Something to Declare

Post No. 1: Preview of trip starting May 5, 2023

East-West Tours calls this “Magic Poland.” I prefer to call it “Back in the Shtetl Again.”

My mother’s family came to the U.S. from “Russia.” We never knew anything more specific, so we don’t have any idea where in “Russia” (which is a big place). On the other hand, my father’s family was a little more specific. My paternal grandfather’s family came from Poltava, which is about 350 kilometers east of Kiev in Ukraine. My paternal grandmother, Yetta, claimed to have come from “Austria.”

Now “Austria” conjures up all sorts of images. Like Vienna, waltzes and opera houses (Mahler, Mozart), art (Klimt and the Secessionist Movement), literature (Werfel, Schnitzler), scientific genius (Freud, Meitner), the Ringstrasse, Schönbrunn Palace and imperial glitter, and Sacher-Torte in the coffee houses.

What I think Grandma Yetta was not mentioning is this: When she claimed to have come to the U.S. from “Austria,” she had to have been referring go the Austro-Hungarian Empire (see below). As you can see, the old Habsburg empire constituted almost all of central Europe. It spread from Austria proper in the west, to Transylvania in the east, from Bosnia-Hercegovina in the south, through Vienna, all the way north through Hungary, Bohemia, and into parts of what are now Ukraine and Poland.

The latter area included a region called “Galicia” (the blue and brown area in the upper right).

As a group, Ashkenazi Jews from Galicia were called “Galizianers.” This was not a flattering characterization. It elicited images of common folks from the shtetls, as opposed to the more urbane, intellectual “Litvaks” from Vilna (now Vilnius) in Lithuania.

So, by referring to “Austria,” we think Grandma may have been pulling a fast one. It’s less probable that her folks attended soirées in the salons of the likes of Alma Mahler:

And more probably lived lives like that of Tevye the Dairyman from “Fiddler on the Roof:”

Let’s admit it: Grandma was probably a Galizianer, my father was probably half-Galizianer, and I am probably part Galizianer as well. I own my [presumptive] Polish roots.

Which brings us to the East-West tour, “Magic Poland,” scheduled to begin this Friday.

Back in 2020, Stef and I had planned a trip we nicknamed “Hel.St.B.” This stood for Helsinki, St. Petersburg and Berlin. The plan was to fly to Finland, spend a few days in Helsinki, take a cruise ship from there to St. Petersburg and back, and then fly to Berlin, and then home. Then (as we all recall) they invented Covid, and we had to cancel the whole thing. We got our money back from everyone except East-West tours (the ones who ran the cruise line). They kept $1,000, which they said would continue to be good, for a while, as a “credit.”

Well, that “credit” was set to expire, and I was damned if I was going to let them keep the money. Given the current political climate, it was clear a trip to St. Petersburg (or anywhere else in Russia for that matter) is not likely to be happening in the near future So I scoped out other tours run by the company and came across “Magic Poland.” It’s a short tour (about a week), and includes Warsaw, Częstochowa, and Kraków, with side trips including Oświęcim (better known as “Auschwitz”).

Galicia (see white arrow in red circle at the lower right) is not on the tour, but I’d like to think that, with Ukraine as a war zone, this is as close to my old homeland as I’m ever likely to get. Back in the Shtetl again, so to speak. Stay tuned.