and Balkan Europe
by IECOB & AIS Università di Bologna
This area collects information about a wide range of books, monographies and edited volumes concerning the countries and themes relevant to PECOB
Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland
edited by: Erica T. Lehrer and Michael Meng
published by: Indiana University Press
pp: 312
ISBN: 9780253015006: Hardback, 9780253015037: Paperback
price: Hardback / £61.00, Paperback / £24.99
In a time of national introspection regarding the country’s involvement in the persecution of Jews, Poland has begun to reimagine spaces of and for Jewishness in the Polish landscape, not as a form of nostalgia but as a way to encourage the pluralization of contemporary society. The essays in this book explore issues of the restoration, restitution, memorializing, and tourism that have brought present inhabitants into contact with initiatives to revive Jewish sites. They reveal that an emergent Jewish presence in both urban and rural landscapes exists in conflict and collaboration with other remembered minorities, engaging in complex negotiations with local, regional, national, and international groups and interests. With its emphasis on spaces and built environments, this volume illuminates the role of the material world in the complex encounter with the Jewish past in contemporary Poland.
Table of contents
Introduction / Erica Lehrer and Michael Meng
1. "Oświęcim"/ "Auschwitz": Archeology of a Mnemonic Battleground / Geneviève Zubrzycki
2. Restitution of Communal Property and the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland / Stanislaw Tyszka
3. Muranów as a Ruin: Layered Memories in Postwar Warsaw / Michael Meng
4. Stettin, Szczecin, and the "Third Space." Urban nostalgia in the German/Polish/Jewish borderlands / Magdalena Waligórska
5. Rediscovering the Jewish Past in the Polish Provinces: The Socio-Economics of Nostalgia / Monika Murzyn-Kupisz
6. Amnesia, Nostalgia, and Reconstruction: Shifting Modes of Memory in Poland’s Jewish Spaces / Slawomir Kapralski
7. Jewish Heritage, Pluralism, and Milieux de Memoire: the case of Krakow’s Kazimierz / Erica Lehrer
8. The Ethnic Cleansing of the German-Polish-Jewish ‘Lodzermensch’ / Winson Chu
9. Stony Survivors: Images of Jewish Space on the Polish Landscape / Robert L. Cohn
10. Reading the Palimpsest / Konstanty Gebert
11. A Jew, a Cemetery, and a Polish Village: A Tale of the Restoration of Memory
Jonathan Webber
12. The Museum of the History of Polish Jews: A Post-War, Post-Holocaust, Post-Communist Story / Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
Epilogue: Jewish Spaces and their Future / Diana Pinto
Notes
Contributors
Index
Author Bio
Erica Lehrer is Associate Professor in the History and Sociology/Anthropology Departments at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, where she also holds the Canada Research Chair in Post-Conflict Memory, Ethnography, and Museology.
Michael Meng is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Clemson University, South Carolina.
PECOB: Portal on Central Eastern and Balkan Europe - University of Bologna - 117, c.so della Repubblica - Italy
