c u l t u r e | andrew ingall
Making a Tsimes, Distilling a Performance
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Vodka and Jewish Culture in Poland Today
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I take a seat at the ariel café, one of several Jewishthemed locales in Kazimierz, Cracow’s Jewish quarter. I order Zubrowka, a purportedly aphrodisiac Polish vodka flavored with bison grass. It is 1996. Like many Jewish tourists, I am momentarily seduced by the quaint charms of Kazimierz. Smells of chopped liver, onions, and chicken soup drift from the café’s kitchen. Lace tablecloths, brass menorahs, and faded photographs recall the interwar years in Poland when Jewish culture reached its full flower. Two bearded musicians in white blouses, black vests, and yarmulkes entertain patrons from Poland, Germany, North America, and Israel. The klezmer melodies, played on violin and guitar, are familiar but off-key. The romantic mise-en-scène has morphed into a model for “Yiddishland” in Walt Disney’s Magic Kingdom. With the cooperation of the café’s management, I set up shop at my table. I display three bottles of vodka: Chopin, a luxury spirit; Cymes, one of Poland’s many so-called “Jewish-style” vodkas; and Z˙ydek (“Jewboy”), my own creation, a fictitious vodka with a brand name of questionable good taste.1 I explain to the Ariel Café’s customers that I am conducting market research on a new beverage. In exchange for free samples, I ask customers to compare the three vodkas and fill out a questionnaire. The initial questions seem perfunctory, but by the end of the survey, participants are asked to reflect on the stereotyping and marketing of Jewish culture in Poland today. Since the early 1990s, Jewish tourism in Cracow has steadily increased. The attraction can be attributed to two primary factors: the fall of Communism; and the release of Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film, Schindler’s List, which was shot on location in and around the city. Tourist itineraries previously were limited to a handful of synagogues, two cemeteries, and a display of ritual objects in the city’s Jewish museum. However, in more recent years, entrepreneurs have opened hip cafés and pubs, antiquarian bookstores, and even a klezmer-themed restaurant. Today, foreign visitors can hear a lecture in Yiddish at Jagiellonian University, attend gastronomica—the journal of food and culture, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 22–27, issn 1529-3262.
international performances at the annual Festival of Jewish Culture, and purchase souvenirs of carved wooden rabbis. This expansion of Jewish culture, though, has little to do with Cracow’s Jewish population. In 1996 there were only an estimated two hundred Jews living in Cracow and an estimated 3,500 Jews in all of Poland.2 Thus, the attempt to recapture Cracow’s Jewish flavor is spearheaded primarily by non-Jews motivated by intellectual, artistic, spiritual, and
˙ ydek Vodka The spectacle of Z permitted me to enter into dialogue with Jews, non-Jews, locals, and tourists alike about the exoticization and objectification of Jews in post-Holocaust, postCommunist Poland.
commercial interests—not by the city’s handful of Jewish citizens. While anti-Semitism continues to rise,3 a new wave of philo-Semitism is sweeping through Eastern Europe. Jewish cultural activity became officially taboo in the late 1960s when Poland launched its anti-Zionist campaign, part of a larger Communist-led assault on dissident intellectuals and students. In 1968, the Polish government forced the fraction of Polish Jewry who had survived the Holocaust to emigrate to Israel and North America. Those who remained went underground. Others abandoned their Jewishness completely. When official anti-Semitism dissipated in the 1980s, many Poles acknowledged the void created by the absence of Jewishness in their country and attempted to revive its cultural traces.4 Critics deride philo-Semitism as ©
2003 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved.
Z˙ydek vodka on the shelf at Roma Discount Wine & Liquor, New York, ny. ©
2003
image was a calculated marketing ploy, which played upon both philo- and anti-Semitism. Cymes is produced by the Cracow regional branch of the Polmos distillery. The Polmos Web site provides a condensed socio-historical scenario for the origin of Cymes vodka:
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photograph by shana dressler
23 Jewish tradition and the history of Cracow are braided together. Polish and Jewish culture co-existed and co-evolved here through the centuries. The specialness of Jewish cooking inspired the Cracow Distillery experts to develop a new vodka named Cymes, the Polish spelling of tsimmes. Cymes Vodka is crystal-clear unflavored vodka made from quality rectified spirits. The real secret of it is the addition of a tiny, strictly controlled amount of…” 5
The Web site’s description doesn’t reveal the secret of Cymes. I imagine people’s various guesses as to the secret ingredient—from the naïve (the essence of carrots and
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trendy, fashionable, and lacking in authenticity. Supporters embrace it as a reparative measure that assists Polish Jews in strengthening their knowledge and identity. Jewish-style vodka is but one manifestation of how businesses capitalize on Poland’s so-called “Jewish renaissance.” I conceived the Z˙ydek Vodka Project during my graduate studies at New York University. As part of a course in folklore, I was required to conduct an ethnographic study of Polish-Jewish life using fieldwork observation. I chose Jewish-style vodka as my subject. I first saw Cymes vodka in the window of a recycling center in Kazimierz. Cymes is the Polish spelling of tsimes, the Yiddish word for a fruit-and-vegetable stew typically prepared on the Sabbath. The image on the Cymes label reminded me of classic nineteenth-century anti-Semitic caricatures: a bulbousnosed, dark-skinned man wearing a black hat, full beard, and earlocks. He forms a gesture with his index finger and thumb, indicating that that the vodka tastes just right. His mischievous grin, arched eyebrow, and squinty eyes suggest that the purchase of a bottle of Cymes is a good deal. I began to suspect that underneath the humorous
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prunes, the ingredients of a classic tsimes) to the anti-Semitic (the blood of Christian babies). The makers of Cymes vodka reduce a complex and troubled history of two peoples to a cross-cultural culinary exchange. Holocaust survivor and local philanthropist Zygmunt Nissenbaum was the first businessman to market Jewish-style vodka successfully. In 1987, Nissenbaum and the Polmos distillery launched a new division of vodka, Polnisskosher. Sales boomed soon after Polnisskosher obtained a rabbinic guarantee of kashrut—certification that the vodka had been prepared according to Jewish dietary laws (despite the fact that alcoholic beverages, except for wine, do not require kosher certification).6 In 1991 Polnisskosher sold eight million bottles, having earned a reputation for premium vodkas that leave no hangover. Following the success of Polnisskosher, other branches of the vodka industry contracted with rabbis from Poland and other European countries to certify the kashrut of their brands. By 1996 approximately one dozen brands of Jewish-style vodka were available on the Polish liquor market.7 Currently, sixty brands of Jewishstyle Polish vodka are listed on the advertising Web site www.ivodka.com. In fact, Jewish-style vodka differs from other vodka only in the way it is marketed through image and text. Names, foods, holidays, costume, and cultural themes are used as signifiers of Jewishness. Jewish-style brand names include Koszerna (a derivation of the word “kosher”), Cugel (the Polish mispronunciation of kugel, a Jewish noodle pudding), Exodus, Tora, Fiddler, Anatewka, Purim, Chanukka, Jon Teff (the Polish spelling of yontif, the Yiddish word for holy day), Abraham, Avi, David, Ester, Herszl, Icek, Jankiel, Jehuda, Judyta, Rachel, Rebeka, and Salomon. The increasing trend toward Jewish-style vodka production coincides with the overall growth of the liquor industry in free-market Poland. According to a marketing report in 2001, the greatest quantities of vodka are consumed in rural areas (36.2 percent of all alcoholic beverages), the least in large cities such as Cracow (11.3 percent of all alcoholic beverages). In 2000, Absolut was the number-one vodka consumed in Poland. Koszerna preceded Chopin as the eighteenth most popular, while Fiddler ranked thirty-first on the list. The fact that Koszerna and Fiddler are counted among the top third of vodka brands makes it clear that Jewish-style vodka is a lucrative and popular consumer product.8 At first I found the idea of Jewish-style vodka amusing, but the charm, like that of Cracow’s Jewish quarter, quickly wore off. The images and marketing concepts behind these alcohol products reduce Jews to negative stereotypes and exotic curiosities. Furthermore, the marketing of Jewish-
style vodka belies—and belittles—the history of the Jews in Poland, where alcohol has historically been associated with tense and frequently violent social relations. Many Jews operated taverns on land leased from the Polish nobility. By the mid-eighteenth century, eighty-five percent of rural Polish Jewry participated in some aspect of the manufacture or sale of alcohol, whether wholesale or retail. Historian Hillel Levine argues that drinking in taverns and inns “strengthened communal bonds among peasants, between native and foreigner, gentry and burgher, and clergy and laity, but created a degree of social distance, and sometimes antagonism, between Jews and Gentiles.”9 In traditional Jewish communities, kashrut, particularly the regulations concerning wine, often served as a deterrent to social relationships with non-Jews. Talmudic sources prohibited the trade of alcohol with non-Jews and the drinking of wine that had been touched by a Gentile. Alcoholic drinks such as beer, mead, or vodka, which did not have to be certified kosher, were allowed for consumption under certain conditions. However, drinking with non-Jews by way of entertainment and fraternization remained forbidden between the Rabbinic and Medieval Periods (ca. 500–1500 c.e.).10 As Jews became more involved in the alcohol trade during the Middle Ages, rabbinic authorities loosened the laws of kashrut. In the sixteenth century, Rabbi Moses Isserles of Cracow declared that Jews who drank Gentile wine should not be excommunicated. Isserles based his argument on a twelfth-century interpretation by Rabbenu Tam, who declared that the Gentiles of his day were not idolaters, and that therefore the Talmudic law forbidding trade with idolaters was moot. Recognizing that Ashkenazi Jews were dependent on Gentiles for their livelihood, Isserles extended Rabbenu Tam’s justification to drinking Gentile wine. For my study project in Poland—a cocktail of anthropology and performance art, fact and fiction—I decided to concoct a recipe for making a tsimes (the word is used metaphorically in Yiddish to mean making “trouble” or “a fuss”). What had begun as my own pilgrimage of memory and history was evolving into a guerilla theater piece aimed at uncovering the attitudes underlying negative stereotypes.11 So, in July 1996 I paid a Ukrainian artist in the main square of Cracow twenty zlotys to draw my caricature. I then photocopied and pasted it over a bottle of Wyborowa, a moderately priced vodka, and labeled it Z˙ydek Wodka. My colleagues and I proceeded to plaster Kazimierz with posters for Z˙ydek and put up a sign at the café announcing “Darmowa Probke!” (“Free Sample!”) We circulated bilingual flyers proclaiming
It’s different! It’s mystical! It’s exotic! Z˙ydek is superior kosher vodka
5.
Please mark which statements you agree with:
made from the finest Israeli potatoes, blessed by kabbalists and slaughtered according to strict Jewish dietary laws. Z˙ydek will make you hum
A. The face on the Cymes label looks Jewish B. The face on the Z˙ydek label looks Jewish
a Yiddish melody and dance like a Hassid. Who knows? You might even grow peyes! So raise a glass and make a l’chayim with Z˙ydek!
C. The face on the Chopin label looks Jewish D. None of the faces on the labels look Jewish 6.
At the café I conducted a vodka taste-test and survey. The twenty-eight people who agreed to participate were asked to read the flyer first, taste the three vodkas, and then provide their age, city of residence, country, ethnicity, religion, and profession. Questions focused on the meaning of kashrut:
If you marked A, B or C, describe the features that make the face(s) look Jewish.
Results of Question #3A–C, Which vodka is Jewish?
cymes
zydek
chopin
Yes
5
3
1
No
4
4
9
Don’t Know
3
4
1
1. Do you drink kosher vodka? If so, why? 2. What is the difference between kosher and non-kosher vodka? 3. What does kosher mean?
1.
Which vodka tastes better? (Cymes, Z˙ydek, Chopin)
2.
Why does it taste better?
3A. Is Cymes Jewish vodka? 3B. Is Z˙ydek Jewish vodka? 3C. Is Chopin Jewish vodka? 3D. How can one distinguish between Jewish and regular vodka? 3E. Do kosher vodka and Jewish vodka have a difference in meaning? 4.
Which label is more appropriate for Jewish vodka? (Cymes, Vodka, Chopin)
Participants overwhelmingly responded that Chopin was not Jewish vodka. I surmise that they did not associate the handsome profile of the great composer Frederic Chopin— a Gentile and a revered icon of Polish culture—with Jewishness. The historian Alexander Hertz cites a conversation that confirms the survey results: “To his amazement, a Polish musician learns by chance that a woman colleague he greatly admires is of Jewish descent. ‘You’re Jewish? Then you don’t like Chopin, you like Anton Rubenstein?’ ‘Why?’ asks the pianist in surprise. ‘Well, because Chopin is alien to the Jewish Soul.’”13
Results of Question #4, Which label is more appropriate for Jewish vodka?
cymes
zydek
chopin
none
8
1
2
2
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A little more than half of the participants wrote that they were not aware of any difference between kosher and nonkosher vodka. Two non-Jewish Poles wrote that kosher vodka is “premium,” “hygienic,” “better,” and “cleaner.” While filling out his survey, a fifty-one-year-old German businessman (and self-proclaimed vodka connoisseur) informed me that Polnisskosher’s Bielsko brand “seems to be more soft” than regular vodka. An eighty-three-year-old Pole spoke to me at length about his career as a manager of a vodka factory. Initially he wrote that Z˙ydek was “rather good” and that “kosher vodka seems to be smoother in taste,” but later, upon reflection, he re-evaluated his response: Z˙ydek was “oily” and “mixed with other spirits.”12 (Did the gentleman change his mind upon realization that my ersatz vodka was yet another Jewish plot against the Poles?) Several respondents recognized the humorous spirit of the project. One, who identified himself as a Catholic priest, wrote: “I don’t drink…This vodka is the first which I have drunk after twenty-five years of abstention. Let God be with you.” Inspired by positive responses to the project, I decided to perform it again a few weeks later. In order to yield improved data, I revised the survey to include the following questions:
25 Results of Question #5, Which face looks more Jewish?
cymes
zydek
chopin
none
10
1
0
2
Cymes won hands down for being the most Jewish-looking. To my great surprise, only a few of the Poles who responded considered Z˙ydek to be Jewish vodka, despite its name. I was wrong to assume that Poland would be as politically
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4. What kind of vodka do you usually drink? How do you compare it to Z˙ydek?
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correct as multicultural America. Only one respondent, a Polish Jew from Warsaw, admonished me for using an offensive term for my product. I deduced that non-Jewish Poles surveyed were either unaware that the word “z˙ ydek” is condescending and infantilizing, or simply decided not to raise the issue with me. When asked to describe Jewish features on the faces, four respondents suggested gesture, clothing, and physical traits. A twenty-seven-year-old Pole who chose Cymes as Jewish-looking wrote “the gesture, the thing on the head, peyes, the whole appearance, complexion, cross-eyed.” A thirty-two-year-old Pole identified “peyes, the glance of the eyes, gesture, expression” as markers of Jewishness on the Cymes label. A twenty-five-year-old German identified “the hat, nose, beard,” while his twenty-two-year-old compatriot wrote “hat, beard, cloth.” However, some respondents were uncertain about the definition of Jewish features. A twentynine-year-old Pole responded that he did not know which face on the vodka looked Jewish: “could be but they needn’t be Jewish faces. They are not so very characteristic.” Another Pole, from Cracow, was also ambivalent: “I don’t know. It’s (sic) just look like Jews, you know.” A twenty-three-year-old Pole from Lublin reflected, “There aren’t any significant
Filling out the vodka questionnaire at the Ariel Café in Cracow. photograph by andrew ingall
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features by which I could guess that somebody is or is not a Jew, like…some Italians or Spanish are easy to recognize but the Jewish would probably have longish, protruding noses, dark hair. Anyway not enough to recognize a Jew and the things I’ve mentioned might be stereotypes.” A twentytwo-year-old Swiss was adamant: “You can’t define how a Jewish face looks like.” The methodology of the second trial was completely revised. After respondents had completed the survey, I encouraged them to question the nature of the project. If participants sensed something treyf (not kosher) about the survey, I revealed to them that the project was a fiction. Thus the second trial was less a performance and more an educational intervention. I engaged more with subjects, elicited dialogue, and encouraged them to think critically about issues of Jewish representation in Poland. Nevertheless, my methodology in both surveys can be described as performance art—a hybrid of theater and visual art, which embraces process, chance, improvisation, the ephemeral, the fragmented, and the incomplete.14
As an artistic endeavor, my Z˙ydek Vodka Project was not a critical success. Although a Polish broadcast news crew videotaped the event and participated in the survey, they ultimately declined to air the story. Nor was the project highly successful as an educational intervention. It was naïve to think that I could change people’s drinking habits; in fact, according to my count of Jewish-style vodkas on www.ivodka.com, the industry has grown fourfold since 1996. I was able to carry out the performance only twice and had no time to establish a means of gauging any long-term repercussions of the two performances. I should have received a poor grade for not following the assignment and for using a methodology that was neither rigorous nor scientific. Nevertheless, the Z˙ydek Vodka Project was an illuminating experience for me. My ancestor the nineteenth-century innkeeper had neither the hindsight nor the power to change his station. As Hillel Levine writes: “Across that barrier of social separation and melded fate, [the innkeeper] dispensed drink of uneven quality in exchange for the peasant’s coins of uncertain value. In the simple act of pushing the overflowing cup across the counter and collecting a few coins, the Jew had little understanding of the complex economic interests in whose service he acted.”15 A century later, I reprised the role of innkeeper, but with a difference. The spectacle of Z˙ydek Vodka permitted me to enter into dialogue with Jews, non-Jews, locals, and tourists alike about the exoticization and objectification of Jews in post-Holocaust, post-Communist Poland. I was still a Jewish entrepreneur, but now my drink was spiked with historical awareness and cultural criticism.g
5. See www.polmos.krakow.pl. 6. For the purposes of this essay, I include under the rubric of “Jewish-style vodka” beverages with or without kosher certification. 7. Laurence Weinbaum, “Spirited Controversy,” The Jerusalem Report, 5 November 1992; Allen Chernoff, “New Polish Chic—Tzitzit and Yarmulkes: Jewish Culture Makes a Comeback with Kosher Beer and Fiddler on the Roof,” The Forward, 4 August 1995, 12. 8. “More discernment in Polish alcohol preferences,” Detal Dzisiaj 21, 6 December 2001. 9. Hillel Levine, The Economic Origins of Antisemitism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), 9. 10. Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Studies in Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 47. 11. For an examination of the late twentieth-century phenomenon of Jewish tourism in Poland as postmodern pilgrimage and secular ritual, see Jack Kugelmass, “The Rites of the Tribe,” yivo Annual 21 (1993): 395–453. 12. The respondent’s negative opinion of Z˙ydek Vodka seems to echo a century-old criticism of Jewish-style vodka. Hillel Levine cites a report by Michal Kachovsky, a tsarist official who attributed grain shortages and inflation in eastern Poland to Jewish profiteering and shady practices. Kachovsky singled out for criticism the alcohol distillation method of Jewish innkeepers. He wrote, “[N]owhere will one find from them drink as it should be: they mix with the alcoholic beverages the plain beverages and all sorts of grasses which quickly lead to the loss of consciousness and to drunkenness of the farmers…” See Levine, The Economic Origins of Antisemitism, 171. 13. Hertz, The Jews in Polish Culture, 46–47. 14. For an overview of the genre, see Robyn Brentano and Olivia Georgia, Outside the Frame: Performance and the Object—A Survey of Performance Art in the usa since 1950 (Cleveland: Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, 1994); and RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988). 15. Levine, The Economic Origins of Antisemitism, 10.
2. American Jewish Year Book, vol. 100, 2000. Some estimates of the Jewish population in Poland are between 10,000 and 30,000, which may include: people who are ethnically identified Jews but not considered Jewish according to religious law; people of Jewish descent who converted to Christianity; or people of Jewish descent who disclaim any identification with Judaism. 3. In the spring and summer of 1999, for example, Jewish sites in Bielsko-Biala, Cracow, and Tarnow were vandalized with anti-Semitic slogans and symbols. For more information, The Stephen Roth Institute at Tel Aviv University documents contemporary anti-Semitism and racism on its Web site: www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/. 4. Ruth Ellen Gruber has collected thoughtful reportage on architecture, museums, and music in Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2002). For a more focused analysis of Jewish travel and gastronomy in Poland, see Eve Jochnowitz, “Flavors of Memory: Jewish Food as Culinary Tourism in Poland, “ Southern Folklore 55, no. 3 (1998): 224–237.
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1. Alexander Hertz argues that some land-owning noble Polish families had close, affectionate relations with Jews under the feudal system. These families referred to their Jew as “z˙ ydek—a ‘little Jew’, one of their own, who could be trusted and whom they considered a part of their own world.” Alexander Hertz, The Jews in Polish Culture (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 81. However, z˙ ydek evolved into a disparaging term referring to someone who is greedy, dishonest, and vulgar.
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notes