Recalling (the Jewishness of) Seweryn Pollak
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31261/NoZ.2019.05.10Keywords:
Seweryn Pollak, Grzegorz Pollak, Wanda Grodzieńska, poetry, Jewish Identity, The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Circle of Polish Philology Students of the University of WarsawAbstract
This article focuses on Seweryn Pollak’s poetry, despite him being known first and foremost as an essayist and translator. Although meeting mixed and negative reviews (including his own), Pollak’s poetry is not only a space where personal and fascinating accounts, memories, conversations with the loved ones, and farewells collide, but also the precise genre which the author chooses to talk of his Jewish ancestry, which is left unmentioned in his narrative works, including those addressed to his family and friends. Among Pollak’s poems, there are texts devoted to the Shoah that actualise the sense of danger and alienation; these painful recollections, although dictated by fear, happen to be the poems where self-reflection becomes sharp and thorough, while
the poetic persona – predominant.
Searching for an insightful perspective on Pollak and his work, this article turns to his captivating handwritten texts with a special emphasis put on the collections of letters exchanged between him and his wife, Wanda Grodzieńska.
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