A tale of one city

"Not yet fully awake, but already bathed in sunshine, the city revealed new prospects before him, opening gates and secret passages he had not been aware of until now [...] becoming better and better acquainted with the eccentric shape of the city, which was composed of such varied and fanciful elements that perhaps only a poetic mind could have seen a unity in them. With time, however, despite the fact that he was not a poet and did not feel like one in the slightest degree, he did intuitively perceive this unity, or rather wholeness, through an awareness of several fundamental layers placed on top of each other here, in time as much as in space."

- From "Castorp," by Pawel Huelle, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

GDANSK, Poland - On the doorpost of Pawel Huelle's bedroom is a page from the Bible describing the exploits of Moses, Aaron and the Israelites in the desert. A friend once gave Huelle [pronounced Hyoo-la] a stack of Hebrew pages he had found in the trash, and Huelle discovered that they were from a Bible. He chose one page, had it framed and hung it on the doorpost. On one side of the apartment, which is situated in the Oliwa quarter of north Gdansk, is an old wooden desk that had been his grandfather's. The only possession of his grandfather that survived World War II, it is now used by the grandson. Two cats, one broad, the other lean, prowl the living room. They, too, like the Bible pages, were fished out of the garbage: Huelle found them as kittens, nearly dead, and adopted them. One has been immortalized in a portrait painted by Huelle's wife, the artist Ida Lotocka-Huelle, which hangs on the living room wall.

In his books, as in his life, Huelle has a propensity for dredging up details and objects from the recesses of personal and public oblivion. That which has been discarded, neglected and forgotten in the garbage cans of history is raw material for his work, which probes the diverse and burdened history of Gdansk, the city in which he was born and where he has lived for most of his life. For Huelle, one of Poland's leading writers, whose books have been translated into many languages and awarded prestigious literary prizes, Gdansk - or Danzig, its German name - is more than the setting of his books. It is one of the main characters.

"I always say that my next book will be set somewhere else, but in the end I take it back," Huelle says, laughing. "Still, it's not by chance, both because I like writers who set most of their stories in the same place, such as Dostoyevsky, Faulkner and Paul Auster, but most of all because the city plays a very important role from my perspective. It's possible that I have been obsessed with Gdansk all my life because it always affords us deep shadows. This is where the Second World War began, where its first victims fell, and it was here that my parents came after the war. During my childhood, it was still possible to find many physical signs of the city's German past, and they confronted me and my generation with a dilemma. We knew of course that the Germans were terrible - toward us, the Poles, too - but we searched for the vestiges of their presence here in the city and we were fascinated by the mysterious shadows they left."

Those shadows - shimmering, shifting, exploding, sometimes fading - are also present in the three works by Huelle that have been translated into Hebrew. His debut novel, "Who Was David Weiser?" (also available in English translation), tells the story of the disappearance of a Jewish boy in Gdansk in the late 1950s, during Communist rule in Poland. The main character of "Mercedes-Benz" (also available in English translation) is a young writer whose relationship with his driving instructor, a former stripper, leads him to expose not only Gdansk's congested streets in the early 1990s, but also the city's decisions about which direction to go in.

Now a Hebrew edition of "Castorp" (whose English translation was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2008) has been published. In this novel Huelle evokes early 20th-century Gdansk and places within it one of the best-known and most beloved characters of modern European fiction: Hans Castorp, the hero of Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain." Mann's novel, which centers around Castorp's visit to a sanatorium in the Swiss town of Davos, charmed Huelle as a teen, when he himself was ill and bedridden for an extended period. "My mother went to a bookstore for me, and because I was such a fast reader she decided to buy the fattest book in the store," Huelle recalls. He was struck by a single sentence, in which Mann relates that before coming to Davos Castorp spent two years at Danzig Polytechnic.

"I asked myself why Mann had Castorp studying for four semesters in this city," Huelle says. "When I returned to the subject, as an adult, I found there was no mention or explanation in Mann's diaries or in articles about the novel that reveal why the protagonist of 'The Magic Mountain' went to school here, of all places. One reason the mystery fascinated me was that my father attended the same polytechnic. So I set out to write a book that is an homage to Mann, that conducts a correspondence with 'The Magic Mountain' and recreates this lost period in Castorp's life by means of a bildungsroman that also allows me to reconstruct imaginatively the city as it was a century ago."

In Huelle's book, which was first published in Poland, in 2004, Castorp finds himself wandering the streets of the Baltic port city, then in Germany. The narrative is set in 1904, at the dawn of a century that Castorp, like many of his contemporaries, believes will be "like none in history before, [...] the age of prosperity and progress, at the behest of science." There is perhaps something symbolic about the fact that Castorp, a German, arrives in the city via the Westerplatte port, the place in which World War II effectively began when a German ship shelled the military camp there on September 1, 1939.

As a student of marine engineering Castorp got to know the city's inhabitants, its sights, offbeat locations and places of entertainment (such as the nearby resort town of Sopot, whose then-new spas made it famous). He also became acquainted with the Kashubians, a Slavic people that was influenced by Polish and German traditions and lived in Kashubia, a lake district near Gdansk; the city's Jews, who used "jargon that the Jews in Hamburg used too, which had a huge number of borrowings from German, but actually sounded alien and almost incomprehensible"; and the childhood stomping grounds of some of Gdansk's most famous sons, such as the German physicist and engineer Daniel Fahrenheit, who invented the system for measuring temperature that was named for him, and the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, whose pessimistic outlook Castorp seeks to understand despite his own occasional depressions.

"One of my reasons for writing the book was the desire to present to German and Polish readers the problems that exist between the two nations, which did not arise only with the outbreak of the Second World War," Huelle explains. "For example, I wanted to show that there were many Germans who, like Castorp, knew nothing about the Kashubians who lived in the region, and to depict the encounter between the cultures. That is why it was important for me to have Castorp fall in love with a Polish girl here."

Love is not the only thing that Castorp experiences for the first time in the course of the narrative. Some of these experiences, which are both exciting and painful, expose him to the political reality of his time. Others foreshadow the events of his life, as described by Mann in "The Magic Mountain." And because up to a certain stage his experience of falling in love is based primarily on observations and on silences, mostly at the beach, the reader gets the feeling that the book, which began as homage to "The Magic Mountain," also becomes, in a way, homage to Mann's earlier novella, "Death in Venice." Huelle smiles at this interpretation and admits that one of his motivations for "Castorp" was the desire to try to write a story in the style of Thomas Mann, with its distinctive motion, the long, serpentine sentences and the somewhat old-fashioned character.

The present absent

Gdansk in early February. Snow blankets the city and continues to fall, in the great shipyard, formerly named for Lenin, where the Solidarity movement was launched in the summer of 1980 with a strike in protest over the dismissal of Anna Walentynowicz, a welder and crane operator; in nearby Solidarity Square, where an underground museum tells the history of the movement, one of the first heralds of the Autumn of Nations revolutions and the end of Communist rule in Poland and throughout Eastern Europe; at the entrance to Lech Walesa's office at the Green Gate of the Old Town, from which Gdansk's most famous resident - the leader of Solidarity, who was jailed, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and became the first president of post-Communist Poland - can look out on the Motlawa River, now frozen, that divides the city. Snow falls too at the entrance to the Amber Museum, at the opposite gate, which shows off the spectacular uses for this precious substance, so abundant in Gdansk and which, like the city itself, encapsulates within it the days gone by.

In Gdansk the bridges between yesterday and tomorrow are straight and high. The sites of historical events, whether of violence or of freedom, turn into tourist attractions. Two important museums that will emphasize the link between the city and the components of contemporary pan-European identity are slated to open within a few years. The site of the old central post office, where the first battles after the German invasion of 1939 were fought, is to be the home of a new museum of the history of World War II. This Polish government project, part of the wave of WWII commemorations that is sweeping Europe, is set to document in detail the horrors of that conflict, focusing on the suffering of civilians. (There is already a memorial site and museum at Westerplatte, dedicated to the attack there.)

In the second major project, an area that had been part of the shipyard and is now at the center of massive development is to house the European Solidarity Center. This European Union museum will seek to showcase the movement that began in Gdansk as well as to promote the concepts of liberty, social struggle, open civil society and free culture. The memory of the Nazi occupation and the Communist dictatorship, as well as the nonviolent struggle for freedom in Poland, are also at the center of Gdansk's bid to be named European culture capital for 2016.

Huelle, like many people in Gdansk, joined Solidarity. Indeed, he owes the beginning of his literary career in no small measure to the ban imposed on the movement in 1981 by the Polish government. Huelle, whose family was originally from the city of Lwow, in Galicia (Lemberg, also known as Lviv, now in Ukraine) was born in Gdansk in 1957. After studying philology at the University of Gdansk he became a reporter. Later on he worked in Solidarity's press office but, as he relates: "The movement's dissolution left me unemployed, with no money but with a lot of time on my hands. And so, even though I had never dreamed of becoming an author I began writing a novel that was critical of the government, on a typewriter the police had removed from Solidarity offices."

No publisher would touch the anti-government text, but Huelle went on to write another book. It raised a sensitive issue: the disappearance of the Jews from Poland, which had a rich Jewish and multicultural history. "Who Was David Weiser?" was published in 1987 to enthusiastic reviews, making a substantial contribution to the public debate in the country about its relationship to the Jews. In 2001 it was made into a successful Polish film.

The novel focuses on a group of children in Gdansk in the late 1950s. The group is led by David Weiser, a mysterious Jewish boy with seemingly magical talents. The children play at war using material left over from the Nazi occupation. On one wild afternoon during summer vacation, Weiser disappears during an explosion. The book seeks to get to the bottom of his disappearance while also discussing the place of the Jews as the "present absent" in postwar, post-Holocaust Polish society. But despite its weighty themes "Who Was David Weiser?" is a captivating work thanks to its finely executed childish point of view - in this world, "zydek" is a compliment rather than a derogatory term for a Jew - as well as the fusion of this perspective with the adult narrator's efforts to solve the mystery and to make sure it is not forgotten.

Huelle: "This story is both realistic and symbolic. The plot focuses on the connection between Weiser and the group of children, but Weiser, as the hero, also represents something that Polish culture has lost. The Holocaust caused the loss of millions of Jewish lives, but it also caused us, the Poles, to lose something very meaningful - the Jewish culture that had existed here - and, in a broader sense, also the range of voices, cultures and minorities that had coexisted here, nourishing each other, for centuries.

"For example, my family tree includes Austrians, Hungarians, Ukrainians and also Jews, such as the physician who lived in the 18th century who converted to Christianity in order to get ahead and who married a Hungarian. This kind of ethnic mixing was common in many Polish cities, where people from many different minorities lived sided by side in harmony. But after World War II, Poland became almost homogenous in terms of ethnicity, nationality and religion. In the book I tried to come to terms with this 'black hole' in the wake of the cultural loss we experienced."

The fact that the novel is set in 1957 could be interpreted as an allusion to the "Gomulka emigration," which began the previous year, in which prime minister Wladyslaw Gomulka permitted Jews to immigrate to Israel. Tens of thousands seized the opportunity. The book also alludes to the authorities' persecution of Jewish officials and members of the intelligentsia in 1968, which led many of them to leave. But Huelle emphasizes that "Who Was David Weiser?" is above all a bildungsroman, describing the coming of age of children in Gdansk at around the time of his own childhood there. "Though not an autobiography, it contains scenes from my childhood. I dedicated it to my son, Juliusz, who was a toddler at the time that I was writing it, because I wanted to show him the city as it was before the big changes that it underwent."

Like many Poles, Huelle says, he was embarrassed by the anti-Semitism suffered by Poland's remaining Jews in the Communist era, but he emphasizes that protest was not an option. "Since the introduction of democracy there has been a deep change with regard to Jews and Jewish culture. Efforts are made to return to our true multicultural tradition and to forge ties with those who were our neighbors or lived among us. In Krakow, for example, there is a large annual Jewish culture festival, and here in Gdansk the city's synagogue was rededicated four years ago. In addition, many books and essays are being published about Jewish history in Poland, and many Poles, including those with no Jewish roots, are taking an interest in that tradition."

Huelle says that while anti-Semitism has not completely disappeared from Poland's public discourse the situation has improved immeasurably, and when Jews are attacked, protests always follow. He himself waged a lengthy struggle against Henryk Jankowski, a Polish Catholic priest and a leading member of Solidarity who in the early 1990s began making anti-Semitic statements. Huelle published an article against Jankowski, in which he stated that in light of his opinions "he does not look like a priest, but like the devil." Jankowski sued Huelle for libel and won, but the verdict was overturned on appeal. The judge ruled that Huelle's response to Jankowski's anti-Semitic, undemocratic and unchristian ideas was justified.

Huelle feels an affinity for Israel and has visited the country twice, in 2003 and in 2005, as a guest of the Jerusalem International Book Fair. He relates how he learned of his first invitation: "Early in 2003, I was traveling with a friend in Ukraine. Our car broke down and we spent a few days in the town of Medzhibozh, where we visited the burial site of the founder of the Hasidic movement, the Ba'al Shem Tov. In accordance with Jewish custom, we prostrated ourselves at the grave and made a wish. My friend, who had met a young woman in town, asked the Ba'al Shem Tov to help him win her heart; I asked for help in going to Jerusalem once in my life. My friend did not have romantic success with the young woman, but after the car was repaired and we were on the way back to Poland, my cell phone rang. It was someone from the Polish Institute of Culture informing me of the invitation from the book fair."

What did you learn from this?

"Well, as I told my friend, you have to know what to ask the Ba'al Shem Tov for."

Glorious history

Late morning at the Gdansk prison, near the central station. Around 40 inmates come for a lecture on Jewish history in Gdansk, given by Mieczyslaw Abramowicz, a representative of the city's tiny Jewish community, now numbering about 100. In the front row is an Israeli journalist; sitting behind him is a man serving a life sentence for two murders. Both men are riveted by Abramowicz's presentation on the vicissitudes undergone by the city's Jews from the 13th century to the present. Both of them, so it seems, are somewhat moved when the voice of Chava Alberstein, singing in Yiddish, washes over the auditorium during the description of the Yiddish theaters that once flourished in Gdansk.

Abramowicz tells the prisoners that during Gdansk's golden age, in the 16th and 17th centuries, the city was the glory of the Polish kingdom and a tolerant haven for people fleeing religious persecution from throughout Europe, including many Jews. In the 19th century, when Gdansk was part of Prussia and then Germany, Jews held key positions in the city's economic and cultural life while also developing Jewish culture. Between the wars, when Gdansk, or Danzig, was an autonomous city under the protection of the League of Nations, the Jews suffered under the Nazi local government, elected in the city even before the German invasion. When the war broke out the Jews were confined in a small ghetto, from which the majority were sent to the death camps.

When the lecture was finished, the lifer approached Abramowicz. "I heard your lecture the last time you were here," he told him, adding that it had given him an interest in the Jewish history of Gdansk. The prisoner asked Abramowicz for recommend reading on the subject. This, too, is apparently one of the ways contemporary Poland is contending with its past.

That multilayered past encounters Poland's democratic, capitalist present in "Mercedes-Benz," first published in 1997. The novel takes the form of a long letter to Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, who is greatly admired by both Huelle and the book's main character. At the height of the period in which the Communist past was consigned to oblivion, in the first years of democracy, Huelle wrote a tragicomic epistolary novel that brings together the narrator, who is learning how to drive, and Gdansk, which is finding it difficult deciding which road to take. Readers encounter marijuana growing beside a World War I cemetery, sly politicians, avant-garde artists and an original capitalist enterprise in the form of two guys who sell all-purpose sermons to all comers. All this is the background to the romance between the narrator - who bears a certain biographical resemblance to Huelle - and his driving instructor, whom the narrator attempts to impress by recounting stories about the old cars that his father and grandparents once drove.

"The Last Supper" (Poland, 2007; English translation, 2008) remains in Gdansk, but shifts from the past to the near future. The characters are a dozen local celebrities who are invited to serve as models of the Twelve Apostles for a photographic recreation of the Last Supper. Hovering in the background are the demographic changes the city has undergone, notably the growing Muslim population, the enervation of the Catholic Church in Poland and the threat of a terrorist attack in Gdansk.

In his next novel, Huelle says, he will revisit the city's history with the story of musicians in the interwar period, one of whom finds an unknown and unfinished work by Richard Wagner.

In addition to being a successful author Huelle is a playwright and a newspaper columnist, and often speaks out on current affairs. Asked about the consolidation of democracy in Poland, he says: "Some people forget that the open and free society we have had here since 1989 must not be taken for granted. But in a historical perspective of 20 years or so, democracy in Poland is definitely in the category of a small success; certainly it is a success compared to the other post-Communist countries in our region."

What dangers and challenges have faced Poland since it joined the EU in 2004?

"There is no peril to Polish society, only great prospects. Possibly Poland's joining the EU is considered dangerous by some nationalist politicians, but I have no doubt that it will allow us to become a more open, pluralistic and, in the final analysis, better protected society. That, of course, is very important for a small country like Poland, especially when one considers the region's history." W