Between Homes, Languages and Identities

Krystyna Modrzewska grew up in an assimilated Jewish family in pre-war Poland and later reflected deeply on her Jewish background, gender and sense of difference. Her studies in Bologna became an important period of self-discovery before the outbreak of war forced her back to Poland.

Krystyna Modrzewska was born on 14 September 1919 in Warsaw as Krystyna Mandelbaum. Her father, Hersz Jakub Mandelbaum, was a doctor and a Bund activist and, before the war, the last head physician of the Jewish hospital in Lublin. Her mother, Franciszka, was a pianist and music teacher. In 1929, the family moved from Warsaw to Lublin, where they lived at 9 Bernardyńska Street.

Krystyna grew up in an assimilated Jewish family closely connected to Polish culture and language. Jewish identity in her home was not associated with religious practice. Years later, she recalled:

One could say that I come from a completely assimilated family. If I know a few words of Yiddish, I learnt them during the occupation. I had no contact whatsoever with the community of religious Jews.
Krystyna Modrzewska, oral history interview, 1 May 1999, Lublin, Oral History Archive of the “Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre” Centre.

Her sense of difference, however, was not limited to her Jewish background. In the autobiographical books she wrote towards the end of her life, Modrzewska returned to her childhood and adolescence, describing her experience of her body and gender. In Trzy razy Lublin (Three Times Lublin), she wrote about growing up without identifying with the femininity assigned to her:

I did not like my dresses as early as the age of three, and afterwards they were merely a necessary evil for me. I was irritated by the growing atmosphere of femininity developing around me […]. I was growing up too, but differently. In a way that I could neither understand nor explain, and which frightened me. I felt betrayed by my own body. It was becoming increasingly alien and cumbersome.
Krystyna Modrzewska, Trzy razy Lublin, Lublin 1991; quoted in Joanna Ostrowska, “Polska, żydowska, queerowa. Tożsamość i biografia Krystyny Modrzewskiej (Mandelbaum)”.

Modrzewska also recalled dressing in her father’s suit as a teenager. She did not present this simply as a youthful rejection of fashion. In later life, she connected these memories with what she described as her “transsexual nature”. In her own writing, her experience of gender became one of the central elements through which she understood herself.

In Trzy razy Lublin, she described her years as a student in Bologna as a period of discovering the world and other people, but above all of discovering herself:

I did not return a different person from the one who had left, but I returned knowing who I was, weighed down by the full burden of that awareness. I now asked myself what to do with my life, and I could find no answer.
Krystyna Modrzewska, Trzy razy Lublin, Lublin 1991; quoted in Joanna Ostrowska.

In 1937, she began studying natural sciences at the University of Bologna. Her move to Italy was her first experience of living outside Poland for an extended period. While in Bologna, she was baptised into the Catholic Church. As she later recorded in her diary, this was not a pragmatic decision. Modrzewska regarded her baptism as a serious decision concerning her faith and identity.

Her time in Bologna also played an important role in her personal development. She later described it as a period in which she first began to understand her own sense of difference. At the time, however, she had neither the language with which to name it nor a social environment in which she could safely live it.

The outbreak of war interrupted her studies. She returned from Italy to Poland and found herself in a reality in which her origins, her name and her ability to move freely would become matters of survival.