Updated May 4, 2021

THE BOOK OF SEROCK MEMORY AND TRANSCENDENCY

Dr. José Milaniene⁵¹
Buenos Aires

"Our eyes receive the light from dead stars":
Andre Schwartz-Bart

Translated by Susan Farb

The reading of The Book of Serock generated a dual sentiment; on one side nostalgia for the world of yesterday represented by the rich Jewish life in the Shtetls of Eastern Europe between the wars; and on the other, the joy found only in recapturing an invaluable legacy that obliges us to a renewed telling.

The magnificent tale of Dr. Silvio Gutkowski-the compiler and translator-gives a reading of the true event(s), that affects the nucleus of Being on multiple levels:

A. Sustaining the "obligation of memory": Serock represents the hundreds of dispersed villages in Eastern Europe, in which Jewish life reached an unequaled splendor. There, in those poor holes circled by a hostile world, small towns full of traditions, signified by a respect for writings and a spiritual culture, and expressed by a devotion to letters (alef-beis) and to the
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⁵¹ Medical Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst. Didactic Professor of the Psychoanalytic Association of Argentina. Author of, among other books, of Clinical Difference in Times of Generalized Perversion.

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fundamental writings, lovingly instilled, since Cheder. The touching result recorded as the humble and simple men of the town did not neglect A. the spiritual value and the community organization , and tended to preserve the traditions and rituals that were legacies the men of the past, considered genuine and that they believed were genuine legacies in their safekeeping.

The ideals of redemption and the messianic utopias belonging to the Jewish town were expressed as much in their religious dimensions as laics, and the fervor of the polemic passion-inherited from the Talmudic conflict-confronted observant Jews with Marxists, and Hassidic Jews with illustrious Jews, at the end, with all the fertile currents of powerful Jewish thoughts found in Serock their fraternal expressions. The dialogue sustained essential ideals and values, and in that rich inheritance, it affiliated the descendants-sons and grandsons-of the shtetls, among those we find laborers, great thinkers, creators, and antifacist fighters and social revolutionaries, scattered throughout the world.

The confrontation of different theological discussions are written over the horizon of a rich cultural and artistic life, inundated with a jubilant celebration of life, accompanied by the rhythm of klezmer music and interwoven with theater actors in the Yiddish language. The cultural creation in Yiddish possessed the beauty that has the colorful, everyday expressions, and the sayings, refrains, and the curses of an unequaled sharpness. The Jewish humor of the shtetl full of heat, persipacity, and irony-was the privileged instrument to overcome adversity in a world that denounced the Jew, given that was this bearing of the fidelity of the law and the ethical pact with the Word.

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The testimonies that Silvio Gutkowski recounts reflect, well, a world of yesterday and, well awaken a nostalgia for that had been in Jewish Europe, that had not been annihilated by the Shoah, that also generates in us the pleasure that comes from connecting with the richness without the collective creation of a town preserved in its convictions, and this noble attitude threatened us from the past to recover the essentials of this legacy.

Reading the testimonies does not make us passive, but incites an imaginary dialogue with the inhabitants of the village of Serock. My utopian desire surges to express that they could extinguish the lives and erase a unique culture-in that they nourished an infinity of thinkers and essentials of the west---; that they could obligate the survivors to emigrate throughout the world, but they could not cancel their Messianic ideals and aspirations; on the contrary we say to our beloved ancestors from Serock that their ideals are alive and spoken about in the writings. We say about these testimonies that their sons talks about their stories, that we do not forget and, we want to do it, and now generate this supreme form of transcendency that is the book, that we make in this case as a clear testimony of the testimonies.

While we tell our children the story of Serock, the spirit that animates its lost, inhabitants untouchable in essence and warns us to keep the cosmic vision that animates even in the worst circumstances: the solid love of town and community, the respect for the traditions and rituals,-even those that are without either ritual or dogmas of faith,--and the care for the alter of the Other (God), expressed by the responsibility for the widow, orphan, and the sick.

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We can summarize with only two Yiddish expressions the ethical imperatives that governed life in the shtetl of Serock: that mandate was Zai a Mensch (be a man), which means, assuming the dignity of man imposes an irrenunciable obligation of attending to all the given words, that always commits us to good actions-Mitzvos-with all similar sufferings.

In summary, Jewish ethics rests in the Pact with the Word and in the acts that keep the hospitable Other (God): the Jews of Serock sustained, without concessions these principles, not only in life before the war, but even in the persecutions in the dark night of the Shoah.

B. Keep the thought: the text is formed as an entry to three dimensions:

1) The stories that describe everyday life in Serock, with the individual and group vicissitudes of the inhabitants until the notable heroic acts of the Shoah. They unfold in front of our eyes such attitudes of daily life of feeling and beloved persons, like the risks in full actions of courage and of memorable personages, that should choose for forced and dangerous elections, stories as immigration or the fight against the Nazi enemy.

It deals with testimonial stories, that bring forward the Existential dimension of "objective" data that describes the history books, that compliment with potency that is the life.

The knowledge of life in Serock since the various voices generate an unedited "bonus of feeling", that enriches the understanding of a world that returns others' to an extent

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crossing time and that is necessary knowledge to be able to tell our children the true history and thus assure the continuity of our own.

The book contributes well to found an "existential pedagogy"- based on the relative testimonies -that works as a necessary condition to be able to construct a narrative that gives a feeling history which, if you don't know it, will condemn us to a destiny of repetition and significant loss by the passion of ignorance and the cowardly tendency of forgetfulness.

To be able to record the forgotten to know the unknown obtains a large degree of liberty and a great capacity to make us in charge of the past, a time that grants us the privilege of inheriting a culture impregnated with ethical values of unpaired vigor.

2) The dialogue: the book starts as a dialogue, made from the footsteps of the living and the stories of the children of Serock. Silvio Gutkowski has placed a dialogue at the back of the testimonial writing of the yesterdays of Serock, with their descendants and between those between himself and us with them of a style which has created a consistent dialogue space in back of which they can write memories, recover lives, rescue myths, and reconstruct the fantasy that signified much of the infancy of many of the descendants of Serock.

To recover the history of our ancestors we obtain an emotional force that arises from the assumption of the origins and the recreation of the values that ruled in a world that even if we do not live in it, appeals to us and promises to maintain the legacy.

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The writing is configured as a privileged dialogue that allows us, in addition, to restore the magnitude of the parental figures, and make them mercifully human in lives that restrained, with courage, adversity and were capable of reconstruction after the impious persecution and forced exile of their cultural universe to others' horizons.

It tries with a just retribution to those who surrounded Jewish culture everywhere, sustained Yidishkait, founded resident's groups, created their families, and educated their children in ethical study and work, without ever forgetting the obligation that binds us to the community. Resounding in my ears are the words of Joel Gutkowski, of blessed memory, who affirmed the imperative phrase "one must work", before breaking the juvenile pleasures and the adolescent idleness of his children.

After reading this book, it seems clearer to me the necessity of installing the dialogue with our past, given that only there will we find the strength to sustain us as deserving inheritors of a fundamental legacy, with the strength of its appropriate transcendency , intended as a construction of a project that retrieves the essential values of the shtetls, felt in study, work, and love.

3) Polyphonic Chorus: finally, the book takes the form of a polyphonic chorus, in which the voices of the descendants of Serock unite the thoughts of Jaime Szpilka, Sara Minuchin de Itzigshon, Jose Itzigsohn, Mari Carmen Gimenez, and Silvio Gutkowski. These intellectuals give the book an appropriate conceptual mark, that not only recovers the essence of the book, but also contributes a more charming, appropriate reading, and contributing to a more pleasurable reading, crossed by the same spirit that governs all the stories.

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C. Homage to the Father: we live in times marked by the fall of values and the collapse of ideals with the resulting loss of the referent ethical essentials. The attack on the symbolic Law, among other symptoms, by the failure of respect for the figure of the Father and the devaluation of His word. We should well bring back the recognition of the fathers, the revelation of their teachings, and the care for their messages, that is to say, to try to restore the dignity of their loving presence and give the tribute that honors their struggles and devotion for their children.

In this feeling, this book exemplifies that which implies an homage to these fathers that, with sorrow for having created a tragic orphanage, tried with maximum strength to give us the gifts that they never received.

The reading of this dear book gives us spiritual comfort because it recaptures, across the narration, the tragic vicissitudes of Serock, all an epoch of Jewish life in the Diaspora, with all the potency of its creativity and with all the useless suffering generated by the Shoah.

This testimonial text is the worthy product of the children, who with their emotional and respectful memory, honor the legacy of an immortal generation.

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