Yaël Bartana's return to Poland

In the category “Returns,” this one is singular.

Yael Bartana is an Israeli filmmaker, born in 1970, who spent her childhood and adolescence in the moshav Kfar Yehezkel, founded in 1921 in the north of Israel. After her military service, she graduated in 1996 from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, then studied in New York and Amsterdam.

In Poland she made, after others, three astonishing films that form a political trilogy (Mary Koszmary, A Wall and a Tower, Assassination), the aim of which is to urge Polish Jews to return to Poland. A little in the manner of Operation Shylock, that novel by Philip Roth in which the novelist has his principal character — his double — say: “The time has come to return to Europe that was for centuries, and that still is today, the most authentically Jewish homeland that has ever existed, the cradle of rabbinic Judaism, of Hasidic Judaism, of secular Judaism, of socialism, etc. And also, of course, the cradle of Zionism”¹. For Roth’s hero, “the historical role of Zionism is over”². Roth, who wrote his novel at the beginning of the 1990s, even goes very far, carrying out this return through the agency, in particular, of Lech Walesa, won over to the cause, and of Pope John Paul II. “It is certain,” the same character continues, “that the pope will see in diasporism not only the means of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but also the instrument of the moral rehabilitation and spiritual awakening of Europe”³. And he goes on: “Better to be neurotics, marginals, anguished assimilationists, and all the rest of what the Zionists detest; better to lose the State than to lose oneself morally by setting off a nuclear war”⁴. This is, of course, the thesis of Roth’s hero, of his double even: Roth does not seem to be defending these ideas. “Diasporism,” equated with a “return” to Europe, remains confined, for him, to a political idea within a novel. But Yael Bartana seems to live diasporism very concretely — she who, an Israeli, represented Poland at the 2011 Venice Biennale.

The first film of her trilogy, Mary Koszmary (Nightmare), stages, in the entirely empty Warsaw stadium, a young man in a tie who addresses “the three million Polish Jews”: “Jews, come back! Come back to your country, our country! We need you! You will heal our wounds and heal your own. We will be together. Come back, and we will at last become Europeans.” One can read an immense banner in this stadium: “3,300,000 can change the life of 40 million Poles.” This young man — whose real name is Sławomir Sierakowski — from then on creates a movement, the JRMiP (The Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland, that is, “the Movement for Jewish Renaissance in Poland”), which we find again in Bartana’s second film, A Wall and a Tower, as surrealist as the first. In this film, young Israelis build, in the center of Warsaw, facing the monument by Nathan Rappoport erected in 1948 to the glory of the heroes of the Warsaw ghetto, a kibbutz (this was before the definitive construction, on the same site, of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews). The leader of these young Israelis informs the young kibbutzniks, in Hebrew, that “the Jews are returning to Poland.” These young kibbutzniks learn Polish; they wear armbands showing a Star of David interlocked with the Polish eagle. It is the emblem of the Movement for Jewish Renaissance in Poland. At the end of the film, once the structure is completed, Sławomir Sierakowski, radiant, brings the movement’s flag (still the Star of David interlocked with the eagle), which is hoisted to the top of the kibbutz. So much for the staging. The passersby, the real ones, look on. The Warsaw press, with photographs to back it up, mentioned the existence of a kibbutz in the very center of the capital. It seems that residents of the neighborhood, dumbfounded, are said to have remarked: “Don’t try to dislodge them, they’re certainly armed; you see how they treat the Palestinians…” After a while, the kibbutz was dismantled.

In the third film, Zamach (Assassination), Sławomir Sierakowski, the leader of the JRMiP movement, is assassinated — by whom, no one knows, perhaps by the Polish far right. His funeral is impressive. Numerous partisans of the movement, young and old, are gathered. A very large statue, in his likeness, is present, hinting at a slight cult of personality in the offing. Polish and Israeli figures file past his coffin. Some deliver a speech. Two opposing messages emerge. A young leader of the JRMiP invites all people of goodwill to join them, broadening the Judeo-Polish framework: “We accept all the persecuted,” he says, “join us and Europe will be stunned.” An Israeli answers him indirectly: “The diaspora died at Auschwitz. The Jews’ place is in Israel, where the State and Tsahal constitute a guarantee for them.”

The film is “dedicated to the memory of Juliano Mer-Khamis (1958-2011), assassinated in Jenin by a member of the Al-Aqsa Brigades the very week of the shooting of Zamach.” Juliano Mer-Khamis was director of the Freedom Theatre in Jenin, the son of an Israeli Jewish woman and of Saliba Khamis, an Israeli Christian Arab who was one of the leaders of the Israeli Communist Party in the 1960s. Juliano Mer-Khamis was himself an active militant for the defense of Palestinian rights.

Bartana’s trilogy is disconcerting. In fine, after the initial surges toward the Polish return in the first two films, doubt sets in, giving way to a new wandering. So goes the fiction, the waking dream of the author.

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But it is not only a fiction. The JRMiP — The Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland — exists; it has a website (www.jrmip.org) in English and Polish versions. Yael Bartana set this movement in motion as early as 2007; other Israelis joined it, including Galit Eilat, founder and director of the Israeli Center for Digital Art in Holon. Polish artistic circles as well. And, above all, the review Krytyka Polityczna (Political Critique) of Warsaw, of which Sławomir Sierakowski is precisely the director. The review benefits from a venue called Nowy Wspaniały Świat (Brave New World), located in the center of Warsaw, where various debates and screenings take place. Krytyka Polityczna⁵ is a political milieu that declares itself anti-liberal left and alter-globalist. It is taking on growing importance in Poland, where branches of the review are springing up in provincial cities. Both the Movement for Jewish Renaissance in Poland and Krytyka Polityczna are a generational phenomenon. A matter of political generation and of age. The Soviet system seems far off.

As for Zionism, it too comes under serious attack. The manifesto of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland states bluntly:

“We want to return! It is no longer a matter of Uganda, Argentina, or Madagascar. Nor even of Palestine anymore. We are nostalgic for Poland, the land of our fathers and grandfathers. Dreaming or awake, we always think of Poland. We want to see how new ensembles are born above the squares of Warsaw, Lodz, and Cracow. We will build schools and hospitals beside the cemeteries. We will plant trees, we will build new roads and bridges. We want to heal your traumas and our own. Once and for all. We believe it is written that we will be able to dwell here, found families, die, lay our loved ones’ ashes in the earth. We are exhuming the Zionist phantasmagoria. We draw from the past — a world of migrations, of politico-geographical displacements, of the disintegration of the reality we know — in order to build a new future. This is our proposal for times of exhausted beliefs, of crisis, of the collapse of the old utopias. Optimism is dying out. The promised paradises have been privatized. The apples and watermelons of the kibbutzim are no longer as beautiful. We wish to welcome new settlers […] We measure ourselves against one of the many potential futures that we can experiment with by abandoning our safe, known, one-dimensional world. Our call is not directed solely at Jews. We will welcome into our ranks all those who will not have found a place in their homelands — the excluded, the persecuted. There will be no discrimination in our movement. We will not rummage through your biographies, we will not check your residence cards or your refugee status. We will be strong through our weakness. Polish brothers and sisters! We are not planning an invasion. It will rather be a march of ghosts, the return of the old neighbors who visit you in your dreams, those whom it may never have been given to you to know. We will speak aloud of all those bad things that happened between Us and You.”

The first congress of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland is announced for the summer of 2012. It will be held within the 7th Berlin Biennale, of which the Polish artist Artur Zmijewski is currently the director. Jewish renaissance, according to the organizers, will be not only Polish but European. The members of Plurielles, of the AJHL, as well as all the Jews of Paris and Navarre, are cordially invited. And, of course, all “men of goodwill.”

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Several aspects must be underlined in this artistic-political message postulating “Jewish renaissance in Poland.” The underlying utopia that characterizes it reminds me of that famous phrase from 1968: “Be realistic, demand the impossible.” A twofold disenchantment characterizes this generation, caught in a Polish-Israeli transversality: Israelis like Yael Bartana evidently display a post-Zionism that no longer even advocates a place — for them, therefore for all — in Israel; the young Polish intellectuals gathered around Krytyka Polityczna are far from the settling of scores with communism that has characterized the Polish scene since 1989. The collapse of the Zionist dream, as it appears in the JRMiP manifesto, imposes on Poland and Europe an examination of the traumatic pasts intended to build, on the basis of their acknowledgment, goodness, social bond, welcome for the persecuted. One dares not speak of a “new Man,” but he is perhaps not so far off…

These proposals are fragile. The political message of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland is, moreover, much more turned toward certainties than Bartana’s films suggest. In the latter, there is a wink at the nascent cult of personality of the new hero Sierakowski, and there is a refusal, among certain Israelis, to leave their nation-state.

In short, all this is perhaps not very serious — a story of artists⁶, of young neo-leftists. It is an option that perhaps erases, in its own way, a little too quickly the Jewish past in Poland⁷ and the destiny of the Hebrew State. But this crossing of various struggles — anti-liberal and anticlerical in Poland, post-Zionist in Israel, served by imaginative and provocative artistic stances — constitutes a symptom of our time.

A symptomatic return.

Notes