In Drohobycz, Drohobycz, one of our most highly regarded Polish writers, Henryk Grynberg, delivers thirteen authentic tales of the Holocaust, including the riveting title story, which reconstructs the assassination of the celebrated writer and artist Bruno Schulz. In each of these stories, it is not only the devastation of the Holocaust that resonates so clearly, but also the trauma that endures among its victims and survivors today. Going beyond the age-old question of individual crime and punishment, Drohobycz, Drohobycz explores the concepts of collective guilt and the impunity of the twentieth century's two most genocidal political systems: Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union. With its profound investigation of bravery, baseness, and the vulnerability of human beings, this incredible collection is a critically acclaimed and highly anticipated contribution to contemporary fiction.

The Street of Crocodiles in the Polish city of Drogobych is a street of memories and dreams where recollections of Bruno Schulz's uncommon boyhood and of the eerie side of his merchant family's life are evoked in a startling blend of the real and the fantastic. Most memorable - and most chilling - is the portrait of the author's father, a maddened shopkeeper who imports rare birds' eggs to hatch in his attic, who believes tailors' dummies should be treated like people, and whose obsessive fear of cockroaches causes him to resemble one. Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jew killed by the Nazis in 1942, is considered by many to have been the leading Polish writer between the two world wars.

This book offers an extensive introduction and 13 diverse essays on how World War II, the Holocaust, and their aftermath affected Jewish families and Jewish communities, with an especially close look at the roles played by women, youth, and children. Focusing on Eastern and Central Europe, themes explored include: how Jewish parents handled the Nazi threat; rescue and resistance within the Jewish family unit; the transformation of gender roles under duress; youth's wartime and early postwar experiences; postwar reconstruction of the Jewish family; rehabilitation of Jewish children and youth; and the role of Zionism in shaping the present and future of young survivors. Relying on newly available archival material and novel research in the areas of families, youth, rescue, resistance, gender, and memory, this volume will be an indispensable guide to current work on the familial and social history of the Holocaust.

A comprehensive assessment of Holocaust literature, from World War II to the present day

Nationalism’s global resurgence has upended societies. With the rise of the Polish nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party, and American Jewry’s swift reaction to its law punishing people who allege Polish complicity in Holocaust crimes, both sides have revived old stereotypes. Stark-Blumenthal argues that American Jews’ disgust with Polish nationalism ought to be checked by America’s centuries-old embrace of white supremacy. Poles and Jews: A Call for Myth Reconstruction confronts both the anti-Polonism deeply embedded in the American Jewish community and Poland’s enduring relationship with antisemitism. Armed with two decades of research and in-depth interviews with scholars, community leaders, and laity in Poland and the U.S., Stark-Blumenthal dispels myths and considers new approaches to this relationship.

With contributions from a dozen American and European scholars, this volume presents an overview of Jewish writing in post--World War II Europe. Striking a balance between close readings of individual texts and general surveys of larger movements and underlying themes, the essays portray Jewish authors across Europe as writers and intellectuals of multiple affiliations and hybrid identities. Aimed at a general readership and guided by the idea of constructing bridges across national cultures, this book maps for English-speaking readers the productivity and diversity of Jewish writers and writing that has marked a revitalization of Jewish culture in France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, and Russia.

A fresh portrait of the Polish-Jewish writer and artist, and a gripping account of the secret operation to rescue his last artworks. The twentieth-century artist Bruno Schulz was born an Austrian, lived as a Pole, and died a Jew. First a citizen of the Habsburg monarchy, he would, without moving, become the subject of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Second Polish Republic, the USSR, and, finally, the Third Reich. Yet to use his own metaphor, Schulz remained throughout a citizen of the Republic of Dreams. He was a master of twentieth-century imaginative fiction who mapped the anxious perplexities of his time; Isaac Bashevis Singer called him “one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived.” Schulz was also a talented illustrator and graphic artist whose masochistic drawings would catch the eye of a sadistic Nazi officer. Schulz’s art became the currency in which he bought life. Drawing on extensive new reporting and archival research, Benjamin Balint chases the inventive murals Schulz painted on the walls of an SS villa—the last traces of his vanished world—into multiple dimensions of the artist’s life and afterlife. Sixty years after Schulz was murdered, those murals were miraculously rediscovered, only to be secretly smuggled by Israeli agents to Jerusalem. The ensuing international furor summoned broader perplexities, not just about who has the right to curate orphaned artworks and to construe their meanings, but about who can claim to stand guard over the legacy of Jews killed in the Nazi slaughter. By re-creating the artist’s milieu at a crossroads not just of Jewish and Polish culture but of art, sex, and violence, Bruno Schulz itself stands as an act of belated restitution, offering a kaleidoscopic portrait of a life with all its paradoxes and curtailed possibilities.

“Thanks to Carol Zemel’s provocative study, we are invited to look at Jewish art in new ways . . . provides a deeper understanding of the ordeal of diaspora.” —Studies in American Jewish Literature Jewish art and visual culture—art made by Jews about Jews—in modern diasporic settings is the subject of Looking Jewish. Carol Zemel focuses on particular artists and cultural figures in interwar Eastern Europe and postwar America who blended Jewishness and mainstream modernism to create a diasporic art, one that transcends dominant national traditions. She begins with a painting by Ken Aptekar entitled Albert: Used to Be Abraham, a double portrait of a man, which serves to illustrate Zemel’s conception of the doubleness of Jewish diasporic art. She considers two interwar photographers, Alter Kacyzne and Moshe Vorobeichic; images by the Polish writer Bruno Schulz; the pre- and postwar photographs of Roman Vishniac; the figure of the Jewish mother in postwar popular culture (Molly Goldberg); and works by R. B. Kitaj, Ben Katchor, and Vera Frenkel that explore Jewish identity in a postmodern environment.

Of all contemporary American writers, Philip Roth is perhaps the most ambitious, yet he is one of the most underrepresented in terms of critical attention given his place in American letters. Unlike many aging novelists, whose production and creative mastery wane over time, Roth has demonstrated a unique ability not only to sustain his literary output, but also to surpass the scope and talent inherent in his previous writings. He has been awarded many literary honors, and in the 1990s alone he won every major American book award. This long-overdue collection of essays covers Roth's entire output and links themes across works, highlighting those thoughts and ideas that recur frequently. Unlike older introductions to Roth's writings, this volume will provide up-to-date coverage of all his works. Each chapter introduces the work or works under discussion, provides a brief summary of the story, and moves on to a lively analysis of its various literary elements and its significance in Roth's overall body of work. While each chapter focuses on the central issues in the specific work, several larger themes that run throughout many of his writings will be addressed, including the rise of suburbanization in post-war America, the problems and prominence of the family, American (Jewish) ethnicity, comedy and satire, the costs of literary celebrity, the promises and failures of the American dream, and others. Newcomers to and fans alike will find everything they need in this volume to build a better appreciation of Roth's work.