Abstract
The stipulated topic of reflection is an attempt at following the identity project contained on the pages of Leslie Brent’s autobiographical texts, especially in his autobiography Sunday’s Child? A Memoire (London 2009). Leslie Brent is a British professor emeritus, a renowned scientist in the field of immunology. He is the co-discoverer - with Peter Medawar and Rupert Billingham - of acquired immunological tolerance (Billingham RE, Brent L, Medawar PB. Nature 172:603–606, 1953). He was born in 1925 as Lothar Baruch in the city of Köslin and escaped the Holocaust with one of the “Kindertransports” travelling from Berlin to Great Britain – the operation that saved 10,000 Jewish children from extermination. Köslin – which with the shifting borders after 1945 became the Polish city of Koszalin – is located in Pomerania, a region spanning the historical and cultural Slavic-Germanic, and now also the administrational, Polish-German borderland. Since 1989 Brent has regularly visited the town of his birth, actively taking on the role of “emblematic Jew” in the local project of reviving Jewish memory.
The intention of this article is to answering the following question: How does the author position himself as an individual in charting the borders of homeliness and strangeness laying between the everydayness of the pre-WWII German Köslin – marked by gradual exclusion of its Jewish community and the reality of Great Britain, in the context of his assimilation/acculturation process, as well as the realities of the post-1989 Polish Koszalin – the time of his first return journey to the hometown and subsequent visits?
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Notes
- 1.
Especially see chapter “Schuldiskurse und andere Narrative. Epistemisches zum Holocaust”, pp. 180–200.
- 2.
The article is connected with a wider research project, which main aim is to reconstruct Jewish topographies of Pomerania based on autobiographies of authors of Jewish origins from Pomerania (after 1945), on which the author is working currently.
- 3.
See also Monaco, A. P. (2009): Sunday’s Child? A Memoir By Leslie Baruch Brent, The New England Journal of Medicine, 16.7.2009, 317. Monaco presents Brent as “a world-renowned immunologist and transplantation biologist”.
- 4.
The German edition of the book: Leslie Baruch Brent (2010): Ein Sonntagskind? Vom jüdischen Waisenhaus zum weltbekannten Immunologen, Berlin: Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag. Work in progress is Polish translation of Brents memories, what should be published in the series of the Kashubian Institute.
- 5.
A new synagogue at Am Kleinen Wall near to Lazarettstrasse had been opened 1885. Jewish society counted to this point of time the highest level – 303 persons. The temple was built on square, flanked with dome, on it the inscription appeared: From the rising of the sun to the place where it sets, the name of the Lordis to be praised (Psalm 113,3). In the interior has been placed an organ. The synagogue was destroyed during the November Pogrom 1938 (Salinger 2006, 481–482).
- 6.
G. Dworetzki (1985): Heimatort. Freie Stadt Danzig. Von Danzig nach Gdansk, Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag; F. Meisler (1996): On the Vistula Facing East, London: André Deutsch; E. Pintus (2005),: Moje prawdziwe przeżycia / Meine wahren Erlebnisse, ed. by J. Borzyszkowski, Gdańsk: Instytut Kaszubski; M. Ryczke Kimmelman (2005): Life Beyond the Holocaust. Memories and Realities, ed. and with introduction by G. G. Schmidt, Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press; M. Ryczke Kimmelman (1996): Echos from the Holocaust. A Memoir. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press; E. Lichtenstein (1985): Bericht an meine Familie. Ein Leben zwischen Danzig und Israel. Mit einem Nachwort von Günter Grass, Darmstadt / Neuwied;: W. Kaelter & G. Cohn (1997): From Danzig. An American Rabbi’s Journey, Malibu, Calif.: Pangloss Press.
- 7.
The text is not a representation of an attitude of deepened confession, one of the attitudes mentioned along withones of testimony and challenge in the concept of “autobiographical triangle” authored by the Polish literature theoretician Małgorzata Czermińska (Czermińska, 2000).
- 8.
About Leslie Baruch Brents participation on world’s first examples of acquired transplantation tolerance see for example Starzl T. E. (2006): Leslie Brent and the Mysterious German Surgeon, Annals of Surgeory, no. 244 (1), 154–157. See also chapter of Brents autobiography From Intolerance (Racial) to Tolerance (Immunological), p. 108–136.
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Borzyszkowska-Szewczyk, M. (2019). “Ich bin ein Koszaliner”? Struggles with Belongings in Borderlands. Leslie Baruch Brent’s Autobiography Sunday’s Child? A Memoire. In: Moskalewicz, M., Caumanns, U., Dross, F. (eds) Jewish Medicine and Healthcare in Central Eastern Europe. Religion, Spirituality and Health: A Social Scientific Approach, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92480-9_13
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