An Ecxeptionally Long Line is the story of a tenement building in Lublin and two of the people who lived there. The building was erected in the seventeenth century, and was home to ordinary people – Poles, Jews, intellectuals and civil servants. For centuries their lives and occupations intermingled. Recreating the fates of the building’s residents is like reconstructing the history of the city, and also the history of memory. For at heart Hanna Krall’s book tells us as much about the past as about remembrance, which itself prolongs history. As soon as we stop remembering, any line – even an exceptionally long one – is broken. Krall’s story starts with the origin of the tenement building, in a Poland of aristocrats and noblemen. In short, random, but vividly narrated accounts, Hanna Krall summarises the building’s turns of fate. Sometimes she describes individual people, at others some significant detail, such as a historical event or something about an apartment’s décor. However, the point of the whole narration is the tale of its two main heroes, Franciszka Arnsztajn (1865-1942) and Józef Czechowicz (1903-1939). Both were killed during the war, he in the bombing raids that took place in the first few days of September 1939, and she much later, during the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. They met in the Lublin tenement building, where Czechowicz came to see her, drawn by her renown. For Franciszka Arnsztajn was a legendary figure among the Lublin intelligentsia of the inter-war period. She came from an assimilated Jewish merchant family, the Meyersons. She was an emancipated woman, and had studied natural history in Germany. She and her husband, doctor and social worker Marek Arnsztajn, founded the Towarzystwo Szerzenia Oświaty „Światło” (“Light” Society for the Promotion of Education). But first and foremost she was a writer, poet and playwright. In 1932 she and Józef Czechowicz jointly founded the Lublin Writers’ Union. Their encounters began with the young poet reading his poetry to the elderly lady, who was hard of hearing. The people who live in the tenement today no longer talk about their former neighbours. They never tell the story of how Józef Czechowicz predicted his own death in one of his poems, nor do they wonder what Franciszka was doing at the time of her death. According to Hanna Krall, perhaps she was reciting one of Czechowicz’s poems. The present occupants’ silence is like a break in a long line. By setting out to tell the story, Krall’s book tries to extend this line. Her narrative reads like a neighbourly chat - something of a muddle, with a multitude of voices and full of digressions – but it keeps returning doggedly to its main theme. Thanks to this book we too can join in the conversation.
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