Białystok – Moskwa Estery Gessen jako rosyjskie świadectwo polskiej Żydówki i nowy typ prozy wspomnieniowej w Rosji

Abstract

The article discusses the diary of Ester Gessen (1923–2014), a Jewish woman born in Białystok. The book was written in 1996 in Polish and published for the first time in Warsaw under the title Drogi, których nie wybieramy (Paths We Do Not Choose). The Russian edition of Белосток – Москва was published in 2014 in Moscow. The author of both language versions is Ester Gessen. Gessen's memoir book tells about a childhood spent in Polish Białystok, about travels between the already Soviet Białystok and Moscow, and about staying in the Asian part of the USSR. In the further part of the diary, she describes the post-war life in Moscow, her family, work, professional trips to Poland and visits to Białystok. In the final parts of the book she depicts the post-perestroika era – her trips to the United States, where the writer's children immigrated, and to Israel. The author of the article draws attention to the memorist's relation to Soviet historiography and the problem of discrimination against Jews in the USSR. In the history of Polish literature, Gessen's diary can be placed, above all, among memories from exile, but this is not a typical record of Poles' stay in the USSR during the Second World War, because Drogi, których nie wybieramy are also, to a large extent, a record of Soviet citizens' community expereinces. It is, moreover, not a typical testimony of a survivor from the Holocaust. The writer left Białystok at a time when no one in the city expected that the Nazi Germany would attack the USSR and most Jewish residents would die in the uprising or would be taken to the camps in Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Meanwhile, for the history of Russian literature, Ester Gessen's book is an important part of a series of publications that has been developing in recent years, showing the history of a totalitarian country through the prism of the experience of "ordinary" people.