Zakleszczony pomiędzy Wschodem i Zachodem? Tożsamościowe sploty Franka Meislera Streszczenie

Abstract

This article reflects on the textual constructions of identity and the image of the Free City of Gdańsk (Danzig) in Frank Meisler’s autobiography On the Vistula Facing East, 1996 (Zaułkami pamięci. Gdańsk–Londyn–Jaffa, 2014; An der Weichsel gegen Osten, 2016). The author was a British-Israeli artist born in 1925 in the Free City of Gdańsk. The narrative analysis conducted here explores how Meisler presents cultural entanglements in the Free City of Gdańsk and its diversified Jewish community. My aim is to examine his strategies for portraying the borderland experience, his multilingualism, and for incorporating the Jewishness into the matrix of the East-West relations. Meisler’s autobiography has been interpreted as an example of the literature of cultural borderlands and of post-factum Holocaust literature.

Keywords

• Frank Meisler
• Kindertransports
• Free City of Gdańsk
• Pomeranian Jews
• identity project
• literature of cultural borderlands