Rise and go to the town of the killings and you’ll come to the yards
and with your eyes and your own hand feel the fence
and on the trees and on the stones and plaster of the walls
the congealed blood and hardened brains of the dead.
—Hayim Nahman Bialik, “City of the Killings”
What I believed as a child: we came from Russia. Russia, a vast, faraway, almost mythical kingdom, ruled by bad czars, filled with mean peasants, who lived in the forest with wolves, and even meaner Cossacks, who, when they weren’t riding horses, or maybe while they were riding horses, specialized in physical attacks on Jews called pogroms: overall a place one left, if one was a Jew, as soon as possible. The fairy-tale-like simplicity of this geography and its inhabitants did not include a longing to return. No one ever talked about going back there, wherever back there actually was.
Before I traveled to Eastern Europe, I would have been unable to locate the city of Kishinev on a modern map. Kishinev itself was a place name that came belatedly, when I was already a middle-aged adult, as an overlay to my childhood vision of the Russian Empire. It wasn’t yet Chisinau, the capital of Moldova, consistently referred to in the media as the poorest country in Europe, known for sex trafficking, the illegal sale of bodily organs, and Twitter-assisted post-Soviet political turmoil. But why was I going to Kishinev, and why did I think that we—my father’s side of the family, the Kipnis side—came from there?
Not long before his death in 1989, my father gave me a few monogrammed forks and spoons, which he described as “silverware from our family in Russia.” Around the same time, he also gave me a photocopy he had made of the index to the New York Times with references to the 1903 Kishinev pogrom checked in the margins, as well as a map of Bessarabia with Kishinev circled in red. I do not remember asking my father directly where his parents came from, nor do I recall ever hearing accounts of their immigration to the United States. And so, when he died, the matter of where we were from remained just that: a fixed, generic, third-generation Jewish template—a classic American narrative of immigration followed by assimilation. For the next ten years, as had been true of my life before his death, I was not particularly interested in knowing more, beyond the vague sense that the where in Russia we were from was Kishinev.
I probably would have remained locked in my ignorance about the specifics of my Eastern European origins if an enterprising real estate agent had not, in the year 2000, reached my sister and me with the news that we had inherited property in a village on the outskirts of Jerusalem from our paternal grandparents. The property amounted to two dunams—two tiny plots of a quarter acre each, bought in my grandmother’s name. This startling information led to an encounter with the other heir to my grandmother’s dunams, my father’s nephew, his older and only sibling’s son, who was living in Memphis, Tennessee. In the year 2000 I met my cousin Julian Kipnis for the first time as well as his daughter, Sarah Castleberry. Through Sarah, who had already become fascinated with family history, I discovered a Web site devoted to our family name that included the ship’s manifests for a multitude of Kipnis immigrants. On the manifest for my grandparents and uncle, under the category “last permanent residence,” was written by hand: Kishiniew. I was instantly hooked by the possibility of finding out more about this family, the Kipnises, whose existence had always been shrouded in a kind of dark silence.1 The encounter with my newly met cousin sent me back to the haphazard collection of objects and ephemera that I had taken from my parents’ apartment after my father’s death and that I had saved without quite knowing why.
Sorting through my father’s papers I found a formal portrait of his parents and older brother. The name of the studio and its location in Kishinev were prominently identified on the front and back of the image. Based on what I took to be the age of the little boy (my unmet uncle) standing between my grandparents, I guessed that the photograph had been taken in 1903, which was also the year of the pogrom (figure 17.1).
Widely reported throughout the world, the Kishinev pogrom stood as a turning point in Jewish history, not only in Russia.2 Perhaps, I thought, these ancestors of mine had actually witnessed the event as immortalized in Bialik’s famous 1904 poem, “City of the Killings,” and Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play, remembered now mainly for its title, The Melting Pot .3 My grandparents and uncle left Russia for America in 1906.
FIGURE 17.1 Rafael, Shulem, and Sheyndel Kipnis, Kishinev, circa 1903. Miller Archive
Although only a handful of biographical facts about the trio had been transmitted to me, the photograph, the newspaper references to the pogrom, and the map, led me to link the Kipnis family name with Kishinev. There was something uncannily suggestive about the way the names of the family and the city seemed to mirror each other, the resemblance carried by the initial letter K, and the overlapping sounds of the syllables (Kip / Kish / nis / nev). I began, largely unconsciously, to identify the family enigma with the history of the city and to wonder whether the place itself could reveal what my father had failed to put into words. I began to feel that the pogrom belonged to me.
In the spring of 2008, almost impulsively, I decided to make the trip that would bring me to the city where my grandparents had resided before their emigration, despite the fact that I knew I was not likely ever to learn exactly where and how they lived or to meet anyone who had known them. The photograph no longer satisfied my longing to know more about them, nor did the ship’s manifest. By the time I made the pilgrimage to the site of the pogrom, large numbers of third-generation descendants of the vast emigration from Russia at the turn of the twentieth century had, like me, begun looking for the towns their ancestors had left, and Web-based organizations like Jewishgen.org had set up Internet engines to facilitate the journey of return. Indeed, it was through a reference from www.Jewishgen.org that I found my guide Natasha.
Initially, I resisted calling my journey a “roots-seeking trip,” as Natasha always referred to the itinerary, but I can’t deny that the category fit my desire: “Amerikanka looking for babushka.”4 I had become not just curious but consumed with curiosity to see for myself the part of the world my father’s parents—and his brother—had left behind and to follow the path of the pogrom. By e-mail Natasha explained to me that if I wanted genealogical information from the Moldovan archives I would have to engage a specialist. Even before I arrived in town, the archivist she recommended had already found records for one of my great-grandfather’s cousins in Kishinev—his marriage and profession—as well as a document about a child who had lived only three days before dying of convulsions, the son of Refuel (my grandfather’s name) from Tulchin, a small town now in Ukraine; more evidence that I, we, they, somehow were from there, from this corner of Bessarabia, as it was called then.
I immediately located the position of this cousin on a branch of the tree that an American genealogist with Kipnis ancestors had made for me years earlier and looked again at the ship’s manifest that I had already downloaded from Ancestry.com. The man, his wife, and his children left for New York from Odessa, a few weeks after my grandparents left Kishinev, on the same ship from Rotterdam, and were headed for the home of my grandfather Raphael Kipnis at 96 Allen Street in New York. The building no longer exists, but at the time it shared a courtyard, back to back, with 97 Orchard Street, the current home of the Tenement Museum of the Lower East Side. Side by side, back to back, this approximation of past locations has something of the ambiguities connecting biographies to locations that Svetlana Boym has designated as the off-modern, a detour from the predictable histories of the straight line.5
I went to Kishinev and followed the path of the pogrom as described in Bialik’s poem, but it was only the second trip I made to the city—the one that could properly be called a return—that helped me understand my puzzling compulsion to make the first journey, a compulsion (abetted by technology) shared by thousands of fellow questers across the world, descendants of immigrants for whom, like me, the image, the screen, and the archive do not seem to be enough. We seem to want, though we might not put it that way, the real thing.
Not long after getting back to New York in May 2008 from my first trip to Kishinev, Aleksandar Hemon published The Lazarus Project and, at the same time, my sister handed over an album of photographs from Russia that had belonged to my grandmother.6 Together, these unexpected occurrences illuminated both the meaning of my individual quest and the wider phenomenon expressed in rites of return: the genre, as it were, of the experience and the modes by which we return, think we return, and think about returning. The book and the album sent me back for a closer look.
Lazarus Averbach survives the 1903 pogrom in Kishinev and emigrates to the safety of America, only to be murdered a few years later in Chicago. In the novel, Brik, the narrator, tries to unravel Lazarus’s story and embarks on detective-like travels to Eastern Europe to reconstruct the immigrant’s pogrom past. When Brik and his travel companion, Rora, a photographer, both Bosnian like the author, neither Jewish, arrive in Moldova, they set out to research the pogrom: “the two of us who could never have experienced the pogrom went to the Chisinau Jewish Community Center to find someone who had never experienced it and would tell us about it.” I was overcome with a sense of anxiety. Here was my own private adventure somehow scooped and transformed into literature through an artful postmodern scrim. What was the novelist doing to my pogrom? Naturally, Brik and Rora’s guide is a Philip Rothian character, a beautiful, if slightly bored young woman, pale, with “deep, mournful eyes” (229). The two men ask her about the pogrom, which she dutifully recounts, and then are led to an adjacent room where they gaze in horror at a display of photographs: “bearded, mauled corpses lined up on the hospital floor, the glassy eyes facing the ceiling stiffly: a pile of battered bodies; a child with its mouth agape; a throng of bandaged, terrified survivors” (230). The description seemed familiar. I’d seen many of those same images online, illustrating the historical event. But I did not see them on my visit. What I saw on display about the pogrom that I too was researching as a character in my own story was an arch in the one-room museum around which collaged photographs had been pasted. The strongest image I remembered was that of young men clutching the Torah scrolls desecrated during the rioting. Had my guide failed to show me these other photographs? Had I seen them and forgotten?
As I raced through the pages of the novel, I had the uncomfortable sensation that Hemon’s fiction was challenging my memory and even my sense of reality. In the novel, for instance, the two characters leave the display of pogrom photographs and move further into the room. Behind an alcove they see “a couple of dummies in Orthodox Jewish attire, positioned around an empty table, their eyes wide open, their hands resting on the table’s edge” (231). I traveled back in my mind, looking at the photographs I had taken, and coming up blank. I started to distrust my reliability as the narrator of my memoir. I sent Natasha a frantic e-mail telling her about the novel and asking her whether we had seen these rooms. How could I have missed the pogrom exhibit? Surely I would have noticed these “dummies” meant to represent, the novel’s guide explains, “a Jewish family from the time of the pogrom” (232). Could I have already forgotten what I had seen only weeks before? But maybe my panic was misplaced. After all, this was a novel: fiction not memoir. Maybe Hemon had invented the whole thing. I hated myself for being so literal minded. I was a professor of literature and knew about genre.
Natasha wrote back about the dummies: “Yes, and Purim figures. It’s in the JCC, with the library where Olga [the librarian] showed you around.” Natasha attached two pictures she had taken of our visit: “Please see yourself and the puppets.” But these puppets are Purim figures, Queen Esther and King Ahashuerus, not dummies dressed as Orthodox Jews. Did Hemon and I visit the same place? I turned to Olga, laying out my confusion. “Aleksandar Hemon is correct in his description,” the librarian began. And the dummies? “The dummies in Orthodox attire just symbolized the atmosphere of an average Jewish home,” she said. I held my breath, stunned by this confirmation of my memory lapse. Finally, toward the end of her long, detailed message, Olga explained that before 2005—presumably when Hemon had visited the city—the museum and therefore the exhibit were located across the street from its current location: “So you couldn’t have seen the described artifacts.” I had missed not only the dummies but also, Olga added, the “exposition devoted to the Pogrom with map, names of the victims, and a large picture of Torah Scrolls damaged by the looters.” I couldn’t have seen what I didn’t see! My heart exploded with relief.
A few weeks later, Olga sent me photographs from the exhibit Hemon described. I see the dummies, I see a beautiful young woman who might have been the guide in the novel, pointing to the photographs of the pogrom. The dummies. The husband is dressed in a long, black gabardine coat, like a Hasidic Jew. His large hat, much too big for his head, is scrunched down around his ears, in front of which curl significant side locks; his bushy, untrimmed beard and full mustache complete the representation of the Orthodox Jew, his gaze resolutely turned away from modernity. His wife’s hair is covered with a black shawl knotted around her shoulders; dressed in a full, white blouse, a knitted vest, and long flowing skirt with an embroidered pattern around the hem, she looks like a Ukrainian peasant.
Compared to the dummies, the photograph of my grandparents taken in Kishinev shows a couple who have distanced themselves from the styles of Bessarabian Orthodoxy. My grandfather has trimmed his beard and poses hatless, in street clothes. My grandmother does not cover her hair and is wearing a fitted blouse and elegant taffeta skirt. The couple looks European, Victorian.
In my grandmother’s album I found two studio cards from Kishinev photography studios. These were portraits of friends, who have inscribed across the back of their portraits messages of farewell in Russian, dated a few months before my grandparents’ departure from Kishinev. In posture and affect the friends resemble the characters in period representations of Chekhov. One reads: “To my dear friend R. Kipnis with his wife, from G. and E. Frein. May you remember us fondly.” I know nothing about these people, but what their faces, fashion, and words tell me is that, far from the caricatures of the dummies, Rafael and his wife belonged to a circle who knew there was a future beyond the pogroms. Three months later my grandparents would sail for America. My grandmother was pregnant, or about to be, with my father.
The photographs from the dear friends, their gesture of farewell, confirmed to me what I had traveled to find the first time but hadn’t: something beyond the ship’s manifest and beyond the family portrait. My second trip to Kishinev was to see not just the site of the pogrom again but to see for the first time the place that my grandparents had left as members of what I had since learned was a vast middle class of petit bourgeois Jews. The tenements of the Lower East Side must have been something of a comedown for the upwardly mobile Bessarabian Kipnises, if they lived anywhere near their friend Mr. Samuel Grigory Traub, “in his private dwelling house… in the upper, newly built part of the town.” Or perhaps they lived near the photography studio located, it says on the card stock, “near the water pump house.”
In my return to Kishinev, I was following an impulse I could not fully explain to myself, but it was hard to resist the self-diagnosis that I had succumbed to Freud’s account of the “repetition compulsion” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle .”7 In the fort/da story, Freud famously describes how a child tries to master an anxiety over loss through a game, a game that allows him to repeat through a symbolic act a feeling—the fear of his mother’s absence, of losing his mother—that threatens his sense of security. Repetition in this sense is a pleasurable way for the child to master the terror of loss beyond his control. For those of us for whom the past is often what novelist Kiran Desai named “the inheritance of loss,” returning to the scene of where something important was lost can feel comforting.8 As adult returnees, like the child playing with the spool, we try to fool ourselves with time travel: we can’t really recapture the past with its losses, but we can go back to its places. Playing with loss becomes a way to deal with one of the crucial features of these rites of return, and that is a confrontation with what we are missing. Sometimes this is something literal: trying to see, find, discover what we have missed—that is, overlooked. But also something symbolic: recognizing what’s irretrievably missing.
I wanted to know where they lived. I’m not going to know that. But, because of the studio cards, on my return I’m going to walk past the street where one of the city’s two water pumps was located. I’m going to walk past the street where the water pump is no more but where the friends who were already missing my grandparents had their photograph taken. On my repeat pilgrimage, I’m going to follow the poem more carefully because now I finally understand the route the pogromchiks took and that I had walked through in a daze the first time, overwhelmed by the strangeness of the topography in which I had found myself. I’m starting to understand what is next to what, what is far, what is close. The river Byck, which marked the border of the poor section of town at the time of the pogrom, in 2009 is barely a rivulet and often entirely dry.
With the screen of the novel doubled by images from the exhibit I hadn’t seen, my effort to fathom the city’s past sometimes felt like a replay of childhood trips to the Museum of Natural History where we were instructed to gaze at dioramas of lost worlds and foreign peoples. But on this occasion, when I crossed the threshold of the Jewish Cultural Center, something felt immediately different, even though the exhibits had not changed. As I walked through the rooms with Olga, I experienced the pleasure of familiarity, repetition. I could double-check some of the details for my book, but I was at ease—not even taking photographs.
Toward the end of our time together, Olga mysteriously left the small performance space for the children’s theatrical productions we had revisited, saying she would be back, saying something, I thought, about “doors.” I waited. When she returned she was carrying three dolls (the doors): Hemon’s dummies, and, in fact, handmade puppets the size of small children. Olga quickly reconfigured the scene that had been the centerpiece of the exhibit I had missed, seating the puppets on chairs around a small table, which was covered with a festive Sabbath cloth, set with candlesticks and a ceremonial kiddush cup, all against the background of a painting representing a Kishinev streetscape from the era of the pogrom. In this reconstructed, improvised version, husband and wife are joined by their daughter, Ora. Olga danced with the daughter doll to show me how the puppets could be used. I don’t know what I would have made of this scene had I encountered it on my first visit. I wasn’t put off, though, as were the characters in Hemon’s novel, by the sight of these figures in an earlier choreography, “a couple of dummies,” awkwardly positioned in their chairs.
Instead, on this return visit to the tiny museum setting, I was moved by what I perceived as the affect driving the curatorial decisions: the twin effort to touch the visitor from abroad, but at the same time to engage the small children living in the city who participate in the center’s activities. In a minor, miniature key, the Kishinev Jewish Cultural Center echoes the efforts made by museums of conscience like the Tenement Museum in Manhattan to reproduce the material setting in which earlier generations lived.9
Through many layers of remove and mediation, the props, the puppets and domestic artifacts, all rehearse the holidays that by definition recur in a kind of perpetual present tense: the weekly Sabbath, the annual Purim. When Olga the librarian danced with Ora the doll, I felt the poignant physical effort to keep alive through ritual something important that was irremediably past except as remembrance or as symbolic performance. You can play in the rooms that contain the local exhibits, as the children do, reenacting the story of Purim—Purim as the story of a pogrom averted—but the adults are summoned to remember the pogrom as tragic history. Those who remained were not rescued, Queen Esther notwithstanding. Watching the dance, I suddenly collapsed inside like the balloons wilting on the stage behind the dolls, a whoosh of intensely held-in breath that I could finally let go. I had been working too hard at all of this, my compulsion to document, to find the exact spot, to keep returning until I got it right. These were the rites. By their stylized artifice, the puppets forced me to realize that the historical people they stood in for would be real to me only as actors in shared rituals, celebrating a long history of survival, as well as loss, a history that extended to all the descendants who wished to see themselves as part of it. Maybe as a good daughter of Freud, my anxiety subsided on this visit because I was returned to childhood memories of a Judaism already lost to me, through assimilation over two generations. Maybe what I had been trying to find was a way to compensate for my indifference to the narrative that I’m now starting to see has shaped me all along. Let’s say that’s part of it, searching for the path of a lost history whose effects nonetheless remain embedded in me. But how much can this process of return give meaning in retrospect to all that I didn’t know and don’t know still?
On this second visit to Kishinev, a broader uncertainty that had accompanied me throughout my quest also began to ease, and this was a troubling anxiety about the story itself that I was constructing to put in the place of my ignorance. I had experienced this uncertainty both on the site, as it were, and as I carried out the research on my lost family at a distance, in my head and on paper, as a kind of dissatisfaction or dissonance: insufficient information or approximate pieces of knowledge. I sometimes called this feeling of frustration by a term from mathematics that had caught my fancy early on in the process as a metaphor for the outcome of my quest: asymptotic. As plotted on a graph, an asymptote is a line that a curve forever approaches. The curve and the line look as though they will ultimately meet, but in the end, they never touch. Nicely for me, the word symptom shares the root of this term—which makes a kind of circular sense; my symptom was frustration at what did not meet (literally, did not fall together). But, given the nature of the enterprise, the failure to coincide with the thing itself was inevitable.
How close, then, was close enough? I wanted to discover my grandparents’ records in the archive; instead I had to make do with their second cousin, the way in nineteenth-century novels the protagonist has to tolerate poor relations. On this return visit I began to internalize this information differently: the second cousin offered lateral confirmation—a sidebar of evidence, but confirmation all the same—of my family’s passage in this city, good enough, to use the comforting language of object relations, close enough to begin repairing the loss, rebuilding lost knowledge.
On our final walk through the pogrom area, Natasha and I stopped to buy water at the little grocery adjacent to the dwelling known as “House Number 13,” a place singled out as a scene of violence by Vladimir Korolenko’s newspaper reportage in 1904.10 On my previous visit I had been frustrated not to be able to enter the courtyard of the building, a site described by an Israeli researcher who had visited Kishinev on the one hundredth anniversary of the pogrom.11 Natasha asked the young clerk if he had access to the courtyard and scribbled the phone number of his boss, the grocery store owner, in her notebook. But we both knew without saying that it was too late. I would have to accept the evidence of the many neighboring courtyards I had already seen. Much as I longed for particulars, I was going to have to be satisfied with the markers of collective, not individual, identity—with approximation. This should not have been surprising. All along I had been able to piece together the Kipnis puzzle, my patrimony, only through the lateral bonds that tied these family members to others of their generation and to the conditions of their emigration, to the collateral domain of what I call the transpersonal. Wasn’t that what the museum exhibits were designed to represent, “an average Jewish home” at the time of the pogrom, a community, moreover, that revealed something important about my grandparents by their difference from its rules?
This lesson of the second visit was not lost on me. A door had literally closed—the door to the yard of House No. 13. Gentrification had begun in the pogrom area; more of the old buildings were bound to disappear. The exhibits at the Jewish Cultural Center library would no doubt change again. The monuments to the pogrom and to the Holocaust would remain, but the city would reconfigure its shape and architecture around them. In yet another rescripting of historical borders, the impoverished country of Moldova itself might merge with its neighbor Romania and fly a new flag. As myth, however, Kishinev would linger in the metaphors of the “City of the Killings” and in collective Jewish history.
Would this be my last return? As we headed for the airport at Chisinau, I felt that something had settled in me, the compulsion had loosened its hold. I knew so much more than when I had begun and yet there was so much I would never know. The exertion of the voyage had been absolutely necessary, but so was acknowledging its limits. Still, I’ve come to relish the pleasures of vanishing knowledge: a photograph of my grandparents taken in a photography studio that no longer exists and a home address, not theirs but that of their friends, friends whose relationship is established, after the fact of their separation, in a handwritten farewell inscribed on the back of yet another photograph taken at another photography studio that no longer exists. Most of the rest of what I wanted to know will take that form of removal—the equivalent of the psychic distance, and yet relatedness, of second cousins—and of puppets.
In a conversation I moderated between Saidiya Hartman, Eva Hoffman, and Daniel Mendelsohn about their memoirs of return, Mendelsohn recalled an event with Leon Wieseltier in which Wieseltier challenged him about the expression “going back.” How could you go back to where you had never been? Wieseltier wanted to know. Mendelsohn answered that when you grow up in an immigrant family you constantly hear about “the country of origin. So it does feel like going back .”12 In my case, I had not heard enough growing up to feel that I was going back to a specific place in the “old country”—and, in particular, when I visited, on the heels of my first trip to Kishinev, the town in Ukraine where my paternal grandfather and great-grandfather were born (as I had discovered searching through the archive of immigrant papers in New York), I definitely did not feel that I was returning there or that there lay my roots, even though, literally, by bloodline and genealogy, I knew this to be true.
Instead, the second trip to Kishinev persuaded me that this was where I wanted to have come from. Through the literary history of the city, the traces of the archive, and the photographs of my grandparents and their stylishly dressed friends, I was moved to an act of “affiliative self-fashioning,” a chosen identification created by the journey.13 Returning to Kishinev had forced me to understand that while this place was the scene of a historical experience that I needed to see, a place where history had happened to the people who came before me, much of what I wanted from the past would continue to elude me. No matter how concrete, how referential, the way a photograph refers to the object in front of its lens, this place of the past lacked the story I was seeking, but it was the origin of the story I would write.
Notes
1. I described this triggering moment in the epilogue to But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People’s Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). A version of this essay appears in Nancy K. Miller, What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011).
2. For a succinct account of the pogrom, see Edward H. Judge, Easter in Kishinev: Anatomy of a Pogrom (New York: New York University Press, 1992).
3. Hayim Nahman Bialik, “City of the Killings,” Songs from Bialik: Selected Poems of Hayim Nahman Bialik, trans. Atar Adari (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 1–9. The title of the poem is alternately translated as “In the City of Killing” and “The City of Slaughter.” Bialik was sent by the Jewish Historical Committee in Odessa to write a report based on victim testimony; instead he wrote a poem. The hero of Zangwill’s play is a “pogrom orphan” who is also a talented violinist. Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot: Drama in Four Acts (New York: Macmillan, 1932). Zangwill published a children’s story version of his drama as “The Melting Pot: A Story of True Americanism,” in From the Tower Window of My Bookhouse, ed. Olive Beaupré Miller (Chicago: Bookhouse for Children, 1921).
4. The archive of the experience has been inventoried and canonized in a now out-of-print, door-stopper-size volume, Jewish Roots in Ukraine and Moldova: Pages from the Past and Archival Inventories published by Miriam Weiner and her “Routes to Roots” foundation in 1999. I describe my two trips more fully in Miller, What They Saved.
5. In this volume.
6. Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (New York: Riverhead, 2008).
7. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961).
8. Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (New York: Grove, 2006).
9. On the affect generated by visits to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, see Liz Ševčenko, in this volume.
10. V. G. Korolenko. “House No. 13: An Episode in the Massacre of Kishinev,” Contemporary Review 85 (February 1904): 266–80.
11. Dan Laor, “Kishinev Revisited: A Place in Jewish Historical Memory,” Prooftexts 25 (2005): 30–38. As Laor’s title suggests, every visit to Kishinev after Bialik’s poem, which itself performs a return and an invitation to bear witness, could also be considered a return. But Laor also closely followed the itinerary recorded in Bialik’s notebooks of testimony. On the relation of the testimony to the poem, see Mikhal Dekel’s “‘From the Mouth of the Raped Woman Rivka Shiff,’ Kishinev, 1903,” WSQ 36, nos. 1 and 2 (Spring/Summer 2008): 199–207.
12. In this volume.
13. Term coined by Alondra Nelson, in this volume.