Sydor Rey

Sydor Rey
Born Izydor Reiss
(1908-09-06)6 September 1908
Wojniłów
Died 15 November 1979(1979-11-15) (aged 71)
Occupation Poet, writer, orphanage worker
Nationality Polish
Ethnicity Jewish
Period Interbellum
Second World War
Post-War period
Genre Lyric poetry
Children one daughter

Sydor Rey born Izydor Reiss (6 September 1908 – 15 November 1979) was a Polish poet and novelist. During the Interbellum he worked in the Jewish orphanage of Janusz Korczak in Warsaw.[1] He dedicated his short story Anioł-Stróż ("Guardian Angel"; 1957), part of his book Księga rozbitków, to the memory of Janusz Korczak.[2] A bisexual author, Sydor Rey did not frequently tackle gay subjects in his writings.[3]

Life in interwar Poland

Sydor Rey was born in Wojniłów (now Voinyliv, Ukraine). He studied law and political science at the Lvov University and at Warsaw University. As a writer, Rey debuted in 1929. He was a member of the literary collective (zespół literacki) Przedmieście in Warsaw.[4] The first issue of the group's literary journal indicated that the association was established on the initiative of Helena Boguszewska (1886–1978) and Jerzy Kornacki (1908–1981) in June–July 1933, with Bruno Schulz, Adolf Rudnicki, and Zofja Nałkowska among the invited founder members. Rudnicki had resigned from membership before the publication of their magazine in 1934, while Halina Krahelska and Sydor Rey were inducted as new members.[5]

The group's name (przedmieście, Pol. "faubourg") has been explained as referring both to the group's programmatic preoccupation with the marginalized aspects of the culture and social life in the Second Polish Republic, and to the connotation of "outpost" – hence by extension avant-garde.[5] The volume carried Sydor Rey's short story Królestwo Boże ("The Kingdom of God"), a fictional narrative of a visit to a privately owned factory by a friend of the proprietors. The visit becomes an occasion for remarkably detailed observations on the work conditions of the employees and their relations with the management, the government (represented by an industrial inspector), and the outside world.[6]

First novel Kropiwniki

Sydor Rey's first novel Kropiwniki was published in 1937.[7] The title of the novel, Kropiwniki, refers to the Polish provincial locality of Kropiwniki in the Volhynia (96 kilometres to the north of the Polish town of Włodzimierz Wołyński; since 1945 within the territory of the Ukrainian SSR), whose name the author uses as a cryptonym for his native Wojniłów, an ancient township founded in 1552 by the charter issued by Sigismund II Augustus.[8] Its real identity thus concealed, the place serves as a canvas on which the author paints the history of three generations of inhabitants from various social classes and religious communities of Polish society, including Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians, representatives of the szlachta but also peasants, merchants, and artisans, thereby presenting an allegory on Polish society as a whole.[9] Each of these various social groups, further subdivided in the book into additional subgroups and subtypes, espouses different and often conflicting sets of beliefs concerning social and political matters, whose beliefs moreover further mutate from generation to generation.[9] While the author parades a plethora of various types of characters on his stage, from the szlachta individuals affecting a grand aristocratic manner, through lordlings enlightened by foreign studies enough to be able to fraternize with the working classes, to well-to-do Jewish businessmen, he devotes most space to the radicalizing poverty of the township and the impenetrable ignorance of the peasant masses of the surrounding villages, succeeding to depict this broad gallery of human types in particularly vivid brush strokes of great directness.[9] Owing however to the well-nigh unmanageable breadth of the scope of his project, it has been observed by contemporary critics that the social doctrine on occasion takes precedence in his writing over art.[9] The author Jerzy Andrzejewski (1909–1983) in literary magazine Prosto z mostu,[10] was even less kind, having seen in Kropiwniki an expression of the alleged Communist stance of an author squandering his talent in a doctrinaire enterprise of quixotic futility.[11] Witold Gombrowicz too wrote a detailed and perhaps most considerate analysis of Kropiwniki, arguing that it is the literary debuts that are more interesting, for all their inchoate form, than an author's later works which, though benefiting from the writer's more crystallized pattern of thought, in general tend to say little that is essentially new.[12]

Rey also translated from the Yiddish into Polish the biographical novel on Karl Marx, Karl Marks (bay zayn shvel): byografisher montazsh-roman by the Polish writer Moisheh Grosman (1904–1961).[13]

A pewnie że poznam drzewo,
 Ale drzewo czy mnie pozna?
 Tak jak ja się zmieniłem,
 Nie zmienia się lipa przydrożna.
________________

Surely I will recognize the tree,
But the tree, will it recognize me?
As much change as I took astride
No poplar could manage by the roadside.

“
”

— "List" (A Letter)
December 1957[14]

Biographer Eugenia Prokop-Janiec of Jagiellonian University asserts that it was ultimately the pervasive antisemitism of the Polish society in the 1930s that forced the writers and poets like Sydor Rey and Henryka Łazowertówna (1909–1942), who never otherwise identified themselves as Jewish while working in the Polish language, to align themselves with the Jewish community for the first time.[15] Sydor Rey's vignette entitled Spacer ("A Walk") deals with the thorny subject of race relations in a homoerotic context. It is a short text about a male couple who, taking a stroll in a public park, attract the attention of a gathering crowd not for being gay but for being of different races: the bystanders are not hostile to both characters as a couple, but in each case only to one of them – selected according to the particular bystander's own racial allegiance: the Gentiles in the crowd of onlookers are hostile to the man who looks Jewish, for they believe him to be somehow exploitative of his companion; the Jews in the crowd on the other hand are hostile to the Gentile believing him to be about to cause harm to his Jewish companion to whom they consequently feel obliged to offer assistance. Both men offer explanations to a policeman who arrives on the scene to institute ad hoc inquiry of his own into the commingling of the couple. The story is an allegory on the impossibility of normal relations between the races on a private level without public or official harassment, even as relations between (or within) the sexes are tolerated.[16] A bisexual author, Sydor Rey did not frequently tackle gay subjects in his writings.[3] His epigram "Na plaży" (On the Beach) is one of the exceptions.[17]

Rey was one of the signatories of the open letter of the Polish writers against the bloody pacification by the Polish police of the workers' protests against the Sanacja régime in March 1936.[18]

Emigration

On the eve of the Second World War, in the spring of 1939 Sydor Rey emigrated from Warsaw to New York City, where he subsequently operated a second-hand bookshop.[19] His wife and daughter left behind in Poland will perish in Cracow during the Holocaust.[20] During his American period his writings appeared frequently in the Polish-language weekly newspaper Wiadomości: tygodnik ("The News: A Weekly") published in London, and in other émigré periodicals (while Commentary and the Transatlantic Review published translations in the United States). In his reply to a survey of Polish writers living in exile conducted by the Wiadomości of London in 1958, nearly twenty years after his departure from Poland, Rey revealed that every writer creatively active in exile is spiritually present, in the act of creation, in his native land.[21] Hence there are in reality no "émigré writers" and no "émigré literatures".[21] He appended his literary testament with the following codicil.

If I, after well-nigh twenty years spent in the United States, have never thought for a moment of adopting English as my creative medium, it is because spiritually I continue to reside in my Homeland. The split involved here at times invests the written word of an author in exile with a terrifying beauty, which flows from his undaunted vision. But at the same time this split can, in the long run, lead to the degeneration of the creative faculty — the most glaring case in point being that of the giant of Polish literature, Adam Mickiewicz. (...) [This happens] when a writer ceases to use the written word in the service of Beauty, as a building block in the project of constructing his own immaterial world, and starts using it as a magic charm invoked for the sake of transforming his immaterial world into a material one.[21]

And Rey clearly remained devoted to the Polish language for life, in the sort of intricate way of an impeccable stylist, as evidenced in his corrections of the minutiae in the prose of other writers or in the praise he generously showered on the dextrous use of the language in other cases, even of those who might not have been professional writers.[22] He was listed by the Wiadomości of London among the Polish writers in exile who ought to be members of the Polish Academy of Literature were such an institution to be established (or rather revived).[23] There is no evidence, on the other hand, that in the United States Rey found anything like a substitute for the land of his youth; in a poem entitled "Miasto na Long Island" (A City on Long Island) published in 1960 he speaks of a "city flat and straight like a cadaver", with street names invoking "Indians that have been exterminated, running streams that have been filled in, hills that have been levelled down, and forests that have been felled": what use to me this cemetery? he asks. "Don't you know that I was born in a land where a white-winged horse would bend down to peer into my crib?"[24] In the poem "Banita" (The Banished One; 1961) Rey speaks of himself as a person deprived of speech, on account of his being "a poet without a land".[25]

Publishing from abroad

During his exile in the United States he also chose to publish his books — Księga rozbitków ("The Book of the Shipwrecked"; first edition, 1959)[26] and Kropiwniki (second edition, 1962)[27] — in the then Communist-controlled Poland, where their publication would have been subject to (and has received) the advance approval of the censors. He also granted an interview to the Polish Radio in 1963, apparently on a visit to Warsaw (see Recordings).

Księga rozbitków ("The Book of the Shipwrecked") is a collection of eighteen short stories that are, cumulatively, a psychological memoir of an author guilt-stricken for having passed the Holocaust in the physical safety of New York while being spiritually connected to the event as closely as or perhaps in some cases more closely than some of the victims, making the work something of a cross between a novel and a psychodrama cum a Gestalt therapy.[28]

Sydor Rey's novel Ludzie miejscowi ("The Folk of the Place") was published in installments in the Wiadomości of London between 1962 and 1966 (see Works). While his writings in prose were praised for their astute psychological shadowing of characters and deep insights into the human condition, his poetry did not appeal to everyone. Marian Pankowski, reviewing his collection of poetry Własnymi słowami ("In My Own Words"; 1967), refused to apply the label of "poetry" to his verses, arguing that the colloquial and sometimes crude turn of phrase favoured by the author put his epigrams beyond the pale of art, while the consistent unsublimated directness of expression made it impossible to interpret this style as a literary conceit.[29] Rey countered that the criticisms presented by Pankowski were illustrated by tendentiously selected quotations that did not constitute a representative sample and had been taken out of context, and that the overall method of extrapolating judgement of the whole oeuvre from bits and pieces was absurd, "rather like presenting an audience with the bottom sliver of Cézanne's Bathing Women — the figures cut off at the ankle — and averring this fragment to possess 'some characteristics of Cézanne's painting style', only to dispatch the artist in toto with the dictum that 'the rest of his output is much in the same manner'".[30] Since Rey did not publish essays, his philosophical ideas found expression in his fiction, both in prose and in verse. Poems that deal directly or (sometimes) veiledly with the principal tenets of the Judaeo-Christian religious doctrine — such as "Bajka" (Fairy Tale),[31] "Ojcze nasz" (Our Father),[32] or "Raz kozie śmierć" (Once a Death Befell a Goat) which quotes (in Hebrew) one of the Seven Last Words in the scornful context of a pastoral ditty[33] — may offend religious sensibilities, expressive as they are of his deep agnosticism and his radical questioning of the truth value of that doctrine.

As a literary critic, Sydor Rey believed that Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago was deeply indebted to Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, notwithstanding the fact of Hemingway's having been "thick-skinned and effect-driven" as opposed to Pasternak's qualities of fragile intelligence and delicacy.[34] He was an admirer of the works of Thornton Wilder, to whom he dedicated a poem (entitled "Festyn" — "A Village Fair"; translated in The Daily Orange in 1966 as "Picnic"), acknowledging his indebtedness in the writing of Księga rozbitków to the style of Wilder's play Our Town.[35]

His collected papers dating from the period between 1940 and 1969 — The Sydor Rey Papers — are preserved in the Special Collections Research Center of the Syracuse University Library in Syracuse, New York, having been donated to the institution by the Author in 1966.[36] Some of his correspondence with Salo Wittmayer Baron is also preserved among the papers of the latter — The Salo W. Baron Papers, 1900–1980 — in the Department of Special Collections of Stanford University Libraries,[37] while his correspondence with the renowned critic Michał Chmielowiec (1918–1974) is kept among the papers of the latter in the Archiwum Emigracji of the Nicolaus Copernicus University Library in Toruń.[38]

Works

Poetry monographs

Selected poetry in periodicals

Novels

Księga rozbitków installments

Ludzie miejscowi installments

Short stories

Literary criticism

Letters

Recordings

References

  1. ↑ Cf. The Interia Encyklopedia online.
  2. ↑ Sydor Rey, Guardian Angel: A Story, tr. N. Guterman, Commentary, vol. 67, No. 2, February 1979, p. 58: see online. The story won the acclaim of readers: cf. Jan Leszcza, "Pochwała" (A Commendation), letter to the editor, Wiadomości: tygodnik (London), vol. 12, No. 2 (615), 12 January 1958, p. 4.
  3. 1 2 Cf. Sydor Rey, Shulim: A Story, Commentary, vol. 29, No. 4, April 1960, p. 324 (see online).
  4. ↑ Jerzy Kwiatkowski, Literatura Dwudziestolecia, Warsaw, Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe (Instytut Badań Literackich Polskiej Akademii Nauk), 1990, p. 31. ISBN 8301099283.
  5. 1 2 Halina Krahelska, "Przedmowa" (Foreword); in: Przedmieście, ed. H. Boguszewska & J. Kornacki, Warsaw, Towarzystwo Wydawnicze Rój, 1934, p. v. See also Zespół Literacki Przedmieście.
  6. ↑ Sydor Rey, Królestwo Boże; in: Przedmieście, ed. H. Boguszewska & J. Kornacki, Warsaw, Towarzystwo Wydawnicze Rój, 1934, pp. 158–177.
  7. ↑ Sydor Rey, Kropiwniki: powieść, Warsaw, Nakładem Księgarni F. Hoesicka, 1937. (393 pp.)
  8. ↑ Cf. Ludwik Dziedzicki, in: The Geographical Dictionary of the Kingdom of Poland, vol. 13, p. 754, col. 2, s.v. Wojniłów (see online).
  9. 1 2 3 4 [Anonymous], "Na ekranie, scenie i wśród książek: Sidor Rey – Kropiwniki" (On the Screen, On the Stage, and Among the Books: Sidor [sic] Rey — Kropiwniki), Czasopismo Skarbowe (Warsaw), vol. 12, No. 14, 15 July 1937, p. 3.
  10. ↑ Cf. Ignacy Fik, 20 lat literatury polskiej (1918–1938), Kraków, Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza Czytelnik, 1939, p. 58.
  11. ↑ Jerzy Andrzejewski, "Nowe powieści: Sydor Rey, Kropiwniki" (New Novels: Sydor Rey, Kropiwniki), Prosto z mostu (Warsaw), vol. 3, No. 2 (110), 10 January 1937, p. 7.
  12. ↑ Witold Gombrowicz, "Proletariacka huśtawka" (A Proletarian See-saw); in (e.g.) id., Czytelnicy i krytycy: proza, reportaże, krytyka literacka, eseje, przedmowy, ed. W. Bolecki, Cracow, Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2004, p. 220. ISBN 8308033954.
  13. ↑ M. Grosman, Karol Marks: powieść biograficzna, tr. S. Rey, Warsaw, Znicz, 1935.
  14. ↑ Sydor Rey, "List" (A Letter), Wiadomości: tygodnik (London), vol. 12, No. 51/52 (612/613), 22–29 December 1957, p. 1. Subsequently published in: id., Własnymi słowami, London, Poets' & Painters' Press, 1967, p. 75.
  15. ↑ Eugenia Prokop-Janiec, Polish–Jewish Literature in the Interwar Years, tr. A. Shenitzer, Syracuse (New York), Syracuse University Press, 2003, pp. 94–95. ISBN 0815629842.
  16. ↑ Sydor Rey, Spacer ("A Walk"), Nowy Głos (a daily Jewish newspaper of Warsaw), vol. 2, No. 155, 5 June 1938, p. 7.
  17. ↑ Sydor Rey, "Na plaży" (On the Beach); in id., Własnymi słowami, London, Poets' & Painters' Press, 1967, p. 49.
  18. ↑ "Protest pisarzy warszawskich" (Protest of the Writers of Warsaw), Kamena: miesięcznik literacki (Chełm Lubelski), vol. 3, Nos. 8–9 (28–29), April–May 1936, back cover.
  19. ↑ Bio on the Onet.pl WIEM reference portal (see online.)
  20. ↑ Zofia Kozarynowa, "O Księdze rozbitków", Wiadomości: tygodnik (London), vol. 14, No. 48 (713), 29 November 1959, p. 4.
  21. 1 2 3 "Pisarze emigracyjni a literatura krajowa: ankieta Wiadomości" (Émigré Writers vis-à-vis the Literature of the Home Country: A Wiadomości Poll), Wiadomości: tygodnik (London), vol. 13, No. 33 (646), 17 August 1958, p. 4.
  22. ↑ Sydor Rey, "Przyjemniejszy szmer" (A Still More Captivating Murmur), letter to the editor, Wiadomości: tygodnik (London), vol. 14, No. 32 (697), 9 August 1959, p. 6. Sydor Rey, "Pisarze nie zawodowi" (Non-professional Writers), letter to the editor, Wiadomości: tygodnik (London), vol. 14, No. 46 (711), 15 November 1959, p. 6. Cf. Sydor Rey, "Para Mistrzów" (Two Masters), letter to the editor, Wiadomości: tygodnik (London), vol. 16, No. 20 (789), 14 May 1961, p. 6.
  23. ↑ "Rozstrzygnięcie plebiscytu czytelników Wiadomości: kogo wybraliśmy do złożonej z 15 pisarzy emigracyjnej Akademii Literatury Polskiej gdyby taka Akademia powstała" (The Results of Wiadomości Readers' Plebiscite: Whom to Appoint to the 15-member Polish Academy of Literature in exile were such an Academy to be Established), Wiadomości: tygodnik (London), vol. 14, No. 41 (706), 11 October 1959, p. 1.
  24. ↑ Sydor Rey, "Miasto na Long Island" (A City on Long Island), Wiadomości: tygodnik (London), vol. 15, No. 23 (740), 5 June 1960, p. 1. Subsequently published in: id., Własnymi słowami, London, Poets' & Painters' Press, 1967, p. 86.
  25. ↑ Sydor Rey, "Banita" (The Banished One), Wiadomości: tygodnik (London), vol. 16, No. 52/53 (821/822), 24–31 December 1961, p. 3.
  26. ↑ Sydor Rey, Księga rozbitków, Warsaw, Czytelnik, 1959. (227 pp.)
  27. ↑ Sydor Rey, Kropiwniki, 2nd ed., Cracow, Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1962. (253 pp.) There is a 140-page difference in the number of pages between this second edition and the first edition of 1937, which ran to 393 pages: it is unclear whether this difference is due to a difference in typesetting styles or to an abridgement of the text (and if the latter should be the case, whether this would have been done by the Author or through an intervention of the censor).
  28. ↑ Gerald Popiel, "The Memories of an Amputee", The Polish Review, vol. 7, No. 2, Spring 1962, p. 105.
  29. ↑ Marian Pankowski, "Rzeczywistość nieokrzesana, czyli o wierszach Sydora Reya" (Uncouth Reality, or About the Verses of Sydor Rey), Wiadomości: tygodnik (London), vol. 23, No. 39 (1174), 29 September 1968, p. 4.
  30. ↑ Sydor Rey, "W obronie własnej" (In Self-defence), letter to the editor, Wiadomości: tygodnik (London), vol. 23, No. 45 (1180), 10 November 1968, p. 6.
  31. ↑ Sydor Rey, "Bajka" (Fairy Tale) Wiadomości: tygodnik (London), vol. 15, No. 51/52 (768/769), 18–25 December 1960, p. 4. Subsequently published in: id., Własnymi słowami, London, Poets' & Painters' Press, 1967, p. 7.
  32. ↑ Sydor Rey, "Ojcze nasz" (Our Father), Wiadomości: tygodnik (London), vol. 16, No. 52/53 (821/822), 24–31 December 1961, p. 3. Subsequently published in: id., Własnymi słowami, London, Poets' & Painters' Press, 1967, p. 8.
  33. ↑ Sydor Rey, "Raz kozie śmierć" (Once a Death Befell a Goat), Wiadomości: tygodnik (London), vol. 12, No. 4 (1086), 22 January 1967, p. 6. Subsequently published in: id., Własnymi słowami, London, Poets' & Painters' Press, 1967, p. 35.
  34. ↑ Sydor Rey, "Pasternak i Hemingway" (Pasternak and Hemingway), letter to the editor, Wiadomości: tygodnik (London), vol. 14, No. 9 (674), 1 March 1959, p. 6.
  35. ↑ [Anonymous], "Kronika: Sydor Rey w zbiorach Syracuse University" (Chronicle: Sydor Rey among the Holdings of the Syracuse University Library), Wiadomości: tygodnik (London), vol. 21, No. 21 (1051), 22 May 1966, p. 6.
  36. ↑ The Sydor Rey Papers, Syracuse University Library in Syracuse (New York). (See online.) Cf. [Anonymous], "Kronika: Sydor Rey w zbiorach Syracuse University" (Chronicle: Sydor Rey among the Holdings of the Syracuse University Library), Wiadomości: tygodnik (London), vol. 21, No. 21 (1051), 22 May 1966, p. 6.
  37. ↑ Cf. "The Salo W. Baron Papers, 1900–1980", Stanford University Libraries, Manuscript Division, Collection No. M0580 (see online).
  38. ↑ "Inwentarz Michała Chmielowca", Biblioteka UMK w Toruniu (Nicolaus Copernicus University Library in Toruń), shelf mark AE/MC/XI (see online).
  39. ↑ "Z warsztatu pisarza: rozmowa z Sydorem Reyem — pisarzem — na temat początków jego twórczości literackiej i pierwszych utworów" (From the Workshop of a Writer: A Conversation with Sydor Rey on the subject of His Beginnings as an Author and His First Works), shelf mark 33-T-3926; see Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe (National Digital Archives) online.

Bibliography


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