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The Book of Serock (Serock's Book)

Jaime I. Szpilka

Psychoanalyst

Madrid

Translated by Judith R. Frazin

When Silvio Gutkowski called me on the telephone in order to tell me that his father had known mine and that he wanted to send to me a translation in Spanish that he was doing of a book about Serock, I felt that an unexpected gift was about to arrive in my hands and with enormous emotion but also with a certain fear of putting myself into who knows what unbearable pain, I got ready (prepared myself) to read the chapters that I was receiving. Always I thought that memory was a very delicate organ that had to be administered with much caution and in my psychoanalytic work I like to say a paradoxical assertion: one must remember in order to be able to forget and one must forget in order to be able to remember. I based [this idea] on a beautiful work of Freud, "The psychic mechanism of forgetting" where it is made evident that the forgotten name, Signorelli, was the name that [when] remembered served in order to forget the great feared owner, Mr. Death. Therefore, there are amnesias which harm and produce symptoms, hypermnesias which harm and produce symptoms too, and there are forgettings that cure and remembrances that sicken. The question is how to find the exact balance between memory and forgetting. And probably the key may be the value that the growing possibility of symbolization in the constitution of the subjective development has, when that symbolization can produce itself and when one has sufficiently worked out (planned) for that production.

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I remember that, as a young child, of very few years, I used to rummage around in my parents' drawers in order to find the letters that they used to receive from the Warsaw Ghetto, that I used to try to decipher with my early knowledge of Yiddish. And these texts about Serock gave new life, freshness and a better subjective inscription to the reactivation of those so vague memories, as to the clearest understanding of my early Zionist militancy in the Dror movement. Also I remember that next to the daily sadness and the guilt that my parents used to feel by being safe in a country far away from the catastrophe of the German invasion, that at times used to turn into severe melancholy, I was always surrounded by idealized and romantic stories of the youth lived by them in Serock. So I remember those who used to speak about the beautiful boat rides along the Narew and the joy of the parties where one used to dance and sing in groups with a strong spiritual communion. My mother, Sara Zajarek, belonged to a numerous family that used to trade skins and cereals, with many brothers and sisters whom she used to remember with immense guilt and pain; she had a beautiful voice and in her few good moments her songs in Yiddish and in Polish used to delight us now and again, so much that from a very young age I asked my parents to allow me to learn to play the violin, not in order to be a Yasha Haifets or a Yehudi Menuhin who might interpret the beautiful whims of Paganini, but simply in order to be able to accompany my mother in her songs, and thus it was that I learned just in order to enjoy those moments that used to make me enormously happy. From a very early age I felt an enormous respect and admiration for my father, Shimon Szpilka. That he had had the vision to leave Serock--where. according to his stories, he used to have a relatively comfortable life--and that he had worked so hard in Buenos Aires in order to be able to bring my mother, my sister and me, a baby of a few months, already

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seemed to me a gesture so heroic that I used to feel that he was excused from any other demand. My father was living with an infinite guilt for being safe with us and not having had either the time or the material possibilities of having saved the rest of his family of origin. I have in front of me very beautiful photos of the era of his secondary school, where one sees him accompanied by his sister Hanele, a dark-haired girl with braids, very beautiful; there are other [photos] of the engagement with my mother, very young and handsome the two of them, they were fifteen and thirteen years [old], and also of the day of their wedding, very elegant and in love; photos that I keep in my library like a treasure, since I find in their images the most vital and happy outlines that surely constituted the most valuable aspects of my own existence. As for my father, I always felt him [to be] a "mentch" ³⁵, in the complete sense of the word, and I never doubted the simple and clear profundity of his ethics which was based, above all, on not humiliating the self love of any person. He was religious in his way, rather liberal, convinced Zionist, but essentially he was not fanatic about anything. The guilt of having saved himself, which he could never cast off, used to impose on him prohibitions as rigid as that of never buying himself an automobile, as if that were a shameful ostentation which he should not permit himself. As for my mother, I always felt her [to be] like a bubble of infinite tenderness, with very severe depressive sufferings and with a guilt infinitely greater than that of my father, which used to plunge her in profound crises of melancholy. I used to accompany her with patience and at times with worry, and surely I owe my profession of psychoanalyst to the immense training of having listened to her [for] hours and hours of her interminable self-reproaches and distressing laments. All this made up for by the moments
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³⁵ A good person

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in which her improvement used to permit her to make us happy with her magnificent Jewish cooking and the beauty of her songs.

Very soon I joined a Socialist Zionist movement, Dror, and I began to profess a different Judaism, I changed the violin of the violinist on the roof for the "jalil" ³⁶ with which I used to play beautiful Israeli melodies which used to allude to the birth of a new State, to life on the kibbutz, to romantic adolescent love and to the heroism of those who were fighting for the creation and the preservation of the State of Israel. I remember the differences with my father's old-fashioned Judaism, the escapes from the Shul in order to meet with my movement companions and the discussions about the religiousness or the secularism of the new country which was [being] constructed. In the movement, to which I am profoundly grateful, I learned to love the theater, philosophy, music, culture in general and the basic social rules of coexistence outside of family. Afterwards, [there] came a difficult period of choices between my vocation of being a doctor--perhaps in order to cure so much historic family pain-- and Aliyah. My vocation of medical student predominated and I was distancing myself gradually from the movement as I was developing my profession as a psychoanalyst doctor, to which I dedicated myself with passion and reasonable success. Finally I chose a completely secular life, without of course renouncing my origins, and being very conscious of the personal ethical commitment and of the emotional obligations with the circumstances that accompanied my early existence. A paradox of life meant that I had to make a reverse migration when Fascism threatened the peace and the harmonious coexistence in Argentina and, after harsh threats, I chose to live in Spain. I always thought about the curious compensations of life; my parents went to Argentina to take refuge from Fascism, my mother, my sister
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³⁶ A recorder

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and I did it in a ship named Asturias, which was sunk during the war and finally I had to return with my new family to take refuge in Spain. The rest is already the normal development of my life with my vicissitudes and my good and bad moments.

And suddenly appears Silvio with the Book of Serock. I had already [spent] thirty three years living in Madrid and it was like beginning again a history quite buried but which worked for me, as I said at the beginning of this story, in order to be able to give my origins a new rededication. "Our little town" and "The little town until the Second World War" filled me with already long forgotten memories and emotions. The names, the places, the long Jewish history of the town, the education of the children and, above all, the important place of spiritual and intellectual development that was occupied by the Zionist organizations and the fights between traditional Judaism and new Judaism, moved me especially. After all, my infantile history in the decade of the '40s in Argentina had been practically a replica of the history of the shtetl. And always I thought about the importance that Zionism had in giving Judaism a different feeling, a dialectic jump from an almost tribal Judaism to a new national Judaism. As if trying to be a nation might have implied an ethical and civic jump that was saving Judaism from its ethnic narrowness in order to give [to] it a universal law of nation among nations. At least for me Zionism, even with all the criticisms and reflections that it provokes, had the merit of taking Judaism out of a primary blood connection in order to elevate it to a secondary connection of law. It moved me and of course, the simple sentence in which Iaacov Brujansky says, referring to Napoleon Hill, "During many generations in the corners of the hill were hidden loves and fantasies of the enthusiastic young Jews of Serock."

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In that sentence I could, finally give a time and a space to the intense youthful love---surely secret--that my parents were declaring. Also it served to position for me the important 3rd of May Avenue, that [avenue] which the people [who were] strolling used to cross on Shabbat and which was the road that used to lead to Warsaw, the great and idealized Warsaw. The return of the immigrants on holidays to the Polish capital, who used to want to find themselves with the home-loving atmosphere of the town always missed and adorned in the fantasy with thousands of flowers was becoming very familiar in Madrid, where the genuine inhabitants of Madrid are few, since almost all come from little towns on the outskirts and we, the true foreigners, are those who don't have a little town to which to return [during] holidays and vacations.

And what a beautiful description, the one from Jaim Kapetch, placing "our little town, Serock" on the right bank of the Narew [where it meets] the Bug. "From afar, the small houses seem a wall". In my only trip to Serock, at the end of the '90s, I found myself in a small modern town that never could tell me what the description I have just cited says. And the impoverishment of the '20s, the end of the First War, pogroms and revolutions, incipient nationalisms, permitted me to better understand my father's first migratory attempt, at 18 years [of age], to Buenos Aires. What made him return? Missing the shtetl, loneliness, and the fear of new [things], love for my mother? Impossible to know, but his return was fundamental for my own existence.

However, even within the narrowmindedness, how much love of culture and knowledge! And what a fantastic fight between traditional knowledge and universal knowledge by means of libraries, the theater, the lectures and the beautiful words of Josef Heftman urging [the naming of] Sierotsk, as initials of "Serotsk Iugnt Emantsipirt ruf alemen zu kultur". What a pleasure

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to remember from where my parents' thirst for culture and the ideals of knowledge that they transmitted to me!

Another point that seemed important to me is that of the bravery of the young people who weren't afraid in front of the "hooligans" of the epoch. I remember as a boy, envying the Italian mafiosos of films who used to return to their homes, used to leave their machineguns and used to delight themselves with enormous plates of vermicelli pasta with tomato sauce prepared by the "mother", as if they were heroic big children who were receiving a prize. And I was asking my mother: why can the goyim be bad and be equally loved by their mother? She didn't have the answer but I with all my strength used to want her to authorize me to be bad. In that epoch I used to believe that all the evil which was happening to the Jews was because they couldn't exert their evil, but the more that I used to try, it wasn't easy for me to exert it either and more than once I had to feel myself [a] coward. Therefore, it seemed to me fantastic to regain the bravery and the strength of the young people of Serock, who were not allowing themselves to [be] frightened by the anti-Semites and who were modern and real Bar Kojbas ³⁷, because in reality I had never believed that the story of Bar Kojba may have been true. It seemed that all the good Jews, as Mela Mendelewsky tells in "El Moderno jeider," had to have the same kavod as el moreh, who used to prefer not to demand what they owed him because of pride in his modesty and in his teaching. But, as Elimelej Hershfinger tells in "Our Serock of those times", how difficult it was to be brave and what extraordinary merit it had to be when the Jews used to feel that their life was hefker ³⁸. It is easy to be strong and valiant when
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³⁷ Jewish leader who in the year 132 directed a revolt against the Roman Empire and established an independent Jewish state [over which] he presided until it was reconquered by the Romans in the year 135.
³⁸ Total lack of protection, [a] place without laws. Property without [an] owner

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the law gives one the right to be it, but when it doesn't . . .? It makes me remember so much the works of Giorgio Agamben* about what he calls the "bare" life, the marginal [ones] who had lost all inscription and all right in the organized social world. How to reclaim the dignity, the bravery and the right to fight for existence in the middle of a hefker life? And I insist here again on the fundamental value of Zionism in those times, where the creation of a Jewish state implied for the Jews of the whole world, whether or not they made "aliyah" whether or not they were identified with those ideals, the dream of [no longer] living in the "bare" life. How much I enjoyed that modern Bar Kojba that Iehuda Mendelewsky tells in "The mobilization of the Polish army between the two wars." Blessed be Leibele Zucker! Finally also [there] used to exist in Serock a Jewish Superman, who was giving the right order "let the weak ones escape," with which he was protecting them and also he was protecting himself from them. Doubtless one is stronger without the weak ones nearby.

The stories of Moshe Karanek in "Life and economy" impacted me. The name of Abraham Szpilka as chief of the Beitar, great Torah expert and very intelligent, surely a cousin of my father, the mention that several members of that family emigrated to Argentina, which doubtless refers to my parents, my sister and me, since I don't remember other Szpilkas in Buenos Aires, and the description of the house of the Szpilka family, where surely I was born, between the dairy of Baruj Josef and the spice business of the Leviners, made me believe that I was for the first time in front of an unknown truth. So that was true, that there was an Abraham Szpilka, a Baruj Josef, a Leviner and a house of the Szpilka family? It sounds to me so sweet to be able to place finally again my surname among the names of other simple Jews of the small town, a dairyman, a seller of spices, flavors, smells,
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* Giorgio Agamben, an Italian Jewish philosopher, who has analyzed law and sovereign power and how they determine those individuals who have rights (citizens) and those individuals who have lost their rights and who live the "bare" life.

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senses, experiences, as if everything might gain color in the middle of a white and black without vitality.

And after the horror. How much unnecessary suffering, how much human evil, how much ethical degradation, how much love and solidarity. What a surprise to find myself with non-Jewish Polish people who hadn't lost the sense of humanity, who were helping and were hiding Jews at the cost of their own lives. It reconciled me with the Polish people, what a relief! And how much love and naiveté in Abraham Szpilka, that being able to save himself in the zone dominated by the Russians he could not tolerate being far from his own people and he returned to Serock in order to live so many tribulations. How much love and how much sacrifice! Dear Abraham, I never could speak with you but how much I might have liked to know you and listen to your knowledge of the Torah and your infinite humanity.

It enchanted me finally, to find the name of my father Shimon Szpilka in the chapter of Shlomo Aszenmil, "The society of the natives of Serock in Argentina", forming part of the provisional commission of the new society of Serock and Pultusk. I remember him speaking in Yiddish at so many meetings in the temple and in actions of Keren Kayemet ³⁹, and I always admired the ease of inflaming the people with his oratory in favor of the topic with which he wanted to deal.

I want to give thanks to those who left testimony through these writings and to Silvio Gutkowski, for translating them and sending them to me. It has made me reclaim the happiness of having also a little town where [I could] return and fantasize about that beautiful landscape (scenery) at the joining of the Narew and the Bug and to imagine the secret loves of my youth in the Hills of Napoleon.
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³⁹ Institution that is occupied with collecting funds in order to rescue and to take care of lands in Israel and to finance a wide variety of projects.

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Copyright©Howard Orenstein, 2021.