“Each Poet Is a Jew with a Yellow Patch.” Two Voices about Woroszylski’s Vision of Baczyński

Abstract

“Each poet is a Jew with a yellow patch”. Two voices about Woroszylski’s vision of Baczyński

The article is a multicontextual interpretation of a poem by Wiktor Woroszylski entitled Krzysztof Kamil B., which was published for the first time in the 1988 volume entitled W poszukiwaniu utraconego ciepła i inne wiersze. The work indicates one of the most distinguished Polish poets of the war generation, Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, who died at the age of twenty‑three during the Warsaw Uprising. The poem by Woroszylski who was six years his junior has to do with the controversial question about the Jewish roots of the author of Elegia o chłopcu polskim (his mother, Stefania Baczyńska, had a Jewish background and was an assimilated, Catholic convert). The article firstly refers to various studies upon this subject which were initiated in 1979 by Józef Lewandowski’s essay. The studies were then engaged by a number of researchers and critics in the last decade of the 20th c. and at the beginning of the 21st c. They deliberate among other things whether this fact of the poet’s biography actually influenced his works. The authors demonstrate the manner in which Woroszylski reveals and at the same time nullifies the anti‑Semitic overtones which such speculations feature, the attempts at a more or less categorical determination of someone’s national affiliation. For an important context for the interpretation of the poem Krzysztof Kamil B. is furnished by its motto – an initial phrase of a famous statement by Marina Tsvetaeva, whose culminating point that “all poets are Jews” is placed by Woroszylski at the very end of his work, where he paraphrases these words.

Key words: antisemitism, Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, Marina Tsvetaeva, Wiktor Woroszylski, Holocaust