This article discusses the spread of the Polish language among the Jewish population in the 1930s. Its source is the daily press, which was one of the most important institutions of interwar Jewish culture in the Polish language and one of the key institutions in which Polish served as a means of written communication in Jewish life.

The press can be regarded as one of the principle sources indicating the main modern areas of Jewish communication in Polish and documenting the expansion of this communication from the public to the private sphere, from the exchange of opinions on social, political, and artistic problems to the discussion of everyday issues, family life, or even the most intimate subjects. The Polish-Jewish popular daily press created opportunities for speaking about everyday life through journalistic and literary genres dealing with topics related to family, marriage, sex, health, fashion, cooking, housekeeping, raising children, schools and universities, sport, entertainment, etiquette. The  appearance of Polish-Jewish sensationalist newspapers at the beginning of the 1930s signaled the emergence of new audiences using the Polish language. The interwar vernacularization of the Polish language manifests itself in its growing instrumental value and change in its symbolic signification. The increasingly widespread use of Polish was accompanied by the weakening of its role as a symbol of integration with Polishness and Polish culture.

THE JEW IS LOOKING AT THE PEASANT… RURAL SPACES AND PEASANT HEROES: SOME EXAMPLES FROM YIDDISH LITERATURE

The article is an analysis of several texts from Jewish literature. The main purpose is to see how the characters of villagers were construed and how the rural space functioned in texts created by Yiddish writers. Rural space is the sphere of professional and sociocultural contacts within which heroes are placed and by which their fate is influenced. Jewish–peasant relations are the most interesting aspects of the narratives.

Historic copper repoussé was advanced and rejuvenated by the work of Jewish artists in Poland in the period between the two world wars. Numerous metaloplastics exhibitions were held in Warsaw and Łódź, engendering interest in artistic circles and among critics. Through works from the Jewish metaloplastic art scene, copper reliefs by Marek Szwarc, Chaim Hanft, Józef Śliwniak, and Arieh Merzer, the author attempts to shed new light on these very significant modern expressions of Jewish-Polish interactions created with copper. In the context of Polish culture and the art scene, copper was also making its comment on the fragile and complicated contacts between Poles and Jews with its inner spiritual essence of unity and within its depths.

The article examines subjective memories of two writers, Stanisław Vincenz and Aharon Appelfeld, who both omit central historical aspects while describing their Holocaust experiences. The works of the Polish writer Stanisław Vincenz and an excerpt from a work by the Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld are interpreted while considering the role of historiographic metafiction in modern literature. Though the experiences of both authors are fairly different, their silence may be treated as an act of conscious forgetting, or as a mindful choice of Holocaust recollection. It is suggested that this silence actually offers a valuable perspective for both literary and historical research. While Appelfeld’s experience of the Holocaust was different from that of Vincenz, the silence of the authors carries profound meanings. Reading Vincenz and Appelfeld as historiographic metafiction is to read their silence.

The article reconstructs the model of discourse present in Polish culture since the 1940s. Border Street (1949) is one of the first implementations of this model. An antisemite who becomes a righteous gentile is a pars pro toto of the Polish community. Violence is invoked, but its range is limited: Polish antisemitism stops when it comes to harming Jews. Violence that was, according to historical research, the dominant behavior toward Jews during the Nazi occupation is presented as an exteriorized exception. Two other Polish films of the same type are discussed in the article: Just beyond this Forest (1991) and In Darkness (2011).

Praca naukowa finansowana w ramach Narodowego Programu Rozwoju Humanistyki w roku 2016–2017, złożona do druku we wrześniu 2017.

Recenzja: Agnieszka Jagodzińska, „Duszozbawcy”? Misje i literatura Londyńskiego Towarzystwa Krzewienia Chrześcijaństwa wśród Żydów w latach 1809–1939, Austeria, Kraków–Budapeszt 2017, ss. 520.

Recenzja: Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov, Mówić we własnym imieniu. Prasa jidyszowa a tworzenie żydowskiej tożsamości narodowej (do 1918 roku), Instytut Historii PAN, wydawnictwo Neriton, Warszawa 2016, ss. 353.

Recenzja: Prasa Żydów polskich. Od przeszłości do teraźniejszości, red. Agnieszka Karczewska, Sławomir Jacek Żurek, Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL, Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, Lublin 2016, ss. 278.

Recenzja: Eddy Portnoy, Bad Rabbi: And Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2017, ss. 265.

Recenzja: Anda Eker. Miłość stracona, red. Maria Antosik-Piela, Eugenia Prokop-Janiec, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, Kraków 2017, ss. 309.

Recenzja: Shaul Magid, Hasidism Incarnate: Hasidism, Christianity, and the Construction of Modern Judaism, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2015, 271 pp.