Between Wars, Between Identities II - Why Are We Here?

Illustration credit: Georgia Ryan

In his column ‘Between Wars, Between Identities’, Sam Rubinstein explores key issues of early twentieth-century Ashkenazi Jewish poetry, including antisemitism in Eastern Europe prior to the Holocaust, literary debates over the use of local vernaculars in Jewish poetry and expression, and Jewish nationalism and the beginnings of the Zionist movement. In his second column, he takes a look at expressions of displacement and a search for belonging in the poetry of Maurycy Szymel.

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Well, why are we here? – ‘we’ as in Jews and ‘here’ as in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. What are we, Levantine Semites, with our own rituals and traditions, doing in a land of Catholic Slavs? This feeling of unbelonging, of restlessness in diaspora, of alienation in a foreign land – this is the essence of diaspora Jewishness. With a Jewish state in Palestine still little more than a dream, Jewishness in the early twentieth century was, even before the brutality of the Holocaust, paralysed in constant mourning for the loss of a homeland yet to be recovered.

‘Ale skad my tutaj – powiedz dziadku – dlaczego?’ (‘Why are we here? Tell me, grandfather – why?’), a young boy asks in Maurycy Szymel’s poem, Zima w moim domu (‘Winter in my House’). This interaction, for Szymel, a Polish-Jewish poet who I discussed in my last column for the Cambridge Language Collective, is an experience common to all Jews in diaspora: the realisation of being in some sense different from other people, and, with that realisation, a loss of innocence. This moment came rather late for me, perhaps too late, sequestered as I was at a Jewish primary school in East Finchley, unaware that the things I considered normal were actually fairly unusual. The boy in Szymel’s poem is at once confronted by a sense of unbelonging, and, with it, the basic fact of his Jewish identity:

‘Bo przecież w Biblii nie pada śnieg. Dziadku, cóż to się z nami stało?
Wiem już, wiem; to my, naismutniejsi ludzie świata.
Czapę masz biała i brodę biała
I nie wiem nawet, czy jesteś Mikołaj czy Matatiasz.’

(‘It doesn’t snow in the Bible. Grandpa, what happened to us?
I know, I know. It is us, the saddest people in the world.
You have a white hat and a white beard,
And I don’t even know if you are Santa Claus or Mattathias.’)

So, the boy experiences a jolting uprootedness, and uncovers the bitter truth that has been hidden from him. He knows, and has been taught to know, that his true home is the Promised Land. He also knows from scripture that it doesn’t snow there. And yet, he knows from his own experiences that it does snow in Poland; and so he infers, as Jewish children in diaspora have long done, that he is away from home, and that his people are consequently the ‘saddest in the world’.

Yet, at the same time, he recognises that Jews are, at least superficially, absorbing the culture that surrounds them, such that he cannot tell if his grandfather is ‘Santa Claus or Mattathias’. Mattathias was the patriarch of the Maccabee clan, the warrior-priests who shook off the yoke of Seleucid domination in second-century BC Judea (their victories are celebrated annually at Channukah). The Maccabees directed their ire not only towards their foreign persecutor, King Antiochus, but to Hellenised, ‘assimilated’, Jews. Although the Maccabees managed to defend ‘Judaism’ from Hellenic ‘pollution’, their successors were unable to prevent Jews like the boy’s grandfather from becoming so assimilated that they look like a symbol not of Channukah but of Christmas, Santa Claus.

Szymel is a thoroughly pessimistic, miserable poet – but this was a warranted response to his times. In Psalm, he laments yet again that Jews are ‘beaten’ by the world: ‘Wiec świat nas bije, bije, bije’ (‘So the world beats us, beats, beats…’). He sees the fact of Jewish presence in Europe, rather than ‘Great Zion’, as a tragic humiliation, the pivotal misfortune of Jewish history:

‘A myśmy nie po to pozostawili Syjon wyniosły
I nie po to z najwyższych zeszliśmy gór,
By handlować na brudnych ulicach Europy.’

(‘We didn’t leave Great Zion
and walk down from the highest mountains
to trade in dirty European cities.’)

His poetry encapsulates a popular tradition within early twentieth-century Zionism that understood the Jewish aspiration to statehood in unmistakably gendered terms. The dispersal of the Jews throughout the nations represented a sort of emasculation (what’s the point of a people without a state?): Jews, Szymel suggests, ought to assert themselves by fighting for their national independence and for their own destiny as a people, after the model of Mattathias. His poem Już nie będę mały (I Won’t Be Small Anymore) functions as a sort of call-to-arms for Jews in the diaspora:

‘Nie będę się liczył
Z upałem, chamsinem –
Będę budowniczym
Nowej Palestyny.
Będę robociarzem,
W słońcu się opalę,
Bo o Tobie marzę
Nowe Jeruzalem.’

(‘I won’t bother
with heat or desert wind.
I will be an architect
of the New Palestine.
I will be a worker
and tan in the sun
because I dream about
the New Jerusalem.’)

The cruelty of diaspora, in Szymel’s view, resides in the fact that it makes Jews submissive, their very survival dependent on the goodwill of the indigenous populations that surround them. The creation of a ‘Nowej Palestyny’ (‘New Palestine’), he suggests, is essential to Jewish freedom, empowerment, to ‘not feeling small’. He longs for the day when his skin will tan and he will resemble less northern Europeans like Santa Claus and more his Middle Eastern ancestors like Mattathias. In Antysemici (Antisemites) he observes that Jews are racialised by their oppressors, perceived as ‘czarny’ (‘dark’), even if superficially they are as white as Santa Claus. In Na dobranoc (For Goodnight) he says to an imagined Slavic interlocutor, ‘Odpływamy: ty na zachód, j ana wschód’ (‘We swim apart: you to the west, I to the east’). But the ‘east’ is where he belongs. Szymel sees his Zionism not as white, European settler-colonialism, but a long-delayed and long-frustrated solution to the tragedy of diaspora Jewishness, a return of a people to their home. He would perhaps find comfort in the fact that many Jews today no longer need to constantly ask themselves ‘Why are we here?’.