An amalgam of personal reminiscences of a bright young man with later observations of a mature scholar bring to life the mighty pulsation of Jewish life in Poland in its last two decades of ...existence, 1919-1939--an extraordinary, perhaps unique, mode of Jewish life in the diaspora.
"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."
Abstract
As a path to survival in the Łódź ghetto, “rescue through work” privileged the young and able-bodied. How did elderly ghetto inhabitants respond to the policies and demands of a strategy ...that inherently marginalized and disadvantaged them? Older men and women worked as long as physically possible, but the limitations of aging bodies were compounded by the deleterious effects of living in the ghetto. A scarcity of viable employment opportunities, taxing manual labor, and lack of food, forced most elderly men and women to seek alternative strategies. Petitions for survival reveal how older men and women supported the ghetto’s collective strategy for survival while simultaneously exploiting the rhetoric of “rescue through work” to challenge the ideological tenets at the very core of that strategy.
The book, based on memories of a native son and the research of
a scholar, is an amalgam of descriptions and discussions, peppered
with conversations, personal observations and an acute observer's
...reflections, focused on the fabric of life in the city of Lodz and
its vicinity. The author describes the "court" of the Hasidic
Rabbis of Aleksander, with which his family was affiliated, the
rival camps of Hasidim and Zionists, industrialists and laborers,
struggles with the Polish authorities, and more. Detailed chapters
are dedicated to a description of studies at a modern
Jewish-Zionist high school (Gymnasium) - its exhilarating goals,
directors and teachers, to the Lodz poet Yitzhak Katzenelson before
and during the Holocaust, and to life in a small Polish shtetl.
The concluding chapter "Return to Poland" examines the cities
and towns described earlier in the book, as well as
Breslau-Wroclaw, where the author had completed his rabbinic and
university studies in 1933, as they appeared to him during his
visit in 1982, nearly fifty years after his departure from Europe
for Israel.
The author's aim was to produce a portrait, sympathetic,
intimate, but also knowledgeable and critical, of a generation that
did not have the time to take stock of itself before its
obliteration. He has thus rendered palpable the experiences and
quandaries of many of his contemporaries.
The book is about poverty in Poland during the period of system transformation and in the decade that followed, as documented in the life courses of consecutive generations of women living in the ...disadvantaged neighbourhoods in the post-industrial city. 69 life histories were collected. The authors analyse the life histories of four generations of women where the oldest are former workers in state-owned factories in which they worked until retirement and who used to be the avant-garde of the women’s working class during the socialist period. Their daughters, granddaughters and great-granddaughters occurred redundant on the capitalist labour market and lived on social benefits. The book is unique in both Polish and world literature since it goes beyond traditionally considered “feminisation of poverty” in monetary terms. It searches for poverty drivers and maintainers embedded in changes in industrial relations, welfare regime and family structures and relations. It also tells about women’ efforts and capabilities to cope with the disadvantage.The publication will be of interest to a broad audience composed of scholars concerned with poverty, social marginalisation and exclusion, officers in public and non-governmental institutions as well as to students of social work, sociology, pedagogy, psychology, social policy, gender studies and family science.
Ghettostadt Horwitz, Gordon J
2008, 2008-01-01, 20080101
eBook
Ghettostadt is a terrifying examination of the Jewish ghetto's place in the Nazi worldview. Exploring ghetto life in its broadest context, it deftly maneuvers between the perspectives and actions of ...Łódź's beleaguered Jewish community, the Germans who oversaw and the ghetto's affairs, and the "ordinary" inhabitants of the once Polish city.
From the point when it was noted for the first time, gentrification has changed, and so has the role of the State, as public intervention has become central to urban upgrading. A popular model of ...this development describes three waves of gentrification for the U.S. Whether or not these experiences are indeed global, however, remains under discussion – and this is particularly the case for post-socialist cities. Against this background, the paper wishes to contribute to the ongoing debate about “state-led gentrification” and test the applicability of a widely used model of gentrification in a different context than it was developed. The guiding questions of the paper are the following: 1) What is the significance of institutions/policies in shaping the onset and trajectory of gentrification in Łódź (Poland), and what are the contributing factors behind it? 2) What are the underlying similarities and distinctions between the case of state-led gentrification in Łódź, and the general features of this phenomenon observed in the Global North?
•Public housing's prevalence chiefly determines the extent of state-led gentrification in the inner-city of Łódź.•In Łódź the waves of gentrification overlap rather than follow one another.•State-led gentrification in Lodz stems from executing local development strategy provisions and corresponding housing policy.
