“In this sweeping and heart-wrenching book, Slawomir Żurek takes us on a fascinating voyage from the prewar Polish-Jewish poets to Polish writers in Israel who are struggling to contend—in the shadow of the Shoah and in their mother tongue—with the shattering of their once-flourishing world. Packed with deftly sketched portraits, the result is an impassioned and poignant history of a bifurcated Polish-Jewish culture.”
— Vivian Liska, author of German-Jewish Thought and its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy
“This wide-ranging and path-breaking collection of essays is a comprehensive account of the way the impact of Polish Jews on the development of Polish culture, their presence in Polish social life, and relations between Jewish and non-Jewish Poles has been reflected in literature and literary criticism. These complex and controversial topics are handled in a manner that is both sensitive and dispassionate, and the book seeks to find a path to a common Polish Jewish remembering. It is essential reading for all those interested in the complex interaction of Poles and Jews.”
— Antony Polonsky, Emeritus Professor of Holocaust Studies, Brandeis University, Chief Historian, Global Education Outreach Project, Museum of Polish Jews in Warsaw
“The relation between the Polish and Jewish literary fields constitutes a major area of Sławomir Jacek Żurek’s scholarly research. His dedication to ‘The Polish-Jewish Borderland’ has lasted decades, and his contributions to the field of Christian-Jewish relations and the origin of antisemitism contains important studies on historical, sociological, literary, and spiritual topics.
In Polish-Jewish Re-Remembering, Żurek aspires to a commendable goal of reevaluating a topic that’s in ‘the processes of transformation, transmutation, and transfiguration,’ to identify the crucial sources of his conclusions. The reader observes people of different identities, including different identities among Jews themselves.
This well informed and fascinating narration provides a roadmap to dealing with one of the most difficult areas in history and literature as well as the reality we still experience around us.”
— Anna Frajlich, Senior Lecturer Emerita, Columbia University, and Polish writer.
“Zurek's book is an extensive study of Polish-Jewish relations. The area where everything is played out here is memory, and the title category of re-remembering means extracting content from the deep layers of forgetting and repression. The author's interpretive work can be called burying in memory, which has a double sense: it is about digging through memory and burying in it what has been dug up, about extracting from oblivion and entrusting the social memory with the extracted content. Even more explicitly: it's about revival and burial at the same time.
In this archaeological-philological work, the author seeks above all that which is connective, bilateral, and therefore neither exclusively Jewish nor exclusively Polish, but Jewish-Polish or even JewishPolish. He discusses literary depictions of Polish-Jewish cities (Lublin) and regions (the Borderlands), presents a common warfare (Polish Jews in the army of the Second Polish Republic), analyzes the linguistic consciousness of Polish-Jewish poets, extensively presents the work of the important poet Arnold Slutsky, and interprets the writings of Polish Jews creating in Israel.
All these studies bring us closer to the last part of the book, in which the author presents Polish literature written after 2000 as a rogue method of assimilating and processing Jewish culture. Younger writers introduce traces of the presence of Jewish culture into Polish literature but use the Holocaust as a kind of bible of the third millennium—as the broadest common language, as a system of cultural references, as a set of topoi. In addition, they introduce the Holocaust using pop culture, collective psychoanalysis, or pornography. They consider no literary tricks forbidden, no register of language inaccessible. And they shatter the system of correctness. Not because they want to use the Holocaust for scandal, but because they want to understand the Polish present—full of social aggression, transferred hatred, crafted memories and real content of displacement.
Zurek thus leads us to the conclusion that one cannot understand oneself in today's Polish society without understanding Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust. Actually, a reader could start reading the whole book from this last part. And then retreat into the depths of memory. Re-memorizing corpses of texts and corpses of bodies.”
— Professor Przemysław Czapliński, Director of Center for Open Humanities, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland
