Bożena Keff

A Piece About a Mother and the Fatherland

A Piece About a Mother and the Fatherland is a cross between an opera, a tragedy and an oratorio. The mixed voices of the Narrator, Meter and the Chorus tell the life stories of a mother who has survived the Holocaust, and of her daughter, whom the Mother has trapped in her own suffering.
For this reason Bożena Keff’s outstanding book can be regarded as a Polish version of Art Spiegelmann’s Maus. The child-artist’s struggle with a powerful historical experience represented by their parents is of key significance to both authors. It is a struggle for their own identity, for the right to get out of the mausoleum of the Holocaust.
The mother in Keff’s book is a Holocaust survivor. She lived through it, and so her suffering is without doubt, her sense of her place within history goes without question, her proof of her right to existence is indisputable. She has had a daughter in defiance of oblivion and the Holocaust, so the child, unlike the Mother, has no right to suffer nor to her own separate existence. The daughter seeks her release above all through art. She becomes a poet, for whom “there are no… inexpressible things!” But as the reality that she has to express is a tangle of contradictions, so she turns to contradictory means of expression. However, it all seems half-baked, because the tie between mother and daughter is woven of so many historical and sociological threads that there is always some element of the fabric that eludes any general conception.
 
Discovering where the permeable boundaries of one’s own autonomy are is crucial in view of the epilogue. The mixture of anti-Semitic, patriotic nonsense that appears in it proves that xenophobia is the cement binding the Polish fatherland community together. To construct the fatherland differently you need narratives that express this murky, though strong, connection between patriotism and hatred for what is foreign. Bożena Keff’s book is an example of an unusual expression of hatred for the mother-fatherland. An expression after which no one – whether victims of the Holocaust, victims of the victims of the Holocaust, or advocates of anti-Semitism – can claim the right to hate, and no one can believe that in his hatred he remains innocent.

Przemysław Czapliński

Bożena Keff is a poet, writer, essayist and journalist, by education a student of philosophy and Polish studies. She lives in Warsaw.