Magdalena Ruta

“THE PUREBRED ACES,” OR SAMUEL JAKUB IMBER’S LOOK AT POLISH-JEWISH RELATIONS

Samuel Jakub (Shmuel Yankev) Imber (1889–1942), a Yiddish and Polish poet and critic, can be regarded as the spiritual father of modern Yiddish poetry in Galicia. He wrote also for Polish- ewish press, trying to improve the image of Jews in the eyes of their Polish fellow citizens. This matter was a major concern already in his long poem Esterke (1911), one of the high points of Imber’s oeuvre in which he called for a harmonious coexistence of Jews and Poles. In the 1930s, when antisemitism was on the rise in Poland, Imber published two collections of articles in Polish: Asy czystej rasy [The Purebred Aces; 1934] and Kąkol na roli [The Weed in the Fields; 1938], in which he sought to counteract the ways in which Jews had been portrayed by the Polish nationalist press. The article discusses the significance of the poem Esterke and of selected texts from both collections of articles.  

After World War II, the Communist regime took over power directly after the liberation of Poland in 1945. Jewish survivors, having stayed in the country for a certain period of time, tried to revive their multilingual cultural life. Literary works of writers in that community are a fascinating testimony of their struggles: how to be loyal to the Socialist state (condition sine qua non to take part in the official cultural life) on the one hand, and on the other how to express their feelings, thoughts and convictions which they could not and did not want to ignore. Their struggles can be observed on the sample of the three most important motifs of postwar Polish-Yiddish literature: the Holocaust, Communism itself, and Polish-Jewish relations. The article discusses selected literary works of the most prominent Polish-Yiddish writers, whose main character or lyric subject is the ‘new Jewish man’ shaped according to the Communist principles. The author attempts to answer the question of what the most important features of a personality formed by Communist doctrine are, and also to learn about the circumstances of the communist world in which that literary hero lives. Close reading of the programmatic literary pieces of some Communist writers also enables observing whether and how Polish Jewish Communists managed to find a compromise between the mutually exclusive Communist internationalism and their attachment to Yiddish-language culture, and how they reacted when information of Stalinist crimes came to light and their party comrades turned the blade of antisemitism against them. The ambitious project to build a new model of secular progressive Yiddish culture (the so-called ‘nusekh Poyln’), failed to bring the expected results. In spite of concerted attempts to meet the unrealistic demands of Socialist Realism, it soon transpired that Polish-Yiddish literature under Communism was unable to deal with the lack of space afforded by Communist ideology for mourning its murdered nation or with the spasms of unease that were the reaction to the periodic antisemitism in the non-Jewish environment.

Double Portraits, 1939–1956: Memoirs of Polish Jewish Women from Soviet Russia

During the first months following Germany’s attack on Poland, some members of the Jewish community managed to sneak away to the eastern frontiers of the country which had been invaded and annexed by the Red Army in the second half of September 1939. The tragic experiences of these refugees, heretofore somehow neglected by Holocaust scholars, have recently become the subject of profound academic reflection. One of the sources of knowledge about the fate of Jewish refugees from Poland are their memoirs. In this article the author reflects on three autobiographical texts written by Polish Jewish women, female refugees who survived the Holocaust thanks to their stay in Soviet Russia, namely Ola Watowa, Ruth Turkow Kaminska, and Sheyne-Miriam Broderzon. Each of them experienced not only the atrocities of war, but also, most of all, the cruelty of the Communist regime. All three of them suffered persecution by the oppressive Soviet authorities in different ways and at different times. While Ola Watowa experienced (in person, as well as through the fate of her family and friends) the bitter taste of persecution and deportation during WWII, Sheyne-Miriam Broderzon lived a relatively peaceful life in that period (1939–1945), and Ruth Turkow Kaminska even enjoyed the luxurious lifestyle reserved for the privileged members of the establishment, and it was not until the years immediately after the war that the latter two women would face the true image of Communism as its victims. The Wats managed to leave the USSR shortly after the war, whereas for the Broderzons and the Turkows the war would not end until the death of Stalin and their subsequent return to Poland in 1956. According to Mary G. Mason, the immanent feature of women’s autobiographical writings is the self-discovery of one’s own identity through the simultaneous identification of some ‘other.’ It is thanks to the rootedness of one’s own identity through the connection with a certain chosen ‘other’ that women authors can openly write about themselves. The aim of the article is to attempt to determine to what extent this statement remains true for the memoirs of the three Polish Jewish women who, besides sharing the aforementioned historical circumstances, are also linked by the fact that all of them stayed in romantic relationships with outstanding men (i.e. writers Aleksander Wat and Moyshe Broderzon, and jazzman Adi Rosner), which had an enormous impact not only on their lives in general, but also specifically on the creation and style of their autobiographical narratives, giving them the character of a sui generis double portrait.

The literary output of the Polish-Yiddish writers who survived WWII in the Soviet Union  is mostly a literary mirror of the times of exile and wartime wandering. The two major themes that reverberate through these writings are: the refugees’ reflection on their stay in the USSR, and the Holocaust of Polish Jews. After the war, some of them described that period in their memoirs and autobiographical fiction, however, due to censorship, such accounts could only  be published abroad, following the authors’ emigration from Poland. These writings significantly complement the texts produced during the war, offering plentiful details about life in Poland’s  Eastern Borderlands under Soviet rule as it was perceived by the refugees, or about the fate of specific persons in the subsequent wartime years. This literature, written in – and about – exile  is not only an account of what was happening to Polish-Jewish refugees in the USSR, but also a testimony to their coping with an enormous psychological burden caused by the awareness (or the lack thereof) of the fate of Jews under Nazi German occupation. What emerges from all the literary texts published in post-war Poland, even despite the cuts and omissions caused by (self)-censorship, is an image of a postwar Jewish community affected by deep trauma, hurt and – so it seems – split into two groups: survivors in the East (vicarious witnesses), and survivors in Nazi-occupied Poland (direct victim witnesses). The article discusses on samples the necessity of extending and broadening of that image by adding to the reflection on Holocaust literature (which has been underway for many years) the reflection on the accounts of the experience of exile, Soviet forced labour camps, and wandering in the USSR contained in the entire corpus of literary works and memoirs written by Polish-Yiddish writers.

The article examines Yiddish-Polish writers’ response to the Holocaust in their poetry written in the years 1941-1948 and published in Poland in the early postwar years, when the country enjoyed relative political freedom. Special attention is given to a highly interesting theme appearing in the wartime lyrics written by Jewish survivors in the East (like B. Heller, H. Rubin, R. Żhikhlinsky, A. Zak), i.e. their call to arms addressed to the Jews living in Nazi-occupied Poland. The refugees could not bear the thought that whole masses of Jews died without putting up a fight in the ghettoes and camps in the West. It was probably this helplessness that evolved into their poetic appeal addressed to their ghettoized brethren, their call for resistance and punishment of the Nazi German murderers. Interestingly, the works of some writers who survived in the ghettos (such as Y. Shpigl, Y. Katsenelson and others), prove that ghettoized Jews who were tormented by the “docile death” complex also dreamed about being involved in an armed struggle against the Nazi Germans, but were aware of their weakness in the face of a much stronger enemy. Immediately after the war, this discrepancy of experience and knowledge led to a serious lack of understanding between those Jews who had survived in Poland and those who had survived in the East. The article examines these difference of experiences as it is reflected in the poetry.