The Shoah, postmodernism, the canon and popular culture

In the article the author asks a question about the reasons for the absence of postmodern and popular literature in the prose canon of the Shoah. He sees the cause of this state of affairs in the historical conditions of the literature of the Shoah, in the ethically and moralistically oriented reading of its texts and in the problems of this prose associated with the categories of fiction and fictionality. According to the author, the “exclusion” of postmodern and popular prose in the canon and its distance toward these phenomena results from the concern about the excess of textuality which is peculiar to these literary forms. Another reason is associated with the perspective, historically determined in the Polish context, of understanding postmodernism as an ahistorical trend – contrary to the classical views of Linda Hutcheon, Amy Elias or Paula Crosthwaite, who emphasise the state of being “possessed by history”, typical for this formation, which according to the researchers brings about a far‑reaching transformation of the perception of historicity and the attitude of literature toward the trauma. As a result, the postmodern answer to the trauma of the past makes a recourse to the repertory of different literary means and it (usually) engages the Shoah from the perspective of a temporal and generational distance. In a similar manner the author attempts to demonstrate, on the basis of a crime novel by Zygmunt Miłoszewski, Ziarno prawdy (2011), how Polish memory about the Shoah is reflected in popular literature, being a reflection of the collective mechanism of repression, processing and answering to the trauma of the past.

Key words: Holocaust, postmodernism, canon, crime novel, trauma, postmemory

The attitude of Hungarian literature toward the Shoah. The problems concerning the canon

The text presents a number of the most important figures of the landscape of Hungarian literature devoted to the theme of the Shoah, among others S. Márai, M. Radnóti, J. Pilinszky,
F. Sánta, who faced the problems of memory, the torments of war and the experience of the “Jewish condition”. Each of the subsequent generations of writers engaged the subject of the Shoah in different ways, changing the conventions or the stylistic or genre‑related resources, owing to which there emerged an extremely abundant literary material, varied as far as the form, volume, language, artistic freedom and references to the works which constitute the canon of writings devoted to this subject are concerned. One of the formal solutions which are unique on a world scale is the phenomenon of de‑tabooisation, of choosing genres which are incongruous with the rules of aesthetic bienséance (irony, the grotesque, surrealism), whose presence is testimony to the lack of the presence of the Shoah in the social discourse and to a desire to restore it to its rightful place in the context of literary experiments which provoke but which also demand to be perceived and solved.

Key words: Hungary, genocide, canon, Jewish literature in Hungary

Always a fragment. On Polish literary studies and its canon (of the Shoah)

The author considers the status of the canon of Holocaust literary studies. Based on Jan and Aleida Assmanns’ well known thesis he proposes to consider this kind of writing as an Encyclopedia – a cumulative reading list of literary studies works considered canonical, and, on the other hand, as a Method, i.e. a model mechanism of creating an analysis and exegesis of the Holocaust writing. The author concludes that despite numerous attempts there is a dominance of canons which fall within the sphere of the first category whereas the second one still awaits fruition. According to the author, a crucial element of the latter would be to define the specific relation between a scholar and the object of his or her research as a particular feature of Holocaust literature and its theory.

Key words: Holocaust, literary (meta)criticism, canon

“Narration is the persistent shadow of existence”. Some remarks about the canon of the Shoah in the most recent literary works

On the basis of abundant short‑story and novelistic material the author presents the formation of the contemporary canon of the Shoah. According to Marta Tomczok, the domination of the short story over the novelistic form constitutes a result of the dialogue of generations and its influence upon the narrative situation of the prose by Agnieszka Kłos, Sylwia Chutnik or Magdalena Tulli. And in a deeper sense, which is discernible in Czarne sezony by Michał Głowiński, it involves a departure from the fictionalisation of the Shoah in favour of an autobiographical and memoir reflection. The author perceives the causes of such a state of affairs in the influence of Sąsiedzi by Jan Tomasz Gross upon Polish literature after 2000, and the rhetoric of cruelty, which is more and more discernible in it, as well as in the separation of the historiographical and the narrative discourses, which according to the author, influence each other in the case of the contemporary narrations about the Shoah, above all in the sphere of the popular novel.

Key words: canon, narration, Holocaust, story, novel

The necessity of a trace. Canons of children and teenagers’ literature

The article is an attempt to characterize the school canon of required readings concerning the Holocaust, as well as other books dedicated to the youngest readers. The author analyses the records of core curriculum and inspects books for children which were written in the first decade of the 21st century. In these recommended readings she notices a mechanism of creating the post‑memory of young readers’ generation, which shape corresponds to the contemporary reflection on the Holocaust, undergoing constant changes which are a result of appearances of still new contexts. The researcher considers a trace to be a superior category which enables forming of contemporary remembering matrices. For the same reason the author pays special attention to this motive while analysing the chosen texts. It results in the conclusion that the presence of a trace generates nostalgia, which in turn leads to the feeling of loss, a category without which it would be difficult to imagine contemporary texts on the Holocaust for children.

Key words: Holocaust, Children and Youths’ Literature, canon of required readings, loss

The garden of life and the garden of death – two instances of existence in a camp Eden vs. Auschwitz

In her article the author describes the ways in which the prisoners of the Sonderkommando KL Auschwitz‑Birkenau experienced the space of the camp. The form of perceiving and describing the camp forces one to submit to the conditioning of the description by two interrelated topoi. The imagined garden of life and the garden of death, i.e. two areas which were experienced by the prisoners in the camp and which were traversed by them during their work, inspired in those prisoners a feeling of awe, of transgressing a taboo and of embracing the structure of a myth. The text indicates the factors which in the memories constitute the narration about the living and the dead areas of the camp, and which are an interesting instance of creating a memory about this place. Recycling the elements of life and death, the mixing of the categories of the living and the dead which attracts the attention of the reader of the memoirs of the former prisoners and of the one who engages in a conversation with them. An important role in the formation of these concepts is also played by the visual iconography which is analysed by the author (photographs taken in the camp, sketches and drawings made by the former prisoners). In the text an attempt was made to reproduce the structure of the extreme experiences of the prisoners of the Sonderkommando, by researching the particular elements of their accounts which refer to various recurrent themes such as the pure – impure opposition, the images of the bodies which fall out from the gas chamber, gassing people, the “dead area” (graves and post‑incineration pits), nakedness and the camp trees as the permanent reference points which recur in the recollections of the prisoners.

Key words: Auschwitz, Sonderkommando, gas chamber, nature

“Each poet is a Jew with a yellow patch”. Two voices about Woroszylski’s vision of Baczyński

The article is a multicontextual interpretation of a poem by Wiktor Woroszylski entitled Krzysztof Kamil B., which was published for the first time in the 1988 volume entitled W poszukiwaniu utraconego ciepła i inne wiersze. The work indicates one of the most distinguished Polish poets of the war generation, Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, who died at the age of twenty‑three during the Warsaw Uprising. The poem by Woroszylski who was six years his junior has to do with the controversial question about the Jewish roots of the author of Elegia o chłopcu polskim (his mother, Stefania Baczyńska, had a Jewish background and was an assimilated, Catholic convert). The article firstly refers to various studies upon this subject which were initiated in 1979 by Józef Lewandowski’s essay. The studies were then engaged by a number of researchers and critics in the last decade of the 20th c. and at the beginning of the 21st c. They deliberate among other things whether this fact of the poet’s biography actually influenced his works. The authors demonstrate the manner in which Woroszylski reveals and at the same time nullifies the anti‑Semitic overtones which such speculations feature, the attempts at a more or less categorical determination of someone’s national affiliation. For an important context for the interpretation of the poem Krzysztof Kamil B. is furnished by its motto – an initial phrase of a famous statement by Marina Tsvetaeva, whose culminating point that “all poets are Jews” is placed by Woroszylski at the very end of his work, where he paraphrases these words.

Key words: antisemitism, Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, Marina Tsvetaeva, Wiktor Woroszylski, Holocaust

Post‑remembering, post‑body. About Patrycja Dołowy’s artistic activities in the former Warsaw Ghetto

The article has to do with an analysis of the artistic activity in the sphere of cultural and individual memory which refers to the area of the Warsaw Ghetto. On the basis of Patrycja Dołowy’s works and a drama piece which she co‑wrote the author examines the extent to which the strategies of individual memory are not intellectual in a fundamental way. They do, however, constitute a collection of memories, concepts and interpretations which preclude objectivisation – so much expected in reference to the national memory whose aim is to establish the foundation of the identity of the nation. In her article the author introduces an innovative term, “Jewish fiction”, construed as the making up or combining in a collage manner of Jewish stories in order to situate them in the collective imaginarium as a new chapter of post‑memory activities.

Key words: body, memory, Warsaw Ghetto, Muranów

“Biographies also consist of loops”. The un‑narrated life of Irena Gelblum

The article presents the book by Remigiusz Grzela entitled Wybór Ireny in the context of the contemporary controversies/debates about the biographies and the narrations about the Shoah. In this case the “biographical loops” result both from the life attitude of the female protagonists who are described as well as from the strategy that was embraced by the biographer. The messenger of the Jewish Combat Organisation disassociated herself from her past and created a new image and biography for herself. The writer is continuously poised between the truth that he intends to reveal and fiction – a mystification put forward by Irena Gelblum vel Waniewicz vel Conti Di Mauro. Thus a story emerged whose essence (and significance) consists not so much in familiarising the reader with the figure and the tragic experiences of one of the “scorched” ones but in the exhibition of the ethical and literary problems associated with an attempt at presenting such a story.

Key words: Irena’s Choice, Remigiusz Grzela, biography, ghetto

To tell about the invisible. An attempt at analysing the movie Ida by Paweł Pawlikowski

The present text is the first attempt in Poland at analysing the movie by Paweł Pawlikowski, Ida. The author’s premise is that the cinematographic means of expression which are employed in Ida serve to convey meanings which do not result merely from the course of the action and which are not contained in the dialogues. A closer look at the camera work, at the relation between the image and the sound, the recurrent stylistic means in the film allows one to reach the meaning which results from the deep structure of the cinematographic message. The article frequently mentions the statements made by the makers of the film, the accounts from the shooting and the postproduction periods because here the process of the analysis is understood to a certain extent as the reconstruction of the process of creation. The fundamental aim of the analysis of Pawlikowski’s film is to situate it within a historical and cinematographic context, reference to which has direct justification in the structure of the film. Such an attitude opens Pawlikowski’s work to the subsequent stages of interpretation and facilitates a polemics with the reading of Ida which is already well‑established in critical works.

Key words: Ida, Paweł Pawlikowski, Łukasz Żal, Holocaust, film and history, frame composition, light in cinema

The midget, the frog and the stranger or a surreal story about the Holocaust

The article attempts to indicate a change in the means of representing the Shoah. The latteri s more and more frequently described with the use of the means suggested by popular culture. An attempt was made to reconstruct the evolution of the discourse of the Shoah, with special reference to the contemporary representations which were discussed on the basis of the example of the comic book genre. The subject of the Holocaust comic book was treated in a comprehensive manner by exploring its history, constitutive features and criticism. The comic book entitled Achtung Zelig! Druga wojna by Krzysztof Gawronkiewicz and Krystian Rosenberg was used as an example to illustrate the problem which is engaged in the article. Special attention was devoted to its genesis, its realisation of the features peculiar to the genre, its innovative nature and reception. There is an indication of the sources of the surreal convention which was employed by the Polish authors. This convention may have originated, among other things, from the occult roots of Nazism. The authors also mentioned the links between Achtung Zelig!… with cinematographic works such as Hanna by Joe Wright and Zelig by Woody Allen, as well as with Krzysztof Zalewski’s musical project of the same title. Moreover, the authors indicated the similarities between Achtung Zelig!… and Maus by Art Spiegelman in an attempt to evaluate the extent to which the employment and transformation of models used in the American graphic novel was successful in the case of the Polish comic book.

Key words: Holocaust, Shoah, comic books, popular culture, Achtung Zelig!, Maus

A conversation with the present/absent one. Niepokoje. Twórczość Tadeusza Różewicza wobec Zagłady. Red. Piotr Krupiński. Warszawa, Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2014, ss. 248.

The review discusses a collection of articles entitled Niepokoje. Twórczość TadeuszaRóżewicza wo bec Zagłady (ed. Piotr Krupiński). Its author directs his attention above all to the
dissertations and essays which engage the problem of the interpretative community in which the Różewiczian “traces” of this past are perceived. The text also features a question about the Polish narration (memory) of modernity, and, to be more specific, about the role of Różewicz’s works in the revelation and interpretation of the understatements, inconsistencies and adulterations. The review emphasises the authentic polivocality of the debate about the literary representation of the Holocaust in which the authors of the book participate.

Trzy książki w jednym tomie: historia, analiza i antologia życia kulturalnego w Buchenwaldzie. Magdalena Izabela Sacha: „Gdyście w obóz przybyć już raczyli…”. Obraz kultury lagrowej w świadectwach więźniów Buchenwaldu 1937–1945. Bydgoszcz–Gdańsk, Wydawnictwo Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2014, ss. 508 + 8 s. wkł. zdj.

Three books in one: history, analysis and anthology of cultural life in Buchenwald Magdalena Izabela Sacha: „Gdyście w obóz przybyć już raczyli…”. Obraz kultury lagrowej w świadectwach więźniów Buchenwaldu 1937–1945. Bydgoszcz–Gdańsk, Wydawnictwo Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2014, ss. 508 + 8 s. wkł. zdj.

The text discusses Magdalena Sacha’s approach to the issue of cultural activity in death and labour camps in her book „Gdyście w obóz przybyć już raczyli…”. Obraz kultury lagrowej w świadectwach więźniów Buchenwaldu 1937–1945. It consists of three parts: a historical introduction of major death and labour camps in the Third Reich, an analysis of the cultural production in Buchenwald and an anthology of poetry created in Buchenwald and HASAG‑Leipzig camps. The author of the article argues that Sacha’s seemingly traditional approach to historiography is deeply involved in the methodology introduced by New Historicism.

The pitfalls of theory. Aleksandra Ubertowska: Holokaust. Auto (tanato) grafie. Warszawa, Instytut Badań Literackich PAN Wydawnictwo, 2014, ss. 367.

Holokaust. Auto (tanato) grafie, the most recent book by a distinguished Polish researcher of the literature of the Shoah, Aleksandra Ubertowska, engages the themes which the author
herself considers peripheral. The researcher emphasises the instability of the texts that are analysed – essays, women’s writing and the autobiographies of the historians of the Shoah. The main reservations of the reviewer have to do with the lack of a precise indication of the things which lie at the heart of the discourse of the Shoah and of why the selected texts – and these include e.g. the works by Primo Levy and Jean Améry – were considered marginal. Ubertowska also indulges in quite far‑fetched associations, and her argument stumbles along theoretical, excessively free‑ranging though erudite considerations. In a number of cases there is also a lack of certain important contexts, e.g. a reference to the French feminist historiography. The author of the review also has a different opinion concerning the evaluation of certain phenomena – of Raul Hilberg’s research method or of constructing an analogy between the Jewish condition and the homosexual condition. However, the publication which is here discussed is at its best when th eauthor speaks her own mind instead of resorting to the fashionable, alien, theoretical discourse.

Women and the Holocaust: a brand new old discipline. Women and the Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges. Eds. Andrea Peto, Louise Hecht, Karolina Krasuska. Warszawa, Instytut Badań Literackich PAN Wydawnictwo, 2015, pp. 268.

The text presents a collection of essays entitled Women and the Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges which tackles the issues of female experience of the Holocaust. The author
notes that the book as a whole entangles new and old approaches to the problem, thus presenting an interesting, although partly repetitive overview of women holocaust studies perceived as an autonomous field of study.

Take care of the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves? Agnieszka Kłos: Gry w Birkenau. Wrocław, Fundacja na Rzecz Kultury i Edukacji im. Tymoteusza Karpowicza, 2015, ss. 303.

Ewa Graczyk’s text is above all an attempt at describing the narrative structure of the collection of stories by Agnieszka Kłos entitled Gry w Birkenau. According to the author of the essay, the contemporary reflection about the Shoah and the accompanying awareness of the impossibility of closing the post‑Holocaust space – both the literal and the semantic one – are ubiquitous in Agnieszka Kłos’s prose.

In the writings by the author of Gry… there is a recurrence of a sort of a “narrative enjambment” which consists in the continuation of the particular themes and subjects by seemingly
finished works. This device yields the effect of movement, falling apart and the intertexture of the tropes which are crucial for this prose. This aspect of Ewa Graczyk’s prose which is discussed is associated with the problem of the nomadic singularity of the narratrix/protagonist of the stories. This singularity has to do with the constant constitution (and frequently deconstruction) of the rebellious lesbian feminine subjectivity, which inquires after the power, sex and gender in the world after Birkenau.

These tensions are exhibited in the text by juxtaposing Gry w Birkenau with the pre‑Holocaust writings of Bruno Schulz and Debora Vogel. This juxtaposition enables us to see that Agnieszka Kłos’s stories seem to invoke both Schulzian confrontations of the Maker and the Creator with the work and the world as well as the literary experiments of Debora Vogel in which there is a seeming absence of the narratrix and the creatrix.

A red plait. Martin Pollack: Skażone krajobrazy. Przeł. Karolina Niedenthal. Wołowiec, Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2014, ss. 112.

The present essay is devoted to a book by Martin Pollack entitled Skażone krajobrazy. In this volume the Austrian reporter and essayist creates a peculiar map of Central and Eastern
Europe. The former includes the sites of mass murders which were perpetrated in strict secrecy, and which until today have not been commemorated. Pollack argues that until this happens, the perpetrators who attempted at all costs to commit their crimes without any witnesses will prevail. A separate trait of Pollack’s essay has to do with a reflection about the “topography of terror”: the author presents with a poet’s devotion the landscapes in which acts of genocide were perpetrated. This enables the readers to examine the process of the Shoah from yet another perspective – a post‑anthropocentric perspective.

The world with a shortage of wonders. Sylwia Chutnik: W krainie czarów. Kraków, Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy Znak, 2014, ss. 257.

The author discusses W krainie czarów (2014), the most recent collection written by Sylwia Chutnik. She indicates that the book features the themes which are familiar from the previous works of the writer: the matters associated with women, the history of Warsaw (its past and present), the Warsaw Uprising. However, the author of the review at the same time emphasises that W krainie czarów may be considered a unique entry in Chutnik’s literary oeuvre. It may be so not only due to the personal, almost confessional character of the eponymous story which opens the book but above all due to the fact that in W krainie czarów the Shoah assumes the importance of a separate theme, thus becoming apart from the Warsaw Uprising the second war area which is explored by the author of Łączniczki.

The Holocaust Games. Yann Martel: Beatrycze i Wergili. Przeł. Andrzej Szulc. Warszawa, Wydawnictwo Albatros A. Kuryłowicz, 2010, ss. 240.

In a review of Yann Martel’s novel Beatrice and Virgil, the work of the Canadian writer is presented through the pursuit of a new language of speaking about the Holocaust. This is a task which Martel as well as the protagonist of his novel, Henry, the author of a work about the Holocaust of the Jews, in which he futilely attempted to go beyond the sanctioned ways of writing about the Shoah, set themselves. In Beatrice and Virgil a crucial feature is the interpenetration of two orders – the problem of thematising the Shoah meets an animal theme, which is represented by Legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller, a story about an obsessive hunter, and through the art of preparing and stuffing the bodies of dead animals and transforming them into artistic exhibits. In Martel’s work, the master of taxidermy is also the author of a theatrical play about a sheass and an ape, Beatrice and Virgil, which became the victims of events which bear a striking similarity to the various scenes of the Shoah. The basic problem in the novel is not so much a problematisation of the Holocaust but the means of “linguifying” it and the position which may be asserted by the writers who present their Shoah‑related narrations.

“The wail of the genes”. Magdalena Grzebałkowska: 1945. Wojna i pokój. Warszawa, Biblioteka Gazety Wyborczej, 2015, ss. 413. Anna Janko: Mała zagłada. Kraków, Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2015, ss. 259.

In her review the author compares the narrations about the war and the Shoah which were published in 2015: a report by Magdalena Grzebałkowska entitled 1945. Wojna i pokój and
Mała zagłada by Anna Janko. The basis of the comparison is constituted by the Shoah of the Jews as the common, although secondary theme of both books, its influence upon the social
imagination and the rhetoric of both narrations. Apart from indicating the strong points of the narrations, which include an in‑depth study of the archive materials associated with the end of the war (Grzebałkowska) or the presentation of the problem – which was hardly present in the writings devoted to the war and occupation in Poland (the pacification of the village Sochy in the Zamojszczyzna region in 1943, of which Janko’s family fell victim), Marta Tomczok directs her attention to the weaknesses of such discourse, especially in reference to Mała zagłada. These weaknesses include: the intensification of the suffering of the recipient, effected through the juxtaposition in one book of the greatest massacres of children in the history of the world and the rhetoric of the Shoah transposed into the area of the stories about the war sufferings of the Poles. Janko presents both narrations, the Polish and the Jewish one, as mutually competitive.

(Pop)Historie polskich emisariuszy. Komiksy. Kurier z Warszawy. Scen. Mariusz Urbanek i Mateusz Palka. Rys. Bartłomiej Stefanowicz. Wrocław, Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 2014, ss. 79. Jan Karski. Człowiek, który odkrył Holokaust. Scen. Marco Rizzo. Rys. Lelio Bonaccorso. Przeł. Adriana Hołub. Kraków, Wydawnictwo Alter, 2014, ss. 146

Pop(Histories) of Polish emissaries. Comic books Kurier z Warszawy. Scen. Mariusz Urbanek i Mateusz Palka. Rys. Bartłomiej Stefanowicz. Wrocław, Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 2014, ss. 79. Jan Karski. Człowiek, który odkrył Holokaust. Scen. Marco Rizzo. Rys. Lelio Bonaccorso. Przeł. Adriana Hołub. Kraków, Wydawnictwo Alter, 2014, ss. 146.

The review is devoted to two comic books about Polish emissaries who were active during the Second World War. The first one, Kurier z Warszawy by Mariusz Urbanek, Mateusz Palka (script) and Bartłomiej Stefanowicz (drawings), is the history of Jan Nowak‑Jeziorański’s mission since 15 September 1939, when the latter was already on the front line, until the press conference with the journalists held in the Ministry of Information of Great Britain in 1945. The second one, Jan Karski. Człowiek, który odkrył Holokaust, is the work of Italian artists: Marco Rizzo (script) and Lelio Bonaccorso (drawings). From this comic book we also learn about the tasks performed by the Polish war emissary, Jan Karski, until he reaches the United States and makes an account about the state in which his fatherland found itself. In both cases the authors used the memoirs of the emissaries which were published in book form. The aim of the review is to direct the reader’s attention to the changes which occur during the adaptation of such sources to comic books. One of such elements includes the introduction of images and the transposition of the narration from the verbal to the graphical plane. Another important category which is used in the review is the representativeness of the narration of testimony. The entirety of the considerations is summarised by a remark about the transformations of the contemporary comic books about the Holocaust and the location of the comic books which are discussed in this area.

Reconstructing a Jewish town. Nils Roemer: German City, Jewish Memory. The Story of Worms. Waltham, Brandeis University Press, 2010, pp. 316. Michael Meng: Shattered Spaces. Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2011, pp. 351.

The text briefly compares two books: Nils Roemer’s German City, Jewish Memory. The Story of Worms and Michael Meng’s Shattered Spaces. Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland. Both represent fascinating approaches to the process of the reconstruction of the Jewish identity as an important part of the European urban culture destroyed during WWII. By discussing these issues on the examples of Worms (Roemer) and Warsaw, Wrocław, Potsdam, Berlin (Meng) both, albeit in different ways, restore the Jewish identity of these cities not only by approaching the history of historical or architectural landmarks, but also by discussing some less material, discoursive memory markers such as mythology, tourism, politics etc.