Michał Głowiński’s “Circles of Strangeness” at the conference “Jewish Pole – Polish Jew”
The conference is organized by the Section for Research on the Literary Culture of National Minorities in Poland of the Institute of Polish Literature of the University of Warsaw and the Inter-Faculty Unit for Comparative Studies of the Institute of Polish Literature of the University of Warsaw.
During the panel discussion “Jewish identity in literary texts from the time of the Holocaust” on November 16th at 10:30 Prof. Aleksandra Ubertowska will give the lecture „»Circles of Strangeness«, double coming-out. Autobiographical project of Michał Głowiński”.
Michał Głowiński is a theorist and historian of literature, author of numerous essays and academic works (among others, “Nowomowa po polsku” – “Newspeak in Polish”), as well as autobiographical novels (such as “Czarne sezony” – “Black Seasons”, and “Historia jednej topoli” – “The Story of One Poplar”). The author focuses in his books on subjects such as the extermination of Jews in Poland and growing up in the Polish People’s Republic.
Prof. Michał Głowiński is one of “Irena Sendler’s children” – the Righteous Among the Nations rescued him from the Warsaw Ghetto and provided him with shelter on the so-called “Aryan side”.
Głowiński pays tribute to Irena Sendler in his newest book “Circles of Strangeness. An Autobiographical Story”, published by Wydawnictwo Literackie in 2010.
Irena Sendler, activist of the underground Council to Aid Jews “Żegota”, saved 2,500 children during the Second World War. Michał Głowiński was one of them.
He left the ghetto in January 1943, together with his parents. For a while he had been hiding on the so-called “Aryan” side, until the family’s friend – Irena Sendler – put him in an orphanage run by the nuns of the Servants of Blessed Virgin Mary Congregation in Turkowice. He lived there until the liberation.
Irena Sendler also helped his mother – she found her a job as a domestic servant in Otwock near Warsaw. Michał Głowiński describes the experience of hiding in such moving words: “I stopped being a child in the ghetto, I became a Jewish child hiding on the Aryan side, or rather hidden, because after all I couldn’t be an active side, I was transformed into an object, looked after by people with goodwill”.
The two-day conference will consist of the following panel discussions: “Jewish identity in the interwar period”, “Polish-Jewish literature in the 19th century”, “Polish-Jewish literature in the interwar period”, “Jewish identity in literary texts from the time of the Holocaust”, “Polish-Jewish literature and its relations with Yiddish literature in postwar Poland” and “Identity described years later”.
