The Slippery Memory of Men analyzes how during the early fourteenth century a discourse of eternal enmity was created between the Teutonic Knights and the rulers of Poland as these former allies ...contended over the disputed region of Pomerania.
A vivid and unsparing memoir of the experiences of an eight year old child incarcerated in the Warsaw Ghetto. Her escape from the Ghetto and from Warsaw following the Uprising was due to her mother's ...resourcefulness. Settling finally into an outwardly comfortable American life she repressed her horrific memories until compelled to bear witness.
Reassessing Communism Katarzyna Chmielewska, Agnieszka Mrozik, Grzegorz Wołowiec / Katarzyna Chmielewska, Agnieszka Mrozik, Grzegorz Wołowiec
2021, 20210430, 2021-04-30
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The thirteen authors of this collective work undertook to articulate matter-of-fact critiques of the dominant narrative about communism in Poland while offering new analyses of the concept, and also ...examining the manifestations of anticommunism. Approaching communist ideas and practices, programs and their implementations, as an inseparable whole, they examine the issues of emancipation, upward social mobility, and changes in the cultural canon. The authors refuse to treat communism in Poland in simplistic categories of totalitarianism, absolute evil and Soviet colonization, and similarly refuse to equate communism and fascism. Nor do they adopt the neoliberal view of communism as a project doomed to failure. While wholly exempt from nostalgia, these essays show that beyond oppression and bad governance, communism was also a regime in which people pursued a variety of goals and sincerely attempted to build a better world for themselves. The book is interdisciplinary and applies the tools of social history, intellectual history, political philosophy, anthropology, literature, cultural studies, and gender studies to provide a nuanced view of the communist regimes in east-central Europe.
What happens when a region accustomed to violent shifts in borders is subjected to a new, peaceful partitioning? Has the European Union spent the last decade creating a new Iron Curtain at its ...fringes?Building Fortress Europe: The Polish-Ukrainian Frontierexamines these questions from the perspective of the EU's new eastern external boundary. Since the Schengen Agreement in 1985, European states have worked together to create a territory free of internal borders and with heavily policed external boundaries. In 2004 those boundaries shifted east as the EU expanded to include eight postsocialist countries-including Poland but excluding neighboring Ukraine. Through an analysis of their shared frontier,Building Fortress Europeprovides an ethnographic examination of the human, social, and political consequences of developing a specialized, targeted, and legally advanced border regime in the enlarged EU. Based on fieldwork conducted with border guards, officials, and migrants shuttling between Poland and Ukraine as well as extensive archival research,Building Fortress Europeshows how people in the two countries are adjusting to living on opposite sides of a new divide. Anthropologist Karolina S. Follis argues that the policing of economic migrants and asylum seekers is caught between the contradictory imperatives of the European Union's border security, economic needs of member states, and their declared commitment to human rights. The ethnography explores the lives of migrants, and their patterns of mobility, as framed by these contradictions. It suggests that only a political effort to address these tensions will lead to the creation of fairer and more humane border policies.
"Life in Transit is the long-awaited sequel to Shimon Redlich’s widely acclaimed Together and Apart in Brzezany, in which he discussed his childhood during the War and the Holocaust. Life in Transit ...tells the story of his adolescence in the city of Lodz in postwar Poland. Redlich’s personal memories are placed within the wider historical context of Jewish life in Poland and in Lodz during the immediate postwar years. Lodz in the years 1945-1950 was the second-largest city in the country and the major urban center of the Jewish population. Redlich’s research based on conventional sources and numerous interviews indicates that although the survivors still lived in the shadow of the Holocaust, postwar Jewish Lodz was permeated with a sense of vitality and hope."
Jack M. Bloom presents a moving account of how an opposition developed and triumphed in communist Poland, showing the perspectives and experiences of the participants, while often letting them ...recount their own stories and explain their thinking.
Engaging Cultural Ideologies offers a recontextualization of the effects of Poland's cultural practices on the genesis and performance of contemporary Polish compositions from 1918 to 1956.
William and Rosalie Schiff, William; Schiff, Rosalie; Hanley, Craig
2007
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In 1941, newlyweds William and Rosalie Schiff are forcibly separated and sent on their individual odysseys through a surreal maze of hate. This is an account of two Polish Jews who survive six ...different German slave and prison camps throughout the Holocaust. It describes the struggle of the lovers to stay alive and find each other at war's end.
The powerful writings and art of Jews living in the Warsaw Ghetto
Hidden in metal containers and buried underground during World War II, these works from the Warsaw Ghetto record the Holocaust from ...the perspective of its first interpreters, the victims themselves. Gathered clandestinely by an underground ghetto collective called Oyneg Shabes, the collection of reportage, diaries, prose, artwork, poems, jokes, and sermons captures the heroism, tragedy, humor, and social dynamics of the ghetto. Miraculously surviving the devastation of war, this extraordinary archive encompasses a vast range of voices-young and old, men and women, the pious and the secular, optimists and pessimists-and chronicles different perspectives on the topics of the day while also preserving rapidly endangered cultural traditions. Described by David G. Roskies as "a civilization responding to its own destruction," these texts tell the story of the Warsaw Ghetto in real time, against time, and for all time.
Written by a Brit who has lived in Poland for more than twenty years, this book challenges some accepted thinking in the West about Poland and about the rise of Law and Justice (PiS) as the ruling ...party in 2015. It is a remarkable account of the Polish post-1989 transition and contemporary politics, combining personal views and experience with careful fact and material collections. The result is a vivid description of the events and scrupulous explanations of the political processes, and all this with an interesting twist – a perspective of a foreigner and insider at the same time. Settled in the position of participant observer, Jo Harper combines the methods of macro and micro analysis with CDA, critical discourse analysis. He presents and interprets the constituent elements and issues of contemporary Poland: the main political forces, the Church, the media, issues of gender, the Russian connection, the much-disputed judicial reform and many others. A special feature of the book is the detailed examination of the coverage of the Poland’s latest two elections, one in 2019 (parliamentary) and the other in 2020 (presidential) in the British media, an insightful and witty specimen of comparative cultural and political analysis.
