Sydor Rey

Sydor Rey was born in Wojniłów (now Voinyliv, Ukraine). He studied law and political science at the Lvov University and at Warsaw University. As a writer, Rey debuted in 1929. He was a member of the literary collective (zespół literacki) Przedmieście in Warsaw. The first issue of the group's literary journal indicated that the association was established on the initiative of Helena Boguszewska (18861978) and Jerzy Kornacki (19081981) in JuneJuly 1933, with Bruno Schulz, Adolf Rudnicki, and Zofia Nałkowska among the invited founder members. Rudnicki had resigned from membership before the publication of their magazine in 1934, while Halina Krahelska and Sydor Rey were inducted as new members. The group's name (przedmieście, Pol. "faubourg") has been explained as referring both to the group's programmatic preoccupation with the marginalized aspects of the culture and social life in the Second Polish Republic, and to the connotation of "outpost" – hence by extension avant-garde. First novel Kropiwniki Sydor Rey's first novel Kropiwniki was published in 1937. The title of the novel, Kropiwniki, refers to the Polish provincial locality of Kropiwniki in the Volhynia (96 kilometres to the north of the Polish town of Włodzimierz Wołyński; since 1945 within the territory of the Ukrainian SSR), whose name the author uses as a cryptonym for his native Wojniłów, an ancient township founded in 1552 by the charter issued by Sigismund II Augustus. Its real identity thus concealed, the place serves as a canvas on which the author paints the history of three generations of inhabitants from various social classes and religious communities of Polish society, including Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians, representatives of the szlachta but also peasants, merchants, and artisans, thereby presenting an allegory on Polish society as a whole. Each of these various social groups, further subdivided in the book into additional subgroups and subtypes, espouses different and often conflicting sets of beliefs concerning social and political matters, whose beliefs moreover further mutate from generation to generation. was even less kind, having seen in Kropiwniki an expression of the alleged Communist stance of an author squandering his talent in a doctrinaire enterprise of quixotic futility. Witold Gombrowicz too wrote a detailed and perhaps most considerate analysis of Kropiwniki, arguing that it is the literary debuts that are more interesting, for all their inchoate form, than an author's later works which, though benefiting from the writer's more crystallized pattern of thought, in general tend to say little that is essentially new. Rey also translated from the Yiddish into Polish the biographical novel on Karl Marx, Karl Marks (bay zayn shvel): byografisher montazsh-roman by the Polish writer Moisheh Grosman (19041961). ________________ Surely I will recognize the tree, But the tree, will it recognize me? As much change as I took astride No poplar could manage by the roadside. Biographer Eugenia Prokop-Janiec of Jagiellonian University asserts that it was ultimately the pervasive antisemitism of the Polish society in the 1930s that forced the writers and poets like Sydor Rey and Henryka Łazowertówna (19091942), who never otherwise identified themselves as Jewish while working in the Polish language, to align themselves with the Jewish community for the first time. Sydor Rey's vignette entitled Spacer ("A Walk") deals with the thorny subject of race relations in a homoerotic context. It is a short text about a male couple who, taking a stroll in a public park, attract the attention of a gathering crowd not for being gay but for being of different races: the bystanders are not hostile to both characters as a couple, but in each case only to one of them – selected according to the particular bystander's own racial allegiance: the Gentiles in the crowd of onlookers are hostile to the man who looks Jewish, for they believe him to be somehow exploitative of his companion; the Jews in the crowd on the other hand are hostile to the Gentile believing him to be about to cause harm to his Jewish companion to whom they consequently feel obliged to offer assistance. Both men offer explanations to a policeman who arrives on the scene to institute ad hoc inquiry of his own into the commingling of the couple. The story is an allegory on the impossibility of normal relations between the races on a private level without public or official harassment, even as relations between (or within) the sexes are tolerated. A bisexual author, Sydor Rey did not frequently tackle gay subjects in his writings. His epigram "Na plaży" (On the Beach) is one of the exceptions. Rey was one of the signatories of the open letter of the Polish writers against the bloody pacification by the Polish police of the workers' protests against the Sanacja régime in March 1936. ==Emigration==