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Promising Harmonies: The Aural Politics of Polish-Jewish Relations in the Russian Empire

2014; Indiana University Press; Volume: 20; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

1527-2028

James Loeffler,

Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies

In the early 1820s, during a series of summer sojourns in the Polish countryside, Frederick Chopin imagined himself as a Jewish klezmer musician. Meanwhile, the Polish composer Stanislaw Moniuszko reportedly convinced the most famous nineteenth-century cantor, Yoel-David Strashunsky, to abandon Judaism for a career on the Polish stage. These strange, forgotten instances of Polish Jewish musical encounter defy conventional images of a strict separation between nineteenth-century Polish and Jewish cultures. In this article, I employ literary and archival sources to peel back the layers of myth that encrust these encounters. Pushing past the consistent focus on vertical cultural relationships in eastern Europe, I argue that we should focus instead on the horizontal plane of interethnic aural contacts in order to see the historical dynamics of culture and power at work in Polish-Jewish relations and recover the full imprint of empire on the modern eastern European cultural imagination.