Korczak, dialog i dwoiste tożsamości

The text discusses Bożena Wojnowska’s book Korczak’s Other Face, which provides a new interpretation of Janusz Korczak’s (Henryk Goldszmit) writings and activities – an interpretation focused on themes of identity. Although Korczak declared himself invariably as “a Jew and a Pole,” his Jewish identity was sometimes forgotten or overlooked. The themes of children’s rights and new education associated with Korczak encouraged a decontextualization and universalization of his work. Wojnowska’s approach allows us to see Korczak’s biography in a different light than the Holocaust-dominant focus of recent publications about him. On the one hand, through extensive research on source materials, Wojnowska reconstructs the local, Warsaw-centered, Polish-Jewish, and ultimately Central and Eastern European context of Korczak’s thought. On the other hand, she juxtaposes the local with supra-local contexts, rarely present in Polish studies of the matter: the tradition of Midrash, Judaic hermeneutics of Torah, Martin Buber’s dialogism, Emmanuel Lévinas’ phenomenology of dialog, or the philosophy of Kant, Goethe, and Stanislaw Brzozowski.