“And dresses, bright dresses, will remain after me” Ostap Slyvynsky

Is there an even worse instance, even more inconvenient from the point of view of “survival in historical memory”, than simply being a woman in a patriarchal society? Yes. It is being a female who represents a cultural or religious minority, a woman associated with a hostile ideology or – perhaps the worst possibility – living at a juncture of cultures, nationalities, religions or ideas.

I know I have to start with this story.

Not only because it involves Zuzanna Ginczanka, the Polish-Jewish poet with whom all this started, and not only because this micro-tale simply has to be written somewhere and by someone. But above all because it is an allegory of our non-remembering, our misunderstanding, of our own past which we had to abjure not three times, but infinitely many times, in order to physically survive and keep at least some crumbs of testimony deep inside our pockets.

Two weeks ago, when with a small Polish-French group of documentary filmmakers we were walking around the Lviv tenement house where Zuzanna Ginczanka was hiding during World War II, we found ourselves in an apartment of a hospitable elderly lady, Mrs. Sława. She did not know the Jewish poet; they had missed each other in this house by nearly thirty years, but we asked her if she was friends with some Jews before the war, or if she remembered them. And she told us about Gicia, a friend from her youth, a dressmaker who sewed clothes for the whole family. One stormy night, in the mountains, Gicia was shot by the Nazis together with dozens of other Jews from the area. She left behind the most beautiful dress as a souvenir. “And where is this dress now?” we asked. “Did you keep it?” „No,” replied Mrs Sława. “I don’t have it. I left it in the wardrobe when I had to flee from the Bolsheviks during the war.”

Three, maybe four years earlier, Zuzanna Ginczanka escaped from the apartment which was exactly below us during this conversation. She was fleeing from the police. Officers came three times to apprehend her, a Jewish woman who did not comply with the order to resettle into the ghetto. And it was probably here, in this Lviv tenement house, that she wrote her last poem, containing the line: „and dresses, bright dresses, will remain after me”.

Dresses of other women still live in our wardrobes today. Formerly beautiful, elegant clothes are now silent rags, which can tell you quite a lot about their former owners.

It is known that the mills of history crush primarily those from the lowest ranks of society. The defenceless, those deprived of the protection of their own property and the shield of social institutions, all those workers, small craftsmen and farmers who were the first to become cannon fodder and to fill mass graves, anonymously and without witnesses. Anonymous victims of mighty machines of destruction – try as you might, it is usually impossible to recreate their faces.

But the situation of women was always the worst. In old photographs rescued from the fires in which we try to recognise faces today, they are usually somewhere off to the side; and although they were usually kept at bay from the management of government and the machinery of society, this did not protect them at all when these machines disintegrated. Although they remained in the shadows, it usually did not give them protection, and if it did, it was at the cost of disappearance without a trace and oblivion. And this is the problem: extracting female stories from under the layers of the past probably is the most difficult task. As Okxana Kis wrote, “women not only were removed from power, strength, resources and ideology, but also their lives passed almost imperceptibly, in the world of private spaces uninteresting for historians”.

Is there an even worse instance, even more inconvenient from the point of view of “survival in historical memory”, than simply being a woman in a patriarchal society? Yes. It is being a female who represents a cultural or religious minority, a woman associated with a hostile ideology or – perhaps the worst possibility – living at a juncture of cultures, nationalities, religions or ideas.

The memory of such women returns very slowly, sometimes for decades, sometimes never. In Lviv, in this “doomed city”, as Jan Paul Hinrichs called it, in the city of broken bones, this “never” is more likely than elsewhere. And yet these women return. Even without support in great national narratives, which like nets pull those who manage to clutch at them from the waters of oblivion, they gradually emerge to the surface. They were the urban connective tissue; they chose the real community of the city instead of the imaginary community of the nation. To be more precise, they directly linked what was local to what was universal, practically bypassing the narrow national perspective.

Many of them were Jewesses from more or less assimilated families. Children from such families felt more clearly than others that they had a choice – of language, of faith or atheism, of a name and cultural context. Body and space, physicality, were given and objective.

And yet it was the body and space that were the biggest obstacle for them.

The feminine body was weighed on masculine scales and classified in masculine terms. If “beautiful”, it became an object of fetishisation, separation from the person, transformation into an aesthetic object. If “ugly”, it provided an excuse for disregard.

And the space was divided, stratified nationally, devoid of room for “neutrality”, “observers”, “witnesses” (the Lviv pogrom of 1918, justified by the alleged support of the Jewish population for the Ukrainian army during the November fights for Lviv, was an eloquent example of punishment for neutrality). This space was the fulfilment of Polish fantasies about a mono-national and mono-religious state.

A woman, a Jewess, regardless of her personal choices, was doubly excluded, precisely because of these two factors. This was the case in all social classes, and the intellectual elites were, unfortunately, no exception. Women’s work in science, literature, translation and higher education were a constant silent struggle for the right to do so, and the greater the women’s ambitions were in these spheres, the more determination was needed in the fight.

Male friends patronisingly called the girl from Lviv, Rachela (Rochl) Auerbach, “a quiet cat” who liked to “show her claws”. Born to a Jewish (probably Polish-speaking) family in Podolia, during her studies at the University of Lviv, she joined an ambitious project to revive Yiddish culture in Galicia and quickly became a great enthusiast of this cause. She was entrusted with editing the Yiddish cultural and artistic magazine “Cusztajer”, although officially the editor in chief had to be a man (it was Dawid Koenigsberg). But it was Auerbach who gathered an excellent group of Lviv Jewish authors around the magazine: Debora Vogel, Rachela Korn and others. In fiery polemical articles she herself criticised the stereotype of a muse, which reduced the woman to the role of a passive figure in the sphere of culture and art. She incited a rebellion against the constant eroticisation of the female body, reducing it to a biological object. She sarcastically wrote about her so called ugliness, which became an important disguise for her during the German occupation, when, after escaping from the Warsaw ghetto under the name of Aniela Dobrucka, she was hiding in the zoo.

In one of her letters, Rachel Auerbach writes about a female friend, coming to the conclusion that “it may be better for a woman when she is not beautiful”, because beauty brings her into a stooper, does not push her to develop and fight, but encourages her to accept typical male gestures of “indulgence for beauty”. This friend was a writer and art historian Debora Vogel, considered to be one of the greatest erudites of interwar Lviv.

Just like Auerbach, the bilingual, Yiddish-Polish author from the borderlands, an emancipated intellectual with a doctorate in philosophy (“a suspicious phenomenon,” as she mockingly wrote about herself), she did not fit into any patterns of conservative Galician society. Ironically, her memory was revived with dramatic delay by the genius of Bruno Schulz, her close friend; the woman who fiercely opposed the objectification of women in art, was not spared the label of “muse” under the influence of whom Schulz wrote “The Cinnamon Shops”. And Vogel herself, in one of her experimental prose texts entitled “Soir de Paris”, wrote about illusory emancipation when a woman, finally “set loose” on her own so that she could go to a shop or café, continues to meet male expectations: “women with incredibly narrow waistlines pass through. They are like cut out of a fashion magazine and as if they couldn’t happen in life independently of these colour magazines.” The best thing would be if outside the home a woman just looked nice, but this did not work: society, by paying much less for women’s work than for men’s, in fact made them take on the role of kept women.

Unlike Auerbach, who left for Warsaw in 1933 and survived, Debora Vogel decided to stay in the “doomed city” and died during an anti-Jewish liquidation campaign in the summer of 1942. You don’t necessarily have to see a symbol in it; it’s rather a tragic fact. But anyway, Vogel, buried in layers of oblivion and stuck in the gap between the uniform, polished national histories, remains in the sphere of special responsibility for today’s inhabitants of this city, mine and yours. Her dresses rustle in our wardrobe. Just like her manuscripts, which nobody will read anymore, because they were burnt by the new residents of the tenement immediately after the war.

We must also reclaim from oblivion the fearless Halina Górska née Endelman, although she used to thunder on the radio and at meetings, rallying people to act. Although a socialist by conviction, she was the only deputy of the People’s Assembly of Western Ukraine (26-28 October 1939) who abstained from voting on the accession of Western Ukrainian lands to the USSR. The last material trace of her disappeared in the city already in the times of independent Ukraine: Halina Górska Street was renamed. Had it not been for the recently unveiled modest plaque on the monument to the Lviv ghetto, her presence in Lviv would have been just as phantom-like as the presence of Auerbach or Vogel. And yet hardly anyone in the interwar city did as much to create a community out of its inhabitants. In contrast to many other Galician authors of that time, Górska never locked herself in her own cosy national drawer (which drawer was she supposed to consider her own anyway?). On the contrary, she saw everyone, regardless of nationality and faith, as travelling in the same boat, a boat of poverty, class and gender discrimination, and lack of perspectives. In her most famous novel series “Barak płonie”, she showed the urban poverty uniting people of different nationalities – Poles, Ukrainians and Jews live in one poor suburban area. Class divisions go deeper than ethnic divisions.

Although Górska, as a member of the Union of Writers of Western Ukraine, could flee deep into the USSR during the German occupation, she decided to stay in Lviv with her sick husband, perfectly well aware of the threat to her as a Jewish woman with left-wing views. After many months spent in the Gestapo prison, she was shot at Pasheki Lychakivskie.

For Andy Eker, the “doomed city” became the beginning and the end, it enclosed her, it stunned and tamed her, like authoritarian parents do to their children. At the beginning of the 1930s, the young, talented Polish-speaking poet succumbed to the will of her Zionist relatives and set off for Palestine. However, she soon returned to Lviv on her own – the reasons for her decision were inadequate climate and not knowing the language, but above all, longing. She died after less than a year in the city she had missed so much. Officially of pneumonia, but some suggest suicide. So where was her real home, behind which star? Who remembers her today in Lviv? Where did she live? In whose closet should we look for her words?

That damp December day we – a group of Polish-Ukrainian-French researchers and filmmakers – stood in front of a tenement house on 8a Shota Rustaveli Street as if it was an unresolved riddle.

We visited almost all the flats, we talked to whoever we could, we shot hours of film, and yet we didn’t find an answer. Of course, nobody knew anything about Zuzanna Ginczanka. People knew only what they had heard from the few strangers who, like ourselves, had been there before. Zuzanna Ginczanka (Gincburg), born in Kyiv, resident of Rivne, a star of Warsaw literary salons, one of the most outstanding Polish poets of the interwar period. Equally rebellious, equally belonging to everyone and to no one as the other female writers mentioned here. She was brought to Lviv by the winds of war, for a short time, with tragic consequences. She didn’t want to stay in Rivne, where she was too well known, so she decided to hide in a larger city where she had a few trusted friends. Somewhere here, in an apartment on the first floor, she experienced one of the most dramatic moments of her life: on account of being denounced by her caretaker, a Polish woman, she had to run from the German police, sleep in a bathroom closed from the inside and remain vigilant even in her sleep, so that it became a nap draining her of energy.

But when did she move to this tenement house? Izolda Kiec, the author of Ginczanka’s only biography so far, claims that it was in 1939, right after her arrival in Lviv, but Ginczanka’s friend Lusia Stauber remembers that it was not until 1941, after the German occupation. Where had she lived for these two years? And why did her husband, and later also herself, flee to Kraków, their final city, where life was not less, but more dangerous than in Lviv? Where did she write her last (was it really the last?) legendary poem about the treacherous caretaker – here or already in Kraków? And who kept this scrap of paper until the end of the war, before it reached Lusia Stauber?

Maybe it’s just insignificant details? Biographical garbage?

Perhaps. But these small lost facts are bricks that make up a solid wall of oblivion. And it can only be dismantled in this way, brick by brick.

“I left no heir here,” wrote Ginczanka bitterly in the poem quoted above. And one could read this poem calmly and indifferently, were it not for the fact that this verse speaks directly to us, its readers today. Can we still become her heirs? Can we still read the message left for us in the closet? Maybe it’s not too late yet. Or vice versa: it is no longer too late.

Translated from the Polish by Tomasz Bieroń

Ostap Slyvynsky – poet, translator, essayist, critic. Author of five poetry books. A selection of his poems Moving Fire in Bohdan Zadura’s translation was published in Poland by Biuro Literackie. He translates from English and Slavic languages. Among Polish authors, he translated Czesław Miłosz, Hanna Krall, Olga Tokarczuk and Andrzej Stasiuk to Ukrainian. He runs a discussion project “Stories of Otherness” as part of the Forum of Publishers in Lviv, explores the urban literature of multicultural Lviv. He teaches Polish literature and translatology at the University of Lviv.

This essay is a reflection based on the city walks dedicated to female writers of interwar Lviv. In autumn 2018, these meetings were led by literary experts Ostap Sływynski and Iryna Frys. They were part of the public programme accompanying the exhibition Zuzanna Ginczanka: Only Happiness Is RealLlife, mounted at the Centre for Urban History in Lviv from 21 September to 30 December, 2018.

Organisers: Polish Modern Art Foundation, Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature in Warsaw, Centre for Urban History of Central and Eastern Europe in Lviv
Patronage: Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in Lviv
Partner: Authors’ Association ZAiKS