Like a Dark Yarmulka on the Head of the City': WWI Traces in Post-War Jewish Travelogues from Galicia

• In Event: Official Narratives and Repressed Voices on the Disputed Territory of Habsburg Galicia in the Interwar Period

Abstract

The experience of WWI was deeply traumatic for Galician Jewry, causing great loss of life, property and population. Many Galician Jews fled the province and moved to Vienna for fear of violence. After the First World War, they began to return to Galicia. During the Second Polish Republic, Galicia became a point of interest for many visitors, including Jewish authors who wrote reports in Polish, German and Yiddish for major newspapers. In their travelogues, they often reflected on the subsequent destruction and transformation of Jewish life in the province. The lecture will be dedicated to the ways of remembering as represented in the journalistic literature of Galicia. In particular, I will focus on the 1928 travelogue of Yoel Mastboym, who traveled throughout Galicia and noted the destruction and changes caused by the war. The leftist Yiddishist searched for traditional Jewish life, but instead found the province as a postwar landscape. The changed borders cut off Jewish trade routes, war violence drove Hasidim from the Hasidic courts and Jewish magnates from their Carpathian residence. On a visit to the war cemetery in Gorlice, Yoel Mastboym called it "a dark yarmulka on the head of the city". During the lecture I will analyze how the postwar Jewish perspective treated the war as a tragedy for Jewish culture in Galicia, reflected in the landscape changes.

Author

• Vladyslava Moskalets, Center for Urban History of East Central Europe (Ukraine)