In the previous post I have detailed my search for the identity of Hosiasson’s “fiancé who is a mathematician.” I sometimes feel uneasy about my dissecting of the details of Hosiason’s private life, and I figured I might explain myself a little bit, try to describe where I am coming from.

Writing anything biographical about female scholars—women in general?—is fraught with danger. No one wants to be one of those people who write about women primarily in terms of who the defining men of their lives were: who they married, who they did not marry, and who their big important PhD supervisor was (for surely they could not come up with all those ideas on their own). But I do want to be able to write about whole lives, not just scholarly lives—because it is whole people I am interested in. And in real lives, the relationships that matter most are usually not the ones we have with our academic peers.

Janina Hosiasson was a philosopher. She was a serious academic, and one of my goals is to make her work available to contemporary philosophers, to make it known, read, and discussed. This side of the project—the Hosiasson Project, if you will—is not what this website has been focused on, for I have decided to do it fairly recently. Soon it will be getting its own scholarly home as a proper research project at the University of Vienna.

But she was also a person—a teacher, a friend, a wife, a communist, a Jewess, all of those things at a particular place and time—and what initially drove me into this research was wanting to get to know this person. So many people remembered her as somewhat special, magnetic, fascinating, intense—and yet we get very few glimpses into what that meant. Understanding that is basically what this Janina Project here is about.

And as a biographer, I have committed myself to finding everything that still exists that relates to her. When I became interested in Janina, there was barely any information available. At first I was desperate to find any material on her simply to have something to hold on to, to have something to build an image on. Over time, this search became a little more compulsive, in fear of missing out something crucial: I want to reach every piece of paper, every document, every memory recorded of her. This is a form of preserving a person, a form of paying respect even.

From the research perspective, I think that the only way to write any biography is to really pay due diligence to the gathering of the data from which the narrative is then constructed. It’s the most important thing to do in order to maximise truth and try to avoid falsity. It also means that every time something looks unexpected, inconsistent or downright weird, it should be further investigated.

Occasionally, this kind of obsessive digging into minute details opens up new avenues for further search. There is no such things as a Janina Hosiasson archive—no collection of letters and documents deposited somewhere at the end of her life. The only way to find out anything about her is through documents found in various places, and there are not that many of them.

The majority of the people that she ever interacted with disappeared without many traces as well. But every now and then, we get lucky: it turns out that she was friends with someone who lived long enough and ended up being considered important enough to warrant a personal collection somewhere. Every new connection I find means a chance for new material.

These unexpected, unlikely connections have already brought me a lot of new material. And Poznański is a rare case of someone who Hosiasson was apparently close to before the war, but who left Europe early enough to not have all his possessions burned. As always, the chance of finding anything groundbreaking is extremely slim, but it would be foolish to not even try to follow this lead. I already found out that Poznański was an amateur photographer and took photographs of some of his friends. Photographs which might now be sitting in a family home in Israel.

So, I will be obsessing over the boyfriends and other seemingly trivial matters, and occasionally recounting the process here. Someone has to, so that you—we—can eventually know things.