There is a mystery here -- a mystery to me, who was raised in a monolingual home -- the mystery of what happened in some of those assimilating Jewish homes. Aleksander Wat, for example, another polonized Jew of Tuwim's generation (and also a Polish poet) did not speak Yiddish while his father did not speak Polish. The two spoke to each other in German and Russian, acknowledging all the while that those were not their languages (because they spoke them less than perfectly). I can't get this through my head: what it is like to grow up with parents whose language you do not speak?
Yet, this should not amaze: many second generation Americans grow up like this today. Perhaps, deep conversations with parents are somehow not necessary for most parent-child relations. Who knows, perhaps not having a language in common actually helps? This would be typical: people seem generally the more likable the less we know them. That includes parents.
There is another mystery: why did the middle class Jews polonize? That other successful diaspora nation, the Chinese of South East Asia, generally assimilated to the ruling culture: English is Malaysia, American in the Philippines, Dutch in Indonesia, French in Vietnam. There was simply nothing to be gained by assuming the national identity of the conquered nation. If one was ready to give up his ethnic identity and assume another, then the identity of the ruling nation was preferable, it opened more doors.**
So, one is mystified: why did middle class Jews in partitioned Poland polonize rather than Germanize or Russify?
One answer sometimes given is that there is something attractive about the Polish culture. The expressive warmth of the extended Polish family are usually quoted here. But this may be different from North German families -- and therefore account for polonizing Germans -- but is it really different from the way Jewish families function? No one has suggested what could be a better reason for polonization: the pure pleasure of speaking Polish, I wonder why. Perhaps Polish speakers assume that all speakers of all languages get equal pleasure out of theirs; I am not convinced that this is true. Poles do take enormous pleasure in speaking their language and miss it more than anything else when in exile.
In fact, I do not buy either of these two arguments. I think the middle class Jews polonized in the way in which they christianized. It was typical of the assimilating Jews in Poland, if they took the step of abandoning the Old Religion, to adopt the minority Protestantism rather than the majority religion, Catholicism. This way they could justly claim that they were not just rushing in to join the bandwagon (the Catholic majority): such Jews could assimilate without assimilating entirely, they could preserve an area of independence, an area which has not capitulated to the run of the mill.
I think Jews polonized in the same way. Polonizing under Russian occupation achieved two purposes: on the one hand, it assimilated one to a "modern culture" (as assimilating Jews saw these things) -- one of playing Schubert on the piano, dining in the Belvedere, vacationing in the Antibes -- and yet it preserved one's stubborn resistance to the power that be, in this case, the majority (Russian) rule. This way one could have his cake and eat it: abandon one persecuted minority -- Jews -- in order to join another one -- Poles.
This way no one could accuse you of taking the easy way out.
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*"Lithuania, my fatherland": the opening words of Pan Tadeusz. The Polish Armavirumque.
**See Anthony Reid's excellent Sojourners and Settlers for discussion of Chinese assimilation in SEA.
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