Studies in Jewish History and Memory – serie

Children have a specific perception of the Holocaust: it did not destroy their earlier world view, but became the field of first experiences. This book focuses on the traumatic dimension of the Holocaust and how it is expressed (or left unexpressed) in children’s diaries. «Here and Now» under the German Occupation presents an analysis of diaries and school elaborations written in Polish by Jewish children during German Occupation. A Literary Return to Childhood during the Holocaust is dedicated to Polish retrospective literature, in which authors return to the experience of the Holocaust during their childhood years.

This book is an anthropological essay which aims to capture the elusive phenomenon of hideouts employed by Jews persecuted during the Second World War. Oscillating between life and death, the Jewish hideouts were a space of the most diverse and extremely complex human relations – a specific realm of everyday life, with its own inherent logic. Based on different literary sources, especially wartime and post-war testimonies of Jewish escapees, the author seeks to examine the realm of hideouts to develop a novel, interdisciplinary perspective on this often neglected aspect of the 20th-century history.

This book analyses the role of social networks in the process of migration. Based on stories of Polish Jews who migrated between Poland and Palestine in the 1920s, the author presents all stages of the journey and shows how networks of friends and families spread in different countries contributed to the migration experience. Presenting these stories through correspondence, she shows how migrants were not only motivated by traditional push and pull factors, or ideology, but also by dependence on other members of their social network. This book shows the process of migration from the perspective of their international social ties.

Edmond Jabès was one of the most intriguing Jewish thinkers of the 20th century – a poet for the public and a Kabbalist for those who read his work more closely. This book turns his writings into a ground-breaking philosophical achievement: thinking which is manifestly indebted to the Kabbalah, but in the post-religious and post-Shoah world. Loss, exile, negativity, God’s absence, writing and Jewishness are the main signposts of the negative ontology which this book offers as an interpretation of Jabès’ work. On the basis of it, the book examines the nature of the miraculous encounter between Judaism and philosophy which occurred in the 20th century. Modern Jewish philosophy is a re-constructed tradition which adapts the intellectual and spiritual legacy of Judaism to answer purely modern questions.

Seventy-five years after the Holocaust, Poland’s approach to its murdered Jewish community still remains a highly debated and often politicized issue. This book addresses this contested topic in an interdisciplinary way, integrating the approaches of memory studies, social anthropology and sociology. The authors revisited the material from the fieldwork carried out 25 years ago and compared it with the interviews collected recently with the younger generation of Poles. The result is a fascinating account of the process of collective forgetting that offers not only an original insight into Christian-Jewish relations after the Holocaust, but also a significant contribution to the reflection on the social mechanisms of remembrance and identity-building.

The book constitutes an innovative study devoted to modernisation processes among Lviv Jews during the period of Galicia’s autonomy (1867-1914). It takes into account Vienna’s influence on various areas of life. The author reconstructs a triad which is quite surprising: Vienna was at its top, Lviv below, and the Galician province figured at the bottom. Key processes and events are presented, including the success and failure of assimilation, the shaping of modern Jewish elites, political and religious conflicts, the birth of Zionism, economic and political migration, and the influence of Jews on the creation of modern Lviv. The book draws on numerous and often untapped sources from Polish, Ukrainian and Austrian archives.

The book is the first attempt in historiography to present the attitude of Christian Churches (Catholic, Evangelical, and Orthodox) in the Kingdom of Poland towards Jews at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The work is based on a rich and varied source base, it presents many new facts and introduces unknown or unused sources. The monograph deals with the issues of extremely important historical significance, often remaining at the center of the updated historical and political disputes. Despite the difficulty and complexity of the topic, the analysis of the source material, the narrative, and the conclusions contained therein were not involved in these disputes. The work is an important step towards understanding Christian-Jewish relations and Polish-Jewish relations.

This pioneering study shows what brought Yiddish-speaking Jewish intelligentsia to the Communist movement in the interwar years. They believed that Communism is not only a way to solve the Jewish problem but also to save the Yiddish culture. Biography of the central protagonist of the book, a Yiddish writer Dovid (David) Sfard, is just a pretext to show a full range of Jewish Communist activists (such as Hersh Smolar, Bernard Mark, Szymon Zachariasz, etc.) and their life choices. This relatively small milieu influenced and controlled the Jewish life in post-war Poland until the anti-Semitic campaign of 1968. Their lives, reconstructed thanks to sources in several languages, make up a panorama of Jewish Communist experience in 20th-century Eastern Europe.

The book deals with the issue of the Holocaust in the Polish literature for children and adolescents. Drawing upon some of the leading Polish authors of the twentieth and the twentieth-first centuries, the author reveals the historical, ideological, and cultural entanglement of their works. The main focus of the book is to search for reasons behind the outpouring of interest in the Holocaust noticed in the most recent Polish literature for younger readers. Among these reasons, the author lists the Polish local and historical context, the new approach to issues traditionally seen as taboo, the development of memory and postmemory narratives, and the postmodern shift from a discursive totality and universalist explanations.

This book is a reflection on the Jewish presence in two European capitals, Warsaw and Berlin, in the first half of the 20th century. It was inspired by the works of Polish-Jewish, Yiddish and German-Jewish authors, as well as by the connections between urban spaces and the formation of different varieties of modern Jewish identity. The spotlight is cast on images preserved in literary works, namely those concerning separate Jewish neighborhoods and the sphere of cultural interethnic contacts. By attempting to restore the presence of Jewish inhabitants of both cities, destroyed by the Holocaust, it may become possible to see how the imagined communities of the time were created and preserved in the texts, even if, in reality, the metropolises were transformed into necropolises.

In this path-breaking book, he reflects on the evolution of Polish Jewry in these years against the background of its enormous contribution to Jewish religious traditions and its tragic fate in the Holocaust. A Jewish community, ‘small in numbers’ but with a ‘big presence’, continues to function in Poland. This book is essential reading for all those who wish to understand this remarkable phenomenon.Antony Polonsky, Emeritus Professor of Holocaust Studies,Brandeis UniversitySmall Numbers, Big Presence is history rooted in assiduous dispassionate research, but no less, in passionate commitment to Polish Jewry. As much Pole as Jew, Stanislaw Krajewski was a witness to Poland’s postwar Jewish renaissance and the Jews’ de-assimilation. A frontliner in many struggles and triumphs, he tells the story with an insider’s knowledge of the intricacies of events and personalities.Moshe Rosman, Bar-Ilan University, IsraelThe most important is Stanisław Krajewski’s ability to capture complex phenomena with often mutually exclusive interpretations in a surprisingly new and original way.Stanisław Obirek, Professor at the American Studies Centre,University of Warsaw

The book thoroughly explores postmemory in the Polish historical and political contexts to reveal the multidimensional identity strategies of the second generation of Jews in Poland after the Holocaust, also called the "generation after". Kuchta provides a captivating reflection by focusing on transgenerational transmission of trauma, strategies adapted toward the Holocaust legacy, and ways of constructing Polish-Jewish identity projects in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The book comparatively analyzes literary works by the "generation after" while considering the influence of postmemory on the identity of people born after the Second World War. To that end, Kuchta analyzes autobiographical threads in texts by six Polish writers born in the 1940s and 1950s into families of Holocaust survivors, whose works can be read as identity declarations, namely Ewa Kuryluk, Bożena Keff, Roman Gren, Magdalena Tulli, Agata Tuszyńska, and Monika Sznajderman.

The book presents Polish-Jewish cultural contacts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from an interdisciplinary perspective. Using methods from Jewish, cultural, and literary studies, Prokop-Janiec takes a topographical approach by focusing on selected places, institutional spaces, and texts from the borderland.Her reflection begins from changes in the understanding of the borderland phenomenon that happened in recent decades. Transformations within anthropology and the development of a new conceptual framework in Jewish cultural studies provide an opportunity for reinterpreting modern multilingual Jewish culture and its relationships with non-Jewish cultures. The monograph covers rarely considered areas of literature, such as mass-circulated Polish-Jewish newspapers, Polish-Jewish serialized novels, textbooks, and children's literature. Transformations within anthropology and the development of a new conceptual framework in Jewish cultural studies provide an opportunity for reinterpreting modern multilingual Jewish culture and its relationships with non-Jewish cultures."A fundamental and essential work for anyone interested in this subject" - Prof. Sławomir Buryła, University of Warsaw

The Holocaust was a pan-continental event with a global impact: the evolution of its memory is, similarly, both pan-European and globally wider. This collection, stemming from a discipline-leading international project, explores the growth and change of Holocaust literature in Dutch, Polish, Russian, Hebrew, German, British, and American literatures and in a range of genres, for adults, young adults, and children. This collection will be a core resource for understanding the contemporary range of Holocaust literature and a first port of call for comparative work in this field.Robert Eaglestone, Royal Holloway, University of London.