BOOKS
173
a deeply religious man who felt no compulsion to pass on his Judaism to
his eight children. Wat felt he owed his first initiation into the "thrill of
metaphysics and into poetry" to his adored family servant, Anna Mikulak,
who frequently brought along the young Aleksander secretly with her to
church for vespers. "Imagine," Wat recalled decades later, "a boy from
what was still a Jewish home surrounded by all those candles, that music!"
Wat's disconcerting pronouncements on Judaism ("Judaism is a reli–
gion that must come to its end") surface throughout
My
Century,
and
Venclova writes lucidly about Wat's religious oscillations and putative con–
version. What attracted Wat to Christianity, Venclova believes, was not its
teachings but Wat's strong identification with the figure of a suffering
Christ. "Moreover, Christ became, in Wat's imagination, an archetypal
image of Jewishness and also of the Jewish fate."
To Venclova, Wat was "a relentlessly eccentric soul, forever marginal–
ized and excommunicated by society." An exile both inside Poland and
later in France and the United States, Wat was, throughout his life, an alien
- a Jew who wore a cross around his neck, a Christian when he was in
prison among observant Jews; a man imprisoned in prewar Warsaw for his
Communist views and in wartime Alma-Ata for challenging the Soviet
authorities and courageously refusing a Soviet passport. Like Czeslaw
Milosz, Wat did not belong to any of the three major waves of Polish emi–
gration, which placed him in a "chronological no man's land," and made
his later poetry primarily a dialogue with himself.
Despite repeated internal and external exiles and attempts at conver–
sion to his own self-styled amalgam of Christianity, Wat was, to his
dismay, unable to escape the label of Polish-Pole or Jewish-Jew. His final
break with his native land occurred in May 1967 when he made his last
contribution to the Polish press, declaring his solidarity with Israel. "The
new post-Holocaust wave of anti-Semitism in Poland," Venclova explains,
"was, for Wat, the ultimate disgrace," upsetting the fragile balance between
his Jewishness and Polishness.
Venclova's primary interest is Wat's poetry, which he writes about
with great insightfulness, agilely weaving together Wat's biography with
analysis of all of Wat's extant writing, including an unfinished novel enti–
tled
Loth's Flight,
that seems to have been "intended as an eastern European
(and Jewish) answer" to Thomas Mann's
Doctor Faustus.
The novel's
theme of the surrender and destruction of intellectuals in the face of a
totalitarian regime is one that clearly distressed Wat throughout his life.
Wat's thorough description of his ill-fated Communist "adventure"
and time spent in Stalinist prisons in
My
Century
was complemented by
his widow Ola's (Paula) extensive writing about their life together, so one
of the biggest difficulties Venclova faced was disentangling their myths,
