This did not work very well, and there were attacks on him from both sides -- from Jewish activists for "desertion", from Polish right wing for -- well, this is interesting, for what? Though the nationalists usually stated plainly antisemitic sentiments as reason for rejecting Tuwim -- some merely paraphrasing in various ways the dictum that "once a Jew forever a Jew" (i.e. can't make a purse, etc.) others adding some pseudo-theoretical apparatus, such as the presumed plagiaristic nature of his poetry ("only Aryans are truly creative") -- the real causes, I can't help feeling, were political. Tuwim was a russophile; and he had left wing sympathies; Polish nationalists saw both these attitudes as essentially anti-Polish and therefore saw Tuwim as irredeemably foreign and inherently unassimilable. They put both to his Jewishness.
(By way of a footnote, a short disquisition on Polish anti-semitism. This essentialist idea (i.e. that as a Jew Tuwim had a different, foreign essence, was Jewish chalk to Polish cheese) was ugly, but perhaps understandable: Poles, in the process of recreating Poland as a nation state in 1918 out of the corpse of what had once been a multi-ethnic state, experienced in the course of its recreation a violent and bloody separation from their former co-citizens; former co-citizens of Commonwealth who now, suddenly, turned out to be foreign bodies, intent on having their own states: Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Czechs, Slovaks, Tartars, Germans. This was the pattern: the foreign element oozed out of the body politic, like a thorn rejected by the body by the means of putrid and painful fistula. The idea that one former group of the Commonweatlh -- the Jews -- should do the opposite -- not demerge, but on the contrary -- merge in, assimilate, dissolve, become inalienable part of the national fabric -- was in such a stark opposition to the attitudes of everyone else that it was hard, if not impossible, for Polish nationalists to conceptualize).
Tuwim was proud and easily provoked into altercation. Confronted on his ethnic identity, he refused to apologize or explain; and whenever attacked, heattacked back. When Jewish activists accused him of "desertion" he told them that their language (Yiddish) was ugly and their religion stupid; when Polish nationalists attacked him as somehow not Polish, or not fit to be Polish, he pointed out that they had had Jews in their own families; thus, in both cases, he opened himself to the charge of antisemitism. (As many other assimilating Jews did).
When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Tuwim escaped, by way or Romania, France and Portugal to Brasil; then the US. There he lived on comfortable scholarships, feted by the diplomatic corps as a great poet, while in Poland his family and acquaintances were being murdered. He kept a meticulous journal, of the "eggs for breakfast, walk with dog, salmon for lunch" variety in order to know, in the future, what he did on each day of the Shoah; so that when he learned that so and so was killed on such and such a day, he could go back to his journal and see that on that day the weather had been balmy and he ate a sandwich with strawberry jam. To me this journal symbolizes most powerfully his sense of guilt -- the guilt of the survivor. This guilt made him rethink the issues, made him take his Jewishness more seriously. It caused him to arrive at a new synthesis of himself.
The Shoah also caused Tuwim to throw his lot with the communists. To his mind, Russians, of the two evils which descended upon Poland, seemed the lesser one: they at least did not try to exterminate the Jews. (That they had a final solution for Polish gentry did not touch Tuwim personally and was thus easy for him to overlook, or forget. This blindness made his break with Polish right wing, and with many ordinary Poles, including his oldest and closest friend, Lechon, final. Of that later).
After the war, breaking with most Polish emigres in the west, Tuwim returned to Poland. There he was feted and treated like a king -- because he was such a huge public relations catch for the Russians. For this he was immediately branded as a traitor by Polish nationalists. ("We told you so, once a Jew etc.").
But Tuwim's honeymoon with the Communists did not last. The break up came over the celebrations surrounding the unveiling of the monument of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Tuwim was at first asked to make the keynote speech. After he had submitted it, it was suggested to him that maybe it would be the third or fourth speech of the day. Then that perhaps it should be spoken not at the monument, but at some other, simultaneous event. Then that perhaps it should be not at any event, but on the radio, later that day. Or maybe the next.
Eventually, he appears to have gotten the message and withdrawn it.
Why was the speech turned down?
The speech was turned down because the communist regime, for all its lip service to the international solidarity of the proletariat, and all its attacks on the nazi fascists, was in fact a nationalist beast. It found it unacceptable that Tuwim's speech started with the declaration that he no longer felt either Jewish or Polish; that he in fact rejected those definitions; that before the horrible crime of the ghetto he felt simply human; that at the ghetto a terrible crime was committed by men against other men, not Germans against Poles, of Germans against Jews, or Jews against Poles, or Poles against Jews, or Jews against Jews or Germans against Germans, but by man against man; that every man ought to be shocked by it, not just Jews or Poles, and every man should be shamed by it, not just Germans or Poles; every man, not by virtue of his tribal membership, but by virtue of his humanity.
I stand before you, Tuwim had wanted to say in his speech, as neither Pole nor Jew, but as a man.
This the communists did not like. They were perfectly willing to accept the self definition Tuwim had offered all these years: of a polonized Jew, a man of Jewish roots but of Polish culture and, by virtue of no more than personal choice -- of Polish nation. They wanted Tuwim to say again that he felt Polish; they wanted him to be a great Polish poet who had seen the light and joined the Polish communist struggle. They did not want him to talk about universal human values. That he did, bothered them; it did not fit their ideology; to their minds, in his new-found internationalism Tuwim simply went too far; he took the Marxist-Leninist thing too seriously. He appeared to take, like all neophites, that international side of the business too seriously.
So the regime sidelined his speech.
No doubt they hoped he would see the light; no doubt he imagined they must come round to understand what he had wanted to say. As it happens, both were wrong, but a fatal heart attack made this discovery mercifully short. A few months later, Tuwim was dead.
*
And thus, when he finally appeared to resolve the question of his national identity for himself, late in his life, pushing sixty, the resolution being neither Polish nor Jewish but emphatically neither, Tuwim found his decision again rejected by his surroundings; again it was controversial.
Tuwim's decisions about his personal identity could never be accepted by anyone, it seems. (Homosexual activists might want to spare a thought here on the universality of the human condition).
What surprises me in all this is that Tuwim took so long to come to his decision; and that it took Shoah to show him the obvious light that we are none of us Poles or Jews or Germans; or anything; but that we are all men, ourselves, each of us a member of a nation of one: himself. But it surprises only because Tuwim was such an intelligent, witty man; that he was so slow in such an obvious conclusion surprises, even shocks. I made mine so much younger than he, and without the need for a world war. Why couldn't he?
On the other hand, that those around him did not understand or approve does not surprise. After all no one ever appears to approve whatever it is that I do, either. It seems that disapproval is the one constant, permanent condition of independence. To me it seems part and parcel of adulthood: if we want to live by our own lights, we simply have to learn to ignore others' opinions.
After all, whose business is it whether we are Polish or Jewish or what?
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