The works of Maurice Gottlieb and Samuel Hirszenberg express corporeal wandering and psychological ambulation characteristic of the refugee condition. The third artistic stratagem emerges in the works of the copper artist Arieh Merzer. His work embodies a liminal form of movement, an elusive dynamism etched into metallic surfaces. This interstitial motion is situated between the external and internal realms, occupying the depth of the relief medium that stands between painting and sculpture, engaging the world while simultaneously withdrawing from it. Merzer’s aesthetic thereby exemplifies the intricate dialectic of the refugee experience, one alternately characterized by an inexorable sense of displacement and entrapment in a Penrose-like perpetual movement that can lead to new creative expressions. His art is an art as refuge.

The article seeks to provide a comparative perspective on Jewish emigration to the United States and to Mandatory Palestine during the period spanning World War I and the civil war in Ukraine through the closing of the United States borders to immigrants in 1924. The study consists of three sections. The first offers a typological explication of the concepts of emigration, aliyah, and refugeehood. The second part utilizes this typological discussion to characterize Jewish emigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The third section considers the attitudes exhibited by absorbing societies towards newcomers. The article furnishes a detailed account of the socio-political forces shaping Jewish emigration patterns and their implications for identity and absorption. In addition to a critical examination of the ideological, economic, and social context of Jewish migration, it discusses the hardships of displacement and absorption and traces the characteristics inherent to Jewish emigration.

The article delves into the profound meaning of home for refugees, a concept that takes on a new depth when one's homeland is ravaged by war. It examines the contrasting experiences of the Polish writer Stanisław Vincenz and his Jewish friend Benedykt Liebermann, both  rom the Eastern Carpathian region. Despite their different paths, both individuals demonstrated remarkable resilience. Vincenz, while in exile, poetically recreated in memory his childhood Carpathian home, which allowed him to continue his writing. For Liebermann attempted to build a new home in pre-state Israel after being uprooted, the destruction of Jewish life in his former hometown made recovering a sense of home immensely difficult. The author of the article suggests that philosophies about memory’s role in preserving a home have limits, as the trauma of losing one’s home is a highly personal experience. For Jewish refugees, that rupture severed entire cultural worlds in a way that defied simple remedies.

This article discusses the significance and enduring presence of nostalgic narrations in works by Polish-Jewish authors that are often accompanied by motifs of anti-nostalgia. They derive from complex relations with spaces categorized as familiar and alien, close and remote, as well as complex, ambivalent experiences of bonds, distance, and loss. The intersection of nostalgia and anti-nostalgia brings together and intertwines Polish and Jewish traditions and discourses of nostalgia. The sources of the article are writings by the outstanding inter-war Polish-Jewish writers Roman Brandstaetter, Anda Eker, Stefan Pomer, and Maurycy Szymel.

The subject of reflection in this article is the Israeli period in the work of Polish-Yiddish writer Kalman Segal (1917–1980), who decided to emigrate to Israel after the antisemitic campaign inspired in 1968 by Poland’s Communist authorities. Referring to Przemysław Czapliński’s definition of “nostalgia” (“a narrative manifestation of the [longed for] past, an effort to meticulously reconstruct personal experiences, spaces, people and customs preserved only in memory”), the author analyzes literary texts in which the writer, already a citizen of Israel, continues his life-long mission of nostalgically remembering the “Murdered Shtetl” (as the author calls it), a symbol of Jewish civilization in the Polish lands, and commemorating its Jewish inhabitants murdered in the Holocaust. At the same time, using Jora Vaso’s definition of “anti-nostalgia” (“the emotions of a modern exile who has left his ‘backward’ homeland to live in the modern world, being aware of its shortcomings, as a result of which it becomes an object of recollection, which arouses his harsh criticism and roots him in the past, making obsessive thinking about his former homeland his main preoccupation”), the author tries to show Segal’s difficult process of adaptation to the Israeli reality that was alien to him and how he was disturbed by the suffering and longing accompanying the decision to leave his former homeland. Over time, one can see in Segal’s work a growing acceptance of the new situation and commitment to the new reality. This can be read as overcoming both nostalgia and anti-nostalgia towards Poland. Life experiences lead Segal to believe that being in exile is a universal experience and an existential condition of the Jewish people.

The subject of reflection in this article is the Israeli period in the work of Polish-Yiddish writer Kalman Segal (1917–1980), who decided to emigrate to Israel after the antisemitic campaign inspired in 1968 by Poland’s Communist authorities. Referring to Przemysław Czapliński’s definition of “nostalgia” (“a narrative manifestation of the [longed for] past, an effort to meticulously reconstruct personal experiences, spaces, people and customs preserved only in memory”), the author analyzes literary texts in which the writer, already a citizen of Israel, continues his life-long mission of nostalgically remembering the “Murdered Shtetl” (as the author calls it), a symbol of Jewish civilization in the Polish lands, and commemorating its Jewish inhabitants murdered in the Holocaust. At the same time, using Jora Vaso’s definition of “anti-nostalgia” (“the emotions of a modern exile who has left his ‘backward’ homeland to live in the modern world, being aware of its shortcomings, as a result of which it becomes an object of recollection, which arouses his harsh criticism and roots him in the past, making obsessive thinking about his former homeland his main preoccupation”), the author tries to show Segal’s difficult process of adaptation to the Israeli reality that was alien to him and how he was disturbed by the suffering and longing accompanying the decision to leave his former homeland. Over time, one can see in Segal’s work a growing acceptance of the new situation and commitment to the new reality. This can be read as overcoming both nostalgia and anti-nostalgia towards Poland. Life experiences lead Segal to believe that being in exile is a universal experience and an existential condition of the Jewish people.

This article presents a 3D scanning method used to read the inscriptions on the oldest damaged tombstones at the Jewish cemetery in Chrzanów. To date, the technique has not been used at any other Jewish cemetery in Poland. The authors discuss the techniques and methods used, how the acquired data was processed and analyzed, and what results were obtained. The work presented here is part of a broader project to inventory Jewish cemeteries in the region of Zagłębie and western Małopolska (Lesser Poland).

This article uses microhistory methods to explore the impact of the changes in the first half of the twentieth century and how they are represented in the egodocuments written by women. The research is based on previously unknown and unpublished autobiographies and diaries of seamstress Dveira Dines. Her egodocuments are considered from four perspectives: what were the challenges of being a woman; what can be learned about childrearing and healthcare; whether women’s egodocuments can be a chronicle of their generation; and what can they tell us about life in Vilne (Vilnius) and its people. The analysis of these documents shows that egodocuments written by women can help significantly expand our knowledge about everyday life and, in this case, can also show the historical events of that period from the perspective of an ordinary citizen or participant rather than an organizer or ideologue.

This article uses microhistory methods to explore the impact of the changes in the first half of the twentieth century and how they are represented in the egodocuments written by women. The research is based on previously unknown and unpublished autobiographies and diaries of seamstress Dveira Dines. Her egodocuments are considered from four perspectives: what were the challenges of being a woman; what can be learned about childrearing and healthcare; whether women’s egodocuments can be a chronicle of their generation; and what can they tell us about life in Vilne (Vilnius) and its people. The analysis of these documents shows that egodocuments written by women can help significantly expand our knowledge about everyday life and, in this case, can also show the historical events of that period from the perspective of an ordinary citizen or participant rather than an organizer or ideologue.

The article investigates the issue of the status of contemporary Judeo-Spanish literature, principally poetry, and advances the thesis of the postvernacular character of works written in Judeo-Spanish (Ladino). The backing for this conclusion is an analysis of dozens of volumes of poetry published during the arrebivimyento period, between 1975 and the 2020s. This study analyses several characteristic features of these book editions that give evidence of the postvernacular condition of the language and its culture, primarily the multilingualism of the book, the variety of the adopted alphabets and orthographic notation in the Latin alphabet, and the presence of many paratexts. These elements are understood as aimed at supporting the reception of a book written in Ladino by its potential readers—in a situation where the Ladino language itself, classified as endangered, is not “autonomous” enough. The article concludes by offering the metaphor of a nature monument of a tree, protected and upheld in its existence by various “props,” as a figure reflecting both the material and nonmaterial aspects of contemporary Judeo-Spanish literature and books.