Konstanty Gebert
Can Furies Retire? Do Furies Die?
A fury is created only to harass its victim. Once the victim dies, so does the reason for the fury’s existence; it can then either die itself, or attach itself to another being in need of punishment—one way or the other, it disappears from the story being told. But what happens if a fury decides it has done its part of harassing? Can it reinvent itself and retire, or does it need to die then too? And if it cannot retire, does it not become just a footnote to the victim, the way it has made the victim a footnote to his/her fate?
Konstanty Gebert is an author, journalist, lecturer, and political activist based in Poland. In 1976 he graduated from the Department of Psychology at the University of Warsaw. He was a prominent figure in the democratic opposition in the 1970s and 1980s, cofounder of the unofficial Jewish Flying University (1979), the Polish Council of Christians and Jews (1980), and a trade union of the employees in academia, technology, and education that merged with Solidarność (1980). After the government imposed martial law, he wrote articles for various underground publications under the pseudonym Dawid Warszawski. Konstanty Gebert also served as a war correspondent in Bosnia for Gazeta Wyborcza. His articles have appeared in a variety of national periodicals and foreign media. He has written numerous books, including a first-hand account of the Polish Round Table negotiations of 1989 as well as books on French policy toward Poland, on the Yugoslav wars, the wars of Israel, Torah commentary, and postwar Polish Jewry. He is the founder of Midrasz, the first Polish-language Jewish periodical in postcommunist Poland, and regularly lectures in Poland, Great Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and the U.S.