Wedged between East and West? The tangled identity of Frank Meisler Cover Image

Zakleszczony pomiędzy Wschodem i Zachodem? Tożsamościowe sploty Franka Meislera Streszczenie
Wedged between East and West? The tangled identity of Frank Meisler

Author(s): Miłosława Borzyszkowska-Szewczyk
Subject(s): Social Sciences, Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Sociology, Polish Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Szczecińskiego
Keywords: Frank Meisler; Kindertransports; Free City of Gdańsk; Pomeranian Jews; identity project; literature of cultural borderlands; intercultural literature; Holocaust literature of post-factographic charact

Summary/Abstract: This article reflects on the textual constructions of identity and the image of the Free City of Gdańsk (Danzig) in Frank Meisler’s autobiography On the Vistula Facing East, 1996 (Zaułkami pamięci. Gdańsk–Londyn–Jaffa, 2014; An der Weichsel gegen Osten, 2016). The author was a British-Israeli artist born in 1925 in the Free City of Gdańsk. The narrative analysis conducted here explores how Meisler presents cultural entanglements in the Free City of Gdańsk and its diversified Jewish community. My aim is to examine his strategies for portraying the borderland experience, his multilingualism, and for incorporating the Jewishness into the matrix of the East-West relations. Meisler’s autobiography has been interpreted as an example of the literature of cultural borderlands and of post-factum Holocaust literature.

  • Issue Year: 12/2019
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 119-142
  • Page Count: 24
  • Language: Polish