What remains? Shaping a Jewish past for Tykocin

The essay is a subjective story of Prof. Alan Duben about the town from which his ancestors came. A tale full of nostalgia, irony, but also an attempt to understand the contemporary inhabitants of Tykocin, in which there are no longer Jewish residents: Tykocin in Podlasie: „Ida Horowitz, née Chaje Kurlander, my maternal grandmother, was born in 1893 in Tykocin, a place she always referred to with the Yiddish name Tiktin, in what is now northeastern Poland. When she left for the U.S. in 1907 at the age of fourteen there were about 5, 000 people in the town, more than half of whom were Jews. Today there are around 2,100 inhabitants there. On the 24th and 25th of August 1941 all but a few of the roughly 1,500 Jews then living in Tykocin were slaughtered by the Germans in the nearby Lopuchowo forest. After the war the few survivors returned, but the situation proved to be untenable for them and they dispersed around the world. The remains of the once extensive Jewish cemetery in the town until recently had a marker: a sign at the edge of the cemetery in Polish and Hebrew, Tykocin Jewish Cemetery: 1522–1941, the beginning and end of the long Jewish presence in that part of Poland. The oldest Jewish community in the Podlasie region until the late 18th century, Tykocin was a major center of Jewish learning, home to many famous scholars as well as a significant center of trade, located along the Narew River, connecting the town with major cities in the region such as Königsberg, Vilna, Poznan, and Lublin and Gdansk. In the 19th century the importance of the town waned as the fortunes of the nearby industrializing city of Bialystok rose. By the time Chaje was born Tykocin was a backwater. During the interwar period Tykocin’s main manufacturing effort went into tallit, prayer shawls, hardly a modern enterprise”.Uniwersytet Biligi w Istambule, Wydział Nauk Społecznych i HumanistycznychAuron-Górska Joanna, Describing Who? Poland in Photographs by Jewish Artists. Warsaw Studies in Jewish History and Memory. Germany: PL Academic Research, 2014.Bar-Yuda M. and Z. Ben-Nahum. Sefer Tiktin (Memorial Book of Tiktin). Tel Aviv, 1959.Davies Norman, God’s Playground: A History of Poland. Columbia University Press, 2005.Gruber Ruth Ellen, Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe. University of California Press, 2002.Hertz Aleksander, The Jews in Polish Culture. Northwestern University Press, 1988 [1961].Hoffman Eva, Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews. Public Affairs, n.d.Lehrer Erica, Na szczęście to Żyd: Polskie figurki Żydow/Lucky Jews: Poland’s Jewish Figurines. Krakow: Korporacja Hal!art, 2014.Kirshenblatt-Gimblett Barbara, “Objects of Memory: Material Culture as Life Review”, in E. Oring, ed., Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: A Reader. Utah State University Press, 1989.Destination Culture: Toruism, Museums, and Heritage. University of California Press, 1998.Kugelmass Jack, “Bloody memories: encountering the past in contemporary Poland,” Cultural Anthropology, 10(3): 279-301(1995).Polonsky Antony, The Jews in Poland and Russia. Oxford: Littman Library, 2010, 3 vols.Restauracja ‘Tejsza’: Kuchnia żydowska i domowa, [broszura].Shandler Jeffrey, Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History. Rutgers University Press, 2014.Tykocin: perła baroku, [broszura] (www.um.tykocin.wrotapodlasia.pl).Villa Regent, Kuchnia żydowska w Tykocinie, [broszura].Wolf Larry, Inventing Eastern Europe. Stanford University Press, 1994.617