Pamięć – Biblia – tożsamość. O religijnym znaczeniu pamięci na przykładzie twórczości Romana Brandstaettera

Abstract

The paper is dedicated to a religious dimension of memory as one of the fundamental categories for the creation (and understanding) of the bond between Jews and Christians and the Holy Scripture, which is also crucial for the creation of individual and collective identity. The role of memory is described on the basis of Roman Brandstaetter’s works. In the case of this author, the concept of memory is key to understand the phenomenon of the presence of the Bible in his writing. For him the Bible stands for the Book of Israel (the Torah), the ancestral book, the canonical book of his own culture (both Jewish and Polish) as well as for a personal and internalized text. These various dimensions of the perception of the sacral text seem to reflect a Jewish comprehension of memory as memorization and actualisation. Without memory there is no way to be either Jewish or Christian, as for both the Word of God becomes the centre of their identity through the processes of memory.