Anna Frajlich: Departures, Returns, Memory

Abstract

Shakespeare's plays dominated the sixteenth century, with martyrs clamoring for justice and rehabilitation, and villains longing for cleansing; life's great circus exposed the powerlessness of innocence. In The Ghost of Shakespeare, Anna Frajlich reminds us that the English writer's ghost hovers today still. Her essays about Polish and continental European literature and poetry look at the impact of the human tragedies wrought by wars, revolutions, ideologies, genocide, and exile, dating from the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 and World Wars I and II to the Holocaust and the Cold War; she also pays special attention to issues of émigré literature during and after the Cold War. Her essays address the impact of history on shaping émigré writers and poets, including herself. The network she created through her writings and contacts with émigré Polish writers helped her to appreciate their plight and in turn understand her own. Through the years, her study of the pain of exile deepened her self-defense mechanisms, adaptation, self-assertiveness, and perspective; this in turn enabled her to use these emotions creatively.The Ghost of Shakespeare contains twenty-eight essays in four sections, two of which are devoted to poetry, one to prose, and one to Frajlich's personal life journey. Since Frajlich's publications include at least 325 entries in addition to more than two dozen book chapters and numerous paper presentations at conferences, what guided the choices made by editor Ronald Meyer? Working with Frajlich, he eliminated her journalism pieces such as book reviews, interviews, and short essays in order to concentrate primarily on scholarly essays and talks, most of which are comparative by nature. These essays, among which are eleven book chapters, draw on Frajlich's research and writing after 1980. All except the essay on Bronisław Przyłuski were published after the mid-1980s and represent authors about whom she began to lecture and write much earlier and into whose community of exiled authors she was integrated immediately after her arrival in the United States in 1970.The complex weave of The Ghost of Shakespeare exhibits multiple connections between the Polish and English texts of the articles as well as between their Polish, Western European, and American publications in a ballet between exile and return. Frajlich wrote in English the texts to be read in the United States or Western Europe at symposia, conferences, presentations to university students or to foreign cultural institutes (Belgium, Italy, Romania). Thirteen of the book's articles fall in that category, including three of the four reflective essays concluding each part of the book. Nine of the articles appear here for the first time, and only three articles were translated from Polish. Some of the articles were published in Polish or in English in Poland, at least one was translated into Polish from its first English publication. This modest attempt at statistics only confirms the tight interaction of Frajlich's literary life between East and West, and the richness of her contributions to both cultures. It may be interesting to note that it was longtime editor of Wiadomości Literackie and Frajlich's friend Stefania Kossowska who first urged her to consider publishing in Poland after the end of the Cold War.Meyer organized The Ghost of Shakespeare around four themes that are predominant in Frajlich's life work: poetry, prose, Russian Symbolist poetry, and her own poetry. Spanning Frajlich's entire life dynamic, this structure evokes the poetic departures and returns of her favorite authors as well as her own physical, emotional, and poetic departure from and return to Poland. Two fellow poets and writers about whom she wrote often are Henryk Grynberg and Czesław Miłosz, the latter aptly writing to her in the early 1980s that her poetry was in constant motion, coming and going between landscapes, emotions, and people. Thus, the relational process of Frajlich's writing, her lifetime weave of themes and authors, make the scholarly essays in The Ghost of Shakespeare the apex of the vast web of her journalistic and other writings. This relational process goes beyond her keen attention to the current émigré literary scene, however, for it extends to earlier writers such as Józef Wittlin, Bruno Schulz, Jerzy Ficowski, and Russian Symbolist poets.“The Ghost of Shakespeare” is the title of one of Frajlich's essays on Wisława Szymborska, in which Frajlich explains that Polish writers such as Szymborska and Shakespeare expert Jan Kott went through a cleansing process from Marxism and Communism after 1956. Like many Polish writers, they had been members of the Communist Party until 1956, when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's revelations brought about soul-cleansing from the excesses of Stalinism and began the rehabilitation of past victims of cultural purges. Frajlich builds here on Jan Kott's seminal 1957 essay “Shakespeare, Our Contemporary,” followed by his book by the same title (published in 1961). Both works explained the post-Stalinist writers’ guilt as similar to Shakespearean characters’ attempts to cleanse themselves from a major sin. This attempt to liberate oneself from guilt is visible in Szymborska's 1957 poem “Rehabilitation,” and in later interviews with and letters to Frajlich, in which she admitted her shame not only about the Stalinist period in Poland's cultural life, but about the anti-Semitic campaigns and violence of 1968–1969. Shakespeare's insight into the human soul thus became for Frajlich a prism through which she continues to analyze Polish literature. According to her, it is a paradigm that remains important today.Shakespearian motifs are many in post-1956 Polish literature. The writers’ purging included unmasking the absurd, which Szymborska felt was the most important aspect of reality. Graveyard scenes as those found in Hamlet became a metaphor for cleansing and re-burial, a notion not lost on Grynberg who also searched for his father's grave and named one of his characters “Hamlet.” Anna Frajlich, who always scrupulously cites the works of others, is proud of several of her original thoughts on the subject of Shakespearean themes. Michał Choromański used “the reverse structure of Othello to write his novel” before 1939. And Szymborska's poem “Four in the Morning” and Jan Kott's essay “Shakespeare Our Contemporary,” which appeared almost simultaneously in 1957, used the only exact time noted in Shakespeare's tragedies to evoke the night terrors of World War II as well as the time between night and dawn when fateful decisions are often made. The concept of “four in the morning” thus encapsulates Anna Frajlich's travails as well as those of her fellow writers and her own family throughout the twentieth century.The relationship between “modernism” and “classicism” is another theme that undergirds Frajlich's essays. Each of the authors featured in The Ghost of Shakespeare tied modernism to classicism in a different way, but their search for uniting past and present is evident. All of them had their literary production interrupted by history during the fractured Polish twentieth century. Their modernity cannot be understood apart from its post-fracture dimension, be it its flight into the unknown for the interwar generation, or a loss of identity and language for the post-1945, 1968, and 1981 exiles. Their modernism stands in contrast to classical writers of the nineteenth century who also lived through exile and whose examples helped modern poets anchor their experience of return and identity recovery into a broad, collective memory. Therefore, concludes Frajlich in one of her most original findings, modernism is a relative concept which includes reconciling classical and avant-garde threads.The five poets of the first part of the book represent each a chapter of departure/modernity and return/tradition in Polish literature: Czesław Miłosz's two exiles, from Wilno in 1937 and from Poland in 1951, and his focus on the landscape of return; the exile modernism of Bronisław Przyłuski; and the Shakespearean themes in the poetry of Zbigniew Herbert and Szymborska. Vasyl Makhno, a Polonophile Ukrainian poet living in the United States of his own free will and for whom foreignness is fascinating, provides the “control group” of a younger generation. The four novelists of the second part of the book, Józef Wittlin, Bruno Schulz, Grynberg, and Jerzy Ficowski, sought deep roots in the past as writers and poets. The three Russian symbolists in the third part of the book, Valery Bryusov, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, and Vasily Komarovsky, painted the Russo-Japanese war in Roman costumes.Frajlich amply demonstrates this connectedness in her own poetic work, ceaselessly affirming the symbiotic connectedness of departure and return and the importance of memory. The Ghost of Shakespeare is a tribute to her parents to whom she dedicates the book. Not only did they encourage her to write poetry and to find her voice, but their experiences helped her process her own trauma, and own her childhood as well as her long genealogical heritage, as she explains in the section entitled “On Writing and Exile.” Her deepest transformation came with her understanding of her parents’ exile. They experienced the Great War as children, World War II as young adults, and emigration to the United States in their retirement—the three major traumas experienced by the writers Frajlich spent her lifetime analyzing. Realizing this synapse gives a broad relevance to the historical fractures of the twentieth century and suggests that, albeit in different settings and forms, connectedness dwells within each of us and shapes us. Becoming aware of it has most certainly given Frajlich's poetry a timeless quality that leaves only “the pure light of the words,” in the words of 1988 Neustadt Prize recipient Raja Rao.“On Writing and Exile,” the fourth and final part of The Ghost of Shakespeare, collects Anna Frajlich's autobiographical texts. Its title, we may assume, points to what the author sees as the leading themes of her life. Frajlich situates herself within two inextricably linked lived experiences of being a writer and an exile as they become the building blocks of her identity. “On Writing and Exile” attempts to provide an answer to the author's essential question: Who am I? One could argue that the focus of this last set of essays is even broader than the identity of Frajlich herself, and branches out to include her family, as well as of Polish Jews of her and her parents’ generations.Ronald Meyer, the editor of The Ghost of Shakespeare, makes an important decision to open this final section of the book with the essay “My Native Realm.” Already the text's title gestures towards Native Realm by Czesław Miłosz, the Nobel laureate from 1980, and suggests a connection between Frajlich and Miłosz. Both poets gazed to the east to find their family roots — Miłosz in Lithuania and Frajlich in Lviv (then Lwów)—and both wrote with great sensitivity about the nature of homeland, religion, identity, and language.In “My Native Realm,” Frajlich pulls together many threads that weave her identity into geographic, cultural, historical, and linguistic realities of her life and as Meyer suggests in his Afterword, she “lays out the important milestones and events in her quest for self-definition” (280). Frajlich was born in Kyrgyzstan, where her mother fled for safety after the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1942. The family members were reunited in the Urals, where Frajlich spent her early years. Frajlich becomes self-aware while growing up in Szczecin, where her parents settled after the postwar return to their beloved Lviv became impossible. Frajlich likes to repeat an anecdote about her family's arrival in the newly Polish city of Szczecin: after a long journey from the Soviet Union, she cannot contain her excitement when they enter an apartment assigned to them in a half-destroyed building. Still a young child, she is delighted with the pretty floral wallpaper and runs through the rooms of their new home shouting “Poland, Poland” (242) only to be firmly corrected by her father's stern pronouncement, “This isn't Poland, this is Szczecin” (242). For her, unlike her father, Szczecin and later Warsaw, are Poland and the life under communist rule becomes quite normalized. She realizes only much later during her own exile that what seemed to her at the time to be an arrival in the longed-for homeland, was just another exile for her parents living among other exiles in a Polish city that until the end of the war had been a German city. In their exilic existence, they would forever, even after their final move to the United States, mourn and long for their beloved Lviv, their “small fatherland” (268).Frajlich clearly recognizes exile as “the central experience” (268) that shaped her adult life, because just as her parents lost their homeland due to World War II, she suffered a similar loss due to her banishment from Poland after state orchestrated anti-Semitic attacks culminated in the post-March 1968 expulsions. For Frajlich, the shock of exile from the country she identifies with cannot be underestimated. She repeatedly places herself within the Polish cultural tradition embedded in Polish literature which she studied at the University of Warsaw and within the linguistic tradition of her Polish-speaking, secular, Polish-Jewish home. As a poet, she emphasizes her particular attachment to Polish as her native language and her clear focus on the precision of poetic expression. Even after many years spent in the United States, she firmly identifies herself as a Polish poet creating in her native tongue. It is with pride that she recalls an event promoting her book in Poland when, in introducing her to the audience, fellow poet Rev. Jan Twardowski pronounces: “It is known that the author that writes in a given language belongs to the nation that uses that language, and we welcome in Anna Frajlich—a Polish poet” (269). For Frajlich, the rich cultural associations carried by the Polish language and the care for its purity are of paramount importance and translate into her deep concern about what she classifies as the contamination of the language in contemporary Poland. She writes, “Now the Polish cultural language, polluted with the technocratic American slang borders on pidgin” (276). She refuses to accept these changes as the normal evolution of a living language. Interestingly, she points to the émigré community as the guardian of the Polish language and believes that postwar émigrés in general, contrary to popular belief, endeavor to protect their native language from an unnecessary influx of foreign words and structures.Frajlich's youth and her parents’ care protected her from the trauma of war, so it is not surprising that the most dramatic intersection in her life is formed by the circumstances leading to her expulsion from Poland, the heartbreaking moment of departure, and the initial struggles and social degradations of exile in a foreign land. Exile forms the solid barrier between her mature life in the United States and her happy youth in Poland where she started developing her poetic talents, studied Polish literature, had a fairly satisfying job at a small journal for the blind, fell in love and bore a child, but also where she experienced the rejection from the very people whom she believed were her compatriots. In the essay, “March Began in June: My ‘Processed’ Trauma,” Frajlich engages in a comparative analysis of the pertinent political factors that led to the infamous March 1968 expulsion from Poland of Polish citizens of Jewish heritage with her personal recollections and emotional impressions of the tragic events. She confronts the political expediency of the Communist government in creating an internal enemy to solve its growing political problems, with the reactions of ordinary citizens, some of whom were quick to vilify and threaten their Jewish neighbors and others who, like many of her friends, were willing to endanger themselves to show support and compassion. She remembers fondly the many people who, ignoring their own safety, came to bid her and her family farewell at one of Warsaw's railway stations, Dworzec Gdański (Gdańsk Railway Station). This traumatic moment, when she believes she is leaving Poland forever, becomes an indelible mark on her psyche, a forever symbol of rejection and exile. She writes, “Fifty years have passed since the infamous March of 1968 and I still consider this event and its aftermath the major formative factor in my life, despite the fact that I was not a participant in the events, but rather a recipient” (250).It is hardly surprising, then, that Frajlich employs the trope of exile to designate “the predominant theme” (268) of her writing. As a young Polish poet, she finds herself in a foreign environment where the audience for her Polish-language poetry is very limited and where she fears a literary “homelessness” (270), suddenly severed from her supportive community of fellow writers. She describes “the first years of the emigration as a real hell” (269) both in her creative and everyday life. And yet despite this hellish existence, she manages to achieve much: a doctoral degree in Russian literature, a teaching position at Columbia University, publishing her poetry in respected émigré publications in Paris and London, and, finally, with the change of the political system in Poland, a return of her poetry to the old homeland. She also acknowledges the importance of her contacts and interactions with eminent Polish poets both in Poland and abroad, such as Henryk Grynberg, Tymoteusz Karpowicz, Czesław Miłosz, and Wisława Szymborska.“On Writing and Exile” includes a few fragments of Frajlich's poems which grew out of her life experience. The poet suggests possible interpretations and describes the origins of some of her poems. Most importantly, she challenges her critics, especially the ones who question her reluctance to write about the Holocaust. She classifies such attitudes toward her poetry “as a form of reverse racism” (246). Even though she lost most of her relatives in the Holocaust, she never knew them and did not experience the Holocaust herself, which forbade her, she believed, from writing about it. Yet, she is not completely silent on this topic. In her early poems, she focuses on the “feelings of loneliness and exclusion” (246) to express the suffering of the Jews during the war. She also approaches this topic indirectly by writing about the profound sense of sorrow her parents felt after losing their families and friends, their lifestyles and livelihoods and their beloved city of Lviv.Through the lived experience of the exile, through her conviction that “Who I am now was determined by my exilic experience” (251), and through the recovered second-generation memories of her parents’ exile, Frajlich learns that suffering and trauma may, after all, offer valuable insights. She discovers the fragility of the social ties that promise safety and security, but at the same time she is empowered “initially against my will, to take charge of my own life” (251). For her, the appreciation of freedom is only possible after the loss, the uprooting, and finally the conscious acceptance of a new identity, “In my soul my three beings—Jewish, Polish, and now American—are one indivisible” (278).