Roman familial et territoire : Les Contrebandiers d’Oser Warszawski

Abstract

Oser Warszawski (1898-1944) became famous at the age of 21 thanks to this novel. It was written in a time when Yiddish literature was trying to reformulate its modernity in relation to classical heritage. Published ten years earlier than the sagas of I.J. Singer and M. Kulbak, in which the historical epic meets an underlying family romance, Warszawski’s Smugglers seems to embody a more humorous side of family romance, just like some of Faulkner’s works (As I lay dying or The Hamlet, for example). The main difference with the historical family epics drawn from naturalism is however the concept of territory, which refers to space and not only to time. Smugglers is the story of a Polish shtetl, close to Warsaw, occupied by the German army during World War I. In reaction to their misery, the inhabitants of this shtetl start to smuggle goods on the black market. This essay analyzes the role of space and of the smugglers’ territory in the novel. On this spatial and historical background, the plot evolves through a dynamic of adaptation and focuses successively on three different characters, who symbolize three different steps in the life of this family of smugglers.