Listy Jakuba Goldszmita do Elizy Orzeszkowej. Część 1
Jakub Goldszmit’s Letters to Eliza Orzeszkowa. Part 1

Summary/Abstract: The article contains letters, commentaries, and an introduction. In the first part the reader is given three Jakub Goldszmit’s letters dated 1881, while the author’s remaining correspondence (11 pieces produced between 1881–1909) is expected to be published in one of the forthcoming issues of “Pamiętnik Literacki” (“Literary Memoir”). The introduction focuses on Orzeszkowa’s attitude to the Jewish cases, namely equality of Jews, and mutual relationship of Poles and Jews. Orzeszkowa’s important statement about the matters in question is her own text “Wstępne słowo [Introduction]” contained in Goldszmit’s publication “Kalendarz dla Izraelitów” (“Calendar for the Israelites”) (1881). Jakub Goldszmit’s and Józef’s – his brother (Janusz Korczak’s father) – activities on the one hand allow for sketching here a picture of acculturation process in the Goldszmit family. On the other hand, they give an example for building a parallel between the advocates of integrationalism and Orzeszkowa’s attitude to the Polish (and also Jewish) case. As long as in political commentary papers she at times approached (though multidirectionally) the positivist stance which considered the Jewish situation instrumentally through the prism of Polish interests, in her literary pieces she succeeded in going beyond the limits which the then polonocentrism imposed on its contemporaries. Being in his literary pieces far from subjecting the aims of Jewish regeneration to the needs of Polish modernisation, Orzeszkowa managed to consider the unassisted role of integrative movement and appreciated the internal values of Jewish life. She also discerned the analogy between Polish historical fortune and the historical position of people which brought the idea of monotheism and its moral implications to culture.

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