Między diasporą a wielkim światem. O przestrzeni kulturowej w opowiadaniach Szaloma Asza
Between the Diaspora and the Big World. On Cultural Space in the Stories of Sholem Asch

Author(s): Olaf Krysowski
Subject(s): Cultural history, Studies of Literature, Pre-WW I & WW I (1900 -1919), Interwar Period (1920 - 1939), WW II and following years (1940 - 1949), Post-War period (1950 - 1989), Transformation Period (1990 - 2010), Theory of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Asch; Jews; community; space; diaspora; shtetl; tradition; myth
Summary/Abstract: Some short stories of Sholem Asch, such as The Daughter of the Master, Dina, Cantor and his Choristers, My Most Beautiful Love or Beauty were translated from Yiddish into Polish by Stanisław Wygodzki and published jointly in 1964. The storylines of these works are focused on socio-cultural issues and show pictures of life in a small-town Jewish diaspora. The space in them is shaped specificically, as it is organized around the cultural values of the Jewish community. The great world which extends beyond the diaspora is identified by the writer with the Zionist dream of the Promised Land and with the return to the great ancestral culture of the patriarchs and the prophets. In turn, the diaspora is associated with narrow alleys of a small town, with an area of the nation’s everyday life, its worries, passions, typical activities (work, celebration, studying, reading the Talmud, praying in the synagogue), as well as existential, moral and religious problems. There is only one strange element in this bipolar composition – the vestigial nature of the description of the autochthonous territory, which (in the light of anthropological research) should accompany the images of ethnic groups forming “the community in the community”. The autochthonous space in Asch’s short stories is usually shown as terra incognita, an alien, dangerous land inhabited by suspicious representatives of local authorities or described explicitly as a space of moral decay, which disinherits the Jews from their traditions and dooms them to perish.

• Details
• Contents