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The text by Pesach Bergman (1898–1944) is an excerpt from his fictionalized memoirs about the life of the shtetl of Widawa from the late 19th century to the 1930s. Written in Yiddish, it was translated into Polish by Dr. Marcin Urynowicz, with the assistance of Sara Arm. It constitutes an original and unique literary genre in itself, which is closest to the meditation (Latin: soliloquia), combining elements of social criticism and sentimental recollections.
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Oskarżona: Vera Gran (Vera Gran: The Accused), a hybrid biographical work relating the life story and testimony of the Warsaw ghetto singer by the Polish second generation author Agata Tuszyńska, was translated to many languages. Yet, all the translations were made on the basis of the French one, which in fact reflects a strongly edited version of the original text. As the author of the article argues, the modifications introduced to Oskarżona: Vera Gran upon its release on the foreign markets go far beyond the standard editing procedures and have to do with the fact that Tuszyńska’s original text openly questions a certain fixed paradigm of representing the Holocaust and some of the socially sanctioned patterns of Shoah remembrance. The comparative analysis of the Polish and the American editions of the book presented in the article traces the most significant changes introduced to the foreign adaptation, identifying three main areas where the misbehaved testimony to the Shoah – of the survivor and the secondary witness alike – was disciplined to conform to the largely globalised discourse of Holocaust memory, subjected to the regime of conventional representation and culturally reproduced reception patterns.
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In the 36,525 days of the twentieth century, between 100 and 160 million civilians lost their lives at hand of mass-murder, slaughter and massacres – that is an average of more than 3.000 innocent deaths per day. The pace has not slackened in the new millennium: statistically speaking, September 11 was an ordinary day. In his lecture, Zygmunt Bauman outlines and analyses the efforts made to solve the mystery that more perhaps than any other keeps ethical philosophers awake at night: the mystery of unde malum (Whence the Evil?) and, more specifically and yet more urgently, of “How do good people turn evil?” The latter is, succinctly put, the secret of the mysterious transmogrification of caring family people and friendly and benevolent neighbours into monsters.
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The article advances an approach to studying 20th century Jewish experience in the former Pale of Jewish Settlement that foregrounds individual biographies and places them in a larger cultural and historical context. Drawing on interviews and various other sources, this approach reveals, among others, how individuals challenge familiar categories of identification and thereby appeal to flexible research agendas.
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Whether or not we understand the Holocaust to be unique or following a series of catastrophes in Jewish history, there is no doubt that the writing that came out of those traumatic events is worth examining both as testimony and as literature. This article looks again at Holocaust poetry, this time circumventing Adorno’s much-cited and often misquoted dictum on poetry after Auschwitz. The essay challenges the binary of either “Holocaust poetry is barbaric and impossible” or “art is uplifting and unaffected by the Holocaust.” I analyse three individual cases of Holocaust poetry as a means of both survival and testimony during the Holocaust – not retrospectively or seen by poets who were not there. Aesthetic and ethical issues are very much part of a writing in extremis which is conscious of the challenge well before Adorno and critical theory. In a comparison of Celan, Sutzkever, and Miłosz we can see their desperate attempt to write a poetry that meets the challenge of the historical moment, for all the differences between them in their cultural backgrounds, language traditions, and literary influences. As I argue, although scholars and critics have read these poets separately, they should be studied as part of the phenomenon of grappling with an unprecedented horror which they could not possibly at the time understand in all its historical dimension and outcome. We should no longer ignore their sources and antecedents in trying to gauge what they did with them in forging a “Holocaust poetics” that would convey something of the inadequacy of language and the failure of the imagination in representing the unspeakable, which they personally experienced on a day to day basis. By not reading “after Adorno” we can arrive at a more nuanced discussion of whether there is a Holocaust poetics.
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Vladimir Solonari, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2019, 328 pp.
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In this essay, I discuss a particular narrative structure manifest in contemporary genocide narratives, a structure based on a distinctive presence of a first-person – usually male – narrator, who describes his experiences and reflections born in the course of his peregrinations to sites of mass extermination. Rooting my research in geocriticism, I explore ties between space and memory, which allows me to distinguish several levels of analyzed texts, tending towards metaphysical generalizations of nihilistic or patriotic nature. I apply the said analytical categories to my study of selected passages of Dawid Szkoła’s and Przemysław Dakowicz’s respective essays.
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The Jewish Territorialists, represented as of 1934 by the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonisation, searched for places of settlement for Jews outside Palestine/Israel. I here argue that Territorialist ideology demonstrated both continuity and change in the post-1945 years, and continued to focus on an investment in Diaspora life, Yiddishism, anti-statism, colonial and postcolonial attitudes, and Socialist Revolutionary idealism. This article thus challenges the notion that the Shoah spelled the end of non-Zionist Jewish political activities, by demonstrating the ways in which the Freelanders, headed by the enigmatic Isaac N. Steinberg (1888–1957), imagined an alternative Jewish cultural and political future after the Shoah. By mapping the Territorialist movement’s continued endeavours after 1945, this study also adds to our broader understanding of the rich spectrum of post-Shoah Jewish political ideologies.
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The author presents fragments of the diary of rabbi Josef Guzik’s from Dukla. In the introduction Farbstein characterizes the diarist and also discusses the tragic fate of the local Jewish community. Guzik kept his diary in hiding during 1943–1944. He wrote in Rabbinic Hebrew, using expressions and references to Jewish sources despite not having access to the books he was quoting. He treated writing as a mission to bear witness for the sake of the future generations. Josef Guzik’s writings go back and forth between the internal and the external world, revolving around four axes of time or space which intertwine in every entry. The original text did not survive. The incomplete copy of the diary is stored at Yad Vashem.
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The text can be divided into two parts: in the first part, we focus on the principles of protection of minority rights after the First World War which were addressed by the Paris Peace Conference (1919), and in the second part, we deal with the Jewish minority in Slovakia within the Czechoslovak Republic. According to the original proposals, the protection of racial, national, and religious minorities was to be incorporated in the statute of the League of Nations, but this concept was not accepted. Subsequently, the protection of minorities was included in peace treaties with defeated and newly formed states. The Czechoslovak Republic was committed to provide protection of life and liberty to all citizens, regardless of their origin, citizenship, language, race or religion. The Republic agreed that regulations concerning persons belonging to racial, religious or linguistic minorities were of international coverage and guarantees of the League of Nations. With its constitution and laws, the CSR created a framework within which individual minorities built both their relationship with the republic and their own identity in the new state. Further in the text there is a focus on the Jewish minority in Slovakia within the First Czechoslovak Republic. The Republic was among the first in the world to allow declaring Jewish nationality. This section focuses on the various layers of Jewish identity: religion, nation, language, relationship to Zionism, and political organization. The Republic enabled the Jews to live a full religious, social, political and cultural life.
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The principal research question pursued by this work is as follows: How do the Republic of Moldova, Romania, and Ukraine present one another in their history curricula and textbooks? How do the history textbooks of each of these three countries present the relationship between majorities and minorities?This book is thus focused on two main objectives: first, to generate improved understanding of the state of the discipline of history in these countries via discussion of reforms to and debates around history curricula in each country, and second, to shed light on the ways in which history textbooks in each of the three countries represent the other two and their peoples.Curriculum development and textbook production in all three countries still remain centralised. Textbooks are produced by state and private publishing houses. Most textbooks are curriculum-based and developed according to the guidelines issued by the Ministries of Education. Through their textbook publishing policy, these ministries control the content and quality of textbooks. History curricula and textbooks in all three countries have progressed, but we still encounter many problems. Among them are the following:• the content of curricula and history textbooks continues to place too much emphasis on national aspects to the detriment of the world, regional, and local dimensions of history;• it reflects the history of wars and violence instead of giving more space to periods of peaceful coexistence, cooperation and cultural communication, or of mutual enrichment between various social groups as well as between nations;• it neglects regional history and cultural and historical links with neighbouring countries;• as it stands, it causes problems in history education and the development of ethnic identity, as well as the relationship between “Us” and “Others”;• it leads to or accepts poor textbook design.The relationship between national and European history remains a closely debated topic in all three societies. Their shared reality, as evidenced by this study, is that all three countries are currently not presenting one another in any meaningful way in their history textbooks at all educational levels. In all three countries, history education and textbooks are dominated by political history and narratives of victimisation. National histories do not pay attention to their neighbours.History textbooks play an important part in the process of collective identity formation, building a relationship with the past and creating an image of the “other”. The content of textbooks determines, in many cases, students' attitudes to their neighbours. Therefore, in order to improve the situation in history education and to develop a tolerant approach to “others” in history textbooks, there is a great need for joint efforts by politicians, professionals and members of civil society in Moldova, Romania and Ukraine.
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Social mobility is a relatively common phenomenon in society; however, in the period of the Slovak State (1939–1945) it was predominantly caused by the economic and social engineering of the single ruling Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party. Anti-Semitism was made one of the main pillars of the internal state policy. Systematic pauperisation of the Jewish community gradually affected each perspective of everyday life of Jews in Slovakia, including the limitation of Jewish people’s living space. This practice led to involuntary moving out from houses and flats in designated urban zones. Subsequently, this process culminated in the Aryanization of the housing formerly owned by Jews. The main aim of this contribution is to analyse spatial and social consequences of the reshaping of the Jewish housing opportunities with special interest in the entangled social mobilities of both Jews and Gentiles, which will be mainly exemplified through selected cases from the Banská Bystrica district.
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The Holocaust has found ample expression in Israeli documentary cinema throughout the years. The case study of the paper is the documentary film Oy Mama (Noa Maiman; Orna Ben-Dor Niv, 2010). In the documentary, third generation Holocaust survivor Maiman explores the way the trauma of her 95-year-old grandmother, Fira, influenced the second and third generation, and the way it combines in the life of Fira’s Peruvian caregiver, Magna, and Magna’s 5-year-old daughter, Firita, who are about to be deported from Israel. The paper will analyze the complex combination it generates between generations, past and present, Jewish-Israelis and research, which questions the trans generational transformation of the trauma, the paper will show how Maiman claims that the Holocaust shaped the identity of the second and third generation in her family. The paper will also show how through the combination of Fira’s, Magma’s and Firita’s stories, Noa asks, not only to commemorate a familial Holocaust story, but also to enable the viewers to interpret the present through the past, hoping it will help the plea of the foreign worker.
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Thomas Kühne, Mary Jane Rein (eds.) Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2020, 246 pp.
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In 1942, the regime of Hlinka's Slovak People's Party deported more than 57,000 Jews to territory under the control of the Third Reich. Of these, 40,000 Jews were deported to the General Government´s Lublin District, where Operation Reinhardt, one of the biggest extermination operations of the Holocaust, was just beginning. Its central elements were Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka death camps. Therefore, the vast majority of Jews deported from Slovakia in 1942 fell victim to extermination Operation Reinhardt. The article presents a set of documents that characterize deportations of Slovak Jews to the Lublin District, as well as Operation Reinhardt itself.
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