SHTETL: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews.<i> By Eva Hoffman</i> . <i> Houghton Mifflin: 269 pp., $25</i>

“Shtetl” was conceived as a companion volume to a documentary of the same title made by Marian Marzynski that aired on the PBS news show “Frontline” in April 1996. It has become much more than that three-hour film; “Shtetl” is a thoroughly researched and powerfully written guidebook to one of the most contested areas of recent European past.

Marzynski, a Polish filmmaker living in Chicago, visited Bransk, one of the former shtetls, or Jewish settlements, in eastern Poland to probe the memories of its now exclusively Polish population about their former Jewish neighbors whose fate was settled during the Holocaust. He also interviewed Jews from Bransk now living in America or Israel. At the end of his journey, he came up with a mixed and more than a bit disturbing story.

In Bransk, Marzynski met people like Zbyszek Romaniuk, a young Pole who lovingly unearthed, often literally, the Jewish past of his native town. Marzynski talked to older people, still scarred by the horrors they witnessed during the war and still trying to cope with their feelings of helplessness in the face of the ultimate evil. Yet he also found Poles who openly declared their indifference to the Jewish fate or who rejoiced at having their town, and Poland in general, finally free of the Jewish presence. There were also chilling clues about something much worse: acts of complicity with the Nazi murderers, crimes committed against Jewish neighbors out of greed or hatred and gratuitous acts of cruelty.

In his film, Marzynski highlights the heroism of many Poles, in Bransk and elsewhere, who risked their lives to save Jews, and he pays tribute to a Polish family that helped him, a Jewish child, survive the war. And yet his camera focuses mainly on those who seem to confirm the notion of Polish anti-Semitism. Marzynski’s film created a furor in the Polish community in the United States and in Poland. It was decried as tendentious, even slanderous. Letters of protest were issued by Polish organizations and signed by prominent Polish personalities. Even the film’s hero, Romaniuk, felt obliged to distance himself from the allegedly skewed message. It was a sad reenactment of the drama that erupts whenever Polish-Jewish relations, especially during World War II, are mentioned in less than glowing terms. (Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah,” the controversy about the presence of Carmelite nuns at Auschwitz, and the fiftieth anniversary of anti-Jewish riots in the Polish town of Kielce are other recent examples.)

Eva Hoffman, an American Polish writer from a Jewish family who frequently writes on Eastern European subjects, visited the same sites and talked to many of the same people depicted in Marzynski’s film, and she is able to probe much deeper than the documentary could. By placing the story of Bransk, its Poles and Jews in the context of their centuries-long coexistence, Hoffman shows why the Poles and Jews differ so much in looking at their own history and why their mutual relations were much more complex than both sides admit. “My aim,” Hoffman writes, “is not to absolve any more than it is to condemn, but it is, at the very least, to complicate and historicize the picture.”

For many centuries, the Polish lands, more specifically their eastern borderlands, were the closest thing to a European homeland for the Jewish Diaspora. Jews started to arrive there in larger numbers in the late Middle Ages, escaping from religious persecution and economic uncertainty in western and southern Europe. In the vast, multiethnic, loosely woven domains of the Polish crown, they found relative tolerance, economic opportunity and a chance to nurture a rich and lasting cultural identity.

That does not mean that Jewish life in Poland was an idyll. Jews had to cope with restrictions, discriminatory laws and occasional hostilities from the Poles or other ethnic groups of the Polish kingdom. Yet for a variety of reasons, they developed into a unique social phenomenon: a nation within a nation with considerable political, economic, religious and cultural autonomy. Their very numbers provided them with a modicum of protection. At times they made up more than 10% of the country’s population and were a clear majority in many eastern shtetls.

Hoffman suggests that the Polish-Jewish cohabitation was a prototype of contemporary multiculturalism. Poles and Jews lived for centuries in a symbiotic relation. They met on a daily basis, conducted multiple transactions and, in some cases, they grew remarkably similar to one another. They shared the same rhythms of the peasant life: They ate the same food, borrowed each other’s folk tunes and pined for the same brooks and meadows. Most Poles, irrespective of their personal disposition, must have seen Jews as a part of the Polish landscape, as natural and immemorial as stork nests and weeping willows.

And yet on a deeper human level, each group remained almost impenetrable to the other. One danger of this “multiculturalism” was the very “separatedness” that Polish Jews were allowed, and later expected, to maintain. Pole and Jewish “otherness” became their defining factor. Of course, as a dominant culture, Poles would often callously disregard the will of minorities and draw imaginary boundaries between them and others. And yet, as Hoffman demonstrates, for a long time the isolation of Jews from Polish society was as much the result of their own decision to preserve their identity as it was of Polish discrimination. There were practically no social contacts between the communities, and there was a shocking, at least by modern standards, ignorance of each other’s culture and religious beliefs, which opened the way to myth, superstition and fantasy. This unusual mixture of familiarity and estrangement, says Hoffman, “was so persistent as to have become a kind of unified truth--the simultaneous existence of benign, even warm acceptance, and a gap that could at any time widen into a gulf.”

The gap started to widen rapidly at the end of the 18th century, when Poland lost its independence and was carved up by its three powerful neighbors, Russia, Prussia and Austria. Polish nationalism germinated in captivity and basically preserved on the spiritual and mythological level something that no longer existed. Polish nationalism was never based on the concepts of race or territory but rather on cultural tradition, language and, increasingly, Catholic faith.

For a while, it seemed that even this new form of Polish national consciousness would keep its pluralistic, multiethnic character. The 19th century poet Adam Mickiewicz, the foremost legislator of the Polish imagination, treated Jews with mystical reverence and believed they would play a prominent role in Poland’s resurrection. However, a much narrower, exclusive concept of nationhood started to prevail, and Jews, preoccupied with their own survival among political upheavals and shifting borders, were cast as foreigners who threatened the essence of the Polish identity. “Jews were still the main Other, the Polish alter ego,” writes Hoffman, “but this otherness was no longer primarily religious or caste-based, or even cultural. Instead, it had become practical and ideological.” Thus Polish anti-Semitism was born.

How much does all that bear on what happened in Poland during the Nazi occupation? Hoffman rejects the argument that “ordinary Poles were naturally inclined, by virtue of their congenital anti-Semitism, to participate in the genocide.” The destruction of Jews was engineered by the Nazis for their own devious purposes and not to please Poles. Under the German occupation, Poland was a suppressed, exploited slave nation and, as was not the case in some states that allied themselves with Hitler’s Reich, there were no large-scale attempts made to cooperate with the final solution.

Yet Polish behavior during and immediately after the Holocaust poses more than one question. This also happens to be the time when Polish and Jewish memories diverge most. Poles remember themselves as an undaunted, noble nation bravely resisting the Nazi occupation. There is no doubt they suffered terrible losses. This suffering and loss had to be compensated by a sense of spiritual victory, a syndrome of morally pure, heroic victimhood.

Jews, on the other hand, even those who survived the war thanks to Polish assistance, tend to see the Poles as indifferent and callous, eager to profit from the Jewish misfortunes and, most of all, totally unpredictable. In many Jewish accounts, the Poles during the war were enigmas, people who could just as easily have been angels of salvation as messengers of death.

Historical records suggest that this new sense of apprehension and uncertainty was not entirely groundless. Hoffman reports that even among the small and highly homogeneous Polish population of Bransk, individual responses to Jewish pleas for help were not only widely diverse but often hard to explain by such factors as culture, religious values, even a person’s prewar sentiments toward Jews.

She attributes this state of moral confusion to the extreme perversity of the Nazis, who encouraged cruelty and penalized common human decency. Helping Jews during the war was punishable by death, and sometimes whole families, even villages, were destroyed in retaliation. Yet Hoffman realizes that even the most extreme circumstances cannot fully explain that degree of amorality. In other equally dangerous endeavors, for example, involvement with the Polish underground, ordinary Poles showed more consistent human solidarity and resolve. Poles’ relative indifference to the Jews’ fate was rather a case of tribal thinking, of “us” versus “not us.”

In one of the saddest statements of the book, Hoffman writes: “During the war, it was the sense of separatedness that--whatever the nuances of personal attitude--had to be overcome by any Pole who made a conscious decision to help. Before the war, most Poles and Jews did not include each other within the sphere of mutual and natural obligations. A Pole who decided to risk his or her house, life and family for a Jewish person was stretching his compassion beyond the bounds of absolute responsibility. And there are Jewish survivors honest enough to say that if the roles had been reversed, they cannot vouch for how they would have acted toward people whom they still call ‘the goyim.’ ”

The last part of Hoffman’s statement is impossible to prove and speculative. Jews were a minority, very much at the mercy of the Polish majority, and any reversal of those roles moves us into some purely hypothetical territory. Yet it is undoubtedly true that while Jews perished, some Poles tried to help, some others tried to harm and the rest thought it was all very sad but not necessarily their business.

Of course, it is not the moral extremes that cause us problems today. The heroes receive our deserved respect, and criminals meet with unanimous condemnation. It is rather the large, mostly anonymous and still enigmatic middle, with its endless shades of indifference, denial, contempt, helplessness and moral confusion, that is the object of the ongoing Polish-Jewish debate. The enigma that the Poles presented to Jewish eyes (and also, as suggested in more penetrating Polish accounts, to their own) continues to bother, especially because of political restrictions, it was largely unexplored in the Polish postwar culture. Moral ambiguity is particularly hard to accept when confronted with the brutally unequivocal reality of the Holocaust. Hence the repeated and emotionally charged attempts on both sides to reach some kind of final clarification, a collective balance sheet of good and evil.

Hoffman is skeptical about the feasibility of that effort. She writes: “All acts of memory are to some extent imaginative; we can no longer reconstruct ‘the full truth’ of the Shoah or of a long and various past. But one thing is sure: the truth and the past were far more striated, textured, and many sided then either nostalgia or bitterness would admit.” What especially concerns the author is the possibility of reducing the debate to a set of sweeping generalizations and automatic moral reflexes. That would be a most uncomfortable outcome, especially now, when the debate is increasingly among those who have only a secondhand knowledge of the actual events. Thus she warns her Jewish readers that the horrors of the Holocaust, combined with the memory of the prewar Polish trespasses, can easily upset the sense of proportion and overshadow other parts of the wartime experience. As for the Poles, they should try to abandon their instinctive defensiveness and boldly face the less praiseworthy facts of their past. The issue of Polish anti-Semitism is not an invention of some anti-Polish cabal. It really existed and, in a nasty, residual form, it exists today, even though there are practically no Jews left in Poland.

In the Jewish memory, Poland was, and is, a homeland turned into a slaughterhouse, a place so painful that everything in its orbit appears with relentless, unbearable intensity--a fact too seldom realized by today’s Poles. Such a place demands a special kind of remembrance. “At this point the task is not only to remember,” writes Hoffman, “but to remember strenuously--to explore, decode, and deepen the terrain of memory.”

This, as her own book clearly demonstrates, does not undermine our right to condemn the vicious and honor the righteous. It just makes the process more demanding--and in the end more worthwhile--both in the moral and intellectual sense.