Authors Writing in Polish in Israel

In 1948, at the point when the State of Israel was founded, one-third of its residents originated from Poland.¹ In the years to come, a further 163,000 or so Polish Jews would arrive in their new homeland.² The dynamics of this immigration were defined to a large extent by the politics of communist Poland's government, which alternately closed and opened the borders for Jews who wished to emigrate.

For many of those who came from Poland to Israel, Polish was their mother tongue and remained so for the rest of their lives. As time passed, another significant proportion achieved a very high standard in Hebrew and so could participate in the Hebrew cultural life of modern Israel. However, often even they chose not to cut themselves off from their Polish cultural roots. Many still felt a need to create in the Polish language and to maintain a relationship with Polish literature.

There is no doubt that, sociologically speaking, Polish writing in Israel constitutes a specific entity. While traditional literary scholarship might define it as no more than a category of Polish literature, as Polish émigré literature is commonly treated, a sociological literary perspective demands a more specific account of the phenomenon.³ A comparison of the work discussed here with Polish émigré literature sensu stricto usually leads to a listing of significant differences. This includes the very important statements of Ryszard Löw and Jacek Leociak stressing the distinctiveness of Polish writing in Israel as a sociological phenomenon. Löw, chair of the Israel Association of Writers in Polish (Związek Autorów Piszących po Polsku w Izraelu), points to the specific attitudes of these authors, to their sense of national and cultural belonging, as the factor that is decisive for the character of their literature and for its distinctiveness:

Literary scholarship talks about two kinds of Polish literature: that written in the country itself and that created in various places of emigration. However, the Polish literature created in Israel is outside this division. The typical émigré author is characterized by nostalgia for the home country—basically, by a constantly expressed desire to return. But the authors here examine Polish reality and Poland itself in a different way. On many issues our view differs from that of other writers who live outside Poland … Here Israel, not Poland, is the homeland of the authors writing in Polish. And this is a free decision. Thus the national aspirations of Polish literature are alien to the writers here. If national aspirations exist at all amongst the authors writing in Polish, they are of a Jewish Israeli nature.⁴

Jacek Leociak, defining the cultural relations within which this writing operates, spoke of very similar categories:

The Polish literature that comes into existence 'on the streets of Tel Aviv' cannot be called émigré literature … The Polish Jews in Israel are Israelis. They are in their own country, for which in many cases they took up arms. To apply a metaphor from physics, the Polish-language literature written in Israel constitutes a third 'state of matter' alongside that written in Poland and in emigration. While maintaining the unique identity of the Polish Jewish experience, it places itself inseparably, through a community of language and cultural tradition, within Polish literature as a whole. While it is a close neighbour of Hebrew literature, developing in the same soil and within the same everyday cultural reality, it has different roots and draws on other than Hebrew sources. It is primarily a literature of the Diaspora, most often in the area of autobiographies and memoirs (before leaving for Israel, that is). In terms of language and subject matter, it belongs to Polish Jewish culture, which experienced a dazzling growth in Poland between the wars.⁵

If this Polish Jewish culture could be taken as the ground from which the phenomenon defined by Władysław Panas and Eugenia Prokop-Janiec as Polish Jewish literature grew, then the Polish writing in Israel should be accepted as a continuation of that literature. This is precisely...