The Long Path to Becoming a Writer: Fulian Stryjkowski as Translator and Reviewer

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If we agree that the twentieth century began with the revolution of 1905, then the hero of this essay was born exactly at the beginning of the century and lived practically to its conclusion. He died in Warsaw, as a witness to the century, having lived ninety-one years, and he left a legacy of tales on the fate of the Jews of Galicia. Alongside Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Grigory Kanovich, he is one of the greatest prose writers to have described the world of the shtetl.

Julian Stryjkowski—for he is the author in question—published his first books late: it was only after the Second World War, in the 1950s, that he published two important and radically contrasting novels. One is the weak, socialist realist Bieg do Fragalà ('The Race to Fragalà'), a story of famine among Calabrian peasants, of unrequited love, and of the slow path to communism; the other is the celebrated Głosy w ciemności ('Voices in the Darkness'), a bitter and nostalgic story of a small Galician town at the beginning of the century, with its poverty, grime, longings, and worries.¹ The following decade witnessed the publication of a collection of extraordinary, existential short stories—complex narratives on loneliness, the decline of feeling, and Jewish identity—in a volume with the telling title Imię własne ('One's Own Name');² and Austeria ('The Inn'), a novel apocalyptic in its tenor, in the form of a classical drama (it was later adapted for the screen by Jerzy Kawalerowicz).³ In the 1970s Stryjkowski published Sen Azrila ('Azril's Dream'), a superb, dreamlike story about the search for lost time, and Przybysz z Narbony ('A Visitor from Narbonne'), a novel full of pathos and modelled somewhat upon a western. Against the historical background of the struggle against the Spanish Inquisition, the narrative illustrates the modern problem of whether a desperate struggle for national dignity has any sense.⁴ In the next decade his most artistically interesting prose work was the stylistically refined Tommaso del Cavaliere, about the great artist Michelangelo; it deals with the failure to find fulfilment in life and art.⁵ His so-called biblical triptych was published in the period after martial law; less accomplished artistically, it follows the stories of the national heroes and saviours Moses, David, and Judas Maccabeus.⁶ If we stretch the chronology a little, we might say that the 1980s encompassed the period when Stryjkowski settled accounts with the past, his struggle with his infatuation with communism constituting the theme of two books: Wielki strach ('The Great Fear') of 1980, and To samo, ale inaczej ('The Same but Differently') of 1990.⁷ Before his death Stryjkowski was able to publish two important novellas: one a quasi-kabbalistic, hasidic morality play entitled Sarna; albo, Rozmowa Szatana z chłopcem, aniołem i Lucyferem ('A Deer; or, Satan's Conversation with a Boy, an Angel, and Lucifer'), the other Milczenie ('Silence'), which had a bold yet subtle homoerotic theme.⁸ He did not have enough time for the novel he dreamed of writing on the 'heretic' Spinoza.

The little boy Pesach Stark—as he was called before he assumed the name Julian Stryjkowski—knew he would be a writer. Did he guess that he would be a Polish writer? His path to becoming an author was neither straightforward nor short. To all intents and purposes he did not make his debut as a recognized writer of fiction until he was in his fifties. His first efforts with the pen were rather as a translator and reviewer, primarily when he was a university student at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s. This essay is an attempt to reconstruct the unknown oeuvre of Pesach Stark vel Julian Stryjkowski as a translator, before he became a renowned Polish writer.

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Of the pre-war efforts of Julian Stryjkowski as a writer and reviewer we actually know only as much as he himself was inclined to inform us of. Essentially...