A Real Pain Jesse Eisenberg explores American Jewish identity eighty years after the Holocaust. by Danusha V. Goska
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/a-real-pain/
A Real Pain is a comedy-drama Holocaust-themed film. A Real Pain was written, directed, and co-produced by Jesse Eisenberg. The film depicts the journey of two cousins, David and Benji Kaplan, who travel with a tour group to Poland. The cousins’ late grandmother, Dory, was a survivor. The cousins’ journey is an effort to honor her and better understand their heritage.
Eisenberg, 41, plays David; Kieran Culkin, 42, plays Benji. A Real Pain also features Will Sharpe as James, the tour guide, and other tour members Jennifer Grey as Marcia; Kurt Egyiawan as Eloge; and Liza Sadovy and Daniel Oreskes as Diane and Mark.
David is a happily married husband and father. He lives in an attractive brownstone and makes a good living selling ads. He suffers from anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, as does Eisenberg himself. David takes prescription medication to suppress his symptoms.
Benji is a “real pain” – as in, “a pain in the ass.” He is disruptive and socially inappropriate. Benji lives in his mother’s house and smokes a lot of marijuana. He has no committed relationships or steady work. He uses the F-word in every sentence.
David’s pain and Benji’s pain are set against the overwhelming pain of the Holocaust. The tour group members are flummoxed in their attempts to assimilate historical reality. They juxtapose their comfortable American lives with what Holocaust victims endured. They cannot craft a coherent narrative about the world or their own lives that encompasses that dichotomy.
RottenTomatoes awards A Real Pain a hefty 96% positive score. Prognosticators predict Academy Award nominations for Eisenberg, Culkin, and the film itself. Moira MacDonald, writing in the Seattle Times, speaks for many. The film “examines Jewish identity, generational trauma, sibling-like rivalry and the strangeness of being in a country you don’t recognize, but that’s nonetheless partly your own.” Other critics use superlatives like “perfect,” “radiant.” “vivid,” “moving,” “funny,” “devastating,” “masterful,” “superb,” “rueful,” “heart-swelling,” and “poignant.” Peter Travers of ABC news promises, “You’ll laugh till it hurts.”
David Fear in Rolling Stone writes, “Culkin” produces “the single greatest, funniest, most cringe-comic and heartbreaking performance.” Richard Roper, in the Chicago Sun Times, says that Culkin takes “a character who could have been a one-dimensional, shtick-reliant jerk and infuses him with vulnerability and empathy.”
A Real Pain opens to the sound of Chopin played, of course, on a piano. Frederic Chopin was a nineteenth-century Polish composer closely associated with the romance of Poland’s struggle for independence from Russian and German colonizers. Chopin’s many public performances aroused adoration. He was famously the lover of the French novelist known as George Sand. He was chronically ill from tuberculosis, and he died young, at 39. Chopin’s piano pieces are the only music on the soundtrack.
David is hustling through an airport, repeatedly leaving messages on the phone of Benji. Benji is not responding. We will learn, in the course of the film, that Benji did not respond because he often does things that are contrary to normal courtesy. David and Benji unite. Benji’s striped pants are baggy and are possibly pajamas. He is wearing a baggy and heavily worn t-shirt. Colorful rags are wrapped around his wrist as a kind of “tribal” bracelet.
David and Benji had been as close as brothers when they were children, though they are actually cousins. They have drifted apart as adults. Benji is critical of David’s life path. David, Benji says, is too straight and narrow. Where is the emotional, adventurous boy Benji once knew? David now, Benji criticizes, has a job selling ads, which is unworthy work. “I hate that s—. It’s part of a —ed up system!” Benji declares. “Money is heroin for boring people,” Benji announces. “Rich people are f—ing idiots.”
Benji has mailed “good s—,” that is, marijuana, to their hotel in Poland. David is shocked. Benji flirts with that most unapproachable of life forms, a TSA agent. David looks on, amazed at his cousin’s charm.
On the plane, David’s seat is 24A. Eisenberg directed his first film for A24 Studios. That wink-wink took me out of the movie.
In Warsaw, we see shots of buildings. These shots are reminiscent of Woody Allen’s salutes to New York architecture in his 1986 film, Hannah and Her Sisters. Eisenberg has identified Allen as a role model. “I’ve read everything he’s written, I’ve watched everything he’s made. He’s changed my life more than any other creative inspiration.”
David and Benji meet with their group. It is lead by James, who has a degree from Oxford in Eastern European studies. Marcia, in her well-preserved 60s, introduces herself as a recent divorcee who is becoming something that she despises, that is, a “lady who lunches.” Diane and Mark, also in their 60s, introduce themselves as “boring” people from suburban Shaker Heights, Ohio. Eloge is a survivor of the Rwandan genocide and a convert to Judaism.
Benji interrupts Eloge and spews his own confusion. An American Jew on a Holocaust tour freaks out when meeting a genocide survivor: this is meant to be charming and funny. Benji calls the others in the group “geriatric” though he is in his early forties, and appears to be roughly the same age as James and Eloge.
Strolling through a park, Benji and David remark that in an alternative universe, they would have beards and not be able to shake hands with women. David says that when he sees a Hasidic Jew he says to himself, “There but for the grace of no god go I.” Later, Eloge will encourage David to practice his religion. David replies that he views Judaism as arbitrary and mechanical.
Benji notices that Marcia is walking by herself. He approaches her and says, “Why are you walking alone? Are you a big f—ing loser?”
The group visits the Warsaw Uprising Monument. Benji encourages the tour group to climb on the monument and imitate the statues. Benji tells them to wrap their scarves around the sculptures as if the scarves were bandages. Hilarity ensues. Everyone has a good time on the monument. David, who refuses to join in – “Disrespectful” – gathers everyone’s cell phones and snaps photos. David’s awkward juggling of cell phones is meant to be humorous.
That night, David, suffering from jet lag, tries to sleep. Benji pressures David to smoke marijuana on the roof of the hotel. In the morning, David oversleeps, and David and Benji are late for the group departure.
On a train, Benji goes into a rage. The group is traveling first class. During the Holocaust, Jews were packed into trains. Benji lambastes the group members, and storms off. David follows. David, sleep deprived, falls asleep and misses the group’s stop. Benji was awake but declined to wake David. David is angry. They get off the train. Their luggage is on the previous train. They take a train going in the opposite direction. Benji encourages David to trick the conductor, rather than to pay for tickets.
“This is our country,” Benji insists.
David says, “This used to be our country but they kicked us out because they thought we were cheap.”
Benji says that “The corporatization of travel is stupid. It ensures that the rich move around the world propagating their elitist loins while the poor stay cut off from society.”
David is not enthusiastic about Benji’s “Marxism.”
The group is standing on a train platform, waiting for David and Benji to show up. David and Benji reunite with the group. Benji and Marcia disparage rich people.
Jakub Kopelman was a Jew who died in Lublin in 1541. His tombstone is the oldest in situ Jewish tombstone in Poland. The Lublin Jewish cemetery once had thousands of tombstones. Only about two hundred survived Nazi destruction.
In this sacred site, Benji harangues James, the tour guide. James, Benji rants, presents too many facts. James should just shut up and allow the group to hang out and feel the vibes. James thanks Benji for offering “actionable” feedback, the first tour group member ever to do so.
The group eats dinner in a Jewish-themed restaurant. Hava Nagila plays in the background. “Antisemitic pricks,” Benji says.
Group members tell their family stories. Their grandparents arrived in America and worked very hard. They made money, and their kids became professionals. David says Grandma Dory observed that this is a pattern. The immigrant generation worked menial jobs; their kids succeeded; their grandchildren live in their parents’ basements and smoke dope. Benji is upset because he lives in his mother’s house and smokes dope. Benji throws his spoon across the room, belches loudly, rises, and leaves.
In his absence, David announces that he loves Benji, he hates Benji, he wants to kill Benji, and he wishes he could be Benji. Countless miracles contributed to his Jewish ancestors’ survival, and yet Benji recently attempted suicide.
The group visits Majdanek. James reports that this concentration camp operated near a “bustling” Polish city. The tour group parades past the preserved shoes of the deceased and gas chambers. As the tour bus leaves the camp, Benji – alone of the group – sobs.
David and Benji visit Grandma Dory’s former home. We see only a closed door in an apartment complex courtyard. Benji and David do not knock. Given that leaving a stone on a tombstone is a Jewish custom, they decide to leave stones on the stoop.
A plump older man shouts from a balcony. He says, in Polish, that leaving stones on someone’s doorstep poses a hazard. The resident may trip and fall.
Back in New York, David returns to his beloved wife, child, job, and home. Benji merely sits in the New York airport, staring into space.
I hated this movie from the opening scene. Using Chopin’s piano pieces as the soundtrack to a comedy about Holocaust tourism is kind of like setting a police procedural in Toronto and depicting the cops and robbers eating a lot of maple syrup. Eisenberg said he choose Chopin because the music is in the public domain and therefore he didn’t have to pay for the rights, and because Warsaw’s airport is named after Chopin. Those aren’t good reasons.
David and Benji both wear heavily worn t-shirts and ill-fitting pants. This is the costume of high school virgins trying to avoid the gaze of the cheerleaders they are afraid to talk to, and the jocks they are afraid to get punched by. This is the uniform of the man-boy, who recognizes what it is to be a mature man, and who has the full capacity to be one, but who aggressively rejects maturity and pretends that his selfishness is superior to “straight” society. Blurting out his own befuddlement when a Rwandan has just announced that he is a genocide survivor is not the act of an empath, and yet Eisenberg wants us to believe that, though Benji is obnoxious, he is lovable because he alone in the group is sensitive and honest.
At the same time that Eisenberg grants his character elevated stature the character does not deserve, Eisenberg expresses some contempt for Benji. He grants Benji no resolution. Benji opens the movie by sitting and staring in an airport, and he ends the movie the same way. Eisenberg has frozen Benji. Visiting Majdanek, the Jewish cemetery, and his own grandmother’s childhood home had zero impact on this character.
A Real Pain could have been a better movie had Eisenberg removed his head from his fundament and allowed any of his secondary characters three-dimensionality. Clearly Eisenberg / David is in thrall to Benji, the pooh-flinging monkey. But Eisenberg insisted on bending every other character to Benji’s “charm,” from the TSA agent to James, the tour guide. Eisenberg scripts James as thanking Benji for acting as if Lublin’s Jewish cemetery existed only to flatter Benji’s needs and desires. And Eisenberg forces his secondary characters to denigrate themselves, so that Benji can shine more brightly. Do happily married couples from Shaker Heights really describe themselves as “boring”? Do well-preserved divorcees like Marcia really say, “I despise myself … I’m a lady who lunches”? These characters see themselves through Eisenberg’s contempt for them.
A Real Pain would have been so much of a better movie had responsible-guy Mark taken a sock at Benji in response to his tour-wrecking antics, or had James lost his cool and berated Benji for his narcissism that couldn’t respect the remnants of a Jewish cemetery that barely survived Nazi depredation.
Eisenberg’s refusal to see his characters as anything except supports for his own limited worldview is most obvious in his treatment of Eloge, the Rwandan genocide survivor. He exists only so that Benji can silence Eloge and become the center of attention when Eloge tries to speak, and also to tell David that he should practice Judaism.
With a tad more awareness, Eisenberg could have recognized that confrontations with Holocaust-related sites sometimes inspires people, Jews and non-Jews, to become better people. Those so inspired realize that one can’t change the past, but one can change the present. Some former tourists became advocates for Israel, or against antisemitism. Some take “Never Again” to heart and work against genocides in places like Rwanda, East Timor, and Sudan.
Not all Jews became atheists after the Holocaust. Emil Fackenheim was a German rabbi. He was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen. After the war, he insisted that Jews must not despair of God and not despair of man. As Yad Vashem reports, “Emil Fackenheim does not remove God from the Holocaust. In effect, he places God at the scene of the crime itself—Auschwitz—but says that he cannot understand exactly what God was doing there. Whatever God’s intention, Fackenheim believes that the Holocaust should be considered a new occasion of Divine revelation, and that a proper response to it is the adoption of a 614th Jewish commandment: not to allow Hitler a posthumous victory by letting Judaism die out.”
In A Real Pain, the central encounter is not between American Jews and Poland or Judaism or the Holocaust. It’s between superego David, and id Benji. A Real Pain is a continuation of one of Hollywood’s oldest themes. The drudge needs the Holy Fool to rescue him from his drudgery. One of Hollywood’s first superstars acted out this drama. Over a hundred years ago, Charlie Chaplin was famously “The Tramp.” Chaplin’s Tramp was “childlike, bumbling but generally good-hearted … a mischievous vagrant … who uses his cunning to get what he needs to survive and escape the authority figures who will not tolerate his antics.” Sweet November, Reality Bites, Along Came Polly, You Can’t Take It With You, A Thousand Clowns, What’s Up Doc, The Odd Couple, etc., all milk this theme.
Both Eisenberg and Culkin are acting out schticks they’ve acted out in previous films. Eisenberg was calculating but lonely in The Social Network. Culkin was a rich socially inappropriate young man in Igby Goes Down and Succession. A Real Pain’s bromance could have taken place in Manhattan. The Next Best Picture podcast assesses A Real Pain as more of a Manhattan movie than a Polish one.
A lesser theme in A Real Pain is contemporary American Jews’ problematic relationship with Jewish identity. On the one hand, many see persecution and victimization as key features of Jewish identity. On the other hand, Jews are among the most economically successful of all American religious groups; see here. Previous works that address this tension include Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus (1959). Literature Professor David Brauner says that Goodbye Columbus depicts American Jews’ alleged “complacency, parochialism, and materialism.” Of course Roth was accused of antisemitism, a charge he rejected.
Eisenberg’s 2022 miniseries Fleishman Is In Trouble explored this theme thoroughly. Ross Douthat characterized Fleishman Is In Trouble as dramatizing the “angst” of being rich but not quite rich enough. A Real Pain harkens back to heroic and poor ancestors and bemoans their descendants, who benefit from their ancestors’ hard work but who, not needing to work, just spend time smoking dope in their parents’ basements. At the same time, the characters voice contempt for people with money, though they themselves have money. Note that David and Benji aren’t even paying for their trip themselves. Holocaust survivor Grandma Dory is. Their limousine Marxism is shallow.
Another question. “Can you be Jewish and an atheist?” In fact this was the topic of a recent 92nd Street Y talk; see here. Eisenberg’s David rejects Eloge’s encouragement that he practice the religion that he claims as part of his identity, but David is an atheist who sees nothing but “arbitrary mechanics” in Judaism.
Benji directs a slapstick comedy routine at the Warsaw Uprising Monument. The film does not inform the viewer of what the Warsaw Uprising Monument commemorates. I’ll do so, below. In this summary, I will focus on the wartime experiences of Polish non-Jews. I do so because educated people tend to know about the Holocaust, the systematic murder of six million Jews. Most people are not well informed about what World War II in Poland was like for the non-Jewish population, and would have no idea of the significance of the Warsaw Uprising Monument.
In 1939, Stalin’s USSR and Hitler’s Third Reich were allies. In accord with the Molotov-Ribbentrop-pact, both invaded Poland in September. Both the USSR and the Third Reich had genocidal intentions toward Poland. The Third Reich’s ultimate goal was the physical and cultural genocide of Poles and Poland; see Generalplan Ost, as well as Hitler’s August 22, 1939 Obersalzburg speech, in which he called for the cultural and biological genocide of Poles and Poland.
For two years before the invasion, Gestapo, under the direction of Reinhard Heydrich, had prepared the Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen, a list of more than 60,000 Poles to be murdered once the invasion of Poland began. As part of the invasion, Einsatzgruppen began mass shootings of Poles, see for example here, here, and here. Victims included, for example, Boy Scouts, aged between 12 and 16, shot by Nazis in a public square. In the first month of war, Germans burned 531 towns and villages. Targeted Poles not immediately killed were sent to concentration camps like Sachsenhausen, and, when it opened in 1940, Auschwitz.
In The Devils’ Alliance: Hitler’s Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941, historian Roger Moorhouse writes, “In the so-called Valley of Death near Bydgoszcz, for instance, in October 1939, over 1,200 priests, doctors, and others were killed by firing squads of the Einsatzgruppen and local ethnic German militias. In total, actions such as these would account for as many as 50,000 Polish deaths in that first autumn and winter of the German occupation.” Nazis also deported, by force, about 400,000 Poles from territory to be given to newly arriving Germans. Deportation conditions were harsh; many died. Poles who so much as frowned at a German could be shot. If Nazis had to hang death notices for all the Poles shot, “then the forests of Poland would not suffice to produce the paper.” About 1,400,000 Poles worked as forced laborers for Germans.
Morehouse highlights parallels between the invading Soviet Communists and German Nazis. “A remarkable symmetry emerged between the occupation policies adopted by the Nazis and the Soviets, with both sides using very similar methods for dealing with their respective conquered populations. Just as the Germans were effectively decapitating Polish society in the west, the Soviets were doing the same in their area of occupation. Measures adopted against the racial enemy in one half of Poland were virtually indistinguishable from those applied to the class enemy in the other.”
The USSR deported an estimated 1,200,000 Poles. They were sent to Kolyma and other notorious prison camps in Siberia. The NKVD arrested 400,000 Polish military and similar personnel. Seven thousand non-military but still suspect Poles were added. These included priests, intellectuals, landowners, stamp collectors, and speakers of Esperanto. In 1940, on Stalin’s order, roughly 22,000 were shot in the back of the head and dumped in Katyn forest and elsewhere. One NKVD officer, the leather-clad Vasily Mikhailovich Blokhin, personally shot 7,000 Poles to death.
In June, 1941, Hitler turned on his erstwhile ally, Stalin, and the Third Reich invaded the USSR. Stalin joined the Allies, and the Red Army fought back hard against the Third Reich, but the Red Army under Stalin was still no friend to the existence of Poland.
By August, 1944, Poland had been under what many assess as the harshest Nazi occupation. The Red Army was moving west and had reached the outskirts of Warsaw. The Polish Home Army hoped to re-establish a Poland independent of Soviets, who were invading Poland for the second time in five years. With little real hope for success, Poles in Warsaw staged an uprising against Nazi occupiers. The Red Army halted its advance, rather than joining the fight against a common Nazi enemy. Stalin himself ordered this. He wanted full control of Poland, not as an independent country, but as a part of the Soviet Empire. Nazis destroying both humans and infrastructure did Stalin’s genocidal work for him.
The American National World War II Museum refers to the Warsaw Uprising as “The People’s War,” a war of “Women, Children, and Civilians.” By 1944, after five years of Nazi occupation, many Polish men were dead, enslaved, or prisoners in concentration camps. Thus, as one fighter reported, “Children, adults, old people – all wanted to help. They carry what they have, paving stones, bricks, tiles, wood, heavy furniture, a child’s pram, and sandbags.” The museum reports that “One in seven combatants were women. The women’s unit Dysk, for instance, was one of five elite battalions … During the first week of the uprising, these well-equipped soldiers succeeded in taking a huge chunk of northern Wola.”
The uprising was doomed. Between 150,000 and 200,000 Poles died. Seven hundred thousand were expelled from the city; 90,000 were sent to labor camps; 60,000 were sent to death camps, including Auschwitz. In one action, the Wola Massacre, between forty and sixty thousand Poles, from infants to the elderly, were killed; some were tortured and raped before being shot.
Though the war was nearing the end and Nazis were fighting a losing battle on several fronts, the Nazis made razing Warsaw a priority. “The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth … No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation,” said Himmler.
Nazis methodically went from building to building with explosives and flamethrowers. They focused on buildings of cultural significance. Historian Adam Zamoyski writes, “When the Red Army ‘liberated’ Warsaw in January 1945, there was nobody and nothing to liberate, except for stray dogs and rats. A huge desert of rubble remained as a monument to the city which suffered more than any other in the whole war.” A film depicts what the Nazis did to Warsaw; you can see that film here.
Eventually, of course, Churchill and Roosevelt, at the February, 1945 Yalta Conference, would submit to Stalin’s desire for domination of Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe. Previously, Churchill and Roosevelt hid the truth of the Katyn massacre. Because the USSR was so important in the defeat of Nazi Germany, Churchill and Roosevelt allowed the public to believe that the Katyn massacre had been committed by Nazis, not Soviets. In short, Poles had no friends during the Warsaw Uprising.
The monument was erected in 1989, the year Soviet Communism finally fell. The statues in the Warsaw Uprising Monument reflect the nature of the fight. The figures are positioned amidst rubble. One wears a helmet that is clearly too large. This is either a woman or a child. Others are without helmets and are wearing street clothes, not military uniforms. One figure appears to be carrying a Molotov cocktail.
Eisenberg knew that if Benji had staged fun and games at a site more closely associated with Jewish suffering, he’d face backlash. Relatively few outside of Poland are aware of what 1939-1945 in Poland entailed, and so Eisenberg’s scene is comic, rather than disgusting.
Nate H. Cohen, writing in the Harvard Crimson, says, “A Chopin piece plays in the background of the scene, getting louder and wilder as the reenactment gets more excessive … Benji’s behavior sets the attention on himself rather than the monument. The tour group left that monument thinking that Benji was cool, not that the monument was meaningful.” After Benji lashes out at the tour group members for traveling first class on a train, writes Cohen, “His point also stands in direct contradiction to what he did earlier; by posing with the statues he trivialized that monument, but now he’s upset at the others for trivializing this experience … Even the subject of the Holocaust feels more like an afterthought than a central element in the film.”
The film’s brief description of Majdanek is misleading. Similarly misleading is how the actors discuss Majdanek in interviews promoting the film. Eisenberg and Grey have said that they find it touching that Poles are dedicated to preserving Majdanek and other camps, even though “their people” did not suffer in those camps.
James says that Majdanek was located close to a “bustling city.” The implication is that Poles “bustled,” unconcerned with proximity to a site of Jewish suffering.
Upon arrival in Lublin, as elsewhere in Poland, Nazis arrested, deported to concentration camps, and massacred leading Poles. Germans then imported new, German citizens. According to modern estimates, seventy-six percent of those the Nazis murdered in Majdanek were Jews. Twenty-four percent were non-Jews. The first inmates were 2,000 Soviet POWs, who shortly died from horrific maltreatment. Non-Jewish Poles were approximately twenty percent of the prisoners in Majdanek. Numbers given here are estimates. Poles were not “bustling” in Lublin; they were living in terror, and no small number of them were prisoners in the camp.
While flippant with the Warsaw Uprising Monument, and with religious Judaism, Eisenberg is devoutly orthodox in his adherence to DEI. David is married to Priya, an Indian woman. Perhaps an Indian wife communicates David’s alienation from his roots, and his participation in a globalist cultural blur, but it also works an Asian into the cast. Tour guide James is played by Will Sharpe, who is half Japanese and appears Asian. A member of the tour group is black. A Real Pain found it more important to adhere to DEI than to depict either Jews or non Jews living in today’s Poland. Other than the grouchy old man at the end, Poles, either non-Jewish or Jewish, are non-existent in the film.
As a movie lover, I appreciate films that give me something worth looking at. A Real Pain gave me nothing to look at. I would never claim that Poland is the most beautiful country on earth. Years ago, I was lucky enough to work in a tiny village in the Nepali Himalaya. I would trek around a bend in the trail and, as if I’d hit a solid wall, Nepal’s overwhelming physical beauty stopped me in my tracks and emptied my vocabulary. I cannot hope to convey the sight of snow falling on prayer flags atop the eleven-thousand-foot Lamjura Pass, or alpenglow on a parade of the world’s highest peaks, or the physical beauty of my impoverished students’ faces, often crusted with soot from kitchen fires, with clear tracks of snot under each nostril, but no less beautiful for that.
Poland is a mostly flat country of fields of rye and poppies, cows and storks. Urban Poland is blighted by Brutalist concrete boxes that sprang up after the wartime devastation of housing stock. Poland’s beauty requires not just the eye, but also the memory, of the beholder. Poland’s beauty is as dense with history and feeling from generations of palpable, vivid, ancestors as a cedar hope chest or a kitchen redolent with holiday recipes. I wish Eisenberg had crafted images that hinted at some of what I dwell on when I think of Poland, in memories, and artworks, and traditions, like the following.
One autumn twilight I and a ragtag crew of Poles, Americans, and Jews followed a Hasidic rabbi to the banks of the Wisla, a sadly polluted river wending its unhurried way on its flat route to the Baltic Sea. At the rabbi’s instruction, we emptied our pockets of lint, bread crumbs, and sins, and tossed them into the weak current. None of us wore an exotic costume; there were no fireworks. We were just a small group of people in jeans and jackets, under a gray sky, tossing something into a river that quietly accepted our sins along with its other pollutants.
This tossing of crumbs into a body of water is a tradition called Tashlich. This custom may date back to the 2,500-year-old Book of Micah, which promises that God “will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea.” Something like Tashlich is mentioned in thirteenth-century Kabbalistic literature. “Whatever falls into the deep is lost forever … it acts like the scapegoat for the ablution of sins.” Others point to the fifteenth-century German Rabbi Yaakov ben Moshe Levi Moelin, who recorded Jewish customs.
The Wisla is not the most photogenic river I’ve ever seen – that would be the Dudh Kosi, the river of milk, crashing down from Everest into its towering gorge over giant boulders, white with foam and turquoise in winter when the monsoon mud is cleared and glacial silt reflects the sky. Tashlich is not the most beautiful tradition. Christmas lights in any given suburb are prettier and more eye-catching.
Aleksander Gierymski was a nineteenth-century painter deeply committed to capturing the lives of most Poles, who were mostly poor. His painting, “The Peasant Coffin,” silently conveys the resigned grief of parents about to lose their child to disease (see here). “Sand Miners” depicts workmen dredging sand from the Wisla (see here).
Gierymski, not Jewish himself, depicted Jewish life in Poland as well. “Jewish Woman with Oranges” tugs at the heart. This veteran street vendor has been out there for a long time; one can see years of hard work and fatigue in her weathered, sunken cheeks. She sells whatever she can find, hoping and praying that enough pedestrians passing her by have the spare change to guarantee that she gets to eat that night. She’s not begging. The pathos of her situation is communicated with just the slightest tilt of her head. She’s not just working at vending. She’s also knitting. This woman cannot spare a moment in her continued struggle to survive (see here).
German Nazis looted “Jewish Woman with Oranges” from Poland, along with countless other artworks. The painting was not returned until 2010; it appears that Poland had to pay Germans for its return after seven months of negotiations (here).
Looking at her sad and desperate face, I think immediately of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story, “The Spinoza of Market Street.” Singer depicts life in Warsaw in the early twentieth century.
“‘Gold, gold, gold,’ a woman who dealt in rotten oranges shrieked.
‘Sugar, sugar, sugar,’ croaked a dealer of overripe plums.
‘Heads, heads, heads,’ a boy who sold fishheads roared.
Through the window of a Hasidic study house across the way, Dr. Fischelson could see boys with long sidelocks swaying over holy volumes, grimacing and studying aloud in sing-song voices. Butchers, porters, and fruit dealers were drinking beer in the tavern below. Vapor drifted from the tavern’s open door like steam from a bathhouse, and there was the sound of loud music … Some of the men carried bundles of wood on their shoulders, reminding Dr. Fischelson of the wicked who are condemned to kindle their own fires in Hell.”
Maybe Gierymski’s “Jewish Woman with Oranges” was the one crying “Gold, gold, gold” beneath Dr. Fischelson’s window. Maybe she is even “Black Dobbe,” the elderly, illiterate woman whom the elderly scholar Dr. Fischelson marries in that short story.
Gierymski also painted “The Feast of Trumpets.” Gierymski painted this scene three times. One of the versions was looted by German Nazis; it remains lost. The name “feast of trumpets” comes from the blowing of a ram’s horn on Rosh Hashanah. This is not a beautiful painting. The River Wisla is slack. The earth is brown. The sky is gray. There are rafts for shipping goods, fishing nets, smoke from a passing train and also from a small fire. Men in black caftans, positioned randomly on the river bank, hold open books in one hand and make supplicatory gestures with their other hand. Gierymski was depicting Tashlich in 1884, a little over a hundred years before I and others followed a caftan-clad rabbi to the Wisla to cast off our sins.
Shortly before Gierymski painted “The Feast of Trumpets,” Wilhelm Stryowski, in Gdansk, created an image of the same tradition. You can see a print of Stryowski’s work here. Stryowski’s “Tashlich” is much more formally composed, and it also offers detailed, rather than impressionistic, images. Each character assumes a pose worthy of an artist’s model. But I like Gierymski’s messy painting better. Stryowski captures the architectural details of the clay tiles on the roof and the fuzz on the fur shtreimels and the shine from wear on the Borsalinos; you could be ordering from a catalog. But Gierymski captures the feeling of that autumn evening so many years ago.
No, the Wisla is not the most beautiful river in the world. But it owns one of the most beautiful songs about rivers; you can hear it here. “Wislo Moja, Wislo Szara” apostrophizes the river. The song speaks to the river directly. You understand that in the grammar form used in the song’s title. “Wisla,” the nominative form, becomes “Wislo,” the form you use when you are talking to someone. Polish grammar is immensely complicated but it contains so many clues to meaning.
“My Wislo, grey Wislo,
where do you flow so quietly?
Where did you gather your waters from?
Speak, before you perish in the sea.”
“I gathered my waters
from this Polish land
from this beloved land.
There is no other above it.”
Not just Polish Catholic peasants converse with the Wisla. Sholem Asch was a twentieth-century author. Asch once said, “Wisla mowi do mnie po zydowsku.” “The Wisla speaks to me in Yiddish.” That was the Wisla into which we threw our sins back on that 1988 autumn twilight. The Wisla that still speaks Yiddish.
During a more recent trip to Poland, in 2022, I spent hours in a Jewish cemetery in Krakow. I felt compelled to photograph bits and pieces of Jewish gravestones. During World War II, Nazis broke up Jewish gravestones and paved the streets with them, or used them for other desecration, for example, in the construction of latrines. Retrieved bits and pieces are now embedded in the wall around the Remah Cemetery. I am not a trained photographer and all I had was a low-cost cell phone camera. But I had to take those photos, and I had to post them to social media (here), and I had to say to whatever passer by happened upon the photos, “Look at these. Think. Feel. Pray. Act.”
There is no hint of this Poland, this history, these heart-breaking, inspiring, unutterably complex Polish-Jewish relations in A Real Pain, a movie, ultimately, about two guys in t-shirts resisting growing up.
Danusha V. Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.
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