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9 The Role of Polish Language and Literature in Bashevis’s Fiction Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska When Oyzer-Heszl (Heshl), the protagonist of Di familye mushkat (The Family Moskat), first visits Hadassah in her room, he looks at her bookshelf and notices a number of Polish books, among others Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz and Stanislaw Przybyszewski’s The Outcry, as well as a thick novel entitled Pharaoh.1 The name of the author of this novel is not mentioned, presumably to indicate that Oyzer-Heszl and perhaps indirectly Bashevis as well are not familiar with this particular work. Oyzer-Heszl declares that he wants to read all these books, and indeed he does read some of them, as we learn later. But we never find out whether he read Pharaoh or any other books written by its author, Boleslaw Prus, the bestknown positivist Polish writer, famous for his detailed depictions of Warsaw and his creation of compelling characters, including Jews. Does Bashevis purposely distance himself from this writer, whose works come naturally to mind to Polish readers of Bashevis’s novels set in nineteenth-century Warsaw, in order to deflect attention from any possible parallels that might exist between them, or perhaps even to conceal some affinities? When Bashevis received the Nobel Prize in , a number of Polish critics and journalists tried to present him as a Polish writer. This was not the case with Polish critics alone. Even twoyears later, when Czeslaw Milosz received the Nobel Prize in , the award was characterized in the London Times as the fourth Nobel Prize in Literature for Poland, after Henryk Sienkiewicz, Wladyslaw Reymont, and Bashevis .2 Bashevis himself claimed that if the Poles wanted to consider him a PolishJewish writer, he did not mind being so labeled. In a letter to his friend Maria Unger, he wrote: In America Poles consider me as one of their writers; that’s how I was described in one of the pamphlets published here. I consider myself a Jewish writer writing in Yiddish, an American writer, and also a Polish writer, as  I write almost exclusively about Poland and I know Poland best. It’s high time people in Poland learned that they have their writer in America.3 This letter, written at a timewhen Bashevis was completely unknown in Poland, shows that he cared about his popularity there. When Bashevis’s works finally appeared in the country of his birth, there were speculations in Poland about how well he knew the Polish language and how well read he was in Polish literature. There arevarious opinions, ranging from thosewho express admiration for Bashevis ’s excellent command of Polish to those who claim that he did not know it at all.4 Bashevis himself was inconsistent in his own estimation of his knowledge of Polish. It is not necessary to speculate on this matter. Depending on the criteria adopted, Bashevis’s knowledge of Polish could be considered either very good, taking into account the fact that he wrote exclusively in Yiddish and that he left Poland as a young man, or very poor, taking into account the fact that he spent as many as thirty-one years of his life in Poland. Bashevis mentioned on various occasions that he learned Polish quite late, when he was already an adult, and that he read some secular literature in Polish, including not only original works written in Polish but also translations into Polish from other languages. What is certain is that Polish was necessary for Bashevis in his dailyexistencewhile he lived in Poland and served him as a helpful tool in rendering the speech of Poles and assimilated Jews in his own later fiction. A number of critics have noticed a striking resemblance between Der hoyf (The Manor and The Estate) and works by Polish positivist writers, especially Boleslaw Prus. A superficial acquaintance with Bashevis’s work, coupled with ignorance of Yiddish literature and support from Bashevis’s rhetorical statements, has led commentators to far-fetched conclusions. Some critics and readers in Poland believe that Bashevis knew Polish literature very well and patterned his works on it. Most of these assertions, however, no matter how flattering they may be for Polish literature , are not well founded. Despite seeming similarities, Bashevis’s Polish characters are created from a completely different perspective, usually a critical one, which contrasts strongly with the patriotically heroic point of view characteristic of many Polish authors. Moreover, this perspective not only is...

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