Henryk Grynberg. Questions identity

Part I. By birth and by choice.

Grynberg left Poland on 12th October 1967 as an actor in the Warsaw Yiddish Theatre Company to make an artistic tour of the USA. Then he and his wife, a Catholic of Polish descent, applied to be granted political asylum from the American government. They were driven to do that in the aftermath of the anti-Semitic campaign staged by the political plotters of the Polish United Workers’ Party Politburo. The campaign was already at its peak the following year, that is after the students’ protest in March 1968. Those events saw about 13,000 Polish citizens of Jewish descent leave the Polish People’s Republic.

On 17th March 1968 in a London magazine, Grynberg – a fledgling emigré, emotionally described his relation to the country of his birth:

I do not know if and when I will be able to see my fatherland again – the inspiration for my thoughts and the food for my writing. I fear to part from Polish words and places, which I cherish so much.

The same article brought also his address to those interested in his fate and literary output:

I let them excuse this touch of pride and dignity of mine, which made me leave Poland. Let them know I will go on being a Polish writer and a Pole who signs himself with this strange name of mine, which I will never change at any price._1

Henryk Grynberg was born on 4th July 1936 in the village of Radoszyna into a Jewish family already settled for a long time in eastern Mazovia, the flatland of central Poland. He owes his survival of the Holocaust to his mother’s heroic efforts and the solidarity of the Poles who were brave enough to help exterminated Jews. He and his mother were almost the only survivors out of their whole, large family.

The experience of Shoah has permeated his life and writing. In this sense he belongs to “the Shoah Generation”._2 Grynberg made his debut as a writer on 16th November 1959 in the biweekly Współczesność (The Contemporary), publishing his first story The „Antigone“ Crew on the postwar exhumations of the murdered Jews.

The time he was born, his generation’s experience and the place where he made his debut allow a historian of Polish contemporary literature to include Grynberg in “The Contemporary Generation”. It was one of the most artistically prolific generations of contemporary Poland, both for works and literary talents. The childhood and adolescence of this generation were branded with the two totalitarianisms of the past century: Nazi fascism and Stalinist communism. When the hopes for a permanent reform of the social-political system were dashed both in Poland and Hungary in 1956, defiant writers began to emigrate, one by one. February 1958 saw Marek Hłasko (born in 1934) leave Poland. Then five years later Sławomir Mrozek (born in 1930) and Włodzimierz Odojewski (born in 1930), who was fired from his work in the Polish Radio after the March events in 1968, followed Hłasko. After the communist regime’s bloody pogrom of Polish workers in 1970, he took up his permanent residence in Federal Republic of Germany. But it is only with Henryk Grynberg that the political censorship and anti-Semitic depreciation can be discussed. This is evident in the adversities that he encountered in publishing his remarkable novel The Jewish War. The censorship also interfered deeply with the style and the contents of his story Buszujący po drogach (The Wanderer) published in Twórczość (The Creativity) no. 7, 1967. Three books comprise Grynberg’s output before his emigration. These are: the collection of stories The “Antigone” Crew (1963), the collection of poems Święto Kamieni (1964) (The Festival of Stones) and the novel The Jewish War which earned him, in 1966, the prestigious literary award of The Kościelscy Foundation.

In exile, he continued with the main themes of his writing: paying homage to the Shoah victims and challenging all manifestations of enmity towards Jews, which he felt so deeply and personally.

The autobiographical character of Grynberg’s writing was noticed by all explorers of his works – such as Jan Błoński, Marek Zaleski, Józef Wróbel and Anna Sobolewska, with the latter, however, warning against any hasty identifications. As she puts it, Grynberg “does not stress the private aspect of his writing – the first-person narrator and the plot bearing reference to the real events underline its documentary quality.”_3

Many a time Grynberg himself made it clear through the agency of the narrators and the authorial dedications like in “Zwolennikom przedawnienia” (To the Advocates of Negative Prescription) in The Jewish War, where he said: “The price of life awes and frightens me. Therefore I must revert, to my father’s inevitable fate and the incredible fighting perseverance of a lonely woman, my mother.”

Victory, his first novel from exile, was published in 1969 and includes a short note to the following effect: “No one would ever want the facts to be different than they really are in the novel more than myself. Author.” It is noticeable that this novel was a continuation of The Jewish War, describing the later fortunes of the child protagonist (Henryk Grynberg), who with his mother lived to see the Soviet liberation. In 1979 in London another of Grynberg’s novels appeared in print – Personal Life. In 1984 a collection of his essays – The Non-Artistic Truth – was published in Berlin. And it is in this book that his Obsessive Theme was expounded, the reasons why, as he puts it, exhumation, in the literary sense, came to be my principal task (p. 131). Finally in 1994, in a conversation with Jacek Leociak, he stated:

I feel no need to talk about the Holocaust. This is my bitter and hard duty, which I cannot shirk. That is what makes me write about it._4

However critics disputed the urgency of writing about the Holocaust, and especially whether art could actually penetrate this incomprehensible event.

Raymond Federman says that:

The insistent and obsessive problem of a Jewish writer results from his inability to relate this event either orally or in written form due to the lack of suitable vocabulary…_5

And almost in the same way, the author of the acclaimed collection Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto (Poor Poles look at the Ghetto) states:

The Holocaust is in fact impossible to convey and whatever we read about it makes us frightened and disappointed at the same time. The pen breaks under the burden of the experience, which is too much for a human being. A writer, whose mind is overwhelmed by memories like those, cannot get rid of them. Nor can he control them by working them into a uniform shape… A misfortune like this takes away the writer’s free will and fascinates him at the same time._6

These opinions were strongly opposed by Grynberg, as he explained to Leociak:

The Holocaust, as a literary subject, is not much different from other literary subjects. The difference lies basically in the fact that the hatred and crime of the Holocaust is a thoroughly new experience for mankind compared to other manifestations of enmity and murder. Therefore we search for new ways of expression.

As a poet, Grynberg does not share Theodor Adorno’s doubts as to whether poetry is possible after Auschwitz. In the poem Ashes and Diamonds from the collection Sketching in Memory he makes a contradictory confession:

Let me just add that, contrary to what is expected, writing poetry after Auschwitz is possible.

Grynberg’s imperative is simple – the Holocaust must not be shaped into a literature, but it must be used as a means of expression.

Unequivocal as Grynberg’s condemnation of anti-Semitism appears in the literary discourses, his membership in the Shoah generation and its consequences need some further consideration. It is the traumatic experience of the Holocaust that determined the way he perceived his fatherland and the way he thought of his ethnic identity.

Being a Polish Jew can become a nagging question. Lucy Dawidowicz makes an accurate reference to this problem – Jewish Identity, A Matter of Fate, A Matter of Choice._7 This issue concerns all those whom the racist Nuremberg Acts of 1935 subjected to multifarious persecution. Those Acts greatly contributed to the increased enmity towards Jews all over Europe. This in turn made things easier for Hitler, who at the conference in Wannsee in January 1942 decided to implement Endlosung – the complete annihilation of the Jewish population. Jews were killed in every country under the Nazi occupation. But the bulk of the Jewish extermination took place in Poland. Vernichtungs Lager were built, places of mass annihilation of the millions brought in cattle carriages from all countries controlled by the Nazis. Consequently Poland was turned into an accursed land of universal suffering.

The tragic fate of the Jewish population was alive to those locked in ghettos, concentration camps and other hiding places, as well as to those who had managed to escape from the gloomy continent earlier.

Julian Tuwim, staying in America, dramatically identified himself with his exterminated fellow countrymen, pleading of them:

Brothers, let me belong to this hof Doloris Causa Jew be granted to the poet by the nation that bore him.

But the very same Doloris Causa Jew declares:

I am Polish for the simplest, almost primitive reasons. Polish, for Poland is where I was born, bred and educated; for in Poland I was happy and unhappy […]; for what has become the most important part of my life – poetry – is unthinkable in any other language. […]But, first of all – I am Polish because I like the way I am._8

What we have here is a double identification: ethnical (Tuwim was Jewish by birth) and cultural (by the choice he made of the language, tradition and education as a Polish poet). Małgorzata Melchior has proposed an empirical description of the theoretical problems that result from this “identity conflict”._9 The way to resolve it, according to her, is to opt for the double identity whenever it is possible. Let us call it ambivalence. Melchior is more elastic about the essence of the incessant hesitation on the part of the Poles of Jewish descent (or the Polish Jews as Tuwim puts it).

There seem to be three typical ways in which people, or to be more precise – artists of such a background behave. Let us call them: Assimilation, Ambivalence and Alienation. In order to make the picture clear, I will dwell on these three models and skip dozens of others declared, over the last five decades, by Jewish writers who wrote in Polish. I am not making any distinction between writers living in Poland and those who took up their residence in other countries during the war and afterwards.

The most expressive motives for ethnic identification (or being Polish by choice and assimilation) can be seen in the discourse by Marian Brandys, who settled for good in the country on the Vistula River.

He pointed out:

I feel Polish and I will not have anybody impose upon me any of their classifications. Just like I did not let them write „Jewish „ in my documents when I was in the military college forty years ago. I feel Jewish only when Jews are persecuted._10

This is almost a classic example of national identity by choice. However, things seem more complex. By no means are we supposed to depart from our biological determinants. And this is especially the case when those who we would like to identify with reproach us. Jean Paul Sartre, a Frenchman of Jewish descent, made a point of it clearly, poignantly and beyond dispute._11

The idea of a man torn between two nations and two cultures that were formative for him, appears far more common and understandable to philo- and anti-Semites, who can be, at the same time, so quick to condemn it too.

The decision to stay in between marked Henryk Vogler’s declining years:

I am Polish and Jewish. […]My writing will not be to anybody else’s complete satisfaction. Jews will bear resentment towards me and they will find me a renegade as my heart and soul are half Polish, as I haven’t committed myself to the Jewish and what is believed to be Jewish with the whole of my self.
Poles will condemn me for the remarkably different ingredients of my Jewishness with which I flaw my uniform and full-bodied Polish descent._12

Then, is being Polish and Jewish at the same time possible only in the sphere of intention? Goodwill towards one’s existence within a society does not seem to protect against kinsmen’s antagonism either. Nor can their hostility be placated by Artur Sandauer’s strategy of “gradual Jewish to Polish transition”,_13 with which he described the successive stages of his diverse writing. It does not help in terms of alleviating the feeling of estrangement.

Not a single social group he referred to invited these tactics unreservedly. Unfortunately, resentment and isolation is what the advocates of this ethnic symbiosis find more frequently. This was the case with Aleksander Rozenfełd, who bitterly complained after he had left Poland to live in Israel:

For Jews I
am not Jewish. For non-Jews I
am Jewish. It seems like I
have
imagined myself to myself._14

Then it is just a small step towards an even more hopeless situation, which is called in this project alienation. This estrangement was given a desperately concise embodiment in the suicide farewell to the wicked world by the author of the remarkable novel Bread for the Departed and other Jewish survivals like Primo Levi and Paul Celan.

Bogdan Wojdowski’s Judaism as Fate was an expression of a final loneliness:

I have no society to belong to, a society whose traditions make me recognise it; nor can society recognize me. I am by myself. The bonds are broken. My loyalties towards the purpose and the value of life have been invalidated and no appearances can save me; for the limits of being have been violated.
No one in the world can tell a man how to be Jewish and how to go on being Jewish now. From this moment on one only becomes “a Jew”, who is “guilty of” Jewishness, and Judaism itself seems the destiny of those who, for various reasons, can be Judeophobic._15

Henryk Grynberg is Bogdan Wojdowski’s peer. They kept in touch with each other. However Grynberg managed his own problems in a somewhat different way and was fortunate enough to avoid the extreme alienation of his colleague. Although he attracts his fellow man’s imagination with his visions of the Holocaust and the death of innocent millions, he has not managed to reform the anti-Semites much.

Anti-Semitism was and continues to be the principal theme for the author of The Jewish War. He reverts to it and dips into it many a time in his prose, poetry, collections of essays and journalism. The bulk of his essays in The Non-Artistic Truth concern anti-Semitism to a great extent: “Życie jako dezintegracja (Life as Disintegration), Altera Pars, Terra Incognita, Duch ludzki jako sierota (The Human Spirit as an Orphan), Odwrotna strona dialogu (The Reverse Side of the Dialog.” All these essays reveal a tormented man of understanding, who reproaches Christians that “it was humans who made Jews suffer this fate”. Therefore he, who survived the Holocaust and has not forgotten the centuries-old persecution of the Jews, has the right to take up “the obsessive theme” of inveterate and contemporary anti-Semitism wherever it should occur. Grynberg’s obsession feeds on political history, religion, ethnic thinking and psychology.

To cut a long story short – Nazi anti-Semitism deprived Grynberg of his right to live and degraded his humanity. On the other hand Polish anti-Semitism dispossessed him of his fatherland and made him play Proteus’s games of identity.

Both of them made life unbearable with the painful dialectics of taking root in and uprooting from the nation, religion, tradition and territory.

Part II. Identity Games: Choices and Determination.

Examining the sphere of meanings in Henryk Grynberg’s copious literary output leads to a description of the biographical mutual dependencies that he shaped into a work of art, encoding the author’s personal experience. Doubtless, here we come across a writer’s reaction against and recuperation from the traumatic suffering of his childhood under the Nazi occupation; treating his nagging thoughts and obsessions through writing. The process is therapeutic, first of all, to a writer who attempts to charm his individual destiny in this way and soothe his aching psyche. Stanisław Grochowiak made a point of saying: “the hours I spend writing heal my wounds.”

But the social function of Grynberg’s output, his conscious mission of being “a reporter of the truth”, which he declared in The Non-Artistic Truth (p. 141) contrasts with and opposes this idea. That is because, in fact, it opens up new areas of conflict and leads to the inevitable confrontation between ideals and moral attitudes on the one hand, and everyday life on the other. As we all know well, things have never been easy for reliable witnesses and missionaries of truth. And their lives have hardly ever been happy.

I deliberately avoid any possible consideration of the subtle theoretical questions that concern the differentiation of personal relations inside and outside the text, the biographical pacts and the credibility of literary works. Analysing Grynberg’s games of identity, I take for granted that the psycho-social adventures of the literary protagonist are a kind of camouflage, a screen offering a better insight into the complex psyche and the core of the neurosis caused by dramatic circumstances. And it is especially so with an author who experienced and recounted drastic events.

No doubt it was not the fictional protagonist but Grynberg himself who had to play the mortally dangerous game of being Aryan so as to stay alive in the Shoah. For the same reasons, he studied the ways and practices of another religion. The chances for a Jewish child to survive the Nazi occupation increased dramatically the better he was able to imitate his Catholic peers from backwater villages.

The search for identity consumes a great number of pages in Henryk Grynberg’s The Jewish War, Victory, Ideological Life, Personal Life, Family Sketches and Kaddish. The main repertoire of these personal roles, or public imitations of individual incarnations include: a child to a provincial Jewish family in Poland, a son to a Polish cavalry officer, a devout Catholic, an enthusiastic member of ZMP (Union of Polish Youth) ideologically supporting the Communist Party, an expatriate from the PRL (Polish People’s Republic), a Jew returning to the roots of his religion. The personal cost of these forced masquerades and autonomous choices was always high. Here we have a young hero of Victory just after the Russian troops had entered Polish territory in 1944, who resolutely declares to his mother:

Because I don’t want to be Jewish any more … […] I really don’t …I’ll no longer be Jewish, O.K.? (p. 10)

But in wartime and during social revolutions an individual’s will is of little importance. Grynberg learnt it to his cost. He also related in detail other ideological experiments carried out on the students at school, at the university and in the youth organizations of Stalinist Poland. That is mainly what his novels Ideological Life and Personal Life discuss. Here fiction overlaps with biographical facts.

In order to make the picture clear let me quote a writer’s discourse by Henryk Grynberg. It gives a peculiar summary of how a man constrained by various institutions sees his past.

Since the time (when his miserable ZMP – Union of Polish Youth) was dissolved I have never belonged to any political party and I never will. Let them do without me and on their own account._16

However what invariably fascinates the writer in his literary practice and in public is the exploration of the problem: “How can one become a Jew?” This question is analogical to the issue that J. P. Sartre defined in Reflections sur la question juive, published in 1964. Grynberg referred to this matter on at least two occasions, for the first time in Ideological Life, which focuses on the Party’s meandering attitude towards Jews in the years 1945–1968. But what I find more essential is Grynberg’s explication of this problem in Family Sketches, published in 1990.

The same fictional episode allows a more unequivocal interpretation than the novel itself. The protagonist, the writer’s porte-parole – who used to be very popular among the regular bar patrons in the Europejski Hotel – is all of a sudden rejected by them. Their perception of him becomes influenced by new political-social trends. The longstanding community breaks down. A Polish man, accosted and interrogated, looks at the author and his compatriot and says:

Generally I don’t like Jews. Back then we weren’t Jews. And it is only now that we saw that every one of us had become like a Jew. If anybody ever took time to think what it means to be like a Jew, they could see it now. For suddenly we became like them. That is how Jews come into being…_17

The last sentence of the above statement is not just an ironic euphemism. What it refers to is the compulsory expatriation for racial reasons of legal citizens from the common state. In spring 1968 it was caricatured as „Zionists! Go to Siam!“. The narrative Motherland, from which I have quoted the previous statement, is of unique importance to me. It includes two essential motifs: Grynberg’s experience of anti-Semitism and his reasons for emigration. Paradoxically, the ideal-artistic structure of this story makes a direct starting-point for Heritage. It simultaneously sparks the author’s need to return to Poland in order to do what a son is obliged to do – find his father’s murderers and bury his bones with dignity.

Part III. Grynberg’s actual return to Poland.

Grynberg published the story Motherland in the monthly Kultura in Paris in December 1970 and in January 1971, which is only three years after he had left Poland. That story was his settling of accounts with the country where his father’s grave was profaned. In the middle of the rectangular turf that covered his bones, an anonymous barbarian left his excrement. The narrator protests against this profanation twice. First, when he claims that his father is

not just the bones buried in the ground a few kilometres away from here. My father is me. That’s because I am here. That’s what they call fatherland.

Next, when in expiation he identifies himself with his father and verbally breaks off his relations with the country stained by the murderers:

I swear you will not die here and you will not be buried in this place again, because I don’t want to die here. I am taking you and we are leaving. […]
And when we have made our fortunes as the others have – nobody will come and shit on our grave. My son, who will bury me, may find it very important. Because that’s what they call fatherland._18

The same archetypal motif of young Hamlet’s conversation with the spirit of his deceased father has accompanied Grynberg since his debut (Hamlet is the title of the last story in the collection The “Antigone’s” Crew) and is found as late as Heritage, published nine years ago. It was only at the beginning of 1992 that Henryk Grynberg returned to Poland for the first time in twenty-five years so as to participate in the production of the documentary film Miejsce urodzenia (The Birth Place), directed by Paweł Łoziński. The eye of the camera observes the place where the author of The Jewish War was born. Witnesses to the war, who are still alive, are being questioned with a view to find out who murdered Henryk Grynberg’s father.

Heritage is a collection of genuine dialogues transcribed from the soundtrack of Łoziński’ s production. This documentary prose includes twenty-three interviews the writer conducted with the inhabitants of the Mazovian villages Dobre, Radzymin, Gięboczyca, Radoszyna, Nowa Wieś, Nowa Rynia, Antonin, Piwki, Dropie and Jaczewko.

The twenty-first dialogue is a report of all the activities and comments by those present at his father’s exhumation. The twenty-second dialogue reveals the names of the perpetrators and the circumstances of the crime committed by the Wojtyński brothers on Abraham Grynberg in 1944. The collection closes with the great monologue by Hamlet-Grynberg recorded in Me Lean in the USA. Finally what we have is twenty-four parts like twenty-four books of the Iliad, which ends with buying Hector’s corpse back.

This monologue brings into focus all the motifs of Grynberg’s fictional prose; the motifs which tackle his father’s death, the son’s post-war exile, and the extermination of a great number of family members. In the epilogue to Heritage Grynberg lets us know why he thought it necessary to come back to Poland in the context of his father’s tragic fate:

I wanted to give him a human funeral. I wanted, even after his death, to bring him back to people. […] I had nowhere to escape. At first, when I was leaving, time seemed to heal this feeling. But time is a curved line and when I made a circle I had to come back; to this hell from which I haven’t been redeemed._19

Henryk Grynberg came to Poland again in October 1993 and stayed till January 1994. At that time he ran seminars and writing workshops at the Polish Literature Department of Warsaw University. It seems that the expatriate’s second visit to Poland had become possible because the commitments he had undertaken, both as his father’s son and also towards the closest victims of the Shoah, had been fulfilled. By the same token the principal circle of Grynberg’s themes – the poetics of prose with fictional plots entangled in the web of autobiography – seems to have closed.

Jacques Derrida interpreted this psycho-linguistic complication of the creative process in the following way:

In the common understanding the autobiographical anamnesis is identification. Not identity. Identity is never given, accepted or attained, no.
What can happen is only a never-ending and infinitely imagery process of identification. However one returns to his self or to the home at his self (…) whatever the Odyssey or Bildungsroman, however fictional construing of the „self can be, autos, ipse – we always imagine that he or she who writes must already be able to say „I“. Anyway the identifying modality must be, already or from now, on confirmed: confirmed by the language and in its language._20

Therefore Heritage must be considered as Wendepunki of Grynberg’s creativity. When this prose work was completed, he made the transition from artistic creations to documentaries.

In 1993 Henryk Grynberg published a Jewish woman’s occupation notes titled Pamiętnik Marii Koper (Maria Koper’s Diary) and edited fragments of diaries written by Jewish children sent to distant parts of the USSR. Does it mean that Grynberg came to terms with the critics’ opinions, which had expressed so much skepticism at the possibility of inventing adequate vocabulary to render the atrocities of the Holocaust? This does not seem to be the case, as in 1997 he published another collection of stories entitled Drohobycz, Drohobycz and three years later he came out with Memorbuch.

Grynberg’s attitude in the 90’s does not side-step the troublesome questions I asked at the beginning of this paper. As all of his emigre works have reached Poland, the domestic reader can become acquainted with the literary output of the author of Ideological Life. The point is that his works do not make easy reading. And that is so for a number of reasons. The “reporter of the truth” never balked at sensitive matter. The proper reception of Grynberg’s writing requires of the potential reader some effort, a great deal of goodwill and a deep insight into his conscience to discover his share in the sins and the guilt of negligence when so many Jewish victims were denied help at the time of persecution. Meanwhile “the poor Christians” of the Third Polish Republic are less willing and less diligent than they should be about studying the stages and forms of the Jewish martyrdom. They do not feel responsible enough for the wrongs done to Jews in our homeland. God forbid that he should be suspected of being anti-Semitic!

Then, who does Henryk Grynberg, who is a Jewish writer of Polish descent, speak to from America today? First of all he speaks to us. Grynberg’s books are written exclusively in Polish. They deal with the history, the society and the culture of the country on the Vistula River. They tackle the difficult and awkward coexistence of Christian and Judaic adherents, Poles and Jews at the time of the Nazi occupation and during the period of the PRL (Polish People’s Republic).

The inhabitants of the continent where Henryk Grynberg has found his home know neither our hissing language nor the intricacies of the Polish-Jewish grudge, which the two nations bear against each other. Our historical dramas would be strange and irrelevant to them. The refugee from Warsaw cannot win a wide and understanding audience there, an audience anxious to hear about ideological life and everyday life in a people’s democratic republic, in Poland.

Then what is a Shoah generation writer like him supposed to do after such a long-lasting refusal to come to terms with his Jewish fate? There is a reply to be found in Grynberg’s American stories when they are studied with due attention and care. A fragment of his American biography included in his novel Kaddish is quite revealing:

God has brought me to understanding. Suddenly it occurred to me that I should be grateful for being Jewish. And even if it were only for this, I should be a believer. Even if my God isn’t almighty. Perhaps just for that reason._21

A man who, like the biblical Job, returned to his roots, accepted the faith and the chosen people’s destiny to suffer, cannot make a permanent return to the place where he was born, for he found there too little help and too much human atrocity. Henryk Grynberg emphasized this in an interview he gave for Nowe Książki (New Books) magazine: Coming back to Poland, I am back in the past. This is painful. It makes me want to leave now. Then he asked a dramatic question: What is it that you want of me, Poland? I believe that if asked, Poland would reply – I want justice!

We must not forget that it is an essential obligation for both sides of the Polish-Jewish dialogue. And it is all the more important for what Henryk Grynberg wrote in his collection of poems from the period 1964–1989, printed in Poland under the revealing title I Have Returned.

This is what the author wrote about himself:

All my books are addressed, first of all, to Poles; therefore I am a Polish writer. […] I have my talent to offer to the Poles and to the Polish culture. My works testify to my faithful loyalty towards this culture.
I strive to invest it with a bit of the Jewish spirit …as a token. For it deserves this after so many centuries of living together.

POZNÁMKY

_1
Grynberg, Henryk: Pytania i odpowiedzi. Wiadomości 1968, no. 11 (1146) p. 1.

_2
Grynberg, Henryk: Pokolenie Szoa. Odra 2002, no. 4.

_3
Sobolewska, A.: Księgi wieczyste Henryki Grynberga (w:) Sporne postaci polskiej literatury współczesnej. Eds. Brodzka, A., Burska, L. Warszawa 1995, p. 73.

_4
See: Polsko czego ty ode mnie chcesz. Z Henrykiem Grynbergiem rozmawia Jacek Leociak. Nowe Książki, 1994, no. 3, p. 1.

_5
Federman, R. Wygnaniec: Żyd, tułacz, pisarz. Trans. P. Kołyszko. Literatura na świecie 1982, no. 12, pp. 310 –311.

_6
Błoński, J.: Autoportret żydowski (w:) Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto, Kraków 1994, p. 103.

_7
Dawidowicz, L.: The Jewish Presence. Essays on Identity and History. New York 1997.

_8
Tuwim, J.: My Żydzi Polscy… We Polish Jews. Warszawa 1996, p. 99.

_9
Melchior, M.: Społeczna tożsamość jednostki (w świetle wywiadów z Polakami pochodzenia żydowskiego urodzonymi w latach 1944–1955). Warszawa 1990.

_10
Brandys, M.: Dziemik 1972. Warszawa 1996, p. 99.

_11
Sartre, J. P.: Rozważania o kwestii żydowskiej. Warszawa 1957.

_12
Vogler, H.: Wyznanie Mojżeszowe. Warszawa 1994, p. 98.

_13
Sandauer, A.: Byłem. Warszawa 1990, p. 114.

_14
Rozenfeld, A.: Podanie o prawo powrotu. Poznań 1990, p. 103.

_15
Wojdowski, B.: Judaizm jako los. Puls (Londyn) 1993, no. 62, pp. 61– 62.

_16
Grynberg, H.: Autor o sobie (w:) Wróciłem. Wiersze wybmne z lat 1964–1998. Warszawa 1991, pp. 148–149.

_17
Ibid. p. 144.

_18
Grynberg, H.: Dziedzictwo. Londyn 1993, pp. 89–90.

_19
Derrida, J.: Jednojęzyczność innego, czyli proteza oryginalna. Literatura m świecie 1998, no. 11–12, p. 53, przekł. A. Siemek.

_20
Grynberg, H.: Kaclisz. Kraków 1987, p. 44.

_21
Grynberg, H.: Polsko, czego ty ode mnie chcesz, op. it, p. 1.