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.

This book offers a unique perspective on contemporary Polish cinema’s engagement with histories of Polish violence against their Jewish neighbours during the Holocaust. Moving beyond conventional studies of historical representation on screen, the book considers how cinema reframes the unwanted knowledge of violence in its aftermaths. The book draws on Derridean hauntology, Didi-Huberman’s confrontations with art images, Levinasian ethics and anamorphosis to examine cinematic reconfigurations of histories and memories that are vulnerable to evasion and formlessness. Innovative analyses of Birthplace (Łoziński, 1992), It Looks Pretty From a Distance (Sasnal, 2011), Aftermath (Pasikowski, 2012), and Ida (Pawlikowski, 2013) explore how their rural filmic landscapes are predicated on the radical exclusion of Jewish neighbours, prompting archaeological processes of exhumation. Arguing that the distressing materiality of decomposition disturbs cinematic composition, the book examines how Poland’s aftermath cinema attempts to recompose itself through form and narrative as it faces Polish complicity in Jewish death.

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.

Queer Kinship on the Edge? Families of Choice in Poland explores ways in which queer families from Central and Eastern Europe complicate the mainstream picture of queer kinship and families researched in the Anglo-American contexts. The book presents findings from under-represented localities as a starting point to query some of the expectations about queer kinship and to provide insights on the scale and nature of queer kinship in diverse geopolitical locations and the complexities of lived experiences of queer families. Drawing on a rich qualitative multi-method study to address the gap in queer kinship studies which tend to exclude Polish or wider Central and Eastern perspectives, it offers a multi-dimensional picture of ‘families of choice’ improving sensitivity towards differences in queer kinship studies. Through case studies and interviews with diverse members of queer families (i.e., queer parents, their children) and their families of origin (parents and siblings), the book looks at queer domesticity, practices of care, defining and displaying families, queer parenthood familial homophobia, and interpersonal relationships through the life course. This study is suitable for those interested in LGBT studies, sexuality studies, kinship and Eastern European studies.

Though often unnoticed by scholars of literature and history, Polish American women have for decades been fighting back against the patriarchy they encountered in America and the patriarchy that followed them from Poland. Through close readings of several Polish American and Polish Canadian novels and short stories published over the last seven decades, Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction traces the evolution of this struggle and women’s efforts to construct gendered and classed ethnicity. Focusing predominantly on work by North American born and immigrant authors that represents the Polish American Catholic tradition, Grażyna J. Kozaczka puts texts in conversation with other American ethnic literatures. She positions ethnic gender construction and performance at an intersection of social class, race, and sex. She explores the marginalization of ethnic female characters in terms of migration studies, theories of whiteness, and the history of feminist discourse. Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction tells the complex story of how Polish American women writers have shown a strong awareness of their oppression and sought empowerment through resistive and transgressive behaviors.

Welcome to Anthology 2021 on Time, Place, Reflection and Experience. I wanted to create this Anthology to encourage all “writers” in my life, ones I have known for years, or just for a few weeks. I desire to publish the author's short story, or a poem or two. If you have taken the time to write, it is already an unpolished rare ‘Gem’ waiting for the world to read or just for your bookshelf. So, I am so pleased to be able to put these special Gems together and collate a beautiful collection of works for all the Authors in my life. I hope you enjoy this production. Book One of Four. So, Step through the Frame and Enjoy!! The Anthology 2021 on Time, Place, Reflection and Experience suggests that the short stories or poems in the book might be based on memories and reflections. The author of the Anthology hopes to publish the works of various writers and believes that every piece of writing is a rare gem waiting to be read. Book One of Four is a collection of works meant to be enjoyed by everyone. Step through the frame and enjoy the memories and reflections that the writers have to offer.