‘A Small Memorial Candle’ for Adolf Rudnicki (1912-1990)

Summary

ADOLF RUDNICKI died in Warsaw on 15 November 1990. He was an author who, throughout the sixty years of his creativity, continually sought his own tone: from psychological prose and reporting to essays and concise parabolic stories. First and foremost, however, he was a poet of the murdered Jewish people. He was united with this theme to such an extent that what followed in his creative writing was barely noticed by the critics and generally misinterpreted. In order to understand him, it was necessary to transform the perspective from the realistic to the metaphysical, and to look for the source of his secret, multi-dimensional, symbolic prose in the Bible, Talmud, and Hasidic folklore, which this graduate of the Galaician heder blended with the Polish language.

Rudnicki made his dèbut (together with such writers as Gombrowicz, Schulz, and Choromanski) with the novel Szczury [Rats] (1932), which was inspired by Freudian psychoanalysis, and revealed the interesting dreams in the subconsciousness and psyche of a weak man, lost, isolated, and encircled by evil. The novel lends itself to interpretation as an expression of the world-view of a tragic generation, the generation of 1910, over which hung the threat of apocalypse.

At the centre of Rudnicki's pre-war works stands man. The author attempted to present a universal vision of human nature; therefore he did not portray the specific Jewish environment from which he originated and which he knew best. There are similar developments in Niekochana [The unloved one] (1937), a subtle analysis of unreciprocated love, a feeling shown in a pure state, deprived of any supra-emotional conditions. The psyche of a sensitive, affectionate woman is the subject of astounding intuitive interpretations in all his later writings.

At the same time, Rudnicki moved from psychological to sociological analysis in the articles Żołnierzy [Soldiers] (1933) and Doświadczenie [Experiences] (1939), which painted a picture of war and its mechanized destruction of human individuality. Closest to this great theme is Lato [Summer] (1938), seemingly a story of a vacation in Kazimierz Dolny and a pilgrimage to a tsadik in Góra Kalwaria. In reality, however, it is a prophetic portrait of Judaism enclosed in its own separate society in the face of the danger which it perceives from outside.