I watched "Dwa ksiezyce" (Two Moons) with great interest. The first reason is that I am local to the area, and my native Lublin is only 50 kilometers away from Kazimierz. The second reason is more personal and goes back more than 30 years ago, when, as a young man, I was living for some years in Philadelphia. Being the only Pole in my company, all my friends and colleagues were of different nationalities than Polish, and by sheer coincidence, most of them were Jewish. We simply had a lot in common and had similar views. So sometimes I attended parties or even weddings in Philadelphia where I was the only person who was not Jewish. As the years went by, our small group of friends fell apart, and I came back to my native Poland. But even now, after so many years, if I come across something with Jewish connotations, it automatically arouses my sympathy and interest, and this process is probably subconscious. I have read the book "Paintings and Sculpture by Polish Jews" written by Jerzy Malinowski, where I learned that in the 1930s there was a colony of Jewish painters in Kazimierz. By browsing through their biographies, I was horrified to find out that many of those people perished in Nazi concentration camps. So it is understandable that the film "Two Moons" kept me interested. It was based on the short stories written by the Polish writer Maria Kuncewiczowa, who spent a good part of her life in Kazimierz and is even buried in the local cemetery. The film could boast a whole galaxy of famous actors who delivered good performances. To me, the stories were interesting, but somehow they left me emotionally uninvolved. One explanation is that I don't have enough insight into that world, which is forever gone. And I am not only speaking of the Jewish side but also of the Polish side. We no longer have any gentry or aristocracy, so I don't understand their ways of thinking and ways of life. But on the other hand, one of my favorite writers is Isaac Bashevis Singer and I also like the books of his older brother, Israel Joshua Singer, and the writings of Bruno Schulz. So I am simply not sure if "Two Moons" had any message for us-people living in the 21st century. But on the whole I am glad that I was able to see "Two Moons". And I am not giving up. Watching the film stimulated me to buy a couple of books of a distinguished Polish writer of Jewish descent, Adolf Rudnicki, who was also associated with Kazimierz. He survived the war and died in 1990, so I am anxious to find out more about his experiences and point of view.
