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Scholarship on the civilization of Polish Jews has tended to focus
on elite culture and canonical literature; even modern Yiddish
culture has generally been approached from the perspective of
'great works'. This volume of Polin focuses on the less explored
but historically vital theme of Jewish popular culture and shows
how, confronted by the challenges and opportunities of modernity in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it blossomed
into a complex expression of Jewish life. In addition to a range of
articles on the period before the Second World War there are
studies of the traces of this culture in the contemporary world.
The volume as a whole aims to develop a fresh understanding of
Polish Jewish civilization in all its richness and variety.
Subjects discussed in depth include klezmorim and Jewish recorded
music; the development of Jewish theatre in Poland, theatrical
parody, and the popular poet and performer Mordechai Gebirtig;
Jewish postcards in Poland and Germany; the early Yiddish popular
press in Galicia and cartoons in the Yiddish press; working-class
libraries in inter-war Poland; the impact of the photographs of
Roman Vishniac; contemporary Polish wooden figures of Jews; and the
Krakow Jewish culture festival. In addition, a Polish Jewish
popular song is traced to Sachsenhausen, the badkhn (wedding
jester) is rediscovered in present-day Jerusalem, and Yiddish
cabaret turns up in blues, rock 'n' roll, and reggae garb. There
are also translations from the work of two writers previously
unavailable in English: excerpts from the ethnographer A. Litvin's
pioneering five-volume work Yidishe neshomes (Jewish Souls) and
several chapters from the autobiography, notorious in inter-war
Poland, of the writer and thief Urke Nachalnik. As in earlier
volumes of Polin substantial space is also given to new research
into a variety of topics in Polish Jewish studies. These include
the origins of antisemitism in Poland; what is known about the
presence of German forces in the vicinity of Jedwabne in the summer
of 1941; and the vexed question of Jews in the communist security
apparatus in Poland after 1944. The review section includes an
important discussion of what should be done about the paintings in
Sandomierz cathedral which represent an alleged ritual murder in
the seventeenth century, and an examination of the 'anti-Zionist'
campaign of 1968.
Rather than having spent the last 50 years coming to terms with the
magnitude of evil of the Holocaust, this book is about a country
that, according to the author, has largely ignored its
participation and attempted to minimize its national memory of the
event.
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