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Sunday, July 20, 2008

A reader who just returned from a tour of Poland has sent me photos of these kitschy little wood dolls they apparently sell all over the place over there -- including in the gift shops of restored synagogues (run by local historical societies, not by Jews):

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You may ponder the semiotics and derive your own implications.

7 Comments

Not good, not so good.

apart from the "gelt", i think they're quite sympathetic little yidden. i remember some really weird little rosy cheeked hasid children dolls on sale by the dead sea and in the jerusalem zoo gift shop, so obviously there's a market for this sort of thing. won't catch me buying one!

I can't believe this! Even when they're trying to be positive, the antisemitism seeps through.

Another thing: Aside the money bags, the faces on these dolls are ugly caricatures, even if they do have pleasant expressions.

It's as if the prejudice were so deep, it went right down to the marrow.

What's interesting about this to me is that it's a caricature of the past, not the present. Since there are hardly any Jews left in Poland this sort of figure has to stand in for the identity of Jewishness whereas in the US people are more likely to think of a person they recognize from the media or someone they know in real life, but in either case someone modern.

in fact if you wanted to have an overlay of dark irony, you could subtitle this "the last Jews of Poland", or "when Poland had Jews" or something like that, since this is essentially an exaggerated snapshot of Jewish life at the last moment when there was such a thing in Poland.

And Poland didn't have a few Jews either, as I'm sure all of Solomon's readers know, but a large stable community that stayed for centuries. As with the Jews of Salonika, a vast and unknowable history is now simply gone and .. unknowable.

Yeah, good points, Adam.

In fact, I think that Jews were as much as 10% of the population of Poland.

haha that is pretty funny. I wanna get one of these for my cousin.

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