ABSTRACT
An important trend in contemporary Polish literature is a preoccupation with recreating the vanished memory and never-recorded stories of the ‘inni’ (others), i. e. the non-Poles and pre-Poles who historically occupied the space of today’s country: Germans in the north and around Wrocław; Jews in Warsaw, Kraków, Łódź and elsewhere; Ukrainians in the southeast. Before 1989, because of government hypersensitivity on the subject, most such themes were taboo. A prominent author in this regard is Paweł Huelle ‘Ile’ (b. 1957) whose stories are set in the historical landscape of Gdańsk and elsewhere in Pomorze (Pomerania) among Germans, Kaszuby (Kashubians), and Olendrzy ‘Hollanders’, i. e. 16th- and 17th-century Mennonite settlers from Holland. In the present story, the dangers of the Baltic Sea, heavily mined by the Germans in World War II, are magically intertwined with an ancient Kashubian legend about Baltic ‘land pirates’, one of whose ancestors may or may not have been the relative of a contemporary resident of the fishing village where the narrator sets out to buy fish for the family’s Christmas Eve table. In the story’s title, the author draws on the tradition of humorously rhymed literary antagonists, inaugurated in Polish by Adam Mickiewicz in his 19th-century novel in verse Pan Tadeusz (Master Thaddeus). https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315883724/f1ec34ee-0050-45f0-bb21-227ec0c07bdd/content/ufig20_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
