LÖW Ryszard

Born on 1 February 1931 in Krakow into an assimilated Jewish intelligentsia family; son of the civil servant, trader and reserve officer of the Polish Army Józef Löw, and the Polish philologist Dora, née Hecker. He spent his childhood in Krakow, where he attended the St Adalbert (św. Wojciech) Elementary School from 1937. Following the outbreak of the Second World War, he found himself in Brest on the Bug, under temporary German occupation at the time, and then in Lwów (Lviv), which was under Soviet occupation. He was deported from there to the Aldan region of Siberia in June 1940, where he remained until August 1941. He spent the following years in several locations in Central Asia, including periods in children's homes, while intermittently attending either Polish- or Russian-language schools. He returned to Krakow in June 1946. He attended the King Jan Sobieski Secondary and Grammar School, completing his advanced secondary education in 1948. He joined the Youth Organization of the Society of Workers' Universities (OM TUR) during this time. In 1948, he started studying history at the Jagiellonian University (UJ) in Krakow and economics at the city's Higher School of Economics. In January 1950, he left for Paris where he continued his degrees in history and economics at the Sorbonne and the École pratique des hautes études (Science Economiques et Sociales), graduating in 1952. In summer 1950, he also took a course in the culture of French civilization for foreigners at the Sorbonne. In 1952, he settled in Israel. He soon completed two and a half years of compulsory military service, remaining a member of the active army reserve until 1985. As a member of the infantry he was involved in several of Israel's military campaigns, including those in 1956, 1967 and 1973. He made his debut in 1953 with a review of Czesław Miłosz's Zniewolony umysł (published in English as The Captive Mind). Löw's review appeared in the Tel Aviv-based newspaper "Nowiny Izraelskie" (published for a time as "Nowiny Poranne"; no. 127). He continued to collaborate with this daily until 1960. From 1954 he worked for many years mainly in financial institutions as a statistician and economist, with the exception of 1957/58 when he was a bibliographer at the Beit Ariela Municipal Library in Tel Aviv. His interests as a writer, researcher and bibliographer focused on Polish-Hebraic literary relations. He also conducted research on Hebrew texts on Poland, publishing bibliographic overviews on the subject, including an article in "Przegląd Orientalistyczny" in 1959 and a series of contributions to "Twórczość" in 1963-65 and 1967. He also examined the influence of some Polish writers on Hebrew literature and the representation of Jews in Polish literature, as well as documenting Polish-language literary life in Israel. From 1958 to 1981, he was a correspondent for the Poznan-based Department of Current Bibliography of the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL PAN), submitting information on Hebrew texts on Poland. He also cooperated with several other libraries in Poland (the National Library, the Jagiellonian Library and the IBL Library), as well as the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature, supplying them with archival Hebrew texts on Poland and with Polish-language books published in Israel. From 1960, he took a series of trips, some lasting several months, around Western European countries and the USA. Between 1981 and 1985, he took supplementary courses at a university in Tel Aviv on the history of ideology, the history of Russia, and general historiography. In 1986, he took his first trip in decades to Poland. It was the first of what would become regular visits to the country as part of his activities as a scholar and writer. In 1986, he co-founded the Association of Authors Writing in Polish in Israel (which was affiliated to the Federation of Writers' Associations in Israel). From 1987 to 1998, and again from 1990, he was its chair. In 1993, he was appointed editor of the Association's yearbook "Kontury", which had been published in Tel Aviv since 1988. He used the pseudonym Leon R. Sawin for some of his own texts. He established a publication series focusing on Israeli Polish writers under the auspices of "Kontury". The series published works in Hebrew and Polish, as well as in bilingual editions. His articles and archival materials on Polish-Hebrew literary relations appeared in many periodicals and journals, including the London-based "Wiadomości" (1969-70, 1972, and 1976-77; here he used the name Leon R. Sawin), "Zeszyty Literackie" (1992-95), "Dekada Literacka" (intermittently between 1994 and 2005), "Akcent" (1997, 2001, and 2005-06), "Archiwum Emigracji" (1999-2003 and 2006-07), "Teksty Drugie" (2000-03 and 2012), "Miasteczko Poznań" (2013-17) and "Kwartalnik Artystyczny" (2016). In 1987, he joined the Israeli PEN Club, while in 1997 he became a member of the Israeli Association of Slavic and East European Studies. In 1998, he joined the advisory board of the journal "Archiwum Emigracji". In 2007, he was appointed as an international member of the Philological Section of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences (PAU) in Krakow. He has received numerous Israeli honours for his role in military campaigns, while in 1999 he received the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland. In 1956, he married Nina Finzi, a chemist of Bulgarian origin. They have two children, a son Gabriel Meir (1961) and a daughter Michal (1968). He lives in Tel Aviv.