At to date, the early poetry of Julian Tuwim (1894–1953) has neither been placed in the context of the First World War, nor been factored into discussions about his Jewish identity. He is regarded primarily as a poet of the interwar years, even though many of the poems published after 1918 did in fact originate during the First World War. This article proposes that the events of the war provoked an examination of identity constructions in Tuwim’s texts, and that the resolutely expressive use of language in his early poems creates a textual perspective of ironic distance. From this perspective, the ‘comical beating of the Jews’ is transformed into a violent act of exclusion, and the euphoria of war is transformed into a catastrophe. His poetics of linguistic expressiveness represents a radical break with elaborate imagery and metaphorical symbolism, and pointed the way for later writers in the 20^th century.