Sławomir Buryła

The review provides a brief overview of the collective work edited by Eugenia Prokop--Janiec that is devoted to literary and cultural Polish-Jewish contacts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, recognized in the context of the changes in the processes of modernisation and modernity.
 

This article is a synthetic study on major issues related to the events of 1968 in Poland and their similarity to the atmosphere at the time of the Holocaust. The author presents analogies and differences between the antisemitic campaign of 1968 and the Shoah, analyzing: (1) the rhetoric of journalistic texts and political speeches; (2) works of art; (3) literary representations; and (4) memories of the victims. The main material for the analysis consists of prose texts—novels and short stories—written both in the late 1960s and after the political transformation of 1989.

The author of this paper provides a synthetic discussion of the image of the Warsaw Ghetto in Polish poetry, prose, and drama. The Warsaw Ghetto is the one with most literary representations among all of the ghettos that have existed in the territories that were part of the Second Polish Republic before the war. Th e scholar presents the topic in  chronological order, discussing the image of the closed Warsaw district during wartime, in the post-war era, the Stalinist period, the time from the 1950s to the 1980s, and after the year 1989. Th e most notable changes in the ghetto imagery occur after the year 1989, and are associated with the abolishment of censorship, the invasion of pop-cultural  reframings of the subject, and the debuts of writers born after the war. In his analysis the author also considers texts that do not take up the topic of the Warsaw Ghetto directly and he points to traces that open up the possibility of classifying those texts as works about the Warsaw city-beyond-the-wall.