stretches from World War I to the aftermath of World War II. The notion to begin the project came to Mostwin during a visit to Poland in 1961, her first since she had left the country in 1945. This reunion with relatives of her parents’ generation and the powerful jolt of memories provided instant inspiration, but the stamina that the project required came, as she would often remark, from her American education in perseverance. In one of her articles on the benefits of emigration, she wrote about the American ideals and values that she tried to incorporate in her work as a Polish writer: “First, the value of the individual. Of the uniqueness and irreplaceability of every human being. The value that surpasses a group or a society. Second, the idea of creative change. Opportunity for self-enrichment with that which is new and contemporary but which doesn’t shun the past, or what is sometimes called ‘the burden of history.’ In my work, both that of the writer and that of the scholar, I have pointed to the ways of achieving such fullness.”5
In her “Polish” novels, Mostwin addressed the burden of history. There are countries, Poland and Russia among them, where literature is the primary source of knowledge about history because novels are not as easily censored as school textbooks. Historical figures appear only in the background, while the main narrative belongs to a cluster of fictional families, actors in and victims of historic events. Mostwin chose her own family, socially mobile and politically active, and began its story as far back as oral testimonies and preserved documents could pass it on to her. The first and the second books in the cycle, Cień księdza Piotra (The Shadow of Father Piotr) and Szmaragdowa zjawa (The Emerald Specter), take the reader back to the time of the re-emergence of independent Poland during and after World War I. Political matters in these novels—and no personal space there is untouched by intrusion of politics—could not be discussed openly in the People’s Republic of Poland. Mostwin knew it, of course, and did her expert best to enter the forbidden zones.
But it is the third novel of the cycle, Tajemnica zwyciężonych (The Secret of the Vanquished), published in London in 1992, that most conspicuously enters uncharted territory: the Polish family in World War II. The outbreak of the war coincided with Mostwin’s coming of age: she had turned eighteen in 1939 and therefore could rely here on her own memories, conversations with relatives, the recollections of her husband (who provided her with detailed descriptions of several World War II battles), and a variety of preserved documents. The military history parallels that of Mostwin’s extended family: the German occupation of Warsaw and Lublin, the underground activities of practically every relative and friend, the Jewish ghetto in Lublin, heroes, martyrs, traitors. What distinguishes the novel from most other fictionalized accounts of the period in Polish literature is its bracing disregard for political and artistic trends—the latter often serving as strategies to circumvent the former. One may say that here Mostwin rolled up her sleeves and stepped into a locked-up house to recover its unclaimed contents. And this time she went after truth that had been kept secret not because of personal denials and self-deceptions but because of a grand denial by a punitive political system. The denial—which at first had been total, but then gradually weakened and allowed trickles of veracity—concerned all Polish World War II military efforts other than those approved by the Kremlin; the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to collaborate in the destruction of Poland; the Soviet policy of standing idly by during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising; the persecution of military personnel and of vast categories of the civilian population of the territories annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939 and under the communist regime in “liberated” Poland. There were also some secrets and distortions of truth on the Western side of the postwar political landscape which, in most general terms, related to the betrayal of Poland by the Allies. Where choice was possible, however, between the bitter and the poisoned cup, Polish freedom fighters opted for emigration to Western Europe, Israel, and the Americas. The escape of the three main protagonists in Tajemnica is the subject of the short final volume of Mostwin’s family saga, Nie ma domu (There Is No Home), published in Poland in 1996.
Home and house, dwellings that need to be fixed or that are beyond repair, austere rented rooms, flower-filled villas, and dreary hospital rooms—these are Mostwin’s signature topoi, and they owe their function and appearance both to the individual traits of their inhabitants and to verdicts of history. The home-centeredness of Mostwin’s imagination may be attributed to her being a woman writer, perhaps in the same way that her interest in fractured identities is a mark of an émigré writer. When one reviewer praised the “masculine maturity” of her later novels, Mostwin promptly identified his remark as symptomatic of male chauvinism, Polish style. It is true that her female characters are seldom weak or meek and that they may be more adaptable to traumatic reversals of fortune than their male companions. Yet men and women in Mostwin’s fiction are equally capable of great courage and integrity in the face of mortal threat and they are equally, if differently, susceptible to the pain of permanent displacement.
One area in which Mostwin’s gender has mattered is that of the reception of her work in Poland. When her novels The Shadow of Father Piotr and The Emerald Specter were published in Poland in 1985 and 1988—both in very small editions—her name was familiar to only a handful of well-informed readers, and, partly because the entire country was deeply preoccupied with the current political situation (the crushing of the Solidarity movement), the books received scant notice. But male émigré writers, whose works were then beginning to be published or circulated in smuggled copies—some of long-established fame, like Witold Gombrowicz and Czesław Miłosz, others younger and less known—fared much better, preceded by an esteem that traditionally glorified the male exile artist, the émigré poet who, in an old Polish expression, had fought with the pen for the fatherland’s freedom. For forty (yes!) years, Danuta Mostwin had done just that at her home-away-from-home in Baltimore. But in addition to patriotic lore, her typewriter also produced works of broader significance—studies in the contemporary condition of uprootment that are universal and do not require explanatory notes about Polish history. As she examined the fates of the protagonists of her stories, as she transformed living men, women, and children into fictional characters, she continued to discover that external forces in human experience—exile, war, poverty, participation in collective catastrophes or victories—account for only some answers about the trajectory of a life and may reveal as often as conceal the essence of individual existence. In getting close to the point of fusion of the historical and the personal elements of identity, Mostwin attained her very own artistic “third value.”
Danuta Mostwin’s collected works are at last coming out in Poland, issued by Oficyna Wydawnicza Kucharski in Toruń. That this event coincides with the publication of the present book, the first rendering of her fiction into English, signifies a belated turning point in this outstanding writer’s voyage between the old and the new worlds and in time zones that she continues to expand.
Joanna Rostropowicz Clark
Notes
1. Ian Buruma, “The Romance of Exile: Real Wounds, Unreal Wounds,” New Republic, February 12, 2001, 33.
2. Under German occupation, Poles were not allowed to attend secondary or college-level schools.
3. An underground organization that assisted Polish Jews.
4. Danuta Mostwin, “Uprootment and Anxiety,” International Journal of Mental Health 5, no. 2 (1976): 113.
5. Danuta Mostwin, “Podróż w dwóch czasach: O emigracji i literaturze emigracyjnej” [A Voyage in Two Time Zones: On Emigration and Émigré Literature] in Słyszę jak śpiewa Ameryka [I Hear America Singing] (London: Polska Fundacja Kulturalna, 1998), 271.
The Last Will of Blaise Twardowski
NOW THAT Błażej is no longer here, his last will can be opened. But which one? For there are two of them. Which one is more important? Which one will be upheld in court—for that’s the way things are heading, no doubt about that. Two wills. Two pages in
