THE HOUSE OF THE WORLD

Beth Olem Cemetery, and behind it, General Motors. Photograph by Marian Krzyzowski, 2002.

Beth Olem Cemetery lies within the fenced-in grounds of a General Motors manufacturing facility larger and more sprawling than many college campuses. The company allows the public access only twice a year, from ten until two on the Sundays before Passover and Rosh Hashanah. On the Sunday before Rosh Hashanah in 2002, my friend Marian and I drove around and around the deserted factory, searching for a gate that wasn't locked. The landscape around the plant is a dauntingly vast post-industrial wasteland of now-defunct factories that once produced automobile bodies, airplane engines, military helmets, radiators, and cigars. The first commercial property Henry Ford ever owned now houses General Linen and Uniform, one of the few functioning businesses in the area. ("Ford would turn over in his grave if he knew that the guy who owns it and sits at his old desk is Jewish," Marian said as we passed the building.) Millions of square feet of factory space do little but shelter decaying machinery and the trees that have grown inside, pushing through cracked foundations. The windows are boarded up or smashed, the cinderblock walls spray-painted with graffiti (THOU SHALT NOT SCAB). If your car broke down in this neighborhood on a Sunday afternoon, you would need to search for miles before you found a living soul.

On my own, I wouldn't have dared to come. Even on a mellow, late-September day, this section of Detroit is a nightmarish vision of a metropolis fallen prey to some mysterious catastrophe—apocalyptic riots, atomic holocaust, or cureless plague. But my friend Marian—all right, my boyfriend, Marian—grew up in the Polish neighborhood where the GM plant now stands, and a person tends to be less fearful of the decomposing ruins of something he knew while it was living.

The child of Polish parents who spent time in Nazi jails and barely escaped the Communists, Marian was born in Munich, where his mother and father lived in a camp for displaced persons. They made it to Detroit in 1951, when Marian was three. His father had been trained as an architect but didn't speak any English and therefore found it difficult to get a well-paying job. The family, which by then included Marian's younger brother, barely got by, moving from flat to flat in east Detroit. In 1966, Marian left for college in Ann Arbor. The following year, Detroit erupted in riots. Most of the city's white residents—and most middle-class blacks—left for the suburbs. Marian's parents stayed in Detroit longer than most white residents, but in 1972 they moved to a suburb too.

I didn't arrive in Ann Arbor until 1994. I drove into Detroit a handful of times to visit the museums, but the city can boast few neighborhoods in which an out-of-towner can simply park and walk around. Although Detroit is less than an hour's drive from Ann Arbor, most people I met there bragged to me about how long it had been since they had last gone in, if they had ever been there at all.

Then I met Marian. Like many middle-aged Detroiters, he is nostalgic for the neighborhoods that were destroyed by the riots and by the decades of mismanagement and indifference that followed. He laments the loss of industries from Dodge to New Era Potato Chips (which moved out of the city and changed its name to Frito-Lay) that made metropolitan Detroit the hub of American manufacturing, as well as the music, art, and cuisines of the many races and nationalities that mingled on its streets. What makes Marian different is that he is trying to recreate that vanished world. He's not a trained historian—during the day he runs a community and economic development program at the University of Michigan and in the evenings sees clients as a social worker—but in his spare time he records the oral histories of people who lived in the Polish neighborhood centered on Chene Street, to the south of what is now the GM plant, and collects artifacts and memorabilia the residents saved. Bit by bit, he is loading all this information onto a website that will allow viewers to click on an address and find out what businesses operated there in a given year, which families lived above the store, who dropped dead while drinking at the New Elk Bar, what pastries cost at the American Bakery. Click on Chene-Trombly Recreation and you'll see a photo of Babe Ruth and Harry Heilmann, the Tigers' Hall-of-Famer, consorting with local fans and street kids; click on the Chene-Ferry Market and you'll hear what it was like to slaughter chickens for the housewives who shopped there; click on Central Savings at the corner of Chene and Harper and you'll hear the story of "Big Stack" Podulski who shot Cass Kaliszewski, a Detroit policeman, in a bungled attempt to rob the bank; click on Edna's Cozy Corner and you'll hear about the Canadian airman who asked for a date with one of the beautiful women at the bar and got clocked because he didn't know that Edna's was a lesbian hangout. The idea seems ripe for science fiction: someday a person might be able to step into computer-simulated re-creation of his or her childhood and revisit a favorite theater, ice cream shop, or playground, stopping to talk to long-dead shopkeepers, teachers, relatives, and friends.

As someone who grew up in another vanished world—the Jewish Catskills in upstate New York—I couldn't help but be attracted by Marian's dream of re-creating Chene Street. But his Polish Catholic background scared me. Like most New York Jews, I am the grandchild of men and women who were born in a part of Eastern Europe that at various times was ruled by Russians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Austrians, and Poles. Rarely was this association happy. I like to joke to Marian that my grandparents fled Poland to get away from his grandparents. When I told my parents that I was dating a Polish Catholic, visions of pogroms—in the past and yet to come—caused their end of the line to fall silent. Knowing what I know of history, I couldn't dismiss their fears. As interesting as I found Marian's stories of east Detroit, he was rebuilding a world in which I would have felt intensely uncomfortable. He told me that many Polish Jews used to live and work among the Polish Catholics on Chene Street and he was interviewing as many as he could find, but I assumed that relations between the Catholics and Jews on Chene had mimicked the antagonisms between Catholics and Jews in Poland. Whenever he drove to Detroit to take photos of the few buildings left on Chene or interview Catholics who once had lived there, I usually declined to come. He knew I wouldn't be able to resist an invitation to see a Jewish cemetery inside an auto plant. But even as we drove there, I couldn't help but think that Beth Olem would be yet another mute reminder of the Jews' abuse at Polish hands. In Jewish cemeteries around the world, the tombstones offer moving yet immovable testimony to the eviction or extermination of the Jews who used to live there. Maybe, deep inside, my growing affection for Marian scared me so much that I was hoping to find evidence that would justify my ending it.

Because he had grown up in the neighborhood, Marian had long been aware of Beth Olem's existence, but he only recently had learned that GM permitted visitors. An article in the Detroit Free Press had revealed the date and time the gates would be open but not how to get inside. So few landmarks remained from the old days that Marian found it hard to get his bearings. Finally, we found an open gate. The pleasant, rotund security guard told us regretfully that she wasn't allowed to escort us to the cemetery, but we might reach it on our own if we kept driving to the left. We let her write down our license plate, then continued along a road that snaked behind a gargantuan blacktopped lot full of shipping containers, dumpsters, loading docks, and ramps. We passed the looping, paved track on which GM tests the Allanté Cadillacs it produces at this plant. A copse of trees rose incongruously in the distance. Driving closer, we could see that the trees were surrounded by four brick walls, like animals in a zoo. Even then, we might not have known what lay beyond those walls if we hadn't thought to drive to the other side, where an apron of macadam provided space for a dozen cars and a caretaker in a pickup truck kept a watchful eye.

A wrought-iron arch embroidered with BETH OLEM CEMETERY spans the entrance to the graves. Standing inside those walls, a visitor views the headstones against an incongruous backdrop of enormous above-ground pipes, the cars of a rusty freight train, a row of squat white fuel tanks, a red-and-white striped smokestack, a water tower, an upraised hoe. In Hebrew, Beth Olem means House of the World, but the grounds are barely larger than the yard of a suburban home. About eleven hundred bodies lie within the 2.2-acre plot, with only seven hundred stones to mark them. Orthodox Jews must be buried beneath the earth, and so the cemetery is unadorned with mausoleums. Most of the monuments are modest granite slabs engraved with the person's name, his dates of birth and death, a brief inscription in Hebrew, maybe a star of David or those splay-fingered hands that TV viewers of my generation know as the Vulcan form of greeting offered by Mr. Spock on Star Trek—hardly an accident since Leonard Nimoy, the actor who played Spock, stole the gesture from the Jewish men he remembered greeting one another at his father's shul.

As Jewish cemeteries in America go, this one is old. The first bodies were interred here in 1868. The original wooden markers have long since decomposed. Even the granite stones have been effaced by wind and snow and acid rain, and many inscriptions are hard to read. As is true in any graveyard, a visitor can discover unintended irony—the plot for a Jewish family named Shellfish—along with pathos, loss and grief—Ida Kaufmann, daughter of Abraham and Rachel, who was born on December 1, 1880, and died on July 14, 1881; the son of S. H. and Gusta Markas, who passed away in 1904, nine months and six days after his bar mitzvah; Jacob D. Wolf, who was born on Christmas Day, 1887, and "Drowned at the Flats, Aug. 3, 1905"; and Regina Brasch, "beloved wife and mother," who died in 1907 at 36 ("In love she lived/In Peace she died/Her life was craved/But G-d denied").

Gravestones in Beth Olem Cemetery. Photograph by Mariam Krzyzowski, 2002.

Regina Brasch's age indicates that she, like many women at Beth Olem, probably died while giving birth. That first time Marian and I visited the cemetery, we met an elderly mourner who told us that she had been four years old in 1911, when her mother, Sarah Saperstein, died from this very cause. Dorothy Glass had last stood by her mother's grave in 1947, the year before the cemetery closed. Dressed in black, bent at a right angle to the ground, she was escorted across the root-pocked terrain by her granddaughter, Sheila, who lives in a predominantly black and Jewish suburb called Southfield, to the north. Following Jewish custom, Sheila and her grandmother set pebbles on Sarah Saperstein's monument to indicate they had been there. Then Sheila took her grandmother's arm and guided her in tiny, hobbled steps back to their waiting car.

There were few mourners besides the Sapersteins, but a few amateur historians wandered among the graves. When I asked how Beth Olem had come to be imprisoned within an auto plant, one of the men handed me an article from Michigan Jewish History written by Milton Marwil, an elderly member of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Michigan. According to Marwil, Beth Olem was founded in 1862, when two members of the Orthodox Detroit congregation, Shaarey Zedek, got in a buggy and drove three miles beyond the outskirts of Detroit to buy land from some German farmers. The plot was so far outside the city that the congregation figured Beth Olem would remain a pastoral site for years to come. But two major railroads soon laid their tracks beyond the cemetery's walls, and this easy access to transportation brought with it a clump of factories. In 1910, Dodge Brothers built one of the largest auto plants in the world a few hundred yards beyond Beth Olem's gates. Other auto companies grew up around Dodge Main. The Jews of Shaarey Zedek found more picturesque sites to lay their dead. The last burial at Beth Olem took place in 1948. The cemetery sat untended. The earliest tombstones crumbled. Vandals and animals took their toll.

In 1966, Chrysler, which had come to own Dodge Main, bought two adjacent blocks to build a parking lot for its plant. Smith Street, which provided access to Beth Olem, was absorbed by the new construction. To permit visitors entrance to the cemetery, Chrysler built a ninety-foot driveway from the next block, Clay Avenue. The company also paid Shaarey Zedek $10,000 for property rights to the streets around Beth Olem, money the congregation spent on repairing the rundown grounds. At that point, Chrysler razed the surrounding properties, leaving Beth Olem, as Marwil puts it, "a green island in a vast sea of a concrete parking lot."

So yes, Beth Olem did resonate with the presence of Jews who had lived and died in places you might not expect to find them. But that didn't seem the whole story. It was one thing for a cemetery to end up inside a parking lot, but how did it come to lie inside an auto plant?

Marwil's article struck me as strangely coy about what happened to Beth Olem next. "Around 1980, General Motors acquired a parcel of land encompassing much more than the old Chrysler possession, for a Cadillac Motor assembly plant. Even Clay Avenue was swallowed up, leaving the cemetery imprisoned within the vast holdings of the auto company." I showed Marian the article.

He shook his head. "All this was part of Poletown. GM wanted to build the plant. They got the city to use eminent domain and kick everyone out. They knocked down all the houses. When I was a kid, my family lived on Lyman Place. The house was somewhere over there—" He pointed to a depression of marshy land not far from the gate where the guard had let us in. "This is all that's left. The only part of Poletown that GM couldn't destroy was the Beth Olem Cemetery."

Marian had been telling me about Poletown's destruction since the day I'd met him, but I hadn't understood. Maybe I hadn't listened. I suppose I hadn't cared. This section of Detroit wasn't destroyed by riots. It was knocked down by GM. I asked Marian to drive me around the neighborhood and repeat what he'd said before. And this time, I listened.

The parcel of land General Motors "acquired" was still, in the early '80s, a vibrant working-class neighborhood that covered 465 acres of land and was home to 3500 residents. GM's desire to build its Cadillac assembly plant where the antiquated Dodge Main factory stood was understandable—after all, it owned the property, and the railroads were conveniently placed to bring in supplies and move out cars. Unfortunately, to make way for this new facility, GM decided that it needed to condemn and tear down 1400 houses, as well as dozens of family businesses, a hospital, schools, and churches, including the regal brick Immaculate Conception, which served as the house of worship for most of the Polish immigrants who lived around the plant.

In its prime, Poletown offered its residents tens of thousands of jobs, not only at Dodge Main but also at auto manufacturers and suppliers such as Plymouth Huber, Chevrolet Gear and Axle, Packard Motor, Studebaker, Hudson, Hupp, Fisher Body, Murray Body, Briggs, Bulldog Electric, McCord Radiator, and Bohn Aluminum (Marian recited the companies' names with the reverence due a prayer). Grocery stores and bars grew up around the plants. Most of Poletown's residents lived in cheap two-story frame houses kept tidy by babushkas who washed the windows and swept the steps. ("Every day they'd be out there, sweeping and dusting and trimming," Marian remembered. "These were poor people. They didn't have much. But they kept the neighborhood spotless.")

If the area around Dodge Main could be considered Poletown's head, the neighborhood farther south, on either side of Chene, could be considered Poletown's spine. At various times, Marian and his family lived in both sections. As we drove around the pot-holed streets, he pointed out the weedy lots where he had lived while he attended first grade at Saint Hyacinth Church—he didn't speak a word of English and was one of sixty-five students in a class taught by beautiful Sister Mary Andrew, a kind young Felician nun who had never taught before—or the Butzel branch library, designed by Albert Kahn, where Marian once read novels by Zane Grey and dreamed of going west and living as a cowboy—or the soda fountain where he bought comic books and pop. The longer we drove, the more I came to see that even though relations between Catholics and Jews in Poland had been strained by mutual animosity off and on for centuries, when members of both groups emigrated to Detroit they chose to settle side by side on Chene, with a considerable number of working-class blacks living among them in a stable if uneasy peace.

The first blow to Poletown came in the 1950s with the building of the Edsel Ford Expressway, which severed the neighborhood at the neck. The businesses up and down Chene, deprived of their customers farther north, shriveled and died. Many of the Jewish shop owners moved to suburbs north and west. But even in the late 1960s, when Detroit was torn by racial strife and its white inhabitants fled, Poletown clung to life, populated by working-class Polish Catholics, African Americans, and a smattering of stubborn Jews.

Then, against its inhabitants' fervent wishes, the city allowed GM to tear it down. Didn't just allow. Got down on its knees and begged. Detroit was hemorrhaging jobs. Coleman Young, the city's first black mayor, might have been expected to understand the agonies of a neighborhood threatened with being razed—his father's tailor shop had been destroyed when the state seized the district known as Black Bottom to make way for Interstate 75. But Young was rabid about keeping factories in Detroit. What good was it to preserve a neighborhood if there were no businesses to employ the people who lived there? If the city could retain GM, maybe other companies would stay or move back. So Detroit used its right of eminent domain to acquire Poletown, then gave the land to GM, along with millions of dollars' worth of tax concessions.

The residents couldn't believe that the government would force them to leave their homes, let alone tear down their church.* Many of the men had served in World War II, Korea, or Vietnam. Maybe in fascist countries a person could be evicted from his house, but that couldn't happen in Detroit. And how could the city use the taxes paid by Poletown to subsidize its own destruction? The mayor portrayed anyone who opposed the plant as racist for preferring to save a white Polish neighborhood rather than provide jobs for the city's blacks, but many black families lived and worked in Poletown, and most of these families, especially their older members, were as dismayed by the city's decision to seize their homes as their Polish neighbors.

Whatever their race, the majority of Poletown's residents didn't oppose the plant. Like everyone else, they needed jobs. They simply didn't believe that GM needed to destroy their neighborhood to find enough land to build its plant. Architects submitted plans that would have required far less land by building vertical parking structures instead of sprawling lots for employees' cars. At the very least, the company could have spared the Immaculate Conception Church. But GM refused to consider any such suggestions. And by threatening to build the plant elsewhere, the company could have its way.

A city acquiring a plot of land for a public project like a highway is doing nothing unusual. A city acquiring an entire neighborhood, razing the buildings, and donating the land to a profit-making company is putting the principle of eminent domain to such questionable use that Poletown's seizure is studied in many law schools; Marian's elder son, Marek, called one day to say that his professor at Columbia Law had just discussed the legality of the destruction of his father's hometown.

To justify the evictions, the city and GM painted the neighborhood as a slum. But Marian remembers it as no shabbier than Hamtramck, which borders Poletown to the north. (The city of Hamtramck, an integrated island in the middle of nearly all-black Detroit, is now considered hip; my father recently sent me a clipping from a national magazine that recommends Hamtramck as a destination for tourists who favor cutting-edge music, funky coffee shops, and kitschy Polish restaurants serving pierogies and pickle soup.)

No one would help Poletown fight GM. Rather than try to save the Immaculate Conception Church, the archdiocese used the opportunity to sell GM the building—which the parishioners had paid to build—as part of its program to close as many ethnically identified inner-city churches as it could. Only Ralph Nader came to Poletown's aid, and Nader, who already had stuck it to GM by writing Unsafe at Any Speed, was seen by most Detroiters as an outside agitator who hated the auto industry simply for producing cars. Many of Poletown's residents refused to accept the city's modest offers to buy their homes. But their initial disbelief at the government's collusion with GM and the Catholic Church kept them from mounting a strong opposition until it was too late. Entire blocks began to burn and the police did little to stop the arsonists. Demolition workers hauled away the statues from Immaculate Conception, then, as horrified parishioners watched, knocked the church down. Several elderly residents died of the stress, as did Father Joseph Karasiewicz, pastor of Immaculate Conception and one of the only priests who had tried to save it. The city bulldozed the remaining houses. GM put up its plant.

But few of the thousands of jobs that GM had promised ever came to be. The company used the chance to experiment with robotics. Most of the men and women who work at the factory now drive in from the suburbs. Instead of buying sandwiches from the hundreds of vendors GM predicted would gain business from the plant, the majority of GM's workers stay inside the fence and eat in the cafeteria. Chene Street is so nearly devoid of life that Eminem used its blasted remains in his movie 8 Mile to symbolize the devastation amid which his characters live. (Marian and I went to the movie to catch sight of the sign for Chene Street that is visible through the window of the bus that Eminem rides to work. "Look!" Marian whispered as the bus passed an abandoned concrete hulk. "That used to be the Wel Com Inn bar!") Although the merchants up and down Chene once sold more merchandise per frontage foot than any commercial district except Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, the street now looks bucolic; the few remaining residents could graze sheep in the grassy lots.

In an effort to erase the story of how it acquired the land on which it produces Cadillacs, GM insists that its facility be referred to as the "Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Plant." Older Detroiters like Marian call it Poletown anyway (ironically, no one called it Poletown before GM threatened to tear it down; the name started as a catch phrase by reporters and a verbal rebellion by people who used to live there). But as those older Detroiters die, the only reminder of Poletown's existence will be the graves at Beth Olem.

So Beth Olem isn't the testament to anti-Semitism I expected it to be. Rather, it's a monument to the complexities of religion, class, race, and ethnicity in America. Perhaps it was an accident that the Jews of Shaarey Zedek bought property in a field that came to be settled by Polish Catholics. But Jewish and Catholic Poles have ended up in proximity more often than can be explained by mere coincidence, just as it's no coincidence that Marian and I ended up together amid the graves of Beth Olem, a few hundred yards from the industrial slough where his family once lived. As my colleagues at the university like to say, there is an erotics of the Other, a thrill in making love across the rift of the forbidden, although there is also, I think, an urge to heal that rift. If I hadn't fallen in love with a Polish man, I might feel little compassion for the inhabitants of Poletown. Given the destruction of most synagogues in Poland during World War II, not to mention the complicity of many Poles in the annihilation of the Jews who worshipped at those synagogues, I might be less than sympathetic about the demolition of a Polish Catholic church. Yet I have come to understand that Polish Catholics and Jews share a common culture as well as a common past.

Beth Olem is a concrete manifestation of such ironies and inversions. Unlike most Jewish cemeteries in Eastern Europe, Beth Olem was not destroyed. The Jews here died at peace, their remains honored and taken care of. The Jews who lived in Poletown, unlike the Jews who lived in Poland during the pogroms of the nineteenth century and the atrocities of World War II, left this part of Detroit more or less willingly. It was their Polish Catholic neighbors who were forcibly uprooted. I spent my first eighteen years living in a comfortable fifties-style ranch house in a largely Jewish enclave of upstate New York. To my knowledge, I didn't lose a single relative in World War II. Yet Marian's parents spent time in a Nazi jail. Not long ago, when he made a pilgrimage to Auschwitz, he saw a memo the Nazis printed with a list of one day's dead. By a macabre coincidence, there, on the page tacked to the museum wall, was his grandfather's sister, Maria Krzyzowski, whose name differs from Marian's name by only one letter.

After that first visit to Beth Olem, I wondered why GM, which was powerful enough to buy and raze the houses of thousands of living residents, wasn't willing or able to move a few hundred graves. Maybe Beth Olem's survival was a sign of our reverence for the dead as reminders for the living. Rather than bury those we love in isolated plots, we consecrate a common ground and commemorate our dead together. We have been here, the markers say, the way Orthodox Jews leave pebbles to mark their visits to a grave. The inscriptions on those markers testify to a more tangible reality than the version of our lives that governments and corporations want us to believe.

At some basic level, that theory might be true. The dead are there; the living aren't. But the deeper I dug into the story of Beth Olem, the more I came to see that GM would have moved those bodies if it could have. True, Jewish law considers it a desecration to exhume a body and therefore forbids it. But GM wasn't obliged to follow Jewish law. Most of the articles written about Beth Olem in recent years assert that GM was stopped from moving the graves by a Michigan law that prohibits moving a body without the descendants' consent. But that isn't strictly so. Moving a dead person is hard but not impossible. You need to obtain a permit from the local health department. If possible, you need permission from the dead person's next of kin. A funeral director must supervise the exhumation. And whoever moves the grave must pay all the costs. Moving Beth Olem would have been a headache for GM. But a company that had gone to all the trouble and expense of acquiring and destroying an enormous section of Detroit probably wouldn't have let a bunch of dead people stop the project.

For a long time, I couldn't find anyone who knew what had prevented GM from moving Beth Olem. Finally, a member of Shaarey Zedek put me in touch with Andrew Phythian, who took part in the negotiations between the Jewish community and GM in the early eighties and now supervises Beth Olem for Shaarey Zedek. According to Phythian, GM had no "hard plans" to move Beth Olem, but the company "speculated on the possibility." An article in the Detroit News of September 22, 1984, backs up Phythian's claim. GM wanted to move the graves, but "horrified Jewish leaders told the company, as well as Detroit and Hamtramck officials and the governor's office, that Jewish law considered the removal of the bodies from their graves a form of desecration. The leaders said the cemetery probably also contained prayer shawls, Bibles, scrolls and paraphernalia which under Jewish law must be buried, not burned or otherwise destroyed." Although the article maintains that the protests of these leaders prevented GM from carrying out its plans, Phythian told me that in actual fact Shaarey Zedek held a card that GM couldn't trump even with eminent domain. The congregation retained the rights to a perpetual easement the width of a two-horse carriage leading from the cemetery to Joseph Campau Street in Hamtramck to the east. GM couldn't have built its plant without that strip of land. After three years of negotiations, the Jewish community agreed to give up the corridor in return for GM's promise not to disturb the graves and allow the public access. GM preserved Beth Olem not out of generosity or religious spirit or reverence for the dead, but because it had no choice.

Monument in the Beth Olem Cemetery. Photograph by Mariam Krzyzowski, 2002.

 
On the Sunday before Rosh Hashanah in 2003, when Marian and I visited Beth Olem a second time, the same jovial round security guard let us in the gate and the same caretaker lounged in his pickup outside the cemetery entrance. Both the caretaker and guard were black, which caused me to marvel at the way white people shy away from predominantly African-American cities in fear, then turn around and hire black people to protect their property and their children, their elderly relatives, and their dead. A man from the Jewish genealogical society asked us to sign the guest book on a pedestal beside the arch. He showed us a bucket full of golf balls the caretaker had collected from the cemetery grounds. Apparently, the employees at the plant spend their lunch breaks driving golf balls toward the giant cup formed by Beth Olem's walls.

As had been true the previous year, the only mourner was an elderly woman who had come to pay her respects at her mother's grave. This woman and her two middle-aged companions sat on a marble bench beside the stone for Hattie Wedes, who died on January 21, 1919, at the age of 29. Hattie's daughter, Anna, now in her nineties, laid an orange rose on her mother's stone and sat smiling at the antics of a little boy whose exact relation she couldn't quite explain except that "he's the love of my life."

I knelt beside the bench to speak to Anna and her companions, one of whom was deaf. Although this was the first time Anna had been back to Beth Olem since her mother's funeral, she remembered her mother's death "as if it happened yesterday." Soldiers returning from the killing fields of Europe in World War I brought with them the Spanish flu. The disease struck Anna's mother. Her family brought down her bed from the second floor and put it in the parlor. Everyone wore canvas masks. The doctor ordered the family to stand away and give Anna's mother air. "'Open the window!' the doctor shouted. Can you imagine?" Anna shook her frail head. "It was January, my mother had the flu, and he said to open the windows and let in the cold!"

The little boy ran up and Anna smiled at him and kissed him. "I'll never forget," she said. "I could see my mother's eyes over the top of her canvas mask. I was seven at the time. I was standing in the door. My mother looked at her sister—my aunt. Then she looked at me. She was worried who would take care of me when she died. My aunt nodded, as if to say that she would take me in, and then my mother allowed herself to die."

One of Anna's companions told me that when GM decided to build the factory, Hattie Wedes's descendants considered moving her remains to another cemetery. But in the end they decided she was at peace at Beth Olem, and they left her where she was.

The three women stood to go. As Anna placed her feet beside the bench, I noticed a golf ball the caretaker must have missed and grabbed it before she could step on it and trip.

After we left Beth Olem, Marian and I drove to Hamtramck, where we stopped for lunch at one of the Polish restaurants mentioned in the clipping my father had sent. With its Polish eagle above the door and a painting of the Pope hanging in the dining room, the restaurant was hardly welcoming to Jews; my parents would have starved rather than step inside. If I hadn't been with Marian, I wouldn't have found the nerve to eat there either.

But the rye bread was the hard-to-find variety I missed from my childhood. Everything on the menu, from the borscht to the stuffed cabbage, was food I had grown up eating, under slightly different names. As we waited for our meal, we passed the time, as we often do, comparing Polish and Yiddish words and guessing whether people we know or various celebrities might be "one of yours" or "one of ours." For dessert, we both ordered the seven-layer chocolate cake we loved eating when we were kids.

On our drive back to Ann Arbor, Marian took his usual nostalgic detour south down Chene, where little remains except a TV repair shop, a shooting range, several bars, and a restaurant called the Polish Yacht Club, although neither yachts nor water can be found on this burned-out block. One by one we passed the magnificent Catholic churches—Saint Stanislaus, Saint Hyacinth, Sweetest Heart of Mary, and Saint Albertus—that (along with Immaculate Conception) once formed the heart of Polish east Detroit. In front of Saint Albertus, which is open only once a month, stands a forlorn statue of Jesus.

"One of your guys," I joked to Marian.

"No," he reminded me, "one of yours."

Postscript: On July 30, 2004, the Michigan Supreme Court responded to a plea from a Wayne County landowner whose neighborhood was threatened with being destroyed to make way for a high-tech industrial park by unanimously overturning the 1981 decision that allowed Detroit to bulldoze Poletown and give the land to GM. The attorney for the landowner, Ed Hathcock, argued that large-scale development projects such as the Poletown plant or the industrial park planned for Wayne County rarely if ever deliver the jobs and added tax-revenue that would justify the use of eminent domain to seize private land for the public good. Given the verdict in Hathcock v. Wayne County, the 1981 Poletown decision can no longer be cited as precedent in similar disputes around the country, and the new ruling can be retroactively applied to cases in which a plaintiff still is challenging the city's right to tear down Poletown.