Lisa reflects on the difficulty she encountered trying to trace Max's path in Whitman. She found his legacy was essentially invisible among the memories of the long, storied non-Jewish town history.
NARRATOR: Lisa, backgrounding/commenting. It was very important to me to locate Max in Whitman; to show him as a viable and contributing member of the community.
The Whitman memorial library/museum that collected and proudly displayed genealogies and war trophies of Whitman's finest was not the place to find a record of Max's cleaning and tailoring store. My efforts to trace him in Whitman history were fruitless.Lisa proposed similarities between Whitman and Wysokie.
NARRATOR: Amidst this search, the similarities between Whitman and Wysokie became apparent. There were the few Jews –exact number indiscernible– in the service of Gentiles, New England WASPS replacing the loyal Russian peasants. It is fitting that this austere monument to Whitman's glory would be as silent and old as those whose lives are traced within; the town records there exist only for the continuous registration of its descendants.
Whitman was a Yankee town with a history conspicously traced back to the American Revolution. The few Jewish newcomers did not fit into that narrative. However, the further parallelism wasn't strong. The numerous Jews of Wysokie formed a solid, mutually-supporting class of merchants and service-providers; the sparse Jewish populace of Whitman had nothing like the same role. Wysokie's local peasants, actually Belarusian rather than Russian, were a rural folk culture with with little affinity for town culture or national government.