We went to Krochmalna Street, the street in Warsaw that Singer’s narrator, Aaron Greindinger, was raised on and the street Shosha, the woman he fell in love with as a child, still lived on when Aaron returned many years later, so that he fell in love with her all over again, in spite of the fact that they now had so little in common. It’s not clear to the narrator or the reader how much this second infatuation is with Shosha or with a romanticised vision of his own childhood, described so briefly in the opening pages of the novel. Walking down the street as it now stands makes the protagonist's act of nostalgia seem even more nostalgic, for the street full of Jewish life which Singer or Aaron would have known is no more. In its place is a long road with several stunted tower blocks. In one corner of the street there was a small stall under a tarpaulin, selling vegetables and pickles, maybe the only ghostly hint of the smells and the bustle which Singer so vividly describes. The Jewish quarter is no more. Almost all of Warsaw was destroyed in the war, and though much has been rebuilt, the Jewish quarter wasn’t. A whole world vanished. People, buildings, synagogues, customs. Nevertheless, it can still be visited in the pages of Singer’s novel. Literature transcends even genocide. The novel was published in 1978, so the world the novelist conjures was already an act of memory. The novelist would have been aware, when he wrote the book, of the alchemical nature of his craft. These characters might have died in the war; on the road, as supposedly happened to Shosha; in the camps; or in the ghetto, but in the writer’s happy-go-lucky prose they live on. As does Krochmalna Street. Because the truth is that I visited it twice when I was in Warsaw. Once when I walked down the street which is still called by that name in googlemaps, and a second time as I strode through the words of Singer’s novel. And of those two visits, the one that seemed most real, or most alive to me, was the latter.
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