Panna z Ludmiru – chasydka-rebe i „prawnuk, który nie wierzył w duszę”. Wokół Prawnuka Hanny Krall

Abstract

Basing on the example of Prawnuk (The Great-Grandson), the author of the article follows one variant of presenting the subject of the Holocaust in the works of Hanna Krall. The paper discusses the poetics and literary strategies used in Krall’s text, which constitute the uniqueness of her work – focus on details, elliptical narrative, timeskips (mimicking the mechanisms of memory), the economy and conciseness of language and the resulting density of the text. The author concludes that because of this, Krall creates, in the words of M. Cichy, a documentary fairy tale – at the same time a dramatic and evocative biography of a Hasidic woman, endowed with the power of healing, Chana Rachel, also known as the Virgin of Volodymyr and Maiden of Ludomir and her great-grandson – a talented surgeon, endowed with unusual hands, under the touch of which “wounds [...] always heal.” In the background of life’s vicissitudes of the protagonists in this reportage is the twentieth-century history and the extermination of Jews living in Volodymyr.