Zuzanna Ginczanka

Zuzanna Ginczanka, '' pen name'' of Zuzanna Polina Gincburg (March 22, 1917 – January 1945) was a Polish-Jewish poet of the interwar period. Although she published only a single collection of poetry in her lifetime, the book ''O centaurach'' (''On Centaurs'', 1936) created a sensation in Poland's literary circles. She was arrested and executed in Kraków shortly before the end of World War II.

Life

Zuzanna Ginczanka was born Zuzanna Polina Ginzburg ("Gincburg" in Polish phonetic respelling) in Kiev, then part of the Russian Empire. Her Jewish parents fled the Russian Civil War, settling in 1922 in the predominantly Yiddish-speaking town of Równe, also called Równe Wołyńskie by the inhabitants, in the ''Kresy Wschodnie'' (Eastern Borderlands) of pre-War Poland (now in Western part of Ukraine). Her father, Simon Ginzburg, was a lawyer by profession, with her mother Tsetsiliya ( Цецилия) Ginzburg, '' née'' Sandberg, a housewife. Ginczanka was holder of a Nansen passport and despite efforts made to this end, she was unsuccessful in obtaining Polish citizenship before the outbreak of the war.''Współcześni polscy pisarze i badacze literatury: słownik biobibliograficzny'', ed. J. Czachowska & A. Szałagan, vol. 3 (GJ), Warsaw, Wydawnictwa Szkolne i Pedagogiczne, 1994, p. 46. , . Abandoned by her father, who after a divorce left for Berlin, and later by her mother, who after remarriage left for Spain, she lived in the Równe home of her maternal grandmother, Klara Sandberg, by all accounts a wise and prudent woman who was responsible for her upbringing. The moderately affluent house of Klara Sandberg in the town's main street, with its ground-floor shop, was described by the writer Jerzy Andrzejewski, Ginczanka's contemporary who sought her acquaintance, and independently by the poet Jan Śpiewak, the town's fellow resident. She was called "Sana" by her closest friends. Between 1927 and 1935 she attended a state high school at Równe, the Państwowe Gimnazjum im. T. Kościuszki. In 1935 she moved to Warsaw to begin studies at Warsaw University. Her studies there soon ended, likely due to antisemitic incidents at the university.Krystyna Kłosińska
"Wypowiadam wam moje życie. Melancholia Zuzanny Ginczanki, Araszkiewicz, Agata."
''Gazeta Wyborcza'', 29 January 2002 (review of the book by Agata Araszkiewicz, ''Wypowiadam wam moje życie. Melancholia Zuzanny Ginczanki'' published by Fundacja OŚKA, Warsaw 2001).

Early period

Ginczanka spoke both Russian, the choice of her emancipated parents, and the Polish of her friends, but did not know a word of Yiddish. Her longing to become a Polish poet caused her to choose the Polish language. According to Ginczanka's mother, she began composing verses at the age of 4, authoring a whole ballad at the age of 8. She published her first poems while still at school, debuting in 1931 at the age of 14 with the poem "Uczta wakacyjna" (A Vacation Feast) published in the bimonthly high-school newspaper ''Echa Szkolne'' edited by Czesław Janczarski. During this period of her life Ginczanka was also active as the author of song lyrics. Her "mainstream" debut in a nationwide forum took place in August 1933 in the pages of the ''Kuryer Literacko-Naukowy'', a Sunday supplement to the well-known '' Ilustrowany Kuryer Codzienny'', with the publication of the 16-line poem entitled "Żyzność sierpniowa" (Fertility in the Month of August; or perhaps, with greater poetic licence: Fullness of August). In the "Żyzność sierpniowa", the 16-year-old poet speaks with the voice of a mature woman looking wistfully back on the world of young people in the bloom of life, with its ripeness for love (hence the title), from the knowing and indulgent perspective of one whose life had come to fruition long before: the reader can be forgiven for thinking that the author of the verses before him is a person of advanced age. The last two lines, moreover, give voice to the catastrophic sonorities that will forever remain the signature trait of Ginczanka's poetry, often couched in sanguinary imagery as they are here:

Encouraged by Julian Tuwim to participate in the Young Poets' Competition (''Turniej Młodych Poetów'') organized the next spring by the '' Wiadomości Literackie'', the most important literary periodical in Poland at the time, she won an honourable mention (third class) with the poem "Gramatyka" (The Grammar), printed in the issue of 15 July 1934 of the weekly that was devoted in part to the results of the competition. She was 17 years old; most if not all of the other 22 finalists (like Tadeusz Hollender, b. 1910, and Anna Świrszczyńska, b. 1909, who won first prizes, or Witold Makowiecki, b. 1903, who won an honourable mention, first class, and Juliusz Żuławski, b. 1910, honourable mention, third class) were her seniors in age. Seven weeks later, in its edition of 2 September 1934, ''Wiadomości Literackie'' will revisit its poetry competition by publishing a list of additional book prizes awarded to the winners: for her contribution, Zuzanna Ginczanka will receive a collection of Michelangelo's poetry in the translation of Leopold Staff. Ginczanka's poem, which opens boldly with a punctuation mark (a left parenthesis), deals with parts of speech, describing each in a poetic way beginning with the adjective, then taking on the adverb, and ending with a philosophico-philological analysis of the personal pronoun ("''I'' without ''you'', ''you'' without ''me'', amounts to nought"; line 30)

To this period belongs likewise Ginczanka's poem "Zdrada" (Betrayal; though the word can also mean "treason") composed sometime in 1934.

Warsaw period

Upon her arrival in Warsaw in September 1935, the 18-year-old Ginczanka, already notable, quickly became a "legendary figure" of the pre-War bohemian world of artists of Warsaw as a ''protégée'' of Julian Tuwim, the doyen of the Polish poets at the time, a connection which opened for her the doors to all the most important literary periodicals, salons, and publishing houses of the country. (Her detractors bestowed on her the sobriquet of "Tuwim in a petticoat", ''Tuwim w spódnicy''; while Gombrowicz, known for inventing his own private names for all his acquaintances, monikered her "Gina".) High-calibre critics, such as Karol Wiktor Zawodziński, have traced aspects of Ginczanka's lyricism to the poetic achievement of Tuwim, deemed both indefinable and inimitable but concerning primarily the renewed focus on the word, its freshness, and the ultimate conciseness of expression respective of each particular poetic image or vision treated. Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz for his part recalls that Ginczanka was "very good" as a poet from the first, without any initial period of incubation of the poetic talent, and conscious of her literary prowess kept herself apart from literary groupings, in particular wishing to distance herself publicly from the Skamander circle with which she would have normally been associated by others. Thus for example, her frequenting of the Mała Ziemiańska café, the renowned haunt of the Warsaw literati where with gracious ease she held court at the table of Witold Gombrowicz, was memorialized in her poem "Pochwała snobów" (In Praise of Snobs) published in the satirical magazine ''Szpilki'' in 1937. (The co-founder of the magazine in question, the artist Eryk Lipiński, who will play an important role in salvaging her manuscripts after the War, will name his daughter Zuzanna in memory of Ginczanka. The other co-founder, Zbigniew Mitzner, will opine in his memoirs that Ginczanka was tied to this particular weekly magazine by the closest bonds of all the alliances that she maintained with the literary press.) In testimony to her fame, she would sometimes be herself the subject of satirical poems and drawings published in literary periodicals, as for example in the 1937 Christmas issue of the '' Wiadomości Literackie'' where she is pictured in the collective cartoon representing the '' crème de la crème'' of Polish literature (next to Andrzej Nowicki and Janusz Minkiewicz, both holding Cupid's bows, though their arrows point discreetly away from her rather than towards).

Impressions

Ginczanka was a woman possessed of striking, arresting beauty "the beauty of a Byzantine icon", in the words of the slightly older writer Ryszard Matuszewski who remembered her visits to the Zodiak café in Warsaw many of her fellow writers remarking on her eyes in particular (each slightly different, both in some reports enhanced by a strabismus of Venus) and on the irresistibly attractive harmony between her nimble physical appearance and her personal psychology. Jan Kott saw in fact a connection between her poetry, "which enthuses all", and her personal beauty: "there was something of a Persian ''qasida'' in both", he wrote. (Her Italian translator, Alessandro Amenta, has recently taken this line of reasoning further, opining that for her admirers, her body has merged with her text.) For Kazimierz Brandys, her peer in age, she was a "sacred apparition" with "the eyes of a fawn". The author Adolf Rudnicki, casting for an apt expression to describe her, settled on "Rose of Sharon" (''Róża z Saronu''), a trope from the '' Song of Songs'', adding that the painter (identified by him only as "C.") for whom she sat in the nude (in the presence of her husband) confessed to him "to have never set his eyes on anything quite so beautiful in his life". Her portrait by the noted Polish painter Aleksander Rafałowski (18941980) a depiction ''en grande tenue'' is well known, and has been reproduced in the '' Wiadomości Literackie'' weekly in 1937. Ginczanka was admired by many for many reasons. Czesław Miłosz says that the writer Zbigniew Mitzner, co-founder of the magazine ''Szpilki'', was romantically involved with her. She was known to repulse her suitors ''en masse'', however, sometimes thereby as in the case of Leon Pasternak earning their enmity which resulted in their publishing pasquinades at her expense in revenge. For Stanisław Piętak, one of the most distinguished Polish poets of the Interbellum period, to meet her in the street was an experience akin to encountering a star break away from the heavens above and land straight on the pavement next to you. (There is evidence that while outwardly she received all the adulation with gracious warmth, the attention she generated weighed heavy on her mind; she reportedly confided in a female friend ( Maria Zenowicz), "I feel like a Negro", '' sc.'' a curio.) Only the poet Andrzej Nowicki was seen to enjoy her favour for a time, but even he was deemed by Tadeusz Wittlin to be a companion of convenience without relational entanglement. Tadeusz Wittlin, p. 241 (see Bibliography). Ginczanka was seen as abstemious, of studiedly modest demeanour, and virtuous she didn't smoke or drink ("except for a few drops now and then under the duress of social propriety"): Wittlin calls her "Virtuous Zuzanna (''Cnotliwa Zuzanna'') in the literal 'i.e.'',_ecclesiastical.html"_;"title="i.e..html"_;"title="'i.e.">'i.e.'',_ecclesiastical">i.e..html"_;"title="'i.e.">'i.e.'',_ecclesiasticalsense".__This_perception_was_shared_by_others;_the_poet_:pl:Alicja_Iwańska.html" "title="i.e.">'i.e.'',_ecclesiastical.html" ;"title="i.e..html" ;"title="'i.e.">'i.e.'', ecclesiastical">i.e..html" ;"title="'i.e.">'i.e.'', ecclesiasticalsense". This perception was shared by others; the poet :pl:Alicja Iwańska">Alicja Iwańska