JERUSALEM — Occasional upticks in animosity between Jews and Poles has produced a correspondence between a Polish friend and my colleague Shlomo Avineri. It’s been an open and friendly exchange, pondering the memories of both people and one land.
And it has reminded me of an instance in my youth, in Fall River, Massachusetts.
Grandpa Morris Mines came to Fall River years ago, after he left Bialystok at the age of 14. In Fall River he married, raised a family, and opened a shoe store. It was the Boston Shoe Store, on South Main Street near Columbia Street. As the oldest grandson, and in need of money, I began working for him when I became old enough to register with the government and receive a Social Security number. I was 14.
My work was simple. It occurred on weekends, i.e., Saturday and sometimes Friday evening, and I was not allowed to sell shoes. I cleaned up, put shoes back in their proper place after a customer had tried on several pairs. And I brought packages to and from the shoe store of my great-grandfather, another Morris Mines, who was my Grandfather’s father-in-law. His store was on Pleasant Street.
Grandpa had married his first cousin, and his father-in-law did what he did for most of his sons and sons-in-law: he helped Grandpa establish his shoe business.
Great-grandpa got his own start in Bialystok as a shoe maker.
The population of Fall River is important for this story. It was a mill town, and at one time the largest producer of cotton cloth in the United States. The Yankee mill owners recruited workers from a number of countries, and according to stories prohibited Jews from working for them.
When I was growing up there were a number of small Orthodox synagogues and one grand Conservative Temple, which all together served some 3,000-5,000 Jews. Most of the elders earned their living as merchants, with sons becoming attorneys, physicians, dentists, pharmacists, or accountants.
The ethnic profile included Portuguese from the Azores, French Canadians, English, Irish, Italians, and Poles. It was a poor city, not rich enough to attract more than one or two Black families, and not more than a handful of Chinese.
Years later I learned that some of the Portuguese were, or had been Jews, but kept that identity hidden in the way they had learned in their community.
My own youthful lusts were attracted to good looking Portuguese, French Canadians, Italians, Irish, English, and Poles, although strict parents made it clear that I was to save my thoughts for Jews. Except for one classmate, who my father forbid me from dating, due to some nastiness in the competition between her peddler grandfather and my own peddler grandfather. Both of those grandfathers expired years earlier, but their images affected who I was allowed to love.
The Grandpa I worked for was my maternal grandfather, never involved in the Jewish trade of peddling.
Now the Polish story.
It challenges my memory of Grandpa, who was not to my knowledge political or ethnocentric in his expressions or actions.
But one Saturday afternoon an elderly woman came into the store and began shopping for shoes. Along the way she identified herself as a Polish Christian, and said to Grandpa something like, “and I understand that you, too, are Polish.”
That produced an explosion, which I recall as “I am not Polish. . . . Get out of my store.”
Wow!
Grandpa throwing a customer from his store, without trying to sell her shoes!
I heard him muttering something to the effect, “I’m a Jew. I never was a Pole.”
I knew that his native language was Yiddish, which he’d use on occasion. I never heard a word that I thought might be Polish from his tongue.
I presume that his action reflected what he acquired as a child, growing up in a city that was majority Jewish. Perhaps he never learned to speak Polish. Or declined to use the language once he reached the United States.
The story occurred in the mid-1950s. The Holocaust was not widely discussed among the Jews that I knew. But I recall a conversation between my Grandmother and my Mother, which included the line that “Our relatives haven’t answered our mail. What’s happened to them?”
In recent years, via the on-line archives of Yad Vashem, I’ve located the names of numerous people with the family name of Mines, from Bialystok, who were killed in the early 1940s.
Fall River and my family has changed greatly since then.
The mills have closed. Earlier because most of them moved to the US South. And afterwards they were taken over by companies, typically owned and managed by Jews, which employed local labor to make clothing.
Now they have closed, due to competition from China and other sources.
Jews have left the city. Instead of the 3.000-5,000 or so of my youth, I heard from a retired Orthodox Rabbi that there remains one Jewish family with children in the city schools.
There are Jews in surrounding towns. Boston and Providence, and their suburbs, have substantial Jewish populations.
Fall River’s population has declined from close to 120,000 to less than 90,000. Boston has taken advantage of empty tenements and has sent some of its homeless families to Fall River. The city now has about the lowest socio-economic indicators of any Massachusetts city.
The young lady I was not allowed to date is now a friend. She and her husband have visited us in Jerusalem, and we have visited them outside of Boston. I’ve told her that she was forbidden to me years ago, and we’ve traded comments about grandfathers, peddlers, that neither of us knew.
Non-Jewish spouses are no longer forbidden. Cousins have married Christians, and the mother of my senior grandson, was born in the US to parents who arrived from Korea.
Grandpa’s Polish story is part of our history. And it reflects what we know about Jews and Poland. There was, and is, anti-Semitism in Poland. Poles served Germans in the concentration camps, and after the war there were attacks on Jews by Poles.
There were also Poles who risked their lives to protect Jews. And now Christian Poles support a good relationship with Israel and with Polish Jews.
Next to our apartment building in Jerusalem is a primary school named for Janusz Korczak. That was the pen name of the Jewish physician, author and head of an orphanage, who repeatedly turned down offers of protection and chose to go with his children to their death.
There’s a lot to ponder and debate in the Jewish-Polish relationship. Stories and debates continue, both from Poles who insist on their own nationalistic perspective, Poles who reflect the anti-Semitism in their context, Jews who tell of hatred and of protection. Poland was the source of the largest Jewish population and the most Holocaust deaths, it’s history not something that’ll pass.
My own Grandfather’s story is part of this.
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Ira Sharkansky is professor emeritus of political science at Hebrew University. He may be contacted via ira.sharkansky@sdjewishworld.com