Hebrew Works Differently: An Interview with Julia Fiedorczuk

Hebrew Works Differently: An Interview with Author & Translator Julia Fiedorczuk

az20200306_005-kopia.jpg, default, Julia Fiedorczuk, photo: Albert Zawada, Hebrew Works Differently: An Interview with Author & Translator Julia Fiedorczuk

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What role does the Hebrew language play for a Polish author, poet and literature specialist? Julia Fiedorczuk speaks about her memories of the Jewish past of Serock, singing psalms and the need for new forms of spirituality.

Filip Lech (FL): In preparation for ‘Psalms’, your volume of poems inspired by biblical texts, you began studying Hebrew.

Julia Fiedorczuk (JF): Let me start by saying that I didn’t grow up in Jewish culture. It’s not part of my family history. I developed my interest in Hebrew and Judaism as a result of reading various literary texts. From the beginning of my writing, multilingualism was very important to me. I have a way of writing in which I reach out for various languages – sometimes ancient languages – the languages of ancient books. At one point, I studied a bit of ancient Greek, but I didn’t get as far with that as I did with Hebrew – Hebrew fascinated me.

Hebrew works differently, it isn’t an Indo-European language. The structure of a sentence, the structure of a word is entirely different; it creates meaning in another way. In Europe, we’re used to thinking in categories which we’re forced into by our languages. From a purely poetic point of view, from the point of view of linguistic imagination, it’s remarkably inspiring. I like to dive into puzzles that offer some kind of resistance. This allows for moving past using language by reflex and falling into a routine of thought and of imagination.

FL: What fascinates you in old books?

JF: I’m intrigued to see how they maintain their insight and keep their wisdom when we view them from a completely different perspective. I look at them from a modern perspective; I look at them as ancient literary texts.

I continue to be a mere beginner in Hebrew, but I can read: I learned the alphabet and I know the meaning of the letters. The role of the language and the alphabet in Jewish mysticism is fascinating to me. I’m interested in various mystical traditions, but this one is exceptionally interesting from a writer’s point of view, because it’s directly connected to the letters.

I said that I don’t come from a Jewish home, I didn’t grow up in that tradition, but, on the other hand, I have a very strong feeling that Jewish culture and also Yiddish culture are part of my identity – they formed in a real melting pot. My family has a mixed background – Catholic-Eastern Orthodox – but Siemiatycze, which is where my parents come from, before the war was really a shtetl [Jewish town]. I have strong intellectual and spiritual feelings that the lost part of those territories’ culture is part of my heritage. In that sense, looking at the Hebrew threads within that culture, I feel that I’m trying to reintegrate a certain lost portion of the collective Polish identity.

Core Exhibition of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw – Image Gallery

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FL: You spoke about the mystic meanings of the alphabet. I’d like to go back to the very beginnings of your studies – the alphabet and your first steps in encountering the language. That must be the hardest step – personally, I failed at that stage when I began to learn Hebrew.

JF: In the beginning, my guide was my friend with whom I collaborate at times, Gerardo Beltrán. He’s a Mexican living in Warsaw, an exceptionally talented translator of Polish, Lithuanian and Yiddish literature into Spanish. Gerardo taught me the alphabet patiently. We spent a lot of time on calligraphy; it became my routine. To this day, I can’t write Hebrew script which Hebrew speakers use to write. I can only calligraph letters. I would calligraph one letter per day. The first five went really smoothly; the later ones were harder. Then there was practice, practice and practice. Learning the alphabet well enough that I could write it on my own from start to finish took me about a month. Over the next few months – I was pretty disciplined about it – I learned to read.

When it comes to vocabulary, it’s worse. I’m like a child lost in the fog. Although biblical vocabulary is relatively limited, still, paradoxically, when you begin reading, for example, the Book of Kohelet [Ecclesiastes], at a certain point you begin to understand a fair amount. After the Psalms, for about a year, I studied Kohelet with the Hebraist Magda Sara Szwabowicz – this was the basis of my story Under the Sun – I have two notebooks full of notes from those lessons.

FL: You study American literature. Have you looked at any English translations of the Psalms?

JF: For me, it was very important to read the psalms in Polish translations. There’s a big tradition of translating psalms in Polish poetry. Many poets published psalters – from [Jan] Kochanowski to [Czesław] Miłosz. I only got to know the most standard of the English translations. I mostly used Jewish translations – there’s a fairly significant difference. In Polish, you can the differences quite clearly whether you’re reading Izaak Cylkow’s translation (it’s the most common Polish Jewish Bible translation: songbooks used in the synagogue are based on it), or whether you’re reading the entirely different Catholic Millennium Bible. Incidentally, I really like Cylkow’s Bible. His Polish is very rich, poetic, melodic. It speaks to me in a way that it’s hard for me to explain rationally.

When writing Psalms and Under the Sun, I did something that is a profanation in the sense of Agamben (though in a somewhat different context). Giorgio Agamben speaks about profanations as practices that are anti-capitalist. One takes an element of the system and uses it in one’s own way, farcically. It’s like when a child takes a household implement and finds an entirely new use for it in a game. I try hard to comprehend deeply the biblical context, but sometimes I take some fragment and I play with it like a child who places a pot on her head. Sometimes, in spite of my great and abiding regard for these texts, I can treat the Psalms fairly ironically.

FL: Which languages have you studied?

JF: I speak and work in English. At one point, I spoke French fluently. I had an absolutely wonderful teacher – the teacher in Under the Sun was an homage to him. He was a true friend and also an old-school intellectual who knew all of French poetry backwards and forwards. I mourned him for a long time; after he died, I couldn’t learn French any more.

There was a time that I spoke Russian fluently, but that language got pushed out of my mind by English and French. I understand a lot of Russian and I could probably come back to it pretty quickly; it’s stored somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind. I’m learning Spanish: I speak pretty poorly so far, but I understand a lot. That language is very important to me. I studied Greek and learned the basics. I know German very poorly. My next dream is to learn Yiddish, but so far that’s just a plan.

FL: And Esperanto? It’s one of the main themes of ‘Under the Sun’.

JF: I don’t know Esperanto, but my friend Gerardo is an Esperantist. He taught me what an interesting project it was from a utopian perspective – even if it was completely insane and never fully realised. It was a time when socialism seemed to offer entirely different possibilities. Such ideas are a bit close to my heart.

Besides which, Zamenhof was from Białystok! That’s something we should be very proud of. I’ve thought to myself how Białystok could make use of that in interesting ways – I’d like to see that happen.

Białystok Photos by Bolesław Augustis – Image Gallery

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FL: Could you imagine that kind of linguistic project arising in our times?

JF: I have no idea. We’re living in such an awfully strange time, when everything is changing so fast and so much in a direction that is hard to fathom – the pace of the changes is so great that we’re left completely bewildered.

I’m now reading the book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Jonathan Crary and it’s made quite an impression on my imagination. Crary analyses sleep as the last outpost of natural function which is being taken away from us by a world that’s open 24/7 in which there is not a second in which one can’t partake in consumerism. We never really fall asleep; it’s never fully dark out. If we never fall asleep, we also can never wake up – we live in a constant state of semi-consciousness. Living through the pandemic is a certain kind of existence on the frontier between sleep and waking. Can any fully conscious projects come out of this strange semi-sleep? It’s very hard to foresee what is coming.

Unfortunately, English is beginning to play the role of Esperanto. I say ‘unfortunately’, because English carries with it the entire baggage of colonialism. Esperanto was meant to be above all a language without an army and without a country. You can’t say that English is a language without an army. The dominance of English, the extent of colonisation of the world by Anglo-Saxon culture, mostly American, is quite advanced.

English is very flexible and it evolves. Americans and English people often don’t understand people who have exotic accents or speak dialects based on English.

English has the advantage that you can speak it poorly and still get your meaning across. In Slavic languages, for instance, it would be hard to just know the basics and still express a coherent message.

Participants of the National Congress of Esperantists in Łódź after a visit to the Widzewski Factory, pictured: Profesor Odo Bujwid (with a coat in his hand) and Lidia Zamenhof, September 1930, photo: NAC

FL: Among Slavic studies students, there is a myth of the first Slavicist congresses at which everyone spoke their own language, but everyone understood one another – as if the Slavic lands had among them the potential for a natural ‘Esperanto’. Why do you think that Poles have such little awareness of Zamenhof?

JF: One answer – which is entirely unfortunate – is that Ludwik Zamenhof for many was not Polish enough. We aren’t proud of Jewish heroes, just as we don’t give any thought to Jewish Nobel laureates.

I can understand how we forget about Polish-Jewish Nobel laureates: they die far away, often on another continent and they often had lost their contact with Poland. But Zamenhof is still with us: his remains are here in Warsaw, just a few kilometres from where we’re talking.

This seems so incomprehensible to me that I took action to remind people of Zamenhof. He appears in Under the Sun, because I want us to remember him and to be proud of him. I like Białystok and I’d like to see the city promote and celebrate Zamenhof more. There is a Ludwik Zamenhof Centre which includes the first public library in Poland with substantial collections in and about Esperanto. But it seems to me that more could be done to celebrate Zamenhof – maybe some kind of festival?

The Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw, the grave of Ludwik Zamenhof, photo: NAC

The second answer is that Poles remember very little about Zamenhof because he was a utopian. His project was somewhat naïve. He hoped that creating a common language would bring about peace. If people were to understand one another on the level of language, they might stop fearing each other and, when they stop fearing each other, they will stop hating each other and fighting. That a naïve idea, but I think that without such naïveté at this moment we’re absolutely done for. Such a utopian hope is necessary so that we can come up with alternatives to an apocalyptic future.

I don’t like apocalyptic scenarios – on the contrary, I’m interested in utopian scenarios, even those that are naïvely utopian. Though utopias fell into disfavour for a long time, perhaps because of the failure of real socialism. The realisation of that utopia took the form of a crime.

Lidia Zamenhof (1904–1942), the daughter of the creator of Esperanto, was a believer in Bahaism – a humanistic religion which aims to overcome individual differences among religious traditions in the direction of social unity. I think that in many places on earth, for instance, in India, such attempts are being made. But from our perspective, the idea of such a metareligion smacks of ‘new age’ thinking and we approach it with great skepticism.

The 4th National Congress of Esperantists in Warsaw placing wreaths on Zamenhof's grave while Leo Belmont gives a speech, 4th June 1933, photo: NAC

Nevertheless, it’s a fact that we need new forms of spirituality. The project of complete secularisation did not succeed; the result turned out to be having everything swept up in consumerism. A complete elimination of spiritual life is impossible and undesirable, though it needn’t be carried out amongst institutional religions which can be very oppressive. I come back again to the socialist utopia. Religion is the most misunderstood concept in the thought of Karl Marx. His maxim ‘Religion is the opiate of the people’ is not an expression of Marx’s materialism: he is talking about the mechanisms of oppression which the market brings to bear together with institutionalised religion in order to strip people of their vital spirituality. Nietzsche, in saying ‘God is dead’, was probably expressing a similar view.

FL: Do you find some sort of spirituality in Polish culture that might interest the contemporary person in this time of crisis? It was on our land, after all, that Arianism arose and that the Baal Shem Tov and Jakub Frank promoted their mystical visions.

JF: Yes, that’s a very interesting and likely little known area (though we’ve heard a bit lately about Frank, partly because of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, but not only that). It’s worth looking into those past visions, but a new spirituality has to grow out of the experience of our own not fully understood moment, out of some new vision. There’s a problem with that, because, if Crary’s right, then that which we are losing fastest today is precisely the ability to experience things. Like in a trauma.

A 19th-century drawing of the skull of Jacob Frank, photo: Jewish Historical Institute (ŻIH), Warsaw

In the context of spirituality, what’s most important to me is the question of super-human nature. Lately there’s been discussion of the emotional consequences of a planetary disaster – and that’s good – though in my opinion we aren’t giving enough attention to the spiritual consequences of such a catastrophe. I’m sure that – along with biodiversity and wildlife – the space available for our souls is also growing ever more limited. I often find this intuition reflected in literature and poetry, including Polish literature. Spirituality as the relational experience of one’s own existence (beyond the infantile narcissism of the 24/7 world) still lives in poetry, perhaps particularly in experimental poetry. This is a massive subject – for a separate discussion.

FL: Do you find echoes of Far Eastern spiritualism in Polish culture?

JF: Buddhist thought, or rather practice, belongs to a tradition that evolves and adapts to the conditions it encounters, especially Zen Buddhism. That’s why Tibetan Buddhism is shamanistic (Tibet has a deep tradition of animism), Japanese Zen is samurai in form, Korean Zen is gentler. In the iconography of Buddhism, Zen takes the form of the goddess of empathy (in Japan, she has the name Kannon; in Korea, Kwan Seum Bosal), some European centres represent her as Mary, mother of Jesus, showing respect to the Christian tradition. This tradition adjusts itself to the symbols it finds locally and develops local variants.

And it’s accepted in many places because people recognise within it intuitions which also exist in other spiritual traditions. For instance, the matter of eternal hunger, a sense of everpresent insatiability – duhkha, which I wrote about in my article in Przekrój – is a universal experience. It has intensified with the growth of capitalism and now that pressing need for more is an inseparable part of our life. The harsh insight resulting from the practice of Zen isn’t connected to one or another symbolic expression; it is something one can come to by a number of different paths. There are many new age stupidities which superficially allude to Far Eastern thought and create exotic decorations – but the very heart of such practice isn’t the least bit exotic.

I’m sure that some elements of Buddhist insight are present in other traditions – in Christianity, too. Not in the institutional religions, but in the practice of spirituality. Especially there where people understand their place in a web of life that connects all beings. I think that East European magical realism – since it’s a mistake to associate magical realism solely with Latin America – expresses recognition of that place.

Tibetan Gallery in Warsaw - Image Gallery

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FL: You spent your youth in Serock where half of the inhabitants before the war were Jews. When we started talking, you mentioned that you feel yourself a part of Yiddish culture even though you didn’t grow up in it.

JF: When I was a little girl, I used to climb a hill that they called ‘the fortress’, because there were supposedly medieval remains up there from the beginnings of Serock. I’d go up stairs that had weird symbols engraved on them. And no one paid any attention to the fact that we’d been walking on matzevot [tombstones] all that time.

I don’t remember what year those steps were replaced. The matzevot were brought there by the Nazi Germans; the cemetery was in another part of town. That was the first layer of my involvement with Jewish history. The fact that everyone walked up and down those stairs completely…I don’t know – not knowing? I can’t say now when I realized what I was walking on. I don’t know if my friends knew or when they found out. In itself, it’s interesting in an awful way: I don’t know if I knew. Memory that’s tied to trauma – not my trauma, but collective trauma. Trauma works in such a way that you don’t know where exactly it is. And if it exists, what is it exactly?

Dom i budynek mieszkalny, Pilica, miasto w Śląskiem, lata 40. XX w., fot. Łukasz Baksik — House in Pilica, Silesian city, 1940s, photo: Łukasz Baksik

I had a specific situation, because my father was aware of this and, for some reason, it bothered him. I don’t know what his wartime history was, but it seems to me that he must have seen something awful that left an impression on him. Unfortunately, I never had a chance to speak with him about it – he died when I was a teenager and I wasn’t interested in such things or I didn’t know yet that I was interested in them.

Now the Jewish cemetery is commemorated. In the late eighties, I heard for the first time that ‘Jews come to see these tombstones’. I remember some odd kind of bristling surrounding the word ‘Jews’ – it wasn’t clear if you could use that word. Was it some sort of insult? In my school, they used to say ‘Jews’ when talking about Jehovah’s Witnesses.

FL: You studied synagogue singing with Anna Jagielska-Riviero, a singer who performs a Sephardic repertoire and who is the first female cantor in Polish history, who has sung during services at the Reform synagogue in Warsaw. Where did that idea come from?

JF: Whilst writing Psalms and learning Hebrew, I wanted to delve even deeper into the texts from the perspective of their sound. To have contact with these texts from a more sensory side, from a purely poetic side. There are times when I don’t understand what I’m singing; it’s more an experience connected to breathing, the bodily dimension of language and sound.

My poetic path keeps leading me in the direction of voice with which I used to have a very significant problem. It was hard for me to speak publicly; up to a certain point it was practically impossible for me. There were times when I was just rendered speechless by extreme shyness when I had to recite something before people. For me, this is a paradoxical project, because it used to seem to me that singing was the most impossible thing of all for me.

Maybe my personal poetic path leads me to voice and producing voice aloud specifically because that is my own pet fear and overcoming it is my special challenge. Of course, I never plan to perform singing, but the very fact that I do it is a very trying experience. I do it in order to get as close as possible to the sound of the text. This has an impact on writing though not always on a conscious level. I don’t completely control how the experience of song affects my texts.

FL: So you never studied singing. How have you begun to learn?

JF: It turns out that it’s going pretty well for me. Many years ago, I overcame the problem of speaking publicly – I read my poems out loud, I lectured. I always thought I had a weak voice, but that’s simply not true. That’s not where the problem was – in fact, I had the voice. It’s interesting because our voice is something that belongs to us, but not entirely. It’s something connected to our body, but also with the end of our body. It’s something that haunts us.

The capability of producing voice is also something that we’ve to some extent lost. People living in villages once would accompany most everything they did with song; every important occasion had songs that went with it. I recently read an article describing the country music of Brittany. The author claimed that song was an even more natural form of communication for the residents of Brittany than speech.

When I already began singing psalms and was preparing to write my Kohelet-inspired book Under the Sun, I began traveling more often to Podlasie with my mother. I tried to contact my father’s older sisters who lived in a Podlasie village. We found the elderly sisters and discovered that they spent entire evenings singing psalms, just in Ukrainian (they’re Baptist). I had thought that I was doing something revolutionary in singing psalms, until I found my old aunties…

FL: It’s interesting that you started from synagogue singing and not, for example, with ‘white voice’ which is considered the most liberating style, if not to use the problematic term ‘primitive’.

JF: Yes, I started exactly from the other end.

FL: What caused you problems in learning to sing?

JF: Tension in the jaw. Forcing my voice out rather than releasing it, which results in producing voice with a clenched throat instead of projecting it forward. To put it another way: not controlling that which needs to be controlled and simultaneously leaving out other important details. It’s an interesting exercise in self-awareness. I know that talking about self-awareness seems banal nowadays since consumer culture has cheapened the idea of mindfulness, but it really is terribly important. In the case of synagogue singing, this includes, for example, articulating the text. It’s really above all about the text: you don’t sing psalms as freely as you would common songs. And, at the same time, you have to let your voice fly free.

FL: What sort of music do you listen to?

JF: On my way here, I listened to Arcade Fire, a bit nostalgically. Björk (whom I really like) once said that time doesn’t affect her in a linear fashion – it’s full of corridors and, at certain moments in life, one feels a particularly strong connection to some other time, like a decade ago. For various reasons, I’m now feeling a connection to the time of a decade ago and I’m immersing myself in music from that period (I’m obsessively listening to PJ Harvey, for instance, White Chalk, Arcade Fire’s Suburbs, Bowie, of course, like everyone else, and Sonic Youth).

But I listen to lots of different things from opera to punk. Since we’re talking about Jewish subjects, I went through a phase of Tzadik when I’d buy anything of theirs that came to hand and I became particularly attached to some albums produced by [John] Zorn – for instance, I’d listen to the Bester Quartet’s Metamorphosis every so often. For the last few years, the music and broader work of Laurie Anderson has been especially important to me: I worked as her translator and I still stay in touch with her. I learned a lot from her and I keep on learning.

John Cage is a soulmate of mine musically. I like Shostakovich and lately I find myself drawn to folk music: I’d like to get to know the musical traditions of Podlasie better and also, for instance, African traditions. A few years ago, I was at the International Poetry Nights festival in Hong Kong and we were accompanied by a musical group from Central Asia which blended folk with avant-garde and it was amazing, even shocking. Unfortunately, I didn’t write down the name of that group – which I regret very much – I don’t remember the names of the artists, but I remember the sound very well. I am interested in traditional instruments and in different ways of using the human voice. Anecdotally: I’ve never heard Dylan. At a Tricky concert at the club Stodoła (it was already two decades ago), I literally passed out from the vibrations I felt through the floor.

Interview conducted in Polish, Aug 2021, translated by Yale Reisner, Aug 2021

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