“Io sono a scacchi”. L’identità ebraica nell’opera letteraria e teatrale di Janusz Korczak

The article ‘I’m chequered’. Jewish Identity in Janusz Korczak’s Literary and Theatrical Work aims to focus on the problem of ethnic coexistence in some literary and theatrical texts of the Polish writer, from his earlier humoristic short stories to the drama The Senate of Madmen. As many other Polish writers, Korczak perceived literature as an actual space of freedom, but, unlike other Jewish literary men writing in Polish, he has always remarked his belonging to Jewishness and his firm belief in an equal and double identity (Jewish and Polish). In his long literary career Korczak never practiced ethnic “agnosticism”: on the contrary he spread Ashkenazi humoristic tradition and topics from yiddish literature (szmonces, the type-figures of the schlemiel and the nudnik, the topos of the shtetl) in Polish culture, converting them from an exclusive symbol of the Jewish identity into elements of a cultural universality