I owe my initiation into the world of insects and plants to Meterling,³³⁴
the life of minerals to Ruskin³³⁵ (The Ethics of the Dust).
As for writers, I owe the most to Chekhov³³⁶ – a great social diagnostician
and clinician.
I have visited Palestine twice,³³⁷ I have seen its “bitter beauty” (gorkaya
krasota Palestiny³³⁸ – Żabotyński³³⁹), I learned the dynamics and techniques
of life for the halutz and the settlers from a moshav (Symchoni, Gurarie,
Brawerman).³⁴⁰
For the second time I have seen the miraculous machinery of the living
system adapting to a strange climate – Manchuria, now Palestine.
I have learned the recipes of wars and revolutions, I was directly involved
in the Japanese³⁴¹ and European³⁴² wars [x]³⁴³ and the civil war (Kiev),³⁴⁴ in the
334 Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949), Belgian writer, poet, essayist, author of natural and philosophical works.
335 John Ruskin (1819–1900), English sociologist, writer, social critic. Korczak quoted a fragment of his work, The Ethics of the Dust, in one of his radio programmes. See Korczak, Pisma wybrane, vol. II, p. 319.
336 Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904), novelist and playwright, classic of Russian literature.
337 In 1934 and 1936.
338 (Russian) “The bitter beauty of Palestine”.
339 Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky (1880–1940), political activist, Zionist, leader of the rightwing New Zionist Organisation, the so-called revisionists.
340 Moshav (Hebrew: seat, headquaters), a cooperative agricultural estate. Korczak mentions families he stayed with there. He made friends with David Simchoni and Yehuda Gurarie. See Korczak, Pisma wybrane, vol. IV, p. 399.
341 In 1905 he was called up to the Russian army, serving as a doctor in a train running between Kharbin in Manchuria and Irkutsk in Russia. He often visited the town of Quantchantsa, where his friends taught him Chinese. He returned to Warsaw in March 1906. See J. Korczak, Pamiętnik i inne pisma z getta, p. 11.
342 Between 1914 and 1917 he was sent to the Russian army for the second time, serving as the junior ward-head at the field divisional field hospital in Poland and Ukraine, among others in Glubotchek.
343 [x] “in the Bolshevik revolution”.
344 In the spring of 1917, after demobilisation from the Russian army, he stayed in Kiev. During the civil war he worked in shelters for Ukrainian children. He wrote about his experiences from that time in Momenty wychowawcze (1919). In June 1918 he returned to Warsaw.
