27 - A Voice from the Diaspora: Julian Stryjkowski

Summary

Pesach Stark, who was later to adopt the pseudonym Julian Stryjkowski, was born on 27 April 1905 in Galicia, that legendary land of Jews, Poles, Ukrainians and many other peoples, that country in which, according to Paul Celan ‘men and books lived':

There was a great deal of tolerance in Austria. It was possible for a Jew and a priest to meet and become friends; at school, Jews, Poles and Ukrainians sat on the same bench. The exasperation that followed did not yet exist. I do not mean that there was no antisemitism; there has always been anti-semitism, but it did not reveal itself so bitterly. There were friendships between Poles and Jews. Even more often, there were friendships between Poles and Jewish women. And this was the last and only time of well-being in that country. Under the wing of Emperor Franz Joseph.

Stryjkowski was born near Lwów (as it was called by the Poles, Lemberg by the Jews and Germans and Lviv by the Ukrainians) in a small town called Stryj from which he was to take his name. Austria-Hungary and Galicia in particular form the countryside and the ‘raison d'être’ of most of his works, which are marked with a nostalgia for that lost land, that far off and unrepeatable Atlantis, which clearly has the universal and unchangeable contours of epic countrysides. Stryjkowski became the bearer of the great myth of Middle Europe and of that lament which is for Lwów, Prague and Trieste.

Noch einmal, noch einmal, Father

my old Jew, recite

a passage from Genesis, from Deuteronomy

and also if you can, from the marvellous world

which disappears with you.

Trieste, Siidhahnhof, Sunday morning,

the Vienna express via Ljubljana.

Give me your little hand - you said

and you repeated it in German.

And I fervently followed you.

As the ‘Vienna express via Ljubljana’ was to Folkel, who came from Trieste, so the road to Duliby or the Hetmanskie Valleys at Lwów had for Stryjkowski all the obviousness of symbols and did not require explanation. ‘In Austeria Stryjkowski often evokes the road to Duliby, a village of thieves, just as if all his readers in every latitude knew perfectly well where the village of Duliby was and what it represented.