Warsaw as a Formative Space of a Jewish-Polish Identity. A Case Study Based on Zygmunt Turkow’s Memoirs Fragmentn fun mayn lebn

This article aims to sketch out the Jewish-Polish identity of a prominent Jewish actor and director, Zygmunt Turkow (1896–1970). A summary of the nature of Jewish identity is followed by a study of his memoirs Fragmentn fun mayn lebn [Fragments of My Life] (1951) from the period of 1896–1916. Drawing on Cultural Literacy (Segal 2014), the study focuses on the methods and thoughts of Roland Barthes ([1967] 1985) on urban space. The main section of this paper includes an overview of the places and institutions in Warsaw that Turkow mentioned in his memoirs. All the addresses are ascribed to four social categories (home and friends, religion, education, and freetime) and then discussed. The final section contains research conclusions on Turkow’s selfhood, his sense of Jewish and Polish identity, and his attachment to Jewish or Polish culture, as well as the defining characteristics of his Polish-Jewish/ Jewish-Polish self-identity. This article aims to explain the peculiar circumstances that contribute to the complexity of determining and investigating what can be considered as Jewish identity.