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The book presents various aspects of literary representations of post-Holocaust trauma in texts of Polish and German literature. The phenomena of transgenerational memory transmission or – as Marianne Hirsh puts it – "postmemory" are an important element of the author’s reflections.
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The book presents various aspects of literary representations of post-Holocaust trauma in texts of Polish and German literature. The phenomena of transgenerational memory transmission or – as Marianne Hirsh puts it – "postmemory" are an important element of the author’s reflections.
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The article shows Sholem Asch’s biographical and mental connections with Poland and Polish culture. In addition, the worldview factors, derived from the tradition of romanticism, and especially from the space of Polish romanticism, are presented in the Asch system of values. "As a result,, the Yiddish writer derived his thinking about literature as much from the Jewish tradition as from reading works by Adam Mickiewicz or Juliusz Słowacki. Moreover, in his project of public life and Polish-Jewish relations, Asch was of the opinion that, thanks to civic models represented by Berek Joselewicz, Tadeusz Kościuszko and Józef Piłsudski, peaceful and beneficial coexistence of Jews and Poles in one country – Poland – was possible.
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Some short stories of Sholem Asch, such as The Daughter of the Master, Dina, Cantor and his Choristers, My Most Beautiful Love or Beauty were translated from Yiddish into Polish by Stanisław Wygodzki and published jointly in 1964. The storylines of these works are focused on socio-cultural issues and show pictures of life in a small-town Jewish diaspora. The space in them is shaped specificically, as it is organized around the cultural values of the Jewish community. The great world which extends beyond the diaspora is identified by the writer with the Zionist dream of the Promised Land and with the return to the great ancestral culture of the patriarchs and the prophets. In turn, the diaspora is associated with narrow alleys of a small town, with an area of the nation’s everyday life, its worries, passions, typical activities (work, celebration, studying, reading the Talmud, praying in the synagogue), as well as existential, moral and religious problems. There is only one strange element in this bipolar composition – the vestigial nature of the description of the autochthonous territory, which (in the light of anthropological research) should accompany the images of ethnic groups forming “the community in the community”. The autochthonous space in Asch’s short stories is usually shown as terra incognita, an alien, dangerous land inhabited by suspicious representatives of local authorities or described explicitly as a space of moral decay, which disinherits the Jews from their traditions and dooms them to perish.
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The author advances the thesis that Sholem Asch’s epic should be situated against the background of modernist realism with its specific features, which include „scattering the meanings” and focusing on the present of the world shown as if involuntarily. Thus, Asch creatively neutralizes the realism of the second half of the 19th century, whose ideological background was homogeneous.
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In this study, discussing the previous state of research on The Witch of Castille, I give my own voice in the debate upon the theory of evil inscribed in Sholem Asch’s long short story. I express doubt about defining the text as "Jewish Quo vadis" and consider if the writer’s efforts to create the moral world of Paul IV’s Rome should not be compared (rather) with the effort of Joseph Conrad constructing the axiosphere of Heart of Darkness. To prove Asch’s distance towards the ethics of Sienkiewicz’s heroes and, on the contrary, closeness – towards Conrad’s characters, I analyze The Witch of Castille in the light of (1) the mysterial-sacrificial topic of René Girard, (2) the theory of symbols and archetypes of Carl Gustav Jung, (3) Tadeusz Kobierzycki’s "axiological metabolism", (4) Ernst Cassirer’s symbol-forming practices, (5) Shakespearean intertextuality of Asch’s long short story as well as (5) the theory of Kantean’s das radikal Böse, and among the other issues – (6) I also juxtapose the Conradian Leopold’s Kongo and Aschian Paul IV’s Piazzo di Judea.
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The article attempts to analyze the Jewish Child, a story by Sholem Asch, (in the context of the song Crazy Mother written by the same author ) as a parabolic, meditative text with special contemplative properties, which due to the addressed issues (individual-collective relationship, human boundary situation) and construction (the structure of an “open work”) associates this work with Romantic heritage. The text brings out the special feature of Asch’s writing, which can be described as a connection between realism, moral or historical specificity and metaphysical depth, pulsating under the canvas of a realistic pictureand located in the spiritual dimension.
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This article analyses the clash between tradition and modernity in the short stories written by Sholem Asch on the example of the institution of marriage. Asch was deeply rooted in Jewish culture, but at the same time, he strayed away from the tradition of his ancestors. He watches the world he knows so well from the outside. He notices the crisis of tradition among Jewish communities and exemplifies it through marriage, one of the most important Jewish rituals. In his short stories, he presents people who break the tradition bymarrying beneath themselves, not following all the elements of the ritual, choosing spouses against traditional advice. However, this neglect of tradition rebounds on the heroes – they are lonely, suffer from social ostracism, feel excluded, do not get along with the spouse or even die. Asch creates a hermetic world of a Jewish community which is slowly pervaded with unwanted changes. On the one hand, the narrator finds this tradition beautiful and loves it, on the other, it is anachronistic, rotten and destroys the characters in his stories..
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The aim of the article is to analyse Tertullian’s attitude to the position of women in the Christian community on the basis of his work “De cultu feminarum”. A thorough analysis of this work aims to answer the key question to what extent the image of a woman presented in it is dominated by the author’s rhetorical passion and temperament. At the end of the article the author asks whether Tertullian really treated the woman as the cause of all evil, or it was one of his violent expressions which he used in his numerous polemics in the dispute over the ideal of Christian life.
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The aim of the paper is to present the image of women according to a 10th-century poem Occupatio written by Odo of Cluny. Odo describes his own vision of anthropology and human fall with particular emphasis on the role of Eve. She was the first channel of sin which affected all mankind. Odo presents female nature as extremely sinful. Women are associated only with carnal sins and lust, they cannot have any spiritual values. Occupatio is compared to Odo’s sermon in honour of Mary Magdalene to indicate the differences between two ways of presenting feminity in both sources.
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This paper presents the ways of showing women in the chronicle of Rodulfus Glaber – a historian of the year 1000. The text shows how a Benedictine monk sees the role of women in the post-Carolingian world, before the intellectual revolution of the 9th century. In the text, we can examine relationships between women and other social groups, especialy linked with heretics. The article discusses the questions whether women are needed in a monastic chronicle, and if it it possible to speak of an unequivocal image of them.
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The article deals with the supposed sinfulness of women in medieval dance. Since women – Eve’s de scendants – were understood as more prone to sin, the author wonders how women were considered in this entertainment compared to men. She analyses information about dance derived from the Bible, selected Church writings and literature of the time, with a focus on depictions of dance appearing in medieval manuscripts. The author argues that sinful dance is not assigned with gender features, it is rather connected with class differences.
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The aim of the article is to analyse the image of queen Bona in the texts whose authors were influenced by the black legend of the queen. The legend had its source in the 16th-century pamphlets, in which she was portrayed as a greedy and murderous woman. Later, in the 18th century, the black legend of the queen became an important element of classicist tragedies and was reproduced by successive 19th-century historians (Czacki, Bandtkie, Lelewel, Bobrzyński), as well as authors of popularizing works (Czartoryska, Siemieński, anonymous author of an article from “Przyjaciel Ludu”) and writers (Pol).
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The article is another voice in the discussion about the main female character of Juliusz Słowacki’s drama “Mary Stuart”. Judging her deeds, interpreters propose various points of view. Some of them claim that Słowacki’s portrayal of Queen of Scots contributes to her black legend by showing her as an evil murderess. I expose her evilness as one more role she created. I want to emphasise that everything happening at the Scottish court is beyond her, so she decides to try if evil might be the answer.
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The aim of the article is to analyse the image of women that is created by Christine de Pizan in her most famous piece “The Book of the City of Ladies” (“Le Livre de la Cité des Dames”) which she wrote at the beginning of the 15th century. The first part presents the structure of the main source and the figure of Christine de Pizan. The subsequent parts examine the arguments she uses in order to defend women. At the end of the article the question if it is appropriate to call Christine de Pizan ‘mother of the feminist critique’ is answered.
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The aim of this article is to present the figure of Lina Heydrich – the wife of the director of the Reich Main Security Office and Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, Reinhard Heydrich. First, the information concerning the sources and Lina’s descent and education is presented. It is followed by the description of her marriage Reinhard Heydrich, her approach to maternity and attitude to national socialism.
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The aim of the article is to analyse the path of Elżbieta Szemplińska, from a woman sensitive to the harms of the weak and humiliated people, to a “shrew” fanatically devoted to a destructive ideology. The first part of the article analyses the writer’s work and selected facts from her life before the Lviv period. In the second part the author analyses the opinions of people Szemplińska met in occupied Lviv. The last part of the article attempts to find an answer to the question how a woman living in such a system dealt with the structures of evil and whether was she able to remain innocent?
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The aim of the article is to analyse the image of Cleopatra, who in Life of Antonius is presented as femme fatale. Plutarch shows heroes of his works focusing on the moral aspect of attitudes and actions. We familiarize ourselves with Antonius’ character through his contacts with good Octavia and bad Cleopatra. Antonius is showed as a silly man, controlled by Cleopatra, who would be the cause of his fall. For Plutarch Antonius is the example of a man under woman’s control, so the biography can be read as a collection of examples and anti-examples of honest women.
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The article discusses issues related to the life of Constance Markievicz, an Irish nationalist, one of the leaders of the Easter Rising and the first woman to be elected to the British House of Commons. The aim of the article is to portray factors that shaped Markievicz’s political and social mindset and also to characterize her influence on the formation of the Irish nationalist organizations. The sources for this analysis were testimonies from the collection of the Irish Bureau of Military History, transcripts of Dáil Éireann debates, and Markievicz’s political writings and speeches.
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The article focuses on the way in which Polish media report murders committed by women and how it influences the perception of female killers in public discourse. The research describes social and media reactions to the three most common types of female killers: the perpetrator of the murder of a partner as a result of domestic violence’s acts, infanticide and a killer of a stranger. The research uses the linguistic and qualitative analysis of news releases relating to each of the types mentioned.
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