An Ordinary Life?
The Journeys of Tonia Lechtman, 1918–1996
By Anna Müller
A Jew, Pole, daughter, mother, wife, Communist, migrant, Holocaust survivor, and refugee driven to fight for a better world. Ordinary or anything but? In Tonia Lechtman’s life, the lofty and the quotidian intertwined, making everything she did both monumental and mundane. Who was she?
Biography & Autobiography | Jewish · Jewish History · History | Modern | 20th Century · Poland · Palestine · Israel · France · Spain · Polish and Polish-American Studies
Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities
Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840–1920
By Lenny A. Ureña Valerio
Ureña Valerio illuminates nested imperial and colonial relations using sources ranging from medical texts and state documents to travel literature and fiction. She analyzes scientific and medical debates to connect medicine, migration, and colonialism, providing an invigorating model for the analysis of Polish history from a global perspective.
Polish History · German History · Colonialism and Decolonization · History of Science · Poland · Germany · Africa · South America · Polish and Polish-American Studies
Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities
Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840–1920
By Lenny A. Ureña Valerio
Ureña Valerio illuminates nested imperial and colonial relations using sources ranging from medical texts and state documents to travel literature and fiction. She analyzes scientific and medical debates to connect medicine, migration, and colonialism, providing an invigorating model for the analysis of Polish history from a global perspective.
Polish History · German History · Colonialism and Decolonization · History of Science · Poland · Germany · Africa · South America · Polish and Polish-American Studies
Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction
By Grażyna J. Kozaczka
Through close readings of several Polish American and Polish Canadian novels and short stories published over the last seven decades, Kozaczka demonstrates how Polish American women writers have acknowledged their patriarchal oppression and tells the complex story of how they sought empowerment through resistive and transgressive behaviors.
Literary Criticism, US · Literary Criticism, Women · Women’s Studies · Poland · Polish and Polish-American Studies
Marta
A Novel
By Eliza Orzeszkowa
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Translation by Anna Gąsienica Byrcyn and Stephanie Kraft
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Introduction by Grażyna J. Kozaczka
Of trailblazing Polish novelist Eliza Orzeszkowa’s many works of social realism, Marta is among the best known, but until now it has not been available in English. Easily a peer of The Awakening and A Doll’s House, the novel was well ahead of English literature of its time in attacking the ways the labor market failed women.
Fiction · Women Authors · European Literature · Polish and Polish-American Studies · Poland
The Politics of Morality
The Church, the State, and Reproductive Rights in Postsocialist Poland
By Joanna Mishtal
The Politics of Morality is an anthropological study of the expansion of power of the religious right in postsocialist Poland and its effects on individual rights and social mores.
Political Science | Religion, Politics & State · Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social · Religion | Sexuality & Gender Studies · Poland · Polish and Polish-American Studies
Taking Liberties
Gender, Transgressive Patriotism, and Polish Drama, 1786–1989
By Halina Filipowicz
Moving beyond a traditional study of Polish dramatic literature, Taking Liberties is a masterful intellectual history of what may be called patriotism without borders: a nonnational form of loyalty compatible with the universal principles and practices of democracy and human rights.
Theater - History and Criticism · Media Studies · Gender Studies · Polish and Polish-American Studies
Between the Brown and the Red
Nationalism, Catholicism, and Communism in Twentieth-Century Poland—The Politics of Bolesław Piasecki
By Mikołaj Stanisław Kunicki
Between the Brown and the Red captures the multifaceted nature of church-state relations in communist Poland, relations that oscillated between mutual confrontation, accommodation, and dialogue. Ironically, under communism the bond between religion and nation in Poland grew stronger. This happened in spite of the fact that the government deployed nationalist themes in order to portray itself as more Polish than communist.
Polish History · Religion | Religion, Politics & State · Nationalism · Catholicism · Poland · Polish and Polish-American Studies
The Borders of Integration
Polish Migrants in Germany and the United States, 1870–1924
By Brian McCook
A comparative study of Polish migrants in the Ruhr Valley and in northeastern Pennsylvania, The Borders of Integration questions assumptions about race and white immigrant assimilation a hundred years ago, highlighting how the Polish immigrant experience is relevant to present-day immigration debates. It shows the complexity of attitudes toward immigration in Germany and the United States, challenging historical myths surrounding German national identity and the American “melting pot.”
Labor History · History · Polish and Polish-American Studies
An Invisible Rope
Portraits of Czesław Miłosz
Edited by Cynthia L. Haven
Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) often seemed austere and forbidding to Americans, but those who got to know him found him warm, witty, and endlessly enriching. An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz presents a collection of remembrances from his colleagues, his students, and his fellow writers and poets in America and Poland.
Memoir · Literary Criticism, Eastern Europe · Poland · Polish and Polish-American Studies · Literature
The Origins of Modern Polish Democracy
Edited by M. B. B. Biskupski, James S. Pula, and Piotr J. Wróbel
The Origins of Modern Polish Democracy is a series of closely integrated essays that traces the idea of democracy in Polish thought and practice. It begins with the transformative events of the mid-nineteenth century, which witnessed revolutionary developments in the socioeconomic and demographic structure of Poland, and continues through changes that marked the postcommunist era of free Poland.The
Polish History · Polish and Polish-American Studies · Poland
Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter
The Catholic Church and Independent Poland, 1914–1939
By Neal Pease
When an independent Poland reappeared on the map of Europe after World War I, it was widely regarded as the most Catholic country on the continent. Yet the relations of the Second Polish Republic with the Church proved far more difficult than expected.
Polish History · Religion | Religion, Politics & State · Catholicism · History | Modern | 20th Century · Poland · Polish and Polish-American Studies
The Law of the Looking Glass
Cinema in Poland, 1896–1939
By Sheila Skaff
The Law of the Looking Glass: Cinema in Poland, 1896–1939 reveals the complex relationship between nationhood, national language, and national cinema in Europe before World War II. Author Sheila Skaff describes how the major issues facing the region before World War I, from the relatively slow pace of modernization to the desire for national sovereignty, shaped local practices in film production, exhibition, and criticism.
Media Studies · European History · Film and Video - History and Criticism · Nationalism · Poland · Polish and Polish-American Studies
Holy Week
A Novel of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
By Jerzy Andrzejewski
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Introduction by Oscar E. Swan
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Foreword by Jan T. Gross
At the height of the Nazi extermination campaign in the Warsaw Ghetto, a young Jewish woman, Irena, seeks the protection of her former lover, a young architect, Jan Malecki. By taking her in, he puts his own life and the safety of his family at risk.
Historical Fiction · European Literature · Polish and Polish-American Studies · Poland
The Clash of Moral Nations
Cultural Politics in Piłsudski’s Poland, 1926–1935
By Eva Plach
The Clash of Moral Nations is a study of the political culture of interwar Poland, as reflected in and by the May 1926 coup and the following period of “sanacja.” It tracks the diverse appropriations and manipulations of that concept, introducing an important cultural and gendered dimension to understandings of national and political identity in interwar Poland.
Polish History · Poland · Polish and Polish-American Studies