11 - Trends in the Literary Perception of Jews in Modern Polish Fiction

Summary

TOWARD LITERARY EMANCIPATION OF THE JEW. CLASSICIST AND ROMANTIC TRADITIONS

In the early 1840s Michat Grabowski, a conservative literary critic, deplored a Polish writer's ‘serious’ that is, non-comical that is, noncomical, treatment of his Jewish characters. Grabowski blamed the romantics, against whom he campaigned on a number of ideological fronts, for much of this new ‘seriousness’ in depicting the Jewish world. Specifically, he linked this new approach to the figure of Jankiel in Adam Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz. Although Grabowski devoted only limited space to comments on Polish literary perceptions of the Jews, he was in fact responding to a major socio-literary trend.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the social horizons of Polish literature were rapidly widening. This process expressed itself in the massive introduction of lower-class themes which were until then regarded unfit for artistic treatment. The literary advancement of peasant, bourgeois, Jewish and other plebeian motifs was accompanied by the gradual abandonment of comicality as the standard approach to non-noble characters. The appearance of ‘serious’ Jewish characters in non-satirical contexts, an approach offensive to Grabowski's understanding of literature, echoed the emergence of new literary perceptions of non-noble groups in Polish society.

In other words, the classicist convention in depicting social reality was crumbling. The Jew's place in this convention was determined by the role which classicist aesthetics assigned to literary characters in general. Treating them as mutations of a basically unchangeable ‘human nature’, classicist writers credited fictional figures with features which, while universal, were ‘typical’ of groups rather than individuals. As an element in the classicist panoply of plebeian types, the Jew was to remain on the periphery of high culture. The collective features which he personified such as greed, shrewdness and social exclusivism made him instrumental in the classicists’ selective criticism of the basically immutable social order. Although this enlightened didacticism became less pronounced in the following period, the comical Jewish villain established himself as a stock figure in Polish literature and folklore.

Grabowski was correct in blaming the romantics for altering this classicist pattern. They did so by establishing a link between the degradation of the contemporary Jew and the glory of his biblical ancestors. The biblical connection increased the dramatic potential of Jewish characters and cleared the way for their selective literary ‘rehabilitation’.