Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Polenstudien
Refine
Document Type
- Review (21)
Has Fulltext
- yes (21)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (21)
Institute
The growing interest in the Jewish past that has been visible in Poland in the last two decades gave rise to a wide range of cultural and commemorative initiatives across the whole country. The collection of essays "Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland" is an academic response to these developments. Edited by Erica Lehrer (author of "Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places" [link]) and Michael Meng (author of "Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland" [link]), the volume explores the question of how today's Poland responds to its Jewish (and not only Jewish) past. As editors Lehrer and Meng note in their introduction, 'space as a common analytical category' (p. 3) is the unifying element of the whole volume. As a result, most authors look at different sites of Jewish past (from centres such as Cracow and Warsaw, to less known Szczecin and Lodz, to entirely local examples of Chmielnik and Brzostek), with only a few of them (Tyszka, Cohn and to some extent Kapralski) trying to look at the issue of space from a wider perspective. Since the authors of the thirteen articles collected in this work represent various academic disciplines (from history to anthropology), "Jewish Space" is a truly interdisciplinary study. This diversity, however, is both a strength and weakness of the book.
The main aim of this collection of essays is to challenge the general Western historical approach to the results of the Treaty of Versailles of 1919. The peace treaty (or, to be more accurate, a number of peace treaties) was signed between Allied and Central Powers and it established a new political order that was to govern European politics for the next twenty years. Essays published in this volume attempt to present a more complex picture of the post-World War I politics. As the authors argue, European peace after the Great War was governed not only by the Treaty of Versailles, but also by the Treaty of Riga signed in March 1921. In other words, Riga played as important a role in the East as Versailles did in the West. The book is not the first attempt to put the Treaty in a wider context. It is rather surprising that the editor of the volume does not mention Traktat ryski roku 1921 po 75 latach (1998), which is an earlier collection of essays edited by Mieczysław Wojciechowski.
Anna Laudau-Czajka's "Polska to nie oni. Polska i Polacy w polskojęzycznej prasie żydowskiej II Rzeczypospolitej" presents a very interesting approach to Jewish-Polish relations in interwar Poland. The book looks at the issues of Polish antisemitism, Jewish patriotism and assimilation by analysing Jewish newspapers published in Polish, making the issue of language the most important element of the study. Landau-Czajka is fully aware of the nuances of Jewish interwar press, understanding the difficulties of her own work and presenting a collection of different case studies that should be treated more as a catalogue of questions than as a list of clear answers (p. 11). She is also aware of the tricky issue of public opinion and the fact that Jewish press published in Polish, though read mostly by acculturated (not assimilated) Jews, cannot be considered as an expression of any universal Jewish perceptions of Poles and Poland (pp. 42-3). It cannot even be considered as an expression of acculturated Jews' opinions, partly because different newspapers presented different opinions, partly because these opinions changed over time.
The Anonymous Poet of Poland, as well as other studies by Gardner, was undoubtedly a pioneering work when it was first published. Today the decision to reprint this book may appear a little odd, but let us hope that it may initiate a greater interest in Polish Romantic writing, both in Poland and abroad.
"Bożena Keff's essay is not a historical work, but reflection on culture" we can read on the cover of "Antysemityzm". It is a very good summary of the book which offers a nice summary of the history of anti-Semitism in Europe and Poland. Aiming at a wide audience including "college students, university students, teachers and lecturers", the book may serve as an introduction to the topic for those who have never had a chance to read more comprehensive studies discussing the same problem.[1]
Anti-Jewish Violence. Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History, edited by Jonathan Dekel-Chen, David Gaunt, Nathan M. Meir and Israel Bartal, is a collection of eleven essays devoted to pogroms and their role in the history of Jewish-non-Jewish relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Without looking at pogroms through the lens of the Holocaust, the authors succeeded in presenting different types of pogroms (or the lack of them at the times of the growing anti-Jewish violence) in a new and highly unique way.
Warsaw. The Jewish Metropolis is an impressive collection of twenty five scholarly essays devoted to Warsaw and its Jewish community, from the earliest (mostly illegal) Jewish settlements in the Polish capital in the sixteenth century to the destruction and reconstruction of the Jewish community in the twentieth century. The book is divided into two parts: Part I ("The Rise of the Metropolis") discusses over four centuries of Jewish history in Warsaw prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. Part II ("Destruction of the Metropolis and Its Aftermath") presents new approaches to the tragic events of the post-1939 era. As the editors argue in the introduction to the volume, Warsaw's status of 'the first true metropolis in diasporic Jewish history' was not only about the numbers of Jews living there, but also about the diversity of the Jewish community (p. 2). This element became one of the recurring themes in almost all essays discussing the pre-war period.
In "Shattered Spaces. Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland" Michael Meng looks at two cases of remembering, preserving and reconstructing the Jewish past from 1945 to 2010. In his presentation of a "shifting history of Jewish sites" (p. 10), the author analyses five cities: Essen, Berlin (East and West), Potsdam, Wroclaw and Warsaw. While the Polish and German capitals were chosen as the largest Jewish cultural centres before the war, the three other cities "provide different glimpses into the postwar history of Jewish sites" (p. 10). Five chapters of the book present dichotomies and similarities between his case studies breaking with the common assumptions of the good West (preserving Jewish places) and bad East (destroying and erasing them). Though governed by different principles and ideas, Germany and Poland engaged in similar activities towards postwar Jewish ruins creating "a parallel history across a diverse region" (p. xii).
"Polish Risorgimento" by Lidia Jurek explores contacts and problems relating to Polish-Italian relations in the years 1848-1871. The book, based on the author's PhD thesis, is the first instalment of the "Eastern European Culture, Politics and Societies" series and it concentrates on three main problems: the presence of Italian models in the Polish search for reconstructing the Polish nation, the impact of successful Italian unification on Polish elites and their national identity-making and, finally, the relationship between nationalism and religion. These issues are discussed in three parts, each one dealing with "different national strategies which were drawn from the Italian example" (p. 45). Although Jurek's work is not the first dealing with this subject, it presents the most complex picture of these contacts.
Mordechai Zalkin's work, published by Brill in 2016, is the English version of his book published in 2008 in Hebrew under the title From 'Heder' to School: The Modernisation Process in 19th Century East European Jewish Education. The book is a relatively short study of the ways in which the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) and its proponents (maskilim) attempted to modernise the education of Eastern European Jews (here limited geographically to the territories of Russia, particularly the Pale of Settlement). As Zalkin argues, the subject of education has usually remained on the margins of wider studies of Haskalah. His work offers a unique insight into the "formulation of maskilic educational thinking" (p. 1). Although the author is fully aware of all major debates taking place among the maskilim, he devotes only one section of the book (chapter 5) to the practical implementation of these ideas. Because of its brevity (the book is 192 pages long, with only about 160 pages of actual content), Modernizing Jewish Education in Nineteenth Century Europe requires a very good knowledge of the nuanced history of Jewish Enlightenment, since Zalkin does not even attempt to introduce neither historical nor ideological context, in which all the theoretical debates on the subject of Jewish education took place