Stanisław Lem’s Jewish Paradoxes

Marat Grinberg considers Stanisław Lem as a Jewish writer.

By Marat GrinbergApril 24, 2025

• SF

HARDLY ANYONE looms larger in the history of 20th-century science fiction than Polish writer Stanisław Lem (1921–2006), who exerted enormous influence on the development of the genre. A masterful and witty stylist, philosopher, and metaphysician, Lem has not yet been fully understood as a specifically Jewish writer and thinker who viewed the fissures of human memory and the cosmos through a biblical and exegetical lens.

To unpack the Jewish underpinnings of his vision, this essay will reflect on three of Lem’s works: his autobiography Highcastle (1966) and two novels, His Master’s Voice (1968) and Fiasco (1986). These texts contain the themes of memory and interstellar contact that are so central to Lem’s imagination, as central as the trauma he carried as a Holocaust survivor. The way he confronted these themes and his own past reveals that Lem should be viewed as a Jewish artist.

Lem was born to a Jewish family in Lviv, then known as Lwów, the third-largest city in the Republic of Poland (it is now located in Western Ukraine). Jews constituted one-third of the city’s population, situated between Polish elites and the Ukrainians disdained by them. Lem was enraptured by his birthplace, calling it in Highcastle “a nirvana.” Unlike the majority of Lviv’s Jews, who were exterminated during the war, Lem and his parents survived, aided by false documents, so-called “Aryan papers.” When Lviv again became part of Ukraine through annexation after the Soviet victory in 1945, the Lems were allowed to “repatriate” to Poland and settle in Kraków.

Lem chose not to divulge details about his Jewish upbringing, even claiming that he knew nothing about “the Mosaic faith” as a child, but Highcastle reveals the influence of Judaism on his way of thinking. The book consists of snapshots of Lem’s childhood—of the places and people who surrounded him. It also conveys his notion of memory as something with a life of its own, an independent entity. While writing the book, Lem wanted to be silent—a paradoxical position for an author—in order to let memory take over and resurrect his childhood self. When this didn’t happen, Lem describes, he discovered that “our thoughts are like underground tunnels that collapse.” Instead of his wholesome childhood self, he ended up with the wreckage of this “collapse”—the bits and pieces of his past. Lem laments that the all-knowing memory did not take over but instead manipulated and misled. It prevented him from entering the sites he sought, and it purposefully obstructed his nostalgic path. Lem presents memory as a deceitful labyrinth while recognizing its primacy, which speaks to the Jewish influence on his outlook. Yet where Judaism sees covenantal promise and the link between generations, Lem stumbles upon a chasm.

Two central episodes in Highcastle suggest Lem’s overcoming of this impasse. First is the description of his teachers and school—“the gymnasium” that, Lem writes, “[o]ne should treat […] as one treats the Absolute.” He continues, “My style waxes biblical, but perhaps one can speak of such things only thus.” In a whimsical midrashic mode, Lem imagines the biblical Jews as schoolchildren “playing hooky with golden calves” when God isn’t looking from his “Ark of the Covenant” lectern. In the same vein, Lem’s school becomes the place where the events of the Torah are constantly reenacted: the students kneeling in awe before the teachers’ “burning bush,” arguing “like Moses on Sinai when he was called on unexpectedly by Jehovah.” All in all, the young Lem and his peers stand “painfully face to face with the Unknowable, that divine element […] which I,” he says, “now try to invoke with the name of the Absolute.” Lem emphasizes that he does not mean this as a joke or parody. Instead, he offers something quintessential to modern Jewish literary imagination: a view of the world through the prism of the Jewish canon even after the links to tradition have been wrecked.

The second episode is similar but more intricate. Lem describes the game he played for years in secret at school: “making identification papers” that would permit him entrance into the lands and kingdoms he imagined. Identity papers were key for Jewish survival during the Nazi occupation, including Lem’s, but there was also a sacred component to his game. He describes himself as a “willing slave of the liturgy of officialdom, a petty bureaucrat of Genesis.” He connects “legal documentation with the Absolute,” which leads him to “the threshold of art.” Lem again transplants a Jewish idea—Law as the manifestation of the divine, and its replication as holy art—onto a new turf outside of tradition. He acts here like a Jewish scribe, and it’s remarkable that these passages were published in 1960s communist Poland.  

These episodes inscribe Lem into the canon of modern Jewish literature, inviting a special parallel with Franz Kafka. Despite his distance from tradition and the absence of explicitly Jewish characters in his texts, Kafka, too, views the human condition through the prism of Jewish scripture, especially its concept of the Law. Lem admired Kafka and perceived a fundamental affinity between their worldviews. In a letter to his English translator and confidant Michael Kandel, Lem wrote, “But what is it that [Kafka] leads us to in the end? A Mystery […] the impenetrability of the Mystery.” Lem picks up where Kafka leaves off, pursuing this mystery at the ontological level, probing the very core of human existence in relation to the cosmos. He translates Kafka’s theological artistic imagination into his own speculative terms.

The divine silence portrayed by Kafka takes on interstellar proportions for Lem. Central to Lem’s oeuvre is the impossibility of establishing contact with an interplanetary force that might be transcendent—the radical Other—and this invariably brings to mind the Hebrew Bible’s concept of the divine. Lem always pits his characters against the ineffable, whatever that might be, which leads to their traumatic and revelatory experience of the Mystery. A great example of this galactic miscommunication and muteness occurs in His Master’s Voice, published in Polish in 1968 and masterfully translated into English by Kandel.

The novel’s plot is quintessential Lem: by sheer accident, scientists identify a signal from space that, they hypothesize, might have come from another civilization. An international group of experts convenes to decode the signal, only to realize, after painstaking experiments, that their mission of translating it and establishing contact is futile. One member of the group, Holocaust survivor and renowned philosopher Dr. Saul Rappaport, recounts a horrifying war experience. During a roundup and execution of Jews in an occupied city, a film crew drove in: “Rappaport did not know then—or later […]—what had happened. Perhaps the Germans intended to film a pile of corpses.” The Nazi officer in charge ordered the surviving Jews to film and asked for one volunteer, though it was unclear what the volunteer would need to do. Rappaport recalls that he felt torn: he wanted to “step forward […] but he did not budge.” Finally, another prisoner volunteered. He vanished with the two Nazis “behind a broken wall.” After a few shots, he reappeared, covered in blood but unhurt, and rejoined the other inmates. The volunteer’s job, it turned out, was to move the bodies of the executed. Rappaport was among the few left alive by sheer chance. Lem revealed in a December 1972 letter to Kandel that Rappaport’s story was his own: “What happened […] to Dr. Rappaport is what happened to me.” Lem replicates the exact details of the horror he experienced, except for “one extra element, the call for a volunteer.” The invention of this call is key, and it unlocks the core of Lem’s philosophy.

In the text, Rappaport himself wonders why the German officer, who was in full control of the condemned Jews, needed a volunteer at all. His explanation presents Nazi evil as a parallel to the hopelessness of cosmic contact: “Although he spoke to us, […] we were not people. He knew that we comprehended human speech but that nevertheless we were not human […] Therefore, even if he had wanted to explain things to us, he could not have.” This Nazi officer—“a young deity of war,” a figure of “fate, which one did not have to explain”—is like a transcendent and malignant force with which it is impossible to communicate. While in the cosmic case, the lack of communication is “received metaphorically, as a kind of fable,” here “it is completely literal”: radically dehumanized by the Nazis, the Jews are the human “species” confronting the inexplicable and all-too-real horror of annihilation.

Rappaport tells his story to the narrator of His Master’s Voice, Peter Hogarth, a mathematician and Lem’s other alter ego. Hogarth proposes that the power that sent the signal from space can indeed be divine, “mysterious as it was dramatic,” and “the only equivalent available to [him] of holiness.” If “read correctly,” Hogarth believes, the signal would lead to revelation; however, the secret to reading it correctly cannot be fathomed. With this conundrum, Lem seems to invoke Kafka’s famous retort to Max Brod about whether there’s hope in the universe: “[P]lenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope—but not for us.”

The conclusion of the novel extends this hopelessness to the breach in internal human communication. Lem ends His Master’s Voice with a devastating statement from Hogarth on the lack of human empathy and the impossibility of feeling one with the living and the dead. He wonders, “What would happen to us if we could truly sympathize with others, feel with them, suffer for them?” Hogarth believes the results of such true empathy would be excruciating: “If from every unfortunate, from every victim, there remained even a single atom of his feelings, if thus grew the inheritance of the generations, if even a spark could pass from man to man, the world would be full of raw, bowel-torn howling.”

Via Hogarth, Lem is lamenting what he cannot reclaim—his Judaism. The choice of words here is significant. The “inheritance of the generations” alludes to the Jewish concept that all souls are bound in the toils of life, while “a spark” evokes “dos pintele Yid”—the spark that remains within each Jew and carries the Jewish spirit into eternity. To Lem, this everlasting unity is the tragically unattainable personal and universal ideal. Like Nabokov, Lem wishes to exclaim, “speak, memory!” (the title of Nabokov’s 1951 memoir), but he knows that this call would likely remain unanswered. In Highcastle, after all, memory deceives and obstructs instead of unveiling and healing. Paradoxically, within Lem’s work, these expressions of tragedy and trauma coexist with premonitions of hope and revelation.

A case in point is Lem’s final novel, the scientifically dense and mesmerizing Fiasco, first published in German in 1986 (and once again translated by Kandel). Reflecting Lem’s own fear of aging and approaching death, the novel revisits the scenario of His Master’s Voice. The plot takes place on the spaceship Hermes, whose international crew consists of physicists, doctors, a priest, a supercomputer named DEUS, and the pilot Pirx, frozen during the previous expedition and brought back to life. Hermes succeeds in approaching the planet Quinta, a world the crew believes to be inhabited by a highly evolved species currently embroiled in an apocalyptic war. Determined to establish contact with this civilization, even at the cost of destroying it, Hermes dispatches the pilot on a reconnaissance mission. Despite the fact that the Quintans sent a message inviting him ashore, once Pirx lands, he encounters nothing but emptiness and silence amid an impenetrable maze. Interpreting the situation as a trap, Hermes initiates the demolition of the planet. As the “thermal blast” eviscerates it, Pirx, engulfed in flames, falls to the ground. In this final moment of agony, “he realized that he had seen the Quintans.”

Even at the point of annihilation, Lem allows for the possibility of revelation. Seeing and revelation are intricately linked in the Hebrew Bible. Like Moses who saw God face-to-face, or Job who says to God, “I had heard You with my ears, / But now I see You with my eyes,” the pilot sees the Quintans. What mystery was unlocked via this seeing? Whatever the answer may be, it’s certain that Lem persists in looking for a way out of the cosmic labyrinth and for the Absolute that may be hiding there.