Marek Pelc – A Polish-Jewish poet in Frankfurt/Main

In Frankfurt/Main
 

In 1982, Marek Pelc returned to Germany to visit his father in Frankfurt/Main. During that time, war broke out between Lebanon and Israel (the First Lebanon War). Marek decided to remain in Germany and to continue his studies there. With this aim in mind, he threw himself into learning the German language. After passing his language exam, he enrolled at the Goethe University Frankfurt, where he studied German language and literature. This study, too, was mainly self-funded. The Pestalozzi Foundation had only granted him a small, temporary stipend. 

In 1983, he made the acquaintance of Polish émigrés who had migrated to Frankfurt following the imposition of martial law in Poland, and who worked on the editorial board of the “Przegląd Tygodnia” (“Weekly Review”), which appeared in Polish.[2] He then joined the magazine himself, remaining there for seven years as a permanent member of staff and contributing short stories, feuilleton-style articles and poems. The other members of the editorial board were Wiesław Bicz, Urszula Wierzbicka and Krzysztof Wierzbicki, who was responsible for the layout. The magazine continued to be published throughout his time there and was sold in places where Poles typically met, such as the “Polish” church. In 1989, Marek Pelc completed his German studies with the overall grade “good”. His Master’s thesis, supervised by Professor Ralph-Rainer Wuthenow, was entitled “Elias Canetti as an enemy of death”.

The fate of the Jews and Marek Pelc’s own identity
 

During the late 1990s, Marek Pelc spent four years working on a research project at the Fritz Bauer Institute of the History and Impact of the Holocaust (Fritz Bauer Institut zur Geschichte und Wirkung des Holocaust), for which 2,400 photographs of Jews from Będzin and Sosnowiec were scrutinised which were found in Auschwitz [after 1945 - translator’s note] and are now held in the museum in Oświęcim (formerly Auschwitz). These images formed the basis for the documentary film “... Forgive me, I’m alive” (original title: “Przepraszam, że żyję”), for which Marek Pelc and the director Andrzej Klamt wrote the script. In 2000, the filmmakers were awarded the prestigious Hesse Film Prize.

Pelc was also a research assistant for the first Jewish children’s book to appear in Germany since 1945.[3] During that time, he also translated poetry and prose by Jehuda Amichai, Natan Zach, Admiel Kosman, Lea Goldberg and Dalia Ravikovitch from the original Hebrew into Polish. 

In 1995, he began training as a psychoanalyst at the Frankfurt Institute of Psychoanalysis, during the course of which he himself underwent analysis as a trainee. In 2001, he terminated his training for financial reasons. He also worked for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation during this period, conducting more than 30 interviews lasting several hours with survivors of the Holocaust in Germany and Denmark which were documented in professional films. 

Marek Pelc has been married to Marina Shkolnikova, a Russian, since 2006. They met in Frankfurt when she came to the city for research purposes after obtaining her doctorate in philosophy at the University of St. Petersburg. However, once in Germany, and after she and Marek had become a couple, she decided to study law; today, she works as a lawyer. As Marek likes to joke when talking about his wife: “Frankfurt is halfway between St. Petersburg and Tel Aviv”.

Usually when he travelled, it was to Israel and Poland. In Israel he has friends and family whom he visits every year. With a smile, he says, “for years, I’ve been travelling to Lisbon and every time I end up in Tel Aviv”. On multiple occasions, he also participated in meetings of the Polish-Jewish emigrants of 1968 which are held in Israel as part of the “Reunion Initiative”. 

His poetry
 

Even as a very young boy, Marek Pelc was already composing poetry in Polish. Today, he also writes in Hebrew and German. He made his literary debut in 1982 in “Przegląd Tygodnia” in Frankfurt, while at that time, he was also being published in Poland in the “Czas Kultury” (“Time of Culture”) magazine.[4] Some of his poems are also included in the dual-language anthology “Napisane w Niemczech. Geschrieben in Deutschland” (“Written in Germany”), which appeared in 2000.[5] In 2015, the Paris-based publishing house Éditions yot-art issued a volume of poetry as part of its “Recogito” series entitled “Czarnowidzenia” (“Seeing Black”), with Marek Wittbrot, a Pallottine, who was editor-in-chief of the Polish-language magazine “Recogito” in France, a driving force at the Centre for Dialogue (Centre du Dialogue) in Paris, and who also wrote the afterword.[6] The illustrations for this volume were created by Artur Majka. 

In his writing, Marek Pelc repeatedly takes up motifs such as memory, transience and unfamiliarity, archetypes of Jewish-Christian culture in which the Holocaust sometimes resonates as an echo in his poems. As Marek Wittbrot writes in the afterword to “Czarnowidzenia”: “Like the Jews who went in search of a new land which offered so much more than the affluence of Egypt and yet also something different from it, and like Aeneas, who set out from Troy on a journey into the unknown, Marek Pelc, ‘by the hand of fate, a refugee’[7], as descendent and inheritor of the few who survived the annihilation, chose a hazardous path. While he may not have reached the Lavinian shore, he did succeed in arriving at the foothills of Hesse, in a sense at the border posts mentioned by Tacitus in monte tauno, where human fates have already frequently crossed in history. However, he never turned away from the past, and always remained connected to his roots. His poems are like a band of light / above a thicket / of dark contours. Another silent scream that cannot be described in words. Yet there is no doubt that it is there. It cannot be suppressed. It fills not only existence, not only memory, not only the bodies”.[8]

Joanna de Vincenz, August 2022