Jewish Life in Cracow, 1918-1939, Sean Martin (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004), xviii + 276 pp., cloth $69.95, pbk. $29.95. After the Holocaust: Polish-Jewish Conflict in the Wake of World War II, Jan Chodakiewicz Marek (Boulder: Social Science Monographs [distributed by Columbia University Press], 2003), 265 pp., cloth $40.50. Between Nazis and Soviets: Occupation Politics in Poland, 1939-1947, Jan Chodakiewicz Marek (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 497 pp., cloth $100.00. The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland, Polonsky Antony and Michlic Joanna B., eds. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), xiv + 489 pp., pbk $24.95. Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland, Blobaum Robert, ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 348 pp., cloth $57.50, pbk. $24.95.

2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-146
Author(s):  
K.-P. Friedrich
2006 ◽  
Vol 7 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 13-26
Author(s):  
Jane Marie Law

Cornell University This paper is a comparison of two museums dedicated to the Japanese diplomat to Lithuania during World War II, Sugihara Chiune. Credited with having written over 6,000 visas to save the lives of Jews fleeing German occupied Poland into Lithuania, Sugihara is regarded in Europe, in Japan, and within the Jewish community as a whole as an altruistic person. This study is not an inquiry into the merits of Sugihara’s action, but rather astudy of how the process of memorializing, narrativizing and celebrating the life of Sugihara in two vastly different museums is part of a larger project of selective cultural memory on the part of various Japanese organizations and institutions. This paper situates the themes of altruism and heroism in the larger process of cultural memory, to see how such themes operate to advance other projects of collective memory. The case of Sugihara is fascinating precisely because the vastly differing processes of cultural memory of the Holocaust―in Lithuania, in Japan, and in a wider post-World War II, post Holocaust Jewish Diaspora each have different ways of constructing, disseminating and consuming narratives of altruism. This paper is based on fieldwork in Kaunas and Vilnius, Lithuania, in 2003, 2004 and again in 2005 and in Japan in 2005.


2021 ◽  
pp. 437-471
Author(s):  
Magdalena Tarnowska

The Holocaust and Rebirth in the Works of Sara Gliksman-Fajtlowicz, a Painter From Łódź, 1909–2005 Sara Gliksman-Fajtlowicz, a painter, came from a well-off family of Majerowiczs, the owners of opticians’ shops in Łódź. She studied at private painting and drawing schools in Łódź and Warsaw. Before the outbreak of World War II, she was active in the Polish art milieu. In 1933, she became a member of the Trade Union of Polish Artists (Związek Zawodowy Polskich Artystów Plastyków, ZZPAP) and participated in its exhibitions in Łódź, Warsaw, Kraków, and Lviv. She painted mainly landscapes, still lifes, and—less frequently—portraits. She published her works in the union magazine Forma. In 1940, she was displaced to the Łódź ghetto where she worked as a graphic artist at the Statistics Department. Thanks to this she could obtain art materials. Her clandestine activity was documenting life in the ghetto in paintings and drawings. She survived the liquidation of the ghetto and then was forced to work on cleaning this area. Liberated on 19 January 1945, she returned to her house where some of her prewar works had survived. After 1945 she continued her artistic career and exhibited with the ZZPAP, as well as with the Jewish Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts. In 1957, she emigrated to Israel. Gliksman died in Tel Aviv in 2005. The aim of this article is to verify and describe Sara Gliksman’s biography, to present her activities in the Polish-Jewish artistic community of postwar Poland, as well as to place her works in the context of issues concerning survivors’ memory and artistic attitudes toward the Holocaust, and art as a manifestation of hope for the rebirth of Jewish life and culture in postwar Poland in the second half of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s.


2008 ◽  
pp. 177-205
Author(s):  
Adam Kopciowski

In the early years following World War II, the Lublin region was one of the most important centres of Jewish life. At the same time, during 1944-1946 it was the scene of anti-Jewish incidents: from anti-Semitic propaganda, accusation of ritual murder, economic boycott, to cases of individual or collective murder. The wave of anti-Jewish that lasted until autumn of 1946 resulted in a lengthy and, no doubt incomplete, list of 118 murdered Jews. Escalating anti-Jewish violence in the immediate post-war years was one of the main factors, albeit not the only one, to affect the demography (mass emigration) and the socio-political condition of the Jewish population in the Lublin region


2007 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 26-29
Author(s):  
mayer kirshenblatt ◽  
barbara kirshenblatt-gimblett

Mayer Kirshenblatt remembers in words and paintings the daily diet of Jews in Poland before the Holocaust. Born in 1916 in Opatóów (Apt in Yiddish), a small Polish city, this self-taught artist describes and paints how women bought chickens from the peasants and brought them to the shoykhet (ritual slaughterer), where they plucked the feathers; the custom of shlogn kapores (transferring one's sins to a chicken) before Yom Kippur; and the role of herring and root vegetables in the diet, especially during the winter. Mayer describes how his family planted and harvested potatoes on leased land, stored them in a root cellar, and the variety of dishes prepared from this important staple, as well as how to make a kratsborsht or scratch borsht from the milt (semen sack) of a herring. In the course of a forty-year conversation with his daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who also interviewed Mayer's mother, a picture emerges of the daily, weekly, seasonal, and holiday cuisine of Jews who lived in southeastern Poland before World War II.


Author(s):  
Emily Robins Sharpe

The Jewish Canadian writer Miriam Waddington returned repeatedly to the subject of the Spanish Civil War, searching for hope amid the ruins of Spanish democracy. The conflict, a prelude to World War II, inspired an outpouring of literature and volunteerism. My paper argues for Waddington’s unique poetic perspective, in which she represents the Holocaust as the Spanish Civil War’s outgrowth while highlighting the deeply personal repercussions of the war – consequences for women, for the earth, and for community. Waddington’s poetry connects women’s rights to human rights, Canadian peace to European war, and Jewish persecution to Spanish carnage.


Author(s):  
Tim Watson

In this chapter I investigate the paradox that the writer who most vividly embodied the exchange between literature and anthropology during this period, Michel Leiris, worked hard to maintain separate identities and spaces for his life as an anthropologist (working at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris) and as a writer and memoirist (working at home). While Leiris came of age professionally and aesthetically during the fertile interwar period in France of “ethnographic surrealism,” his anthropological writings in the period after World War II show a surprising fidelity to disciplinary protocols. The chapter argues that Leiris’s ethnography of the Francophone Caribbean, Contacts de civilisations en Martinique et en Guadeloupe, tries to subvert those protocols, turning from a social science survey into something like a novel of manners by the end. Ultimately, however, this literary turn falls prey to tropes of imperial romance that Leiris ostensibly seeks to undercut.


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