Karolina Koprowska

The article sets out to investigate the experience of social advancement in the dissimilation mode, which is contrary to the assimilation. The process of becoming non-identical and affirming one’s distinctiveness is examined in reference to the novel Majdan by Marian Pilot, one of the authors of the so-called peasant current in the Polish literature. The term “rozkraczność” (“straddle-ness”) taken from Pilot’s prose is used to describe the condition of a displaced subject as persistence in a state of ambivalence between heteronomy and autonomy.

The article is an attempt to analyse both artwork and prose of Ewa Kuryluk, focusing on the question of the representation of the Holocaust and its boundaries. This analysis refers to “the generation of postmemory” which is struggling to work through a heritage of the Holocaust. The author uses the notion of collage concerning Kuryluk’s works to describe not only a technique of an art and literary production, but also an aesthetic process of reconstruction a family biography and seeking own identity as a member of traumatic experience.

The article is an attempt to analyse both artwork and prose of Ewa Kuryluk, focusing on the question of the representation of the Holocaust and its boundaries. This analysis refers to “the generation of postmemory” which is struggling to work through a heritage of the Holocaust. The author uses the notion of collage concerning Kuryluk’s works to describe not only a technique of an art and literary production, but also an aesthetic process of reconstruction a family biography and seeking own identity as a member of traumatic experience.

Polish original: (2015) Kolaż jako akt profanacji? O twórczości Ewy Kuryluk. Wielogłos 1(23), pp. 43–55.

The subject of the article are conceptualisations of the experiences of Holocaust, war and occupation (from the Polish perspective) as well as Polish-Jewish (and peasant-Jewish) relationships that were formed in the context of violence that were formulated as a part of the most recent village literature. Seemingly telling is the fact that more and more publications appearing on the Polish book market discuss the issue of the village, amongst which are works where the Holocaust happening on the „outskirts” plays a central role. Therefore the starting point for the considerations presented in the article is the question about the possible causes of the current turn towards the village being embroiled in the Holocaust. The author places this literary phenomenon in the context of current historical research concerning the so-called third wave of the Holocaust and concentrates on the analysis of two books: Sońka by Ignacy Karpowicz and A Little Annihilation by Anna Janko which seem to be particularly representative for the strategies of formulating literary responses to the findings of the historians.

This article analyses the relationship between the subject and the landscape in Avrom Sutzkever’s early poetry (primarily focusing on compositions published in the volumes Lider [Poems], from 1937, and Valdiks [Forested], from 1940). Th e author explores the matter of epiphanic experience of landscape – wherein the stake is the search for  metaphysical sense within nature – that is a dominant feature of Sutzkever’s pre-war poetry. The way these epiphanies are depicted reveals the romantic–modernist provenance of the early poetic compositions of this Yiddish writer.

The author analyses Isaac Leib Peretz’s play Bay nakht afn altn mark (A Night in the Old Marketplace) through the lens of the ambivalences of the carnival, which give rise to various transgressions of socio-political and cultural, as well as metaphysical and existential, orders. The carnival category positions Peretz’s drama in the dialectic of beginning and end, and it suggests the violation of the existing normative order in order to expose the tension between the traditional world of the shtetl and the modernity that is impinging on it. Moreover, the carnival spectacle reveals metaphysical and historiosophic dimensions, since it tackles the question of the human condition, which is defined by the opposition of life and death and is entangled in the course of history.

* Artykuł powstał przy wsparciu finansowym POB Heritage w ramach Programu ID.UJ (edycja specjalna I).

Translated by Jessica Taylor-Kucia

The paper concerns the question of the status and role of the landscape in relation to the experience of migration and displacement in the post-war poetry of Avrom Sutzkever. The author investigates what is characteristic about the relationship between different landscapes and migrant subject. In the poetry of Sutzkever, the landscape is intertwined with the process of reconceptualisation of the identity of the Holocaust survivor and immigrant to the land of Israel, as well as with the cultural-literary project of the integration of East European heritage and new Israeli reality. 

The article is a review of the book Dalej jest noc. Losy Żydów w wybranych powiatach okupowanej Polski [Beyond is the Night – the Fate of Jews in Selected Local Government Districts in Occupied Poland]. This two-volume work, edited by Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski, has been published by the Centre for Holocaust Research IFIS PAN. It is a summary of a research project that concerns survival strategies of Jews during the Occupation in the General Government (1942-1945). The authors attempt to describe nine different poviats through the prism of microhistory, focusing on the course of events during the Holocaust, German policies at the time, Polish-Jewish, Polish-Polish and Ukranian-Jewish relations.

The article is a review of Aleksandra Ubertowska’s book Holokaust. Auto(tanato)grafie which analyses the Holocaust literature, especially autobiographical narratives, introducing an opposition between “centre” and “periphery,” as well as the notion of “auto(tanato)graphy.” Ubertowska focuses on three genres: essay, literary representations of women’s war experience and autobiographies of the Holocaust historians, which she describes as “peripheral” and “controversial.” The main aim of the review is to present values and doubts about Ubertowska’s conception and to supplement it by the comitted issues and remarks about the current situation of the Holocaust literature.
 

The article is an interpretation sketchof one poem by Zuzanna Ginczanka, a Polish poet of Jewish ancestry. The analyzed poem Pycha [Pride] may be considered representative for the early, pre-war output of Ginczanka, excellently exemplifying her evolution towards literary maturity, originality and literary consciousness. The sketch mainly presents the diversity of literary strategies used by the poet to show many dimensions of the experience of adolescence.

This article is an attempt to present the issue of subjectivity in the testimonies of Muselmann survivors which were assembled in a medical study by Polish doctors Zdzisław Ryn and Stanisław Kłodziński. The Muselmann, who was a prisoner of concentration camps during World War II, exhibited extreme apathy as well as physical weakness and emaciation.
The testimonies of Muselmänner are analysed and compared with Giorgio Agamben’s philosophical thought of witness status. The main aim of the article is to supplement Agamben’s conception by proposing an additional view of Muselmänner’s subjectivity.