An Ordinary Life? The Journeys of Tonia Lechtman, 1918–1996 by Anna Müller (review)

Reviewed by: An Ordinary Life? The Journeys of Tonia Lechtman, 1918–1996 by Anna Müller Elżbieta Kossewska Anna Müller. An Ordinary Life? The Journeys of Tonia Lechtman, 1918–1996. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2023. 376 pp. The title of this biography raises the question: Was Tonia Lechtman's life an ordinary one? I find an answer to that question in a scene when she received a copy of Stanislaw Brzozowski's Flames, the literary manifesto of the young Polish generation of the interwar period. Young people sought to identify with the fate of the protagonist of Brzozowski's novel. Coming from a traditional and religious home, that protagonist, in his youthful rebellion, rejected the values of his conservative home, left his family, and went to university, becoming involved with the revolutionary movement and the struggle for a new social order built around proletarian values. Brzozowski's Flames was designed to be received as a very Polish text—and so it was, albeit with one exception: it also struck the mood and captivated Jewish youth as well. Thus, Lechtman's identification with Flames may have seemed extraordinary at first glance but on closer scrutiny proves to have been emblematic for a whole generation of Polish Jews. Tonia Lechtman's choice of communism can be understood in the context of the political events of her time. More than a century of Polish struggle against the rule of the partitioning powers erased in the national consciousness the memory of the times when Poles had fought among themselves for rights and the shape of the government. Poland's regain of independence (1918) cast the question of civil rights and liberties into a whole new context. Young people faced a choice of either fighting for social order or consenting to loyalism justified on rational grounds. Linking themselves to communism was a way for youthful individuals to rise to the fight for social equality, while also hoping for modernity and—for some members of minority groups—for emancipation. Lechtman can be counted among the latter. The story of Lechtman's life is undoubtedly a fascinating topic, but the biography has a number of shortcomings. One is that the book offers an interpretation of a broad set of facts based on what is ultimately a slim collection of sources. One document particularly heavily cited in the work is Dorota Dowgiałło's End Page 241 biographical interview with Lechtman, running over a hundred pages long—the detailed account she gave of her life to an employee of the Polish embassy in Tel Aviv in 1994. The conversation begins with her life and childhood in Łódź, and ends with Lechtman's imprisonment in Poland and decision to move to Israel. The number of references to this interview in the book indicates that it was the biographer's main source of knowledge about Lechtman's life. Another document Müller draws on is the official record of the suspect's interrogation during her arrest and imprisonment in Warsaw; this type of document undoubtedly has its flaws and cannot be used uncritically, and the author is right to use it cautiously. Both documents, the interview and the protocol, are held in the collections of the Archives of Modern Records in Warsaw. Lechtman's personal and family correspondence is not very extensive, documenting mainly the French period of her life. Another source Müller used is Marcel Loziński's film Tonia i jej dzieci (Tonia and her children; Warsaw: Kronika Film Studio, 2011). A second shortcoming is that the book's narrative is uneven. Compared to the Łódź period, which is described quite well, the documentation of Lechtman's activity in Palestine, for example, comes across as weak. The biographer fails to note the leftist and kibbutz movements and does not address the entire rich and complex prewar reality. On the one hand, she portrays the book's heroine as a strongly leftist-oriented communist, while on the other, apart from general assertions of her commitment to communism, we learn little about the values she professed or her views on the distinctive political environments in Palestine, France, or Poland. The Israeli period in Lechtman's life is...