„Klin” Tuwima: strategie przeżycia polsko-żydowskiego poety

• Authors: Tomassucci, Giovanna

Title variants

PL

Tuwim’s Wedge: “Survival Strategies” of a Polish-Jewish Poet

Abstracts

EN

Tuwim’s approach to the “Jewish question” has already been analyzed by Polish and foreign scholars. The article is intended to consider some “survival strategies” of the Polish poet from a slightly different angle. In Poland, in the period between the wars Jewish writers were persuaded to accept total polonization and a rejection of their ethnic identity; yet, at the same time they often suffered a rejection from the circles of Polish artists. Any attempt of highlighting their Jewish identity or even a slight interest in Jewish culture incited brutal Jew-bashings. Tuwim considered his being a Polish Jew not only as a fact to be proud of, but also as an opportunity for engaging with self-criticism. He painfully felt the Jewish question as “a powerful wedge cleaving [his own] worldview”. However, like many other Polish- Jewish writers he masked its enduring presence in his own psyche, constructing his public persona through a process of self-fashioning. This paper tries to follow the traces of this “wedge” in Tuwim’s works: from poems supposedly having nothing to do with the “Jewish question”, to encrypted allusions to the great Yiddish writers, from his relentless questioning of all forms of intolerance and nationalist rhetoric, to his conviction that a new poetic language could “reform the world” and become a homeland for all readers regardless of their nationality.

Keywords

EN

Julian Tuwim; Jewish identity; Polish-Jewish poet; polonisation; assimilation; antisemitism; "self-fashioning"

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Łódzki. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Journal: Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Litteraria Polonica
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 26
• Issue: 4

Dates

published

2014

Contributors

author

Tomassucci, Giovanna

other

Wydział Filologii, Literatury i Lingwistyki, Uniwersytet w Pizie, Włochy (Dipartimento di Filologia, Letteratura e Linguistica, Università di Pisa, Palazzo Matteucci, Piazza Torricelli 2, 56126 Pisa, Italia)

other

Giovanna Tomassucci – profesor polonistyki na Uniwersytecie w Pizie (Dipartimento di Letteratura, Filologia e Linguistica), członek jego Centro Interdipartimentale di Studi Ebraici (C.I.S.E [Ośrodek Badań nad Historią i Kultura Żydów]). Po studiach slawistycznych we Florencji uzyskała doktorat z polonistyki w 1989 roku na Uniwersytecie „La Sapienza” w Rzymie. Jej dorobek naukowy obejmuje publikacje z zakresu polskiego renesansu, baroku, romantyzmu, Młodej Polski i literatury XX–XXI wieku oraz twórczości polskich pisarzy żydowskiego pochodzenia. Tłumaczyła St.I. Witkiewicza, A. Sterna, J. Kurka, J. Tuwima, T. Borowskiego, T. Kantora, K. B randysa, H. Krall, D. M asłowską i wiersze wielu polskich współczesnych poetów

other

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Identifiers

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/11089/12029