Jak si disidenti připomínali holokaust

Author(s): Stephan Stach / Language(s): Czech Issue: 3/2016

This is a Czech translation of ‘Dissidentes Gedenken: Unabhängiges Holocaustgedenken in der DDR und der Volksrepublik Polen’, in Peter Hallama and Stephan Stach (eds), Gegengeschichte: Zweiter Weltkrieg und Holocaust im ostmitteleuropäischen Dissens (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag 2015, pp. 207–36). The article is concerned with commemoration ceremonies on Holocaust Memorial Days – the ‘Kristallnacht’ of 9 November 1938 in the German Democratic Republic and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 19 April 1943 in the Polish People’s Republic – organized by dissidents in both countries in the 1980s. These commemorations were both an attempt by emerging civil society to reclaim interpretations of history which were different from the master narratives produced by the State-Socialist regimes and were also part of the opposition movements’ political struggle with their governments. In a comparison of these events, the author concludes that despite all their differences they constituted an often overlooked but important contribution to public memory in Poland and Easter Germany and also motivated the two societies to reflect on the meaning of the Shoah.

"Vergangenheitsbewältigung" po česku

Author(s): Peter Hallama / Language(s): Czech Issue: 3/2016

This is a Czech translation of ‘“Vergangenheitsbewältigung” auf Tschechisch: Der Holocaust im tschechischen Samizdat’, which is published in Peter Hallama and Stephan Stach (eds), Gegengeschichte: Zweiter Weltkrieg und Holocaust im ostmitteleuropäischen Dissens (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag 2015, pp. 237–60). The author analyses representations of the Holocaust in Czech dissident literature published as samizdat in the 1970s and 1980s. He concentrates on historical writings, but also considers journalistic contributions, memoirs, and works of belles-lettres, as well as translations of publications. In particular, the article considers two aspects that highlight the difficulties one faced and continues to face when trying to fully integrate the Holocaust into Czech national history. First, the Holocaust was often understood by the dissidents as evidence of the inhuman nature of totalitarian regimes. This interpretation, however, led to placing the persecution of the Jews by the Nazi regime on the same level as the persecution of the Czechs by the Nazi and Communist regimes. Second, if there was a reassessment or questioning of the Czech national master narrative, then topics such as home-grown antisemitism or the Holocaust were not addressed. The dissidents admitted that Czechoslovakia also had its question of guilt, but they related it to the expulsion of the German minority after the Second World War. The Holocaust, by contrast, did not generate any similar debate among the dissidents. The behaviour of Czechs during the Second World War, the attitude towards Jews, and domestic antisemitism were thus not questioned at all. The Holocaust has, according to the author, therefore tended to be overlooked or, at best, mentioned only incidentally in writing about twentieth-century Czech history – whether the authors published their texts in state-owned publishing houses or in samizdat.

Asimilace: kritika jednoho pojmu

Author(s): Kateřina Čapková / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1/2019

The article was originally published in English under the title “Beyond the Assimilationist Narrative: Historiography on the Jews of the Bohemian Lands and Poland after the Second World War” in the Polish journal Studia Judaica, Vol. 19, No. 1 (37) (2016), pp. 129–155. The authoress compares the historiographies of the post war history of Jews in the Czech Lands and Poland, analyzing not only differences between, but above all similarities in paradigms of interpretations of the Jewish experience in these two regions. She first compares the institutional base, contents, and quantity of research of Jewish history in the Communist and post-Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland, drawing a conclusion that while dozens of publicationson the post-war experience of Polis Jews were written in Poland in the 1980s and particularly in the 1990s, writing about the modern Jewish history (save for a few works on Theresienstadt) had been unacceptable in Czechoslovakia until the political changes in 1989, and even then the interest of Czech historians in the post-war life of Czech Jews (unlike that in their tragic fate during the war) did not show any substantial increase. At the same time, the authoress claims that it generally holds true (and not only for the Polish and Czech/Czechoslovak historiographies) that while the notion of assimilation has been broadly criticized and questioned with respect to the older period of the Jewish history, it still dominates in works dealing with the time after the 2nd World War. This means, in fact, that the post-war existence and experience of religious-minded Czech and Polish Jews has been either denied, or marginalized, and that the history of Jews, who are often perceived as a monolithic social group, has been misleadingly interpreted as a story of linear assimilation. To a substantial extent, the interpretation is a result of the unacceptable generalization/extrapolation of the situation in the center (Prague, Warsaw) to that in outlying regions. It must be noted that roughly a half of the post-war Jewish population in the Czech Lands were immigrant who had lived in Carpathian Ruthenia or eastern Slovakia before the war and who were forming up new communities based on different traditions; similarly, almost a half of the post-war Jewish population in Poland were living in Lower Silesia where they had been repatriated from the Soviet Union. Compared to the assimilation narrative burdened with nationalism and conforming to the official interpretation of the Communist era, the authoress offers alternatives respecting the complexity and plurality of the human society.

Arnošt Lustig a ti druzí

Author(s): Jiří Holý / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1/2018

This article examines changes in the Holocaust/Shoah presentation in literature throughout the several past decades. According to Alvin H. Rosenfeld, the Holocaust is not percieved as an authentic historical event these days and slowly becomes a shared symbol of evil or entertainment. Rosenfeld warns about the possible “end of the Holocaust” in public consciousness. Short stories and novels by Arnošt Lustig are good examples of these changes. Later books by the author accentuate the harsher side of life in the camps (violence, brutality, hetero- and homosexual prostitution, lack of unity among the prisoners etc.). He often records stories of young Jewish girls and women. Their beauty and youth form a moving contrast to the horrors of the Shoah. In the novelette Colette, for instance, many conventional images are used in the narrative. Credibility of presented figures disappears very often, they are “omnipresent” and “omniscient” almost like the famous Forrest Gump. By using various information and statements reproduced by these characters, the author constructs a kind of Auschwitz-Birkenau encyclopedia. The result of this is the loss of authenticity. At the same time, though, a lot of data of this “encyclopedia” is inaccurate. Lustig uses elements of thriller and romance. In works by other well-known authors who write about the Holocaust, various elements can be found: elements of thriller (Jonathan Littell), fantasy, comics, horror as well as porn films (Igor Ostachowicz). Literary texts by both Littel and Ostachowicz are full of violence, brutality and sexual scenes. Like Lustig, Jonathan Littell has created an encyclopedia of Nazi crimes during the WWII with implausible characters and situations in his novel The Kindly Ones. In contrast to Lustig and Littell, Night of the Living Jews by Ostachowicz is more original and impressive. It also brings actual questions concerning the past and relations between Poles and Jews.

Reflexe antisemitismu v meziválečných prózách Egona Hostovského

Author(s): Milan Hanyš / Language(s): Czech Issue: 5/2020

This study analyses images of antisemitism in the interwar prose works Ghetto v nich (The Ghetto in Them, 1928), Případ profesora Körnera (The Case of Professor Körner, 1932) and Dům bez pána (House Without a Master, 1937), focusing on Hostovský’s representation of antisemitism at various levels (social, cultural and psychological), which is present to various degrees of explicitness in his works. It is generally the case in these prose works that Hostovský’s characters recognize and live out their Jewish identity whenever they experience exclusion and face hatred. Racial stereotypes and antisemitic prejudices go through the minds of non-Jews and Jews alike, and have a fundamental importance in the creation of the contradictory identity and selfunderstanding of Hostovský’s characters. The novels Případ profesora Körnera and Dům bez pána in particular show that the affirmation of Jewish tradition and identity may in certain situations be an indication of escape from responsibility and the dilemmas of human existence. In these prose works, assimilation, a return to the traditions of the ancestors or an attempt at individual emancipation are not adequate responses to antisemitism and the problems of life in a modern society. The only possible solution proves to be mutual solidarity among people who overcome their socially and culturally determined status by combining their strengths and strenuously endeavouring to achieve mutual comprehension.

Papież Benedykt XVI, Mystagogia Benedicti. Wprowadzenie w tajemnice roku liturgicznego. Objawienie Pańskie. Od drugiej Niedzieli po Bożym Narodzeniu do święta Ofiarowania Pańskiego, red. ks. Andrzej Demitrów, Biskupów 2020

Author(s): Andrzej Sebastian Jasiński OFM / Language(s): Polish Issue: 25/2021

Papież Benedykt XVI, Mystagogia Benedicti. Wprowadzenie w tajemnice roku liturgicznego. Wielka Noc Zmartwychwstania Pańskiego. Niedziela Zmartwychwstania i Oktawa Wielkanocy, red. ks. Andrzej Demitrów, Biskupów 2021

Author(s): Andrzej Sebastian Jasiński OFM / Language(s): Polish Issue: 25/2021

Atti del settimo convegno RBS. International Studies on Biblical & Semitic Rhetoric, F. Graziano – R. Meynet – B. Witek (ed.), Seria: RBSem 30, Leuven: Peeters 2021

Author(s): Jerzy Bosowski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 25/2021

JUDEN UND CHRISTEN IM ANTIKEN ROM. EIN PARADIGMENWECHSEL UND SEINE WIRKUNG AUF DIE ENTWICKLUNG DER JÜDISCH-CHRISTLICHEN BEZIEHUNGEN

Author(s): Marko Jovanović / Language(s): German Issue: 2/2020

Bis ins 20. Jahrhundert wurde die jüdische materielle Kultur aus der Zeit des antiken Roms als irrelevant für die Interpretation und das Verständnis der Entstehung des Christentums betrachtet. Erst in den vergangenen Jahren kam es zu einem Paradigmenwechsel in der Wahrnehmung des komplexen Verhältnisses zwischen Juden und Christen in der Antike. Bis heute jedoch ringen Wissenschaftler um eine angemessene Terminologie, die diese sehr komplexen historischen Beziehungen angemessen beschreiben könnte.

Obraz mniejszości żydowskiej na łamach „Gazety Piotrkowskiej” (1921-1923)

Author(s): Daniel Warzocha / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2021

The weekly “Gazeta Piotrkowska” was published in Piotrków Trybunalski in the years 1921-1923. It presented the opinions of the People’s National Union (National Democracy). Much attention was paid to Jewish matters. The journal considered that Jews were harming Poland. The Jewish origin of communist activists was emphasized. The worst traits were attributed to the Jews. They have been compared to a parasite that feeds on other nations. At the same time, their love of money, most often allegedly obtained dishonestly, was emphasized. It was no longer a long-standing aversion to the Jewish religion (anti-Judaism), but purely racist thinking, according to which assimilation was impossible, change of religion meaningless, and “Jew-ish blood” was supposed to infect “Aryan blood”. The communist movement and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia were identified with the Jews, going so far as to say that “Bolshevism and Judaism are one thing”. “Gazeta Piotrkowska” also used anti-Semitic fakes that were popular at the time. The Jewish origins of the political opponents of the National Democracy were recalled. The Jews who fought for independent Poland (in World War I and the war between Poland and Soviet Russia) were not mentioned. And yet they also lived in Piotrków. The anti-Semitic propaganda of “Gazeta Piotrkowska” did not have the expected effect. From September 1, 1923, the weekly ceased to be published “due to temporary financial difficulties.”

Bitak i ništa – Mistični elementi kod Heideggera i Celana

Author(s): Otto Pöggeler / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 1-2/2022

Martin Heidegger je svojim misaonim putovima utjecao na naše vrijeme kao malo koji drugi filozof i to daleko onkraj akademskih područja. Pritom se Heideggerovo filozofiranje, naravno, shvaćalo na najrazličitije načine.

Warsaw and Yiddish: Europe’s Once Largest Jewish City

Author(s): Tomasz Dominik Kamusella / Language(s): English Issue: 6/2022

Prior to the Katastrofe (Yiddish for ‘Holocaust’), Warsaw functioned as the world’s capital of Yiddishland, or the Ashkenazic civilization of Yiddish language and culture. In the terms of absolute numbers of Jewish inhabitants, at the turn of the 20th century, New York City surpassed Warsaw. Yet, from the perspective of cultural and political institutions and organizations, Warsaw remained the center of Europe’s Jewish life. This article offers an overview of the rise of Warsaw as such a center, its destruction during World War II, and the center’s partial revival in the aftermath, followed by its extinction, which was sealed with the antisemitic ethnic cleansing of Poland’s last Jewish communities in 1968. Twenty years after the fall of communism, beginning at the turn of the 2010s, a new awareness of the Jewish facet of Warsaw’s and Poland’s culture and history has developed during the past decade. It is a chance for a new opening, for embracing Jewish culture, Yiddish and Judaism as inherent elements of Polish culture and history. This country’s history and culture was not created exclusively by Catholics, as ethnonationalists are wont to claim incorrectly. Hence, the essay is intended to serve as a corrective to this anachronistic preconception.

INCURSIUNI BUCOVINENE PRIN INTERMEDIUL LUI V. SIMIGANOVSCHI

Author(s): Mircea A. Diaconu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 2/2022

In the study “The Bukovinian Incursions of V. Simiganovschi”, the author discusses a multitude of topics that contribute to the realization of a detailed analysis of the peasantʼs life in Bukovina. Mircea A. Diaconu explores, as much as possible, the world of the Bukovinian village as reflected in the pages of a booklet published in 1889 by the theologian student V. Simiganovschi: A Friendly Advice. Something about the state of our people and how to improve it. A few economic advices. In this booklet, beyond the treated themes, it is also shown to what extent the peasant problem, the colonizations and the representation of the Jews are complementary problems and difficult to separate. The author of the study starts the discussion about this quasi-unknown writer and the image he offers us about the peasants from much further away, bringing into question an eloquent case from two points of view, revealing: 1. the complicated and uneven reaction of the Romanians who have been under the Austrians for decades; 2. the tendency to interpret the facts solely in oneʼs own interest.In essence, the study wants to present Simiganovschiʼs booklet both from the perspective of the authorʼs intentions and from that of the way in which, indirectly, it becomes a mirror of the peasantʼs life and, moreover, of the intentions of its author. Simiganovschi wants to offer the peasant a guide to help him in his agricultural activities and in his daily life, in order to save himself from the danger of poverty and loss of identity. At the same time, he proposes some micro-narratives with an identity character, regarding the peasantʼs attitude towards school, towards drinking, towards daily life. Inevitably, considering that the blame for the fallen state of the peasant belongs to the Jews, the booklet is also considered a small manual of anti-Semitism, because the intention of awakening the national conscience is fatally doubled by blaming the Jewish immigrants in Bukovina.For contextual clarifications, the author also resorts to other related “documents”, which show how to configure the image of the Romanian peasant in the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Thus, other references are also brought into question, mentioned being the writings of Ion Budai-Deleanu, of Gabriel Splény, the first governor of Bukovina, and also the literary texts of the Bukovinian priests IracliePorumbescu and Constantin Morariu.

„DIE STIMME” – O VOCE BUCOVINEANĂ ÎN ISRAEL

Author(s): Carol Mohr / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 2/2022

The publication “Die Stimme” [The Voice], which appeared in German in Tel Aviv between 1944 and 2017, is a valuable corpus for historical and linguistic research. Originally established with the aim of strengthening the cohesion of Jews who had fled from Bukovina to Palestine (Eretz Israel) and to support their integration into the new homeland, it became in time the most important publication of Bukovinian Jews in the world. In this work we want to highlight the fact that Bukovinaʼs cultural tradition and the German language remained for a long time (after the Holocaust and even after the establishment of the State of Israel, in 1948) essential components of the identity of the Bukovinian Jews everywhere. The corpus is also important for sociological and anthropological research, because it contains information not only about the elites of the Bukovinian Jews, but also about the daily life of simple people, with troubles, nostalgia and small satisfactions.

Sižets ATU 777: par ebreju stereotipu latviešu folklorā

Author(s): Svetlana Pogodina / Language(s): Latvian Issue: 38/2018

The article is dedicated to the problem of a Jewish stereotype (ethnocultural pre judices and perception of the Jews), spread among the non-Jewish inhabitants in Latvia nowadays – Latvians, Russians, Latgalians, Belarusians, etc. The Non-Jews constructed an image of the Jew in order to explain their “different” behaviour, language, festivities, food practices, their “other” culture and tradition. To show how the Jewish stereotype is being constructed and preserved in the local traditional culture, the folklore narratives have been examined. The article is focused on the universal subject ATU 777 named The Wandering Jew (ceaselessly wandering and unable to die as a punishment for blasphemy). The Latvian variations of this subject recorded in Latvian and Latgalian in 1920s-1930s are kept today at the Archives of Latvian Folklore (ALF). The image of the Wandering Jew manifests its folklore-related nature, as well as a strong connection to the Christian culture and religion.

Identități construite, identități atribuite: fizionomia identitară a evreității (Evul Mediu, Epoca Modernă)

Author(s): Alexandru-Florin Platon / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 41/2022

The identity, a currently global concept in the social and human sciences, has always been defined in the most various ways. Nowadays, it is usually understood as an expression of “subconsciousness”, in relation to which the body occupies a secondary place. However, this was not always the case. For a very long time, until mid-twentieth century, the identity was regarded as closely related to the body and manifesting itself through its aspect, gestures and movement. It was not only what a person said, acted or behaved like that indicated who that person was and how they were identified, but also their appearance, their face and features, as well as those of their entire body. The body was an indicator of the soul and, unquestionably, a “marker” of membership. Translating the first and establishing the latter were conducted through physiognomy.The Jewish identity is, from this perspective, one of the most relevant examples. Starting with the 12th–13th centuries, the Jews began to be recognised in the Western medieval societies not only by their clothing, but also by a series of psychological “peculiarities”, inferred from the sacred texts and especially from certain facial (eyes, nose, hair) and body features (darker skin colour) that were considered unique. The tradition of body “interpretation” (as revealing for one’s soul) is very old in the European culture, going back to Aristotle (384–322). His treaty, “On Soul” (Peri Psyches / De Anima), provides the basics of translating the soul through the body. Later associated to Galen of Pergamon’s theory of temperaments, the principle of physiognomic lecture founded by Aristotle was taken further in the next centuries by all authors and passed on to the Middle Ages by the Arabs. In the Modern Era (18th–19th centuries), physiognomy did not disappear, but it evolved by being incorporated into several sciences (such as phrenology). This explains the steadiness of body categorising, through which Jewish people were identified, but now set up in a different ideological and (bio-) political mechanism: the theory of races that resulted in the well-known tragic events of the 20th century.

Memories of Immigrant Life: Marie Jastrow’s A Time to Remember: Growing Up in New York before the Great War (1979)

Author(s): Anca-Luminita Iancu / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2022

In her coming-of-age memoir, A Time to Remember: Growing Up in New York before the Great War (1979), Marie Jastrow, a Jewish-American immigrant woman, cleverly captures the daily life of her family in Yorkville, New York City, in the early decades of the twentieth century. Jastrow recalls the difficulties she and her parents had to face during their first years in the United States, between 1907 and 1918, and the ways in which they managed to adapt to the social, economic, political, and cultural circumstances of the new environment. Therefore, this essay sets out to explore how Jastrow’s family members succeeded in negotiating the challenges of a gendered immigrant experience

The Modernizing Jewish Family as a Negative Role Model in Polish Popular Novels at the Turn of 19th and 20th Century

Author(s): Małgorzata Domagalska / Language(s): English Issue: 19/2022

In Poland at the turn of 19th and 20th century a modernizing Jewish family appears quite frequently in anti-Semitic and non-anti-Semitic “Jewish novels”. In both cases a Jewish family is presented in rather pejorative light as a point of reference to a Polish family. In such comparison Polish culture and Poles are presented as a more attractive, more civilized and that is why their way of living is followed by the Jews. Jewish families try to undergo the process of assimilation but their effort are depicted in rather pejorative or even ridiculous way. There are some Jewish heroes presented as a role model, but they only prove the role. There is a huge gap between Poles and Jews who have to make an effort to change their personality and behaviour according to Polish expectations. In anti-Semitic novels a description of the process of modernization and assimilation of Jews had to prove its negative consequences. Jews were treated as enemies and novels’ plot revealed their main goal – the conquest of Poland. This kind of writing can be also seen as a warning against mix marriages to prevent Polish society from the integration with Jews, who are presented as the main threat of homogeneity of Polish nation.

“Like Beasts of the Field”: The Poverty and Sanitary Conditions of the East End’s Jewish Immigrants in the Context of British Imperial and Racial Discourse

Author(s): Karolina Sierzputowska / Language(s): English Issue: 19/2022

The influx of Eastern European Jewry into London stirred controversy within British society and within the Anglo-Jewish community. Newly arrived Jews became part of the debate over the “alien problem,” which resulted in the passing of the Aliens Act in 1905. This paper will examine the disputes over the poverty and “dirtiness” of Jewish immigrants in the context of the British imperial and racial discourse. The aim is to show how the controversy over the poverty of immigrants and the sanitary conditions of the Jewish quarter exposed deeper social anxiety over the position of the British Empire. The paper will focus on accusations against Jews from Eastern Europe of impoverishing and polluting the “heart of the Empire,” thus contributing to the collapse of the ideals of British progress and superiority.