Against Tracelessness: Paweł Huelle’s Memory Work in Weiser Dawidek

• In Event: Memory and Non-Memory in Polish 20th Century Literature

Abstract

Paweł Huelle’s Weiser Dawidek (1989), a novel dealing with the mysterious disappearance of a Jewish boy in 1957 in Gdańsk, was considered by many to be one of the most important novels to emerge in Poland during the eighties, lauded for its thematic depth. In the years since its publication, however, some scholars have been more critical of the text, in part because of Huelle’s choice to frame his story as a kind of enigma that evades all the possible, and often very ugly, reasons why a Jewish person would disappear from the post-war Polish landscape and be forgotten. However, as I argue in this paper, Huelle’s evasions directly correspond to the themes of memory and remembrance, on both personal and social levels, that underscore his text. Huelle’s silences are a distinct strategy that point both to the silences of the post-war milieu in Poland and in Polish collective memory in the eighties regarding its Jewish past, as well as to how some lives are rendered invisible in the collective imagination, dis-membered and effaced, and hence unremembered and unmemorialized. Huelle shows, however, how silent, and silenced, traces can endure and still speak in some way, his text working to remember, and to re-member, what—who—was erased from the Polish landscape and its culture discourse.

Author

• Diana Sacilowski, The Ohio State U