Abstract
Reviewed by: James Bjork, King’s College London, UK
Followers of East European history will likely know Hubert Zawadzki from the superb one-volume history of Poland that he co-authored with Jerzy Lukomski. Some will also know his earlier, engaging biography of Prince Adam Czartoryski. His most recent project is rather different and much more personal: a translation of the previously unpublished memoirs of his mother, Irena Protassewicz. The first adjective and noun in the title aptly convey two running themes in this account. Protassewicz’s memoir is in many respects a national narrative, the story of a member of the landowning elites who were the primary carriers of the Polish national idea. But it is also an intensive retrospective reflection on Protassewicz’s experiences as a woman in the early twentieth century, including a striking critique of the sexual and religious norms of the time.
Irena Protassewicz’s itinerary during and immediately after the Second World War will be familiar to historians of Poland, but it is nonetheless an extraordinary journey. The Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in 1939 led first to the dispossession and eventually to the deportation of Protassewicz, along with tens of thousands of other Poles, into Soviet Central Asia. Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, which transformed Poland into the Soviets’ awkward ally, provided the possibility for most of these deportees to be transported through Persia to British-ruled territories in the Middle East, with some – including Protassewicz – ultimately settling in the United Kingdom. This wartime odyssey involved gruelling hardships and required constant ingenuity, as well as luck, among those who survived it. Protassewicz’s descriptions vividly evoke these experiences, in particular the constant preoccupation with both the nutritional value and the sensory experience of food.
While the war years provide the book with its central drama, they actually only constitute about half of Protassewicz’s full memoir. What is perhaps even more interesting and valuable about this book than its close description of this period of ‘conflict, deportation, and exile’ is the author’s reflections on the entirety of her autobiography, including long sections on her childhood and early adulthood, mostly spent in or near the family manor in the village of Borki in interwar Poland’s eastern borderlands (kresy), present-day Belarus. Despite Borki’s status as a backwater, the Protassewicz family was thoroughly integrated into the country’s political and cultural elite. Irena’s aunt and uncle were close associates of Józef Pilsudski (another native of the kresy), whose writings Irena read with religious devotion (105). Her reminiscences are replete with references to Polish cultural icons (Sienkiewicz; Mickiewicz; above all, Chopin), and she mentions several times her idolization of Emilia Plater, a Polish noblewoman who led a military unit during the national uprising of 1830.
Although Protassewicz’s sense of Polishness was closely interconnected with her membership in the landowning elite, she expressed some retrospective ambivalence about the class dynamics of her local milieu. At times, she described the (Orthodox, Belarussian) local peasantry as a threatening alien mass. But Protassiewicz subsequently offered more self-critical reflections on the nobility’s fear of ‘banditry’. She observed that ‘the peasants stole because they were poor’ and that it was sometimes those who committed acts of petty theft who ended up being most generous to the family when it needed help during the war (35). The author offered sympathetic and nuanced portraits of individual servants, as well as individual Jews, the latter encountered in roles ranging from trader to doctor. Protassewicz insisted on never having succumbed to anti-Semitism, and, indeed, she conspicuously rejected the notion – already in circulation during the war – of widespread Jewish disloyalty to Poland during the Soviet occupation in 1939 (111). Strangely, however, she had become involved, through a mutual friend, in the far-right nationalist circle surrounding Bolesław Piasecki in the 1930s, an episode that is recounted but not really explained (55).
The clearest and most sustained critical thread that runs through the memoir is her commentary on the religious and sexual norms of her childhood and young adulthood. Protassiewicz declared that she lost her religious faith entirely in the sixth grade after realizing that the local clergy were ‘Pharisees’ who had corrupted true religion for their own gain. She insisted that it was only in the 1960s that she ‘recovered the right to my own brain and to my own conscience’ (28–9). ‘Puritanism’, which ‘deformed a healthy approach to the body and sex’ (25) was central to Protassewicz’s critique of the church. But in her descriptions of her own reactions to the sexual activities of those around her, which left her ‘greatly offended by the lack of moral restraint’ (151), the author admitted that she had nonetheless internalized such standards herself. Protassewicz’s persistent, intensive examination of the sexual mores of the time and her recurring references to the Second Vatican Council make the memoir a valuable primary source for historians of the social history of religion and sexuality in the 1960s.
Zawadzki is admirably thorough in his introductory and concluding sections, which draw on his mother’s correspondence and other documentation to flesh out her life story, especially after her arrival in the United Kingdom, where her formal memoir concludes. Maps, illustrations and a family tree provide further helpful context. But Zawadzki is also admirably restrained in his interventions, avoiding excessive speculation about his mother’s thinking or motivations. Irena Protassewicz’s own words are largely allowed to speak for themselves, offering wonderful insights into her mind, as well as into the era in which she lived.