Mit Kresów w literaturze polsko-żydowskiej dwudziestolecia międzywojennego
The Myth of the Eastern Borderlands in the Polish-Jewish Literature of the Midwar Period

Summary/Abstract: Poland has been a Jewish homeland for centuries. It was there, not in Palestine or the United States of America, where most of Jewish population were settled on the eve of the World War II. The most significant areas of the Polish Republic for them were the eastern or south-eastern frontiers, which become “the mythic land” (both in the Polish or in the Ukrainian, and most of all, in the Jewish consciousness). Jewish people inhabited mostly small Galician towns and villages scattered throughout present western Ukraine and eastern Poland. Therefore the major borderlands myth in the Polish-Jewish poetry of the midwar period was “sztetł” (a town where deep-rooted Jewish communities were co-existing with other inhabitants of the Polish Republic). The second myth (analogically to Polish poetry of this period) concerns Lviv that is the symbol of the Borderlands, and, at the same time, the symbol of the naturalization of the Jewish people in the culture of the Polish Republic. The third myth presents the Borderlands as Jewish Arcadia not only in the earthly but most of all eternal life. The myth of a Borderland town may be found in the Polish-Jewish poetry of, {inter alia}: Władysław Szlengel ({Wanderers Bundle}), Roman Brandstaetter ({For Bialik, Sentimental Psalm}), Horacy Safrin ({The Song about the Baal-Szem, The Ballad about Night at the Old Square}), Bronisław Mayer ({We have thrown}), Maurycy Szymel ({The Ballad about Fools from Chełm, Jankiel the Cymbalist}), Stefan Pomer ({Podolian Elegies}). Their poetry, filled with melancholy, even nostalgy for small Jewish homeland left in Chełm, Bracław, Humań , which they miss living in a big modern city. The second Polish-Jewish Borderland myth is Lviv. Among poets, the most significant eulogists of this city are those from the weekly “Moment” circle: Anda Eker ({A Poem from the Springtime Lviv, The Elegy from the Orient to Lviv}), Daniel Ihr ({In the Dreams, The Ballad on the Alley}), and Karol Dresdner ({The Golden Rose}). These authors treat Lviv as the centre of the Borderlands. The Eastern Borderlands are also the last resting-place for many generations of Polish Jews. Therefore there are images of old Jewish cemeteries in this poetry, for example in Stefan Pomer’s {The Grave of My Father}, there are fantastic visions of ghosts of ancestors (as in {The Elegy About My Forefathers}), and the descriptions of the persecutions and death of thousands of Jews at the time when Poland was regaining its independence, or even earlier to these events, as in Jakub Lewittes ({The Prayer}). To conclude, one should draw attention to the fact that the paper only signals the most important issues and threads of these problematics.

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