Język Polski
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Maria Konopnicka’s Mendel Gdański: Not about Anti-Semitism
Abstract
Maria Konopnicka’s novella Mendel Gdański was written in response to a request from the author’s friend Eliza Orzeszkowa. The work was a contribution to a publicity campaign in the part of Poland occupied by Russia at that time, conducted in order to make Polish society aware of the dangers of adopting cultural attitudes that were alien to it. Such attitudes were propagated by the tsarist bureaucracy, which, in the interests of the Russian empire, incited anti-Semitism in order to divide Polish society. The article emphasizes the need for a contextual reading of the novella. It shows how important it is to know the historical reality in which the work was written and its genesis. The author gives a characteristic of the perpetrators of the riots described by M. Konopnicka and the neighbors of the Jewish family, concluding that it is necessary to reinterpret the novella’s message, which is not so much a protest against anti-Semitism as a protest against instilling hostility towards others into Poles.
Keywords:
anti-Semitism, coexistence, neighbors, stereotypes, JewsDetails
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.