by Elaine Durbach
NJJN Bureau Chief/Central

January 17, 2008

When Agnieszka (Aga) Legutko mentions women and demons, she isn’t thinking about fictional creatures alone. For the 30-year-old Polish student, raised Catholic in Cracow, her passionate interest in Jewish culture has come to feel almost like a spiritual possession.

“I think I’m a gilgul [reincarnation] of my Jewish great-grandmother,” she said, talking by phone from her Manhattan apartment near Columbia University, where she is working toward a doctorate in Yiddish literature. “Three generations later, I look just like her.”

How she fell in love with Yiddish and then discovered her own connection to Judaism will be the subject of talks she will give as scholar-in-residence at Temple Beth O’r/Beth Torah in Clark on Jan. 25 and 26.

Her connection with the Conservative congregation came about through its president, David Brotman. On a visit to Cracow last summer, he took a tour of the town’s synagogues and got talking to his guide — Legutko. Fascinated by her story, he invited her to visit the temple.

Legutko had no idea that she had Jewish roots when she first became intrigued by all things Jewish. Late in her high school years, her parents, both math teachers, took her to see Fiddler on the Roof. It was the early 1990s, with the newfound cultural openness following the fall of the communist government.

“I was totally overwhelmed and in love with the film,” she said. Her father taped the sound track, and she listened to it over and over. “It was almost as if it stirred some genetic memory.”

Legutko set out to learn everything she could about Jewish customs and traditions; she read Jewish literature and listened to Jewish music, and slowly learned about how much Poland lost when its Jewish population was destroyed by the Nazi Holocaust. She even became a guide, taking visitors to see Cracow’s Jewish quarter and its old synagogues.

Legutko was about 22 when she commented to her parents one day about her strange affinity for Jewish culture and history. Her father replied, “What’s so strange about it?” and proceeded to tell her for the first time that his grandmother, who had immigrated to Poland from Romania through Ukraine, was Jewish.

“I know that halachically, that means I’m not Jewish,” Legutko said. But a few years ago she also learned that her mother, whose family came from England, might also have Jewish roots.

“Who, other than Jews, would have come from England to Poland?” she asked, though adding that again, the link is through a father.

Her mother told her that in 1969, when a wave of anti-Semitism drove out many of Poland’s remaining Jews, she was harassed by schoolmates who, for some reason, assumed she was Jewish.

Legutko went on to study English literature in college and then Yiddish literature in English translation. She speaks with audible passion about the great Yiddish author Isaac Bashevis Singer. Wary of the distortions in the English translations, she set about studying Yiddish so she could read him in the original, taking the classes offered by the Lauder Foundation, and was charmed by the expressive richness of the language. Knowing some German helped, but to take the next step, she also began to study Hebrew.

Legutko came to New York in 2004 to do her doctorate, and her husband, Michal, a sound engineer, followed a year later. She is about to begin work on her dissertation — probably about women and dybbuks and demons in modern novels by Jewish women. She is also teaching an undergraduate course in Yiddish.

“I feel as if my great-grandmother is pushing me to get closer to my roots,” she said.

She has returned to Cracow each summer for the hugely popular Jewish Cultural Festival there, picking up her old role as a guide to the city’s synagogues. A few years ago, she wrote a brief guide book about Cracow, part of a series on Polish cities, which she translated into English herself. It was very well received, and now she is working on a second book, on Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter, and those synagogues she has come to know so well.

Meanwhile, Legutko is enjoying life in New York and the city’s abundant offerings of Yiddish culture, from the Folksbiene Yiddish Theatre, to performances at the 92nd Street Y, the appearances of Yiddish singing groups, and the wealth of books available at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and through the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass.

She and Michal haven’t decided what their next move will be. But one thing Legutko is clear about: It will have a Jewish dimension. If they have children, she said, she wants to raise them with a connection to their Jewish roots and with the Jewish values that have become so dear to her.

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Scholar-in-residence

AGA LEGUTKO will be the scholar at the annual Mark and Edith Lief Memorial Scholar-in-Residence Shabbaton on Friday and Saturday, Jan. 25 and 26, at Temple Beth O’r/Beth Torah in Clark. The lectures are free and open to the public.

On Friday, Legutko will speak during 8 p.m. services, following a 6:30 Shabbat dinner, describing her background and the discovery of her Jewish roots. On Saturday, after a lunch at 1 p.m., she will discuss the history of the Jews in Poland and the current state of Jewish life in that country today. Her last lecture will be that afternoon, at the 4:30 p.m. Minha service, when she will cover her experiences as a student in the United States.

The cost for the Friday night dinner is $18 for adults, $9 for children under 12. There is no cost for lunch on Saturday. Preregistration for meals is required.

For more information and to register for meals, call the temple office at 732-381-8403.