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Reading (in) the Holocaust

Practices of Postmemory in Recent Polish Literature for Children and Young Adults.

by Małgorzata Wójcik-Dudek (Author)
©2020 Monographs 252 Pages
Open Access

Summary

The book deals with the issue of the Holocaust in the Polish literature for children and adolescents. Drawing upon some of the leading Polish authors of the twentieth and the twentieth-first centuries, the author reveals the historical, ideological, and cultural entanglement of their works. The main focus of the book is to search for reasons behind the outpouring of interest in the Holocaust noticed in the most recent Polish literature for younger readers. Among these reasons, the author lists the Polish local and historical context, the new approach to issues traditionally seen as taboo, the development of memory and postmemory narratives, and the postmodern shift from a discursive totality and universalist explanations.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Acknowledgements
  • Table of Contents
  • Chapter One Mount of Remembrance
  • The Predicament of Postmemory
  • Educational Practices vis-à-vis the Holocaust
  • The Polish School of Memory
  • The Ethical Challenge of Reading about the Holocaust at School, or on the Importance of Context
  • DS804.34 and PZ
  • The Faultlines of Memory
  • Chapter Two Jan Brzechwa’s Pan Kleks Series: An Alternative Reading
  • Games with Akademia pana Kleksa
  • Between the See-Saw and the Scaffold: 1946
  • Growing up, or “the Disenchantment of the World”?
  • An Academy or a Cheder?
  • א Aleph = Academy
  • What Is Erasure?
  • Younger Siblings of the Academy, or, on the Books That No One Reads
  • The Difficult Case of Tryumf pana Kleksa
  • The Fairy Tale that Does Not Uplift
  • Chapter Three The Architecture of Biography: The Case of Korczak
  • Between Memorials and Literature: From Mapping the City to Mapping Memory
  • The Year of Korczak, or on the Troublesome Invasion of Memory
  • From a Tactician to a Strategist: A Modern Take on Korczak
  • Chapter Four Micronarratives from the Peripheries of the Holocaust
  • Micronarratives and Counter-History, or on Overcoming Oppression
  • The Holocaust According to Anne Frank
  • Girls’ Narratives: Intimist Writing and the Holocaust
  • The Fairy Tale and the Holocaust
  • The Trap of Meanings
  • Chapter Five Motherhood in the State of Emergency
  • Between the Yiddishe Mame and Medeą
  • The Metonymy of Mother: The Sliska Street Case
  • The World without Mother: Patterns of Storytelling
  • Mother as a Pretext
  • Hunger/Satiety: Mother and Affect
  • When Mother Is Far Away
  • The Animal Point of View: Another Version of Motherhood386
  • Polish Mothers and the Rituals of Hospitality
  • Chapter Six Space Management and Postmemory
  • Sacred Landscape
  • Beautiful Deceit
  • Philosemitic Postmemory
  • Playing with Space
  • The Jewish Space
  • a) The Continuity of the Wall
  • b) Clearings of Truth
  • The Post-Jewish Space
  • Non-place: The Disneyland of Memory
  • Space Talks
  • Chapter Seven The Dybbuk Versus Facebook
  • The Dybbuk: A Case Study of Kotka Brygidy by Joanna Rudniańska
  • Facebook: A Case Study of Wszystkie lajki Marczuka by Paweł Beręsewicz
  • Close Strangers: An Attempt at a Conclusion
  • Bibliography
  • Index
  • Series Page

cover

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche
Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available online at
http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of
Congress.

About the author

Małgorzata Wójcik-Dudek (PhD) is a lecturer at the University of Silesia in Katowice. Her academic activities focus on the teaching of Polish literature at primary and high school levels, literature of children and young adults, and changes in cultural representations of the past in the Polish education.

About the book

The book deals with the issue of the Holocaust in the Polish literature for children and adolescents. Drawing upon some of the leading Polish authors of the twentieth and the twentieth-first centuries, the author reveals the historical, ideological, and cultural entanglement of their works. The main focus of the book is to search for reasons behind the outpouring of interest in the Holocaust noticed in the most recent Polish literature for younger readers. Among these reasons, the author lists the Polish local and historical context, the new approach to issues traditionally seen as taboo, the development of memory and postmemory narratives, and the postmodern shift from a discursive totality and universalist explanations.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Table of Contents

Chapter One Mount of Remembrance

The Predicament of Postmemory

Educational Practices vis-à-vis the Holocaust

The Polish School of Memory

The Ethical Challenge of Reading about the Holocaust at School, or on the Importance of Context

DS804.34 and PZ

The Faultlines of Memory

Chapter Two Jan Brzechwa’s Pan Kleks Series: An Alternative Reading

Games with Akademia pana Kleksa

Between the See-Saw and the Scaffold: 1946

Growing up, or “the Disenchantment of the World”?

An Academy or a Cheder?

א Aleph = Academy

What Is Erasure?

Younger Siblings of the Academy, or, on the Books That No One Reads

The Difficult Case of Tryumf pana Kleksa

The Fairy Tale that Does Not Uplift

Chapter Three The Architecture of Biography: The Case of Korczak

Between Memorials and Literature: From Mapping the City to Mapping Memory

The Year of Korczak, or on the Troublesome Invasion of Memory

From a Tactician to a Strategist: A Modern Take on Korczak

Chapter Four Micronarratives from the Peripheries of the Holocaust

Micronarratives and Counter-History, or on Overcoming Oppression

The Holocaust According to Anne Frank

Girls’ Narratives: Intimist Writing and the Holocaust

The Fairy Tale and the Holocaust

The Trap of Meanings

Chapter Five Motherhood in the State of Emergency

Between the Yiddishe Mame and Medeą

The Metonymy of Mother: The Sliska Street Case

The World without Mother: Patterns of Storytelling

Mother as a Pretext

Hunger/Satiety: Mother and Affect

When Mother Is Far Away

The Animal Point of View: Another Version of Motherhood

Polish Mothers and the Rituals of Hospitality

Chapter Six Space Management and Postmemory

Sacred Landscape

Beautiful Deceit

Philosemitic Postmemory

Playing with Space

The Jewish Space

a) The Continuity of the Wall

b) Clearings of Truth

The Post-Jewish Space

Non-place: The Disneyland of Memory

Space Talks

Chapter Seven The Dybbuk Versus Facebook

The Dybbuk: A Case Study of Kotka Brygidy by Joanna Rudniańska

Facebook: A Case Study of Wszystkie lajki Marczuka by Paweł Beręsewicz

Close Strangers: An Attempt at a Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

←10 | 11→

Chapter One Mount of Remembrance

Radio: And then the Germans marched into Warsaw and said that Poland wasn’t Poland anymore, and Warsaw wasn’t its capital but a rubble-filled hole in the ground …

Little Metal Girl: Dead right, a hole! A shithole. I hate this city. The tube, wrrr, the trams, bruu, stinking buses, and wherever you’re headed, you go over dead bodies, dead bodies, dead bodies!

Dorota Masłowska: Między nami dobrze jest1

Aleksandra Ubertowska argues that the above passage from Dorota Masłowska’s play is an affirmation of posthistoricity in the sense of “the atrophy of ‘grand narratives’ […] which lay claim to imposing order on the magma-like, amorphous reality, to forcing it into a coherent shape and meaning.”2

Details

Pages
252
Year
2020
ISBN (PDF)
9783631822920
ISBN (ePUB)
9783631822937
ISBN (MOBI)
9783631822944
ISBN (Hardcover)
9783631808627
DOI
10.3726/b17001
Open Access
CC-BY-NC-ND
Language
English
Publication date
2020 (April)
Keywords
Polish literature for children and adolescents Holocaust Post-memory World War II Contemporary literature
Published
Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien, 2020. 252 pp.

Biographical notes

Małgorzata Wójcik-Dudek (Author)

Małgorzata Wójcik-Dudek (PhD) is a lecturer at the University of Silesia in Katowice. Her academic activities focus on the teaching of Polish literature at primary and high school levels, literature of children and young adults, and changes in cultural representations of the past in the Polish education.

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254 pages