Where is the Muranów Lily? Unearthing Traces of Queer Jewishness in Contemporary Warsaw

Abstract

In this essay I explore the possibility of an embodied, desiring encounter with traces of queer Jewishness in contemporary Warsaw. Examining Benny Nemer’s 2015 experimental audioguide Lilia z Muranowa (The Muranów Lily), commissioned by POLIN, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, I propose a line of enquiry following a dybbuk-like haunting that the audioguide performs. In doing so, I investigate how desiring, affective speculation, legends and rumours might enable an encounter with history, if we allow ourselves to be haunted by them. I provide a landscape which the listener or the performer of Nemer’s experimental tale may engender with their desire, their body and their fantasy, in order to restore lives lost and forgotten in the archives, through the desiring archival subject: a queer Polish Jew.