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Review: Maciej Jabłoński, Przeciw muzykologii niewrażliwej [Against Insensitive Musicology], Wydawnictwo Nauka i Innowacje, Poznań 2014.
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This article explores two family or generational narratives – Anna Janko’s A Minor Extermination and Sergey Lebedev’s Oblivion – to tackle the question of intergenerational transmission, including from a biological perspective. Artwińska is interested in the inscription of figures and metaphors belonging to the genealogical discourse, as well as in their function in and beyond the text. Janko’s work can be read as a literary manifestation of the concept of epigenetics, while Levedev’s presents the metaphorization of problems related to the image of ‘blood ties’. The two family narratives exemplify how topical the notion of generation is in its genealogical dimension.
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Plato’s Timaeus, a dialogue on the creation of the world and the soul of the world, mentions a hidden mistake or defect inscribed into the structure of the cosmos. Gnostic philosophers examined this passage in the first and second centuries. In the Syrian-Egyptian writings of the Nag Hammadi Library, this mistake, on which matter is founded, becomes key to understanding the world as emptiness (kenoma). A similar perspective can be found in Isaac Luria’s Kabbalistic ideas as well as in the works of Franz Kafka. The latter’s short story ‘The Cares of a Family Man,’ a testimony to spiritual experience in which the author approaches the limits of what is human, has been variously interpreted by Theodor Adorno and other philosophers. Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem have made Odradek a reference point in their theological discussions. Rudaś-Grodzka’s anamorphic approach, meanwhile, presents a new reading of the story.
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SLOVENSKÝ ŠTÁT 1939 – 1945, PREDSTAVY A REALITA. ČESKÉ, SLOVENSKÉ A ČESKOSLOVENSKÉ DĚJINY 20. STOLETÍ IX. ARS MONTANA. UMĚLECKÝ A KULTURNÍ TRANSFER V OTEVŘENÉM PROSTORU ČESKO-SASKÉHO KRUŠNOHOŘÍ NA PRAHU RANÉHO NOVOVĚKU (1459–1620). 19th BIENNIAL BALKAN AND SOUTH SLAVIC CONFERENCE ON LINGUISTICS, LITERATURE AND FOLKLORE. HOSŤOVSKÉ PREDNÁŠKY NA KA TEDRE HISTÓRIE FF UP JŠ. XVIII. ARCHÍVNE DNI V SLOVENSKEJ REPUBLIKE. HOLOKAUST NA ÚZEMÍ DNEŠNÉHO JUŽNÉHO SLOVENSKA. DISKUSNÉ VEČERY ÚSTAVU PAMÄTI NÁRODA A KATEDRY HISTÓRIE FF UPJŠ V KOŠICIACH. VÝUČBA REGIONÁLNYCH DEJÍN NA ZÁKLADNEJ ŠKOLE – FORMY, METÓDY, KONCEPCIE, SKÚSENOSTI. THE GREAT WAR: REGIONAL APPROACHES AND GLOBAL CONTEXTS. INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON THE OCCASION OF THE FIRST CENTENNIAL OF THE BEGINNING OF WORLD WAR ONE.
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After the long period of intentional silence surrounding the subject of the Holocaust survivors in the official discourse of Israel, more and more often the Holocaust served as a justification for the Israeli military activity as well as it became a central element shaping the national identity of the Israeli Jews. This situation is directly reflected in the texts of Israeli mass culture but also has been widely criticized with the use of tools it offers. The main objective of the article is to give a brief overview of the history of this dual relationship between Israeli pop culture and the Holocaust memory, as well as to explain the special status it has in Israel from the first decades of the state’s existence until the period of an extensive presence of the topic of Holocaust memory in various kinds of popular media.
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Being one of the most prominent figures of the New York avant-garde scene since the early 1980s of the 20th century – John Zorn is almost nonexistent in the Polish musical studies. Moreover, even though his art is densely packed with the dilemmas of the contemporary culture, Zorn’s music seems to be unnoticed neither by the anthropology nor by the cultural studies. Style-wise, due to the theory of the Jonathan Kramer and other notable music theorists, John Zorn’s music should be classified as connected to the postmodern movement. In his early works Zorn explores different musical contexts: the concept of “high” and “low” styles, structural unity, eclecticism, popular culture, etc. But dated from the release of the album, titled Kristallnacht, the next period of Zorn‘s musical activity is deeply involved in search for the Jewish identity in music and therefore rerouted to the new political religious social and traditional context. In short, John Zorn through his music is questioning the fundamental issues of contemporary culture: its identity, existence and tradition.
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Beginning with Superman and the Golden Age of American Comic Books, by Will Eisner’s graphic novels and Art Spiegelman’s underground stories, till the most recent examples of artists from both American and Francophone comic schools – there is a long history of Jewish motives in the comic stories. The article presents an analysis of the relations between the identity of the authors and their comic books. Among them are i.a. Art Spiegelman, Michel Kichka and Jérémie Dres who represent both different artistic generations and cultural backgrounds; yet, they all explore the issue of Jewishness and express their thoughts by using the language of comic books.
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The following article aims to show places where pop culture merges with Jewish tradition on the example of comic books. The author tries not only to reconstruct the evolution of the genre and its changing reception but also to show the history of comic books which introduce Jews as their main characters. The emphasis is put on comics about the Holocaust and superheroes which have actually become a separate category of graphic stories. The author uses as an example the Polish comic anthology - Złote pszczoły, which is one of the rare examples concerning the comic art about Jews and which has been incorporated into the cultural heritage and rescue history. The article draws attention to the fact that this is and institutional comic in which animal symbols have an important meaning and the Holocaust is not mentioned by its name at all, which seems to be done on purpose.
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The authors of contemporary Polish crime stories frequently use the threads connected with the history of Polish-Jewish relationships, which are full of stereotypes, legends and concealments. This arouses the authors’ interest and makes them write the most intriguing novels. In my article I analyze such solutions used by three Polish crime story authors in some of their novels. The critical assessment concerns both the ways of coping with the stereotypes and the significance, which, in social perception, may be attributed to the fact of working out in crime stories the legends and concealments from Polish-Jewish history.
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In the article I pay attention to the contemporarily increasing importance of the family saga in the Polish Jewish studies. I propose the reading of the prose of Bronisław Wildstein (Czas niedokonany), Ałbena Grabowska (Stulecie Winnych), Ben Elton (Two Brothers) and Karina Schaapman (The Mouse Mansion. Sam and Julia). The 20th c. history of the European Jews present in these books usually focuses on several key pictures/moments/situations, that is: pre-war pogroms, the Shoah, and – only in the Polish version – żydokomuna [“Judeo-Communism”] and March 1968. I demonstrate their influence on pop-cultural narration through the analysis of Czas niedokonany in particular. In this story the inheritance of trauma, significant for the narration of the Second Generation, gains a supplement in the form of the inheritance of the Jewish capital, post-war Jewish careers and professional advancement. The article is an introduction to the profound study on the newest pop-cultural story tackling the subject of Jewishness; it also indicates the necessity of extracting from a large group of Polish, noble and post-noble family sagas the storylines centered on Jewish culture, based on a different ideology and distinct myths.
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The main purpose of the article is an analysis of the ways of existence of the Wandering Jew character in contemporary culture. Considerations include literary texts, movies, comic books and computer games. In the 20th and 21th century this motif is still present in pop culture, and the apocrypha is very interesting material for many reinterpretations and renarrations. The analysis is based on two types of narration – “biblical” and “non biblical.” The first group includes works where the Wandering Jew participates in the suffering of Jesus and has a possible impact on the course of events. The second group includes works where the Wandering Jew does not participate in life and death of Jesus; however, characters have his name or there are references to the legend.
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The paper deals with the image of Jews in contemporary Polish cabaret. Increasingly, homegrown artists take up the subject of anti-Semitism and intolerance although sometimes they include stereotypical figures, clever Jews. Sometimes you can still find very nostalgic references to the lost past. Generally, this subject does not enjoy the popularity of cabaret performers; their focus on describing the present Polish society rarely takes into account any representatives of other nationalities. The analysis of these representations is supplemented by the reflection on the vitality of prejudices against the Jewish community and the place of their Polish heritage in popular culture.
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A man mistreated day after day – experiencing his own death every day for years, denigrated, beaten, threatened, with no perspectives for the future – should hate his oppressor. The story of a Jewish Hungarian family of dwarfs shows that this is not always the case. In this sketch, the author analyzes the biographical narrations of the chacters of the book, who are clearly ambivalent towards doctor Mengele. It appears that the key to the interpretation of their behavior lies in deep psychological mechanisms. The analysis of the subjects’ narrations shows that Holocaust survivors suffered until the end of their days from, what psychologists and psychiatrists have named, the posttraumatic stress disorder. As the author is not a psychiatrist, she does not discuss PTSD symptoms from a medical perspective. The aim of the study is to look at the memories presented in the book with an approach informed by the humanities and embedded in the context of psychiatric terminology. The main analytical method is hermeneutics (Prot 2009).
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The Jewish community in Kraków were an example of the organizational forms used in the Jewish communities in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. They varied from community to community. The administration system and system solutions were defined under state authority regulations, local and private legislation and internal regulations of Jewish authorities. For the Jewish community in Kraków in the modern period the most important internal sources were the Kraków Community Charter and the community record books – pinkasim. People who worked for the community could be divided into two groups. To the first group belong the Kraków Community Board (parnasim, towim and fourteen kahal members). In addition to the Kraków Community Board there were a number of other officials of the community. They had several areas of responsibility: finances, maintenance of order in the Jewish quarter ad supervision of crafts and trade. To this group belong also judges [three to each of the three governing bodies]. To the second group of the people working for the community belong rabbi, cantor, ritual slaughterer and beadles, community secretary, midwives, doctors, street cleaners, public bath personnel, prison guards and sentries watching over the gates leading to the quarter. The analysis of the list of the Kraków’s community officials and functionaries showed as the power was in the hand of a small groups of inhabitants. Nevertheless, the system of the communal institutions proved very durable, probably because till the end of the 18th century there was no other alternative solutions.
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At the end of the16th century Kraków’s Jewish community was the most important cahal in Poland. This situation lasted until the middle of the17th century. Just a century later Kraków’s elders were begging the voivode of Kraków to protect them against claims of smaller communities, such as Wodzisław, which demanded jurisdiction over Jews in villages just by the walls of Kraków’s agglomeration. The lecture will show how the changes in Jewish demography as well as the king’s resignation from jurisdiction over Jews in private estates and other changes in political system of the Polish Commonwealth affected the situation of Kraków’s community and resulted in its loss of power in the state and among the Jewish population in Lesser Poland.
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Soon after the collapse of communism in Romania the period of the Second World War became the focus of heated debates with two intertwined issues related to it, namely – the personality of the wartime leader Marshal Ion Antonescu and the topic of the Holocaust. The article traces the emergence and evolution of these debates, while also paying attention to the way in which the European and Euro-Atlantic perspective of the country affected the memory of these particular issues. It comes to the conclusion that the memory of the Second World War was somehow “negotiated” and suited to fit the present-day necessities of post-communist Romania and raises doubts whether the outside pressure on Romania’s revisiting this dark chapter of its history wasn’t in a way counterproductive, leaving the possibility of the existence of two parallel versions of the past – one for internal and one for external use.
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The aim of the communication is to present the different manners utilized in contemporary Bulgaria for facing the painful problem of the participation of Bulgarian authorities in the deportation of the Jews from Thrace and Macedonia during World War II. On the basis of examples from the historiography, textbooks, literature, cinema, museums, memorials and public debate are discussed the difficulties in the construction of one common and indivisible memory on events connected to the theme of responsibility and guilt, throwing the long shadow of the past on the actuality.
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The paper shows an image and functions of Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish languages among Jewish Diaspora groups – the Balkan Sephardim and the Ashkenazim (the Ostjuden group) – in the period from the beginning of the twentieth century until the outbreak of World War II. The study is based on the articles from Jewish weeklies, magazines and newspapers from pre-war Bosnia and Hercegovina and from Germany/Poland. It demonstrates a double-sided attitude towards the languages. On the one hand – an image of the languages as determinants of Jewish identity. Touching on this theme, the authors of the paper also try to highlight the images of Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish and as determinants in a narrower sense – of the Sephardi/Ashkenazi identity in that period. On the other hand, the paper shows a tendency to treat the languages as “corrupted” and “dying” languages, and as factors slowing down the assimilation of Jewish groups and also as an obstacle for Zionist ideologies.
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The goal of this article is to examine how different events and phenomena related to the Second World War and the Holocaust are framed via Wikipedia articles written in Polish, Hebrew and English. Departing from the pillars of the theory of framing in mass media, the article conducts a content analysis of three articles, in three different languages. The articles under analysis are the following: “Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp”, “The Pogrom in Jedwabne”, and “Righteous Among the Nations”. The analysis will use the four roles of frames as categories, determined by Entman: definition of the problem/phenomenon, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and treatment recommendation. Analyzing how the articles fulfill each of the roles in the different languages, the research hypothesis is that the framing of the phenomena will differ between the versions, and each version will follow pillars of the collective memory of the Holocaust in its respective country. Findings, however, are not in complete compliance with this hypothesis.
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This article explores Gershom Scholem’s ‘On Our Language: A Confession’ (an open letter to Franz Rosenzweig on the secularisation of the Hebrew language) as well as Jacques Derrida’s essay on Scholem’s text. Underhill draws on the figure of the palimpsest and the cabbalistic concept of language in her attempt to reconstruct both texts. She also borrows Derrida’s notion of the ‘third language’ on the border between sacred and profane language.
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