What do you know about your family heritage? Aside from your great aunt’s fabulous recipes of food from the old country, Grandpa’s stories about first arriving in America and the holiday family tradition of going to midnight Mass, maybe not a whole lot.

But one woman, a Grinnell College alumna and first-year graduate student in anthropology at the University of Michigan, has spent several years exploring her Jewish heritage in Europe.

She put together a photojournalism exhibit that combines photographs with interviews to tell the story of what she saw and experienced during her visits to Poland. Erica Lehrer’s “The Motives of Memory: Commercializing Jewish Culture in Poland” is on display now at Grinnell in conjunction with the college’s sesquicentennial celebration.

Lehrer and her brother first embarked across the Atlantic around 1989, a time when the entire continent was in tremendous upheaval. She and her brother stayed about a month and visited Auschwitz, which was one of the largest concentration camps during World War II. While her family had ties to Poland, she herself was not very familiar with those roots. “I knew we had some sort of ancestral connection, but I was not sure what,” Lehrer explained.

From what she had heard growing up as a young, Jewish-American girl, what she saw in Poland was a world apart from what she had thought she’d experience. “I just saw lots of remnants of the Jewish past around me, which I hadn’t expected at all,” Lehrer said. “Growing up Jewish in the United States, I thought there wasn’t anything left, just a huge graveyard there.”

After Lehrer waved goodbye to her undergraduate years in Iowa, she decided to take a year off from school to continue her exploration of Europe. She spent five weeks of a summer in Cracow, Poland, right after graduation. And the more she learned, the more complex the whole situation seemed to her. “My thoughts got even more complicated on the matter,” Lehrer explained. “There was just a lot going on there with Jewish stuff, a lot that you could see on the landscape and in people’s heads.”

So Lehrer decided to roll up her sleeves and delve deeper into the heart of the matter and record people’s thoughts during “this whole transitional period between Communism and a free market,” she said. She began whipping out the camera at every opportunity and interviewing residents.

During the course of her stay, Lehrer noticed an interesting, rapidly moving trend: an interest in all things Jewish started to surface. “It had previously appeared to me that most of the Jewish stuff in Poland, though still in people’s heads, wasn’t real visible,” she said. “That was really beginning to change. I started to see all of these Jewish things in stores. Everywhere I looked, there was a new Jewish cafe, art gallery, place that sells Jewish dolls.”

Part of the reason behind this burgeoning interest is the effort on the part of newly independent and newly capitalist countries to “find themselves” and remember their own rich histories. “Perhaps the biggest thing is an identity crisis since Communism because all of these nations that had identities sort of given to them by Communist nations are now saying, ‘Who are we now?'” Lehrer said. “And these nations are looking back and saying, ‘Well, who were we?’ For Poland, it involved Judaism.”

With the renewed interest in authentic Jewish fare and artifacts, the same type of commercialism that plagues African-Americans and Native Americans in our own country started popping up. For instance, the Jew doll in the photo for this story is holding the scroll upside-down. Little mistakes such as these run rampant in these new products.

“There are a lot of quirky things about that,” Lehrer said. “Poles have their own ideas about Jews. In the whole intervening generation, the past 50 years or so, people don’t have a connection with Jews. When stuff gets produced, a lot of quirky things happen.”

And while these errors may be painful for some individuals (Lehrer included), she stresses that the purpose of her exhibit is not to impose blame on those who are involved in this new market. “The point of it isn’t to accuse Poland of anything,” she said. “The point is to look hard at what we take for granted, what kind of value we place on which things . . . Poland and Jews have a particular history which makes it particularly painful for me. That’s not to say that what goes on here isn’t painful for, say, Native Americans.”

The exhibit, “The Motives of Memory: Commercializing of Jewish Culture in Poland,” is on display now through next summer at Grinnell College in Grinnell.