MATERIAŁY: Marek Hłasko Szukając gwiazd
MATERIALS: Marek Hłasko, Searching for the stars

Summary/Abstract: Marek Hłasko’s short story Szukając gwiazd was published in 1963. It has all the properties of a parable and is a kind of parable about the Holocaust. Its conventional character points to the ethical controversies related to such a kind of Holocaust presentation, i.e. we deal here with the temptation of universalisation. The hero undergoes a specific rite of passage from childhood to adulthood, centred around the Holocaust, being at the same time a mythical “original event”, underpinning the existential condition of “a man without innocence” – a figure designed by Marek Hłasko. The boy will later become all the men in the writer’s stories and novels. What is interesting is the superposition of a typical Hłasko motive, i.e. frustrated love, on the Holocaust situation, and the resultant impossibility of an authentic encounter between the I and the Other. Existential loneliness and being lost in the world are combined with the memory of the Holocaust.

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