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This article discusses the significance and enduring presence of nostalgic narrations in works by Polish-Jewish authors that are often accompanied by motifs of anti-nostalgia. They derive from complex relations with spaces categorized as familiar and alien, close and remote, as well as complex, ambivalent experiences of bonds, distance, and loss. The intersection of nostalgia and anti-nostalgia brings together and intertwines Polish and Jewish traditions and discourses of nostalgia. The sources of the article are writings by the outstanding inter-war Polish-Jewish writers Roman Brandstaetter, Anda Eker, Stefan Pomer, and Maurycy Szymel.

Bożena Wojnowska, Inna twarz Korczaka. Szkice o dwoistej tożsamości (i nie tylko), Wydawnictwo Austeria, Kraków–Budapeszt–Syrakuzy 2023, ss. 391, [6], il.

Polish Jewish Culture beyond the Capital: Centering the Periphery is a path-breaking exploration of the diversity and vitality of urban Jewish identity and culture in Polish lands from the second half of the nineteenth century to the outbreak of the Second World War (1899-1939). In this multidisciplinary essay collection, a cohort of international scholars provides an integrated history of the arts and humanities in Poland by illuminating the complex roles Jews in urban centers other than Warsaw played in the creation of Polish and Polish Jewish culture. Each essay presents readers with the extraordinary production and consumption of culture by Polish Jews in literature, film, cabaret, theater, the visual arts, architecture, and music. They show how this process was defined by a reciprocal cultural exchange that flourished between cities at the periphery-from Lwów and Wilno to Kraków and Łódź-and international centers like Warsaw, thereby illuminating the place of Polish Jews within urban European cultures. Companion website (https://polishjewishmusic.iu.edu)

Recalling his experience growing up in interwar Kraków, the Polish Jewish writer and literary critic Henryk Vogler (1911–2005) notes that “even the most convinced Zionists primarily used the Polish language, and for the Jewish intelligentsia it was their native tongue. . . . Only among the poorest masses was Yiddish the only language used. Hebrew, on the other hand, was not current at all.”¹ Women were reportedly the most Polonized group among the Jews in Kraków, which stemmed from their attending Polish schools, common even among Orthodox families. Preeminent physicist Leopold Infeld (1898–1968) recalls that his mother “spoke

This article discusses the interpretation of the war waged over the memory of national suffering and a peculiar rivalry in victimhood between Poles and Jews in the writings of Jewish intellectuals in Poland after the 1980s. It focuses on works by three authors representative of different generations, different philosophies of being Jewish in Poland after the Shoah, and different strategies of functioning in Polish-Jewish relations: a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising Marek Edelman (1919–2009); philosopher, publicist and Jewish activist Stanisław Krajewski (b. 1950); and journalist Konstanty Gebert (b. 1953).

This article discusses the spread of the Polish language among the Jewish population in the 1930s. Its source is the daily press, which was one of the most important institutions of interwar Jewish culture in the Polish language and one of the key institutions in which Polish served as a means of written communication in Jewish life. The press can be regarded as one of the principle sources indicating the main modern areas of Jewish communication in Polish and documenting the expansion of this communication from the public to the private sphere, from the exchange of opinions on social, political, and artistic problems to the discussion of everyday issues, family life, or even the most intimate subjects. The Polish-Jewish popular daily press created opportunities for speaking about everyday life through journalistic and literary genres dealing with topics related to family, marriage, sex, health, fashion, cooking, housekeeping, raising children, schools and universities, sport, entertainment, etiquette. The appearance of Polish-Jewish sensationalist newspapers at the beginning of the 1930s signaled the emergence of new audiences using the Polish language. The interwar vernacularization of the Polish language manifests itself in its growing instrumental value and change in its symbolic signification. The increasingly widespread use of Polish was accompanied by the weakening of its role as a symbol of integration with Polishness and Polish culture.

In the Polish literary criticism, racist discourse is strictly related to nationalist discourse and principally comes to play in the mainstream of interwar nationalist literary criticism. This symptomatic configuration of race, nation and literature in the aesthetics of the West is conditioned – according to Anthony Appiah – by ‘the dual connection made in eighteenth and nineteenth -century thought between, on the one hand, race and nationality, and, on the other, nationality and literature. In short, the nation is the key middle term in the relations between the concept of race and the idea of literature”.

In 1892, the Warsaw assimilatory weeklyIzraelitapublished a short piece by the chief editor of the magazine, Nahum Sokołów, discussing the problem of the “Jewish novel.”¹ Critics of the time applied the term “Jewish novel” to works that referred to Jewish life, but Sokołów’s article disputed the use of the term in this sense. In his opinion, a “Jewish novel” could and should refer only to works that show the Jewish world from an interior perspective, guaranteeing that it would render a true image, not one falsified from lack of knowledge or deliberate bias. “The inner Jewish life as