My Poland Story

So many Australian youths are raised acutely aware (and often embarrassed) of their immigrant cultural heritage. Dark-skinned Italians naively attempt to hide what they perceive to be their over-involved grandmothers and Greek children struggle to rid themselves of offensive WOG related taunts. Despite Australia’s claim as an all-inclusive multicultural society, these children are often made all-too aware of their differences and are therefore forced to fully comprehend the geographical origins of their family history.

Despite the fact that I was well-aware of my Jewish background, my geographic heritage was never revealed. When I looked in the mirror I was met with a dirty blonde, porcelain-pale faced young woman – my complexion easily allowed me to fade into the background of thousands of other ‘Australian’ girls I could see in the streets of Melbourne. But I felt I was different - and it wasn’t just because of my religion. One could be Jewish anywhere - It wasn’t restricted to being any one nationality.

Something was tugging at me. There was something restricting my family from adopting a thick ocker accent and elder generations in my family exhibited unfamiliar European habits.

First of all, my mother insisted on eating at dusty-wallpapered, dimmed restaurants like Sheherazade and displayed some strange nostalgic feelings towards gluggy soups consisting of vegetables which I never thought could be liquefied. My father, on the other hand, possessed a few stranger habits. He regularly broke out in strange guttural languages and his parents even made him learn the piano-accordion. As a child, the only benefit in this was the hiding spot created by the accordion’s larger than life sized box (the best place to hide from the deafening noise it made when Dad pulled it out on odd occasions to play his rendition of old Beatles’ classics).

There was definitely something very European going on in my family, something that can’t be explained by just being Jewish. My investigation continued. I looked up – to my grandparents.

Now here was something altogether bizarre. When I told other non-Jewish people I was going to visit my Nanna and Zaida, they screwed up their faces like they had eaten something sour and asked me 'What country is that in?' This was the first sign of something strange - we called our grandparents by foreign-sounding names that were never mentioned on Neighbours and Home-and-Away. Secondly, when I arrived at their house, there was always an intense smell of onions and stewing meat which could not possibly be the product of chicken casserole, rissole or any other Australian-role. But the biggest give-away was their accent. When I disocovered that not all of my Jewish friends had grandparents who rolled their r’s and pronounced their w’s as v’s I realised I had stumbled on something big.

One Friday night I innocently and curiously asked the question:
‘Nanna, where are you from?’
‘I am Jewish!’ she spat out at me.
‘I know you’re Jewish, but which country did you come from?’ I persisted.
‘Nowhere I would go back to, so it’s not important.’

Her response to these questions really sparked my interest. Upon approaching my parents, I noticed that they had begun to act even stranger than before. They had recently discovered the internet and had began spending more time than I did chatting to my friends on ICQ (back in the day) emailing people across the other side of the world with surnames which were similar to our own.

‘Where is Nanna from?’ I tried once again
‘Poland.’
‘And Zaida?’
‘Poland.’
‘And Bubba?’
‘Poland.’
And Zajda?’
‘Poland.’
‘You mean to tell me that all of my four grandparents are from Poland and no one ever thought to tell me?’
‘What does it matter – you’re not Polish, you’re Jewish.’

But it did matter. I was scared. All of a sudden when I looked in the mirror and saw dirty blonde hair and a porcelain-pale face I couldn’t see an Australian at all. All I could see was a young Polish girl staring back at me. It occurred to me that my grandparents could all have met each other in Poland, and my parents then could also have met each other in Poland and I could have been born in a small village where I had to milk cows and speak a language which forgot to insert vowels in the necessary places. What do you mean it doesn’t matter?

***

No one ever internalises the fact that to be Ashkenazi means to actually be Polish (or German, or Hungarian, etc...). In our community, to be Polish only has the connotation of cleaning houses and drinking vodka. I don’t know of any Jews who do much of either of these two things. Perhaps these perceptions are justified – after all, as my Nanna says ‘My neighbours just stood by and watched as we were murdered – mostly they even helped the Nazis to do it!’

It doesn’t erase the fact that I am of Polish blood. The idea began to take hold of me. I am Polish. I began to cross a reinforced-concrete taboo. I started feeling oddly proud of my new-found European heritage. I began seeking out Polish styled restaurants and I even found a Polish teacher to teach me the language. All of a sudden my lips began to produce over-consonantal words like ‘chsesz’ and the sounds felt familiar and somewhat comforting to my ears. This new discovery of my Polish heritage was creating an identity crisis within me that no Polish Jew in Australia was able (or willing) to help me with.

As a second-generation Australian I thought: ‘Does this make me any less Australian? (Even though in Australia, it is probably more common than not to be a descendant of an immigrant!)

As a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors I asked: ‘Is it disrespectful to all those who were killed in Poland to feel this way?’

As a Zionist I mused (in shock): ‘Is it anti-Zionist to feel this way!?’

***

Next week I am off to seek the answers to all these overwhelming questions. I will be doing something that very few Jews have been known to do in the past 60 years. I am going ‘back’ to live in Poland. Ok. That may be an exaggeration – I have assured my parents and Nanna that it will only be a few months. Something is calling me to Poland. Its language is becoming unexpectedly familiar and its heavy food is now what my taste buds are craving.