Cabaret Identity: How Best to Play a Jew or Pass as a Gentile in Wartime Poland

In the late 1980s, Stefania Grodzieńska (1914–2010), a Polish Jewish cabaret artist and satirical writer, composed her first work of nonfiction on a wave of fury. Titled Urodził go Niebieski Ptak (The Bluebird Brought Him), her book began as a biography of the great Warsaw cabaret director Fryderyk Járosy, and evolved into a personal recollection of the Holocaust and World War II, when she and her husband, songwriter Jerzy Jurandot, became close friends with him. Grodzieńska explained that she felt compelled to write “the truth” about Járosy after she had seen an inaccurate portrayal of him in the film Miłość Ci Wszystko Wybaczy (Love Forgives Everything; 1981): “I was furious. My rage exploded when [the film showed] a humiliated Járosy walking into the Ghetto.”1 Like many interwar cabaret artists, Járosy disappeared during Warsaw’s occupation, subsequently quit Poland, and was not permitted to return. That he should be slandered in absentia and posthumously was more than Grodzieńska was willing to bear. Yet “the truth” that Grodzieńska writes about Járosy is more broadly revealing. In foregrounding her Gentile professional idol, mentor, and beloved friend, she evokes a complicated portrait of her own, in parts spotlighted and elsewhere obscured. Grodzieńska explicitly seeks to restore Járosy to an ignorant Polish public, to bear witness to his consummate cabaret persona and his unseen artistry and bravery during the war. In the process, The Bluebird Brought Him underscores and validates Grodzieńska’s artistic development and its uses—her cabaret identity—and minimizes her identity and humiliation as a Jew during the Holocaust. As she writes it, Grodzieńska’s awed description of Járosy’s direction and performance showed her how best to play a Jew or pass as a Gentile in wartime Poland.