In the light of small things

What is the connection between Jeff Goldfarb and myself that began many years ago when he visited my small town of Sejny in Poland? From the very beginning when we met, the feeling was that we had known one another for a long time because there was a kind of brotherhood. What was behind that encounter? What was the power of this encounter between us? And what happened at the kitchen table that once existed in communist Poland in the 1970s and 1980s when Jeff visited us in our country? What happened to this kitchen table after 1989? Where is it today? Where is this table?

Echoing what Jeff Goldfarb wrote in the Introduction to The Politics of Small Things, which he entitled, ‘In the Shadow of Big Things’ (Goldfarb, 2006, pp. 1–8), I think we are all the time under this shadow. Nothing has changed from when he wrote that book in 2006. But we, at least, have the path of light or illumination around the small things Jeff provides. In what follows, I will say a few words about why the power of small things has been so important and influential for my practical work and worldview.

What is this connection between Jeff Goldfarb and myself that began many years ago when he visited my small town of Sejny in Poland? From the very beginning when we met, the feeling was that we had known one another for a long time because there was a kind of brotherhood. What was behind that encounter? What was the power of this encounter between us? And what happened at the kitchen table that once existed in communist Poland in the 1970s and 1980s when Jeff visited us in our country? What happened to this kitchen table after 1989? Where is it today? Where is this table?

There are a few important things behind our initial meeting and encounter. One of them is the theatre. I am a part of the Polish alternative theatre movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Maybe not exactly the theatre that Jeff wrote about in The Politics of Small Things, because he wrote mostly about direct political public theatre in the 1970s. My story takes place later when my colleagues and I engaged with anthropological theatre based on expeditions to local communities, first in Poland, and then in different corners of the world, in Europe, South America, and Australia where ancient cultures still survive. As city dwellers, we did not have a culture to give back. So, our theatre was based on receiving gifts from those communities who shared with us their songs, rituals, memories, dances, and their most intimate treasures. And, we were collecting them, building avant-garde performances based on their gifts, we could not reciprocate. We never had the chance to give anything back to them because we usually only met them briefly, and then we would leave with our performance for festivals and not come back to them again. One of the reasons for creating the Borderland Center (Pogranicze), in 1990 was to find a way in which we could stay with people and the theatre – even at the cost of the theatre itself. (Borderland Foundation). We ceased being a traveling theatre group when we ended up in a small borderland town called Sejny in Poland. The main point for us was to stay with people to do something together – to listen, hear, and find answers for how we could use our artistic craft, which was the craft of theatre, to transmit memories and experiences into art.

The second background behind my encounter with Jeff Goldfarb is poetry. And the person who connected us, as a kind of bridge, is Czesław Miłosz (Goldfarb & Ustun, 2014). And why his poetry? Because Miłosz was a very special poet, not only for Poland but also, I think, for that part of the world which connected poetry with a romantic, emotional attitude to poetry. Poetry is something irrational and messy, which tries to connect us with the spiritual dimension of life. Miłosz, in contrast, was a poet who taught us that poetry is about concrete details. Poetry is about the truthfulness of concrete things. For Miłosz, poetry is like building a language that is precise, truthful, and faithful to one’s inner and social experiences (Matynia, 2022). He not only wrote poems that are politically engaging, though he wrote such poems as well but also those concerned with spiritual life and concrete things such as ‘The World: A Näive Poem’ and ‘The Witness of Poetry’ (Miłosz, 2003, 1984). Jeff was influenced by Miłosz’s tradition of poetry that emphasised the concrete in everyday life.

When we established the Borderland Center, I received my first letter from Czesław Miłosz, which was written with the sentiment along the lines of: ‘You are going to do something after communism, after 1989, which will be based on concrete things and with respect to details, to individual life, to the truthfulness of reality.’ At that time the Borderland Center was meant to be anti-communist, and a way in which we could base our work on activities that were individual, concrete, and anti-ideological.

And the third background that Jeff and I share is Jewishness. I don’t know if Jeff ever thought about the connection between ‘the politics of small things’ and Jewishness, but I have a friend, an Italian writer living in Trieste, Claudio Magris, who is himself a kind of borderlander. Once Magris visited me in Sejny, and at the end after spending a few days looking through our programs and studios, he said, and I paraphrase:

This belief was that small towns and a small community could be the centre of the world. It was the belief that such libraries, schools, the Yeshiva, could be the most ambitious, from the philosophical, theological, cultural point of view, and that one doesn’t need to go to big centres to fulfill your ambitions in any dimension. I think that the profoundly Jewish belief in the power of small things, is I think, also behind our encounter.

But now, I want to say a few words about the kitchen table. What happened with the kitchen table after 1989? Because, as you know from The Politics of Small Things during communism, it was a regime, and people found their shelter and a free space in the kitchen because it was impossible to find such a space outside in the public sphere. The kitchen was the only possibility where one could be honest and speak to one another without hesitation. When Jeff wrote about kitchen tables during the 1970s and 1980s, it was illuminating for us, as Poles, who were citizens of Central Eastern Europe at that time. It was surprising that a person coming from New York, from the United States, from such a large country, with its language and culture could respect our small ways of life in Poland. Although we talked around tables, we had little respect for them. We did not recognise the significance of the kitchen table. Instead, we wanted to be big, we wanted to go out of the limits of that kitchen space to something bigger. And I think this is precisely one of the reasons why we have problems with solidarity among other things after 1989. Since we were not capable of defending small things, we lost something in the new period of our history after communism. And suddenly, we heard this voice from the other side of the ocean that the small things around a kitchen table matter, that we should capitalise on this space of freedom and build something upon it. This was the message that I heard from Jeff Goldfarb.

Yes, I am now among all of you here in the New School, not even having a PhD, coming from a small town, and I feel at home here. And for many years, I feel at home here. Why? How did it happen that, Jeff with his team at the Transregional Center for Democracy, at the Public Seminar, and the Democracy Seminar, created this practice of small things? How are you respected because of practicing small things? The only contribution I can have to this meeting, to other meetings we had, was my practice in small things. So, in effect, I am part of your policy of small things. But it is a big thing to know that one’s small things, small steps and small town, matter and have power. Sometimes, we need a person from a distant place to make us aware of that. In fact, that was precisely Jeff’s role for us.

What happened with this table, the kitchen table, which is no longer in the kitchen? The first thing we felt obliged to do after communism was to go out of the underground, to go out of our alternative culture to the public, to the very center. Hence from that moment, we took our private table to the public sphere. We took our theatre-inspired table to the small community of Sejny in the borderlands of Poland and Lithuania. We took our table to a community, which was not very much ours and decided with our colleagues to move to this small town where we didn’t know many people. In fact, the people from Sejny had never even sat around our table. It was not like in the 1970s when we knew everyone around that table. On the contrary, there were new people, who were not familiar with this kind of culture of being present around the table. But at least there was our invitation that we extended to the people of Sejny that perhaps they could join us.

Consider this space in the very center of a small town, which was once Jewish, but is now empty. We asked if we might be able to talk, to gather to hear them, to hear about their life experiences in the twentieth century. In various ways, we expressed the sentiment that: ‘You Lithuanians, you Ukrainians deported there after the Vistula River in 1947, you Russian Old Believers, you Poles, you Greek Catholics, you Orthodox, you Protestant. Let’s talk.’ Thus, the first gathering around the table in a former synagogue was precisely about this invitation to talk. It was the first time that the entire multicultural community was gathered around one table. Rather than sitting at different tables according to nationality, religious differences, and so on, we wished to slowly transform the table in the former synagogue into the common table. The second step was, and of course, not to speak to them, but rather to remain silent and let them speak. To learn how to listen, even when there was silence or even when the person joining the table was someone who might be considered a nationalist or even an anti-Semite. The main thing was not what the person said, but his or her participation around the table. It was important for them not to reject the invitation to join us.

In fact, that is when the second aspect about the table became clear to us – the table could no longer move or travel but needed to stay in one place for a long time. We decided to stay with the residents of Sejny, because otherwise, the public space of the table would not work. One needs time – a year, two years, ten years, – now thirty years, to keep it working. And we understood that one cannot expect to solve anything around this table over one year or any kind of short event or project. Instead, we should somehow invent and nurture a completely new element, which is the dimension of time. We need to have time to nurture what we wish to build around the table.

The next aspect to consider was, of course, memory, which was the burden that many people sitting around the table carried within them. How to work with their different memories? In short, my answer is threefold: Critical memory, common memory, and good memory. Critical memory means that you are doing self-critical work to be part of the table. Thus, one does not only talk about their own victimisation or suffering but tries to find one’s own weaknesses and be brave enough to talk about them. One does not expect that others will speak about their memories. One should speak if possible. Thus, one goes deeply into critical memory and has more time. As a result, we published books like the one by Daniel Beauvois on Polish colonialism in Ukraine, which was quite a strong new narrative for Poles in Poland at that time in the 1990s (Beauvois, 1996a, 1996b). Then we published the Polish translation of Jan Gross’s book about Polish-Jewish relationships, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne (Gross, 2000, 2001/2022). In doing such work, we made room for other people to sit around the table.

The second is common memory, which is still perhaps difficult to imagine, but we know that we have different stories, different memories. But can we share something in common in our memories? And the third one, which is most difficult in fact, is to give, to allow ourselves, or to struggle for, to dig up a good memory of the community from inside of us. It is very easy to dig up negative memories, to remember conflicts and sufferings. But how can we find a common language, a legitimate language around this table through which we can share positive memories? Daniel Dayan wrote about the important role of gestures which are present in conversation. There is the willingness to make a good gesture towards the others. But how can this gesture be done? We have rituals for gestures, rituals for stating how we have suffered, and for celebrating independence days and national songs. But to say something truly positive about our neighbors is not easy.

Most recently, our table in Sejny has turned toward the direction of Ukraine. We now have a Ukrainian community who are newcomers from Ukraine. We even opened a Ukrainian ‘Zustrich’ (Encounter) Club in our small town to give them space and to help them feel at home in this space. But the discussions we have and our actions around the table, are focused on the war in Ukraine and how to cope with it. Something miraculous happens when the table works, which I call the ‘Karuna’s blow.’ Although Karuna is the goddess of compassion in Sanskrit, she has a different kind of compassion. It is not compassion related to one’s own suffering or to the suffering of one’s own people. The compassion of Karuna is about being awakened to face the suffering of others. Hence, with Karuna’s blow, one is awakened as a self precisely because others are suffering. And this awakening is exactly what is happening now around our tables. We are awakened when we hear the voices of suffering going on in Ukraine. What it means is that this compassion towards others gives one not only the power to be hospitable to people from Ukraine but also to do as much as possible among them. One should not separate aesthetics from ethics or have a border between beauty and the good. Suddenly, under Karuna’s blow, one feels that everything is united, in fact, around that table. And this I think is one of the major narratives that we have against Putinism. It’s not only Putin’s Russia but a kind of Putinism found in Poland and other corners of the world. So, the politics of small things for us now is very much about how to oppose Putinism in different parts of the world.

In closing, I would like to share a quotation from a recent essay, entitled, ‘Small Center of the World’, which was translated by Marci Shore and edited by Jeff Goldfarb in a very masterful way.

In reading what I wrote about the small center of the world, I wish to thank Jeff Goldfarb for providing us the occasion to give and offer gifts to him. We are so rich now because in giving him gifts, we together become a (small) center of the world.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.