Speaking Silence: Expressions of Polish-Jewish Identity in Hanna Krall’s SUBLOKATORKA and Magdalena Tulli’s WŁOSKIE SZPILKI

• In Event: Post War Communist Jewish Writing

Abstract

This paper examines silence in texts by post-war Polish-Jewish writers as a narrative strategy used to express and grapple with fractured, multivalent Polish-Jewish identities. In particular, I offer a comparative reading and analysis of Hanna Krall’s SUBLOKATORKA (THE SUBTENANT, 1985) and Magdalena Tulli’s WŁOSKIE SZPILKI (ITALIAN HIGH HEELS, 2011), two semi-autobiographical, coming-of-age texts that offer a glimpse of post-war life in Communist Poland and share similar approaches towards representing the intricacies of being Polish and Jewish during this time. The former text deals with the author’s concealment as a child during World War II, the anti-Zionist campaign of 1968, and the declaration of martial law in Poland in 1981; the latter takes place after the war and ends with the campaign of 1968, with several forays into more contemporary times. Despite the autobiographical undertones of their texts, both Krall and Tulli similarly undermine their autobiographical “I’s”, using, for example, 2nd or 3rd person pronouns for characters that often appear to be their own stand-ins or different, and even multiple, names for these characters. Moreover, both writers often avoid directly referencing their own Jewishness, even largely avoiding the words “Jew” and “Jewish” throughout their texts. I argue that this particular narrative strategy of silence highlights the writers’ split Jewish/Polish identity, pointing to their fragmented subjectivity, their underlying sense of “otherness”, and their inability to fully conceive of their selves according to normative cultural values that often pit Polish and Jewish identities against one another. However, as these texts show, silence perhaps also offers a means of representations beyond those values, beyond normative schemas of identity. While silence is often seen as some kind of lack, as a circumvention of difficult topics, or perhaps a response to traumatic experiences, I explore the ways that silence, framed and utilized in certain ways, can speak.

Author

• Diana Sacilowski, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign