Isaac's Army by Matthew Brzezinski Page B

emphasishad always been on assimilation. Despite the Mortkowiczes’ rabbinical Viennese roots, religion had never played a role in their lives. “My grandfather wanted to be more Polish than the Poles,” Joanna recalled of the patriarch Jacob Mortkowicz, who in the world of Polish publishing occupied a lofty position similar to that of Alfred Knopf in New York. “He would stay up late into the night, almost each night, poring over the dictionary in search of ever more esoteric words.” These linguistic exertions were partly a matter of pride: Jacob Mortkowicz traveled in notoriously elite intellectual circles and he wanted to be the most eloquent person in the room. But the word games also reflected a deep-seated insecurity that might have been instantly recognizable to any American immigrant: “He practiced pronunciation,” Joanna explained. He wanted to ensure that his elocution left no trace of his own father’s heavy Yiddish accent, of “the Hebraic-German garble and the traditional mutilation of Polish speech,” as his star writer, Julian Tuwim, himself an assimilated Jew, put it, less delicately.
    As with the Osnos family, Yiddish was pointedly not among the vast reservoir of languages—French, English, German, and Russian—spoken around the Mortkowicz dinner table. Nor was the Sabbath celebrated. And Joanna passed each Christmas in the Polish tradition: opening her presents under the mistletoe after supper on December 24.
    So the news that she was Jewish was shattering. “It’s not true!” she shouted, running into her mother’s arms. “I’m not Jewish. I don’t want to be Jewish,” she kept repeating. Joanna wailed and pounded her little fists, until her grandmother Janine finally had enough. “And what is so terrible about being Jewish?” she snapped, wresting the startled child from her mother’s soothing embrace. Joanna trembled. She lived in fear of her grandmother. “She was a very proud and strong-willed woman. In many ways she was much stronger than my mother.”
    Despite her diminutive stature and matronly appearance—even with her gray hair coiled up in a bun, she barely reached five feet—Janine had always been the power behind the Mortkowicz throne. Her husband had built the publishing empire on the strength of his relationship with writers. But his artistic and sensitive personality had not lent itself well to the harsher business side of publishing. And Hannahad inherited her father’s delicate personality, along with his corporate debts. “She was not well suited to bear the burdens after my grandfather’s suicide. In practice, my grandmother ran things.”
    In her anger at that moment, Joanna recognized a tragic feature of Polish assimilation that would take her decades to understand when she was an adult. “I was so upset at being Jewish because assimilation was based on identification with Polishness, which was based in part on anti-Semitism,” she later explained. “I was being taught to hate myself.”
    Ironically, Joanna’s family had spearheaded the literary assault on anti-Semitism in Poland by publishing writers like Tuwim, Antoni Slonimski, Jan Lechon, and Boleslaw Lesmian. Collectively known as the “Skamander Group,” they were mostly poets and mostly Jews, all household names in a poetry-crazed culture that built monuments to its dead bards and elevated the living to a celebrity status just shy of movie matinee idols.
    The Skamanders battled bigotry through parody and allegory while laying siege to the chauvinist proponents of “Poland for Poles” by ridiculing the far right’s misguided notions of nationalism.T UWIM AND SLONIMSKI ARE ONE HUNDRED PERCENT JEWS screamed headlines in conservative newspapers, seething with outrage that Poland’s national poets, men whose works would later be required reading in every high school and who would have streets named after them in virtually every major Polish city, were neither Catholic nor Slavic.
    So despite