This week we look at the work of Hanna Krall, a writer who mixes the conventions of journalism and the novel.

Presented by Amy Drozdowska

In the stories of Hanna Krall, facts alone aren’t enough to get at the truth. Here, the conventions of journalism and the novel are intertwined, and elements of fiction blend with non-fiction to create a style all her own.

Krall was born in Warsaw in 1937. When just a small child, she lost many of her closest family members to the Holocaust. She only survived herself because a local family took her in, and hid her and her mother from the Nazis. She began her career as a journalist writing for publications like Życie Warszawy, the magazine Polityka, and later the daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.

Krall’s first commercial success and widespread recognition came with publication of “Zdążyć przed Panem Bogiem,” meaning “To Outwit God;” though the book’s title is generally presented in English as “Shielding the Flame.” The book tells the story of Marek Edelman, a doctor and then last living survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. And it introduced the techniques and themes that became models for her later works.

The books of Hanna Krall center on the lives and fates of ordinary people, with the Holocaust often as a backdrop. She focuses on the far-reaching repercussions of what happened during that time within the lives of individuals. As Krall says, her works aim to bring the stories of real people to light. It’s a task for which she feels both reverence and humility:

Ci moje bohaterowie są współautorami moich książek, gdyż ja piszę o ludziach, którzy żyją albo żyli do niedawna. Te miejsca, o których piszę istnieją naprawdę, zdarzenia naprawdę miały miejsce. To jest pierwsza moja myśl zawsze połączona z taką wdzięcznością, że ci ludzie chcieli powierzyć mi swoje życia.

My characters are the co-authors of my books, because I write about people who are still living or who lived not long ago. These places that I write about really exist, the events truly took place. First and foremost, I feel such gratitude that these people wanted to entrust their lives to me.

Her stories may usually center on the events of World War II and the complicated relations between Poles, Jews and Germans. But Krall emphasizes that these stories aren’t bound to a particular time, place, or community.

To o czym ja piszę, to co się nazywa okropnym amerykańskim słowem Holocaust, to się przytrafiło Żydom. Ale to nie jest wewnątrz-żydowska sprawa. To jest sprawa wewnątrz-ludzka. I tak naprawdę moim pragnieniem jest, żeby to czytelnicy moi zrozumieli i poczuli. To nie jest tak, że się przytrafiło nam Żydom, nam Polakom, albo nam Niemcom. To się nam ludziom przytrafiło.

What I write about, which is called that awful American word “Holocaust”, that happened to Jews. But it’s not a solely Jewish affair. It’s a human affair. And really that’s my desire, that my readers will understand and feel this. It’s not that it happened to us Jews, us Poles, or us Germans. It happened to us humans.

“The Dybbuk” is a short story originally published in Poland as part of the collection “Dowody na istnienie,” or “Proofs of Existence.” The English translation of the story can be found in “The Woman from Hamburg and other True Stories,” published abroad. In Jewish tradition, a Dybbuk is the soul of someone who has passed away. The spirit enters into the body of someone else, looking for solace or maybe seeking revenge. The dybbuk becomes a lifetime companion who can either torment or lie dormant.

In Krall’s story, the Dybbuk is a small boy who was murdered in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Second World War. In the following excerpt, Hanna Krall introduces us to Adam S, and his confrontation with events that preceded him, and yet profoundly envelope him:

Adam S., tall, handsome, with blue eyes and a white-toothed smile, teaches the history of construction at an American technical college. He’s been to Poland several times. He was interested in the wooden synagogues which burned down during the last war.

I asked Adam S., why an ambitious American, almost six feet tall, born after the war, should be interested in something that no longer exists.

The answer came in a letter written on a computer. He must have been in a hurry, for he didn’t even tear off the perforated sides. His father, he wrote, was a Polish Jew, who had lost his wife and son in the ghetto. After the war he had left for France and re-married. His new wife was French, Adam S. was born in Paris, at home they talked French.

‘So why do I come to Poland?’, he wrote in his print-out.

‘Because of the dybbuk. My step-brother, my father’s child from his first marriage, born before the war with my name, who was somehow lost in the ghetto. He’s been with me a long time now, through my childhood, through my school years…’

The word dybbuk comes from the Hebrew and means union. In Jewish tradition it is the soul of someone dead that dwells in a living person.

Quite early in his life Adam S. realized he wasn’t alone. He was possessed by outbursts of inexplicable rage; someone else’s rage. At other times he was swept up in sudden, alien laughter. He learned to identify these moods, controlling them well enough and not revealing them in the presence of others.

From time to time this tenant would say something. Adam S. had no idea what, because the dybbuk talked in Polish. He started studying the language: he wanted to understand what his younger brother was saying to him. When he learned enough, he visited Poland. Then he became interested in the wooden synagogues that had existed for three hundred years only in Poland. On their walls were painted heavenly gardens, fantastic animals, the walls of Jerusalem or the rivers of Babylon. Their domes, invisible from the outside, since they were covered up by normal roofs, inside created a feeling of unending, vanishing space.

Those gardens and walls were long gone, Adam S. examined them on old, poor photographs, but he wrote beautiful essays about them. After some time he got a PhD and moved to a better college. He got married, bought a house and lived like every normal, educated American, except he had a double life. His own and his younger brother’s, who was called Abram, and when he was six years old ‘somehow got lost in the ghetto.’

In April of 1993 Adam S. came to Poland. He hadn’t been here several years, so first he went to Połaniec, Pinczów, Zabłudów, Grójec and Nowe Miasto. Who knows what for. Maybe he hoped that this time in Grójec he would see the rivers of Babylon in a synagogue, and the willows, on which ‘we hung up our harps…’ Perhaps in Zabłudów he wanted to find gryphons, bears, peacocks, winged dragons, unicorns and fish-serpents…

As was to be predicted he found grass and a few sad trees.

He returned to Warsaw, the fiftieth anniversary commemorations of the Ghetto Uprising were just getting under way. During a break at an academic conference we went for dinner.
I congratulated Adam S. on the birth of his first son, I looked at the photographs and asked:

‘What about… him?’

I didn’t know what word to use: brother? Abram? dybbuk?

‘Is he still with you?’

Adam S. understood immediately.

‘He’s still with me, although I’d rather he went away. He irritates me, complains, he doesn’t know himself what he wants. It’s hard for him with me and I feel worse and worse with him.

‘I found out about a Buddhist monk living in Boston,’ continued Adam S. ‘An American Jew who converted to Buddhism and became a monk. A friend told me that this man could help me…’

‘I went to the monk. He asked me to lie down on a couch and he started to massage my shoulders. At first I didn’t feel anything, I just lay there, then after a half-an-hour I suddenly burst out crying. I listened to the weeping and I knew it wasn’t my voice. It was the voice of a child.
The child cried in me. The crying grew stronger and I started to shout. The child started to shout. He was shouting. I knew that he was afraid of something, it was a cry of fear. He was terrified and furious, tossing and striking about with my fists. A few times he calmed down, obviously tired, but then he started again. It was a child unconscious from exhaustion and fear… Samuel, the monk, tried to talk to him but he went on shouting.

All this lasted a few hours. I thought I would die, I didn’t have any strength. Suddenly I felt that something was happening inside me. Something rocked inside. The crying subsided, a shadow loomed on my belly. I knew that all this was only an illusion but the monk must have noticed it as well for he addressed the shadow directly: ‘Go away,’ he said gently. ‘Go to the light.’ I didn’t know what it was supposed to mean for everything was taking place in the normal daylight . ‘There, there…’ And the shadow began to move. Samuel kept on talking, he repeated the same words over and over again. ‘Go to the light… Go… There, there, don’t be afraid, you’ll be happier there…’ And the shadow kept on going away… It didn’t go, rather it slunk further and further away and I understood that in a moment it would disappear altogether. I felt sad. ‘You want to leave me?’ I said.’ Stay with me. You are my brother. Don’t go away.’ It’s as if he was waiting for that. He came back, with one swift motion jumped on me and I stopped seeing him.

Adam S. stopped talking.

We were sitting in an Oriental restaurant on Plac Teatralny in Warsaw. A cold afternoon outside. Those anniversary days were always humid and cold. Drizzling grayness settled on cars, people rushed about without looking sideways.

We looked at them thinking about the same thing: does anybody care about ghetto celebrations, wooden synagogues and crying dybbuks?

‘In America they don’t care about them either,’ I said although Adam S. knew it better than I did.

Photos of Adam’s son and wife were lying on our table: a cheerful, smart boy embraced by a serious looking woman with brown eyes behind thick glasses.

‘Moshe,’ said Adam S. ‘Like my father. But my father was an ordinary, real Moshe, and my little boy is called Michael.’

‘Did you tell your father about the monk and Boston?’

‘On the phone. He lived in Iowa then, I called him when I got back home, I thought he wouldn’t believe me, or that he would at least be surprised, but he wasn’t surprised at all. He listened to me calmly and then he said: ‘I know the sound of that crying. When he was thrown out of the hiding place he was standing in the street, crying loudly. This was how he cried, my child, when he was thrown out into the street.’

‘This was the first time I talked with my father about my brother. My father had a heart condition, I didn’t want to upset him. I knew that my brother had perished, like everybody else, what was there to ask about? Now I found out that the little boy had been hiding somewhere with his mother, my father’s first wife, and several other Jews. I don’t know where, whether in the ghetto or on the Aryan side. Sometimes I imagine a kitchen crowded with many people. They were sitting on the floor… They tried not to breathe… He cried… They tried to calm him down… How can you calm down a crying child? With a candy? A toy? They had neither candies nor toys. He cried louder and louder, the people crowded on the floor were all thinking the same thing… Someone whispered: ‘Because of one brat we’ll all die…’ Well, perhaps it wasn’t a kitchen… Perhaps it was a cellar or a bunker… My father wasn’t with them, only she was there, Abram’s mother. She stayed on with the people and survived. Later she lived in Israel, maybe she still lives there, I didn’t ask, I don’t know…

‘My father died.

‘My wife went to the hospital to give birth to the baby. I went with her and lay down on a bed next to her. When the midwife told my wife: ‘Push, it will soon be over,’ I felt that something was happening inside me as well. I felt a motion, a sort of rocking… It was him, I realised. He was getting ready to come out. He was getting ready to settle down inside my child. I quickly got up from my bed. ‘Oh, no,’ I said aloud. ‘Don’t you dare. No ghetto. No Holocaust. You shall not live inside my child.’

‘No, I wasn’t crying, but I was speaking clearly. I was speaking in Polish so my wife and the midwife did not understand me. But he did. He calmed down and I lay down again. I was so exhausted that I dozed off. A loud crying woke me up but this was crying without fear. This was a crying of a normal healthy kid that was just born. My son. Moshe.’

You’ve been listening to an excerpt from Hanna Krall’s short story, “The Dybbuk.”

Like she does in this story, Krall uses her background as a reporter to build a narrative based on interviews and reported details. But from there she goes further.

In books like “Wyjątkowo długa linia,” or “An Exceptionally Long Line,” Krall shifts between time and place, commingling her voice with that of her characters, and weaving fictional narratives in with the authentic ones. She manages to present both evidence and art. She documents the lives of real people with a style that’s journalistic and poetic.

“An Exceptionally Long Line” tells the story of a tenement building in Lublin. The building was first constructed in the 17th century, and was home to mix of ordinary people: Poles and Jews, intellectuals and civil servants. For centuries the lives and identities of these occupants intermingled.

To jest o jednym domu, o jednej kamienicy w Lublinie i ta kamienica to jest cały świat w gruncie rzeczy.

This is about one house, about one residence in Lublin, and that residence is essentially the whole world.

In recreating the history of the building and its inhabitants, Krall reconstructs the history of a whole city. It’s a story about remembering and what happens when we forget.

The story focuses on two main characters: Franciszka Arnsztajn and Józef Czechowicz. He died in the bombing raids that took place in the first few days of September 1939. Arnsztajn, a writer, poet and playwright – and a well-known figure among the interwar Lublin intelligentsia - perished much later, during the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. The two met in the Lublin building where they both lived. The young Czechowicz, an aspiring writer himself, was drawn to the much older woman’s renown. He’d visit her and recite his poetry.

She’d listen, even though her hearing was fading, and comment.

In the following excerpt from “Wyjątkowo długa linia,” or “An Exceptionally Long Line,”
we join Czechowicz for one of his visits to Franciszka Arnsztajn’s apartment. She’s called ‘F.A.’ in the story. Krall describes the details of the interior:

She never gave up furniture, she never bought new things, it was all as in the past: a long table with squat legs, a green velvet tablecloth, a three-armed chandelier and an oil lamp in the middle of the table although the tenement had electric lighting by then.

She too sat as in the past at the head of the table.

Czechowicz placed his written in, graph-paper exercise book before her.

He waited.

She read in silence, but repeated some of the verses aloud. She was nodding her head; I knew she liked it.

Once they were easy, so he guessed them from the lip-he began with polite questions; movements.

How is the doctor? He meant her husband.
Then: how is the captain? He meant her son.
Then: how is your daughter-in-law? He meant her son’s fiancée.
Then: how’s everything in general?

She replied in short, matter-of-fact sentences, though he had asked quite formally.

Rywcia Winograd gave birth to a child with no fingernails, so I consoled her by saying they would grow.

Meir Reichgold’s daughter can’t learn French. Her parents won’t let her to, because the lessons are on Saturdays. I consoled her by saying she can teach it to herself.

My granddaughter prayed in her own words at school again. No, I didn’t console her, I talk to my granddaughter like an adult, said F.A., and from a letter-writing pad she tore a page with a poem, neatly written out in capitals, with artistic flourishes.

He listened. He changed seats. He started writing, about the poem she had read to him a short time ago, or his own poem, unfinished, that he was still working on. Their sheets of paper lay next to each other. She looked over his shoulder. When he took his pencil off the page, as if suspending his voice, she tried to guess how it would go on, generally getting it wrong. Then he finished writing.

Oh yes, she said, of course it’s like that.

They decided to put some pages together as a whole, his and hers. F.A. wrote them out in a fair copy. A lengthy work emerged, with male and female. In the final stanza-fifty-six verses divided into “Voices” next to two verses he wrote “Together”.

I’ll quietly enter, an old man, into the light of ancient bonfires,
for I lived with the double strength, of waiting and of loving.

(that’s him)

Sunset already. The day is at an end. What has the slave of hunting
in his net.

(that’s her)

What’s left beneath the silver distaff of Lachesis?
the-A work in stigmata.-gleam and the body of verse

(that’s him)

He brought her poems about the approaching holocaust. He was listening out for it. He tried to tame it with words.

one is from time immemorial
the famine the holocaust and you
one is from time immemorial
the famine the holocaust and you

He spoke, or rather wrote: in your fate what I have feared all my life, what I still fear will come true. What I fear most of all: death and loneliness. They are coming after me step by step, but it’s you they’ll catch up with, not me. You will take them on for both of us.

So nothing bad can happen to you, she wrote, though she might have said it aloud.

You’re consoling me like Rywcia Winograd, he smiled, but he did seem reassured.

You’ve just heard an excerpt from Hanna Krall’s “Wyjątkowo długa linia,” or “An Exceptionally Long Line.”

And that’s all for this edition of Bookworm from Hannah Harvester, Dave McGuire and me Amy Drozdowska. The translations came thanks to Christopher Garbowski and Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

For more on the work of Hanna Krall see here

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