Search Results

This chapter traces Betar's complex relationship to Polish nationalism from the diverse and often conflicting vantage points of Betar's members, leaders, and Polish government officials. Betar's efforts to link Zionism with Polish nationalism became a regular feature of their activities in the early 1930s. At the very moment that Betar's leaders claimed to perform a distinct national identity, they modeled their ceremonies on Polish patriotic rituals, called for their members to “act Polish,” and attempted to include Polish government officials as both observers and participants in their celebrations. The chapter then explores the dynamics and paradoxes of acculturation for young Jews coming of age in interwar Poland, as well as the complex factors at play when government officials attempted to determine the extent to which young Jews and other minorities could be integrated into the new Polish state.

This chapter looks at language choice within the context of Franco-Polish relations in the Resistance in Romain Gary’s novel Éducation européenne. It draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia to analyze characters who speak in multiple languages but whom Gary represents in French. Gary’s use of heteroglossic French and of multilingualism in the novel is a response to the politics of La France libre, the journal where excerpts from his novel were first published. French and Polish authors of numerous articles focus on links between France and Poland—especially through a shared history of Romantic Revolution—as an expression of European democracy, one that could pave the way for a united Europe in the postwar period. Gary represents this link through language, but he also inserts Jewish language into the discussion, including the Jewish people in a European Resistance.

This chapter looks at 29 book reviews. The first set of books discusses hasidism in Poland; the history of the Jewish population in lower Silesia after the Second World War; the Jewish communities in eastern Poland and the USSR; Jewish emancipation in Poland; and the memoirs of Holocaust survivors. The second set of books examine the Holocaust experience and its consequences; the ethical challenge of Auschwitz and Hiroshima; the history of the Jews of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the eleventh to eighteenth centuries; and Russia's first modern Jews. The third set of books assesses the Kishinev pogrom of 1903; the history of feldshers in general and Jewish feldshers in particular; the diplomacy of Lucien Wolf; the Berlin Jewish community; the aspects of Jewish art; magic, mysticism, and hasidism; and the Jewish presence in Polish literature. The fourth set of books explores the depictions of Jews by Polish artists, both Christian and Jewish; the history of co-operation between the Polish government and the New Zionist Organization; and the origins of Zionism.

The Nazi destruction of Polish Jewry progressed incrementally from 1939 to 1945 through legal restrictions, confiscations, deportations, ghettoization, slave labor, death camps, and death marches. Knowledge of the Nazi programs increased in Poland and in the West over time, but the way this knowledge was comprehended and responded to by different actors varied. This chapter argues that the ‘spaces of engagement’ where knowledge of the unfolding Jewish tragedy was acquired crucially influenced responses to it. To illustrate this point it focuses on the reactions of the British Foreign Office, the Polish Government in Exile (based in London) and the Polish Underground in Poland itself. In addition, understandings of the Holocaust were heavily influenced by geographies of obligation - that is, the hierarchies of responsibility and consideration between different groups at various spatial scales. This issue has been extensively debated in the last decades, but largely in the context of Polish-Jewish relations. This chapter expands the scale of analysis and explores how the notion of geographies of obligation can help deepen understandings of the way different institutions and key actors responded to the Holocaust as it was taking place.

This chapter follows Arthur Szyk's career toward the outbreak of the Second World War. This period marked a period of increased political activism on his part. Supported by the highest levels of the Polish government, Szyk's work continued to spread the message of mutual co-operation and freedom, meeting with positive responses during his exhibits. He once again took up the pen as a political caricaturist during this period, adding contemporary images to the message he believed was already embodied in the statute, to help alert people to the worsening situation in Germany. He contributed drawings to several Polish newspapers, highlighting the threats posed by the rise of the Nazi party and commenting on the sad state of affairs experienced by his fellow Jews living in Germany.

This chapter traces the life of refugee scholar Jacobs Leib Teicher from archives and family sources. Born a Polish Jew, Teicher studied Arabic and Jewish philosophy in Italy, gaining his degree in philosophy and oriental languages at Florence University, while also completing a course of study at the Italian Rabbinical College. The chapter traces his precarious status as a foreign Jew in Italy and then in Britain until his post-war appointment to a Lectureship in Rabbinics at Cambridge. Supported by the SPSL, Teicher spent parts of the war in the cosmopolitan circles of Oxford, though he had difficulties adapting. He worked on the Corpus Platonicum project with philosopher Raymond Klibansky, before moving to London as secretary to the Jewish representative on the National Council of the Polish Government-in-Exile.