David Stromberg [DS]: What position did Isaac Bashevis Singer occupy as

or cultural figure, when you grew up in Poland?

Magda Teter [MT]: Soon after Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize
Literature, Literatura na świecie, a literary monthly predominantly intere
world literature, devoted a portion of its April 1979 issue to Isaac Bashe
This marked a turning point for a discussion about Polish Jewish history
culture, which had been taboo since the events of March 1968. Soon his
works began to appear, three in 1983: The Magician of Lublin, The
Manor, and The Estate. These publications began a renaissance of intere
Polish Jewish literature and culture. Soon the conversation opened up to
topics as well. By the early 1990s, works by other Yiddish writers were t
into Polish. During that period I. B. Singer was one of the most popular w
Poland, and part of the attraction was precisely the fact that his novels
stories were about Poland – rooted in the Polish landscape, its sights, sm
sounds. But for Poles, Singer’s works also confirmed the Jews’ otherness

https://publicseminar.org/2018/09/how-jewish-was-polish-history/
 part of the Jewish populations of Europe will have been extinguished, a
meeting of 40,000 American Jews gathered in Madison Square Park yes
afternoon adopted a resolution embodying a program for saving as ma
in the Nazi-occupied territories as possible.” And on September 7th, on p
the same paper noted that “during the five-year war period, Jews in 4,20
communities throughout the nation have contributed $82,000,000 to t
Jewish Appeal for Refugees, Overseas Needs and Palestine to save Jews
Europe.” Though these reports were buried in the paper, for Singer, who
connected to the Jewish presses, these accounts would not have been u
Just a few months earlier, another Polish Jew wrote a powerful essay th
question of Polish Jewish identity. Julian Tuwim’s essay, “We, the Polish
is a powerful response to the reports of extermination. But unlike Singer
language of literary creativity was Yiddish, Tuwim wrote in Polish. And h
addressed the question of otherness and belonging of Jews in Polish soc
Tuwim did not write with broad historical strokes. He boldly claimed to
Pole” and divided “Poles” just like “Jews and other peoples” into “wise a
polite and nasty, intelligent and dull, interesting and boring, injured and
gentlemen and non-gentlemen…and also into fascists and anti-fascists.”
he claimed his Polishness not just because of the land where he grew up
soil and landscape, the language he spoke and wrote, or “national vices
himself adopted, but also “because my hatred for Polish fascists is great
for fascists of any other nationality. And I consider that a very importan
of my Polishness.” The two essays arise from the pain each writer must
thinking about their families in Europe. Both were spurred by the news a
Nazi destruction of European Jews to reflect on Jewishness and Polishne
approached it through different cultural prisms. Each did it in different s
Tuwim’s is a poetic reflection on nationalism, identity, and blood. Singer
pedantic prose offers a short history of Polish-Jewish relations.

DS: Where do you think Singer gets the historical part of his article right?
do you think he get it wrong?

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 way to look at it — and if one does, one subscribes to a partial version o
Singer saw Polish Jews and Polish Christians, whom he called “the Poles
“living together but not together,” and took a sweeping look at hundreds
of history. Yes, Polish Jews retained their distinct Jewish identity, since b
modern period there was no expectation of anything else. To use Moshe
Rosman’s phrase, Polish Jews were “categorically Jewish, distinctly Poli
in Poland were Jews, in a legal, cultural, and religious sense. To expect o
in the premodern era would be to expect their conversion. Modernity ch
these social structures, re-inventing the concept of nations, and with it c
expectations of “assimilation,” which is perhaps a secular version of con
But before the modern period, close and intimate relations between Jew
Christians anywhere, not just in Poland, were not only discouraged by b
Jewish and Christian authorities, but in some respects were even illegal.
does not mean that they did not happen. Jews and Christians did in fact
together, sometimes under the same roof, and maintained intimate rela
historical evidence from both the premodern and modern periods demo
this unequivocally. As historian Shmuel Ettinger once said, “at no period
history have Jews barricaded themselves against social and cultural
developments of other nations.”

DS: How is the narrative that Singer conveys – which derives from his ow
personal experience and inherited folklore in Poland – different from histo
circumstances or sources that you’ve come across in your work?

MT: Singer’s essay is very much a product of his own experience, the exp
of Jews in the 1930s, and of the Yiddish cultural world. The discussion o
gentiles as drunks and ignoramuses, and the view of the nobleman as s
to fear are distinctly shaped by Jewish lore. The questions he raises abo
Poland might become after the war are very much influenced by the exp
of the 1930s, especially after 1935, a period he would have learned abou
second-hand. The way Singer framed the essay is also very much a prod
modern nationalist discourse, as he speaks of “the Polish people,” “the It
the French, the Spanish,” and “the Germans.” Such stark national identiti
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 translator of Hebrew and Yiddish literature into Polish, Michał Friedman
remembered the cultural changes of his home town, Kowel, after WWI e
Poland regained independence. Friedman and his friends had to learn Po
language of the new state. Though, for complex historical reasons, Jews
Yiddish as their language in eastern Europe, they generally also spoke th
vernaculars of the lands in which they lived. From my sources for the pe
the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, partitioned by Russia, Prussia, an
Austria between 1772-1795, court records indicate that, with some exce
Jews spoke Polish. Was it “good Polish”? There was no good Polish spok
anyone then. The universalization of grammar and spelling was a mode
phenomenon. In the records I have seen, Jews spoke the vernacular no w
than their Christian neighbors. Written language is another story, but th
majority of Polish Christians could not write either. The question of lang
would change with the partitions of Poland — with new states sidelining
Polish language to privilege languages of political power and the state:
and Russian. Another point to remember is that by the 1930s, the Jewis
population was quite large. It was now possible to live in an entirely Jew
neighborhood without interacting with non-Jews. The YIVO autobiograp
Jews from the interwar period beautifully describe the cultural struggles
people experienced in the Polish Republic. Here, Singer speaks from a sp
cultural milieu. Tuwim would tell a different story. For Tuwim Polish was
language in which he was “called in my parents’ home,” on which he “w
nourished”; a language in which his “mother taught [him] Polish poetry
songs”; a language, in which “the first shock of poetry came” to him; a l
that was “the most important” in his life because “poetic creation” was
“unthinkable in any other language, no matter how fluently I might spea
Tuwim wrote. Yiddish was such a language for Singer, though he clearly
other languages even when he lived in Poland. He was after all a transla
world literature into Yiddish.

DS: The article is written for general audiences and treats Jewish-Polish r
in very broad brushstrokes. But it also seems to play up the different ster
with which the two groups saw each other. Where do you see the nuance
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 photographs from the interwar period showing Poles and Jews, in schoo
tours, and it is often difficult to tell the difference. That is not to say that
was no difference, but rather that we choose to remember the alienated
the Zionist writing in Polish or the Yiddish speaker saying that “this is o
our home.” Jews and non-Jews both do it, if for different reasons. But tha
easily-otherized Jew serves a purpose. In the post-Holocaust era the na
mutual alienation has been useful. For Jews to deal with the pain of betr
for Poles to deal with an acknowledged or unacknowledged sense of gui
must be seen as truly a people apart.

DS: Singer emphasizes alienation between Jews and Poles rather than ha
and openly blames the “Nazi massacres” on Polish anti-Semites and Na
could this formulation influence how we deal with the current state-led in
to inscribe these kinds of nuances into Polish law? In your understanding
law, would Singer’s statement make him vulnerable to legal action?

MT: Singer’s narrative overstates the alienation. He flattens centuries of

by stating that “we can compare Jews and Poles to a couple who has liv
together for forty years and has remained as alien to each other as they
the first day.” Certainly, in the 1930s there was a sense of alienation, bu
we examine the long history of Polish Jews, which Singer’s essay addres
see them embedded in and part of Polish culture and society. To be sure
connected to other Jews, had a real, or ritualized relationship with “Eret
the historic Jewish homeland, praying each Passover for “Next Year in
Jerusalem,” or contributing alms to Jews in the region, but Poland (or his
the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) was nonetheless their “homelan
Poland Jews were intrinsic to, and inseparable from, the country’s socia
political, and economic landscape. They perceived themselves as such a
were so perceived by their non-Jewish neighbors, even if each may have
harbored prejudice against the other. Jews in Poland were Jews, but the
were Polish Jews, and Poland was their homeland. Their distinct identity
did not necessarily imply “alienation,” even as they still connected to Jew
Jewish communities beyond the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and

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 published his commentary on the Shulḥan ‘Arukh, was exile from the “ho
community of Wilno.” Jews in Poland began to be identified as distinctly
in the mid-sixteenth century. The 1568 edition of a maḥzor, or a prayer
which was published in Venice, contains one of the first examples of an
reference to Polish minhag, or custom. This centuries-long history – the
perception of Poland (or the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) as “hom
why there has been so much pain and resentment about being rejected
many centuries as “strangers” by modern Polish Christian society, and w
was a deep-seated feeling of betrayal during the war.

However, Singer incorrectly projects the alienation and desperation of th

and 1940s onto the past. Historians have demonstrated clearly, as the l
Goldberg famously said, that there “is no history of Poland without the
the Jews, and no history of the Jews without the history of Poland.” And
history has painful parts, to be sure, with the most painful taking place
the twentieth century. But it is only an honest examination of this long
its fullness that can help heal some of the raw emotion still present whe
topic of Polish Jewish relations is raised. And that’s what was at stake w
Polish parliament passed the now infamous law that threatened to gag
despite assurances otherwise — discussions and research of this most r
past. The Polish law has now been modified, reducing the charges from
to civil. But the reason why this law came into place, and why it became
explosive issue, is that for a host of complex reasons, Polish society has
honestly dealt with the question of antisemitism within the roots and d
its being, or its persistence, especially after the war. Right after the war,
1946, and 1947, many intellectuals, writers, journalists, scholars, and po
surprised by the persistence of antisemitism even in the wake of the nea
destruction of Jews in Poland. Mieczysław Jastruń, a poet and essayist,
June 1945 noting that “antisemitism, deeply rooted in Poland before the
did not weaken — even though over three million Jews and those consid
be Jews were murdered by the Hitlerite inquisition.” And the writer Jerzy
Andrzejewski concurred in 1946 that “Polish antisemitism did not burn o
ruins and the conflagration of the ghettos.” Antisemitism was discussed
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 foreigners and strangers, hostile to Poland. The stereotypical representa
Polish Jewish history as a history of alienation helps no one. A nuanced
to that complex history forces us to confront the fact that there is no
purely Polish history. Jews have always been an intrinsic part of it, and s
history is not just a history of Jews. Indeed, examining the fullness of th
may raise what may be an uncomfortable question for some people: “H
Jewish Was Polish History?”

David Stromberg is a writer, translator, and literary scholar based in Jeru

Magda Teter is the Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies and Professor of Histo
Fordham University.

Read Isaac Bashevis newly translated piece, “Jews and Poles – Together f
Years but
Not Together,” here.

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Keywords: Europe, History, Judaism, Poland, Religion

Related Names: I.B. Singer

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