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The article discusses Jewish conversions to Catholicism in Poland before 1795, presenting the issue from the perspective of discourses of anthropology, religion, and, importantly, class stratification, with reference to the most important European contexts. The survey of source texts includes selected authors, such as Wacław Potocki or Walerian Nekanda Trepka, allowing for an introductory sketch of relations between the idea of nobility, anti-Judaism, and antisemitism.
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The article analyses and interprets the apothegms and quotations from ancient and old-Polish literature in one of the most important testimonies of the Holocaust in world literature. In Polish criticism, there are few discussions of Perechodnik’s journal, and the existing articles are controversial because of their biased interpretations, which, in the present author’s opinion, are often manipulatory. It seems that the Polish intepretators of Spowiedź try, contrary to the author’s clear intention, to inscribe the text in the current controversies between Poles and Jews, while disregarding the third nation (Germans), and to turn Perechodnik into a postmodern author, because it allows for suspension of ethical rules. The greatness and tragedy of the author, however, stand for their own without such manipulations.
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The article relates the life and work of a pre-war author who is almost unknown by name, but very popular because of his work, an author of songs, cabaret sketches, and film scrips. He was born in a family of assimilated Jews from Lviv. He made a great contribution to Polish language, both literary and colloquial, by writing song lyrics with phrasings that have become fixed expressions used in communication of the simplest and most universal feelings. Schlechter became a victim of the Holocaust, and his artistic work, which focused on joy and the bright side of life, did not protect him physically and mentally from the Nazi death machine. He was killed in Lviv ghetto, probably in 1943.
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The point of departure for this article is the memory of moving fragments of Janusz Korczak’s journal from Warsaw ghetto. The author confronts the fragments with Korczak’s earlier texts, such as the short storied about holiday camps for Polish and Jewish children, and the novel Król Maciuś na bezludnej wyspie [King Maciuś on a Desert Island]. The image of a canary bird, used in the novel, is confronted with other symbolic stories about this bird, such as the story in Wiesław Myśliwski’s Pałac [Palace]. With reference to the image, the article invokes Korczak’s meditations on identity and tolerance, and human ethical and aesthetic choices. The audacity of Korczak’s thoughts and conclusions goes far beyond his time, and seems perfectly fit for ours.
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Based on conversations with the hero, Patrycja Bukalska’s Rysiek z Kedywu. Niezwykłe losy Stanisława Aronsona [Rysiek from Kedyw. Incredible Tribulations of Stanisław Aronson], is an important contribution to the study of Polish-Jewish relations. This is because Aronson’s life is a unique combination of various elements of Polish and Jewish biographies in the 20th century. His life story includes: a happy childhood in a wealthy assimilated Jewish family, the nightmare of Soviet and German occupation, deaths of closest relations, participation in Armia Krajowa resistance movement and Warsaw Uprising, military service in general Anders’s corps, and then in Israeli army. Jew, Pole, Israeli: each of these identies demanded a different ordering and expression of memory, different omissions and declarations. With such an unusual and mixed experience, Aronson had a vantage point to look at the images that Poles, Jews, Holocaust survivors and citizens of newly created Israel, had of one another. Bukalska’s book can be read as a voice against generalizations, as a narrative about a concrete human life immersed in history, a narrative about individual choices, courage, and friendship.
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The article is an attempt to reach the first statements and texts by Michał Głowiński, relating to Jewish identity in Poland, the condition of a child of the Holocaust, the trauma of a Holocaust survivor, and the situation of an intelectual. The author of the article tries to demonstrate continuity of all creative gestures, from the frist writings and statements, signed with pseudonyms, through Czarne sezony [The Black Seasons] and their continuations, to the autobiographical Kręgi obcości [Circles of strangeness]; the continuity is seen in the perspective of identity. The author is also interested, in the given subject scope, in Głowiński’s spatial obsessions (especially claustrophobia and phantasmagoria). The stake of literary “self-therapy” is in the most crucial things: truth of oneself, memory, self-identification.
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The article is an interpretation of the eponymous long poem from Tadeusz Różewicz’s volume nożyk profesora [professor’s knife]. The first part discusses the modes modes of narration of the experience of the Holocaust. The discussion focuses on meanings of the words “memory” and “history”, on the ironic use of pastoral convention, and on the transformation of the metaphor from Cyprian Norwid’s Przeszłość [The Past]. The poem recycling from the volume zawsze fragment. recycling is an important context. The second part of the article is devoted to the friendship between Tadeusz Różewicz and Mieczysław Porębski. The description of the friends’ breakfast points out to an interpretation of their relation in the context of their wartime biography: a death camp for Porębski, and resistance fighting for Różewicz. The poet, in spite of his memory and long-time friendship with the former prisoner, presents the Holocaust as a mediated experience that is virtually inaccessible. However, in many ways he still tries to bring it closer to the reader and does not let the reader forget it.
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The article contains reflections on changes in biographical writing, especially biography of persons of heterogenous ethnic identity. The biographies are not only reconstructions of an individual’s life, but also a clear testimony and reflection of changes in collective consciousness. It turns out that biographies also discover, in a peculiar way, the author’s identity, who, in the process of selection and creation of a biographical text, reveals a part of their own history. This aspect is clearly seen in texts by second and third generation Holocaust survivors, and is demonstrated by interpretations of Magdalena Tulli’s Włoskie szpilki [Italian High Heels] and Piotr Paziński’s Pensjonat [Boarding house].
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Representation of various modes, forms, symptoms and degrees of mental illnesses, frequent in The Street of Crocodiles, are analysed in two perspectives: psychological and literary-cultural. Using the tools of modern psychology, the article interprets the pathological symptoms of Touya, Maria, aunt Agatha, and various other characters, most importantly the advancing illness of father Joseph, who displays symptoms of schizophrenia. Schulz uses a language filled with metaphors, blurring the border between symptoms of illness and metaphors, between the imaginary and the real, and between health and illness, norm and pathology, between the human and the animal. Schulz’s representation of madness opposes the modern understanding, which is dominated by analytical, rationalist identification of an illness, related to a socially determined norm of mental health. It brings back the premodern quality to madness, which becomes a divine phenomenon, related to the pagan rite of fertility, to the “orgy of life” and Dionysian element, and to Freudian life drive. Dionysius and Freud meet in an area independent from the rules of culture and reason: the return to nature, including the nature in a human being. Here, madness becomes a “basic figure” and “the ultimate ur-schema”, as they belong to the unintellectual, basic, ecstatic sphere. This is related to the imperative of penetration of areas that threaten the “balance of the soul”, to address the topic that shows “the scar of removal”, and forces us to ask the question of limits of humanity.
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The article is a reaction to the second edtion of Józef Czechowicz’s Letters (2011), which the author compares to the first edition (1977). It turns out that the poet’s letters, when they went through censorship screening in the 1970s, were purged not only of politically charged passages, where he mentions Miłosz, Czuchnowski, Iwaniuk, and Łobodowski, as well as the critical passages about Marxism, but also his remarks about Jews, remarks that were mostly antisemitic and stereotypical. The analysis of these passages is confronted with Czechowicz’s photographs of the Jewish quarter in Lublin and with the “Jewish traces” in his poetry. Above all, however, the discussion focuses on the language of violence, exposed in the poem śmierć [death] in the volume called dzień jak co dzień. The poem has been interpreted polemically, in opposition to Jacek Leociak, who reads śmierć both figuratively and as a text about a slaughterhouse. In this way, unexpected dimensions of Czechowicz’s sensitivity are shown, as the poet understands the cruelty of modern “animal killing industry” (used by the designers of the Holocaust machine), while at the same time he uses a dangerous array of antisemitic stereotypes, which were previously unknown to his critics.
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The article discusses Marci Shore’s social and historical thought, as presented in her books: Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968 (2006), The Taste of Ashes (2013), and her essays recently published in Polish translation. The author follows the American historian, presenting her concept of modernity, but focuses on the main theme of her research: the contribution of Jewish writers, poets, artists, and intellectuals to the creation of Marxism. The author acknowledges the great value of Marci Shore’s writings, but argues that her panorama of the 20th century would be fuller if her discussion included a reflection on the religious attitude of many Jewish thinkers to Marxism and the USSR. This topic was discussed by Nikolai Berdyaev and Polish thinkers who published in pre-war social journals.
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The essay is about Wisława Szymborska’s late poetry, especially the last volume, Wystarczy [Enough]. The poet’s frequent returns, repetitions, and various references to her earlier work are of particular importance. The author argues that, contrary to the general opinion, these references do not reflect a creative crisis or exhaustion of Szymborska’s poetics, but develop and deepen her anthropological reflection on the essence of humanity.
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In the present article Andrzej Sosnowski’s poems is analysed against the theoretical principles elaborated by Ezra Pound. Pound’s postulates such as the ideogrammic method and the melo-, fano-, and logopoeia, all of which are briefly discussed, are used to characterise Sosnowski’s poetic practice. The article shows that, irreducible differences notwithstanding, both poets write in accordance with a set of similar principles. The difference between Sosnowski’s poems and Pound’s Cantos consists mainly in the fact that the former gives up on the inherently Poundian desire to reorganise reality in an epic work and seeks what may be termed a scene of voice on which one’s ownmost identity can be manifested. It is among the many discourses that comprise poems that a voice of life sounds in all its complexity and fragility.
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Pisarze w zwierzyńcu [Writers in an Animal Park] by Janina Abramowska are an admirable display of erudition, originality of interpretation, and careful composition. The text brings on reflections about the animal world, its distinct quality, and the animal narrative perspective, which the author has not noticed.
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The essay is devoted to Krzysztof Hoffmann book dubitatio o poezji Eugeniusza Tkaczyszyna-Dyckiego [dubitatio on poetry by Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki]. The author discusses the critic’s interpretative strategies, as well as his theoretical and metatheoretical assumptions. The author demonstrates how deconstructionist philosophy influences the modes of reading of poetical languages proposed by the young critic and his critical consciousness shaped by doubt and uncertainty. This distinguishes him from modern scientific strategy (structuralism) that treats interpretation as a way to reach the truth of a work. Hoffmann writes about the difficult, rhetorically sophisticated poetry by Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki, and more specifically, about its early stage before 2005. The story is built around four words: home, friendship, schizophrenia, disbelief. The most important problem, however, is the language of the poetry: its status, problematic referentiality, and difficult link to existence. The author, thus, reads dubitatio as a metaphorical discussion of theory and practice of poetry interpretation in general, and Tkaczyszyn-Dycki’s poetry in particular.
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The article suggests a reading of Nałkowska’s first work, treated as a literary study of narcissism. In Lodowe pola Nałkowska made an unsuccessful attempt to express the work through an inner narcissistic conflict, giving the protagonist, Janka Dernowiczówna, the qualities of narcissistic personality, such as individualism, dandyism, estheticism, Nietzscheism, atrophy of instinct, need for self-control, stage directing of life, and never-satisfied self love. The author also transferred her own feeling of emotional neglect by her mother in infancy onto the feeling of rejection of Janka’s proposal by Rosławski. The image and experience of “ice fields” as the emptiness of life, chaos, and powerlessness, becomes a metaphor of narcissistic “abandonment depression”, which became, in Nałkowska’s later work, a constantly present emotional mood and a source of artistic “tanatic imagination”.
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The main aim of the article is an analysis of entomological motifs in the Nałkowska’s wartime diary. The surprising frequency of these motifs gives an opportunity for a more general discussion: the key context for an explanation of insect metaphors seems to be the tendency, common for modernist authors, to place the concept of humanity in a widely understood philosophy of nature. The rule would also apply for the war, or more generally, for mechanisms of human violence, which Nałkowska subjects in her diary to a peculiar darwinistic representation. Understanding the war as a “naturalistic fact” (Hanna Kirchner’s description) results in a gradual blurring of the differences between the violence of nature and the violence of history. The author of the article has identified a similar procedure in Czesław Miłosz’s work, which constitutes a specific counterpoint for Nałkowska’s wartime diary.
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The article, while discussing the concept of friendship, presents social and personal relations between the protagonists of Zofia Nałkowska’s fiction. Against the background of tragic social conflicts, numerous shows of disloyalty, trade in women, low motives, and thoughtlessness, the writer points out to friendship as the only worthwhile relationship, even if it brings many disappointments. Apart from her enormous sensitivity to women’s plight, and focus on their mutual solidarity, Nałkowska often focused on friendship between men, representing their emotional engagement and delight of one man in another. In Nałkowska’s fiction, friendship is linked to risk, opening up to otherness, and internalization of the gaze of another human being. Friendly relationships, although they are fleeting and full of ethical tensions, help people to free themselves from their mould, change their character, and escape from dependencies that discipline their desires. Thus, friendship means a personality crisis, weakening of character, and temporary transgression. The passage, a temporary escape from entrenched ways of living, is possible in Nałkowska’s fiction only at the cost of a friendly bond.
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The author analyses the love-hate relationship between Zofia Nałkowska and her seven years’ senior, the legendary painter Maria Komornicka, who was for a time romantically ivolved with Zofia’s father — Wacław Nałkowski — and her friend — Cezary Jellenta. The relationship between the two writers has excited emotional reponses from researchers for many years. Two critics specializing in Komornicka have shown their interest most explicitly: Izabela Filipiak and Edward Boniecki. They accuse Nałkowska of not maginalizing Komornicka’s role in women’s literature of early 20th century, of unfeeling attitude for Komornicka’s tragic fate, even though Nałkowska was inspired by her in the early age, and of the failure to help Komornicka, when she was declared insane and disempowered after her symbolic transformation into a man. Researchers have so far seen Komornicka as a lost and harmed person, whereas Nałkowska was perceived as the morally questionable winner. However, Hanna Kirchner, who specializes in Nałkowska, has recently shown interesting sources of Nałkowska’s dislike for Komornicka, pointing out to a forgotten juvenile poem called Historia „Forpoczt”. The author of the article, who also wrote a monograph about Maria Komornicka, analyses the arguments presented by critics of both writers, observing the relation between Nałkowska and Komornicka from a neutral ground, without sharing the dynamic of hasty accusations.
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