Izrael Poznański was a serious man. Was he born into poverty? He'd liked us to have us believe that, but it's doubtful. He took over the family business at the age of 19 in 1851; by 1877 he had built one of the three largest cotton mills in Łódź, enterprises that had turned this nondescript village into the fifth-largest city of the Russian Empire (after Moscow, St Petersburg, Warsaw and Kiev). Together with his great rivals, the German industrialists Karl Scheibler, Louis Geyer and Louis Grohman, he contributed to the transformation of Łódż into a powerhouse of textile manufacturing.
The three Germans had already established their factories in 1840s and 1850s, and these drew in tens of thousands of people eager for regular work and wages. Łódź expanded rapidly; by the outbreak of WW1, its population was nearing half a million.
Poznański was a ruthless and exploitative employer with a 16-hour working day (5am to 9pm). Pay was among the lowest in Łódź. But later in life, he turned philanthropist; his charitable works included the financing of a city hospital, Orthodox and Catholic church architecture, as well as support for Jewish charities.
The Poznański Palace is open to visitors; it is the family home of the Poznański family; below ground level it is also the museum of the city of Łódź, with excellent displays showing the city's growth, its history from a village in the Russian partition, German occupation in WW1, Polish independence, more German occupation, the communist era, and the city's current rebirth. One of the best museums I have been to.
Below: are we in Chambord? Is this Paris? View of a terrace overlooking the courtyard at the Poznański palace. Just visible through the trees to the right, the red brick of Manufaktura, the former Poznański textile factory that's now a retail and entertainment complex.
Below: the ballroom. Whilst not quite as big or grand as the ballroom in its contemporary palace in Książ castle, Wałbrzych (visited last year), it still makes an impression. Note the two-level bandstand/stage to the left.
While wandering through the palatial rooms that once belonged to this Jewish family, I was struck by a parallel with another stately home; one I knew well, having visited it several times in the previous century. Waddesdon Manor, home to fourth-generation scion of another Jewish family, Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild.
Built around the same time, both palaces, around the same size, are in the Neo-Renaissance style, and modelled on French chateaus. The interiors are similarly decorated and furnished, with oriental touches to the Art Nouveau decor; I wondered whether Baron Ferdinand would ever have socialised with the new-moneyed parvenue Poznański, in Monte Carlo or some other fashionable resort.
Despite the similarities, there's one glaring difference between the Poznański palace and Waddesdon Manor – location. Whilst the latter stands in agreeable countryside some 50 miles (80km) from the financial institutions of the City of London, Poznański built his palace right next door to his factory, its belching chimneys and its oftentimes fractious workforce. The ground-floor windows of the southern and eastern facades of Poznański's palace open up onto the pavements of ulica Ogrodowa and ul. Zachodnia – passers-by can literally peer in, standing the width of a brick wall from a world of unimaginable opulence. Quite unlike the privacy enjoyed in rural Buckinghamshire; Waddesdon Manor stands half a mile from the nearest public thoroughfare.
The basement of the Poznański palace is divided into two major exhibitions. One tells the story of how Łódź rose and fell to rise again; the other portrays social life across the centuries. Below: a recreation of a Protestant German kitchen from the late 19th/early 20th century. The work-ethic, tidiness, and investment in labour-saving gadgets, come across. Other interiors depict the day-to-day lives of Jews and Poles – but interestingly – not of the Russian colonisers. This has been a city of three – not four – cultures.
Poznański died in 1900, three days after attaining the age of sixty six and two thirds. He is buried in the
New Jewish Cemetery in Łódź, alongside his wife Leonia, who outlived him by 14 years.
In death, we are all equal, but Izrael Poznański's mausoleum, is, according to Wikipedia, "perhaps the largest Jewish tombstone in the world and the only one containing decorative mosaic." Below: the mausoleum from the rear, illuminated by the late-afternoon sun.
Below: the tombs of Leonia (
left) and Izrael (
right). The inscriptions are in Polish rather than Hebrew or Russian; the dates of death, however, accord with the Hebrew calendar (20 Shevat 5674 and 1 Iyar 5660 respectively).
Below: the mausoleum features a rare occurrence in Jewish funerary architecture of a mosaic, the work of Compania Venezia Murano from Venice. (Google Gemini refutes Wikipedia's assertion, stating that there are mosaics in some early-20th century mausoleums in the Jewish cemetery in Budapest.)
Below: the Beit Tahara (funeral home) of Łódź's New Jewish Cemetery. On either side of this hall, which houses the cemetery's museum, are two smaller rooms in which bodies were prepared for burial.
The cemetery is a long walk from the centre of Łódź, through the part of the city that was the Jewish ghetto, demolished and replaced with generic 1960s blocks of flats. There is, however, a good tram service, and tram tickets can be bought with (and stored on) credit/debit cards.
Izrael Poznański stands as a symbol of the city's rise to prominence, the story of how many faiths and cultures could have got on together to create a new value. His practices as an employer would not be tolerated today; the loss of Łódź's preeminence as a textiles centre is not mourned by those who recall spitting out blood from their lungs, a symptom of byssinosis, a disease caused by exposure to cotton dust.
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