Bolesław Prus and the Jews by Agnieszka Friedrich (review)

Reviewed by: Bolesław Prus and the Jews by Agnieszka Friedrich Mikołaj Kunicki Bolesław Prus and the Jews. By Agnieszka Friedrich. Translated by Ben Koschalka. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021. 296 pages. 109. 00 (cloth). We live in a revisionist time when historical figures and events, literary and cinematic canons, patrons of monuments and public institutions are reassessed and occasionally toppled. This trend has not bypassed present-day Poland, which is currently experiencing at least three revisionist approaches to history, culture, and memory. The first relates to the rewriting of national history in a way that legitimizes the Law and Justice party, delegitimizes its opponents and liberal high society, and forges an ethnocentric, conservative Catholic identity and creates new elites in Poland. The second is reflected in the shift in the social sciences, humanities, and popular history to study previously "repressed" and neglected groups and subjects, for example, peasant serfs and social engagement under communism. This tendency discards totalitarian, neoliberal, colonial, and elite-centered narratives and belatedly "restores" the peasant and blue-collar roots and family ancestries of most contemporary Poles. The third revisionist approach concerns the young intellectual Left, which distances itself from yesterday's cultural and political heroes, for example, former anti-communist dissidents who embraced the neoliberal order after 1989 and still cling to their leading positions in political, moral, and intellectual domains. These members of the older generation are often dubbed dziaders, a derogative term coined by writer and poet Jacek Dehnel that is reminiscent of "OK boomers. " They are thought to be complacent, ossified in their judgments, and patronizing younger people with unsolicited advice. Shortly before accepting the invitation to write this review, I witnessed a lively exchange on a social media platform about Aleksander Głowacki, better known as Bolesław Prus, the Polish writer and public intellectual associated with the nineteenth century positivist movement, which dominated the Polish intelligentsia in the 1870s and 1880s. In the initial post, a well-known historian and journalist shared his criticism of Prus's final, and End Page 161 arguably, weakest novel Dzieci (Children) on the 1905 Revolution in Russian-partitioned Poland. Not only did the book misrepre-sent and demonize the revolutionaries and social upheaval, but, according to the author of the post, it also revealed Prus to be a dziaders who towards the end of his life was out of touch with Polish society and politics, very much like the advocates of the 1863 January Uprising that he had criticized in the 1870s. While I am not discussing the validity of this statement, I find the use of the dziaders catchphrase both humorous and symptomatic. As part of the Polish literary canon, Prus has been discussed in the context of a present day generational and political conflict, which itself constitutes an episode in the long cycle of intellectual wars fought by the Left and the Right, radicals and moderates, antisemites and the advocates of Jewish participation in Polish society. This last aspect is central to Agnieszka Friedrich's Bolesław Prus and the Jews, published first in Polish in 2008 and now available in English. According to Friedrich, the "main objective of this book was to compile as fully as possible the views on Jews and the Jewish question expressed by Bolesław Prus, and to use them to reconstruct the writer's more general views in this respect" (24). By the "Jewish question" she means two interwoven issues, the emancipation of Jews and their relationship with the Polish majority (22). This "compiling" goal does not do justice to the author's work and undervalues her project, which probably tracks down all of Prus's writings on Jewish issues, some 300 texts that include articles, novellas, and excerpts from novels (1, 25). Unlike previous authors who examined Prus's views on Jews, Friedrich does not focus on the question of whether the author of The Doll was an antisemite or a philosemite. Once she starts examining his views on Jewish emancipation, identity, religion, position in the economy, and relationship with the Poles, it becomes clear that the long journey Prus takes from the initial endorsement of assimilation to support for Zionism was anything. . .