2024-10-27 11:28:00
Germans can still learn to pronounce his name correctly, Mikołaj Łoziński scored a real hit in Poland. The focus of his novel “Stramer” is a Jewish family from the city of Tarnów. The soap opera meets contemporary history.
Even before Hitler’s attack on Poland and the attackers’ subsequent murder of Jews, Tarnów was a deep province for most Poles. Anyone who, like Mikołaj Łoziński, revolves an entire novel around the microcosm of Tarnów makes a statement. Łoziński’s little saga about the Stramer family runs the risk of telling not the heroic story of the victims, which almost always ends in mass death, along the lines of “Schindler’s List”, but rather everyday life, great hopes and small joys of a life quite normal people among which remember three million Polish Jews. “Stramer” has certainly become a bestseller in Poland as more and more people realize that Hitler’s terribly successful campaign against defenseless Jews has forever mutilated the face of Polish culture.
While Warsaw Ghetto survivor Hanna Krall’s great novels address the unspeakable nature of loss with literary finesse, or Paweł Pawlikowski’s cinematic masterpiece “Ida” explores the historicizing black and white of the 1950s, Łoziński, born in 1980, tackles the theme in a very unpretentious way. As if they were a neurotic New York extended family from Woody Allen’s cosmos, we get to know the Stramers in the episodes through their slightly awkward encounters.
Like Woody Allen
Especially the patriarch Nathan, who wanted to succeed his brother Ben, who became rich in New York, but then returned to Tarnów out of nostalgia and love. He is left with some American slang and the infamous inability to do business after his voyage to the New World. Sometimes Nathan invests in wickless candles, sometimes he opens a small bar whose guests don’t want to consume anything and then saws off the legs of their chairs in revenge. In addition to this typical “air person,” his wife Rywka works as a Yiddish mother to their six children. Sometimes she dreams of the sea which, unlike her husband, she has never seen.
The author dedicates himself in detail to the growth of the young Stramers between the love of fish and anti-Semitism, between the communist doctrine of salvation and the football of the cult club of Jewish influence Samson Tarnów. Moreover, the protagonists Salo, Hesio, Rudek, Nusek, Wela and Rena did not know that it took a lot of tenacity and a good dose of luck to ensure that the Stramers did not collectively end up in the gas chambers or in front of German machine guns.
The British historian Bernard Wasserstein sociologically described an entire ethnic group – Eastern Jews – in the waiting room of death in his masterpiece “On the Eve”. Many of his observations – secularization and growing marginalization, pressure to emigrate or assimilate, higher education despite growing poverty – can also be found as stories in Łoziński. Mother Rywka reflects on her missing neighbors, who were lured to South America by exploiters at the end of the Habsburg era.
Several Stramers were dragged into communism and one of them was even imprisoned, while Karol Radek from Tarnów, a close friend of Lenin, was liquidated by Stalin in 1939. Then the esthete Rudek, a student of classical philology, wanders into the life of Krakow’s bohemians and comes into contact with the emancipated and wealthy Irka, whose camera will save his life much later among the Germans.
What is admirable about this novel is the ease with which Łoziński narrates his fate almost in the style of a soap opera, while at the same time he and the reader know that, accompanied by jokes, flirtations and Jewish escapades, the noose is always there. for actors it continues to tighten. After the summer of 1939, when the Spanish fighter Salo Stramer found himself in the Paris Resistance, some brothers from Tarnów fled across the San River to the Soviet Union, where they experienced terrible things such as deportation, brainwashing or starvation , but at least not the worst, gas chambers and special forces expected.
This clever author only mentions how Rudek fled east from a Soviet coffin factory in Lviv in 1941 to survive the advancing Wehrmacht and took his brother and sister with him at the last second. Will some Stramers make it out of the Bloodlands maze alive? The novel ends with Rywka’s last fond thoughts about her children and grandchildren – in the Stutthof concentration camp. He would never see the sea he dreamed of.
Mikołaj Łoziński: Stramer. Translated from Polish by Renate Schmidgall. Suhrkamp, 410 pages, 26 euros
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