The Life Behind the Books: Reconstructing the Przeworskis’ Biographies
The Life Behind the Books: Reconstructing the Przeworskis’ Biographies

Summary/Abstract: Adopting critical and feminist archival approaches, this article reconstructs the dis/continuous biographies of the Przeworskis, intertwined with the activities of the Wydawnictwo J. Przeworskiego (J. Przeworski Publishing House), which excelled in innovative life-writing and fiction, avant-garde aesthetics, works of progressive intellectuals, and bestsellers by women writers. As the Przeworskis were cultural mediators active in the global transfer of modernist works in Central Europe and in the UK, select UK and US archives act as substitute repositories, allowing some gaps in the scholarship on J. Przeworski to be filled. The article focuses on marginalized women publishers whose role in modernist publishing networks are only now being uncovered. Drawing on publishing correspondence, the biographical reconstruction is supported by recollections of family, other people in the literary marketplace, and Holocaust survivors. The research findings highlight the need to re-investigate previous assumptions on interwar print culture, frequently based on limited data and reproducing the mechanisms of systemic violence.

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