Description
Book SynopsisThe book deals with the issue of the Holocaust in the Polish literature for children and adolescents. Drawing upon some of the leading Polish authors of the twentieth and the twentieth-first centuries, the author reveals the historical, ideological, and cultural entanglement of their works. The main focus of the book is to search for reasons behind the outpouring of interest in the Holocaust noticed in the most recent Polish literature for younger readers. Among these reasons, the author lists the Polish local and historical context, the new approach to issues traditionally seen as taboo, the development of memory and postmemory narratives, and the postmodern shift from a discursive totality and universalist explanations.
Table of ContentsChapter One Mount of Remembrance
The Predicament of Postmemory
Educational Practices vis-a-vis the Holocaust
The Polish School of Memory
The Ethical Challenge of Reading about the Holocaust at School, or
on the Importance of Context
DS804.34 and PZ
The Faultlines of Memory
Chapter Two Jan Brzechwa’s Pan Kleks Series: An Alternative
Reading
Games with Akademia pana Kleksa
Between the See-Saw and the Scaffold: 1946
Growing up, or “the Disenchantment of the World”?
An Academy or a Cheder?
ŕ Aleph = Academy
What Is Erasure?
Younger Siblings of the Academy, or, on the Books That No One Reads
The Difficult Case of Tryumf pana Kleksa
The Fairy Tale that Does Not Uplift
Chapter Three The Architecture of Biography: The Case of
Korczak
Between Memorials and Literature: From Mapping the City to
Mapping Memory
The Year of Korczak, or on the Troublesome Invasion of Memory
From a Tactician to a Strategist: A Modern Take on Korczak
Chapter Four Micronarratives from the Peripheries of the
Holocaust
Micronarratives and Counter-History, or on Overcoming Oppression
The Holocaust According to Anne Frank
Girls’ Narratives: Intimist Writing and the Holocaust
The Fairy Tale and the Holocaust
The Trap of Meanings
Chapter Five Motherhood in the State of Emergency
Between the Yiddishe Mame and Medeą
The Metonymy of Mother: The Sliska Street Case
The World without Mother: Patterns of Storytelling
Mother as a Pretext
Hunger/Satiety: Mother and Affect
When Mother Is Far Away
The Animal Point of View: Another Version of Motherhood
Polish Mothers and the Rituals of Hospitality
Chapter Six Space Management and Postmemory
Sacred Landscape
Beautiful Deceit
Philosemitic Postmemory
Playing with Space
The Jewish Space
a) The Continuity of the Wall
b) Clearings of Truth
The Post-Jewish Space
Non-place: The Disneyland of Memory
Space Talks
Chapter Seven The Dybbuk Versus Facebook
The Dybbuk: A Case Study of Kotka Brygidy by Joanna Rudniańska
Facebook: A Case Study of Wszystkie lajki Marczuka by Paweł
Beręsewicz
Close Strangers: An Attempt at a Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
