%0 Journal Article
%T “I was hiding a Jew for some time”. Stanisław Lem as Polish-Jewish Writer
%A Wołk, Marcin
%J Konteksty Kultury
%V 2022
%R 10.4467/23531991KK.22.027.16541
%N Volume 19 Issue 3
%P 353-373
%K cryptonomy, psychoanalysis, Stanisław Lem, Polish-Jewish literature
%@ 2083-7658
%D 2022
%U https://ejournals.eu/en/journal/konteksty-kultury/article/ukrywalem-przez-jakis-czas-zyda-stanislaw-lem-jako-pisarz-polsko-zydowski
%X The author of this article, following the lead of Agnieszka Gajewska’s research, contemplates affiliation of Stanisław Lem’s oeuvre with the Polish-Jewish literature, understood as a literary recording of Jewish experiences in the Polish language. The author analyses Lem’s correspondence with Michael Kandel as well as his early oeuvre, in which the writer sees himself confronted, in different ways, with the experience of Holocaust, each time camouflaging the autobiographical character of the described experiences. Their symbolic character in Lem’s prose is reminiscent of the categories of the incorporation and the crypt which are crucial notions in Nicolas Abraham’s and Mária Török’s psychoanalysis. In the light of these ideas, one can speak of cryptonomy of Jewish origins and Holocaust experiences in case of Lem’s work that are coincidental with a tendency of their substitute reveal. The combination of visible fear of self-reveal to the Polish audience with more or less encrypted references to experiences of Holocaust and anti-semitism is the reason why Lem’s oeuvre documents the situation and the attitude to the inherited identity not only in case of the author but also of many other Jews living in the post-war Poland.