into Mother's ear. She would wink and wrinkle her sharp chin in a meaningful way--she had customers of a high class and knew more than a little about them! . . . We bought aromatic bread with fennel seed at the shop belonging to a man called Rajter, a traditional Jew with a black beard that the Germans later cut off . . . A woman from Bochnia brought eggs by the dozen in a big wicker basket. Mr. Sroka, who owned a big delicatessen business on Dluga Street, sent sacks of flour and sugar to us at home. This Sroka was a tiny mustached man who wore a pince-nez; his colossal wife called him 'Daddy.'"

Thanks to these everyday details and his sharp sketches of individuals he still remembers from childhood, Natan Gross makes his prewar Cracow live again. His oft-quoted poem about Cracow in Autumn, however, closes the volume with the sadness and sense of loss that are essential to the act of memory, and especially to this particular act.

"Autumn chestnuts spill from Cracow trees--
But no one hangs them on a Sukkoth booth.
Unchanged, Wawel stands. But near the Dragon's Den
There are no Jewish children

(...)

"On Józefa, Estery and Dietla Streets,
In the doorways crouch no Jewish beggars;
On Szeroka, Skawinska and Waska Streets,
The wind moans, the wind murmurs.

"From Wawel down Stradom
The tram line still runs
Right to Krakowska Street.
Yiddish was spoken here,
Jewish love filled the air,
Where fresh foliage stretched along the Dietla Planty,
Jewish children played here,
Holidays were observed,
With the help of the Lord.

"At this season Miodowa Street
Filled with a gala, ceremonious throng
On their way to Ajzyk, Remuh, and the Old Synagogue
And to Tempel, where the Reformed went to pray.
In this season in Cracow the shofar blew,
Heartfelt prayers rose unimpeded to heaven.

"What we have today
Are profaned Torah covers
And azkarot--
Assemblies of mourning.

"Azkarot for Stradom and Kazimierz,
For Jakuba, Józefa, Szeroka, Miodowa,
Rabbi Meisels and Podbrzezia Streets,
Orzeszkowa, Skawinska, and for Brzozowa.

(...)

"We are strung together like those Cracow chestnuts
On a thread of memories longer than our sorrow:
Our idyllic Cracovian Jewish childhood,
Our days of rage and triumph, youth, frivolity,
Our days of love and joy, our downfall and our care.
Who knows better than the cobblestones of Cracow
What pained us early, what pains us still:
The Jewish fate given us to fulfill.

"Autumn rains soak the chestnuts of Cracow,
Autumn on the Planty, winter in our hearts.
Evening falls. Hurry home. They are locking the gates.
Sleep shrouds the Cracow I can never forget,
The Cracow that is no more"
 
 

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