In the 1930s, through the prose of Bruno Schulz (1892–1942), the Polish language became the linguistic raw material for a profound exploration of the modern Jewish experience. Rather than turning away from the language like many of his Galician Jewish colleagues who would choose to write in Yiddish, Schulz used the Polish language to explore his own and his generation's relationship to East European Jewish exegetical tradition, and to deepen his reflection on golus or exile as a condition not only of the individual and of the Jewish community, but of language itself, and of matter. Drawing on new archival discoveries, this study explores Schulz's diasporic Jewish modernism as an example of the creative and also transient poetic forms that emerged on formerly Habsburg territory, at the historical juncture between empire and nation-state.

"In the 1930s, through the prose of Bruno Schulz (1892-1942), the Polish language became the linguistic raw material for a profound exploration of the modern Jewish experience. Rather than turning away from the language like many of his Galician Jewish colleagues who would choose to write in Yiddish, Schulz used the Polish language to explore his own and his generation's relationship to East European Jewish exegetical tradition, and to deepen his reflection on golus or exile as a condition not only of the individual and of the Jewish community, but of language itself, and of matter. Drawing on new archival discoveries, this study explores Schulz's diasporic Jewish modernism as an example of the creative and also transient poetic forms that emerged on formerly Habsburg territory, at the historical juncture between empire and nation-state"--

Finalist, 2023 National Jewish Book Award Winners in Women’s Studies In Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919–1939, Allison Schachter rewrites Jewish literary modernity from the point of view of women. Focusing on works by interwar Hebrew and Yiddish writers, Schachter illuminates how women writers embraced the transgressive potential of prose fiction to challenge the patriarchal norms of Jewish textual authority and reconceptualize Jewish cultural belonging. Born in the former Russian and Austro‐Hungarian Empires and writing from their homes in New York, Poland, and Mandatory Palestine, the authors central to this book—Fradl Shtok, Dvora Baron, Elisheva Bikhovsky, Leah Goldberg, and Debora Vogel—seized on the freedoms of social revolution to reimagine Jewish culture beyond the traditionally male world of Jewish letters. The societies they lived in devalued women’s labor and denied them support for their work. In response, their writing challenged the social hierarchies that excluded them as women and as Jews. As she reads these women, Schachter upends the idea that literary modernity was a conversation among men about women, with a few women writers listening in. Women writers revolutionized the very terms of Jewish fiction at a pivotal moment in Jewish history, transcending the boundaries of Jewish minority identities. Schachter tells their story and in so doing calls for a new way of thinking about Jewish cultural modernity.

"A prolonged labor of love [and] a model of a kind of penetrating adoration."--Richard Bernstein, New York Times

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.

This carefully curated collection consists of 16 chapters by leading Polish and world literature scholars from the United States, Canada, Italy, and, of course, Poland. An historical approach gives readers a panoramic view of Polish authors and their explicit or implicit contributions to world literature. Indeed, the volume shows how Polish authors, from Jan Kochanowski in the 16th century to the 2018 Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, have engaged with their foreign counterparts and other traditions, active participants in the global literary network and the conversations of their day. The volume features views of Polish literature and culture within theories of world literature and literary systems, with a particular attention paid to the resurgence of the idea of the physical book as a cultural artifact. This perspective is especially important since so much of today's global literary output stems from Anglophone perceptions of what constitutes literary quality and tastes. The collection also sheds light on specific issues pertaining to Poland, such as the idea of Polishness, and global phenomena, including social and economic advancement as well as ecological degradation. Some of the authors discussed, like the Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz or the 1980 Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, were renowned far beyond the borders of their country, while others, like the contemporary travel writer and novelist Andrzej Stasiuk, embrace regionalism, seeing as they do in their immediate surroundings a synecdoche of the world at large. Nevertheless, the picture of Polish literature and Polish authors that emerges from these articles is that of a diverse, cosmopolitan cohort engaged in a mutually rewarding relationship with what the late French critic Pascale Casanova has called “the world republic of letters.”

A Dorothy Rosenberg Prize–winner: "A remarkable social history that investigates the process of Sovietization among Jews in Belorussia” (Jeffrey Veidlinger, author of In the Shadow of the Shtetl). This insightful history demonstrates how Jewish life in Belorussia fundamentally changed when Jews started joining the Bolshevik movement and populating the front lines of the revolutionary struggle. While Andrew Sloin’s story follows the arc of Bolshevik history, it also shows how the broader movement was enacted in factories and workshops, workers’ clubs and union meetings, and on the Jewish streets of White Russia. In the eyes of the Bolshevik leadership, the project of transforming Jews into integrated Soviet citizens was bound inextricably to labor. The protagonists here are shoemakers, speculators, glassmakers, peddlers, leatherworkers, needleworkers, soldiers, students, and local party operatives who were swept up, willingly or otherwise, under the banner of Marxist socialism. With extensive research and keen insight, Sloin stresses the fundamental relationship between economy and identity formation as party officials grappled with the Jewish Question in the wake of the revolution.