Anna Foltyniak
“INTELLECTUAL JEWISH-POLISHNESS” AND THE MEMORY OF EXTERMINATION. JEWISH MOTIVES IN KAZIMIERZ BRANDYS’S WRITING
The text is an attempt at reading Kazimierz Brandys’s prose from the perspective of two Jewish motives present in it. The considerations, based on analyses of fragments of the text, concentrate on the traces of Jewish origin in Brandys’s autobiographical discourse. They also focus on Brandys’s construction of protagonists, trying to find a place for a Jewish tradition in the shaping of a subjective self both in the “I” in the text and in the biographies he constructed. The self is based on a difficult coexistence of the sense of Polishness and of belonging to Polish intelligence alongside the Jewish nation. The latter is built mainly of the negative, difficult experience. What links Brandys with the Jewish nation is the stigmata, persecution and humiliation. A memorable experience in thus formulated sense of the national self is the Holocaust, and a Brandys-like protagonist construction: a witness, who avoided extermination, but was forced to see the suffering of others. This, in turn, resulted in his painful feeling of guilt and condemned to constant returns in his memory to the difficult experience of war.