Ignaz Friedman: Romantic Master Pianist

2 From Poland

9 2 From Poland . . . a desperate desire to communicate certain information to the Western reader, to explain what it meant to come from that other part of Europe, the worst part, the sort of historical complications a person from there has to experience. Czeslaw Milosz, describing an abandoned sequel to Native Realm As a pianist, Friedman came to represent the musical culture of Vienna, Berlin, and, to a lesser extent, Poland, the land of his origins, which had imposed upon him the dual status of Pole and Jew, a status well worth considering. He was cast as a resented outsider; the Austro-Hungarian government and popular anti-Semitism were reminders of where power resided. His spoken Polish was elegant, infused with archaisms inspired by romantics such as Mickiewicz. Though an ardent supporter of Polish autonomy, Friedman never considered returning to live in Poland after it had gained independence. When Lydia one day asked her father’s Kraków friend Kogut Goldman how their lives had been “over there,” he told her, “You can’t imagine what a miserable surrounding we grew up in and how happy we were to come out of this, and for me to marry my wife and for your Papa to marry.” Poland evoked poverty and anti-Semitism in Friedman’s mind, yet provided his family’s cultural base. When Lydia once addressed her father as tate-leben (“father dear”), Yiddish words she had picked up, he icily 10 · Ignaz Friedman withdrew. Friedman’s mother Salcia (Salomea) once came up from Kraków to visit them in Berlin, greatly impressing Lydia by creating imaginative and ornate costumes from tablecloths for one of Lydia’s birthday parties . During such rare encounters with her grandmother, they played card games; she had inherited her father’s passion for them. They played into the early morning hours, talking all the while, yet little was ever said of Salcia’s world, in which Friedman’s Polish identity had been shaped. Rather than being ecstatic at having won their long-sought independence , the generation emerging after Friedman—the postwar writers and philosophers constituting free Poland’s first avant-garde—saw themselves as outcasts, damaged by their proximity to Polish society. Poland’s neighbor Russia also distressed them. Dmitri Merezhkovsky said, “Russia is a woman, but she never had a husband. She was merely raped by Tatars, Czars, and Bolsheviks. The only husband for Russia was Poland, but Poland was too weak.”1 (The Russian intelligentsia still snubs Polish culture as beneath it.) Pushkin expressed the characteristic fatalism of Slavic nations in a letter to Chaadayev (whose Philosophical Letters earned him both exile and a declaration of insanity by the tsar) that depicted Russia as the ultimate outcast, isolated and abandoned by the West: There is no doubt that the Schism separated us from the rest of Europe and that we have not participated in any of the great occurrences which have agitated it. But we have had our own special mission. Russia, in its immense expanse, was what absorbed the Mongol conquest. The Tatars did not dare to cross our western frontiers and leave us to their rear. They withdrew to their deserts, and Christian civilization was saved. For this purpose we were obliged to have a life completely apart, one which though leaving us Christians left us such complete strangers to the Christian world that our martyrdom did not provide any distraction to the energetic development of Catholic Europe.2 Poland, a cultural and physical doormat situated between cerebral yet self-destructive Russia and militaristic Prussia, had been partitioned. Parts of Silesia were ruled by Germany, Friedman’s native Galicia was held by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the rest was governed by tsarist Russia . Foreign occupation led to a spirit that Milosz considered defining and innate: “The air in Poland is always oppressive; one breathes in elements of melancholy there that constrict the heart, and one always has the feeling that life is not completely real: hence the constant yen to drink vodka in the hope that an inaccessible normality will be restored.”3 From Poland · 11 This gloom influenced not only Milosz, but also Poland’s greatest twen­ tieth-century writers: Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) and Witold Gombrowicz (1904–69). Schulz may have identified too closely with his own fiction’s “mythicization of reality.”4 He lost his life while procrastinating over abandoning his family, and his...