Mark Turkov and his "imagined community"

To establish a figure as an “intellectual,” a fortiori as a “Jewish intellectual,” necessarily invites one to question the limits and the problems that this notion encounters. What is an intellectual? What are his role in the social space and his relationship to power? Does he belong to a group of his own, or does he emerge, in isolation, within diverse groups to whose interests he adheres? From Antonio Gramsci to Michel Winock, by way of Raymond Aron and Edward Said, there is no lack of thinkers who have interrogated this particular figure, omnipresent in modern European societies, and whose emergence — in any case as a social phenomenon and as a named entity — coincides with the progression of Marxist ideas and with the engaged intervention, on the social and political scene, of a growing number of figures belonging to the cultural field. While the definition of the intellectual and of the manner in which he inscribes himself in society varies from one system of thought to another, one nonetheless finds certain constants in what the notion covers, characterized, among other things, by the establishment of an intermediate zone, neither fully moored to ideological thought nor¹ confined to an art detached from all contingency. It is in this place of friction that the bearer of discourse and of writing makes himself, by his position and his points of view, the spokesman of a certain political ethos, manifesting himself thereby as a figure of authority whose power would have shifted to the plane of knowledge and intellect: writing — and, more broadly, the printed space — then become an instrument of transmission and diffusion that allows the intellectual to act upon the social group he addresses, even to reshape its contours.

In this sense, Mark Turkov² is indeed not only an intellectual, but a Jewish intellectual. An intellectual because at the crossing of the politico-social and cultural spheres; Jewish not because this qualifier would be assigned to him from the outside by the reception, Jewish or non-Jewish, of his writings, but because the whole of his activities — artistic, literary or institutional — unfolded within a framework that aimed to redefine culturally a Polish Judaism whose modernization, secularization and migration had already profoundly upset the stakes in the first half of the twentieth century, and whose existence, henceforth shaken by all these ruptures, underwent a new type of questioning at the close of the Second World War.

Born in 1904 in Warsaw, Mark Turkov is the third of a sibling group that distinguished itself by its activities in the theater milieu and that, in the interwar period, occupied an active place within Polish Jewish cultural life and public space. Zigmunt and Yonas Turkov, as well as their brother Yitskhok — also known under the pseudonym Grudberg — all made careers as actors, directors or playwrights. Mark Turkov is the only one who is an exception: although he studied in Polish schools of dramatic art and cinema, he confronted the scenic space only on paper. An important journalist of interwar Warsaw, he indeed published numerous articles dealing with theatrical activity, operating thus as a kind of intellectual relay of what took place on the cultural scene and which, through his writings, found ways to express itself, to make itself explicit and to be set into thought in forms that contributed to instituting artistic activity as a political act.

Mark Turkov’s Polish Judaism

This power — that of acting upon cultural life by enunciating it, and thus of contributing to forming the gaze that the group casts upon itself — Mark Turkov continued to use in the aftermath of the Second World War as a means of redefining a Polish Judaism that the destruction and dispersion of the Jewish communities of Poland, as constituted spatial and social entities, had rendered obsolete. Installed in Buenos Aires from 1939, director of the Latin American section of the HIAS from 1946, then representative of the World Jewish Congress for Latin America from 1954, he created, parallel to his administrative activities, under the aegis of the Central Union of Polish Jews in Argentina, an editorial collection ambitiously named Dos poylishe yidntum³ [Polish Jewry⁴], whose aim seems to be to create a space of writing, printing and reading that could serve as an alternative place of existence for the heirs of a Polish Jewish life abruptly annihilated while it was in the process of restructuring itself around social, political and cultural aspirations that called into question the traditional religious organization of the group’s life. The collection, created in 1946 in collaboration with Avrom Mitlberg — who handled the administrative management of the project while the intellectual aspect, precisely, fell to Turkov — thus seems to be understood as a kind of “imagined community” in the sense that Benedict Anderson gives to this term, that is, as the imaginary place of gathering of individuals who feel they belong to one and the same group.⁵ Turkov’s collection, in a certain manner, fixes or consolidates, by enunciating them, the criteria that found the cohesion of this group. Composed of one hundred seventy-five volumes published over a span of twenty years (between 1946 and 1966), that is, an average of eight works per year, spread out irregularly according to the years and declining little by little,⁶ the collection gathers works of diverse genres as well as authors of varied horizons and political orientations, brought together by the will to “give a complete image, strictly detached from any party, of Polish Judaism under all the aspects and all the spheres of its social, political and cultural activities.⁷”

This, in any case, is what Turkov postulates, under the neutral appellation of “the editorial board,” as an epigraph to the very first volume of the collection, Malke Ovshyani dertseylt [Malke Ovshyani Recounts], otherwise signed by his hand. These two introductory pages are a genuine presentation of the stakes that the Central Union of Polish Jews in Argentina sets itself in creating what might be a library of the Polish Jew in the diaspora. The mission that Turkov sets himself is to “bring the broad mass of Jewish readers of the entire world closer to all the problems linked to the Jewish life of destroyed Poland,” to bring “his contribution to the glorious history of Polish Judaism,” and this by evoking at once the current existence of the Jews in Poland, the memory of the disappeared communities, and the important personalities or events of the history of Polish Judaism before its destruction. It is a matter, in short, of constructing, through the compilation and ordering of diverse works within one and the same collection, a narrative of self in which the group of Polish Jews might recognize itself.

But this group, too, appears as a form of intellectual creation that Mark Turkov, by virtue of his institutional and editorial authority, contributes to inventing. The “Polish Judaism” of the collection, that in which its authors and its readers recognize themselves, is not so impartially edified as the introductory note of the first volume gives to understand. In any editorial apparatus rooted in the project of creating a “library,” there exists this double movement that consists in addressing a particular public, onto which certain expectations are projected, and in educating this public, in forming it to the thought conveyed by the published books and thus, in a certain manner, in kneading the contours of what characterizes it as a group. It is therefore not only a matter, for Turkov, of addressing a “Polish Judaism” already constituted, but indeed of interrogating a group whose existence has become problematic, of making it the object of a discourse and, in so doing, of redefining its contours in this play of exchange and mirror that is established between the collection’s director, his authors and his readers. Benedict Anderson underscored, in his essay on the national imaginary, the fundamental role played by print in the constitution of these “imagined communities” that are created outside of all immediate contact. The reading of the press in particular, a practice undeniably linked to modernity, produces a form of temporal coincidence which, instead of fusing the present, the past and the future, as ritual societies did, connects multiple presents that recognize themselves in the simultaneity of their experiences. The newspaper, as a perishable commodity, is read by its consumers at equal intervals of time, in a ceremony that repeats itself to the rhythm of the clock and creates, in the network of its readers, a concordance born of this feeling of belonging to one and the same time. The collection, less regulated in its cadence of appearance than the newspaper or the journal can be, creates objects that are less ephemeral but not devoid of a certain form of periodicity. Each publication belongs to a whole, which implies the continuation of what was begun elsewhere and the awaiting of volumes to come. In this respect, it is significant that the Central Union of Polish Jews in Argentina offered subscriptions that allowed readers to order in advance the announced volumes, and that, in each publication, one finds not only a list of the works already published but also an announcement of the books in preparation. Moreover, the prefaces are almost always dated and thus imbued with a will to mark time, to put oneself in relation with a present to which the work and, still more, the manner in which it is presented intend to be a response.

All this inscribes the collection in a form of interaction with current events which, without placing itself at the service of any partisan ideology whatsoever, no less orients the definition of Polish Judaism in the direction that Turkov gives it. Thus, if it is true that diverse persons express themselves within the collection — writers by profession or by chance, historians or literary figures, Zionists or socialists — and if it is true, moreover, that the collection’s director establishes a space of speech which, if only by the choice to publish in Yiddish, inscribes itself at the margins of the dominant discourses, it nonetheless remains that Turkov himself represents a certain power. An intellectual authority invested with the faculty of making public the writings of a certain number of authors, he occupies a position that confers on him the possibility of giving the floor to others while taking it himself.

Thus, if it is undeniable that the authors he publishes belong to varied political horizons, one nonetheless notices certain recurrences and, inversely, certain absences, which unveil the flaws of the totalizing ambition claimed by Turkov and indicate the manner in which his intellectual authority innervates the collection and orients the representation of the future of Polish Judaism that reinvents itself there. Political current events, if they give rise to no direct stance on the part of the collection’s director, seem to favor certain types of publications which, taken in their immediate historical context, already appear as a form of commitment. Turkov’s Zionist sympathies, without being openly stated, are fairly evident and, from 1948 onward, probably under the influence of the war of independence and the creation of the Israeli state, one sees appear a certain number of works evoking, through reportage or fiction, the immigration of the Jews to Palestine: “Umlegale” yidn shpaltn yamen⁸ [“Illegal” Jews Split the Seas], by Sh. Izban (1948); Familye Karp⁹ [The Karp Family] by the same author; and Di mentshn fun “Ekzodus 1947” [The People of “Exodus 1947”] by Yitskhok Perlov¹⁰ in 1949. The two novels are devoid of any paratextual explanation, while the reportage on the “illegal” Jews trying to reach Palestine is preceded by an introduction, ideologically marked to be sure, but signed by Ruth Kliger, without the intervention of one of those notes “to the reader,” still very frequent in these first years of the collection’s appearance, by which the editorial board was accustomed to making explicit the reasons that pushed it to publish the work in question. In a context where such an intervention would risk transforming the editorial line into a political label, Mark Turkov delegates the introductory words to an outside voice or lets the work speak for itself. He then expresses himself only through his structuring function, through the choice he makes to integrate the book into the whole that the collection forms, as well as through the plays of associations and resonances that are created not only with the other published works, but also with political current events.

Insofar as the publications are not buttressed by an editorial discourse that would put the works at the service of an institutional ideology, imposing on the readers a fixed line of thought, the manner in which the collection’s director uses his own speech and his power to inflect the reading of the works he publishes arises from an intellectual positioning. A subject at the margins, exiled from state power as well as institutional power, the intellectual is not, according to Edward Said, “someone whose public positions can be predicted, nor confined within a slogan, the orthodoxy of a party or an immutable dogma.¹¹” If his status requires that he pronounce himself before the events of the time, he seems to owe the manifestation of commitment only insofar as this stance bears witness to his own ethical responsibility, without a relationship of dependence or fidelity to a pre-established structure. His role is to give of events a reading detached from the hold that the power of the state, of institutions or of consensus can exert on thought. It is certain that this independence has its limits: Turkov, if only because he addresses an audience that is, potentially, ready to adhere to his views, if only because he creates his collection under the aegis of the Central Union of Polish Jews in Argentina and sees his publications in great part financed by the Claims Conference,¹² does not escape a certain number of categories of thought which, even in an underground manner, may interfere with his freedom as an intellectual. Yet, if he indeed speaks in the name of a group, it is a group in the making, which he wants constituted of a mosaic of points of view: more than any ideology whatsoever, the choice of the authors he publishes seems to indicate a response, engaged but in no case definitive, to history in the making. Hence a sympathy for Zionism which, at the dawn of the 1950s, manifests itself through the publication of the works of Izban and of Perlov but also, more generally, through the presence within the collection of authors attached to the idea of a Jewish national renaissance.¹³ Hence also, in counterpoint, a critique of the Soviet regime passing through writers who do not hesitate to call into question the benevolent image that Russia sought to give itself in the aftermath of the Second World War. Certain authors of the collection went through the gulags: this is the case, for example, of Yisroel Emyot, who gathers in Fardekte shpiglen¹⁴ [Covered Mirrors] several accounts inspired by his passage through the Siberian camps following the liquidation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in 1948. The testimony of Avrom Zak, Knekht zaynen mir geven¹⁵ [Slaves We Were], is also largely devoted to the gulags. One finds, moreover, in the memoirs of writers and cultural personalities who wandered for several years across the Soviet Union to escape Nazism, descriptions of the tragic situation of the refugees in the territories where the Red Army reigned. Tanya Fuks,¹⁶ notably, evokes the forms of discrimination of which the Polish Jews were the object once the border was crossed. A work that very categorically affirms its anti-Sovietism — since the author announces in his introduction the double objective of perpetuating the memory of the former militants of the communist party in Poland, victims of their own illusions, and of making known the fatal role played by world communism on the destiny of humanity — appeared in 1954 under the title Di geshikhte fun a falsher iluzye [The History of a False Illusion], the work of a repentant communist who undertakes to write, on the basis of his own memories, a history of Polish communism.¹⁷ It is no doubt no accident that this volume appears two years after the organized assassination of thirteen Yiddish writers and shortly after the affair of the Doctors’ Plot, in a context marked by the recent ravages of Stalinist antisemitism. Here again, although these works are devoid of any introductory editorial discourse, their very presence within the whole that Turkov’s library forms indicates a political preoccupation, a concern for current problems, which make of the collection the echo and the mirror of what is happening in the world. The publications, because they are dated, because they are spread out over a time to which they are an endlessly renewed response, appear as an invitation to reflect not only on Polish Judaism, but on the stakes and aporias posed by the present time to individual ethics.

Which place(s) for Polish Judaism?

To the questions posed by the situation of the immediate postwar period, the collection offers a space of reflection shared by authors and readers united in a common history and cultural heritage. What this heritage is and what this history is, it is the published writings that enunciate and construct it over the years, redrawing the contours of this “Polish Judaism” all the more inclined to recompose itself in that it refers to no precise geographical delimitation. Insofar as, after the Second World War, the Jewish communities of Poland, ravaged by Nazism and deprived of their former socio-cultural structures, occupy a marginal place in relation to the new institutions that had been created, already before the war, in Israel, in Latin America, in the United States, or in Western Europe under the aegis of immigrant Polish Jews, the Polish Judaism such as Mark Turkov envisages it can only play out beyond the geographical borders of Poland, in a space that evolves at the margins of all territorial restriction, a space represented rather than inhabited.

It must, however, be recalled that this disjunction between the denomination of “Polish Judaism” and the geographical distribution of the group to which it refers is not new: it is rooted, on the one hand, in the lability of the borders which, in this unstable region, found themselves endlessly recomposed by the play of political reversals, and, on the other hand, in the mutations proper to the Jewish communities subjected to internal and external laws different from those that governed the existence of the rest of the population, to crises that were proper to them, as well as to evolutionary and migratory rhythms into which a singular experience entered. As early as the end of the eighteenth century, the era of the partitions of Poland, the common culture to which the Jews of this zone felt they belonged no longer found a correspondence in the political unity of the territory in which it was inscribed. Subjected to a constant reworking of borders, laws or political regimes, the Jewish communities found themselves torn between the consciousness of belonging to one and the same group, rooted in a heritage and a common language, and the divergent influences exerted on their evolution by the diverse environments within which they were now situated. Divided between the Austrian empire, Prussia and tsarist Russia, they continued to think of themselves as Polish Jews while evolving in a geographical zone whose borders never ceased to be redrawn. From the Russian Revolution and the Treaty of Versailles onward, this fluidity was further exacerbated by the collapse of the Habsburg empire, by the short period of independence of Ukraine, by the creation of the Soviet Union and by the proclamation of the Second Polish Republic.

Moreover, beyond these external upheavals, the image of the group and the representation it made of its space never ceased to ramify over the course of its internal mutations. As early as the first half of the nineteenth century, the competition between Hasidism, Haskalah and the Mitnaged movement redrew a map of the Polish Jewish world characterized by the bastions of these different movements: the influence of the maskilim, at the outset concentrated in the great centers and the intellectual milieus, met with growing success once these began to make use of Yiddish to diffuse their ideas; the hasidim, present above all in the vicinity of Ukraine, in Volhynia, in Podolia and in Galicia, organized themselves into courts whose existence quickly upset the distribution of centers and margins, erecting the small towns where a tsaddik established himself into places of mass gathering; the mitnagdim, finally, long remained associated with Lithuania, where the rationalist influence of the Gaon of Vilna persisted. In the second half of the nineteenth century, finally, the growing politicization of the Jewish world, its participation in the surrounding movements — whether the development of socialist thought or adherence to Polish romantic nationalism — and the later invention of political thoughts more specifically anchored in the Jewish universe¹⁸ created new representations of self and instituted multiple centers, sometimes purely symbolic, according to the ideology in which each individual recognized himself.

It is therefore no accident if the intrication of all these tendencies remains a privileged subject of the collection directed by Mark Turkov. Between 1946 and 1966, the question of what Polish Judaism is certainly does not pose itself in the same manner as in the nineteenth century or at the turn of the twentieth, but it must reckon with this multiple heritage, find a way to situate itself in relation to it, invent a way of pursuing it and transforming it. This is why the volumes of Dos poylishe yidntum deal with themes as varied as Hasidism, the Haskalah, religious orthodoxy, socialism, Zionism, communism, the relations between Jews and Poles across the centuries, the autonomy of the Jewish social structures in Poland, the assimilationist tendency, the secularized cultural renaissance or the national claims. The publications address all the subjects making it possible to approach the changes that operated in Polish Judaism over the course of the external political reworkings and of its own internal upheavals.

And yet, in the underpinnings of this fragmented cultural flowering, one also sees at work an element that is only rarely addressed head-on, but which underlies both the whole of the currents that divided the Polish Jewish world and the matter in which the collection itself is modeled: it is the language in which this world is said, a language whose contours draw, for its speakers, an alternative space of existence. In a context where the relationship to language is often tinged with ideological positions, the choice to publish in Yiddish necessarily implies a form of commitment. For the generation of Jewish intellectuals to which Mark Turkov belongs, exiled from the traditional world both spatially, through migration, and symbolically, through the secularization of knowledge and modes of life, language constitutes a place of anchoring, the assurance of a certain form of continuity between the inherited tradition and the cultural renewal initiated by the young generations. In a context where religion can no longer operate as a factor of structuring of the group, Yiddish is understood as a place of collective recognition materialized by the production of writings. The circulation of these writings within a globalized readership constitutes so many channels of communication that allow the different members of the group to remain bound to one another despite geographical distance.

Mark Turkov himself, it must be recalled, does not begin his career in 1946: like most of the authors he publishes — a fortiori those whose works he takes up posthumously — he is marked, in his social relations and his literary works, by the great upheavals that operated in the first half of the twentieth century. At that time, the feeling that the Yiddish writers of the interwar period and their readers have of belonging to one and the same group finds its anchoring not in spatial landmarks, but in language first and — though this comes more or less to saying the same thing — in the sharing of the same cultural referents. When, in 1946, Turkov publishes the first volumes of the series Dos poylishe yidntum, the group he addresses is the same as that which, one or two decades earlier, tried to redefine its existence through the circulation of newspapers, journals and various materials which, printed in Yiddish in different centers of culture and publishing, found readers throughout the Yiddish-speaking world. Here again, the publications are trans-geographical. It is now a matter of reconstructing, in the space of writing, a ghost geography, produced by “Polish Jews” installed in the four corners of the globe and whose feeling of belonging is constructed less in the interaction with the Jewish world of Poland than in the effacement of the latter. At the intersection of their writings is born a remembered and partially fantasized space, functioning as mirror and as trace of a geography now disappeared. The multiplication of volumes inspired by the model of the yizker-bikher indicates a desire to reconstitute a topography that no longer exists except in the space delimited by the tracing of words on the page. For if only one of the works of the collection, dedicated to the town of Bełchatów,¹⁹ is clearly identified as a yizker-bukh, faithful to the polyphonic structure and the plural modes of enunciation proper to this type of memorial collectively elaborated by the survivors of one and the same town, the works organized around a particular place, or around a constellation of places aiming to grid a certain geographical zone, are numerous. The symbolic addresses of prewar Jewish life, those with which a whole swathe of Polish Jewish culture is associated, also occupy a central place, since one finds in the collection two different volumes devoted to number 13 of Tłomackie Square,²⁰ where the union of Jewish writers of Warsaw was located.

It is often by the surveying, mental or physical, of these places that the ties of continuity are woven between the remembered past and its repetition in the present of writing or publication. In the volume by Avrom Teytlboym entitled Varshever heyf²¹ [Warsaw Courtyards], the passage from one Warsaw courtyard to another, a narrative wandering that allows the author to move through the temporal units segmenting his own existence, is what permits the surging up of memory and narrative, as well as the creation of a virtual space onto which each reader is free to project his own memories and images. In other works, where memory is activated not by the traversal of an interior itinerary but by direct confrontation with the reality of postwar Poland, it becomes evident that this relationship to space, far from occupying a purely commemorative function, is accompanied by political, social and ethical questionings about the possible continuation of a Jewish existence within Polish territory. The presence within the collection of works such as Poyln – 1946²² by Khayim Shoshkes, or the three-volume memoirs of Zigmunt Turkov,²³ both accounts born of a journey through the Poland of the immediate postwar period, show to what extent the collection exceeds the mere melancholic repetition of the bygone world in order to interrogate the manner in which what has taken place engages the history to come. One of the implicit questions that Turkov poses, through the reportages and the collections of testimonies that he publishes, is that of knowing whether there can still be a Polish Judaism in Poland, or whether it must definitively find a way to implant itself and reinvent itself elsewhere.

In the first years of publication, in any case, the places to come of Polish Judaism remain undefined, and this all the more so in that, the question of what will become of the survivors and the stateless not having yet been resolved, Europe overflows with Jewish refugees who find themselves literally deprived of any stable space of life, reduced to existing in that non-space that the displaced-persons camps are, condemned to live in transit while waiting for some state authority to consent to allocate to them a place to settle. Among the works that evoke this spatial dispossession, this feeling of non-anchoring and of profound confusion provoked by the political indecisions and the massive population displacements of the immediate postwar period, one may cite Heymloze yidn,²⁴ which recounts the journey of Yisroel Efros through the refugee camps of Germany. Although Efros is — Turkov underscores it in the preface — a poet and a professor of Hebrew literature whose profession is not to concern himself with politics, his work appears as “a document with tragic resonances, for it unveils to us the image of the conditions in which thousands and thousands of Jewish men and women, young people and children, live to this very day, in a so-called liberated world.” This book, the prefacer adds further, “is an act of accusation against the world in general, no less accusatory toward our own Jewish world, against our leaders and our world organizations, which have shown themselves entirely powerless to shake the numbed conscience of the world and to free those who have remained shut up and reduced to slavery in the camps of Germany.” Heymloze yidn thus presents itself from the outset as an intellectually engaged writing, approaching in the mode of ethical reflection the universal inertia which, after having let the Nazi extermination camps prosper, abandons the surviving Jews to places that are not places. Turkov, in publishing this work and in underscoring its accusatory scope, affirms in his turn his will to bring these facts “to the knowledge of the widest possible Jewish public,” to act on the present by acting on the knowledge of his readers. The works, novelistic or documentary, that evoke the situation of immigrants prevented from reaching the shore of Palestine and forced to continue wandering on the waters; the insistence, in the collection of children’s testimonies edited by Noyekh Gris, on the will of these children to leave for Palestine and to participate in the construction of a country that would be their own — these resonate with a new echo once they are set against the numerous volumes evoking the situation of the Jewish refugees during and after the war, constrained to lead a life of wandering while waiting to find the place where their existence might be reconstructed.

Notes