Language and belonging
Language and Belonging – Polish and Swedish
Modrzewska lived and worked between languages: Swedish became the language of her professional life, while Polish remained the language of memory and writing. Later, learning Hebrew became a way of reconnecting with a Jewish heritage that had played little role in her childhood in an assimilated family.
Swedish became the language of her professional life. Polish remained the language in which she wrote, remembered and made sense of her past.
In her oral history interview, she said:
I lectured in Swedish, but my language is Polish.
Krystyna Modrzewska, oral history interview, 1 May 1999, Lublin, Oral History Archive of the “Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre” Centre.
Later in life, she also began learning Hebrew. In 1999, she explained:
I began learning Hebrew in Sweden. Out of curiosity and out of a need to pay my respects to the past.
Krystyna Modrzewska, oral history interview, 1 May 1999.
Her relationship with language therefore changed throughout her life. Polish was the language of her childhood and education, of literature and memory. Swedish became the language of her professional life in exile. Hebrew appeared later as an attempt to turn towards a heritage with which her assimilated family had had little connection.
Language was also a tool through which she could speak about gender. For many years, Modrzewska lacked a language with which she could directly describe her experience. Her later autobiographies are therefore not simply memoirs, but attempts to find words for something which, as she herself wrote, had remained difficult to understand and accept for most of her life.