Reading (in) the Holocaust. Malgorzata Wójcik-Dudek
Janusz Korczak as writers, but are entirely ignorant of their ethnic background. In and of itself, this might not be very controversial, were it not for the fact that the contributions of people of Polish origin to the culture and scholarship of other nations are at the same time propagandistically spotlighted.”48
Rypel also points out that, interestingly, while information about the descent of an author or an artist may be included in the textbook, it tends to be so implicit that students can easily miss it; for example, Bruno Schulz’s biographical note mentions that he was shot dead in the ghetto, and Anna Frailich’s says that she left Poland in 1969.49 Rypel registers positive changes with satisfaction, noticing that although textbooks still stress religious devotion as the primary feature of the Jewish nation or community, they no longer perpetuate many other stereotypical features of the Jew.50
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The Ethical Challenge of Reading about the Holocaust at School, or on the Importance of Context
It seems that despite the recent changes in classroom approaches to teaching about and addressing the Holocaust, no corresponding literary canon has taken a recognisable shape yet. Moreover, I believe that such a canon, if too firmly structured, might in fact curtail the “freedom” of the formation of postmemory which, to repeat, is produced within a particular generation – here and now – in response to the emotional needs of contemporary people and in accord with the aesthetic frameworks which are currently valid.
I am afraid that the difficulty in addressing the Holocaust which besets Polish schools does not result from the lack of a canon or from its instability, but rather from the fact that the Holocaust has been dissociated from other issues of Jewish culture and history and turned into the only pivot for the school narrative about Jews. As a consequence of such sustained uncoupling, literature probing Jewish themes (other than the Holocaust, that is) is only poorly represented in the classroom, while texts about the Holocaust are fetishised.
The claim that the canon of readings about the Holocaust cannot be fixed in contemporary school education begs some clarification. Actually, we would be hard pressed to talk of any canon today; at best, if we want to salvage the notion in the first place, we might refer to a multiplicity of canons, which often hinge on teachers’ quite arbitrary choices. This is where both the weakness and the power of reading literature at school lie. It is the Polish teacher who becomes a depositary of texts, and his/her literary knowledge and competence determine the ways in which literature is presented. This need not be a fault, provided that the teacher receives conceptual and methodological support as regards not only perfecting the skills of reading texts about the Holocaust, but also learning about the process and the history of such readings (whereby universities that train Polish teachers have a crucial role to play). The inclusion of such competences into the teacher education curriculum is necessary to prevent classroom literary analyses from being reduced merely to the historical context or to the emotional response, and to promote interpretations of the Holocaust meta-text. The latter invites reflection not only on what is conveyed, but also on how it is conveyed. Such aesthetic explorations may crucially affect the understanding of the distinctiveness of individual codes of remembering.
However, the reading of texts about the Holocaust at school usually eschews the “dramatic” facet of their production, even though a context-embedded evocation of disputes on or historical negotiations of Holocaust representations ←26 | 27→would be extremely useful in interpreting the fortunes of postmemory.51 It will not be an exaggeration to posit that in this context postmemory is reminiscent of Derrida’s différance, for it can be defined and interpreted only in relation to prior postmemorial structures. The difference in their meanings harbours the generation’s attitude to the Event that was the Holocaust.
It is rather obvious that the texts listed in the Polish Core Curriculum (Podstawa programowa… of 23rd December, 2008)52 will not be enough to glean such insights from, even though the policy document is admittedly quite revolutionary as far as “Jewish issues” are concerned.
The Holocaust is first addressed in junior secondary school,53 and the Core Curriculum recommends reading a selected short story by Ida Fink for this purpose. At the upper secondary education level, the Holocaust is fundamentally represented by Borowski’s selected short stories, Krall’s To Outwit God and Amiel’s Scorched.
As can be seen, the reading list has been expanded by titles which have not been discussed at school before and which effectively augment the ways of presenting the Holocaust (Scorched is obviously particularly relevant to the concept of postmemory). Nevertheless, the problem is that none of these books are obligatory reading; they are all introduced in the “recommended” category. Practically speaking, this means that they may not be studied in Polish lessons at all. Scholastic Holocaust transmission is likely to still be shaped by the canonical ←27 | 28→texts which have “always” been there, such as Krall’s reportage or Borowski’s short stories. They tend to be chosen by teachers almost without exception as the familiar and methodologically mastered ones, and as representative of the Holocaust themes. Yet, emphatically, essay topics for the 2012 (advanced) “Matura” exam54 included an assignment based on Ida Fink’s short story; specifically, the assignment read: “Everyday life in the times of the Holocaust: Analysing and interpreting Ida Fink’s ‘In Front of the Mirror,’ discuss the construction of the protagonist figures, their situation and the meanings of the eponymous mirror.”
Still, the most interesting thing about the Core Curriculum is that it strives to place the texts about the Holocaust in a broader discourse on Jewish culture and the position of Jews in Poland. Consequently, at the basic level, the reading list has been expanded to include mandatory short stories by Bruno Schulz and optional readings, such as Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Magician of Lublin and Julian Stryjkowski’ Austeria [At a Roadside Inn]; at the advanced level, two recommended, but non-compulsory readings – a reportage by Henryk Grynberg and a selected essay by Jan Błoński – have been added to the list. In practice, authors of textbooks indeed make use of selected passages from these texts, which improves their chances of actually being discussed in classroom. In this context, Błoński’s “Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto” (“The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto”)55 seems to enjoy the greatest popularity.
With such recommended readings, there is a considerable chance of generating a basic, tolerably coherent structure of school narrative not so much about the Holocaust alone as about Jewish tradition per se. The optional choice of these ←28 | 29→texts is certainly a downside of the curricular decisions, but at the same time, the learning outcomes defined for the advanced level of Polish instruction include the capacity to recognise literary allusions and cultural symbols (e.g. biblical, Romantic, etc.) as well as their ideological and compositional function, together with signs of traditions, including antiquity, Judaism, Christianity, Early Modern Poland, etc. This entails the expediency of selecting texts which promote meeting the requirements stipulated in the core curriculum.
Given this, it seems that the Minister’s regulation which came into effect in 2009, while altering the reading list, first and foremost modifies the ways of talking about the Holocaust. As far as the transformations of the reading canon are concerned, I can see three areas in which truly relevant changes can happen.
Firstly, texts by authors as yet not discussed in schools, such as Fink and Amiel, have been included in Jewish discourse. Such