Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017), the Polish Jewish sociologist and philosopher, lived through the hardest of times. He experienced a glimpse of the Holocaust in Poland before fleeing to the Soviet Union. And, as a communist in the postwar People’s Republic of Poland, he was ostracized as a Jew and compelled to leave. After an interregnum in Israel, he settled in Britain, where he was a professor of sociology at the University of Leeds.
In My Life In Fragments (Polity Press), Bauman’s life and ideas unfold through diary entries and stories written in Polish and English across a span of three decades. He generally writes in a detached style, but occasionally the words explode on the page.
Although he admits he knows little about his family’s past, he has definite opinions.
He describes his father as a “self-effacing, humorless, taciturn man” who was fluent in several languages and who was drawn to Judaism once he discovered that there was more to it than “perfunctory daily prayers and dietary rules.”
Shortly before leaving Poland in 1957, his father briefly worked as an accountant at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Following his wife’s death, he lived on a kibbutz. He was a Zionist, but did not find “his Zion” in Israel.
His mother, a “vicious” and “exuberant person, was unable “to contain the energy which kept spilling out in bouts of inexplicable gaiety and equally abstruse anger.” She received a strictly Polish education and seems to have regarded Yiddish condescendingly.
Bauman’s paternal grandfather, a Yiddish-speaking shopkeeper in the village of Zagorow who hardly spoke Polish, had no education apart from what he learned in an Orthodox seminary.
Bauman himself was born in Poznan, which had been a Prussian city for a century before becoming Polish again after 1918. “By Polish standards, Poznan was a truly exceptional city,” he writes. “It managed to combine a virtual absence of Jews with the most vituperative antisemitic sentiments.”
“Poznan became the driving force and the fortress of National Democracy — a party which sought to captivate the hearts and mind of the rest of the country with the enchanting vision of a Jew-free life,” he adds.
Antisemitism grew more venomous in the years prior to the outbreak of World War II, he notes. The Polish government opposed anti-Jewish violence, but tolerated an economic boycott of Jews and encouraged their mass emigration.
Due to the animosity that Jews faced in Poland, Bauman was attracted to Zionism, “a world in which people were liked or disliked for what they did, rather than what they were.”
The German army invaded Poznan on September 1, 1939. “The bombs began to fall on the city from the early hours of the first day of the war.” Bauman and his family fled, a German aircraft pursuing their train eastward, and landed deep inside the Soviet Union.
His sister, who held a British Commonwealth passport, was allowed by the Germans to board a train bound for Berlin, from which she travelled to Palestine.
Bauman, following a brief stint as a traffic policeman in Moscow, joined the Polish army-in-exile. A Polish woman in a captain’s uniform urged him to change his surname to “a nice Polish name,” but he refused.
During a battle, he was wounded in the shoulder by an artillery shell shard.
With the war having ended, he returned to his homeland, eager to participate in building a better Poland.
“The communists promised to end the ‘old ways’ … they believed they were the only ones who could create the conditions for the freedom, equality and brotherhood demanded by all the greatest intellectuals since the Enlightenment …”
In retrospect, he should have known better, having spent a few years in the Soviet Union.
Having settled in Warsaws with his parents, Bauman studied physics and then philosophy, sociology and social history at the University of Warsaw. During this period, he met his wife, Janina, a survivor of the Nazi Warsaw ghetto.
By now a political officer in the Polish army, Bauman was shocked to learn he had been dismissed after his father visited the Israeli embassy. Still a “committed communist,” he bounced back as a lecturer in the University of Warsaw’s department of philosophy.
Strangely enough, he does not have much to say about the antisemitic campaign that erupted in Poland after Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six Day War. But he alludes to it when he writes, “In November of 1967, a group of friends gathered in my daughter Anna’s room to celebrate her eighteenth birthday. As they were leaving, all of the guests were arrested, pushed down the stairs, brutally beaten, and kept overnight for ‘interrogation …'”
As well, Bauman received anonymous threats on his phone: “We will come soon, you scabby Jew, to take care of you.” And in his apartment building, the words “Bauman is the enemy” appeared.
Forced to leave Poland, like about 20,000 other assimilated Jews who considered themselves Poles, Bauman went to Israel. Oddly, he hardly mentions his relatively brief sojourn in the Jewish state. Being a communist, he was presumably unhappy there.
“I am a Pole,” he writes in a heart-felt exposition. “Polishness is my spiritual home. Polish language is my world. This is my decision … I am a Polish Jew, I’ll never shed my Jewishness … I do not see why my Jewishness should be difficult to square with my Polishness.”
This comes across as a naive observation in light of his expulsion from Poland. Yet Bauman is not entirely clueless. He denounces Polish antisemites and he drops this bombshell: “If I had embraced the Polish view of the world … it was hardly by invitation. Most Poles I knew did everything to force me to change my mind; they tried really hard to make me feel unwelcome, foreign and undeserving. Yet if I do what they wanted me to do, I will confirm the very principle of tribalism — the tribal right to reject and to persecute, the very reason of hatred and suffering.”
Being a universalist, Bauman rejects ethnic and religious barriers and parameters. As he puts it, “Our history has been a never-ending lesson in what happens when the human race crumbles into tribes … Being truly Jewish means to strive for a world without tribes.”
Bauman is entitled to his view that tribalism is a negative phenomenon worthy of disappearance. Yet a sober analysis of his years in Poland refutes his assumption.