The structuring of Jewish-Polish identity in autobiographical fiction by Artur Sandauer, Ida Fink, and Hanna Krall

Abstract

Artur Sandauer (1913–1989), Ida Fink (1921–2011) and Hanna Krall (born 1935) represent three literary generations of modern Polish-Jewish authors, three different paths of life and three various attitudes to writing. Nevertheless, their autobiographical fiction shares an important common feature: they alternate the first- and third-person narration in the process of creating the author’s self-portrait. These changes of perspective seem to constitute a textual representation of the complex Jewish-Polish (or Polish-Jewish) cultural and ethnic identities of the writers. In Artur Sandauer’s writings they also reflect the author’s tendency to look at himself from without, the tendency stemming both from his situation of a Jew assimilated into Polish culture and of his critical approach towards what he considered the “inauthentic” identity of a Jew-Pole. In Ida Fink’s autobiographical novel The Journey (1990) extensive use of the third-person narration (interchanging with the first-person one) reflects the situation of someone hiding their identity during the Holocaust, forcing alien, non-Jewish identities on themselves as the only chance to survive. Finally, in the autobiographical novel by Hanna Krall The Subtenant (1985) the identity of the main character, who had lived through the Holocaust as a child, remains split into two conflicting personalities, thus showing far-reaching aftermath of the Shoah. Here, the alternation of the first-, third-, and occasionally also second-person narration is a textual representation of the psychical trauma as well as a metaphor of the ambivalent attitude towards Jews and the Holocaust in the post-war Polish culture.