Joanna Adamczyk
Konteksty Kultury, Volume 20 Issue 2, 2023, pp. 99 - 113
https://doi.org/10.4467/23531991KK.23.012.18352The purpose of this article is to analyze the communicative situation in selected Jewish and Polish-Jewish lullabies from the turn of the 20th century. The main criterion for the selection is the person of the speaking subject – successively a man and a woman, while the most important contexts of their statements include the role of the father and mother in the Jewish family, the way of coping with traumatic experiences and the absence of the partner, the subjectivity of the rocking person, and the national identity of the authors of the lullabies. The conclusion to be drawn from the analysis of the works is a change in the view of the lullaby function, which from a piece of trivial content intended to put children to sleep becomes a work that serves adults, with a clear self-therapeutic emphasis. Beyond poetological tools for text analysis, the work also includes references to psychological and musicological concepts, justified by the specifics of the research undertaken.