Polish-Jewish Borderlands

Introduction

In this book, I aim to describe places, texts, and institutions of the Polish-Jewish borderland. This undertaking has an inherently topographic nature. While cartography strives toward constructing a generalized image of the whole, topography concentrates on local detail. This method of description “shows paths, boundary lines, connections, and intersections, preferring the recognition of open and restricted relations to systematic interdependence.”¹

Several considerations motivate the choice of a topographic perspective. First, this decision stems from the conviction expressed by representatives of frontier studies that “identifying any clear regularities in the functioning of borderlands remains extremely challenging. In their concrete manifestations, one can always perceive peculiarities of various types, unique differences, and exceptional situations.”² A focus on individual phenomena enables insight into idiomatic configurations of factors that shape particular cases of borderland phenomena.

Second, this choice relates to current projects within Jewish studies examining relationships between Jewish and non-Jewish cultures. In the essay “Hybrid with What? The Relationship between Jewish Culture and Other People’s Cultures,” the distinguished historian Moshe Rosman emphasizes the ambivalence of rootedness and autonomy present in Polish-Jewish relations and the fact that this “cultural interrelationship is fluid and requires description at various points of contact rather than one all-embracing characterization.”³ Therefore, research should focus on various modes of interaction, local points of cultural intersections, and particular areas of convergence. The topographic perspective leads to such descriptions of spatial, textual, and institutional nodes—cases of cultural interaction, interference, and transfer.

Third and finally, the topographic perspective acknowledges the nature of Jewish places and Jewish space. Elie Barnavi, author of A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People, maintains that

Jewish perception of space is marked by unique characteristics: it comprises a notion of multiple spaces – rather than one of a single space; and between these spaces – a void. … “My heart is in the East [Jerusalem] my body in the extreme West [Spain]” – in this famous verse, Judah Halevi, the greatest poet of the Jewish Golden Age in Spain, epitomizes the perception of multiple spaces and their discontinuity. … This uniqueness of Jewish spatial experience has been a constant factor in Jewish history, both when dominated by religion and when molded by Zionism or modern secular ideologies. Jewish consciousness constantly shifts between awareness of physical spaces (the birthplace, for example) to spaces of reference (the ancestral homeland, Hebrew, etc.), a shift which actually constitutes the Jewish spatial experience.⁴

Thus, the poles of Eretz Israel and the Diaspora, the territory of symbolic reference, and the actual territory where the individual resides form an arrangement. Religious rituals and ceremonies, which serve as media of communal memory, create, recall, and maintain this arrangement.

Benjamin Harshav presents this type of spatial conceptualization of Jewish presence in Eastern Europe as points marking cities and towns, creating a network of culturally and economically interconnected Jewish settlements.⁵ A similar model emerges in Hasia R. Diner’s work, which describes the arrangement of diasporic enclaves—distinctive “Jewish nodes of life”⁶—as an extensive and expanding network of multiple points or junctions located across various territories. Jewish literature created in the Diaspora also records the experience of constant reference to symbolic space, where the permanent co-presence of the Land of Israel and familial places constitutes one of the topoi: from nineteenth-century novels by Yiddish literature classics, such as The Travels of Benjamin III by Mendele Mocher Sforim,⁷ to twentieth-century autobiographical literature.⁸ In the memoirs of the outstanding Yiddish poet Kadia Molodowsky, the connection between the Eastern European shtetl and Eretz Israel appears as a contrapuntal interpenetration of spatial signs and seasons:

Once a year, the Land of Israel came to our home like a welcome guest. And once a year we traveled to the Land of Israel not by ship and not by train, and not even by cart, and yet it was a long journey. The Land of Israel would arrive on the fifteenth day of the month of Shevat. My father would bring carob from the synagogue and dried figs, placing a paper bag of fruit from the Land of Israel on the table. As ordinary fruit, our apples, pears and plums were not suitable for this festival. Carob and figs were the crops of the Land of Israel. They brought us summer in winter and chased away the cold. Everyone knew that in the Land of Israel, trees began to blossom on this day, but for us spring in winter lasted only one day.⁹

Therefore, the nature of Jewish space prevents understanding the Polish-Jewish borderland as a geographically situated, continuous zone. Instead, we should speak of a network—an arrangement of multiple points or nodes located across various areas and territories. Research into such “Jewish topographies” also emphasizes the transcultural nature of spaces and their interweaving and connection with both immediate surroundings and distant Jewish places.¹⁰

The topic of Polish-Jewish borderland has attracted scholarly attention relatively recently. Signs of interest emerged with the revival of literary and cultural Judaic studies at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. Initially, these studies drew from the description and interpretation style of Polish-Jewish relations that Rosman calls the “discourse of contribution.” In Poland, this discourse follows a tradition dating back to the nineteenth century,¹¹ which culminated in Aleksander Hertz’s The Jews in Polish Culture (Żydzi w kulturze polskiej), a notable book written and published in exile in the early 1960s.¹² However, works from the 1980s and 1990s primarily employ the cultural polysystem model developed in the 1970s as their fundamental interpretative tool.

Both these perspectives clearly collaborated in creating conditions for the emergence of a new paradigm, in which problems of mutual contacts and exchange dominate intergroup relations research. The discourse of contribution emphasized the values shared by both groups—primarily the values building European modernity. As Hertz notes, this undoubtedly contributed to understanding that “the most important cultural patterns are universal and filter into various civilizations and people.”¹³ In turn, the cultural polysystem theory highlighted the issue of cultural heterogeneity, the role of interference and transfer in the functioning of cultures, and the significance of cultural flows for their development and vitality maintenance. Today, alongside previously applied theoretical approaches, new ones emerge—inspired by cultural studies, postcolonial criticism, or interpretative anthropology. These new approaches propose cultural transfer and interference, transculturality, or cultural hybridity as main research areas.¹⁴

The recent discussion of Polish-Jewish social and cultural contacts occurs primarily among historians. As Israel Bartal and Scott Ury demonstrate in their introduction to the monographic volume of the Polin yearbook, Jews and Their Neighbours in Eastern Europe Since 1750, this happens mainly because these contacts provide a crucial context for studying Jewish history in the Diaspora. In turn, according to Adam Teller and Magda Teter, the most significant methodological innovation developed in this field comprises moving away from treating intergroup boundaries as impermeable, and from focusing on the conditions of their establishment and maintenance, toward recognizing them as permeable and focusing on the conditions of exchange and contact.¹⁵

This change entails reshaping the entire field of research problems. First, it pushes into the background such issues as: the functioning of barriers in intergroup contacts; the mechanisms and conditions of setting boundaries; or the principles, rules, and permissible circumstances of crossing barriers. Second, this change equals moving away from the issues of isolation and separation of cultural areas. The perspective of interaction, interference, and exchange focuses on the processes, mechanisms, and manifestations of contact. Its introduction enables capturing connections and integration where scholars previously indicated insularity and isolation.

These tendencies manifest most spectacularly in the revisionist interpretations of the functioning of Eastern European Jewish towns. The myth of shtetl as a Jewish enclave in a non-Jewish sea faces opposition from the image of the town as an “integration arena,” a place of maintaining and crossing cultural boundaries.¹⁶ Teller’s analysis of an eighteenth-century shtetl community provides a model example of such an approach. While the common perception of shtetl emphasizes its exclusive Jewishness, autonomy, and cultural coherence, Teller deconstructs this image through economic and social analyses that prove connections, dependencies, and integration of shtetl with the non-Jewish world.

This hardly means that the vision of a “Chinese wall” rising between communities has disappeared. Particularly in Polish sociological and ethnological research, recent years show interest in isolation issues or culturally regulated prohibition of mutual contact.¹⁷ Ewa Banasiewicz-Ossowska’s work Między dwoma światami. Żydzi w polskiej kulturze ludowej (Between Two Worlds: Jews in Polish Folk Culture) exemplifies this approach, where analyses of endogenous and exogenous isolation factors dominate, while the problems of crossing cultural boundaries remain secondary. From this perspective, the boundary—both separating and connecting—emerges as the sole contact point, the interface space.¹⁸ Thus, contact maintains a limited, hindered, and involuntary character, and pattern transfer appears as permeation. Referring to Marian Golka’s typology of borders and borderlands, one might conclude that Banasiewicz-Ossowska’s analyses employ a model of the boundary as a wall, occasionally transforming into a borderland gate, and of borderland as a gate.¹⁹ Descriptions of Polish and Jewish functioning in modern urban communities, such as interwar Krakow, often emphasize persistent social distance and separation.²⁰

My book relates to and draws inspiration from these recent scholarly discussions. Simultaneously, it complements the description of Polish-Jewish literature that I propose in my earlier works. The opportunity to employ new interpretative tools encourages me to attempt to supplement—and to some extent rewrite—the history of Polish-Jewish borderland literature. I take advantage of the opportunity that we can formulate questions concerning borderland issues differently today and answer them differently than 30 years ago. Furthermore, in the book Polish-Jewish Literature in the Interwar Years, I concentrate on the most distinctive part of the studied field, which I treat as “a region with a clear center and an indistinct periphery.”²¹ In this book, I attempt to describe primarily its margins and peripheral spaces. I agree with the opinion of the semiotician Itamar Even-Zohar:

If one accepts the polysystem hypothesis, then one must also accept that the historical study of literary polysystems cannot confine itself to the so-called “masterpieces,” even if some would consider them the only raison d’etre of literary studies in the first place.²²

We should not omit “objects (properties, phenomena) previously unnoticed or bluntly rejected,”²³ because including marginal phenomena enables a more adequate understanding of the whole. Among excluded phenomena, Even-Zohar lists children’s literature, translations, and mass literature. In his opinion, they maintain close connections with adult literature, the original literature of a language, and high literature occupying the center of the literary scene. Such marginal, previously unconsidered types of texts constitute, among others, the subject of my reading in this book.

By selecting places, texts, and institutions as the basic categories of a topographic description, I draw from the analyses of modern Jewish culture in Central and Eastern Europe proposed by Harshav, who defines polysystem “as a network of interrelated textual genres and social and cultural institutions in a society, each one of which is a flexible system in its own right.”²⁴ I highlight the most significant institution of Polish-Jewish borderland—Jewish press written in Polish, which also formed the foundation of Polish-Jewish literary circulation (le circuit littéraire). Also, I select to read the previously unexamined periodicals, such as the Warsaw sensational daily 5-ta Rano (Five in the Morning), as well as publications like Wolnomyśliciel Polski (Polish Freethinker) and London’s Wiadomości (News), which did not target exclusively Jewish readers but emerged as a result of Polish-Jewish coexistence and cooperation. Instead of offering a synthetic description or press studies characterization of these publications, I focus on selected problems, themes, or authors. In the field of genres, I investigate Polish-Jewish serialized novels, national stories for children, and women’s assimilationist novels. My research generally does not extend beyond 1939; I make an exception for Mieczysław Grydzewski’s émigré journalism, which I connect with his interwar activities.²⁵

In my 2008 article, “Pogranicze polsko-żydowskie: języki, kultury, literatury” (Polish-Jewish Borderland: Languages, Cultures, Literatures), I present an initial attempt at a historical and cultural approach to Polish-Jewish borderland issues.²⁶ However, this book radically transcends the methodological horizon established there. Moreover, it proposes a different approach than literary studies, especially the works of Mieczysław Klimowicz²⁷ or Sławomir Żurek²⁸ concerning literary borderlands. Klimowicz examines the borderland through cultural borrowings and influences, while Żurek treats it as an unconceptualized category which requires no conceptual elaboration.

For the English edition of this book, all chapters underwent revision, supplementation, and correction, and some received substantial reworking.

CHAPTER 1 The Category of Borderland in Contemporary Jewish Studies

It may be true that the culture concept has served its time.¹