Zagubiony w Izraelu (Kalman Segal, Jeszcze żyjemy)

Abstract

In November 1969, Kalman Segal left Poland, the country of his childhood and youth, and never returned. In exile, he settled first in Haifa and then in Jerusalem, where he worked at Kol Israel radio. He continued to write – poems and prose in Yiddish and his last Polish novel, which his family found in his archives in 2018, thirty-eight years after his death. The book was published in 2020; the editors titled it We Are Still Alive. The complex narrative of the work is dominated by inquiries into the identity and nationality of the bilingual-Polish-Jewish writer, a problem rarely undertaken by Segal before 1968. The Sanok novelist’s reflections on the subject stemmed in part from a sense of loss and alienation in the land of his ancestors, especially in Jerusalem, as well as a sense of being uprooted from the Sanok “landscapes of trust,” to which he had closed his way by choosing a one-way train ticket (with no right of return) from Warsaw to Vienna and beyond.