Zuzanna Ginczanka
was born in 1917 in Kiev as Zuzanna Polina Gincburg. Soon after the Russian
Revolution her parents moved to Rowne, which was then in a newly created
Republic of Poland (it is in Ukraine now). Rowne was a town whose majority
of inhabitants spoke Yiddish, but Zuzanna's parents were emancipated Jews
and spoke Russian at home. Thus she had a choice of a language: either Yiddish
of the shtetl, Russian of her parents or Polish of her school friends. Fascinated
by Polish poetry, she chose Polish and wanted to become a Polish poet. She
started publishing her poems when still at school. During her studies in
Warsaw she entered literary circles; one of her friends was Witold Gombrowicz,
another Julian Tuwim. She published her works mostly in periodicals, only
one book of poems appeared before the war. As a pen-name she used half of
her Jewish surname with a Polish ending. During the war she lived in Cracow. As a fluent Polish speaker she could pass as a non-Jew; her friends found her a false identity. Her friends, however, were involved in the resistance and when they were arrested, she was arrested, too. She was executed in 1944, not long before Russian troops entered Cracow.
After the war she was forgotten, not because her poetry was bad (it certainly was not), but because communist censors decided it was undesirable. During the 45 years of communist rule in Poland only two small selections of her poems appeared. In 1990 CZAS KULTURY published some little known poems of Zuzanna Ginczanka. In 1994 OBSERWATOR published her collected poems with a biography written by Izolda Kiec.
