Longing for a place that no longer exists

This was the title of Monica Tempian's talk about Rose Auslander last night. The place was Czernowitz, a far-flung outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, known then as Little Vienna and Jerusalem on the Prut because of its large Jewish presence. There is no place now called Czernowitz. It is now Chernivtsi, a Ukranian city, with no or hardly any Jews. When it was under Rumanian rule, in Monica's parents' time it was called Cernăuti. When Monica's grandmother was born and grew up there it was the Jews that gave it its distinctive character as a cultural centre. There were colourful hassidic communities in the area which enhanced the distinctive Jewish diversity of the city. In 1910 28,000 Jews lived there, 32% of the total population. Only a few hundred survived the Holocaust. So the place Rose Auslander longed for only existed in her imagination. She spent the last eight years of her life confined to a room in a Jewish old age home in Dusseldorf, writing poems about her memories. These resonated with the young German audience, who were eager to discover what was lost in their parents' generation. Rose Auslander, though little known in the English speaking world, is a popular major poet in Germany. But longing for a place that only exists in the imagination is one thing, longing for a real place with  a bloody terrible history is another. Mayer Golditch pointed out that he grew up among Rumanian Hassids who survived the Holocaust. They expressed no longing for the palces they came from. They didn't talk about these. They wanted to forget. I can have an emotional response to Hungarian gypsy music that my father loved, I can talk about the great Hungarian football team of the 1950s, but certainly have no longing for Budapest where I grew up, or any other part of my native land.