The Last Generation of Jews in Poland by Efraim Shmueli

Author:Efraim Shmueli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Academic Studies Press
Published: 2021-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

Poet Adam Mickiewicz – Poland’s great “Bard”

Exam material surely included the epic Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz, a distinctly national tale, albeit about the szlachta (the nobility) in its period of decline, focused on small landowners, their exploits and chicanery. The poem describes Poland as reality and as vision—as it was at the end of the eighteenth century and under Napoleon, and as it never was. It expresses the mood of an exiled poet—in the sense of Halevi’s “My heart in the East/ But the rest of me far in the West”30—as he experienced it in France, the center of Polish émigrés, after the failure of the 1831 rebellion against Russia. “I longed to pass by in my flight, bird of feeble wing, to pass by regions of storm and thunder, and to search out only pleasant shade and fair weather—the days of my childhood, and my home gardens.”31

The book is “Polish” through and through, with its fanaticism, licentiousness, and disruption of public order, and at the same time, it is very human, compassionate, and full of radiant descriptions of sun-touched wheat fields and the moon’s enchantment for love and its yearnings. The book abounds in descriptions of persons and landscapes, soothing idyllic scenes and rattling scenes of hunting, battles, disputes and arguments, passions and yearnings for deliverance, heroic deeds and remorse, many rejoicings and great griefs. No wonder that Pan Tadeusz was a mandatory subject in every Polish school. Good taste has counselled the current regime32 to declare this poem “kosher” even for Communism.

We Jewish readers who learned about the szlachta of that period were well acquainted with its harsh oppression of Jews. Ber Bolochower33 recounted in his memoirs how Polish noblemen abused “their” Jews, how the poor wretches were forced to dance before them, singing “Majufes.”34 This is the period of the Council of Four Lands,35 and the Besht and his associates and disciples are busy with “redemption of captives” from Polish landowners. Only one year before our review of Bolochower’s memoir, in 1927, the Jewish Polish historian Majer Balaban published the memoirs of the nobleman Jan Duklan Ochocki from the beginning of 1774, and they speak for themselves:

5 January. The lessee of the tavern still owes me 91 gold pieces for the past three months. I was authorized, according to the contract between us, to take severe measures and imprison him, his wife and children, until he pays his debt, but I ordered to seize only the swindler himself and to confine him in the pig sty, whereas his wife and children I allowed for the time being to remain in the tavern. Only his youngest son, Leizer, I took to my court and ordered to have him taught the Lord’s Prayer and the catechism, since he is a bright boy. I would like to have him baptized and have already talked this over with the priest who promised to come to court in order to prepare the young soul for baptism. At first, Leizer refused to

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