Motto: Sometimes I remember something very important from family stories, but without the context of the accompanying events. That is why I looked very hard for family contexts in this book.
Professor, this is the third novel in your output and the eighth literary book. The now well-known and respected economist and scientist working in Poland and abroad made his debut at the end of the 1960s with fantasy stories in 'Młody Technik'.
Yes. The editor-in-chief of 'Młody Technik' was the wonderful Zbigniew Przyrowski, and I did indeed debut with some fantasy stories. The editors were favourably disposed towards the young, and the magazine had an interesting publishing tradition and was eagerly bought.
'Młody Technik' appeared on the publishing market in the 1930s and continues to function today. But after your successful debut, you left literature for some time and closed yourself in the circle of economics as an academic teacher, professor at the University of Gdańsk, lecturer in the economics of capitalism, specialist in macroeconomics and the functioning of transnational enterprises. In the 1990s, you taught at the University of Michigan and then became chief economist at Bank Pekao S.A., worked for the European Council of Economists and the Monetary Policy Council. And recently you have returned to literature again. The novel 'Szklanki żydowskiej krwi' (TN: 'Glasses of Jewish blood') was published earlier this year.
The novel was published by the Josef Conrad Regional Public Library in Gdańsk. And I worked on this book for a long time, a very long time, because it covers many years of research, to bring the family stories I heard into the real historical time of that era.
The narrator in this novel is the grandson and the main character is the grandfather Leopold Merst. 'Szklanki żydowskiej krwi' leads the reader through various, often very complicated family fates from almost the beginning of the 20th century, through the times of the First and Second World Wars, through the 1970s, as far as the grandfather's fate is concerned, up to the present day.
When I started to think about family relations from a longer perspective, I realised that my grandfather was for me a much more distinct figure than my father or my mother. And he influenced me more than anyone else in the family. With my father, as with my father, sometimes we understood each other better, sometimes worse, and we had the standard father-son relationships and conflicts. But my father didn't have as many - at least from my perspective - secrets and important experiences as my grandfather. So it was my fascination with a particular person. Anyway, I remember an important conversation with my mother about my grandfather, when she told me about the appearance of my grandfather on the Coast. And she summed up this story with this statement: 'He actually started here from the beginning to build something completely his own, he broke away from the past and started to build a completely new reality himself. He planted a family tree here - said his mother - treating himself as the roots of this tree.' And this conversation was imprinted on my mind in an important way and the book stayed with me for a long time. Slowly, different fragments were written, different episodes were put together and then it was necessary to glue them together.
So the grandfather is the backbone of the family saga.
Yes, yes... Grandfather left his hometown Tarnów, left Kraków, which was very important to him, and left his youth in order to come to Gdynia on the coast. But please note that the name Gdynia does not appear even once in this book. And it is a deliberate choice, but the German name of Gdynia - Gotenhafen - appears when the name of the city needs to be entered into a war document. Gdynia was in the grandfather's mind a certain dream, imagination, or even vision, and only for the father and the grandson does it become a real space. Grandfather was looking for his new place and found it because he built his new world here. And this fact later took many different turns.
The topography of Kraków is an important area in this book.
I knew about the historical context of Kraków in my grandfather's life, I had read a lot of historical studies about the year 1914 in Kraków. I travelled to Kraków many times, not only for historical documentation but also to walk the streets, squares and to wonder how it could have been. Which way did my grandfather walk and why exactly this way - I thought. I remember a moment when I was preparing a piece on the oath of the legionaries. I wondered where he stayed on Maria Magdalena Square because he didn't enter the mass before the legionaries' oath. So I imagined what this square looked like at the time and how the legionaries could have left this church to march to Błonia on Friday, August 4, 1914. Hence in my 'Szklanki żydowskiej krwi' there is this exact topography because I looked at these places myself.
In the biography of grandfather Leopold Merst there were extremely important years, 1914, 1918, 1921, 1939, and you lead your characters through the experiences resulting from them with the help of your narration as a grandson, of course.
That is what you might say. These are the key dates in this novel. The narrator's grandson begins the story at the end of the 1960s, when he is in his first year at the Gdańsk University of Technology, living with his grandfather.
The relationship between the grandson and the grandfather at the beginning of the novel does not seem deep. Even the grandson resents being 'implicated' by his family in this care for his grandfather.
Actually, understanding and fascination build up slowly. In the beginning, the most important thing is that the grandfather is not alone. It is only when the grandfather's fate is recreated in the diary that a different relationship slowly develops between the characters. The grandson begins to trace the grandfather's story. And the death of the grandfather and the disappearance of his mementoes, which are taken away by the family, i.e. the scattering of objects from the past, is the moment when the grandson begins to read the grandfather's past very personally and talk about it.
There are a great many elements in this novel that are completely true to me because I experienced them. For example, the story about my grandfather's silk shirts, the collars of which were cut off when the shirts wore out. And these shirts were made into children's nightclothes. I liked to sleep in those shirts. Sometimes readers ask me how many realities of my life are included in this novel. Are they one-to-one relationships, or maybe one-to-fifty per cent? I answer that it varies, depending on the situation described. In fact, the story about the shirts is one to one, because that was the reality.
And the bullet in your grandfather's lung that the hospital doctor gives to your father after the autopsy?
Also true. I have this bullet. In the 1970s, if a patient died at a hospital, an autopsy was compulsory. My grandfather died at the hospital. And the doctor was sensitive enough to decide that this bullet from my grandfather's lung should be given to the family.
Your sensitivity to detail is important in this novel. You look at your grandfather's world often analysing the details, for example noting the differences in your grandfather's legionary uniform that you saw in the photograph.
The overall picture of the historical reality described is often made up of small elements that I analyse. I perceive the world - and I think many people do the same - by remembering certain details that become important. This is how I described my grandfather's first car. I know from my own experience that my first car - a 'Maluch' (TN: Fiat 126p) - was important for me. And I also know from my own experience that the circle of Piłsudski's soldiers, legionaries, attached great importance even to details connected with the Marshal, including Piłsudski's limousine. I was a witness to the PZU fund financing the repair of Piłsudski's car, the limousine used by the Marshal. A dilapidated wreck was found, which was superbly restored and conserved. I watched the people who did it, enthusiasts themselves, for whom every missing screw was important. Such experiences taught me that great attention must be paid to details, also when writing a book.
Your grandfather's military past, Piłsudski's legions, the 2nd Iron Brigade, also known as the Carpathian Brigade, and then 1939 and World War II... The historical consultant Andrzej Lechowski spoke very highly of your book.
The Director of the Regional Library in Gdańsk, Jarosław Zalesiński, asked for a historical consultation before publication, because the story of the military grandfather is a very important part of this novel. The historian found no mistake.
My grandfather volunteered for the Legions in 1914, and it was his military fate that shaped his entire life. It was from his stories that I knew he was 22 when the First World War ended. And he realised that since matriculation he had done nothing else but move from one rank to another. It is sometimes forgotten that the legionaries were once on the Austrian side, and then they were on the German side, and even some legionaries found themselves on the 'white' Russian side. These were the very complex fates of Polish soldiers.
How did I arrive at this? I stuck to the facts. I learned from him that he had been wounded at Piawa in Italy. For a long time, he was tormented by the question of whether the Italian who had shot at him had shot at his legs on purpose, just to make it more difficult to reach the trenches. I confronted this story of my grandfather with a military officer, who pointed out to me that probably the Italian soldier had the wrong aim.
After some time I noticed that my grandfather's constant reading was Ernest Hemingway's 'A Farewell to Arms'. First influenced by my grandfather, I of course read this novel myself as a teenager, without any conscious reference to military matters or the military contexts described by Hemingway. Then only, many years later, did I realise that my grandfather's reason for sitting on this novel was because he had been on that front himself. So I also looked up what Hemingway was doing there, at that very time, on the Italian front. Hence the story of 'A Farewell to Arms' in my novel.
The title of this book is quite aggressive. " Szklanki żydowskiej krwi", thus a story about identity and the inscription of the characters' lives into historical events regardless of their will. History rules their fate. Grandfather was a Jew, the father was miraculously saved as a child... and the grandson talks about glasses of Jewish blood on Hel with a beautiful young girl he met by chance, Nina, who will turn out to be an important character in this novel. Why are identity issues so important to you in this novel?
(A moment of silence) I smile because I wonder if I should be revealing my cards so much and if I want it to be public. The title is aggressive, I realise that. Let's just say that among the keys to it are family secrets that my mother told me about.
I know of many more family stories and secrets that I will want to use in my writing over time.
I have no experience in speaking as an author of fiction, in analysing real and fictionalised plots. Let me start with the character of Nina. She is a heroine who has the characteristics of three women I know. Two were Jewish, and one had a very strong admixture of Jewish blood. It just so happened that they appeared in my life and played an important role. And they all lived with this Jewish trace.
The events in Denmark are described in such detail because one of these women had a Jewish mother from Poland who, by coincidence, was in Denmark when the war broke out. Her parents died in Poland, she survived. She was rescued as part of a campaign to smuggle Jews to Sweden. It was then that she met her future husband. He was among those Danish communists who participated in the whole smuggling operation. But even so, her Polish-Jewish past weighed heavily on her. The other woman who is Nina's prototype lives abroad, most recently in Canada. She is half Jewish and not halakhic because her father was Jewish. And in 2008, when she was in Poland, she told me about the death of her grandparents and this description of death in my novel is very close to her family tragedy. And there was a third woman, whose part of the personality is also shared by Nina, the protagonist of the novel.
The search for this identity requires an incredible responsibility on the part of the writer: responsibility for the characters, responsibility for the stories told, and responsibility to myself as to how honest I was in this book. Are you better off after writing this book or are you only now starting to feel anxious?
Just writing this novel certainly allowed me to put a lot of internal things in order. And there was such a feeling of relief: I will leave well-ordered because I know where it came from, I know why I react to certain things in a certain way because they are rooted in my consciousness, sometimes even beyond my control...
Was there any anxiety that I would now be identified as a Jew? No, as a matter of fact, it doesn't bother me that much, nor does it alarm me...
I have written some journalism on similar subjects, but in the form of fiction I was able - at least this is how I feel - to show certain things in greater depth. But journalism, even when I've tried to be as reliable and honest as possible, doesn't allow you to get to the heart of the matter as fiction does.
That is, a sense of peace...
Although it's not like I wrote one book and that's it. At the moment I'm working very intensively, I'm already halfway through with another novel also very much set in history. My protagonist is more or less my peer, born in the late 1940s, whose father was sent to Sachsenhausen, not as a result of any heroic deeds, but due to a bad twist of fate. He survived the camp and after the war ended up in Kołobrzeg or the formerly German Kolberg. My young protagonist becomes a journalist of the party press and then, in 1990, the party press belonging to RSW Prasa-Książka-Ruch disappears, and he is forty years old and has to find himself somehow. He meets Germans who are officially coming to Kołobrzeg, their Kolberg, and because he speaks German, he becomes their guide. And the whole story revolves around the clash between what this ex-journalist knows about his father, and what the arriving young Germans know about their fathers, who escaped the Red Army offensive in Kolberg in March 1945. I am writing another book with the conviction that we are very deeply stuck in history, much deeper than we think.
You are already a retired professor of the University of Gdańsk, we don't hear your official statements on economic issues lately, is it possible that you lost economics and science for the sake of literature?
I am no longer scientifically engaged in economics. Now the time has come for literature and writing is my greatest passion.
Thank you for the interview and I wish that 'Szklanki żydowskiej krwi' will find many readers because it is an important and valuable book, and that your work on the new novel will give you as much satisfaction as possible.
Professor Dariusz Filar was interviewed by Alina Kietrys