Authors

Katarzyna Zechenter¹;  ¹ UCL SSEES, UK

Discussion

The paper focuses on Polish-Jewish fiction of the 21 century that is not directly focused on the Holocaust but on its consequences by problematizing the experience of children born in mixed Polish and Jewish families, a sociologically and culturally significant issue as Barry Cohen’s Opening The Drawer. The Hidden Identities of Polish Jews argues.

The paper problematizes popular novels and memoirs written in the twenty-first century, starting with Sylwia Chutnik’s debut novel Kieszonkowy atlas kobiet [A Pocket Atlas of Women, 2008]; Anda Rottenberg’s Proszę bardzo [Here You Go, 2008] about her missing son who was a drug addict and her Russian mother who married a Polish Jew (and a Gulag’s survivor) whose trauma resulted from her surviving the siege of Leningrad when more than one million people died; Ewa Kuryluk Frascati [Frascati Street. An Apotheosis of Topography, 2009] devoted to her Jewish-German mother who married her Polish rescuer, later Minister of Culture in the communist government; a novel by Maria Ulatowska’s Kamienica przy Kruczej, [A Tenmant at Krucza Street, 2012] based on authentic events told to the author by one of her readers; a collection of seven short stories Włoskie szpilki [Italian Stilleto Shoes, 2011] by Magdalena Tulli about her Polish-Jewish-Italian home and finally, and Monika Sznajderman’s Fałszerze pieprzu [Pepper Forgers, 2019] whose Jewish father came from a working Jewish background while her mother from a family of Polish landed gentry.

The paper investigates the relations between the two – or even more - identities and memories, focusing on the elements of secrecy, silence, and understatements in memory transmission. Understanding antisemitism plays another crucial role in the process through the investigation of the personal and intimate, employing the concept of post-memory and generational trauma as it argues that the children from such families carry not only the burden of the memory of their Jewishness but also the memory of their parents’ complex identities as some of the parents were dedicated Communists who rejected Jewish identification in post-1945 Poland.