Sydor Rey born Izydor Reiss (6 September 1908 – 15 November 1979) was a Polish poet and novelist. During the Interbellum he worked in the Jewish orphanage of Janusz Korczak in Warsaw.Cf. The Interia Encyklopedia online. He dedicated his short story Anioł-Stróż ("Guardian Angel"; 1957), part of his book Księga rozbitków, to the memory of Janusz Korczak.Sydor Rey, Guardian Angel: A Story, tr. N. Guterman, Commentary, vol. 67, No. 2, February 1979, p. 58: see online. The story won the acclaim of readers: cf. Jan Leszcza, "Pochwała" (A Commendation), letter to the editor, Wiadomości: tygodnik (London), vol. 12, No. 2 (615), 12 January 1958, p. 4. A bisexual author, Sydor Rey did not frequently tackle gay subjects in his writings.
Life in interwar Poland 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.Jerzy Kwiatkowski, Literatura Dwudziestolecia, Warsaw, Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe (Instytut Badań Literackich Polskiej Akademii Nauk), 1990, p. 31. . 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.Halina Krahelska, "Przedmowa" (Foreword); in: Przedmieście, ed. H. Boguszewska & J. Kornacki, Warsaw, Towarzystwo Wydawnicze Rój, 1934, p. v. See also Zespół Literacki Przedmieście.
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. The volume carried Sydor Rey's short story Królestwo Boże ("The Kingdom of God"), a fictional narrative of a visit to a privately owned factory by a friend of the proprietors. The visit becomes an occasion for remarkably detailed observations on the work conditions of the employees and their relations with the management, the government (represented by an industrial inspector), and the outside world.Sydor Rey, Królestwo Boże; in: Przedmieście, ed. H. Boguszewska & J. Kornacki, Warsaw, Towarzystwo Wydawnicze Rój, 1934, pp. 158177.
First novel Kropiwniki Sydor Rey's first novel Kropiwniki was published in 1937.Sydor Rey, Kropiwniki: powieść, Warsaw, Nakładem Księgarni F. Hoesicka, 1937. (393 pp.) 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.Cf. Ludwik Dziedzicki, in: The Geographical Dictionary of the Kingdom of Poland, vol. 13, p. 754, col. 2, s.v. Wojniłów (see online). 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.[Anonymous], "Na ekranie, scenie i wśród książek: Sidor Rey – Kropiwniki" (On the Screen, On the Stage, and Among the Books: Sidor [sic] Rey Kropiwniki), Czasopismo Skarbowe (Warsaw), vol. 12, No. 14, 15 July 1937, p. 3. 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. While the author parades a plethora of various types of characters on his stage, from the szlachta individuals affecting a grand aristocratic manner, through lordlings enlightened by foreign studies enough to be able to fraternize with the working classes, to well-to-do Jewish businessmen, he devotes most space to the radicalizing poverty of the township and the impenetrable ignorance of the peasant masses of the surrounding villages, succeeding to depict this broad gallery of human types in particularly vivid brush strokes of great directness. Owing however to the well-nigh unmanageable breadth of the scope of his project, it has been observed by contemporary critics that the social doctrine on occasion takes precedence in his writing over art. The author Jerzy Andrzejewski (19091983) in literary magazine Prosto z mostu,Cf. Ignacy Fik, 20 lat literatury polskiej (19181938), Kraków, Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza Czytelnik, 1939, p. 58. 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.Jerzy Andrzejewski, "Nowe powieści: Sydor Rey, Kropiwniki" (New Novels: Sydor Rey, Kropiwniki), Prosto z mostu (Warsaw), vol. 3, No. 2 (110), 10 January 1937, p. 7. 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.Witold Gombrowicz, "Proletariacka huśtawka" (A Proletarian See-saw); in Czytelnicy i krytycy: proza, reportaże, krytyka literacka, eseje, przedmowy, ed. W. Bolecki, Kraków, Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2004, p. 220. .
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).M. Grosman, Karol Marks: powieść biograficzna, tr. S. Rey, Warsaw, Znicz, 1935.
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.Eugenia Prokop-Janiec, PolishJewish Literature in the Interwar Years, tr. A. Shenitzer, Syracuse (New York), Syracuse University Press, 2003, pp. 9495. . 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.Sydor Rey, Spacer ("A Walk"), Nowy Głos (a daily Jewish newspaper of Warsaw), vol. 2, No. 155, 5 June 1938, p. 7. A bisexual author, Sydor Rey did not frequently tackle gay subjects in his writings.Cf. Sydor Rey, Shulim: A Story, Commentary, vol. 29, No. 4, April 1960, p. 324 (see online). His epigram "Na plaży" (On the Beach) is one of the exceptions.Sydor Rey, "Na plaży" (On the Beach); in id., Własnymi słowami, London, Poets' & Painters' Press, 1967, p. 49.
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."Protest pisarzy warszawskich" (Protest of the Writers of Warsaw), Kamena: miesięcznik literacki (Chełm Lubelski), vol. 3, Nos. 89 (2829), AprilMay 1936, back cover.
Emigration On the eve of the Second World War, in the spring of 1939 Sydor Rey emigrated from Warsaw to New York City, where he subsequently operated a second-hand bookshop.Bio on the Onet.pl WIEM reference portal (see online.) His wife and daughter left behind in Poland perished in Kraków during the Holocaust.Zofia Kozarynowa, "O Księdze rozbitków", Wiadomości: tygodnik (London), vol. 14, No. 48 (713), 29 November 1959, p. 4. During his American period his writings appeared frequently in the Polish-language weekly newspaper Wiadomości: tygodnik ("The News: A Weekly") published in London, and in other émigré periodicals (while Commentary and the Transatlantic Review published translations in the United States). In his reply to a survey of Polish writers living in exile conducted by the Wiadomości of London in 1958, nearly twenty years after his departure from Poland, Rey revealed that every writer creatively active in exile is spiritually present, in the act of creation, in his native land."Pisarze emigracyjni a literatura krajowa: ankieta Wiadomości" (Émigré Writers vis-à-vis the Literature of the Home Country: A Wiadomości Poll), Wiadomości: tygodnik (London), vol. 13, No. 33 (646), 17 August 1958, p. 4. Hence there are in reality no "émigré writers" and no "émigré literatures". He appended his literary testament with the following codicil. If I, after well-nigh twenty years spent in the United States, have never thought for a moment of adopting English as my creative medium, it is because spiritually I continue to reside in my Homeland. The split involved here at times invests the written word of an author in exile with a terrifying beauty, which flows from his undaunted vision. But at the same time this split can, in the long run, lead to the degeneration of the creative faculty the most glaring case in point being that of the giant of Polish literature, Adam Mickiewicz. (...) [This happens] when a writer ceases to use the written word in the service of Beauty, as a building block in the project of constructing his own immaterial world, and starts using it as a magic charm invoked for the sake of transforming his immaterial world into a material one.