the tragic, downtrodden caricatures that dominate the collective Jewish memory. The decades of the Cold War divorced the world’s Ashkenazi Jews not just from the few survivors who remained in Poland after the war, but from their own heritage and from the land itself. “For 60 years, from 1939 to 1989, Polish-Jewish relations were in the freezer,” said Michael Schudrich, Poland’s New York-born chief rabbi. “So, each side grew up with its own story, and they don’t intersect.”

When they think about Jewish life in Poland, most Jews in the rest of the world—not just in the United States and Canada but in Israel, in Australia, in the rest of Europe—think of its terminal point: Auschwitz. The death camp has become Poland’s top tourist destination, attracting more than aMuseum of the History of the Polish Jews)

On the obverse, the bedraggled but unbowed Jewish martyrs of Muranow stare directly at the sparkling new facade of the Museum of the History of the Polish Jews, whose glass cladding is inscribed with tangled Roman and Hebrew characters spelling out the words “Polin.” “It references the stories Jews told themselves about how they came to Poland and why they stayed,” Kirshenblatt-Gimblett explained when she took me to visit the construction site last fall. “They were running away from persecution in Germany, expulsions, accusations that they brought the plague, and they went east, and came to a forest.” Her voice took on the rhythmic cadence of a practiced storyteller as she spoke. “They came to a forest, and the clouds broke,