Jerzy Ficowski died in the spring of 2006, in the month of May. But who was — who is — Jerzy Ficowski, and why speak of him here? He was a Polish poet and writer, born in 1924. He was a man of talent, a poet on a par with Poland’s two Nobel laureates — Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska. An artist of universal quality, recognized by world literature and translated into a dozen languages.
Jerzy Ficowski, “discoverer” of Bruno Schulz
Plurielles has particular reasons for celebrating his name. And first of all, in memory of his astonishing encounter with Bruno Schulz. Not that they ever met in person… In 1942 Ficowski is eighteen. A voracious reader, he chances upon Les boutiques de cannelle (The Cinnamon Shops) — a book published in 1934, but which the young man does not come to know until eight years later — and falls at once under its spell. With the ardor of youth, he decides that this is The Book — and he will never change his mind. He devours everything he can find of his idol’s writings, notably in the literary reviews. Through “Roj,” the publisher of Schulz’s two books, he obtains the writer’s address in Drohobycz, the town where he lived, and writes to him to ask for a meeting. A naïve move! Schulz has already changed his address — by now he is shut up in the ghetto of his little town. Soon he will be gunned down in the street during a pogrom unleashed by the SS.1
Ficowski never got over Schulz’s death. As soon as the war ended he went to Drohobycz (which had meanwhile become a Ukrainian — and therefore foreign — town) to try to recover writings, drawings, and documents in Schulz’s hand, and to speak with his neighbors, his pupils (Schulz taught at the town’s secondary school), his correspondents… But the greater part of the documents and witnesses had vanished in the war. All his life, Ficowski sought to gather together whatever bore on Schulz’s work and life. He managed to assemble a sizeable “Schulziana,” which unfortunately represents no more than scraps of Schulz’s output. Ficowski’s great regret: never having succeeded in tracking down the manuscript of Schulz’s unpublished book, Le Messie (The Messiah), though there were times when he had the impression of being very close to it, in the course of a systematic hunt that led him as far afield as the United States and the USSR. Throughout his life, and as his finds accumulated, Ficowski published books about Schulz and documents by the latter. In particular, a whole correspondence the writer had exchanged with his contemporaries, among them Gombrowicz and Witkiewicz. He recounted his quest in a book that reads like a detective novel, Les régions de la grande hérésie (Regions of the Great Heresy, the title borrowed from Schulz).2 Ficowski kept updating this work as events and his researches unfolded; the French version ends with the account of the sensational “kidnapping” of Schulz’s frescoes at Drohobycz by the “specialists” of Yad Vashem at the beginning of 2001.
In truth, if Schulz’s literary work, slender as it is in volume, was not forgotten in postwar Poland, it is thanks to Jerzy Ficowski, whose tireless efforts restored this author to his rightful place. Afterward, the work was recognized throughout the world (and in France, thanks to Maurice Nadeau). The first credit for this goes to Ficowski.
Ficowski the poet wrote, among other things, these verses in memory of Bruno Schulz:
My Unsaved One
For so many years above the beams of my mezzanine between the ceiling and the vestibule glows an eternal light of 25 watts darkened by the droppings of flies behind a barricade of old printed sheets
He is up there he winds his watch he does not chase the spiders he sleeps
He has already translated all the knots in the wood the plaster slowly covers his motionless shadow sometimes he even slips away after the hour of curfew he goes walking in Hyderabad
he opens one by one the veins of the wood he sinks into the wood deeper and deeper wood ever more ancient
My dream today has knocked at his door Knock knock knock against the raw wood
Dear Bruno, it’s all right now, you may do come down.
And he meanwhile awaits the unhoped-for he cannot hear my dream
he who is no one more lucid than any other
he knows it there is no mezzanine no light no me
Apart from Bruno Schulz — or rather, alongside him — Jerzy Ficowski had countless curiosities, to say nothing of his own work, which he built with constancy. Persecuted minorities, in particular, drew him. And most especially, the Jews and the Roma.
Jerzy Ficowski and the Jews
Conscious of the painful disappearance of the Jewish presence in Poland, he attempted impossible rescues. He translated whole swaths of Yiddish poetry into Polish… M. Rozenfeld, A. Rajzen, I. Manger, D. Vogel, B. Heler, I. Emiot, J. Zonszajn were made accessible to the Polish-speaking reader thanks to Ficowski’s translations. In particular, I. Katzenelson’s Le chant du peuple juif assassiné (The Song of the Murdered Jewish People) was masterfully translated by him. Following his example, other Polish poets translated Yiddish poetry, a substantial anthology of which was published in Warsaw in 1986.3
Jerzy Ficowski raised, in his own way, a commemorative monument to the annihilation of the Jews of Poland in his collection Déchiffrer les cendres (Deciphering the Ashes);4 his poet’s sensibility here accomplishes the impossible: the author himself becomes a Jew. The collection opens with this cry of the powerless witness:
I did not know how to save a single life
I did not know how to stop a single bullet
so I wander among the cemeteries that are not there I look for words that are not there
I run to help unsummoned to a rescue too late
I want to arrive in time even out of time
Like the anthology mentioned above, this collection waited many years before being published. Curiously, its first edition appeared in 1979 in London, years after it was written, brought out by a press of the Polish emigration. In Poland it could not appear until years later.
Jerzy Ficowski and the Roma
If Ficowski was not the only one to take an interest in the Jews and their culture in post-Genocide Poland, he was indisputably a pioneer in the Roma domain, particularly neglected by Polish intellectual circles in the postwar years. To the traditional contempt of which this “cultureless” people was the object was added the abundance of other preoccupations, notably the Polish martyrology or the struggle against the imposed regime.
Ficowski was among the first to grasp the interest and richness of Roma oral culture. He gathered narratives, tales, and stories, and published whole collections of them. Above all he sought out Roma poetry, songs, and lullabies; in particular he discovered and brought to light the Roma poet Papusza, an illiterate woman who, thanks to him, is recognized as a poet and also as an official spokeswoman for her people.
But there is more than the cultural aspect. Jerzy Ficowski was alive to the fate inflicted on this minority by the Nazi occupier; he was among the first to call attention to this silent, unrecognized tragedy. This poem bears witness to it:
A Prayer to the Holy Louse
It was in the spring of 1944, during the delousing of the Gypsy block at the camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau
the skirts the shawls withered in the delousing in the camouflage of their colors
poppies irises cornflowers in case of a field that will never come to be
the Gypsy woman in the showers of Birkenau stripped of her colors holds her fist clenched clothed in long folds of water
she hides in her hand a grain of life a seed of rescue
between the line of life and the line of the heart at the crossing of the ways of palmistry
she hides in her fist the last louse
a louse always departs5 when death draws near
the Gypsy woman sings at the showers of Birkenau svanta djouv na dja mandyr
holy louse do not forsake me I will not let you go you alone are left to me
there is no god in hell
your brothers forsake our dead
stay with me save me holy louse
the kapo rushed up with his whip twists her fingers
what are you holding there thief show it that gleaming thing that coin that gold
the louse has fallen the star has fallen
what remains is an empty palm an empty sky
where rises smoke after smoke smoke after smoke
Jerzy Ficowski was a humanist; his death creates a universal absence. At his funeral, in his parish church (he was a believing, though non-practicing, Catholic), beside the priest there stood a Protestant bishop, an Orthodox pope, and a rabbi. An orchestra of Roma violins accompanied the ceremony. A military detachment rendered honors (Ficowski had been an active member of the A.K., the clandestine resistance army against the occupier; he took part, notably, in the Warsaw Uprising within the “Baszta” battalion, to which the Jewish painter Marek Rudnicki also belonged). The crowd accompanied the coffin from the little church to the cemetery. Traffic in the center of Warsaw had been halted for the occasion.
Ficowski, who had a presentiment of his approaching death, composed his own obituary notice:
I, the undersigned JERZY FICOWSKI
in transferring myself on 11 May 2006 to Eternity (equivalent version: to Nothingness) have brought my existence here below to a close without having brought anything to a close
according to the Regulations of the Creator and the immutable practice of the inhabitants of this ill-conceived world and still more ill-conducted
I urgently ask of those near to me and those far from me the blessing of a smile and the grace of a peaceful soul rather than sighs and sadness, for nothing extraordinary has happened.
I thank everyone in advance for honoring this request and apologize for the inconvenience
Jerzy Ficowski Warsaw beyond the reach of time
Notes
The Poles were aware of the importance of Bruno Schulz, writer and painter. The resistance had accordingly drawn up a plan to get him out of the ghetto and shelter him far from Drohobycz. Schulz was killed on the eve of his planned escape; in fact it was on the way to the Judenrat, where he was going to collect provisions for the journey, that he was gunned down.↩︎
A book translated into French by Margot Carlier and published by “Noir sur Blanc” in 2004.↩︎
The history of this anthology illustrates, moreover, the whole ambiguity of the Polish attitude toward the Jews after the war and the fluctuations of official policy in their regard. Its publication, initially scheduled for 1968, was delayed by eighteen years, and its editors, two Polish-speaking Jewish poets, Lastik and Slucki, were expelled to Israel during the persecutions of 1968. Slucki died there before he could see the book.↩︎
This collection now exists in French, published in 2004 by “Est-Ouest Internationales.”↩︎
The Roma believe that, moved by instinct, lice abandon the one who is about to die, somewhat as rats leave a doomed ship (translator’s note).↩︎