This special section of The Polish Review is devoted to the legacy of Jadwiga Maurer: teacher, literary scholar, and the author of remarkable short stories based on her experience as a Jewish child in German-occupied Poland and a displaced person in postwar Germany—all written from the perspective of an émigré in the United States.Among Polish émigré writers who debuted after World War II, Maurer had the rare distinction of being discovered by Mieczysław Grydzewski, the legendary editor of Wiadomości Literackie (published in Warsaw in 1924–1939) and Wiadomości (published in London in 1946–1981). During the interwar period, he championed the constellation of Skamander poets,1 published Witkacy (pen name of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz) and Witold Gombrowicz, and was the first to put Bruno Schulz in print. His authority in matters of literary value never diminished. In 1965, he accepted an article about Stanisław Przybyszewski sent by Jadwiga Maurer, a young assistant professor of Slavic languages and literature at UC Berkeley. Impressed by the originality of the author's talent, he would publish her short stories as well.The stories were collected in a volume entitled Liga ocalałych League of the saved, published by London's Polish Cultural Foundation in 1970. It won the prestigious Wiadomości award for “the most outstanding book by a Polish writer in exile.” League of the Saved and the subsequent extended collection, Podróż na Wybrzeże Dalmacji A voyage to the coast of Dalmatia, published by Oficyna Poetów i Malarzy in London in 1982, received excellent reviews in the émigré press. Reviewers stressed the documentary value of rare historical content in the displaced persons stories and unanimously praised the artistic quality of Maurer's prose, its low-key voice as suited to the existential condition of the Holocaust survivors—the saved, in her chosen word, which is also the word that Primo Levi uses in his renowned The Drowned and the Saved (1988). It was the condition in which they lingered in Germany (of all places!), robbed of identity, suspended between the annihilated past and the future whose reality they only pretended to believe. It commanded silence—silence about the unspeakable, of which Maurer's prose is a model example.Alas, neither the books nor the acclaim could reach Poland because of a strict communist ban on all émigré publications. When it was intermittently relaxed after 1956, attention would turn to writers of prewar fame, with scant interest in those who debuted in exile. And the tumultuous political events in Poland during the 1970s and 1980s further diminished interest in the literary life in Polish London, or New York, or Toronto. The trend moved the other way: Polish writers and artists vied now for recognition in the West, often with support from centers of émigré cultural activity, mainly the Paris-based Kultura. Once again, the winners of the Wiadomości award had to be satisfied with the loyalty of their peers among the Polish intelligentsia in the diaspora. Then at last, in 2002, Maurer's book of short stories came out in Poland, in her native Kielce. It was published by Oficyna Scriptum, whose sole editor Jerzy Daniel included the entire body—modest in size—of Maurer's fiction, adding archival photographs and his comprehensive biographical and analytical afterword. Entitled Sobowtóry: Opowiadania zebrane The doubles: The collected stories, the volume was well received both in print media and in radio and television interviews, even if reviewers did not look beyond descriptive features, as if uncertain of the intent of Maurer's uncommon project.A breakthrough analysis of Maurer's work appeared in Barbara Olech's magisterial study, published in 2001.2 Olech expanded on Daniel's point that Maurer's narratives avoid direct martyrology, focusing instead on a different kind of remembrance, that of the destruction of the human soul. Condemned to exist in “stopped time” (in Maurer's recurrent phrase), survivors are loath to refer to the time before, except in a scant, almost casual reminiscence: that someone has been through all the camps, or a woman says that she doesn't mind darkness because she got used to it during four years in a cellar, or that a pair of twins talks casually about how they were led to the gas chamber but someone pulled them out. Such multivalent vagueness places Maurer's literary legacy along with that of the Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld, her exact contemporary (one of the doubles!). Born in Czernovitz, he survived the war in the bloodlands of Eastern Europe and, like Maurer, approached the reality of the Shoah as if circling a black hole. Another comparison would be with W. G. Sebald, his labyrinthian project of saving the Holocaust's dead.We are opening this special section with Beata Dorosz's expert biographical essay, “Introducing Jadwiga Maurer's Biography as Writer and Scholar,” followed—as if in a dialogue between biography and autobiography—by an in-depth interview conducted by Justine Pas, where the reader will notice Maurer's disregard for conventional opinions about such topics as emigration, antisemitism, and national and cultural identity. Next, in “‘An Eroded Hebrew Inscription’: Survival, Identity and Exile in the Writing of Jadwiga Maurer,” Paweł Panas argues not only for inclusion of Maurer's work in the canon of Holocaust testimony but also for recognizing her significant contribution to twentieth-century autobiographical literature. Honoring Maurer's achievement as a literary scholar, Andrzej Karcz's article, “Critic and Experience: On Jadwiga Maurer's Reviews, Essays, and Polemics,” presents a comprehensive overview of her publications on Polish and American literature, and particularly on the work of writers belonging to the minorities.Along with the articles, we present translations of two of Maurer's short stories—the entire text of her most directly autobiographical “Biskup” The bishop, first published in League of the Saved in 1970, and an excerpt from “Podróż na Wybrzeże Dalmacji” A voyage to the coast of Dalmatia, originally published in her 1982 volume of the same title.3 The narrator of “The Bishop,” a long-time resident of Kansas like the author herself, recalls her wartime stay at a Franciscan convent in Slovakia. Aware of her hidden Jewish identity and the threat it entails, the preadolescent girl seeks double salvation in Christian faith, until she experiences a coming-of-age awakening in the climax of the story. It is only in this short story that Maurer introduces Holocaust horror: the rumblings of nighttime trains transporting Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. In “A Voyage to the Coast of Dalmatia,” the same author-narrator treats the topic of Polish antisemitism in a subtly humorous manner. Here, as in all her writing, fiction and nonfiction, Maurer challenges us to reconsider common assumptions about matters too complex to fit into facile patterns.Still untranslated into English, German, or Hebrew, Jadwiga Maurer, a Polish Jewish writer of “astonishing originality,” to quote Paweł Panas's article, remains unknown outside Poland. In Poland, the country she insisted on calling home, her distinct voice has yet to be fully recognized. We hope that our tribute to her legacy in this special section of The Polish Review may lead to incorporating her work into reading lists, anthologies, and curricula.
Joanna Rostropowicz Clark (Thu,) studied this question.