In Lviv
I arrived in Lemberg at midnight. After checking into a hotel and transferring my things, I rushed to a well-known coffee shop to meet an acquaintance — a writer and actor. But at the door, I was told that no one is admitted after midnight. “This isn’t Warsaw,” they said, “where life only begins after twelve. Here, people go to bed early.” This was not the Lemberg of old.
I returned to the hotel. There, I met a couple of Jewish guests from another city. They spoke to me in German. Galicia, it seems, has not yet fully fallen to Poland, and the German language still resists giving up its place.
From their conversations, I gathered that they still mourn Franz Josef. That they refuse to forget Galicia is no longer part of Austria.
“We, the Jews of Galicia,” one of them explained, “suffer more than the Jews in Poland. We still remember the freedoms we had under Austria. The Polish Jews, on the other hand, lived under a Russian tsar — they’re more used to bearing the Polish yoke.” (“dem poylishen oych”)
I looked at these Jews. They were entirely different from the Jews of Poland. They carried themselves differently, spoke a different kind of Yiddish. They were Galicians — Galician Jews.
“And we have more troubles than the Polish Jews,” one of them told me.
I tried to point out that Polish Jews also face immense hardship, but he would not listen.
“You don’t know what’s happening in Galicia,” the other insisted. “Go to a small Galician shtetl and you’ll see suffering, you’ll see poverty, you’ll see true misery — perhaps for the first time.”
“I will go,” I told him.
“But you must look closely,” said the first. “You have to be patient enough to hear the full extent of the misery. Don’t be like most Americans — they throw a dollar in your face and don’t want to hear anything else.”
“The Jewish towns, the shtetls of Galicia, are dying,” the other added. “People are fading away. Dying. You won’t see living souls anymore. Watch them carefully — and then you’ll understand.”
“I will look. I will see,” I promised him.
Chone Gottesfeld, a well-known journalist for the Yiddish-language newspaper Forverts (Yiddish: פֿאָרווערטס [Forward]) in New York, visited Galicia and documented his impressions in a detailed travelogue, My Trip to Galicia, published by the Association of Galician Jews in America in 1937. His journey was a return to his native land, which he had left three decades earlier, in 1907. The travelogue offers a rich tapestry of comparisons between social life during the Austrian and Polish periods, based both on Gottesfeld’s personal memories and the testimonies of those he encountered.
This excerpt also sheds light on the formation of collective memory among Galician Jews during the interwar period. It explores how they recalled the Austro-Hungarian Empire, their experiences during World War I, pogroms, and the realities of emigration — which, by the time of Gottesfeld’s visit, had become nearly impossible. The United States had imposed restrictions on immigration, and the British Mandate limited entry into Palestine. The text captures Gottesfeld’s emotional response to the changes he observed in Lviv, the city he had known under Austrian rule before his emigration, and the one he encountered again in the late 1930s.
One of the most striking aspects of the excerpt is the author’s impression of the cultural divide between Polish and Galician Jews. Although independent Poland had existed for nearly two decades, Jews from different regions of the country still maintained distinct cultural traits. This is why historian Ezra Mendelsohn, in his study of Polish Jewry, underscores the importance of understanding Polish Jewry as a plural phenomenon. Despite a shared heritage rooted in the early modern period of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the experience of living under three separate empires in the nineteenth century led to the development of diverse cultural, ideological, and social practices. During the interwar period, Polish Jews were not institutionally unified in any meaningful way.
The excerpt also illustrates how a collective myth of a better and more just life under Habsburg rule was formed. It highlights the selective nature of collective memory — a defining feature of myth-making. In this case, nostalgia for the era of Franz Joseph and the freedoms of the past coexists with dissatisfaction with contemporary life in restored Poland. This nostalgia was made possible by conflating present-day hardships — described in the text as the “Polish yoke,” likely referencing the abolition of minority rights, systematic restrictions in the economic and educational spheres, such as high taxes, monopolies, and university quotas — with a romanticized memory of the prewar period.