This Is My Path: Jacek Kaczmarski’s Sung Poetry As Musical Movement

The leading songwriters and lyricists of Warsaw’s popular music scenes after World War II were Polish Jews whose wartime experiences are nearly inaudible across the jolly marches of socialist urban reconstruction, the warmth of intimate love songs, and the sarcastic present-day critique of cabaret. Making and writing new music allowed many—as witnessed in correspondence and diaries by the likes of Władysław Szpilman and Leopold Tyrmand—to construct distance from wartime traumas and displaced or murdered friends and family. This is the intellectual community and artistic environment that shaped Jacek Kaczmarski (1957–2004), the storytelling poet and songwriter best known for his high-octane anthems about political unrest, which rallied the Polish opposition to state socialism. Indeed, Kaczmarski’s political resonance forced him into exile in 1981. When he was not touring Polish-speaking audiences from Chicago to Johannesburg to Perth, he ran a music program for Radio Free Europe in Munich. Across both platforms he grappled with his own involuntary migration through reflections on Polish Jewish history—confronting his own Jewish heritage and the near-annihilation of his mother’s family in the Holocaust for the first time. This paper focuses on the musical work Kaczmarski undertook as social history and personal testimony to confront what he understood as Jewish absence in Polish popular music. He sang and wrote to highlight community and displacement: he masked his voice to sound like Bob Dylan, set the texts of Osip Mandelshtam, and wrote songs to translate the imagery of Bruno Schulz’s artworks.