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Bruno Durocher: l’homme aux mille visages . Sous la direction de Gary D. Mole

2022; Oxford University Press; Volume: 77; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fs/knac213

1468-2931

Helena Duffy,

European Cultural and National Identity

In his ‘Biographie’ (included in Proses (1958)), the Judaeo-Franco-Polish poet, essayist, and playwright Bruno Durocher (born Bronisław Kamiński; 1919–1996) describes himself as a man from whose breast a thousand Jewish heads grow; those of murdered Jews, of panic-stricken Jews, of Jewish musicians, shopkeepers, and mystics. Durocher’s self-definition is reflected in the ambition of this edited volume which celebrates the work of a prolific avant-garde author who won many literary prizes, was nominated for the Nobel Prize during his lifetime, and was posthumously awarded the Prix Europe (1998). Fruit of the conference marking the centenary of the writer’s birth, the eleven essays collected here have been published by Caractères, the press founded in 1950 by Durocher himself. They offer a panorama of the author’s writings in his native Polish; in Esperanto, which he learnt from a fellow prisoner in Nazi captivity; and in French, which he mastered after settling in Paris in 1945. As well as poems, essays, plays, and novels, Durocher’s œuvre includes translations, emblematized by Poezja czarnej Afryki [Poetry of Black Africa] (1962). Published during Durocher’s enforced stay in Poland (1958–63), the anthology, as Michał Obszyński contends, was symptomatic of Soviet support for the emancipation of Africa in the hope of making the newly decolonized countries join the Communist bloc. From the start, Durocher’s life was marked by plurality; son of an assimilated Jewish doctor Zelma Glückstein and an Austrian army officer killed in the last weeks of the First World War, he was given by his mother a Catholic identity. Bronisław Kamiński was thus cut off from both his paternal and maternal lineage. At fifteen, having accidentally discovered his true identity, Durocher converted to Judaism and reinvented himself as Abraham Baruch Kamiński. Arrested by the Nazis in 1939 as a Polish Communist and then sentenced to death for escape, he miraculously survived the war in Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen-Gusen under the name of Ernest Zrogowski. His mother and her relatives perished in the Holocaust. The volume frames Durocher’s trilingual œuvre as an outcome of a fertile cross-pollination of the different linguistic, cultural, and religious traditions which the writer identified with and which have inspired critics to call him the ‘Polish Rimbaud’ and the ‘French Tuwim’. The volume also brings to the fore the spirit of revolt marking Durocher’s writing. His debut collection of poems, Przeciw [Against] (1937), stems from the young poet’s rejection of the forces he saw as hostile to his marginal identity. Among those forces were his mother and the bourgeois values she represented, Catholicism, antisemitism, and capitalism. Finally, as well as close readings of Durocher’s French and Polish texts, the collection includes contributions by Sylvain Barrier, the translator of the writer’s twenty-two Esperanto poems (1946–47); by Amir Parsa, the English translator of Et l’homme blanc écrivait son histoire (1981); by the stage director Patrick Hadjadj, who has adapted and produced of Ni idoles, ni étoiles… (2006); and by Nicole Gdalia, Durocher’s widow, who is co-editor of his complete works and the present director of Caractères.