Before Perec, Zamość was a home to the playwright Shloyme Ettinger (in Polish: Szłoyme Ettinger), who is known above all for his play Serkele, inspired by Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice but adapted to the reality familiar for Eastern European Jews. Finally, Zamość (and surrounding shtetls) often appeared in the work of the Noble Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer. The writer knew the region very well, given that as a young man, he lived with his grandparents in the nearby city of Biłgoraj. The illustrator of Singer’s books, Irene Lieblich, was also from Zamość.
Israel Joshua Singer, the brother of Isaac, created an idealised image of Zamość in his memoirs:
Cities with names such as Zamość, Szczebrzeszyn, Goraj and Józefów; cities with old synagogues, cemeteries, churches and towers, as well as spacious marketplaces surrounded by wooden stalls filled with merchants and tradeswomen; cities where beadles called Jews to pray before dawn, where singing melameds walked children to a cheder, where drummers drummed on the marketplace, announcing the newest decrees and bringing some news from other parts of the world, where boys and girls decorated Jewish houses during holidays with lions and deer; cities where Jews were more Jewish and the Gentiles more Gentile than anywhere else in Poland. […] Both the Jews and the Gentiles living in the ‘land of the poor king’, in the Lublin governorate, were a God-fearing, colourful and old-fashioned people. Far from the railroads and all civilisation, these lands appeared as if not aligned with the times, separated from the outside world by dense forests.
A commendation of the province
Bolesław Leśmian spent 13 unhappy years in Zamość. There, he wrote his poems which are collected in the books Napój Cienisty (Shady Potion) and Dziejba Leśna (Forest Happening). He was transferred there from Hrubieszów. It was technically a promotion, but it brought the poet little happiness, as he disliked his work as a court notary: ‘A writer, willing to have a permanent income, has to dress up as a generally respected member of society, and only in this painful mask of a useful person deserves some money.’
This ‘provincial exile’ brought him suffering. Leśmian was the worldly type, having previously lived in Paris and Munich, and he complained that: ‘Here in Zamość, you could lie down on the main square in the middle of the day. You could sleep in complete peace, nobody will come to you, nobody will step on you… The only passers-by are a spotted cow and two goats walking near the gutter.’
He called Zamość an abject town, other times he referred to it as ‘malicious, grim and unpleasant’. It seems that he was not particularly well-liked. It’s very likely that Zamość was the birthplace of a very old joke, which states that one time, an empty carriage arrived, out of which came Leśmian (editor’s note: on account of his small stature). He prolonged his travels, whether internationally or to Warsaw and Zakopane, for as long as possible. He wrote in a letter: ‘I absolutely do not want to return to Zamość – it is a tragedy for me.’