Pilgrimage to Stratford

‘We went to Stratford-on-Avon. The little house where the great William was born has been so often described that I already knew every corner in it. A strong emotion, however, thrilled me, when I entered that dwelling. When I looked around, this first impression was somehow dispelled by amazement at the human egotism and stupidity which prompt the people to put their own ‘I’ everywhere. Not only the walls, the window-panes, and the ceiling are covered with the names of visitors, but even the bust of the poet is defaced with them.’ This is from some diary notes kept by Helena Modjeska, the great Polish actress who died 110 years ago today. She was known in particular for her interpretations of Shakespearan roles, in Poland, but also - and despite a Polish accent - in Britain and the US where she lived for the latter half of her life.

Jadwiga Benda was born in Kraków, Poland, in 1840 but she was later baptised as Helena Opid, being given her godfather’s surname. The details of her early life are not accurately recorded in her own biography, and remain a little shrouded in mystery. Her mother was the widow of a prosperous merchant, and her father may have been a Polish nobleman. Although she married her former guardian, Gustaw Zimajer, and they had two children together (one of whom died in infancy), she later discovered he had been married at the time of their wedding. Zimajer was an actor and provincial director who used the stage name Modrzejewski, while Helena later adopted a simpler form of the name for English-speaking audiences - Modjeska. She made her stage debut in 1861, and toured through Poland acting in provincial productions.

In 1865, Modjeska left Zimajer and, taking her son, returned to Kraków, accepting a four year contract. From 1868 she began appearing in Warsaw, where she soon became a theatre star. Also in 1868, she married a Polish nobleman Karol Bożenta Chłapowski (later known as Count Bozenta). In 1876, she and her husband (as well as a number of friends) decided to emigrate to the United States, where they bought a ranch near Anaheim in California. It was a utopian dream which soon fell apart, as they knew nothing about farming or ranching, and Modjeska returned to the theatre reprising many of the Shakespeare rolls she had performed in Poland. A theatrical agent signed her for a tour on the east coast where she made her New York debut, and she then spent three years performing abroad (and learning to speak English better), mainly in London and through Great Britain.

In 1883, Modjeska was granted American citizenship, and in the same year she produced Henrik Ibsen’s A Dolls House, the first Ibsen play to be staged in the US in the US. In the 1880s and 1890s, and despite a persistent Polish accent, she had a reputation as the leading female interpreter of Shakespeare on the American stage, and was a much-loved performer. Mostly, she directed her own troupe of actors, touring widely through the States performing not only at major city theatres but in small makeshift halls - accompanied by her personal manager, Count Bozenta. From 1888, for nearly 20 years, they lived at Arden a ranch, not far from their original home, in what is now known as Modjeska Canyon. When in 1893, Modjeska spoke out about the poor conditions of Polish women in Russian controlled parts of Poland, she was banned from travelling in Russian territory. After a stroke in 1897, she managed to return to the stage, and even to travel to Poland in 1903-1903 where she performed in her native Kraków. Back in the US, she continued touring until 1907, and died two years later on 8 April 1909. Further information is available online at Wikipedia, the Online Archive of California, the Helena Modjeska Art and Culture Club, the Helena Modjeska Society.

Much of the available biographical information about Modjeska’s early life comes from her autobiography, published posthumously by Macmillan in 1910: Memories and Impressions of Helena Modjeska (freely available online at Internet Archive). In this memoir, Modjeska occasionally refers to the fact that she kept notes about her life - and these are very diary-like. For example on board the German steamer Donau heading for New York in 1870 she writes: ‘Our journey across the Atlantic was also a novelty to me. I was fascinated by the spell of the sea. It evidently had a soothing effect on me, judging by some notes which I then scribbled down in my nautical enthusiasm.’ And here is her seventh note to herself.

Summer 1876
‘Note 7th
The day after tomorrow we shall be in New York! The ocean is blue again. Every one is on deck. The first- class passengers are looking down at those of the third class. There is a regular beehive there, but the people seem miserable. A band of barefooted, dirty children, young women with tangled hair, unwashed and untidy. Boys with starved or brazen faces, mothers knitting and fathers smoking. Some sleep on the bare deck, with faces to the floor. Our fellow-passengers of the first class amuse themselves by throwing amidst that pitiful crowd small coins and oranges, which produce a great commotion among the young ones. They fight, push, and nearly strangle each other, in their endeavors to catch a coin. Oranges passing from hand to hand, mashed, torn, and squeezed nearly dry, are grabbed by the victors, while the poor children retreat, crying, and extending in vain their tiny, dirty hands, in hope of getting their share of the booty.

This exhibition was painful to me, for there was no charity in it, but a mere heartless sport. So I crossed to the other side of the boat, where I could see the aristocracy of the steerage amusing themselves with dancing. Several sailors also danced with them. Some men moved with most ridiculous motions of feet and body, but with the solemnity of undertakers. One girl was so pretty, and danced with such grace, that everybody admired her. She had blond hair and sad, sky-blue eyes. What will become of that child, I wonder; has she anybody to protect her? I feel so sorry for her, not knowing why. The musician who played on a harmonica had the face of a Richard Wagner, and must have been a German. He looked to the upper deck, tracing on our faces the effect of his music. We applauded, of course.

Encouraged by the example of the steerage, the first-class people began to plan a dancing party for tomorrow, a full-dress affair.

Late in the afternoon we had a beautiful sight. The sun was setting simultaneously with the rising of the moon. On the right the bright red light, dancing on the water like a laugh, on the left the solemn and soft face of the moon floating among the rainbow shades of the skies, throwing in its wake a long stream of silver light. It was curious to watch these two astral potentates looking at each other freely, with nothing between them but the gigantic pane of the ocean, and almost touching each other by the long rays of light which the water carried there and back.’

Later in the autobiography she writes about starting a short provincial tour, that it was her second visit to different English towns, and that she has a few notes from that time. Here are several those.

2 October 1881
‘Sheffield. In the afternoon we walked a long time in the country. Coming back, we met the procession of the Salvation Army. Their ministers call themselves Generals, and, as I hear, are doing a great deal of good, converting drunkards to soberness and commending pure life among the poor classes.

Singing hymns, beating a drum, and playing tambourines, they march among hostile elements, for they are not liked here. We even witnessed a row; an old woman struck with her soiled broom the officer’s face, and a skirmish ensued. The drum was broken, the banner tom to pieces; even some women who wanted to join the procession received quite serious blows.

The English are demonstrative when they do not belong to the better classes.’

3 October 1881
‘At ten o’clock in the morning we left for Birmingham, and opened with ‘Heartsease.’ The house was not very full because people were afraid the play was too risqué. They asked if it was the same play where the heroine dresses on the stage, getting up from her bed. We played it, however, three times, every time to better houses.’
 
5 October 1881
‘Two days ago we rehearsed ‘Marie Stuart.’ It was a sad rehearsal. W. flirted with the dark-eyed Vivian, and paid no attention to his lines; the prompter snored in his chair, and Elizabeth could not read her part fluently, and said by way of excuse that she did not think it worth while to pay much attention to such an insignificant part.

I am still reading the life of Ste. Jeanne Franchise de Chantal. Yesterday I had to put the book aside because I cried so much over the death of young Baron de Torrens and his wife, and over the silent resignation of Madame Chantal. Charles laughed, and said I would never grow old. I feel, indeed, as young at times as I was at twelve, and only when I look in the mirror the sad truth is revealed. But no matter, the older I grow the better I shall be, Anna says, ‘like the old wine.’

When shall I see the Carpathian Mountains again? When?

Yesterday we were invited to supper by Mr. Rogers, the manager of the Prince of Wales Theatre. Mr. and Mrs. Kendal were there and also Mr. Hare. Mr. Rogers spoke a great deal of the brotherhood of actors. How optimistic! After the supper, Mrs. Kendal sang ballads, and was very eloquent and entertaining. Miss Rogers, who was in Poland, and knows a few Polish words, talked to me about cur mutual friends and acquaintances.’

12 October 1881
‘Frou-frou. The house was not well filled. The play was too Frenchy, some one said. We were all in bad humor, which did not help the performance.

It is my birthday. I received many presents and cards from friends and even strangers, but not one word from Poland. I must return, or else they will forget me entirely. This evening I formed a strong resolution to leave the stage in two or three years.

I may succeed, because I have good work in view: to found schools for the mountaineers’ children, and begin by Zakopane. I have no distinct plans, only a desire to do something good.’
 
14 October 1881
‘We went to Stratford-on-Avon. The little house where the great William was born has been so often described that I already knew every corner in it. A strong emotion, however, thrilled me, when I entered that dwelling. When I looked around, this first impression was somehow dispelled by amazement at the human egotism and stupidity which prompt the people to put their own ‘I’ everywhere. Not only the walls, the window-panes, and the ceiling are covered with the names of visitors, but even the bust of the poet is defaced with them. What is the object of desecrating thus the sanctuary? Another proof of idiocy.

In the first room there is a chair by the fireside where Shakespeare used to sit, as tradition tell us. Every person who comes to that room sits down in the chair. Is there any sense in that action?

At the ‘New Place’ we saw an American couple, both young and handsome, kneel down and kiss the ground on which the great man walked. I wanted to do the same, but I had lived in England long enough to learn restraint, and limited my demonstrations to picking up some ivy leaves growing around the well. In church we saw the painted bust. I did not like it: The ruddy-cheeked and stout Shakespeare did not appeal to me.

Finally, later in the autobiography, Modjeska write about her current co-star, Edwin Booth. ‘Every one loved him,’ she says, ‘and all the remarks he made to the actors of his company were received as favors rather than reproofs.’She then writes: ‘I made a few notes on our life in the private car, which may throw more light upon the intimate character of that wonderful man and artist.’ Here’s one of those.

22 April 1890
‘Milwaukee. We played “Hamlet” last night.

Ralph and Félicie have gone - at 1.40 p.m. We did not cry at parting - we hope to meet again in Poland. Only when the train disappeared from the station the tears came to my eyes. I slept the whole afternoon in order to calm myself.

The audiences were cold and unsympathetic.

After the performance we went to the car and had supper. Edwin Booth was delightful. He told us some of his early experiences: how in Honolulu he was compelled to paste his own bills on the corners of the streets, and was surprised at that work by a fellow from New York who happened to be there just at the time. This happened, of course, some years ago, about thirty-five, I think. I went to bed directly after supper, but I heard him talking to the ladies of the company for more than an hour. They all shrieked with laughter.’

I just want a friend

‘Why did I decide to start a diary today? Has something important happened? Have I discovered that my friends are keeping diaries of their own? No! I just want a friend. Somebody I can talk to about my everyday worries and joys.’ This is Renia Spiegel, a Polish teenager, writing in her diary exactly 80 years ago today. But her everyday worries would soon encompass the horrors of being forced to live a Nazi-controlled Jewish ghetto. Renia has been hailed as one of the ‘new voices of the holocaust’, and her diary has recently been celebrated by The Smithsonian.

Renia was born in 1924, in Uhryńkowce, Tarnopol province, then part of Poland now in Ukraine. She had one younger sister, Ariana, who became a child star actress (the ‘Polish Shirley Temple’). By 1939, Renia and Ariana were living with their grandparents in Przemyśl, and studying at the local Gymnasium, where Renia contributed poems to the school magazine. Following the start of the Second World War and Germany’s invasion of Poland, the family were initially located in city’s Soviet zone, but when the Germans overran the city, they became confined to a Jewish ghetto. Renia was shot dead on the street shortly after her 18th birthday on 30 July 1942.

Ariana and her mother survived the war and moved to the US. In the 1950s, Zygmunt Schwarzer, who had been Renia’s boyfriend, and who had survived several concentration camps, gave them a diary that Renia had kept from January 1939 until her death. The diary remained untouched for decades, until, very recently, Ariana’s daughter, Alexandra, had it translated. Subsequently, she showed it to the documentary film-maker Tomasz Magierski who then planned to make a film about Renia; he also helped to have the diary published in Poland.

The recently-founded Renia Spiegel Foundation describes the diary as follows: ‘This nearly seven hundred-page journal by Renia Spiegel, which spans the years 1939 to the summer of 1942, presents a powerful insight into the life of a young woman, whose life was tragically cut short shy of her eighteenth birthday. The diary is an eyewitness account of the horrors of day-to-day life during the Nazi occupation. There is incredible maturity in her observations and insights. Her account of her personal life is poignant, heart breaking, and often amusing with her expression of adolescent infatuation exposing the raw emotion of a teenager. This powerful diary is not only a primary historical source of the Holocaust, but also a true and outstanding work of literature.’

Renia and her diary received international attention when, last November (2018), the Smithsonian published both a biographical article about her and substantial extracts from the diary. The Times of Israel and The Guardian also have substantial articles on the diary, with extracts. St Martins Press (Macmillan) in the US and Ebury Press (Penguin) in the UK (see The Bookseller) are due to publish the English translation later this year as Renia’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Account of the Holocaust. See also the Renia Spiegel Facebook page.

31 January 1939
‘Why did I decide to start a diary today? Has something important happened? Have I discovered that my friends are keeping diaries of their own? No! I just want a friend. Somebody I can talk to about my everyday worries and joys. Somebody who will feel what I feel, believe what I say and never reveal my secrets. No human being could ever be that kind of friend.

Today, my dear diary, is the beginning of our deep friendship. Who knows how long it will last? It might even continue until the end of our lives.

In any case, I promise to always be honest with you. In return, you’ll listen to my thoughts and concerns, but you’ll remain silent like an enchanted book, locked up with an enchanted key and hidden in an enchanted castle. You will not betray me.’

15 July 1942
‘Remember this day; remember it well. You will tell generations to come. Since 8 o’clock today we have been shut away in the ghetto. I live here now. The world is separated from me and I’m separated from the world. The days are terrible and the nights are not at all better. Every day brings more casualties and I keep praying to you, God Almighty, to let me kiss my dear mamma.

Oh, Great One, give us health and strength. Let us live. Hope is shriveling so fast. There are fragrant flowers in front of the house, but who needs flowers? And Zygmunt - I saw him from a distance today, but he hasn’t come over yet. Lord, please protect his dear head. But why can’t I cuddle up next to him? God, let me hug my dear mamma.’

16 July 1942
‘You probably want to know what a closed-off ghetto looks like. Pretty ordinary. Barbed wire all around, with guards watching the gates (a German policeman and Jewish police). Leaving the ghetto without a pass is punishable by death. Inside, there are only our people, close ones, dear ones. Outside, there are strangers. My soul is so very sad. My heart is seized with terror.

I missed Zygus so much today. I thought about him all the time. I’ve longed so much for his caresses, nobody knows how much. After all, we face such a terrible situation. You will help me, Bulus and God.’

A pope's unworldly diaries

Exactly 40 years ago today, the Polish archbishop Karol Józef Wojtyła became Pope John Paul II, the first non Italian pope in more than four centuries. His was a globetrotting papacy - he preached the Catholic religion in many parts of the world never visited by a pope before, often to huge crowds. After his death, two spiritual diaries came to light, and these have recently been published in English. Although they might offer the initiated insight into his inner religious life, there is nothing in them to shed light on his worldly existence.

Karol Józef Wojtyła was born in the Polish town of Wadowice in 1920, the youngest of three children. His mother died when he was eight. He went to a local school in which there was a significant Jewish presence. Aged 18, he moved with his father to Krakow where he enrolled in the university to study languages, for which he had a natural talent. He volunteered as a librarian, and enjoyed sports and the theatre. He served two months military training but, famously, would not hold or fire a weapon. During the war, he worked for a restaurant, a quarry, and a chemical factory, determined not to be sent to Germany. In early 1944, he was in a traffic accident, and spent two weeks in hospital, during which time he decided to become a priest. He hid in the house of an archbishop for the rest of the war. He was ordained as a priest in November 1946, and then moved to Rome for doctoral studies at the Pontifical University.

Wojtyła returned to Poland in 1948, serving in various parishes, teaching at university level, writing for the Catholic press, and even taking students on leisure expeditions (even though priests were not allowed to accompany groups of students during the Stalinist era). In 1958, he was created a bishop, the youngest in Poland. He took part in the Second Vatican Council, making important contributions, and participated in assemblies of Synod of Bishops. In 1964, Pope Paul VI appointed him Archbishop of Kraków, and three years later he was further promoted to the Sacred College of Cardinals. When Pope Paul VI died in 1978, the subsequent papal conclave elected Pope John Paul I, however he died a month later; a second conclave met in October. A split vote between two strong candidates led to a compromise in favour of Wojtyła, who won on the eighth ballot on the third day (16 October) - taking the name John Paul II in tribute to his predecessor. Thus he became the first non Italian pope in over 400 years.

John Paul II liked to travel, and to use his many languages. He made over 100 trips to over 100 countries, always attracting large crowds. Early on in his papacy, his visit to Poland, where he  encouraged opposition to Communism - soon after the Solidarity movement was launched. He was the first pope to visit many countries, including the UK and Cuba, and the first to pray in an Islamic mosque. He did much to foster relations with the Jewish world, and he set up the annual World Youth Day celebration - during its tenth anniversary he offered mass to a crowd of over four million people in Manila, Philippines. In 1981, he was badly wounded in an assassination attempt. A year later, a second attempt led to him using a bullet-proof trailer known as the ‘popemobile’. He died in April 2005. Subsequently he was made venerable, then beatified and canonised - creating him a saint, with his saint day celebrated on the anniversary of his papal inauguration. Online biographical resources include Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Vatican, the BBC, John Paul II National Shrine, Biography.com, and Catholic Online.

From his early years as a priest until two years before his death, Wojtyła intermittently kept a spiritual diary. This was first published in Poland in 2014, and was quickly translated into other languages, but only into English in 2017. The English edition - translated by Joanna Rzepa - was published by William Collins as Pope St John Paul II - Karol Wojtyła: In God’s Hands, The spiritual diaries 1962-2003. ‘Not since the publication of Journal of a Soul, the spiritual autobiography of Pope John XXIII, have we had such privileged access into the spirituality of a pope,’ says George Stack, Archbishop of Cardiff, in his introduction. (For more on Pope John XXIII’s diaries see A pope’s view of Mussolini.)

In a preface (first published in the Polish edition), the then Archbishop of Krakow, Stanisław Dziwisz, explains that John Paul II left instructions for his two notebooks to be burned. However, Dziwisz adds, he did not ‘dare’ do so: ‘I did not burn John Paul’s notes because they are a key to understanding his spirituality, that is, what is innermost in a person: his relationship to God, to other men and to himself. They reveal, so to speak, another side of the person whom we knew as the Bishop of Kraków and Rome, the Peter of our times, the Shepherd of the universal Church. [. . .] They allow us to get a glimpse of the intimate, personal relationship of faith with God the Creator, the Giver of life, the Master and Teacher. At the same time, they present the sources of his spirituality - his inner strength and his determined will to serve Christ until the last breath of life.’

Almost all the entries in the two notebooks were written by Wojtyła during retreats (as listed in the book). Here are several extracts, which, unfortunately, for the non-spiritual among us, give little insight into the man’s worldly thoughts or existence.

8 July 1962
‘The following key inner topics have been put together and discussed with the father:
1. death
2. power
3. creativity
4. people.’

2 September 1962
‘The recollection of these topics and novum [novelty] (as if a common denominator was found for all the experiences and reflections): I am very much in Gods hands - the content of this ‘Totus Tuus’ [‘Entirely Yours’] opened, so to speak, in a new place. When any concern ‘of mine’ becomes in this way Mary’s, it can be undertaken, even if it involves an element of risk (though one must not overdo it: in human terms, i.e. on the human side, the issue needs to be dealt with thoroughly). At a certain point, however, one needs to abandon human calculations and somehow grasp the Godly dimensions of every difficult issue. A peculiar iunctim [junction] of issue 4 with issue 2 begins to emerge here.

I discussed all this with the father too.’

18 August 1965
‘Morning prayers [illegible]; (Rosary); Lauds; Holy Mass; thanksgiving; Matins; Prime; Act of Consecration to the Blessed Virgin Mary

Meditation: Referring back to the retreat of 1963,1 wish to expand on the topic of ‘justification’. I find this topic academically (theologically) appealing and at the same time internally, personally important. The topic develops into a reflection on theological virtues, i.e. divine virtues.

Faith. The catechisms definition: ‘to accept as true all that God has revealed to us and that holy Church proposes for our belief’ can be interpreted and even experienced in different ways. The intellectualist (ideological) interpretation is different from the personalist (charitological) interpretation. It is not only about the sum of truths (propositions) which the mind accepts through the authority of ‘God who reveals them’ - and more directly: Christ, the Church (cf. motiva credibilitatis [compare motives of credibility]). It is about the specific supernatural relationship of man - a person - with the personal God (Trinitas SS [the Holy Trinity]). The nearer foundation of this relationship is the mind (reason). The proper subject matter of this human faculty is truth. Faith is a readiness, indeed, it is an act of reason which is ready to accept God’s truth as its own truth. Communicatio in veritate cum Deo [Communion with God in truth]. It is probably the highest act - one of the highest acts - in a relationship of a person to a person. This readiness to communicate in truth becomes, in a particular way, renewed through revelation, and in general with its help (in its extension lies theology). Faith consists in the acceptance of revelation, but it is possible thanks to the readiness of the mind mentioned above, which revelation takes for granted and simultaneously makes fully possible.

The Way of the Cross: main theme ‘viator - comprehensor’ (‘wayfarer - comprehensor’]; The Little Hours; Reading the schemas; Vespers for Wednesday

Adoration: it somehow provides me with topics for the afternoon meditation

Meditation on practical issues: dialogue, the Church of dialogue, others separately Matins; Spiritual reading; Compline’

24 February 1985
‘6.00 p.m.: Vespers; Veni Creator [Come, Creator (Spirit)]

Talk. Meditation (1): We form a retreat community. In the centre: Christ. The Holy Spirit, who speaks ‘inside us’.

We are at the core of the Church: in Rome - and in the world. The Church prepares for Passover.

Lent - is a calling!

Topic: The symbol of faith.

In unity with the Mother of the Church from Lourdes: St Bernadette’s words: Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for me, a poor sinner.

Eucharistic Adoration; Rosary (III); Litany of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Blessed Virgin Mary, St Joseph; Compline; Reading’

25 February 1985
‘Intentions

Meditation: ‘I am in the midst of them’.

Holy Mass; Thanksgiving; Daily prayers; Act of Consecration to Virgin Mary; Prayer to the Holy Spirit; Litany of the Polish Nation; Lauds

Talk. Meditation (2):

(Credo [Creed]) Only God can properly speak of God: many times and in various ways. . . God spoke ..., in the last days He has spoken by a Son.’

Symbolus Apostolorum [The Apostles’ Creed]: the Trinitarian structure - symbolus baptismalis [the baptismal creed].

(The ecumenical meeting near Trent:)’

Jerzyk’s tragic story

‘In town there was a poster confirming the shooting of ten people. If by the 4th of the month the bandits aren’t handed in they will shoot the next ten hostages to set an example.’ This is the 11-year-old Jerzy Feliks Urman (known as Jerzyk) writing in his diary in late 1943. He was in hiding with his parents in Drohobycz, then part of the Soviet Ukraine occupied by the Nazis, and it would be little more than a week before he committed suicide. Shearsman Books has just published a fresh version of the boy’s short diary and supporting documents, as translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and edited by Anthony Rudolf.

Jerzyk was born in 1932 in Stanisławów (then part of Poland, now Ivano-Frankivsk in Ukraine), a town with a population of 50,000, more than forty per cent of whom were Jews. The Soviets invaded Poland’s eastern territories in September 1939, but then, with Germany’s declaration of war against the Soviet Union in June 1941, Stanisławów found itself in an area overrun by the Nazis. Moreover, the local population seemed particularly willing to collaborate against the Jews and the Poles. Thousands of Jews were murdered that winter in Stanisławów, and a ghetto was established. Atrocities continued into the following year, with many more thousands of Jews being deported to Bełżec, the first of the Nazi extermination camps.

One day, in mid-1942, Jerzyk returned home and told his parents, Izydor and Sophie, about having witnessed a child caught smuggling food into the ghetto, and about how the child’s eye had been gouged out by a German with a red-hot wire. Thereafter, Jerzyk insisted on being allowed to carry a cyanide pill (available at a price on the black market); and the family agreed they would not be tortured and deported - they would survive together or die together. By March 1943, Jerzyk, his parents and two other family members were in hiding in Drohobycz, 100km or so northeast of their home town. In November that year, the local militia (German collaborators, but not the Gestapo) came to the house, and assaulted Izydor. Jerzyk fearing the worst, took his cyanide pill. The militia were so shocked by the child’s death they left, without even reporting the parents, who went on to survive the war.

Anthony Rudolf, an author, poet and literary critic, was researching his own family background when he came across the story of Jerzyk, his second cousin once removed. Rudolf located (in Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem) a transcription of a diary Jerzyk had kept for two months before his death; and he also had regular contact with Izydor and Sophie. He even made ‘pilgrimages’ to Stanisławów and Drohobycz. In explaining how he became involved with Jerzyk’s story, Rudolf explains that he was already writing about Holocaust survivors and had become ‘obsessed with the territory’. In 1991, Menard Press published Rudolf’s I’m not even a grown-up: The diary of Jerzy Feliks Urman.

A quarter of century later, Rudolf has revisited his second cousin’s story with Jerzyk: Diaries, Texts and Testimonies of the Urman Family, published by Shearsman Books. Jerzyk’s diary remains the centrepiece, freshly translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones from the original manuscript, but Rudolf supplies supporting documents (all translated by Lloyd-Jones) to enrich Jerzyk’s story, aiming to give it a place in the historiography of the war against the Jews. These include a distraught diary kept by Sophie after her son’s death, and a 1964 interview with Izydor.

In this new book, Rudolf provides a thoroughly researched and rigourously annotated account of Jerzyk’s tragic story. But, here and there, the reader is also aware of how important this story is to him personally. He now owns the Jerzyk manuscript (acquired from Sophie) and writes about how it is ‘a precious family heirloom which will end up in Yad Vashem one day’. And he does not shy away from mentioning how his ongoing enquiries created tension between Jerzyk’s parents: while Izydor found the subject too traumatic and forbade his wife from discussing it with Rudolf, she herself would meet him secretly.

Rudolf explains, in the introduction to the 2016 edition, his motives for doggedly pursuing the fine detail of Jerzyk’s story: ‘I regard the keeping of Jerzyk’s diary and the manner of his death as acts of resistance, resistance of the noblest and most tragic kind. Although Jerzyk was precocious, clear-sighted, and sharp-witted, the diary is not a work of literature. Nor is it even the work of a future writer [. . .] unlike, for example, the diary of Anne Frank. It is, however, a document of considerable interest beyond the heart-rending fact of its existence. It is an intelligent child’s truthful account of experiences and states such as threat and rumour, nervous energy and fear, pain and insight. He kept the diary, he said, because he wanted people afterwards to know what happened.’

Finally, here are three extracts, the first two from Jerzyk’s diary and the third from his mother’s diary.

3 November 1943
‘[. . .] In town there was a poster confirming the shooting of ten people. If by the 4th of the month the bandits aren’t handed in they will shoot the next ten hostages to set an example. Marysia said the ten shot already were all Ukrainian. There were 2 Poles but the [Polish] Committee liberated them.’

5 November 1943
‘ ‘Don’t leave any dinner for me because I have a meeting with a lady [in town].’ But later, after a longish time, Hela came back really furious because she had gone [in vain] to watch the executions and because she’d been told that today they were going to shoot a Ukrainian priest and 6 women. She hadn’t even finished dinner when Marysia [said]: ‘Come on now or you won’t see anything. We must secure a place in the first row if we want to see anything.’

Hela stopped eating at once. She dressed hurriedly and left. She was out of the house for a long time, a few hours later she came back. She entered the room without saying hello, and said nothing. We made a point of not asking her anything. In the end she couldn’t keep her mouth shut and betrayed to us that the executions were postponed until tomorrow. Genia told her they were shooting people for hiding Jews. [. . .]’

13 January 1944
‘My one and only Son! Two months have passed since that terrible day when evil people caused your death. Here I am writing that word, though I still can’t believe it. Sometimes it feels as if you’re just absent for a while, and sometimes I try to convince myself that we’ve hidden you in a safe place, to protect you from the degradation and atrocities of this incredible war until it’s over. Surely since the world began, there can never have been such a terrible disaster, devised by Satanic minds. Dear Son, Mother Earth has proved extremely merciful. She clasps everyone to her bosom, rich and poor alike, the poorest and the richest, people of any denomination and nationality, and is not governed by the cruel laws invented by our assassins, which hold that only people of ar [Aryan] origin are allowed to walk on her surface, whatever their worth of ability, to render service to to anyone else in life. My dear Son, now you’ve gone to another mother, surely more worthy of such a treasure than I, who failed to protect you. I envy her for hiding so many children in her bosom, but my little Kitten, you were all I had, and now I’m on my own. I no longer visit you twice a day [he was buried in the garden] as I used to, because I’m afraid to attract the attention of the klemp [dimwit]. I only say ‘Good morning’, and ‘Good night’, once, on Fridays before bed. Every time Daddy has tears in his eyes, because he’s reminded of home and all the happy times we spent together. Who could have foreseen that we were destined for such terrible homelessness, and that such a painful blow lay ahead of us! I’m perfectly aware that we’re not the only ones, but for us that’s poor consolation.’

Sense and senselessness

Happy 90th birthday, Zygmunt Bauman. Born in Poland, but domiciled in Britain since the early 1970s, Bauman has become one of the world’s most influential sociologists, publishing prolifically across the spectrum of sociology and social theory. Not known as a diarist, he has, however, recently published a work provocatively called, This is Not a Diary, with entries dated as if it were a diary - each one being a mini-essay on whatever sociology-related subject happened to come to mind that day. The first dated entry is titled, On the sense and senselessness of diary-keeping. Another - On the friends you have and the friends you think you have - is about the evolutionary anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, under whom I, personally, studied many years ago.

Bauman was born to Jewish parents in Poznań, Poland, on 19 November 1925. When the Nazis invaded, in 1939, his family fled to the Soviet Union where he enlisted in the Polish division of the Red Army, working as a political education instructor. He was involved in the battles of Kolberg and Berlin, and in May 1945 was awarded the Military Cross of Valour. In the early post-war years, he served as a political officer in the Internal Security Corps (KBW) formed to combat Ukrainian and Polish insurgents, and as an informer for military intelligence. In parallel, he studied philosophy at the University of Warsaw. In 1948, he married Janina Lewinson, and they had three daughters.

Having risen to the rank of major, Bauman was dishonourably discharged from the KBW, in 1953, when his father - a Zionist - sought permission to emigrate to Israel, even though he, himself, held anti-Zionist views. The following year he became a lecturer at the University of Warsaw. A visit to the London School of Economics led to his first major book, in 1959, on the British socialist movement, some years later translated into English. Other books followed, notably the popular Socjologia na co dzień in 1964, later forming the basis for his English-language text-book Thinking Sociologically in 1990.

By the late 1960s, an orchestrated anti-semitic campaign was leading many Poles of Jewish descent, not least the intellectuals, to emigrate. At the same time, Bauman’s politics had fallen out of line with that of the communist government; so, in 1968, he gave up his Polish citizenship in order to be allowed to leave the country. He went first to Tel Aviv University, but, by 1972, he had taken up a chair in sociology at Leeds University. He retired in 1990, but since then has published over 40 books, on subjects such as globalisation, modernity and postmodernism, consumerism and morality. His wife, Janina, who also wrote a few books on her wartime memories, died in 2009. The following year, the University of Leeds launched The Bauman Institute in Bauman’s honour. There is further biographical information at Wikipedia, University of Leeds, The Guardian, The Culture Society, and The American Task Force on Palestine. The photo was found at Culture.pl.

There is no obvious evidence that Bauman has kept a diary through his long life - although he might have done. However, in 2010 and 2011 he took it into his head to keep a kind of journal, with dated entries, but with all the entries more like mini-essays on current issues of interest or concern to him. Some of these were clearly inspired by things he had read, in the news or elsewhere, and so the dates do have some occasional relevance. The collection of mini-essays were published by Polity Press in 2012, and somewhere along the publishing road acquired the playful title: This is Not a Diary. A few pages can be read at Amazon.

Each dated entry starts with its own title, such as On the quandries of believing, On hurting flies and killing people, On glocalisation coming of age, On immoral axes and moral axemen, etc. Each entry is too long to quote in full, and, unfortunately, given the essay structure, any cutting back reduces, in every sense, Bauman’s little essays. Nevertheless, here are extracts from two sections. I’ve chosen the opening entry, partly because it is the first, and partly because it is, ostensibly, about diary keeping (though more about writing in general). I’ve chosen the second because it’s about a Robin Dunbar theory, and Robin was my tutor, some decades ago (when I was preparing an MSc biological anthropology thesis - on paternal care in primates; see my own diaries - November 1989).

3 September 2010
‘On the sense and senselessness of diary-keeping. I confess: as I am starting to write (it is 5 a.m.), I haven’t the slightest idea what, if anything, will follow, how long it will go on and how long I’ll need, feel the urge and wish to keep it going. And the intention, let alone the purpose, is anything but clear. The question ‘what for’ can hardly be answered. At the moment when I sat down at the computer, there was no new burning issue waiting to be chewed over and digested, no new book to be written or old stuff to be revised, recycled or updated, no new interviewer’s curiosity to be satiated, no new lecture to be sketched out in writing before being spoken - no request, commission or deadline . . . In short, there was neither a frame nailed together waiting to be filled, nor a plateful of podgy work in search of a mould and a form.

I guess the question ‘because of what’ is more in order in this case than the question ‘what for’. Causes to write are abundant, a crowd of volunteers line up to be noted, picked and chosen. The decision to start writing is, so to speak, ‘overdetermined’.

To begin with, I’ve failed to learn any other form of life except writing. A day without scribbling feels like a day wasted or criminally aborted, a duty neglected, a calling betrayed.

To go on, the game of words is for me the most heavenly of pleasures. I enjoy that game enormously - and the enjoyment reaches its peak when, after another reshuffle of the cards, the hand I get happens to be poor and I need to strain my brains and struggle hard to make up for the blanks and bypass the traps. Forget the destination; it is being on the move, and jumping over or kicking away the hurdles, that gives life its flavour. [. . .]

What, after all, is the difference between living and reporting life? We can do worse than take a hint from José Saramago, my lately discovered fount of inspiration. On his own quasi-diary he reflects: ‘I believe that all the words we speak, all the movements and gestures we make . . . can each and every one of them be understood as stray pieces of unintended autobiography, which, however involuntary, perhaps precisely because it is involuntary, is no less sincere or truthful than the most detailed account of life put into writing and onto paper.’ Exactly.’

27 December 2010
On the friends you have and the friends you think you have. Professor Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary anthropologist in Oxford, insists that ‘our minds are not designed [by evolution] to allow us to have more than a very limited number of people in our social world’. Dunbar has actually calculated that number; he found that ‘most of us can maintain only around 150 meaningful relationships’. Not unexpectedly, he’s called that limit, imposed by (biological) evolution, the ‘Dunbar number’. This hundred and a half is, we may comment, the number reached through biological evolution by our remote ancestors, and where it stopped, leaving the field to its much nimbler, more agile and dexterous, and above all more resourceful and less patient successor - called ‘cultural evolution’ (that is, triggered, shaped and driven by humans themselves, and deploying the teaching and learning process rather than changing the arrangement of genes). [. . .]

Electronic sustained ‘networks of friendship’ promised to break through recalcitrant, intrepid limitations to sociability set by our genetically transmitted equipment. Well, says Dunbar, they didn’t and will not: the promise can’t but be broken. ‘Yes.’ says Dunbar in his opinion piece for the New York Times of 25 December, ‘you can “friend” 500, 1,000, even 5,000 people with your Facebook page, but all save the core 150 are mere voyeurs looking into your daily life.’ Among those thousands of Facebook friends, ‘meaningful relationships’, whether serviced electronically or lived off-line, are confined as before within the impassable limits of the ‘Dunbar number’. [. . .]

Dunbar is right that the electronic substitutes for face-to-face communication have brought the Stone Age inheritance up to date, adapting and adjusting the ways and means of human togetherness to the requirements of our nouvel age. What he seems to neglect, however, is that in the course of that adaptation those ways and means have also been considerably altered, and that as a result ‘meaningful relationships’ have also changed their meaning. And so must the content of the ‘Dunbar number’ concept have done. Unless it is precisely the number, and only the number, that exhausts its content. . .’

NB: As usual in Diary Review articles, trailing dots enclosed by square brackets (i.e. [. . .] ) indicate text I have left out from the source published text. Trailing dots not enclosed by square brackets are as found in the original text.

Cramming preserves into a jar

The intriguing Polish writer Leopold Tyrmand died 30 years ago today. His youthful adult life was marked by the turmoil of the Second World War, after which he struggled, in his early writing career, through the years of Stalinism. Escaping to the US, he found some success, before again falling foul of the prevailing cultural and political climate. For three short months, after Stalin’s death and while still in Warsaw, he kept a very detailed diary. This was not published in English until 2014, but reveals Tyrmand had much to say about his own life - his politics, his relationships - as well about the very process of keeping a diary, which he likened to cramming preserves into a jar.

Tyrmand was born in Warsaw in 1920, the only child of a small-scale leather wholesaler and a mother known for her beauty. After leaving school in 1938, he travelled to Paris to enrol in the École des Beaux-Arts to study architecture. He was back in Warsaw, on a break from his studies, when Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939. Tyrmand fled east, like other Jews, ending up in Vilnius, where he joined the staff of a Polish-language newspaper published by the Soviets. His parents, meanwhile, were sent to the Majdanek Concentration Camp, where his father was murdered. His mother survived, and subsequently emigrated to Israel.

During the war, Tyrmand began to cooperate with the Polish resistance, but was arrested in spring 1941 by the NKVD secret police. On being transported to a Gulag corrective labour camp, his transport was bombed by the Nazis, and he managed to escape. With false papers, he returned to Germany where he worked in a series of menial jobs. In 1944, he secured a kitchen job on a German transport ship, intending to escape through a Norwegian port to neutral Sweden. He was captured, and spent the rest of the war in a camp near Oslo. He was back in Warsaw by mid-1946, and, later, made good use of his wartime experiences in his autobiographical novel, Filip, and several short stories. He also took a regular job as a journalist writing for Cut, a current events weekly.

During the years of Stalin’s growing influence in Poland, Tyrmand found his writing stifled, and work opportunities limited. It was not until after Stalin’s death, in fact, that he found some renewed success with Zły (published in English as The Man With White Eyes). He married a young art student, was responsible for organising jazz concerts, moved into a better apartment, and began to travel abroad. But, the relaxed cultural and political atmosphere did not last long, and again Tyrmand found himself at odds with the authorities, his activities repressed and his works censored. He got married again in 1959, to Barbara Hoff, an up-and-coming fashion designer. In the mid-1960s, though, he finally managed to get an export visa, first visiting Israel, and then the US, where he stayed.

Tyrmand struggled at first in the US, but, as a writer from behind the Iron Curtain, he was soon taken up by the New York Intelligentsia, and his writing was in demand from periodicals such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The American Scholar. But once again, with his insistent anti-communist stance and constant criticism of US political and cultural life, he began to find himself drifting out of favour. In 1971, he got married for the third time, to Mary Ellen Fox, and they had twins, a boy and girl. In the mid-1970s, he was invited to work with the Conservative Rockford Institute, editing the Chronicles of Culture magazine, and taking over as the institute’s director from its founder, John Howard. Tyrmand died on 19 March 1985. Further information is available from Wikipedia, New Eastern Europe website, or a paper at Academia.edu.

One of Tyrmand’s most significant literary legacies is a diary he kept for just three months at the start of 1954. This was first published in Polish in 1980 by the London-based Polonia Book Fund under the title Dziennik 1954. In keeping a diary at the time, full of political content as it was, Tyrmand was taking a considerable risk - Stalin was dead, but the official launch of a de-Stalinization policy was still a year or two away. 

The diary breaks off abruptly - in mid-sentence - on 2 April 1954, because, as Tyrmand explains in an afterword, he was about to sign a contract for a novel. The published diary also includes a preface written by Tyrmand. In this, he explains the genesis and subsequent history of the diary, and, to some extent, analyses its contents. The work was finally translated into English in 2014, by Anita Shelton and A. J. Wrobel, and published by Northwestern University Press as Diary 1954. Some pages can be read freely online at Googlebooks.

From the start of Tyrmand’s preface:
‘The facts are as follows:
- I wrote the diary over the first three months of 1954.
- For twelve years, the handwritten notebooks lay at the bottoms of rarely opened drawers.
- In 1956 (it’s obvious at what moment) the Universal Weekly published an excerpt from the diary - the only one that has appeared in print in Poland.
- In 1965, after years of futile applications for a passport, I was finally going to the West in an oldish Opel. I hadn’t decided to emigrate, but I took the manuscript of the diary with me, hiding it, with the help of a trusted mechanic, near the differential. It was an unnecessary precaution; what the customs officials at the border crossing wanted to know was whether my novel Zły was going to be reprinted. After that, their attention was drawn to an antique candlestick on top in the first suitcase they opened. They kept the candlestick and wished me a good journey.
- A few months later the notebooks were deposited at the editorial offices of the Parisian Culture, in Maisons-Lafitte, where they gathered dust for another four years.
- In 1968, when I chose freedom, the diary crossed the Atlantic and traveled with me from place to place for five years. Having settled down in New Canaan, Connecticut, I typed up the manuscript and prepared it for publication as a book.
- In 1974, the London-based Wiadomości (an émigré weekly) began to publish the diary in instalments; the last one came out in 1978. Around half of the full text saw the light of day in emigration in this way.
- The present book represents the entire diary, unchanged for editorial reasons, moral quandaries, political requirements, or concessions to friends and acquaintances.’

Right at the end of his preface, Tyrmand says this: ‘This diary, written in the prime of manhood, and reread at the twilight of middle age, brings me a feeling of fidelity to my own self - which has always seemed to me something desirable and worthy of sacrifice.’

Finally, here are a couple of extracts from the diary itself. Most of the entries are long, running to several pages of small typescript, but Tyrmand is always interesting, whether writing about his relationships, his city, politics or the act of keeping of diary.

5 January 1954
‘I thought that the notebook in which I am keeping this diary would last me for a few months, but now I doubt I’ll fit in all of January. And it devours energy and time. But it draws me in. [. . .]

I took a tram today across Leszno Street and Iron Street to the East-West Route. There, you can still see a good bit of old Warsaw from before the cataclysm. The ugly tenement houses from the turn of the century, so despised by the prewar aesthetes and social do-gooders dreaming of glass houses, have been burnished with a patina of charm by the passing years, sentiment, and ill fortune. They evoke the shoddiness of yesteryear which nostalgia has already ennobled. Especially since they are neighbours to the socrealism of the new Muranow housing estate, which looks like a group of cakes from a street peddler’s basket: small stucco tympanums stuck on as if by a confectioner over oblong windows straight out of primitive functionalism. Facades like dirty icing on a stale cake.

Supper at the Writers’ Club among the same faces, all reflecting the dullness of the choice they made. That’s what it seems like to me, but I may be wrong. Maybe they have sleepless nights, only I don’t know it. The atmosphere at the Club is like that of a prewar Jewish boarding house in Otwock, except that it’s more expensive here, and the food is worse. Everyone knows and dislikes everyone else.

In the afternoon my liver was aching. What’s that about? Hardly a drop of vodka passes my lips; I drink herbal infusions. Could it be that my health, which until now I have boasted about, and which has carried me so reliably through the war, camps, prisons, and private passions, has now been knocked out by infectious hepatitis? But no matter. I already have thirty-three years clocked. For my generation, that’s a ripe old age.

In the evening Bogna showed up, in a foul mood. I also wasn’t exactly in the pink, so there was tension in the air from the start. Getting undressed, she turned out the light, which she usually doesn’t do, and then in the dark she knocked over the humidifier hanging on the radiator, spilling water all over the freshly waxed parquet floor. Nothing sets me off quite like an attack on the shine of my floor, but we were already kind of down to fundamentals, and a fight about spilled water would have been farcical. Instead, when it was all over I just said, “Listen Bogna, I know that your sixteen years and my loathsome pedantry put together are pure surrealism. Isn’t it better to end it?” To that, Bogna, sated, calmly replied, “Uh-huh. You always talk like that when you’ve gotten off.” ’

8 January 1954
‘ “To thine own self be true. To thine own self be true - this above all!” cries Hamlet, as everyone knows. This is an apt bidding. Today it’s tormenting me more than usual. Because I am not myself. But who, then? The devil knows. I have been so determined to be seen as stifled and bypassed by the revolution, the historical moment, my society, and even my own self that I don’t recognise myself. Now I’ll probably never sort it out.

This diary is a substitute for creativity. It’s my justification of myself to myself, and not an independent construction, in and of itself legitimate and fully formed. And is this at all what I am? I always believed and judged that a man must express himself through action, I looked for the call to action, to do my duty - everything else is masturbation, and sooner or later it disgusts. I have been denied creation and action. By whom? It’s embarrassing to keep repeating it.

A diary somehow cannot accommodate what is to be told, what can be told only through creative work, epitome, and metaphor, which are literary devices. There’s always something in this text that doesn’t make it for me, doesn’t satisfy me. What? The right, or privilege to detach myself from the concrete, to cobble together my own law, in harmony with a wider law one must seek with one’s imagination. To be permitted, unrestrained by anything, my own composition of the detail. When I take the bus across Warsaw, my city, which I know better than most people, I can’t note everything faithfully and adequately or I’d fall into idiotic nominalism that would force me to fill up several dozen pages a day. Yet every morning I read my notes from the preceding days and something is missing, something it seems to me I failed to grasp: here, the period, there, insights, yet elsewhere, myself, and instead of them, there are trivialities and cliches, which I’ve already completely forgotten. What I wrote yesterday about McCarthy strikes me today as awkward and shallow. But is this diary supposed to serve as an outlet for someone whom communism has denied the right to have his say about America, who doesn’t have the right to publish what is of immediate value and should be read from day to day? [. . .]

While eating, conversing, touching Bogna, I think impatiently about what I must not lose, what must be captured and recorded. Cramming preserves into a jar, which may never be consumed. This raises the question: were Pepys, Chłędowski, and Gide also crushed by the elephantiasis of the writer’s imperative, or did they know how to confine their diary writing to the margins of their mental and manual effort, endowing it rather with the charm of an evening spent pleasantly jotting memoirs in one’s bathrobe?’

A child in the ghetto

Rutka Laskier, a 14 year old Jewish teenager, was confined with her family to the Będzin ghetto, in southern Poland, and then killed by the Nazis at Auschwitz in 1943. Her short diary, from 1943, was discovered in 2005, and printed first in Polish and then in English and Hebrew editions. A more lavish version with maps and photographs has now been published in the US, and the publishers are calling Laskier the ‘Polish Anne Frank’.

Laskier was born in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland), then a predominantly German-speaking autonomous city-state. Soon after, though, in the early 1930s, her father moved the family to Będzin, the southern Polish city where his parents had come from. During World War II, the family was eventually forced into the city’s Jewish ghetto. Subsequently, Rutka, her mother and brother were transported to Auschwitz concentration camp, where they were killed, probably in a gas chamber. Her father, however, survived the war, went to Israel, remarried, had another daughter, and died in 1982.

For three months, while still in the Będzin ghetto, Rutka wrote a diary. Her friend, Stanisława Sapińska, helped her to hide it under some floorboards; and later, when the ghetto had been cleared and Rutka had gone, Sapińska went back to recover it. She kept the book safe for over 60 years, and secret. It was only in 2005 that her family persuaded her to allow it to be published. (The story is well told on Wikipedia’s Rutka Laskier web page.)

Subsequently, Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, published English and Hebrew editions. Its website has an informative article about the diary. ‘While forming a chilling human and historical document,’ it says, ‘Holocaust diaries have great documentary value for the understanding of the period from the viewpoint of those who experienced it - as an illustration of life in the ghettos, in camps or in hiding, as well as in battling Holocaust deniers.’

The New York Times has a good selection of extracts from the diary. Here is one from 6 February 1943: ‘Oh, I forgot the most important thing. I saw how a soldier tore a baby, who was only a few months old, out of its mother’s hands and bashed his head against an electric pylon. The baby’s brain splashed on the wood. The mother went crazy. I am writing this as if nothing has happened. . .’.

The new version of the diary, just published by Times Inc. Home Entertainment in collaboration with Yad Vashem, is called Rutka’s Notebook: A Voice from the Holocaust. According to Publishers Weekly it sets Laskier’s writings within a larger context: ‘Pages on the left feature her diary entries, typeset on what looks like parchment, while pages to the right feature maps, historical documents, or photographs (including several of Laskier with family members and friends), as well as historical commentary and annotations explaining obscure terminology.’

The co-publishers claim this is a ‘Polish Anne Frank’, but not everyone agrees. Canada’s Calgary Herald says ‘she is nothing of the kind’. Frank’s diary, Naomi Lakritz says in the article, ‘was richly textured with detailed descriptions of people, places, conversations and events. One could walk right in to Frank’s life; trying to catch more than a glimpse of Laskier’s family and friends is like discerning their shapes through a pane of frosted glass.’