This article probes the ways in which two purportedly distinct Polish Jewish survival experiences... more This article probes the ways in which two purportedly distinct Polish Jewish survival experiences of World War II are in fact entangled. Although living through the Holocaust in Poland and flight into the unoccupied regions of the USSR have generally been presented as separate—with the Holocaust largely overshadowing survival in the Soviet Union—both during the war and afterward, many individuals, families, and communities experienced them as linked. Examining the interconnections helps to chart the development of Holocaust memory.
This article examines the contemporary phenomenon of online translations of post-Holocaust Polish... more This article examines the contemporary phenomenon of online translations of post-Holocaust Polish Jewish memorial books. The memorial books, written primary in Hebrew and Yiddish in the decades after the war, each focus on Jewish life and death in a particular prewar Jewish community. Written originally by and for people from those communities, the books are now being translated and posted online by Jewish genealogists, and, most recently, by Polish non-Jews interested in the histories of their own towns. The paper explores what is lost and gained in the process of translating these inward facing, post-genocidal diasporic volumes for entirely new communities of readers.
This article offers an alternative social history of the candle tax, generally viewed as part of ... more This article offers an alternative social history of the candle tax, generally viewed as part of the failed experiment of state-run Jewish schools in the Russian Empire. Building on scholarship that suggests the schools actually had some influence and the Jewish minority in Russia actively engaged with the government in negotiating their own transformation, this article follows the diversion of candle tax funds into private schools for Jewish girls and Jewish religion courses in Russian state schools. I argue that, just as the framers of the original legislation could not have foreseen its secondary uses, so, too, the educators who repurposed the candle tax monies could not have imagined the enduring consequences.
“Mapping a Lost World: Postwar Jews and (Re)creating the Past in Memorial Books,” Eliyana R. Adle... more “Mapping a Lost World: Postwar Jews and (Re)creating the Past in Memorial Books,” Eliyana R. Adler and Sheila E. Jelen, eds., Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post-Holocaust Decades (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017), 68-86.
THE GENRE OF THE BILDUNGSROMAN is so widely recognized that my spell check program passed over it... more THE GENRE OF THE BILDUNGSROMAN is so widely recognized that my spell check program passed over it with no complaint. We are all familiar with the novels of growth, maturation, individuation, and education in its broadest sense that fit into this category of literature. Many autobiographies, especially those written in a literary style or with other gestures toward literature, might also be considered as part of the genre. As Marcus Moseley has demonstrated, Rousseau's confessional model has been hugely influential in the reading and writing of autobiography generally, as well as in the European Jewish community of letters. 1 This essay seeks to define two autobiographies written on the margins of that community, not so much as bildungsroman but as bildungs romance. The original German term literally means a novel of education, but of course bildung, like its English counterpart, can encompass entirely informal and nonscholarly types of education. Nonetheless, it can also be used to mean education in its formal and scholastic sense, as it will be here. In referring to romance I do not mean to write about the love lives of the two authors, although in truth both autobiographies include information about courtship and marriage. Nor do I plan to engage in the interesting discussion of the East European Jewish Haskalah as a part of the Romantic movement recently sparked by Olga Litvak's book. 2 My focus in this brief essay will be on the intense desire for education exhibited in two autobiographies written by women whose lives spanned the upheav
This article probes the ways in which two purportedly distinct Polish Jewish survival experiences... more This article probes the ways in which two purportedly distinct Polish Jewish survival experiences of World War II are in fact entangled. Although living through the Holocaust in Poland and flight into the unoccupied regions of the USSR have generally been presented as separate—with the Holocaust largely overshadowing survival in the Soviet Union—both during the war and afterward, many individuals, families, and communities experienced them as linked. Examining the interconnections helps to chart the development of Holocaust memory.
This article examines the contemporary phenomenon of online translations of post-Holocaust Polish... more This article examines the contemporary phenomenon of online translations of post-Holocaust Polish Jewish memorial books. The memorial books, written primary in Hebrew and Yiddish in the decades after the war, each focus on Jewish life and death in a particular prewar Jewish community. Written originally by and for people from those communities, the books are now being translated and posted online by Jewish genealogists, and, most recently, by Polish non-Jews interested in the histories of their own towns. The paper explores what is lost and gained in the process of translating these inward facing, post-genocidal diasporic volumes for entirely new communities of readers.
This article offers an alternative social history of the candle tax, generally viewed as part of ... more This article offers an alternative social history of the candle tax, generally viewed as part of the failed experiment of state-run Jewish schools in the Russian Empire. Building on scholarship that suggests the schools actually had some influence and the Jewish minority in Russia actively engaged with the government in negotiating their own transformation, this article follows the diversion of candle tax funds into private schools for Jewish girls and Jewish religion courses in Russian state schools. I argue that, just as the framers of the original legislation could not have foreseen its secondary uses, so, too, the educators who repurposed the candle tax monies could not have imagined the enduring consequences.
“Mapping a Lost World: Postwar Jews and (Re)creating the Past in Memorial Books,” Eliyana R. Adle... more “Mapping a Lost World: Postwar Jews and (Re)creating the Past in Memorial Books,” Eliyana R. Adler and Sheila E. Jelen, eds., Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post-Holocaust Decades (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017), 68-86.
THE GENRE OF THE BILDUNGSROMAN is so widely recognized that my spell check program passed over it... more THE GENRE OF THE BILDUNGSROMAN is so widely recognized that my spell check program passed over it with no complaint. We are all familiar with the novels of growth, maturation, individuation, and education in its broadest sense that fit into this category of literature. Many autobiographies, especially those written in a literary style or with other gestures toward literature, might also be considered as part of the genre. As Marcus Moseley has demonstrated, Rousseau's confessional model has been hugely influential in the reading and writing of autobiography generally, as well as in the European Jewish community of letters. 1 This essay seeks to define two autobiographies written on the margins of that community, not so much as bildungsroman but as bildungs romance. The original German term literally means a novel of education, but of course bildung, like its English counterpart, can encompass entirely informal and nonscholarly types of education. Nonetheless, it can also be used to mean education in its formal and scholastic sense, as it will be here. In referring to romance I do not mean to write about the love lives of the two authors, although in truth both autobiographies include information about courtship and marriage. Nor do I plan to engage in the interesting discussion of the East European Jewish Haskalah as a part of the Romantic movement recently sparked by Olga Litvak's book. 2 My focus in this brief essay will be on the intense desire for education exhibited in two autobiographies written by women whose lives spanned the upheav
Please see the conference program. If you want to participate, please register at capkova@usd.cas... more Please see the conference program. If you want to participate, please register at capkova@usd.cas.cz by 28 February 2017.
Applying gender analysis to the field of Holocaust Studies has yielded important results. Whereas before the 1990s, most Holocaust scholarship focused almost exclusively on the experiences of male victims, expanding to include women’s experiences has both opened up new areas of inquiry and raised crucial questions about established areas. And yet this developing scholarly conversation has limitations as well. As Joan Ringelheim, an early adopter, pointed out in her later work, scholarship about women during the Holocaust easily becomes essentializing; at times even suggesting that women were somehow more capable of facing the Nazi onslaught. More recently Pascale Rachel Bos has argued that many of the perceived differences between the experiences of men and women may have more to do with the way the different genders were taught to express themselves than with actual differences. Even more fundamentally, however, examining the Holocaust and its aftermath through the lens of gender requires breaking up the Jewish or Roma family.
Diaries, testimonies and memoirs of the Holocaust often include at least as much on the family as... more Diaries, testimonies and memoirs of the Holocaust often include at least as much on the family as on the individual. Victims of the Nazi regime experienced oppression and made decisions embedded within families. Even after the war, sole survivors often described their losses and rebuilt their lives with a distinct focus on family. Yet this perspective is lacking in academic analyses. In this work, scholars from the United States, Israel, and across Europe bring a variety of backgrounds and disciplines to their study of the Holocaust and its aftermath from the family perspective. Drawing on research from Belarus to Great Britain, and examining both Jewish and Romani families, they demonstrate the importance of recognizing how people continued to function within family units—broadly defined—throughout the war and afterward.
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Applying gender analysis to the field of Holocaust Studies has yielded important results. Whereas before the 1990s, most Holocaust scholarship focused almost exclusively on the experiences of male victims, expanding to include women’s experiences has both opened up new areas of inquiry and raised crucial questions about established areas. And yet this developing scholarly conversation has limitations as well. As Joan Ringelheim, an early adopter, pointed out in her later work, scholarship about women during the Holocaust easily becomes essentializing; at times even suggesting that women were somehow more capable of facing the Nazi onslaught. More recently Pascale Rachel Bos has argued that many of the perceived differences between the experiences of men and women may have more to do with the way the different genders were taught to express themselves than with actual differences. Even more fundamentally, however, examining the Holocaust and its aftermath through the lens of gender requires breaking up the Jewish or Roma family.
In this work, scholars from the United States, Israel, and across Europe bring a variety of backgrounds and disciplines to their study of the Holocaust and its aftermath from the family perspective. Drawing on research from Belarus to Great Britain, and examining both Jewish and Romani families, they demonstrate the importance of recognizing how people continued to function within family units—broadly defined—throughout the war and afterward.