Decoding Józef Wittlin

At the beginning of his book, Józef Wittlin w Ameryce. Klasycznie obcy [Józef Wittlin in America: Classically alien], Jacek Hajduk provides three quotations. The first one comes from Jerzy Stempowski's letter to Wittlin (dated August 23, 1957). Stempowski had worked with Homer for many years, and so he says: “Homer played a great role in the process of social integration” because the readers from different centuries and with different experiences always found in it “a continuity of time and a connection with former generations.” In the second citation, which comes from Witold Gombrowicz's Dziennik [Diary] (October 6, 1962), there is a diagnosis of why Wittlin translated The Odyssey all his life over and over again, destroying many versions of his translation. According to Gombrowicz, Wittlin was himself a walking “anarchy and despair.” In the third quotation, from Czesław Miłosz's letter to Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz (October 22, 1949), Miłosz defines the effect of Wittlin's pains as “very beautiful and—despite all—epochal” (p. 5).Hajduk's competences in the area of Homer, Wittlin, and the American context are more than adequate: he is a qualified classics scholar and translator (among others of Konstaninos Kavafis), as well as a passionate traveler and researcher in Polish literature in exile. Homer's Odysseus (as Hajduk explains in the Foreword) had been chosen as a guide to Wittlin's America, the place of his exile, where he survived the war and the Shoah—only Odysseus affords a full understanding of the Polish writer. Homer and his work accompanied Wittlin all his life, during his time in interwar Poland (1914–1938), then with a particular intensity during his wandering life in Western Europe (1938–1940), and finally in the United States (since 1941 until his death in 1976). As Hajduk convincingly argues, Homer is not only an object of Wittlin's translational struggles but a peculiar protector of his literary output, as can be seen in the Polish writer's famous prewar novel Sól ziemi [Salt of the earth, 1935], a candidate for the 1939 Nobel Prize in literature. Thanks to Homer, Wittlin accepted “navigation” as the fundamental category of each generation, necessary for existential assimilation in the process of maturation. Long before Wittlin, Homer had been acknowledged in common belief as “the fullest persona in the history of literature” (popularized through James Joyce's Ulysses). In Wittlin's opinion, a mature adult is someone who is “resourceful and perfect” and “owes everything to oneself” (p. 15). Hajduk sketches Homer's portrait with panache. It is a “postmortal portrait” because Homer lives in his protagonists, and their presence in the literature of subsequent generations shows that antiquity never ended, that The Odyssey still helps us to understand why peoples and nations wander the face of this earth. This was a particularly acute experience for Jews, although neither The Iliad nor The Odyssey served as topical sources in relation to which they could contemplate their own fate. Wittlin's situation was different: a Jew assimilated to Polishness, he also felt a strong affinity—as does every European—with Ancient Greece. He thus found The Odyssey helpful at the moment of leaving Poland, a while before the outbreak of World War II, as well as in 1940, when like Odysseus he left Europe and sailed from Portugal through the Atlantic towards the New World. Hajduk tries in his book, as he says himself, to investigate Homer's presence in Wittlin's life in many of its aspects: in the latter's reading, translations, authored literary works, but also in the philological, biographical, generational, historical, philosophical, and ideological sense.Józef Wittlin, like the protagonist of Homer's epic poem, left his Ithaca and began wandering together with many contemporary Odysseuses. Thanks to this biographical and literary coincidence (of which more below), he was called the most famous “Polish Homeride” (Zygmunt Kubiak's expression, p. 25). Hajduk emphasizes very clearly that Wittlin “programmatically inscribed the wandering journey of Odysseus, this ‘myth of myths,’ into the ‘age of wars,’ in which he, a pacifist, had to live most of his life” and became a fully conscious representative of “the Homeric moment” (p. 30) in Polish literature. Although the motif of the Wandering Jew is essentially anti-Judaic and antisemitic, Wittlin's own fate of a wanderer was a pathway through which he incorporated the world of Polish persecuted and annihilated Jews into the Homeric order. For him, also the Shoah was a Homeric experience. The survivors found a new Ithaca in the New World of North America (as well as in Israel). The “new,” however, always stands in Wittlin's work in relation to the “old,” to Europe. Despite the catastrophe of the twentieth century, Europe continues to feed America with its life-giving juices; it still participates in the cultural development of Western traditions. The writer's tragic situation, says Hajduk, stems from the fact that he is “torn apart, not so much in the personal or social sense, but with respect to the old and new civilization. When he settled in the United States, Wittlin became a child of the two Wests; because he was uprooted from the Old World and married to the New World, his old life died away, while the new one never took off in full swing” (p. 95). This was so despite what Wittlin wrote in Orfeusz w piekle XX wieku [Orpheus in the hell of the twentieth century]: “American literature has always been infused with the spirit and letter of Antiquity”; “Mediterranean Antiquity” is that which most closely connects the two worlds: “Just as there is no America without modern Europe, there is no America without Greece and Rome” (p. 97).Hajduk describes Wittlin's arrival to New York in 1941 and his initial attempts to settle down in Manhattan and then in the Bronx. It was there that Wittlin wrote, in the late summer of 1942, the utterly heartrending poem Żydom w Polsce [For Jews in Poland], in a meter alluding to the ancient pattern. The poem commemorates the Great Liquidation Action of July and August 1942 in the Warsaw ghetto. In New York, despite its distance from Europe, Wittlin saw the Shoah in everything, especially “in the painful presence of his next-door neighbors, brothers-Jews, which remined him of the ‘non-being’ and annihilation of others” (p. 53). As he wrote in a letter to Tymon Terlecki (March 31, 1951), quoted in the book in fragments, he felt that “his place was there,” in occupied Poland, together with the annihilated Jewish people. Hajduk notes that “the motif of Jewish wandering not only co-exists but actually blends with the wandering of Odysseus and wandering generally in Ancient Greece: this shows that the two traditions are inseparable and have contributed to European culture in equal measure” (p. 78). Wittlin fled Poland not only from the war and German Nazism but also from the Polish anti-Semitic campaign that swept through the right-wing press in 1938–1939 and was designed to “cleanse” Polish literary and public life of Jews. Those right-wing circles regarded Wittlin, a pacifist, as a traitor. It was even postulated that he be placed in prison in Bereza Kartuska, a demand emphatically vociferated by the prewar nationalist Jerzy Pietrkiewicz.In America, Wittlin felt alienated, unable to make it his home, despite meeting his old friends from the prewar Skamander circle: Julian Tuwim, Jan Lechoń, and Kazimierz Wierzyński. Tygodnik Polski [The Polish weekly] was eager to publish him. The Polish intelligentsia associated with the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America (PIASA) was favorable to him. Wittlin describes his émigré experience in an essay in the Paris-based Kultura [Culture], titled “Blaski i nędze wygnania” [The highs and lows of exile, 1959], in which he writes about the pain of being separated “from his mother tongue” (p. 68 in the book under review), of experiencing “a complete void that [. . . ] the imagination only populates with apparitions from the world that no longer exists” (p. 69). Because he longed for living within the Polish language, he was active in the Kultura, in the London-based Wiadomości [News], and in the Polish section of Radio Free Europe in Munich. He constantly felt that “as an emigrant, he was more of a shadow, an echo of his prewar literary self, a blend of perhaps valuable (Jewish-Lvov-Galician-Austrian) but basically vapid significances” (p. 71). In contrast to Gombrowicz, he never made his new debut, never became “a new Wittlin” because his self remained on the Old Continent. Despite having an American passport as of 1949, which allowed him to travel the world, he never identified with his acquired new citizenship. Instead, he took every chance to spend his vacation in Europe, though never on Polish or Ukrainian soil. Hajduk states: “He would rend his garments, ‘play Hamlet,’ complain about his life in America and criticize the American people, but he would no longer wish to live anywhere else” (p. 74).Wittlin wrote about America in many works, above all in what can be considered autobiographical essays “Płaszcz” [The coat, 1941], “Do jakiej Ameryki jechałem” [What kind of America I was going to, 1941], or “Mój pierwszy rok w Ameryce” [My first year in America, 1942]. In one of them he says he felt “alienated in the classic way” (p. 82). And, at the same time, he was aware that thanks to his arrival in the United States, he protected himself from the “starvation of the soul,” he saved “his creative freedom and creative dignity, so brutally suppressed [. . .] on the soil where his finesse took shape” (p. 84). Of all Wittlin's essays written in the United States, the best one according to Hajduk is the one titled “Poe w Bronksie” [Poe in the Bronx, 1952], in which “Wittlin achieved [. . .] formal mastery but also managed to capture, in a profound and moving literary language, the condition of the Polish Jew in America” (p. 90). He found a way to express the depths of this condition after the Shoah, “to speak of the unspeakable, to describe without describing” (p. 91). Wittlin presents the non-existent world of Lviv, Buchach, and Ternopil by verbally communing “with the dead [. . .] and with the past as seen in the concrete faces of his family and friends.” This, “more than anything else,” brings him closer “to Homer's Odysseus” (p. 92).A unique image of America can be seen in Wittlin's notes, which he kept writing all his life, from his twenties until his death. In late ones, he talks about a novel he was planning to write about the New World, which he perceived, as the majority of emigrants did, as “the land of hope and salvation” but also a land that “causes suffering [and] inflicts pain” (p. 94). America—writes Hajduk—is “a drifting kind of travel, but also Whitman's space of freedom”; this turned Wittlin into “a complete Odysseus, a full human-being” (p. 98). If America in Wittlin's life was the place of “experiencing Homer” (from the title of chapter 1), Europe in this context is a space of “processing Homer” (from the title of chapter 2). His Ithaca was primarily the Lviv (called Lvov at the time) of his youth but also other towns where he lived before emigrating to the United States. After the war this became a mere “concept, an idea of a non-place. However, this idea fully crystallized only in the course of his American odyssey. From across the ocean, as a Jew exiled from his land and as a Polish writer exiled from his mother tongue [. . .], Wittlin fully appreciated the shape and sense of this symbol” (p. 106). Europe as a whole became for him a timeless and universal entity, the place of intellectual pilgrims to its ancient sources. In the vital and intellectual alliance between Europe and America, Hajduk recognizes an important order: “Greekness, followed by Romanism and Germanism, and Jewishness bring us to Christian Europeanness, and Europeanness is Americanness” (p. 134). Wittlin occupied a special position in this cultural puzzle, a European emigrant to America “because of his Jewishness,” which made him “a victim of Western civilization, a prick of conscience and a bashful secret” (p. 135). And although in 1953 Wittlin was baptized, deep inside he remained a Jew from Eastern Galicia, one of those with whom “he felt the best” and to whom “he was the closest” (p. 136).In the title of chapter 3, “restoring Homer” relates to The Odyssey, which Wittlin translated all his life. The first rendering was produced in the years 1914–1924 (and published in Lviv in 1924); then came a revised version of that first attempt, published in Warsaw in 1931. The third version was heavily influenced by Wittlin's war experiences, especially his wandering fate. From the point of view of research, this is a particularly interesting chapter: the author skillfully presents the differences between the subsequent versions of the translation on various levels (although the linguistic level takes precedence). Translating The Odyssey has always been a “kind of ritual,” and in Wittlin's case it was no different. It is a process of arriving at “the essence of things, at what is human, and at oneself” (p. 181). It was actually in his translational efforts, rather than in his own poetry, that Wittlin showed the greatest poetic artistry. Thanks to his predilection for formal excellence, which he developed in his work on Homer, Wittlin is remembered as the author of “one volume of poetry, one novel, and one collection of essays,” but also “a translator of The Odyssey, whose every song, every line he experiences like his own life” (p. 209).