Bogdan-Dawid Wojdowski

Bogdan-Dawid Wojdowski (בוגדאן-דוד ווידובסקי,30 November 1930 –21 April 1994) was a Polish-Jewish writer of Yiddish (that is, Ashkenazic) background.

The writer was born Dawid Wojdowski.

During World War II, under German occupation, he used an 'ethnically Polish' (that is, more Catholic-sounding) pseudonym 'Bogdan Kamiński.' After the war, in light of strong antisemitism in communist Poland, he melded his pseudonym's first name with his surname that does not point to his Jewish cultural and social background.

As an adult and writer, he became known as 'Bogdan Wojdowski.' Yet, later in his life, to emphasize the fact that he was not a Pole-Catholic, but a Jew of a Polish cultural background, he started using his birth name Dawid in preference to Bogdan.

Dawid Wojdowski was born to a Jewish (Ashkenazic) family in Warsaw, which at that time was the cultural center of Yiddishland, or Central Europe's zone of Yiddish language and culture.

His father, Szymon Jakub Wojdowski, was an upholsterer and joiner.

His own traditional family of Hassidic character was Yiddish-speaking.

On the other hand, the family of Dawid's mother, Edwarda Bark, was of assimilationist and leftist leanings, and thus, Polish-speaking.

Father spoke Yiddish to his wife and children (that is, Dawid and his younger sister, Irena), but mother spoke Polish with the children, who also received Polish-language education.

During the war, together with about half a million Jews from Warsaw and the vicinity, the German occupation authorities made Wojdowski's family move to the Warsaw Ghetto.

The lived in the ghetto between November 1940 and August 1942.

His parents perished in the Holocaust, but Dawid-Bogdan and his sister Irena were separately smuggled out of the ghetto and survived.

Among others, Jadwiga Danuta Koszutska-Issat hid Dawid-Bogdan from the Germans, while, Irena Sendler his sister.

After the war, in 1949, Wojdowski graduated from secondary school in Warsaw.

Then he studied Polish language and literature at the University of Warsaw, and wrote a master's thesis under Zdzisław Libera's supervision.

He worked as a journalist and dreamed to become a writer, despite widespread antisemitism that convinced most of his family and Jewish acquaintances to leave Poland.

In 1957 the state censors thoroughly altered the shape of his first book Wakacje Hioba (Job's Vacation'), and delayed its publication by five years, until 1962.

In 1964 he lost his last permanent job, and since then he had to work as a freelancer.

Even the 1968 ethnic cleansing of Poland's Jews did not change his resolution to stay in Poland despite all odds.

In 1971 his most important work was published, namely, Chleb rzucony umarłym (Bread for the Departed).

Between 1971 and 1974, Wojdowski cooperated with the Soviet bloc's last remaining Yiddish-language periodical of note פֿאָלקס שטימע folks sztime.

Two years later, in 1973, he married Maria Iwaszkiewicz-Wojdowska.

She was a daughter of Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, one of communist Poland's most important writers, whom the authorities tasked with controlling the country's literary life.

He visited Israel only once, in 1986, where he met with his mother's sister Ida Bark and her family, who had left Poland in 1957.

After the fall of communism, Wojdowski hoped for a revival of Jewish cultural life in postcommunist Poland.

However, when communism finally came to an end in 1989, Wojdowski regretted that he had not emigrated to Israel immediately after the war.

It was actually the Polish language in which he wrote that prevented him from leaving.

To this end, in 1991, he founded the journal Masada, which however, went defunct after the publication of the first issue.

In 1993 the writer published his famous essay 'Judaizm jako los' (Judaism as Fate), on which he had worked since 1989.

Wojdowski proposes that the Jewish religion or a cultural memory thereof is at the heart of Jewishness, making the Jews into a civilization in its own right.

After the Shoah no Jew can give up on their Judaism with impunity.

In relation to gentiles, Wojdowski, as a Jew, does not demand acceptance but liberty.

He saw liberty as the necessary foundation on which he could relate to any other individual.

All his adult life, Wojdowski had periods of acute depression, which at that time was still not diagnosed as PTSD caused by the Holocaust.

As a result, like many other Holocaust survivors who became writers (for instance, Jean Améry, Paul Celan or Primo Levi), in 1994, Wojdowski committed suicide by hanging himself from a window curtain rod.

In 2013, Wojdowski's widow Maria Iwaszkiewicz-Wojdowska and sister Irena Grabska gifted the writer's archive to the National Library of Poland in Warsaw.

The following year, the Polish Book Institute purchased the rights to Wojdowski's opus magnum The Bread for the Departed, which can now be published and translated into other languages free of charge.

Wojdowski worked for over a decade on his novel Chleb rzucony umarłym (Bread for the Departed).

It is the only novel devoted to the Warsaw Ghetto that was written by one of the ghetto's Jewish inmates.

The plot is based on the writer's experiences, yet it is not an autobiography.