[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 137 (Friday, October 12, 2001)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1856-E1857]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




           ESSAY BY RABBI EMANUEL RACKMAN AND STEPHEN WAGNER

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. ELIOT L. ENGEL

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                       Thursday, October 11, 2001

  Mr. ENGEL. Mr. Speaker, I rise to call attention to a powerful essay 
by Rabbi Emanuel Rackman of Bar Ilan University and Stephen Wagner of 
Bar Ilan University entitled, ``Philo-Semitism in the Work of the 
Polish Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz: He Pays Tribute to Jewish 
Literature.'' According to the article, while there has been anti-
Semitism among the Polish masses, the Polish aristocracy and 
intelligencia ``were overwhelmingly philo-Semitic.'' According to the 
essay, Milosz's opinion ``corroborates the views of the great Jewish 
writer, the poet and novelist Chaim Grade, originally, like Milosz, 
from Vilna . . .''
  For several years, I have been striving to protect the works of Chaim 
Grade, many of whose writings were lost due to the complexities Grade 
faced by the copyright laws after he came to the United States 
following World War II. I urge my colleagues to support my legislation 
to fully protect Grade's works, H.R. 2971.
  I ask unanimous consent that the full text of the Rackman/Wagner 
essay be printed at this point.

Philo-Semitism in the Work of the Polish Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz: 
                  He Pays Tribute to Jewish Literature

       Numerous very interested reviews of Czeslaw Milosz's newly 
     published book, Milosz's ABC's inspired us to read it. The 
     various, truly unexpected, unpredictable subjects, 
     alphabetically arranged as if encyclopedia entries, may well 
     require a volume of comments. So we comment here on only one 
     subject, conspicuously absent from this work both as a 
     subject and in spirit--anti-Semitism.
       Czeslaw Milosz, a Polish nobleman, gives as much attention 
     and loving devotion to his Jewish friends and acquaintances, 
     subjects and issues, as Polish ones. The absence of the least 
     trace of anti-Semitism in Milosz's book is to us, as American 
     Jews, a revelation, for it corroborates the views of the 
     great Jewish writer, the poet and novelist Chaim Grade, 
     originally, like Milosz, from Vilna, who said that in Poland 
     anti-Semitism was mainly among the masses--evidently under 
     the influence of the Church of pre-Vatican II--whereas the 
     Polish aristocracy and intelligentsia, with rare exceptions, 
     were overwhelmingly philo-Semitic. Indeed, Chaim Grade wrote 
     a poem of homage to the greatest poet of Poland, Adam 
     Mickiewicz, famous as a philo-Semite, calling him ``the 
     conscience of Poland.''
       Chaim Grade is a master of utmost objectivity, well aware 
     of the horrors of anti-Semitism, for which reason in his 
     Lamentations about the program in Kielce, July 1946--not yet 
     translated--he describes the Polish doctor who at the funeral 
     of the victims denounces the murderous mob with the fiery 
     pathos of a Hebrew prophet. It is the very same doctor, a 
     devout Catholic, who rescued more than twenty Jews from the 
     Nazis, hiding them in his house, again as described by Chaim 
     Grade in his acclaimed philosophical Dialogue, My War With 
     Hersh Rassayner, the complete text of which, edited and 
     revised by Chaim Grade himself, has just been translated into 
     English. Scholar agree--and among them Professor Emeritus 
     Millon R. Konvitz of Cornell University--that the 
     Philosophical Dialogue of Chaim Grade is indeed the Book of 
     Job on the Holocaust and that, like the Book of Job, it 
     belongs ``among Jewish writings that are considered sacred . 
     . . which in the Hebrew Scriptures are wisely placed in the 
     part known simply as writings.'' Chaim Grade attended the 
     funeral of the victims of the pogrom of Kielce with Antek 
     Yitzhak Zuckerman, one of the foremost leaders of the Warsaw 
     Ghetto Uprising, who said that ``while it took one Pole to 
     betray one hundred Jews, it took one hundred Poles to save 
     one Jew, and the Poles who were saving Jews are the glory of 
     mankind.'' Chaim Grade's works reflect this truth.
       No doubt, it is Chaim Grade's absolute objectivity and 
     utmost spiritual and intellectual honesty that inspired 
     Czeslaw Milosz, the spiritual and literary heir of 
     Mickiewicz, to devote to him a chapter of homage in Milosz's 
     ABC's, where among other important comments, he reports what 
     a Jewish authority should have reported a long time ago: The 
     Nobel Prize for Isaac Bashevis Singer was cause for violent 
     controversies among Yiddish-speaking New York Jews . . . 
     Above all, . . . in the opinion of the majority of the 
     disputants, Grade was a much better writer than Singer, but 
     little translated into English, which is why members of the 
     Swedish Academy had no access to his writings.

[[Page E1857]]

     Singer gained fame, according to this opinion, by dishonest 
     means. Obsessively concerned with sex, he created his own 
     world of Polish Jews which had nothing in common with 
     reality--erotic, fantastic, filled with apparitions, spirits, 
     and dybbuks, as if that had been the quotidian reality of 
     Jewish towns. Grade was a real writer, faithful to the 
     reality he described, and he deserved the Nobel Prize . . . 
     Grade was attentive to the accuracy of the details he 
     recorded and has been compared with Balzac or Dickens. . . .
       This statement by an authority of Czeslaw Milosz's stature, 
     himself a Nobel laureate, is a very serious matter. Czeslaw 
     Milosz goes on to describe Jewish life in Poland as it was 
     and Jewish-Polish relations as they were, all as reflected in 
     the works of Chaim Grade. It is regrettable that he did not 
     know what was very well known in Jewish literary circles, 
     that Chaim Grade forbade all from nominating him for the 
     Nobel prize, mostly because his pre-world war II prophetic 
     and poetic visions of doom were recited like prayers both in 
     the Vilna Ghetto and in Auschwitz, along with the poetry of 
     the great Jewish poet Yitzhak Katznelson, who, together with 
     his wife and sons, perished in Auschwitz, and of whose works 
     very little has been rescued. All this was reported by the 
     surviving eyewitnesses in Yiddish and published in Argentina, 
     then in English in America--check the Jewish Book Annual--the 
     American Yearbook of Jewish Creativity 1990-1991, 5751. Many 
     people regretted Chaim Grade's decision, for it was taken 
     advantage of by the writer unequivocally rejected by the 
     Jewish writers and readers for reasons well explained by 
     Czeslaw Milosz, who, by whatever means, got the prize and 
     paraded the foremost representative of Jewish literature, of 
     the very Judaism. Thus, the issue is not that Chaim Grade 
     does not have the Nobel Prize, but that, from the Jewish 
     viewpoint, the least suitable, the worst possible writer, has 
     it.
       As Czeslaw Milosz rightly testifies, the Jewish people have 
     the greatest appreciation for Chaim Grade, especially because 
     of his volumes of lamentations in poetry and prose about the 
     Holocaust, for which Encyclopedia Judaica reports, he is 
     declared ``the national Jewish poet, as Bialik was in his 
     day.'' Chaim Grade's volumes resurrect the life of East 
     European Jewry, such as it truly was, very much as stated by 
     Czeslaw Milosz who, a Pole from Vilna, knew this life very 
     well and is a most reliable witness.
       Czeslaw Milosz's report about the Jewish attitude towards 
     the Yiddish Nobel laureate may be corroborated by the 
     following vignette: Professor Saul Lieberman, the Dean of the 
     Jewish Theological Seminary of America, heard the news from 
     Sweden, and exclaimed in utter disbelief, ``What?!!! But he 
     wrote only pornography!'' When Bar-Ilan University in Israel 
     was approached about a prize for the Yiddish laureate, he was 
     rejected so emphatically that the issue was never raised 
     again.
       Czeslaw Milosz's report is especially important in view of 
     the general contempt for the Yiddish Nobel laureate. Thus, 
     less than a month before the incomprehensible news from 
     Sweden, John Simon wrote on September 12, 1978, in The 
     Esquire: International understanding is a delightful thing. 
     How nice it was at the recent Pula Film Festival, in 
     Yugoslavia, between looking at films, to find a group of 
     critics and scholars from various countries in agreement 
     about the vast overratedness of that self-inflated, dully 
     repetitious, barely second-rate fictionalist Isaac Bashevis 
     Singer.
       And Israel Shenker concluded the definitive literary 
     obituary of the Yiddish laureate in August 1991, in the Book 
     Review of the New York Times: He shied from chicken soup--and 
     chickens--and became a devoted vegetarian . . . ``So, in a 
     very small way, I do a favor for the chickens,'' Singer said. 
     ``If I will ever get a monument, chickens will do it for 
     me.''
       A New York Times reporter in 1978, the year of the shocking 
     choice of the Nobel prize for literature, Israel Shenker is 
     known to have approached the late Eugene Rachlis, the Editor-
     in-Chief of Bobbs-Merryl, then Chaim Grade's English 
     publisher (now it is Knopf); and asked, ``what's going on? 
     Everybody says that it is your man who should have gotten the 
     prize.'' All this explains why Israel Shenker chose to end 
     the definitive literary obituary of the Yiddish laureate with 
     the laureate's own ``chickens'' words.
       And all this proves the great truth of the words of the man 
     who is America's conscience, Abraham Lincoln, ``you can fool 
     all of the people some of the time, you can fool some of the 
     people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people 
     all of the time.'' Most importantly about this case is, of 
     course, not just that the Yiddish laureate is a 
     ``pornographic writer,'' as rightly denounced by Saul 
     Lieberman, nor that he is merely a ``self-inflated, dully-
     repetitious, barely second-rate fictionalist,'' as rightly 
     stated by John Simon and colleagues, nor that--as he himself 
     knew and said--he is a writer for ``chickens,''--whatever 
     this may mean. The most important is precisely as Czeslaw 
     Milosz testifies, ``he created his own world of Polish Jews 
     which had nothing in common with reality,'' as the result of 
     which he has misinformed and mislead people, preventing them 
     from knowing the truth about Jewish life in Eastern Europe, 
     especially about Jewish-Polish relations. It is to be hoped 
     that responsible people like John Simon and Israel Shenker 
     will appreciate Czeslaw Milosz's testimony, that they are 
     aware that the Jewish people are no ``chickens,'' that, prize 
     or no prize, the Jewish people have rejected the so-called 
     Yiddish laureate, that his prize remains an incomprehensible 
     insult, if not an outrage. And we cannot be too grateful to 
     Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish Nobel Laureate, for having made in 
     his ABC's room also for Chaim Grade, the Jewish master, who 
     describes Jewish life in Eastern Europe as it really was, 
     and, above all, the Jewish spirit such as it is, always and 
     everywhere, beyond time and space, the spirit of the Bible.
                                            Rabbi Emanuel Rackman,
                                  Chancellor, Bar Ilan University.
                                             Stephen Wagner, Esq.,
                                     Counsel, Bar Ilan University.

     

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