(E)migration and identity in the prose of Bronisław Świderski

Abstract

Born in 1946 in Warsaw and living since 1970 in Copenhagen, Bronisław Świderski, a philosopher, prose writer, journalist and translator, is undoubtedly one of the most interesting Polish writers of the 1968 generation. Expelled from the University of Warsaw because of political repressions and an anti-Semitic witch-hunt launched by the communist authorities after the so-called March events,1 Świderski, like many other Jewish expatriates, decided to settle in Denmark, which attracted such immigrants as “a cultured European country with democratic and humanist traditions” (Wiszniewicz 1992, 49). A brutal and peremptory expulsion from Polishness, sudden and unexpected branding with Jewishness, and slow, difficult assimilation of/into Danishness – this series of experiences, as he claims, that shaped his multiplied, triple, identity: Polish, Jewish and Danish. It also determined, one should add, the central subject of his writing, which is (e)migration/(i)migration and identity. The juxtaposition of the phenomena of emigration and immigration is not intended here to be an antinomical collision: Świderski’s characters leave their countries as political emigrants, driven out by the ruling regimes, but, once abroad, they refuse to engage in emigrée rituals, to celebrate exile gestures and poses. On the contrary, they focus on strategies to enter the new world, to explore the land of the unknown culture. In their life’s policy, emigro/I leave is closely intertwined with imigro/I arrive.