Sunday, April 5, 2009

Janusz Korczak Which Way and His chosing his Pseudonym







http://korczak.com/Biography/kap-1.htm







How Henryk chose his pseudonym Janusz Korczak. He feared madness descending from his father upon him as an hereditary illness, a common fear of the period. He poured out anguish in his novel Suicide with dark sentiments. A well known editor responded with no sympathy and Henryk responded "to wound a poet's heart,etc". He submitted a play which received honorable mention called Which Way and learned at the last moment he needed a pen name . The play was of a young man whose madness destroyed his family. It bore the pseudonym Janusz Korczak from the first book seen by Kraszewski called The Story of Janasz Korczak and the Swordbearer. The printer misspelled the first name as Janusz. He took the name of a Kraszewski character not by chance. Henryk's uncle Jakub dedicated his novel The Family Drama to Kraszewski appended "Take me under your wing, Master, like an eagle protecting a fledgling bird!". The young playwright is also seeking shelter from this author and the noble character of the fictional Korczak appealed to Henryk.






Between school and his tutoring, Henryk bad few spare moments, but alone in
his room, his only refuge in an apartment now filled with boarders, he was
haunted by the thought that he, too, might end up in an asylum. He was the " son
of a madman, a hereditary affliction. " He poured out his anguish in a novel
called Suicide in which the hero " hated life out of fear of insanity " He wrote
poems with the same dark sentiments until a well-known editor responded to one
that began " Ab, let me die / Ab, don´t let me live! / Ab, let me descend into
my dark grave! " with an unsympathetic " Go ahead! "
" To wound a poet´s
heart is like treading on a butterfly, " he confided to his journal. " I won´t
be a writer, but a doctor. Literature is just words, while medicine is deeds.
"




Two years later, in the fall of 1898, Henryk -by then an intense young
medical student of twenty with vivid blue-green eyes and reddish hair already
thinning at the crown-seemed to have forgotten his determination to abandon
writing. Hearing of a playwriting contest under the patronage of the famous
pianist ignacy Paderewski, he submitted a fouract play entitled Which way? ,
about a deranged man whose madness destroyed his family.
It won honorable
mention (despite the judges´ reservations about its somber mood and lack of
dramatic tension), but the play would not concern us did it not bear the
pseudonym Janusz Korczak.
Legend has it that Henryk learned at the last
moment that he needed a pen name for the contest and took it hastily from the
first book he saw on his desk: The Story of Janasz Korczak and the Swordbearer´s
Daughter,
by Poland´s most prolific historical novelist, Jozef Ignacy
Kraszewski.
The printer (it is said) made a mistake, and the name came out
Janusz rather than Janasz
. But, in reality, pseudonyms were not a contest
requirement, and Henryk's decision to take the name of a Kraszewski character
could not have been random chance
. Uncle Jakub Goldszmit had dedicated his novel
The Family Drama to Kraszewski with the emotional supplication: "Take me under
your wing, Master, like an eagle protecting a fledgling bird!"
The young
playwright seems also to have been seeking shelter under the Master's wing.
The noble character and courage of the fictional Janasz Korczak, a poor
orphan of gentry lineage, must have appealed to Henryk,
if not the contrived
plot. A broken leg prevents Janasz from serving in the Battle of Vienna in 1863,
but he does not let it prevent him from rescuing his beloved cousin, Jadwiga,
and his uncle, the King´s swordbearer, from the enemy. Denied Jadwiga´s hand in
marriage because he is only a poor relative, Janasz turns his fate around by
patience, honesty, and selfcontrol, eventually winning Jadwiga and a place in
the king´s court














Rearing children Janusz Korczak books on Pedagogy





When will parents begin educating and raising their children,so Henrk asks that unanswerable question. Henryk began tutoring the children of the wealthy and would mesmerize the children, enchanting them with grammar,history, and geography. This tutoring was a cathartic or purging of his own problems and would induce blessed forgetfulness, a tonic for him. His father died at age 52 in 1896 under questionable circumstances. His pedagogic strategy would help children to "see understand and love" as well as to read and write. I will try to access his article the first written "The Gordian Knor" which appeared in the popular illustrated weekly Thorns. The passage on Tworki was staffed by nurses who were Polish Nuns and this indicates that the Catholic Churched staffed many social agencies and medical facilities of that period.












To visit Tworki,
one had to take the Warsaw-Vienna train to the small town of Pruszkow and then hire a
horse and wagon for the remaining two miles over muddy, rutted roads. The nurses
were kindly Polish nuns, but Henryk seems to have been mortified bv the "condescending"
smile of the psychiatrist attending his father. The boy could not understand why
his father couldn't
pull himself together and return home to his family.
Over the years that Jozef was
institutionalized, the medical bills piled up faster than his wife could find
the means to pay them. One by one the paintings and fine china began to
disappear to the pawnshop. Everything that had stood firm in the drawing room
-that spoke of eternity- was now up for sale. Once, Henryk and his sister saw
their father´s cloak in a pawnshop window. It looked so familiar as it hung
there that it might have been in the hall of their apartment waiting for its
owner to come along and take it to the courthouse or on a stroll to the café. They decided to say
nothing to their mother, but to save their pennies and buy it back as a
surprise. But by the time they had scraped together enough money, the coat was
gone. "The pawnshop is life, " Korczak would write. "What you pawn-ideals or honor
for comfort or security-you´ll never retrieve again." He would make it a point
to possess only the essentials, and to arrange life so that he could hold on to
those few things he needed.
In order to help support his family, Henryk began tutoring the
children of wealthy friends and acquaintances. He never forgot the humiliation
of being addressed by some of the mothers in language reserved for servants or
his surprise at seeing himself in many of those overprotected rich boys who were
pale from being indoors all day and flabby from lack of exercise. He soon
devised a technique for putting them at ease. He would arrive with a briefcase
and unpack it slowly, letting them examine each object and ask questions about
it. Then he would mesmerize them with a fairy tale or two before leading them
into less enchanting realms of grammar, history, and geography. He discovered in
the process that he liked working with children-and that he was able to forget
his own anxieties while he concentrated on theirs.



Henryk´s efforts to develop himself as a tutor inspired his first pedagogical article, a feuilleton titled "The Gordian Knot," which was published in the popular illustrated weekly Thorns when he was only eighteen. Writing in the first person, he describes "wandering the world" looking for someone to answer his question: Will the day come when mothers stop thinking about clothes and strolls through the park and fathers about cycling and playing cards and begin raising and educating the children they have turned over to governesses and tutors? The dignified old man to whom he poses this question replies that he has seen the "miracles" of the nineteenth century produce gasoline, electricity, and railroads and people like Edison and Dreyfus, and so surely that day will come, bringing with it a new breed of mothers who will prefer books on pedagogy to the latest novels. After asking the old man precisely when this great day will arrive, the author gives the reader the choice of two endings: that the old man will fall down dead before he can answer, or that he will put out his hand and ask for three rubles.
The fledgling writer was already displaying his penchant for injecting irony and wit into the discussion of serious questions: how to motivate parents to take a leading role in shaping their children´s minds and character, and how to develop a pedagogic strategy that would seize the imagination of adults and help children to " see, understand, and love, as well as to read and write. " Seeing his article in print encouraged the young author to submit more. The editor of Thorns remembered Henryk as a shy young man in a school uniform who would enter the office tentatively, place an unsolicited feuilleton signed Hen on his desk, and leave without a word. Amazed at the talent in those pieces, the editor gave him a special column.
Jozef Goldszmit died at the age of fifty-two on August 25, 1896, under mysterious circumstances-possibly by his own hand. A large procession of colleagues and friends, both Catholics and Jews, representing the publications and philanthropies he had once been associated with, accompanied the immediate family in walking behind the horse-drawn wagon that carried his coffin to the Jewish cemetery. He was buried along the main aisle reserved for the Jewish community´s most prominent citizens. The tombstone, a tall, narrow slab (now riddled with bullets from the fighting that took place in the cemetery during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944), was engraved in Polish rather than Hebrew, as was the custom for many assimilated Jews. It was adorned only with an embossed wreath. Soon after her husband´s death, Henryk´s mother obtained a license from the Board of Education to take in student boarders-a socially accepted solution for widows in her position. Placing a notice in the Israelite, she offered tutoring for those who needed it, but did not specify that it would be done by her eighteen-year-old son, who was now the man in the family.

Janusz Korczak The Pawnshop is Life Tutor to children

Orphanage at Krochmalna






I have learned much from reading this passage. Henryk could not conceive why his father could not surmount his disease, that is he could not conceive the physical dimensions of his father's disease. The bills and debts piled up and the ideal world of the drawing room, its china and fine paintings were pawned to pay for that institution's care of his father.His father's cloak was pawned and he raised the money to redeem it, but alas, the cloak was gone and sold to another. This was the paradigm of life, the pawnshop. You pawn your ideals for comfort or survival and they can never be retrieved. Selling of the "soul" is a final and irretrievable act. His ideals however were stuck to him like impenetrable glue. He was prepared in "the tutoring phase" when he tutored children almost just a child in chronological years.






To visit Tworki, one had to take the Warsaw-Vienna train to the small town
of Pruszkow and then hire a horse and wagon for the remaining two miles over
muddy, rutted roads. The nurses were kindly Polish nuns, but Henryk seems to
have been mortified bv the "condescending" smile of the psychiatrist attending
his father. The boy could not understand why his father couldn´t pull himself
together and return home to his family.
Over the years that Jozefwas
institutionalized, the medical bills piled up faster than his wife could find
the means to pay them. One by one the paintings and fine china began to
disappear to the pawnshop. Everything that had stood firm in the drawing room
-that spoke of eternity- was now up for sale. Once, Henryk and his sister saw
their father´s cloak in a pawnshop window. It looked so familiar as it hung
there that it might have been in the hall of their apartment waiting for its
owner to come along and take it to the courthouse or on a stroll to the café.
They decided to say nothing to their mother, but to save their pennies and buy
it back as a surprise. But by the time they had scraped together enough money,
the coat was gone. "The pawnshop is life, " Korczak would write. "What you
pawn-ideals or honor for comfort or security-you´ll never retrieve again." He
would make it a point to possess only the essentials, and to arrange life so
that he could hold on to those few things he needed
.
In order to help
support his family, Henryk began tutoring the children of wealthy friends and
acquaintances. He never forgot the humiliation of being addressed by some of the
mothers in language reserved for servants or his surprise at seeing himself in
many of those overprotected rich boys who were pale from being indoors all day
and flabby from lack of exercise. He soon devised a technique for putting them
at ease. He would arrive with a briefcase and unpack it slowly, letting them
examine each object and ask questions about it. Then he would mesmerize them
with a fairy tale or two before leading them into less enchanting realms
ofgrammar, history, and geography. He discovered in the process that he liked
working with children-and that he was able to forget his own anxieties while he
concentrated on theirs.

Janus Korczak son becomes Father to Joszef Goldszmidt







Tworki is the madhouse that Henryk's father is committed to due to his uncontrollable behavior . Up until that point, he cares for his father and becomes father to him. Already there is a set pattern to Janusz's concern as a father to all needing his comfort and help when even the circumstances of that fatherhood became extremely painful for him to function in that capacity.And he was so young and yet so old in countenance.



Tworki is the asylum described here and built in a fairly progressive environment. I was surprised at reading the description of Tworki of the treatments given their patients as "progressive" in the European sense of the term as they were, the therapies, that is. Its treeless desolation and swamps were par,I suppose, but the treatments in that backward "oriental country" were modeled on the then European treatments. Gardening and carpentry no less!







As his father´s condition worsens, the narrator has to spend more time at
home with him. He is becoming the father, while his sick father is assuming the
role of the son. In the middle of the night he is awakened by the beating of his
own heart, and feels as if he were " crying over the grave of his childhood ."
One day he lets his father win at cards because it seems to make him happy.
" Oh, my God ," he prays that night, " let him survive to an old age. And give
me the strength to help him. "
He knows that his father must have once had
dreams like his. But "now there is nothing left."
Sometime in the early
1890s, Jozef Goldszmit´s behavior became unmanageable at home. He was committed
to a "madhouse," probably the newly built brick asylum in Tworki
, twenty miles
south of Warsaw. Built at great expense by the Czar, Tworki housed four hundred
and twenty patients from all over the Russian Empire; it even had a separate
walled-off compound for criminals awaiting trial. A treeless, desolate place,
whose high red-brick walls were surrounded by unhealthy swamps
, it was the most
advanced mental hospital in the Empire -the first to be lit by electricity. A
large Russian Orthodox church together with a small Roman Catholic chapel but
dominated the grounds. The wards were filled with people suffering from
syphilis, alcoholism, schizophrenia, and manic-depressive psychosis
. Treatment,
modeled on the European system, stressed work projects such as carpentry. There
was little in the way of medicine other than herbs, chemicals, or barbiturates.
Distinguished patients like Jozef were quartered in a special walled-off
compound, given small plots to garden, and encouraged to read and spend time in
the carpentry shop. Those who became uncontrollable were put into straitjackets
and tied down in bed.





Jesus/Sananda







Much more of the Christ consciousness has been expounded than the accounts by ellipsis in the synoptic gospels . A wealth of elaboration of the consciousness that is the Christ has been endlessly,so it seems, expounded. And we are made the better for that elaboration,to be certain. We could never limit the Christ to a body of scripture though He is explained thereby. The Gospel of John states that if all books were to be written of "Jesus" ,the whole world could not contain them. I now see the depths and heights of this profound statement.





  • the Christ self the Christ consciousness Example to have been pictured out in that 2000 year dispensation


  • Only begotten Son of G-d , Lord and Savior


  • Cosmic Christ World Savior World Teacher


  • Yeshua the Messiah of Israel Avatar of the Piscean Age


  • Formerly Chohan of the 6th Ray now Lady Master Nada fully assumed this office


  • Only Begotten Son for this evolution


  • Represents Universal Christ and Holy Christ self


  • Responsible for the underscored entities twelve legions of angels


  • Sananda in the inner planes-He is Master of the Sixth Ray-idealism and devotion which is indigo


  • Incarnated as Jesus-High Priest according to the order of Melchizedek "King of Righteousness"


  • Overshadowed in His Life by Lord Maitreya


  • His lives consisted of the 6 lives listed below


  • He works with the Archangel Uriel




Christ
Jesus
Jesus Christ, Jesus the Christ - because of the
fullness of manifesting the Christ Self , "Only Begotten Son of God", Lord and
Savior (Saviour), Incarnation of the Word, the Universal Christ (the Word
Incarnate) , Cosmic Christ , World Savior (Saviour) , World Teacher , Yeshua,
the Messiah of Israel , Avatar of the Piscean Age - the example of the Christ
Consciousness that was to have been out pictured in that two-thousand year
Dispensation,
World Teacher (since January 1, 1956), Formerly - Chohan of the
Sixth Ray until December 31, 1959, when beloved Lady Master Nada fully took on
the Office of Chohan of the Sixth Ray,
Holds the Office for this evolution of
the "Only Begotten Son" - and therefore the Representative not only of that
Universal Christ but also of the individual Holy Christ Self.
Responsible for:
Ruby Ray , Purple and Gold Ray , Resurrection Flame , Twelve Legions of Angels
from the Heart of the Father/Mother God , Angels of Peace , Angels of Love ,
Angels of the Ruby Ray , Angels of the Purple and Gold Ray , Angels of the
Resurrection Flame .
Jesus Christ is known as Sananda in the inner planes.
He is the Master of the sixth ray, the ray of abstract idealism and devotion,
which is indigo.
During His incarnation as Jesus, He was a high priest in the
order of Melchizedek
and was overshadowed during His life by Lord Maitreya. He
also had lives as Adam, Enoch, Jeshua, Joshua, Elijah and Joseph of Egypt.
He
works with Archangel Uriel to bring peace, brotherhood, service and freedom to
people.
Many missionaries, lawyers, public servants, social workers, blue collar
workers, farmers and business people are on this ray.