In October, I took part in the travel literature festival in Venice, Invito al Viaggio, in conversation with the British Muslim travel writer Tharik Hussain. Our conversation was moderated by Shaul Bassi.
Take a look — it’s a great conversation (though I didn’t realize how much I fiddle with my hands…..)
This volume explores the global transformations of contemporary Jewishness, which give renewed meaning to identity, tradition, and politics in our post secular world.
My chapter essay is titled: “Jewish. Jewish? “Jewish” Jewish! New Authenticities amid Post-Holocaust, Postcommunist Europe’s Jewish Revival”
This 27th volume of the international series Jews and Slavs, entitled Jewish-Slavic Cultural Horizons: Essays on Jewish History and Art in Slavic Lands, dwells on the political, cultural, literary, and artistic interaction between Jews and Slavic peoples from the Middle Ages to the World War II aftermath. The publication contains 21 articles dedicated to the history, ethnicity, culture, literature, theatre, fine arts, architecture, heritage and memory thematically grouped in nine sections.
My essay is titled: “Preservers/Rescuers/Keepers/Guardians of Memory: Recognizing non-Jewish Poles who Preserve, Protect, Conserve, and Promote Jewish History, Heritage, and Memory.”
Back in July I was the focus of an episode of the webinar series organized by the National Library of Israel. It was me — in conversation with my brother, Dr. Samuel D. Gruber, with whom I have frequently worked and traveled. We touched on a wide range of topics related to our Jewish heritage research — and more — over the past three decades.
The event was hosted and introduced by the NLI’s Caron Sethill.
During the pandemic, I’ve been taking part in a number of online Zoom webinars, lectures, discussions, and round-table projects.
Here’s the most recent:
“Synagogues: The State of Preservation and Future Prospects – possible approaches and challenges in heritage protection” — December 7th 2021
A conversation with me, the historian and artist Natalia Romik, the CEO of the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland Piotr Puchta, and the director of the Okopowa St. Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw, Witold Wrzosinski.
Me documenting in the Jewish cemetery in Szydlowiec, Poland, in 1994
B’nai B’rith magazine quotes me in a lengthy and unusually comprehensive article that summarizes initiatives to preserve, protect, and restore Jewish cemeteries in Europe.
Author and scholar Ruth Ellen Gruber runs the website Jewish Heritage Europe, with deep resources on Jewish monuments and heritage sites. She has documented the resurgence of interest in Jewish culture and history over three decades. After the fall of the Soviet Union and communism in Eastern Europe, she said, “People wanted to fill in the blank spaces, and Jewish heritage was one of them.”
Hilary Danailova has written an lengthy article in Hadassah Magazine about Jewish genealogy — and travel, in which I’m quoted, about the impact of digital resources. Her article is called A Pilgrimage Through Ancestral Lands.
“The revolution in genealogy travel is Facebook,” observed Ruth Ellen Gruber, a veteran journalist and Jewish travel authority […]. “There are a million Facebook groups, with subgroups for individual cemeteries, synagogues, shtetls and so forth. People can ask questions and get immediate answers from across the world.” Gruber oversees what is arguably the most comprehensive resource for Jewish heritage tourists: the web portal Jewish Heritage Europe, with daily updates on Jewish heritage-related sights, events and people across the continent, along with genealogy and travel insights.
I gave an illustrated lecture — via Zoom — on Nov. 12 as part of a program organized by the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow. It was called Beyond Virtually Jewish: Adventures in Europe’s Real Imaginary Spaces.
In it I looked back over my experience in Poland, dating back to 1980, when I was a correspondent for UPI covering Solidarnosc and Martial Law (including when I was jailed and expelled from the country because of my coverage) and discussed how throughout my career I have dealt with dreams and aspirations — of freedom, of Jewishness, of the wild west. What I’ve called the “Real Imaginary.”
In this talk, I discuss both my exploration of Jewish heritage and the “virtually Jewish” as well as my adventures in the Imaginary Wild West.
“Jewish Heritage Europe, a website featuring news and information concerning Jewish monuments and cultural sites in Europe, has curated virtual tours and exhibits from various sources.
The site, a project of the Rothschild Foundation, is run by Ruth Ellen Gruber, author of “Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe.” Originally from Philadelphia, she now lives in Europe and has spent the coronavirus lockdown in Italy.
“Museums and other operations have been creating virtual tours and digital recreations and online exhibits for a long time. Since no one can travel, there’s been an explosion of digital experiences of all sorts,” Gruber said. “JHE is an online operation, so I just wanted to bring more useful and expansive content to people who were stuck at home. People want to be entertained, to see beautiful things.”
She started in early March with a series of virtual tours of 11 European towns that included digital recreations of buildings where people could learn local history. After getting a positive response from visitors, she continued to post more virtual experiences in Italy, Hungary, Spain, Germany, the Czech Republic and other countries.
In addition to cemeteries and art exhibitions, site visitors can explore “Atlas of Memory Maps.” Mounted by Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre in Lublin, Poland, the online exhibit features maps of pre-war cities, towns and shtetls drawn from former inhabitants’ memories after World War II.
The JHE website also hosts an exhibit of papercut art by the Polish artist Monika Krajewska commemorating Jewish sites that were destroyed during the Holocaust.
“They’re really fabulous, we got a good response,” Gruber said of the artwork.
She said the challenge for tour guides and organizations is monetizing those experiences to help sustain workers in the tourism industry during coronavirus shutdowns.”
I took part in a conference on Jewish Heritage in Slovenia, held at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in September 2019.
My presentation was “Notes” from the survey of Jewish heritage in Slovenia that I carried out in 1996 — the first full survey of Jewish heritage in the country, and an endeavor that in many ways underlay the scholarship presented by the other participants in the conference.
That survey was carried out for the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad, and was published in downloadable form. Click here to access it.
The conference was filmed — here is a video of my presentation.
In Brno, Czech Republic, the Imaginary Wild West leaps off a wall…. advertising “the best steaks” in the city at an eatery called “U Starýho Bill” (At Old Bill’s) that calls itself “a real ‘TEXAS’ restaurant.”
The wall here was a few steps away from the Sono Center, a major Brno venue for contemporary music — where I was headed to attend a concert by the Czech bluegrass band The Malina Brothers, with guest appearances by Charlie McCoy, the Nashville-based harmonica virtuoso and member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, and the Czech singer Kat’a Garcia. The concert was sold out, and got a prolonged standing ovation from the crowd. And it was being filmed for a live show DVD.
Malinas concert Sono Center
The Malinas are old friends of mine. Banjo player and multi-instrumentalist Lubos Malina was one of the founding members of the great Czechgrass group Druha Trava, and I met him (amazingly) nearly 15 years ago, at one of the many summer bluegrass/country festivals in CZ, when I first started exploring the Imaginary Wild West in Europe.
Guitarist Pavel Malina used to play with DT, and fiddler Pepa Malina still sometimes plays with them. The Malina Brothers band came together informally at first, but over the past five years or so has developed a remarkable following in CZ — as the concert in Brno demonstrated.
The three brothers visited in Italy six years ago and gave a house concert at the home of a friend. It was the first of a series of house concerts anchored by Lubos. The brothers played this arrangement of Smetana at the house concert in 2013 — and at the concert in Brno.
On the night after the Brno concert, Pepa Malina performed with Druha Trava at the start of a a week-long tour with Charlie McCoy — a sold-out, standing-ovation gig in the town of Ceska Trebova.
Here’s a video of the run-through before the Ceska Trebova concert:
Charlie McCoy has had a standout career in the USA and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2009.
I’ve written about him in the past, on my Sauerkraut Cowboys blog, because he is quite wellknown in the country music scene outside the USA. He tours regularly in Europe and elsewhere (i.e. Japan), and he makes a point to play with European bands and also records with them; he has released albums in France, Denmark, Germany, and the Czech Republic. Later this summer he will be touring in Sweden in England.
Onstage at the concert in Ceska Trebova, he recalled how he met up with Druha Trava — it was at the festival in Strakonice, CZ, where he was performing in 2001. DT was also on the bill and asked if he would join them for a few songs — since then he has toured with them half a dozen or more times in CZ, released a live album with DT and also released a CD with The Malina Brothers.
Here’s a promo video about the Malina Brothers album (partly in Czech, partly in English):
I met Charlie back in 2005 during one of his tours with Druha Trava — the concert I saw was at a “Days of Texas” festival in the little town of Roznov pod Radnostem, in eastern CZ.
The festival, I wrote in an article highlighted the fact that from the mid-19th century until World War I, thousands of people emigrated from Roznov and other towns and villages in the region to Texas. Today, Texas has the largest ethnic Czech community of any state in the United States.
There were demonstrations of 19th-century farming customs used by the emigrants and performances by American-style Czech country-western groups, as well as local folk groups performing Wallachian songs and dances. An exhibition of quilting featured a big patchwork quilt reading “Texas,” hung prominently from the upper floor of the old Roznov Town Hall.
Like the Malina Brothers concert in Brno, the Druha Trava/Charlie McCoy concert in Ceska Trebova drew a standing ovation from an energized crowd — and lots of autograph-seekers and CD-buyers afterward.