Sydor Rey


Sydor Rey born Izydor Reiss was a Polish poet and novelist. During the Interbellum he worked in the Jewish orphanage of Janusz Korczak in Warsaw. He dedicated his short story Anioł-Stróż, part of his book Księga rozbitków, to the memory of Janusz Korczak. A bisexual author, Sydor Rey did not frequently tackle gay subjects in his writings.

Life in interwar Poland

Sydor Rey was born in Wojniłów. He studied law and political science at the Lvov University and at Warsaw University. As a writer, Rey debuted in 1929. He was a member of the literary collective Przedmieście in Warsaw. The first issue of the group's literary journal indicated that the association was established on the initiative of Helena Boguszewska and Jerzy Kornacki in JuneJuly 1933, with Bruno Schulz, Adolf Rudnicki, and Zofja Nałkowska among the invited founder members. Rudnicki had resigned from membership before the publication of their magazine in 1934, while Halina Krahelska and Sydor Rey were inducted as new members.
The group's name has been explained as referring both to the group's programmatic preoccupation with the marginalized aspects of the culture and social life in the Second Polish Republic, and to the connotation of "outpost" – hence by extension avant-garde. The volume carried Sydor Rey's short story Królestwo Boże, a fictional narrative of a visit to a privately owned factory by a friend of the proprietors. The visit becomes an occasion for remarkably detailed observations on the work conditions of the employees and their relations with the management, the government, and the outside world.

First novel ''Kropiwniki''

Sydor Rey's first novel Kropiwniki was published in 1937. The title of the novel, Kropiwniki, refers to the Polish provincial locality of Kropiwniki in the Volhynia, whose name the author uses as a cryptonym for his native Wojniłów, an ancient township founded in 1552 by the charter issued by Sigismund II Augustus. Its real identity thus concealed, the place serves as a canvas on which the author paints the history of three generations of inhabitants from various social classes and religious communities of Polish society, including Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians, representatives of the szlachta but also peasants, merchants, and artisans, thereby presenting an allegory on Polish society as a whole. Each of these various social groups, further subdivided in the book into additional subgroups and subtypes, espouses different and often conflicting sets of beliefs concerning social and political matters, whose beliefs moreover further mutate from generation to generation. While the author parades a plethora of various types of characters on his stage, from the szlachta individuals affecting a grand aristocratic manner, through lordlings enlightened by foreign studies enough to be able to fraternize with the working classes, to well-to-do Jewish businessmen, he devotes most space to the radicalizing poverty of the township and the impenetrable ignorance of the peasant masses of the surrounding villages, succeeding to depict this broad gallery of human types in particularly vivid brush strokes of great directness. Owing however to the well-nigh unmanageable breadth of the scope of his project, it has been observed by contemporary critics that the social doctrine on occasion takes precedence in his writing over art. The author Jerzy Andrzejewski in literary magazine Prosto z mostu, was even less kind, having seen in Kropiwniki an expression of the alleged Communist stance of an author squandering his talent in a doctrinaire enterprise of quixotic futility. Witold Gombrowicz too wrote a detailed and perhaps most considerate analysis of Kropiwniki, arguing that it is the literary debuts that are more interesting, for all their inchoate form, than an author's later works which, though benefiting from the writer's more crystallized pattern of thought, in general tend to say little that is essentially new.
Rey also translated from the Yiddish into Polish the biographical novel on Karl Marx, Karl Marks : byografisher montazsh-roman by the Polish writer Moisheh Grosman.
Biographer Eugenia Prokop-Janiec of Jagiellonian University asserts that it was ultimately the pervasive antisemitism of the Polish society in the 1930s that forced the writers and poets like Sydor Rey and Henryka Łazowertówna, who never otherwise identified themselves as Jewish while working in the Polish language, to align themselves with the Jewish community for the first time. Sydor Rey's vignette entitled Spacer deals with the thorny subject of race relations in a homoerotic context. It is a short text about a male couple who, taking a stroll in a public park, attract the attention of a gathering crowd not for being gay but for being of different races: the bystanders are not hostile to both characters as a couple, but in each case only to one of them – selected according to the particular bystander's own racial allegiance: the Gentiles in the crowd of onlookers are hostile to the man who looks Jewish, for they believe him to be somehow exploitative of his companion; the Jews in the crowd on the other hand are hostile to the Gentile believing him to be about to cause harm to his Jewish companion to whom they consequently feel obliged to offer assistance. Both men offer explanations to a policeman who arrives on the scene to institute ad hoc inquiry of his own into the commingling of the couple. The story is an allegory on the impossibility of normal relations between the races on a private level without public or official harassment, even as relations between the sexes are tolerated. A bisexual author, Sydor Rey did not frequently tackle gay subjects in his writings. His epigram "Na plaży" is one of the exceptions.
Rey was one of the signatories of the open letter of the Polish writers against the bloody pacification by the Polish police of the workers' protests against the Sanacja régime in March 1936.

Emigration

On the eve of the Second World War, in the spring of 1939 Sydor Rey emigrated from Warsaw to New York City, where he subsequently operated a second-hand bookshop. His wife and daughter left behind in Poland will perish in Cracow during the Holocaust. During his American period his writings appeared frequently in the Polish-language weekly newspaper Wiadomości: tygodnik published in London, and in other émigré periodicals. In his reply to a survey of Polish writers living in exile conducted by the Wiadomości of London in 1958, nearly twenty years after his departure from Poland, Rey revealed that every writer creatively active in exile is spiritually present, in the act of creation, in his native land. Hence there are in reality no "émigré writers" and no "émigré literatures". He appended his literary testament with the following codicil.

If I, after well-nigh twenty years spent in the United States, have never thought for a moment of adopting English as my creative medium, it is because spiritually I continue to reside in my Homeland. The split involved here at times invests the written word of an author in exile with a terrifying beauty, which flows from his undaunted vision. But at the same time this split can, in the long run, lead to the degeneration of the creative faculty the most glaring case in point being that of the giant of Polish literature, Adam Mickiewicz. when a writer ceases to use the written word in the service of Beauty, as a building block in the project of constructing his own immaterial world, and starts using it as a magic charm invoked for the sake of transforming his immaterial world into a material one.

And Rey clearly remained devoted to the Polish language for life, in the sort of intricate way of an impeccable stylist, as evidenced in his corrections of the minutiae in the prose of other writers or in the praise he generously showered on the dextrous use of the language in other cases, even of those who might not have been professional writers. He was listed by the Wiadomości of London among the Polish writers in exile who ought to be members of the Polish Academy of Literature were such an institution to be established. There is no evidence, on the other hand, that in the United States Rey found anything like a substitute for the land of his youth; in a poem entitled "Miasto na Long Island" published in 1960 he speaks of a "city flat and straight like a cadaver", with street names invoking "Indians that have been exterminated, running streams that have been filled in, hills that have been levelled down, and forests that have been felled": what use to me this cemetery? he asks. "Don't you know that I was born in a land where a white-winged horse would bend down to peer into my crib?" In the poem "Banita" Rey speaks of himself as a person deprived of speech, on account of his being "a poet without a land".

Publishing from abroad

During his exile in the United States he also chose to publish his books Księga rozbitków and Kropiwniki in the then Communist-controlled Poland, where their publication would have been subject to the advance approval of the censors. He also granted an interview to the Polish Radio in 1963, apparently on a visit to Warsaw.
Księga rozbitków is a collection of eighteen short stories that are, cumulatively, a psychological memoir of an author guilt-stricken for having passed the Holocaust in the physical safety of New York while being spiritually connected to the event as closely as or perhaps in some cases more closely than some of the victims, making the work something of a cross between a novel and a psychodrama cum a Gestalt therapy.
Sydor Rey's novel Ludzie miejscowi was published in installments in the Wiadomości of London between 1962 and 1966. While his writings in prose were praised for their astute psychological shadowing of characters and deep insights into the human condition, his poetry did not appeal to everyone. Marian Pankowski, reviewing his collection of poetry Własnymi słowami, refused to apply the label of "poetry" to his verses, arguing that the colloquial and sometimes crude turn of phrase favoured by the author put his epigrams beyond the pale of art, while the consistent unsublimated directness of expression made it impossible to interpret this style as a literary conceit. Rey countered that the criticisms presented by Pankowski were illustrated by tendentiously selected quotations that did not constitute a representative sample and had been taken out of context, and that the overall method of extrapolating judgement of the whole oeuvre from bits and pieces was absurd, "rather like presenting an audience with the bottom sliver of Cézanne's Bathing Women the figures cut off at the ankle and averring this fragment to possess 'some characteristics of Cézanne's painting style', only to dispatch the artist in toto with the dictum that 'the rest of his output is much in the same manner'". Since Rey did not publish essays, his philosophical ideas found expression in his fiction, both in prose and in verse. Poems that deal directly or veiledly with the principal tenets of the Judaeo-Christian religious doctrine such as "Bajka", "Ojcze nasz", or "Raz kozie śmierć" which quotes one of the Seven Last Words in the scornful context of a pastoral ditty may offend religious sensibilities, expressive as they are of his deep agnosticism and his radical questioning of the truth value of that doctrine.
As a literary critic, Sydor Rey believed that Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago was deeply indebted to Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, notwithstanding the fact of Hemingway's having been "thick-skinned and effect-driven" as opposed to Pasternak's qualities of fragile intelligence and delicacy. He was an admirer of the works of Thornton Wilder, to whom he dedicated a poem, acknowledging his indebtedness in the writing of Księga rozbitków to the style of Wilder's play Our Town.
His collected papers dating from the period between 1940 and 1969 The Sydor Rey Papers are preserved in the Special Collections Research Center of the Syracuse University Library in Syracuse, New York, having been donated to the institution by the Author in 1966. Some of his correspondence with Salo Wittmayer Baron is also preserved among the papers of the latter The Salo W. Baron Papers, 19001980 in the Department of Special Collections of Stanford University Libraries, while his correspondence with the renowned critic Michał Chmielowiec is kept among the papers of the latter in the Archiwum Emigracji of the Nicolaus Copernicus University Library in Toruń.

Works

Poetry monographs