The Stormy Life of Am Ha’arets, or How Jacob Won the Virgin. Jacob Frank’s Words of the Lord as a Picaresque Novel
The aim of this essay is to present Jacob Frank’s Words of the Lord as the first (and perhaps the last) Polish picaresque novel which abounds in semi-fantastical, kabbalahinspired stories, depicting a stormy life of a protagonist who calls himself an “am ha’arets” (a man of the land or a village idiot in Hebrew) and brags of his  nfinite and supranatural vitality that helps him to overcome all adversities. The essay considers a hypothesis formulated by Yirmiyahu Yovel, according to which the picaro novel emerged in 16th century Spain, in the milieu of the Marranos or conversos, i.e. the Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity, but usually retained  ome elements of their Judaic faith undercover. This hypothesis seems to fit perfectly well to Jacob Frank’s gadki (stories) as he himself can be regarded as the paradigmatic Marrano: a willing convert to Catholicism, whose aim was to “messianize” the Christian religion from within. The essay ends with a comparison of Frank’s messianic ambitions to Jacques Derrida whose messianicite operates on a similar Marrano basis.

The Pocket Knife of Moses. On the Marrano Homotheology in Julian Stryjkowski

The paper deals with a variety of ways in which the phenomenon of Marranism can be perceived as being at play within the work of the Polish-Jewish writer Julian Stryjkowski. First, the author discusses Stryjkowski’s explicit references to Marranism in a novel and two short stories where this historical phenomenon becomes a   point of reference for a reflection upon contemporary Jewish condition. Then, by means of a close reading of the first chapter of Stryjkowski’s first novel (Voices in the Dark), the author shows a deeper, implicit and metaphorical understanding of “Marranism”: this time the term would refer to the disguised presence of the  homosexual desire within  the framework of the traditional Jewish life. The author points to the complex relation between homosexuality and the transgressive lure of Christianity within Stryjkowski’s work, as well as to the ways in which the Frankist heresy can be seen as offering a historical precedence and context for Stryjkowski’s ‘homotheology’. Finally, the third and most comprehensive understanding of Marranism is presented. This time the term refers to the fragile identity of the Polish-Jewish writer himself, which precisely due to its fractured nature enables the writer to capture a whole universe of tensions within the Jewish world and the complex dialectics of heretical homotheology.

Diminutive Stutter. Aphatic Theology in „Piotruś” of Leo Lipski

The article analyses the theological motifs of Leo Lipski’s work, particularly those present in the micronovel Piotruś. Instead of focusing on the gestures of profanation and blasphemy – already well recognized by commentators – it follows the dynamics of the messianic traces hidden in this work, which the writer derives both from  Christian and Judaic tradition. The key model of messianic linguistic activity in Piotruś is the diminutive, already identified in the title. The secret matrix on which Lipski constructs the novel is, in turn, the idea of „exodus” as a potentially universal experience motivated by the promise of emancipation of a peculiar and particular life. Terms of distorted and heretical theology (the novel’s subtitle calls it „apocrypha”) seem to serve here as autobiographical cryptography by means of which a writer hidden under the pseudonym “Lipski” encrypts the experience of his own disability, aphasia, and permanent mourning. In this way he lays the foundations for what I call  aphasic theology”, in which fideistic contents articulate only through strange stutters.

Blessings of Avant-Garde. “The Scribe of (Un)Holy Scriptures” Miron Białoszewski

It can be observed that the hitherto prevailing tendencies of reading Miron Białoszewski’s works – saturated with religious references used in an idiomatic or profane way – have been either metaphysical (A. and T. Sobolewski, M. Stala, A. Zagajewski) or linguistic (J. Sławiński, E. Balcerzan, S. Barańczak). These two extremities produce a gap that can be bridged by a reading which combines the postsecular perspective, understood in an institutional way, with neo-avant-garde (in H. Foster’s interpretation). Just as the avant-garde is a critique of the obligatory art institution (P. Bürger), so can postsecularism be understood as a critique of the current institution of religion. The article presents readings of Kalejdoskop (Kaleidoscope) and of poems written in the 1950s and 1960s, and shows Białoszewski’s poetry as neo-avant-garde and postsecular at the same time, depicting the writer as the first postwar postsecular Polish poet.

„Distance without a Cause”. Introduction to Leśmian’s Theology of Poetry

This text attempts to highlight those elements of the presented world in Bolesław Leśmian’s poetry (as well as the metapoetic and anthropological reconsiderations that they imply), which turn the poetic theology of the Polish writer into a kind of theology of poetry. Leśmian is not immune to the fear of making God seem all-too-human, which was characteristic of the Young Poland movement. Nonetheless, he does not succumb to idolatry of an unknown, infinitely remote deity, as for example Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer did. Interpretation of Leśmian’s early poetry (primarily poems from the cycle Oddaleńcy), lead me to the conclusion that the future  author of Napój cienisty sees the death of God as a source event, which is responsible both for the constitution of modern subjectiveness and its crisis.
The awareness of the death of God manifests in Leśmian’s poetic world as suspension of the creative act, which cannot be entirely incorporated into the constructed reality. Although poetry is incapable of soothing the ontological uprooting of the human being that parallels the death of God, it nevertheless connects the poet with  hat which is different (the substantially non-human), thus allowing to experience the unembodied remnants of God, which preclude the reconciliation of lyrical autoreferentiality with subjective emancipation. Therefore, Leśmian’s path to God unwinds from inside of the poem and corresponds with the experience of emptiness that is  idden beyond the veil of poetic reflections and repetitions.

“The Forgotten Gender Revolution”: Socialist Emancipatory Project

The article, being a review essay of Magdalena Grabowska’s book Zerwana genealogia. Działalność społeczna i polityczna kobiet po 1945 roku a współczesny polski ruch kobiecy, discusses the question of genealogy of Polish feminist movements. Contrary to the narratives established after 1989, Grabowska focuses on the postwar period, and on the activity of communist female organizations that is regarded as one of the unfilled gaps within the historiography of Polish feminism.