“In our home and in many other homes the eternal questions were more actual than the latest news in the Yiddish newspaper. In spite of all the disenchantments and all my skepticism I believe that the nations can learn much from those Jews, their way of thinking, their way of bringing up children, their finding happiness where others see nothing but misery and humiliation.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
As a teenager, in the midst of the First World War, Singer moved with his siblings and his mother to her hometown, the small shtetl<\/em> of Bi\u0142goraj, where they belonged to a prominent rabbinical family.<\/p>\n Following a short stint in a Warsaw rabbinical seminary, a young Singer would return to the ancestral shtetl<\/em>, where he would fail to support himself by giving Hebrew lessons \u2013 an interesting historical detail for the man destined become the first Yiddish writer to win the Nobel Prize.<\/p>\n Bi\u0142goraj was home to a thriving, if modest, Jewish community, and would inspire many of Singer’s later works.<\/p>\n Nearly a century has passed since Singer left Bi\u0142goraj for good. Other notable former residents included Rabbi Mordecai Rokeach of the Belz Hasidic Dynasty, who famously fled Europe for the Land of Israel in 1944, and the well-known writer and educator Shmuel Ben-Artzi, father-in-law of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.<\/p>\n The town has long been bereft of Jewish inhabitants, yet a replica shtetl<\/em><\/a> now stands there, the brainchild of Tadeusz Ku\u017ami\u0144ski, a businessman and philanthropist, who recently passed away<\/a>.<\/p>\n Ku\u017ami\u0144ski dreamed of building a site that reflected the multicultural nature of pre-War Poland, which could also serve as a contemporary cultural, commercial and residential center. With the vision only partially realized, Bi\u0142goraj is now home to a recreated Jewish marketplace, with plans ready for a second market square set to include replicas of wooden churches and a wooden mosque (of the type long-used by some descendants of Tatars in eastern Poland).<\/p>\n A small museum in Singer’s honor is housed in one of the replica town’s structures, yet the most striking feature of the modern reincarnation of Jewish Bi\u0142goraj is Ku\u017ami\u0144ski’s full-scale reproduction of the destroyed wooden synagogue of Wolpa (a town in modern-day Belarus) \u2013 some 400 km (250 miles) away.<\/p>\n Somewhat ironically, Wolpa was probably most well-known for the very synagogue now recreated in Bi\u0142goraj.<\/p>\n Wood synagogues were quite common throughout Eastern Europe, and yet the Wolpa Synagogue was considered to be one of the finest examples, an aesthetic and technical masterpiece, which stood for well over two centuries \u2013 surviving one world war before being destroyed in the next.<\/p>\n After receiving his Nobel Prize, Singer addressed the distinguished guests at the subsequent banquet:<\/p>\n “People ask me often, \u2018Why do you write in a dying language?\u2019 And I want to explain it in a few words.<\/p>\n Firstly, I like to write ghost stories and nothing fits a ghost better than a dying language. The deader the language the more alive is the ghost. Ghosts love Yiddish and as far as I know, they all speak it.<\/p>\n Secondly, not only do I believe in ghosts, but also in resurrection. I am sure that millions of Yiddish speaking corpses will rise from their graves one day and their first question will be: \u201cIs there any new Yiddish book to read?\u201d For them Yiddish will not be dead.<\/p>\n Thirdly, for 2000 years Hebrew was considered a dead language. Suddenly it became strangely alive. What happened to Hebrew may also happen to Yiddish one day, (although I haven\u2019t the slightest idea how this miracle can take place).<\/p>\n There is still a fourth minor reason for not forsaking Yiddish and this is: Yiddish may be a dying language but it is the only language I know well. Yiddish is my mother language and a mother is never really dead.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Isaac Bashevis Singer passed away some two decades before Tadeusz Ku\u017ami\u0144ski’s dream of a simulated pre-War Bi\u0142goraj began to take shape.<\/p>\n What would Singer have thought or written about Ku\u017ami\u0144ski’s renascent Bi\u0142goraj?<\/p>\n Would he have seen humor in the idea of a replica shtetl with no Jews?<\/p>\n Or the notion of a once-iconic synagogue transported through space and time, plopped down in tiny Bi\u0142goraj, steps away from a modest museum in his honor (despite the fact that he himself only lived there for a brief period)?<\/p>\n Is Ku\u017ami\u0144ski’s Bi\u0142goraj a living ghost? A mother that was never really dead?<\/p>\n Or \u2013 in the spirit of Singer’s childhood home \u2013 an attempt in post-Holocaust Poland to “find\u2026 happiness where others see nothing but misery and humiliation”?<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog.nli.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/Main-Square-in-Bi\u0142goraj-early-20th-century.jpg\")
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