Author: Bożena Shallcross
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821441191
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 480
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Book Description
As the subject of ideological, aesthetic, and existential manipulations, the Polish home and its representation is an ever-changing phenomenon that absorbs new tendencies and, at the same time, retains its centrality to Polish literature, whether written in Poland or abroad. Framing the Polish Home is a pioneering work that explores the idea of home as fundamental to the question of cultural and national identity within Poland’s recent history and its tradition. In this inaugural volume of the Polish and Polish-American Studies Series, the Polish home emerges in its rich verbal and visual representations and multiple material embodiments, as the discussion moves from the loss of the home during wartime to the Sovietized politics of housing and from the exilic strategies of having a home to the the idyllic evocation of the abodes of the past. Although, as Bożena Shallcross notes in her introduction, “few concepts seem to have such universal appeal as the notion of the home,” this area of study is still seriously underdeveloped. In essays from sixteen scholars, Framing the Polish Home takes a significant step to correct that oversight, covering a broad range of issues pertinent to the discourse on the home and demonstrating the complexity of the home in Polish literature and culture.
Author: Piotr Guzowski
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000516113
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 350
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Book Description
This volume shows how families in different contexts – noble, urban, legal, religious - and across different periods of history from the late Middle Ages to the modern era, shaped the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and its successor states, pre-partitioned and post-partitioned Poland. Contributors draw on a diverse range of different sources including rural and urban court registers, church registers, and population surveys to examine the economic bases of families as well as marital and family conflicts. The sources and the applied research methods enable contributors to characterize families led not only by men but also by single women. New research methods employed include approaches to family structures drawn from sociology, such as life-cycle and life-course analysis, as well as anthropological methods to reconstruct kinship in communities. Spanning several centuries, and from the river Oder to the Black Sea, the Baltic, Lithuania, Belarus and the Ukrainian borderlands, this volume is a major contribution to the historiography on East Central Europe, a region still too often omitted from histories of Europe. Framing the Polish Family in the Past will appeal to researchers and students alike in Polish and Lithuanian History and Medieval and Early Modern Society and Culture.
Author: Magdalena Kay
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441198288
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
Are we allowed to choose where we belong? What pressures make us feel that we should belong somewhere? This book brings together four major poets-Heaney, Mahon, Zagajewski, and Hartwig-who ask themselves these questions throughout their lives. They start by assuming that we can choose not to belong, but know this is easier said than done. Something in them is awry, leading them to travel, emigrate, and return dissatisfied with all forms of belonging. Writer after writer has suggested that Polish and Irish literature bear some uncanny similarities, particularly in the 20th century, but few have explored these similarities in depth. Ireland and Poland, with their tangled histories of colonization, place a large premium upon knowing one's place. What happens, though, when a poet makes a career out of refusing to know her place in the way her culture expects? This book explores the consequences of this refusal, allowing these poets to answer such questions through their own poems, leading to surprising conclusions about the connection of knowledge and belonging, roots and identity.
Author: Brian McCook
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821419269
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303
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Book Description
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.
Author: Eliza Orzeszkowa
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821446290
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
Eliza Orzeszkowa was a trailblazing Polish novelist who, alongside Leo Tolstoy and Henryk Sienkiewicz, was a finalist for the 1905 Nobel Prize in Literature. Of her many works of social realism, Marta (1873) 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 the English literature of its time in attacking the ways the labor market failed women. Suddenly widowed, the previously middle-class Marta Świcka is left penniless and launched into a grim battle for her survival and that of her small daughter. As she applies for job after job in Warsaw—portrayed here as an every-city, an unforgiving commercial landscape that could be any European metropolis of the time—she is told time after time that only men will be hired, that men need jobs because they are fathers and heads of families. Marta burns with Orzeszkowa’s feminist conviction that sexism was not just an annoyance but a threat to the survival of women and children. It anticipated the need for social safety nets whose existence we take for granted today, and could easily read as an indictment of current efforts to dismantle those very programs. Tightly plotted and exquisitely translated by Anna Gąsienica-Byrcyn and Stephanie Kraft, Marta resonates beyond its Polish setting to find its place in women’s studies, labor history, and among other works of nineteenth-century literature and literature of social change.
Author: Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821415263
Category : Polish Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 391
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Book Description
Considering the two distinct Polish immigrant groups after World War II - the Polish-American descendants of pre-war ecomomic migrants and polish refugees fleeing communism - this study explores the uneasy challenge to reconcile concepts of responsibility toward their homeland.
Author: Danuta Mostwin
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821416073
Category : Immigrants
Languages : en
Pages : 135
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Book Description
Deeply melancholy and moving in its unsentimental depiction of ordinary people trying to make sense of their uprooted lives, Testaments presents two novellas?
Author: Mary Patrice Erdmans
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821441612
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
The Grasinski Girls were working-class Americans of Polish descent, born in the 1920s and 1930s, who created lives typical of women in their day. They went to high school, married, and had children. For the most part, they stayed home to raise their children. And they were happy doing that. They took care of their appearance and their husbands, who took care of them. Like most women of their generation, they did not join the women’s movement, and today they either reject or shy away from feminism. Basing her account on interviews with her mother and aunts, Mary Erdmans explores the private lives of these white, Christian women in the post-World War II generation. She compares them, at times, to her own postfeminist generation. Situating these women within the religious routines that shaped their lives, Professor Erdmans explores how gender, class, ethnicity, and religion shaped the choices the Grasinski sisters were given as well as the choices they made. These women are both acted upon and actors; they are privileged and disadvantaged; they resist and surrender; they petition the Lord and accept His will. The Grasinski Girls examines the complexity of ordinary lives, exposing privileges taken for granted as well as nuances of oppression often overlooked. Erdmans brings rigorous scholarship and familial insight to bear on the realities of twentieth-century working-class white women in America.
Author: Anja Nowak
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253067448
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362
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Book Description
"For Nazi Germany, the ghetto was a conceptual tool used to facilitate social and political exclusion and further their anti-Jewish campaign. For the Jews who lived in them, the ghetto became the center of their lives--even though they were also sites of immense suffering. Combining thorough historical research with an interdisciplinary analysis of the relationship between space and violence, Violent Space provides a unique insight into the history and the socio-spatial topography of the Jewish ghetto in German-occupied Warsaw (1939-1943). Using rare archival materials and firsthand accounts, many of which have never been translated into English, Anja Nowak traces out the trauma that the space of the ghetto inflicted on its Jewish inhabitants, and how it alienated, disoriented, and harmed them. While the physical ghetto--its buildings, boundaries, and streets--has been reabsorbed and redefined by modern-day Warsaw's urban structure, Violent Space shows us that its presence still lingers in the narratives of those who were forced into this first phase of the Holocaust"--
Author: Anna Müller
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821447823
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 452
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Book Description
One woman’s national, political, ethnic, social, and personal identities impart an extraordinary perspective on the histories of Europe, Polish Jews, Communism, activism, and survival during the twentieth century. Tonia Lechtman was a Jew, a loving mother and wife, a Polish patriot, a committed Communist, and a Holocaust survivor. Throughout her life these identities brought her to multiple countries—Poland, Palestine, Spain, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Israel—during some of the most pivotal and cataclysmic decades of the twentieth century. In most of those places, she lived on the margins of society while working to promote Communism and trying to create a safe space for her small children. Born in Łódź in 1918, Lechtman became fascinated with Communism in her early youth. In 1935, to avoid the consequences of her political activism during an increasingly antisemitic and hostile political environment, the family moved to Palestine, where Tonia met her future husband, Sioma. In 1937, the couple traveled to Spain to participate in the Spanish Civil War. After discovering she was pregnant, Lechtman relocated to France while Sioma joined the International Brigades. She spent the Second World War in Europe, traveling with two small children between France, Germany, and Switzerland, at times only miraculously avoiding arrest and being transported east to Nazi camps. After the war, she returned to Poland, where she planned to (re)build Communist Poland. However, soon after her arrival she was imprisoned for six years. In 1971, under pressure from her children, Lechtman emigrated from Poland to Israel, where she died in 1996. In writing Lechtman’s biography, Anna Müller has consulted a rich collection of primary source material, including archival documentation, private documents and photographs, interviews from different periods of Lechtman’s life, and personal correspondence. Despite this intimacy, Müller also acknowledges key historiographical questions arising from the lacunae of lost materials, the selective preservation of others, and her own interpretive work translating a life into a life story.
