The Story of the Jews

ANNOUNCER

Coming up, 19th-century Jews cross the Atlantic and find a land of plenty.

SIMON SCHAMA

In America, Motel the tailor could become Levi Strauss. A Jew, Adolph Sutro, could even become the 24th mayor of San Francisco. Remember where the Jews of New York had come from, and now uptown, they could lay claim to one of the most extraordinary buildings not just in New York, but in the whole of the United States.

ANNOUNCER

And once in the United States, Jews began to transform popular culture.

SCHAMA

They saw how America would change through the movies. There was Israel Baline, who become Irving Berlin. There were the Gershowitz brothers, shortly to become the Gershwins. What they did was actually to channel that specifically Jewish American sensibility and marry it up with the intense American optimism.

ANNOUNCER

"The Story of the Jews," with Simon Schama.

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At first, it seemed like a place of utter desolation. But then I saw them-- the stylized angels' wings hovering over the ceiling. Out of the dust burst the colors-- the blues of heaven, the reds of the kings of Judah, the rainbows coming through the glass. And then, amidst all this absence, I began to sense the presence...

the cantor's chant, the murmuring banter. And there in the galleries were the women of Jewish Kosice, and down below, the men in silks and hats. In the spring of 1944, 15,700 Jews from Kosice-- the entire community-- were sent to their deaths in Auschwitz. But this wasn't a place that sat passively waiting for its death sentence.

Before the Holocaust, Kosice, like thousands of Jewish towns and villages strung across central and eastern Europe, was alive-- thriving, confident, noisy; the opera and klezmer, the schnorrer beggars and the prosperous merchants, the pushcart peddlers and the street-corner revolutionaries. That this world somehow flourished despite all the pounding storms that would come its way is an escape act so epic that it counts as one of history's all-time redeeming miracles. Even when systematic annihilation overwhelmed the people, the world that had nourished them survived. This is the story about how the unique Jewish culture of Eastern Europe, made of faith, poetry and a longing for deliverance, did not get pulverized by the hammer of history; it just changed its address-- from Minsk to Manhattan, from the shtetl to Hollywood, and ultimately, from destruction to salvation.

Eastern Europe was once home to more than 5 million Jews, the largest population of Jews in the world. They were the Ashkenazim, Yiddish speakers, who first came east from the valleys of Germany and France in search of refuge from persecutions and expulsions sometime around the 13th century. They would find it in what was then the largest and most tolerant state in Europe-- the Polish-Lithuanian Kingdom. Pragmatists, not sentimentalists, the Polish kings asked the Jews to harvest their taxes, allowing the Jews not just to settle, but to prosper.

But when, at the end of the 18th century, the kingdom was carved up between Austria, Prussia, and Russia, most Jews fell under Russian rule. For Russian merchants, this new Jewish population was unwanted competition. Russia's response was to expel the Jews from the major cities and to confine them to the Pale of Settlement, stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Somewhere at the northern end of it, in the neck of these Lithuanian woods, were my mother's family, the Steinbergs.

Like many Jews in the small towns of the Pale called shtetls, they eked out a living as best they could-- trading in illegal liquor, hustling in the markets, and felling trees in the woods. You don't really think about the Jews as woodland people very much-- in fact, in Jewish tradition, the woods are where demons lurked-- yet somehow, the Steinbergs and countless thousands of them had to make a living in what was called the lumber business. The rich Jews got to ship it off to Hamburg and places west. My lot would cut and stack and log and pile.

In our family, there were stories of the wolf attacks; my mother used to talk about her great uncle showing off his wolf scars on his birthday. The Lithuanian Jews, the Litvaks, took a kind of pride in the harshness of their world. But it wasn't at least, however harsh, a solitary life. Everything the villagers of the shtetls did, they did together.

They worked together, they sang together, they ate together, they lived together, they died together. The world "individualism," I think, doesn't have a translation in Yiddish. They were never individuals. They were a "kahal." They were a community.

There's little left of the Jewish Lithuania the Steinbergs knew, buts its ghosts have materialized in the most unlikely places. In 2001, someone reached into a sofa at this gloomy St. Petersburg apartment and pulled out a miraculous treasure-trove of over 350 hand-printed photographs of shtetl life, taken between 1912 and 1914 by a group of Jewish ethnographers. They had set off on what they called an "expedition" into the dark continent of the Pale to document everything they could find-- the streets, the schools, the extraordinary wooden synagogues...

and the countless ways the Jews made their living. There's nothing in these shtetls that Jews aren't doing. It's not true that they're just tailors and peddlers. They're blacksmiths, and they're bakers, and they're weavers, and this cobbler is quite fantastic.

He's not going to pose for the camera. This is actually someone living; he's not a folk caricature in any way. But there is, I don't know, Yunkel, the local grocer, who is sitting there patiently on the bench waiting for his soles to be repaired. And here's a-- here's 3 incredibly dirt-encrusted, nebbish types.

You know, these--these are the bad uncles, really, who have had a bit too much vodka. And there they all are, just sitting there a bit curious. This is a world that lives and breathes and dances and sings, really, and it's not sentimental. It's real.

Throughout the 19th century, Jews were periodically banned from the major Russian cities, from professions and universities, and were forbidden to own land. And in the face of this persecution, shtetl Jews looked inwards to their own culture for enrichment. To the outside world, they looked impoverished, but they had the treasures of their holy books. From the kheyder schools, where the Hebrew teacher taught fidgeting children every word of the Torah and the Talmud, to the deep culture of self-help and charity where everyone from the rabbi to the old folk in the retirement home had an allotted place, the shtetl was a wraparound world, a micro-state shaped to survive amidst the repressive policies of the Russian czars.

And perhaps one of the most enduring and painful memories of shtetl life was the forced conscription of Jewish boys as young as 12 into the Russian Army for up to 25 years. It's hardly surprising, then, that there were times when the shackles would be cast off in a collective frenzy of joy. Times are hard in the shtetl-- the rabbi is on his last legs, nobody can make a living anymore, the Cossacks are around the corner. What do we all need?

We need a simcha. The best simcha of all is a hossnah, a wedding. Weddings are the time when the whole shtetl comes together. In these streets around here in the shtetl, at the beginning would be the niggun, the procession-- slow, dignified, the bride being led into the square by the two mothers.

Two mothers, one on each side. Under the chuppah they go. Their friends say the 7 blessings, the Sheva Brachot. The groom stamps on the glass finally, with the left or right foot-- I can never remember which-- because in all weddings, in all simchas, in all moments of joy, there must be a moment of sorrow.

We must remember the destruction of the temple. Sorrow and happiness-- such a Jewish idea. The crowd go crazy! "Mazel Tov," they shout.

The klezmorim, the cream of music from all around... the skirling clarinet, the zimbal, the cimbalom, the whirling fiddle, the drums. Dancing starts, and maybe even if the rabbi is not so well, he starts the dancing, the men on one side, the women on the other...

Singing in Yiddish

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and the rabbi himself dances and dances with his eyes burning, because an old Jewish saying says, "Every man is the instrument. and his life is the melody." For many shtetl Jews, feeling the joy, letting it course through the body, wasn't something that should be reserved for a wedding, and that deep craving for an ecstatic Judaism sparked the astounding mass phenomenon of Hasidism.

Men changing

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Hasidism is a form of Orthodox Judaism that brings esoteric Jewish mysticism to everyone. In addition to intensive study of the Torah and Talmud, Hasidism urges direct communion with God through joyous bouts of singing and dancing and ecstatic trance-like prayer. The idea was to melt the soul into the Shekhina-- the divine radiance that flows through all earthly things. Hasidism today is one of the most visible forms of orthodox Judaism, but to understand why it emerged, one has to travel further into the Pale and back into the 18th century.

The shtetl of Satanov in the Ukraine was once deep Hasidic country. The number and sheer exuberance of the gravestones reveal the prosperity and vitality of the Jewish presence here. They burst with animal energy and Hasidic high spirits. Hares spin on the cosmic wheel, bears clamber for grapes on the Tree of Life, lions are rampant, as Jewish lions must be.

This community clearly didn't tremble in terror, but terror was never far away, descending on Satanov not just in the form of famine and plague, but rampaging Cossacks, who singled out Jews for slaughter as the protected people of their hated enemy, the Polish King. That's why Satanov's Jews built their synagogue as a fortress. This is where the roots of Hasidism lie. In the face of brutal persecution, many Jews felt that the traditional leaders of the religious community, the severe masters of the Talmud, fell short of answering their spiritual and emotional needs.

Into the breach stepped a group of itinerant mystics called the Baal-e-shem, the masters of the name. Whose name? Well, God's, of course. And these were masters who, through secret knowledge, could manipulate the letters of God's name to protect you from harm.

Those secrets were derived from the Kabbalah, an ancient body of esoteric mystical knowledge that revealed profound truths about the relationship between God and the universe. Kabbalistic tradition has it that the very substance of the world was made of letters-- alef/air, shin/fire, mem/water-- and the most powerful and dangerous letters of all were the many Holy Names of God, which could be rearranged and chanted to perform miracles on earth, bringing the infinite of the Divine into the finite world of man.

Man chanting in Yiddish

Major funding for this program was provided b SCHAMA

It was an extraordinary moment in Jewish history, a moment when wonder-working rabbis ascending into the heavenly courts of God to defend their people from harm struck a profound chord with the people of the Pale, and the most legendary of them all was the man who came to be known as the founder of Hasidism, the Baal-shem-Tov, the Master of the Good Name. The Master died around 1760, and his followers, now known as tzaddiks, righteous men, became kings among Jews, founding dynasties, some of which survive in Hasidism even today. Hasidism was so popular and so successful, I think, because essentially, it was a response against helplessness, against the autocratic states that took Jews for cannon fodder-- and every other kind of fodder, for that matter. Against those states, Hasidism created states of faith, complete with a righteous man, a prince/messiah/scholar at its center, the tzaddik, and around him, an entire spiritual army, and with him, a great body of fabulous lore, tales of wonder and healing and resurrection.

The tzaddik prince could make barren fields fertile. He could make the impotent virile. He could communicate with the stars. He was the possessor of secret mysteries which would keep away demons.

Now, how could enlightened despots-- and for that matter, enlightened Jews-- in their city suits compete with that? But for the "Jews in city suits," Hasidism was not the answer. If you craved more than ecstatic visions, if you had a restless Jewish mind, and even more restless feet, then the world of the shtetl could bring on attacks of claustrophobia, and there, at the very bottom of the Pale, facing the Black Sea, was one place, the port city that from the early 19th century drew these Jews like moths to a flame. Its name was Odessa, a city of grand boulevards and brothels, of theaters and progressive schools that taught Jewish boys Russian, politics, and mathematics.

"The flames of hell burn 7 miles around Odessa," the rabbis warned. And it was soon full of Modern Jews who loved that hellish heat. Grain merchants and gangsters, tarts and klezmer fiddlers, poets and Jewish thinkers, who hung out at cafes where they smoked and sang and read radical Russian literature. Here, they'd ask themselves the big question-- how to be Jewish in the modern world without resorting to Hasidic miracles in the sky.

In tune with the radical spirit of the times, many Jews embraced revolutionary socialist politics, joining forces with the downtrodden people, their non-Jewish comrades, in the hope of creating a motherland free from oppression. But the bitter truth was that even here, in Odessa, the Jews couldn't escape the shadow of violence. On the 13th of March, 1881, Czar Alexander II was assassinated in St. Petersburg by the Russian left-wing terrorist organization Narodnaya Volya, the People's Will.

One Jewish girl was amongst the plotters, and within the month, a tidal wave of pogroms-- from the Russian word "to destroy"-- was unleashed across the Pale. They hit Odessa, Kirovograd, Kiev, then Yekaterinoslav and Kishinev, followed by attacks on hundreds of shtetls across the Pale. In the quarter century of economic and social upheaval that followed, Jews were all too often the victims of terrible violence. In the morning of November the 6th, 1905, people all over Britain were reading this in their "Guardian" newspaper as they ate their bacon and eggs.

"The events in the suburbs of Moldavanka, "Slobodka, and Bugaieoka last night "were of a most terrible nature. "Immense bands of ruffians, accompanied by policemen, "invaded all the Jewish houses "and mercilessly slaughtered the occupants. "Men and women were barbarously felled "and decapitated with axes. "Children were torn limb from limb.

"The streets were littered "with the corpses hurled out of windows. "The houses of murdered Jews "were then systematically destroyed. "In this way, the Jewish population of the district was wiped out." The morning that the reporter visited the hospitals of Odessa, there were at least 3,000 people in the emergency wards. It was, by any standards of outrage, the most appalling atrocity in the entire blood-stained history of the Russian pogroms.

For many Jews, this was the moment that shocked them out of the dream that they might ever attain equal rights in Czarist Russia. One of the illusions was that non-Jewish leftists would come to their defense, but they hadn't, and this bitter lesson threw them in different directions. Some would rush even further into the arms of socialist revolution; others would acknowledge the death of those dreams. Having devoted their futures to Russia, they now founded the first Jewish nationalist organization.

They called it the Lovers of Zion. One of the founders of the Lovers of Zion, Dr. Leo Pinsker, had published a pamphlet called "Autoemancipation." In that booklet, Pinsker diagnosed- and he was a doctor, remember-- Judeophobia as a kind of fear of ghosts. The problem, he said, was that Jewish national existence had died a long time ago, but Jews were still alive everywhere and people treated them as phantoms, and you get neurotic about phantoms.

The only way to cure it, for Pinsker, was not for Jews to be beholden to others, to receive civil rights like charity given to a beggar; the issue was to seize a sense of your own national identity, to make it happen somewhere and make it happen with power and moral strength. Thereupon was a momentous departure-- momentous absolutely for Jews, and as I need hardly tell you, incredibly momentous for the world. But 2 million Eastern European Jews sought a different way out. Why wait for Zion when there was another promised land lying across the ocean--America?

It was known in Yiddish as the goldenemedinah, the golden sanctuary, and it had long been on the lips of the Pale. Letters from relatives who had already made the trip told fables of a land of miracles, and if that sounds like something straight out of Hasidism-- well, then, it's no coincidence. Maybe this is where the Messiah might be, even if this Messiah would be called American democracy. And the tales weren't all tall.

Earlier Jewish immigrants had gone west and struck gold. In America, Motel the Tailor could become Levi Strauss of Levi's jeans... peddlers could build banks... a Jew, Adolph Sutro, could even become the 24th mayor of San Francisco.

Most of them had the same story. Emigrating from central Europe in the 1850s, they had peddled their way across America, selling soap, polish, cloth, opening stores, and investing wisely in the industries that built America-- the steel works and the mines, the railroads and the skyscrapers. In uptown New York, the Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue shows just how established and successful this wave of Jewish immigrants would become. This was, and still is, the headquarters of American Reform Judaism-- progressive, English-speaking, not sticklers for the minutiae of Talmudic laws but proud, unapologetic Jews nonetheless.

This is where many of those Jewish American names you might have heard of- the Wall Street bankers and industrialists like the Schiffs, the Warburgs, and the Guggenheims-- could sit together with their wives in their fancy hats from Bergdorf's, Macy's, and Bloomingdale's--their fellow congregants' stores. Here was the promise of Jews out in the world becoming something, astonishingly realized in glass and stone. Anyone coming into this place could be forgiven for thinking that they had arrived perhaps in a third temple in Jerusalem. And if this wasn't actually Jerusalem, it must have seemed pretty much like it-- the stupendous, glorious decoration, marble mosaics, soaring Romanesque columns all will have delivered an astonishing proclamation of Jewish magnificence.

Remember where the Jews of New York had come from, and now uptown, they could lay claim to one of the most extraordinary buildings not just in New York, but in the whole of the United States. A couple of miles downtown, most of the new wave of Jewish immigrants pouring into New York harbor ended up just streets away from the boat, in the mega-shtetl of New York's Lower East Side. It's THE iconic landing place in the Jewish-American story for a good reason. Of the 2.5 million Jews arriving in America between the 1880s and the 1920s, more than 60% of them began their new lives here, along with immigrants from all over Europe.

Lower East Side Jews were deeply different from the uptown Jews of Temple Emanu-el. Proletarian, drenched in Old World superstition or radical politics, and, worst of all, they all spoke Yiddish, and in many ways, the New World was just a high-rise version of the old one. Here, too, were the pushcart peddlers and the street-corner revolutionaries. In the shove and jostle of ghetto life, the traditional authority of the rabbi was usurped by the institutions of democratic America-- in particular, the socialist Yiddish newspaper the "Daily Forward," and the Jarmulowsky Bank, described as the two handles of the Torah scroll holding the community up.

By the standards of 1912, these two buildings were skyscrapers, the tallest boys in the block, and are very close to each other, two big animals ideologically locking horns. They were built on the same street in the same year by two immigrants from the Pale. On one side was Abraham Cahan, a revolutionary socialist from Lithuania who turned the "Forward" into the most widely read Jewish newspaper in America. Like a secular zsudic, he fought the battles of the poor in print and initiated them into the novelties of American life, like baseball and voting.

On the other was Sender Jarmulowsky, a New World banker, but always a good Torah Jew. Not only did he encourage Jews to save in order to get themselves out of the Lower East Side, he also provided reliable shipping tickets to those they'd left behind in the nightmare of the pogroms. And just to make sure his building was taller than Cahan's, Jarmulowsky added a 12-meter cupola to his roof. Such an American story.

Look, it's possible to think of these big boys, the socialist and the banker, as locked in a battle for control of the Jewish future in the Lower East Side, but I don't really think of it like that at all. I think both of them essentially embodied the old Jewish principle right out of Hasidic Europe-- tzedakah, benevolence or charity, the loving kindness of your fellow neighbor, planted in that other meaning of tzedakah--justice. Both these tall big boys were the embodiments of Jewish justice. Justice, charity, the community-- words that had come straight from the shtetl, hardly surprising in the world of the socialist newspaper, perhaps more so in the world of New York banking.

But what's even more surprising is how shtetl idealism would cling to the next generation of American Jews, who would take it right into the brassy heart of American popular culture. Growing up in the pressure cooker of the Lower East Side was a group of Jewish boys who would go on to create the music that all America would sing. There was Israel Baline, who became Irving Berlin, super patriot, the composer of "God Bless America." There were the Gershowitz Brothers, shortly to become the Gershwins, who took the cool of the jazz age and injected romantic warmth in it. And then there was someone some of you might not have heard of-- Isidore Hochberg, who became Yip Harburg.

Now, Yip had something entirely different in mind for his great song lyrics. He wasn't interested so much in escaping from this world, the world of the Lower East Side, as taking its passions and its concerns right slap bang into the heart of American show business. Yip Harburg was born on the sixth floor of a walk-up on Allen Street to two Yiddish-speaking immigrants-- Louis and Mary Hochberg, from Minsk in the Pale. She was deeply Orthodox.

He was a little bit less so, taking work in the sweatshops whenever it was on offer. Their grandson-- Yip's son, Ernie Harburg-- still lives on the Lower East Side. They were all desperately poor. They worked 6 days a week, and then the mother used to work on Sundays.

I think she made some kind of hats for people. You had to work all the time. And the parents spoke Yiddish, they never spoke English, so Yip was the intermediary between them and the outside world, no matter what it was-- the landlord, the postman, anything. So, you know, he grew up pretty fast.

And the one thing that startled me a little bit was to know, because it was an orthodox or at least a moderate orthodox family, that the father actually told the mother that he was taking Yip to shul, to the Synagogue, and they wouldn't go there. They went to the Rialto musicals along on Second Avenue there. It was a household immersed in the sweatshop socialism of the Lower East Side, which sent Jewish America into a fever of unrest in 1909 and 1910, when over 80,000 mostly Jewish garment workers went on strike. His father was--read the socialist daily paper to him, the "Daily Forward," I think it was, every night and read him poetry and...

I think the left-wing leaning of the father was handed down to the sons and the daughters. Desperate to get his parents out of the tenements, Yip gave up his dreams of becoming a songwriter and set up a company selling home appliances to New York housewives, which, by 1929, was worth a quarter of million dollars. But then, on the 29th of October, 1929, came the Wall Street Crash, which brought his business and America to its knees. 4 million unemployed, almost overnight.

The industries that had built America- railways, mines, steel plants-- all put into what seemed like an eternal deep freeze.

MAN ON FILM

When do we work? There's nothing wrong with me. I can still work. I'm OK.

By 1932, the Great Depression had become the battleground for a new election-- President Herbert Hoover versus Franklin Roosevelt, the Governor of New York, who put the blue-collar working man at the heart of his campaign.

ROOSEVELT

These unhappy times call for the building of plans that build from the bottom up, and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

SCHAMA

but if it was America's nightmare, it was Yip Harburg's salvation. Yip had written enough songs to land a job on a new satirical show on Broadway called "Americana," which was to center on Roosevelt's "forgotten man," and it was with an unknown Tin Pan Alley composer, another Jew, Jay Gorney, that he wrote the song that would become the anthem of the Great Depression.

RECORDING

Once I built a railroad Made it run Made it race against time Once I built a railroad Now it's done Brother, can you spare a dime? Once I built a tower to the sun Brick and rivet and lime Once I built a tower, now it's done Brother, can you spare a dime? I didn't want a song to depress people. I wanted to write a song to make people think. In other words, it isn't a hand-me-up song of, "Give me a dime, I'm starving, I'm bitter." It wasn't that kind of sentimentality.

Woman singing in Yiddish

SCHAMA

The melody was based on a Yiddish lullaby that had been sung to Jay Gorney by his grandmother back in the Pale, and onto a song of suffering and hope, Yip laid the poetry and passion of Lower East Side politics. The first line of their song runs, "They used to tell me I was building a dream." We all know who "they" are-- the fat cats who are surviving the slump. And what is this song doing? Saying THAT American dream no longer survives?

You bet it was, and it only got tougher still in Yip Harburg's lyrics. The song was a potted history of the American dream fallen into the ashcan, a song about American heroes-- the railway and construction worker, the veterans of World War I reduced to begging. And it took two new Americans, two Jews immersed in ideas of justice, to prick America's conscience. And above all, tragically, it's a dagger pointed at the heart of what had become of buddydom, that deep American ideal of friendship.

"Don't you remember I was your pal, buddy?" For the first time, that word "brother" becomes "buddy," can you spare a dime? Say, don't you remember They called me Al It was Al all the time Say, don't you remember I'm your pal Buddy Can you spare A dime It's not a bitter song. It's a man who was proud of what he did. Now, you would think the audience out for a night out on Broadway would be horrified, be walking out.

They did nothing of the sort. They stood every single night for an ovation, cheered till they were hoarse. Harburg and Gorney had not only written a song that was an American history, they had made American history. The election was just a few weeks away.

Suddenly, every crooner-- Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallee-- wanted to record this confrontational anthem of the Great Depression. The Republicans were terrified that it would elect Roosevelt and attempted to ban it, and maybe it did-- he was swept to power. Looking back on it, Jay Gorney said, "That was the song of the American soul." What America had taught the Jews is that the dream that they could be both Jewish and part of the wider culture in which they lived-- a dream that was impossible in the old world of Russia-- did actually have a chance of working out. And not just working out.

The success of their songs would take Yip, the Gershwins, and Irving Berlin across America into the dream factory of Hollywood. Of all the American industries that the Jews had been involved in, this was the one that made the most powerful imprint on American life. In the 1930s, all the big studios had been created and were run by Jews-- Paramount and 20th Century Fox... Warner Bros., run by Harry and Jack Warner...

and the big daddy of them all, MGM, under the iron fist of Louis B. Mayer. Those Jews had pretty much the same story to tell-- their fathers, who's been the immigrants from the shtetls in Eastern Europe, from the bad part of Germany, had pretty much all been failures in the scrap-metal business, selling stuff off barrows on Hester and Delancey Street, but their boys, their boys were hungry for something bigger and more spectacular, and very often, they took time off, especially time off from Jewish observance, to come to places like this to Vaudeville shows. Between the dog-and-pony acts and the busty sopranos and the flat-footed comedians telling slightly off-color jokes, there they saw the future.

They saw little Picture Palace shorts-- "News of the Day," mini-documentaries, sometimes little tiny bio pics, and they saw how America would change through the movies. And it wasn't just about swashbuckling romances or making huge sums of money, thought they'd certainly do that. They wanted the movies to be a school for working-class America-- such a Jewish idea. They'd exalt it with history, with the noble epics of world literature, creating onscreen an ideal of America.

In 1938, Louis Mayer would give Yip Harburg Hollywood's dream ticket-- the job of lyricist on "The Wizard of Oz," a fantasy about munchkins and witches and a magical utopian land in the sky not too far removed from the Hasidic tales. This time, his composer was Harold Arlen, the son of a synagogue cantor from Buffalo, who had started his career in the vaudeville theaters of the Lower East Side. Together, they would write the song that would come to define the golden age of Hollywood and which would win them the Oscar at the Academy Awards of 1940.

MAN

To Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg for the year's best song, "Over the Rainbow" from "The Wizard of Oz." Somewhere Over the rainbow Way up high There's a land that I heard of...

SCHAMA

It was a long way from the shtetl. Or was it? For who could write this universal song of hope better than a Jewish boy from the Lower East Side? And what is Oz other than America--or any place where dreams of a better life really do come true?

And the dreams that you dare to dream Really do come true It's amazing to think that the song which pretty much everybody believes is the greatest movie song of all time, almost never happened. It wasn't in the book for "The Wizard of Oz." The producers of the movie complained that it wasn't right to come out of the voice of a little girl in Kansas, but Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen believed in it passionately. Why? Well, because it summed up all of the history of Jewish yearning for deliverance from oppression, all that back history of their own families.

But what they did was actually to channel that specifically Jewish American sensibility and marry it up with something authentically American, the intense American faith in optimism, and by doing that, they made "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" a universal treasure. I wish the story could end there, with the collective success of America's Jews and the dream world of Oz, but it didn't. Remember the date of that triumphant night at the Oscars-- 1940. In 1940, Lithuania had been occupied by the Soviet Red Army.

The following year, the Nazis pushed out the Soviets and began their own brutal occupation of the country. For the Jews who had stayed behind, these were years of darkness and horror. In the 1930s, the small town of Plung in northern Lithuania, the land of my mother's family, was like any other shtetl community in what was once the Pale-- half Jewish, half Lithuanian, and where life for the water carriers, merchants, and Jewish grandmas still revolved around the old-world institutions of market and synagogue. But in 1941, the shtetl was engulfed in tragedy.

Aged just 17, Jakovas was conscripted into the Red Army to fight the Nazis, which saved his life, but on his return to Plung after the war, he found a shtetl emptied of Jews... his father, brother, and grandfather all disappeared. How many people were killed here, Jakovas? Jakovas is now the last Jew in Plung.

A carpenter, he has devoted his life to rebuilding its Jewish memory, carving a memorial in the woods and surrounding himself with the shtetl characters of his youth. It wasn't the gas chambers of Auschwitz that killed the Jews of Plung. In the summer of 1941, Plunge's Jews were rounded up by the Nazis, with the active participation of Lithuanians who had been the Jews neighbors for generations. And as the grandchild of a Lithuanian Jewish family, I need to tell you what happened.

What happened was this

those Jews who had been rounded up were hermetically sealed inside a synagogue, locked up with no air, no water, no light for two weeks. People died in their own filth. They were not even allowed to throw the dead bodies of the old people, the children outside. When they were finally allowed out, they were forced to defile and burn the heart and soul of their faith-- the Sefer Torah, the scrolls of the law-- before being led into the forests where they had worked for centuries but where they were now forced to dig their own mass graves before they were shot.

So I suppose I should tell you that the Jewish idea that the ethical spirit, moral force, could vanquish physical force, that the Shechinah, the divine presence, fills the entire world, came to an end in those stinking pits of broken bodies and horror. But it didn't end. It never does end. It moves...elsewhere.

The Jews pick up their old battered suitcases and find somewhere else, where there is a possibility of the decency and the nobility of an ordinary life. I remember something said by the Hasidic Rabbi Shlomo of Karlin, who said that "the worst thing the evil urge can do "is to make us forget that men are all the sons of a king." Even in a place like this, thinking of a time like that, I wouldn't be Jewish if I didn't at least try and remember that.

ANNOUNCER

Next time, Simon Schama explores the paradox of Israel, a safe haven and a land of conflict.

SCHAMA

It's not just what the Nazis did to the Jews. but what everyone else failed to do that made the moral case for Israel. There's not going to be peace if Jews can't live anywhere, especially in their homeland. The Bible is many things, but a blueprint for peace in this land, it is surely not.

ANNOUNCER

"The Story of the Jews" with Simon Schama. Major funding for this program was provid To find out more about Jewish history and watch "The Story of the Jews" online, visit pbs.org. A two-disk DVD set of "The Story of the Jews" is available for $34.99. The companion book is also available for $39.99 plus shipping.

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