Our Songbook

“It is a film about recollecting,” said Artur Żmijewski when commenting on the documentary video he had made in 2003. The main characters are old Jews of Polish descent for whom Israel has become their new homeland after the traumatic experiences of World War II. Polish used to be their native tongue, and Poland was the place of their childhood and youth – a time to which they return with sentiment and emotion, a time which is often denied from the emigrant consciousness. The artist asked these people to sing – to “recollect” Polish songs from those times. Some with resistance, others with satisfaction, but all with problems, dug out the melodies, verses and lost lyrics of pre-war hits, the national anthem, patriotic songs, or even Catholic hymns.

As in many other works by Żmijewski, the artist again carefully examines the human being, the human spiritual and mental spheres, in close relation to the human body, which, in his works, is most often sick, handicapped or old. The video was recorded at a geriatric ward in a hospital and in a senior citizens’ club. Old age obviously takes centre stage here and is used to emphasize another issue of paramount importance for Żmijewski: that of remembering and forgetting language and culture. The artist shows the persistent existence, and at the same time the gradual disappearance of a fragment of Poland which for the past decades has existed outside of the country. The past is here redefined – the reality which has already become outdated in Poland is still the “mental” present in Israel. In the contemporary awareness of the emigrants, the Poland which is still alive is the one they remember and which is slowly passing away – as are the people.

Our Songbook also refers to the issue of Polish-Jewish relations, which are predominantly determined by historical experiences. Żmijewski’s video thus inadvertently enters the grid of tensions between the common stereotypes: the anti-Polonism of the Jews and the anti-Semitism of the Poles, forcing the viewers to rethink and revalue the enrooted judgments.

Izabela Kopania