A Subtle
Indictment
Of The
Eastern Bloc
c
SHERWOOD D. KOHN
Special to The Jewish News
gg
old, I would discover," says
Yale Strom in his introduc-
tion to The Last Jews Of
Eastern Europe, "is so much of the life of
the kehillot of the Eastern Bloc. And talk
and song are so much of the warmth that
keeps the feet and hands from frostbite?'
In those two sentences, ethnologist
Strom sums up the principle viewpoints of
his book: the text, which enthusiastically
depicts a warm, cohesive community life
among the Jews of Eastern Europe, and
the photographs, by Brian Blue, which
show us a bleak existence suffered in cold
storage.
Is there no laughter in Krakow, no spring
in Budapest, no sunshine in Belgrade? If
you read Strom's report — for that is what
it is, a report on the status of Eastern
European Jewry — you sense that there
are all of those things, but mostly on a
spiritual plane. The physical realities of joy
and warmth and new growth are present,
but in touchingly short supply.
Blue's stark photographs more than rein-
force that impression. They are full of
unsmiling • elderly faces, neglected
cemeteries, leafless trees, cheerless
interiors; so many, in fact, that the
occasionally captured smile, the infrequent
hint of bodily comfort, leap out at the
viewer with an intensity bordering on
relief.
Strom's report is geographical, historical
and human. He starts each section with an
anecdote centered around a local resident
— Monika and Stacik Krajewska of War-
saw, Mrs. Waltraut Stecher of Prague, Bela
Hap of Budapest, etc. — and works in the
history of the area's Jewish population,
leavening his chronology with stories
about the people who live there now
It is a skillful job of reporting and
writing, and one that makes the reader
acutely aware of the forces — social,
cultural and spiritual — that have sus-
tained Jews throughout the ages, under
the most adverse conditions, in circum-
stances that would discourage the most
dedicated forms of life.
The Last Jews Of Eastern Europe is also
a subtle indictment of the Eastern Bloc.
On the surface, the words and the pictures
of this coffee table book complement each
other only at occasional points. It seems
to be a work at war with itself.
But the work of Strom and Blue bears
closer, more thoughtful examination. If
you look only at Blue's pictures, you may
wonder why there are any Jews at all in
Eastern Europe. If you read Strom's text,
which is a paean of praise to the Jewish
soul, you may understand that they stay
only because they cannot escape.
The Last Jews Of Eastern Europe, by
Yale Strom and Brian Blue. Philosophical
Library, New York, 1986.
Battered and crumbling tombstones are
covered with leaves and brush in a
vandalized Jewish cemetery in
Kishinev, USSR.
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