Leon Pasternak

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Leon Pasternak (1910 – 1969) was a Polish poet and satirist. His Jewish family came to Poland in the 1880s from the town of Tula, Russia, which was outside the Jewish Pale of Settlement, where Jews usually were not allowed to reside. Pasternak was born on 12 August 1910 at Lemberg, Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Tula Pasternaks belonged to a class of "Jewish Landed Gentry" that resided in the manors of the gentile aristocracy, and managed their agricultural estates. In the case of the Pasternaks the estates were in the vicinity of Yasnaya Polyana, Leo Tolstoy's estate. Tolstoy invited Leonid Pasternak, a member of the Odessa branch of the family, to illustrate his books. Leonid's son, Boris Pasternak who became years later a famous poet, wrote the novel "Letters from Tula", maybe in tribute to his relatives. The Tula Pasternaks were very much assimilated - one of Leon's aunts was called Marie, a Christian name that no "proper" Jew would have given a daughter of his. Leon's faith was not religious but a universal humanitarian one. In the 1920s Leon was a young idealist and committed communist. As a result of his political activities — writing satirical verses for socialist revolutionary periodicals, and spreading communist propaganda in any possible way — Leon had to leave Lwow for Warsaw. There his works quickly became popular, but soon the "literary cabaret" which he founded in collaboration with Stanislaw Lec (referred to as the Theater of Boys by some and as the Five Kopeck Theater by others), was closed by the authorities, after only eight performances. In 1934, Leon then a young man of 24, was imprisoned in the Bereza Kartuska prison, the first concentration camp in Poland in which political prisoners were held without trial by the Polish regime. His relatives traveled from...