Obywatel Jidyszlandu : rzecz o żydowskich komunistach w Polsce

Nalewajko-Kulikov, Joanna (1976– )

doi:978-83-7543-064-6

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Obywatel Jidyszlandu : rzecz o żydowskich komunistach w Polsce

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Title: Obywatel Jidyszlandu : rzecz o żydowskich komunistach w Polsce

Abstract:

A saying that is often quoted in Poland in relation to Jewish communists or communists of Jewish origin goes that “a Jewish communist is not Jewish anymore”. This is true concerning those Jews who considered themselves Polish communists and who worked mostly in a non-Jewish environment. However, some Jews who joined the communist party in the interwar period never denied their Jewishness. On the contrary, they lived and worked on the so-called “Jewish street”. They were not a large group, but their influence on the Polish Jewish community was inversely proportional to their number. A good example of such a Jewish communist is a Yiddish writer and activist David Sfard. Born at the beginning of the 20th century in a rabbi’s family in Volhynia (then in the Russian Empire), he received at first a traditional religious education, but after World War I he entered a secular Polish-Jewish gymnasium in Lutsk. The Polish-Soviet war of 1920 was his first meeting with the communist ideology brought to Volhynia by the Red Army. Later he studied philosophy in Warsaw and eventually received his PhD in philosophy from the university in Nancy, France. Having returned to Warsaw, he joined in 1933 the illegal Communist Party of Poland and became active in Yiddish literary circles, including the literary journal “Literarishe Tribune” (1932–1933), the crypto-communist daily “Fraynd” (1934–1935) and the famous Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists at Tlomatske 13. In 1939, at the outbreak of World War II, he escaped to the Soviet-occupied Białystok where again he worked in the Yiddish newspaper “Bialistoker Shtern”. After the Nazis attacked the USSR in 1941, he was evacuated with other Jewish writers to Alma-Ata (Kazakhstan). When he got to Moscow in 1944, he co-founded the Organizing Committee of Polish Jews at the Polish Patriots’ Union (ZPP), an organization that kept in close touch with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. As its vice-chairman and later chairman, he coordinated the repatriation of Polish Jews to Poland and came back himself in 1946, finally settling down in Warsaw. The first-hand experience of the Soviet reality did not put off neither him, nor his fellows from the Jewish faction of the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR). On the contrary, they believed that it would allow them to build the right form of communism in liberated Poland. Their political vision of a particular Polish way to communism was labeled as nusekh Poyln, or “the Polish variant”, and its key element was Yiddish culture. [...] While David Sfard is the main hero of this book, much emphasis has also been given to his Jewish communist fellows, such as David Rikhter, Shimen Zachariasz, Hersh Smolar, Bernard Mark and Binem Heller. The whole community of Jewish communists was shown against the background of history of Jews in Eastern Europe. This book is a panorama of an individual Jewish fate in the 20 th century, a fate that became symbolic for a whole generation – the last citizens of Yiddishland.