Archives
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Narrations of the Shoah 2020, no. 6: The Shoah and other genocides
No. 6 (2020)The present issue is devoted to the accounts of other genocides and their relationships with representations of the Holocaust.
In the current issue of our journal we encouraged the contributors to reflect in-depth on the subject, to assimilate lesser known approaches in the domestic context, and to work out their own proposals. We are especially interested in reflection on the description methodology and in answering the question whether the research should be embedded in the field of postcolonial and comparative studies, or rather discard all comparisons and make the Holocaust only a starting point for separate investigations. At the same time, we intend to draw attention to issues that have yet to be sufficiently developed; we publish case studies devoted to the representations of Nazi camps for Soviet prisoners of war, reports on the situation of Jehovah’s Witnesses in concentration camps, and articles intervening in narratives about the Romani genocide, or providing insights on how to understand the Rwandan genocide thanks to the inspirational reading of Jean Hatzfeld’s reportages.
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Narrations of the Shoah 2019, no. 5: Poetry and the Shoah
No. 5 (2019)A consistent and exhaustive synthesis of poetry of/and the Shoah has not been posed in Polish literary studies yet; however, it does not mean that humanities in Poland are deprived of a detailed and well-established narration on this correspondence. Quite the contrary – we do have such a common narration, yet its “commonness” proves its insufficiency; although it neither falsifies the research nor misses the point, it has a tendency to simplify or generalise its findings. This foundational paradox sets the conceptual framework of the fifth issue of Narrations of the Shoah. Still, there is one more significant factor that affects our position: the inclination to either negate or exclude poetry in Polish Holocaust studies. Since monographic works and case studies tend to focus predominantly on narratives, literary documents, and personal testimonies, poems gain little attention (if any). Moreover, the selection of texts in multi-authored volumes shows a similar disproportion. All of these result in a peculiar orientation of Polish Holocaust literature, as its crucial positions and reflections are posed in the absence of poetry. It does not necessarily amount to claiming that some interpretative tools are privileged over other; rather, such omission calls the usage of these tools under the question and asks how our research is presupposed by it in terms of the selection of either material and exemplification. It is, after all, likely that some concepts might be interestingly modified if they included poems in their hearts. Hence, it may be argued that the aforementioned dominant practice in the Holocaust literary studies appropriates and subjugates poetry instead of including it in the discourse. Even though our field perceived in such a way – perhaps a little simplified one – does not help much in putting forward general outlines or in-depth diagnoses, it encourages us to pose questions, devise new perspectives, and investigate problems instead. […] This issue, devoted to poetry and the Shoah, is inspired by the problems already discussed in our journal in the last years. Because of that, we do consider the texts related to the theme of this issue also as a valuable revision, which we would like to expand in the future. Perhaps such a strategy will eventually made it possible to return to the questions of poetry and the Shoah in order to verify the presented points and postulates, if not to confirm them altogether. [from the introduction by Anita Jarzyna]
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Narrations of the Shoah 2018, no. 4: Israeli narrations of the Shoah
No. 4 (2018)The fourth issue of Narrations of the Shoah is an attempt to grasp the way the memory of the Shoah functions in the Israeli narrations, even if in the fragmentary and by no means exhaustive form, and an endeavour to confront its complex network of contexts. This unique situation makes the stories written or encoded in this milieu an essential and fascinating reservoir of topics, plots, and tropes: fascinating also because of its inherent idiosyncrasy. In order to make them justice, we resigned from the chronological order of the text in favour of the one that organises them with regard to their topics; after all, memory flows in a nonlinear way, whereas the emergence of new tendencies does not necessary wipe out the older trends. Hence, we do suggest to read the texts we proudly present as an attempt of a fragmentary diagnosis of a status quo. Polish and Israeli insight into the archive of collective memory is confronted with the recent events that shape the contemporary Israel, including the social unrest and military conflict facilitated by the activity of the occupational army. All of these facts lead us to pose the following question: what has been told by the Israeli narration of the Shoah except for the Shoah? This is precisely the question the contributors to this issue endeavour to respond to. We wish you an inspirational reading! [from the introduction by Jagoda Budzik and Bartłomiej Krupa]
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Narrations of the Shoah 2017, no. 3: Animals/Shoah
No. 3 (2017)Holocaust studies and animal studies pose a foundational relationship for this issue of Narrations of the Shoah; in this respect, it includes the articles by Barbara Czarnecka, Katarzyna Ebigg, Magdalena Kokoszka, Bartłomiej Krupa, Mirosław Loba, Daria Nowicka, Kinga Piotrowiak-Junkiert, Beata Przymuszała, Lucyna Sadzikowska, Patryk Szaja, Marta Tomczok, and Monika Żółkoś. Adopting various methodologies, these authors analyse the potential of non-anthropocentric position for the humanities, tackle the controversial juxtaposition of the extermination camps and the industrialised intensive farms, and, consequently, loosen the grips of this lexical analogy. Moreover, they broadly analyse the pejorative animalisations, typical of anthroponormative language of violence and widely discussed and read in literary texts; eventually, the contributors to this issue reconstruct various strategies of presenting animal protagonists in literature and culture; they either are involved in the narratives on Jews during the times of the Shoah or experience their own war stories.
Written during his imprisonment in Dachau concentration camp, Edgar Kupfer Koberwitz’s cutting-edge publication, Bracia zwierzęta. Rozważania o etycznym życiu [Animal Brethren. On Ethical Life.] (introduced and translated into Polish by Katarzyna Kończal) provides us with a significant context to the aforementioned reflections. Moreover, we proudly present Primo Levi’s “Mnemagogia” (1946) (translated by Paweł Wolski), a short story that until now has remained unknown in Poland, and Kitty Millet’s “Caesura, Continuity, and Myth: The Stakes of Tethering the Holocaust to German Colonial Theory” (translated by Monika Żółkoś). In addition, this issue of Narrations of the Shoah includes Andrzej Juchniewicz’s detailed reading of the genre of lullaby, its variants and implementations, in poetry written during the times of the Shoah, Karolina Koprowska’s text on conceptualising violence in Jicchok Kaceneleson’s “Wej dir,” and Anita Jasińska’s contribution on Rutka Laskier’s diary, whose reading includes a take on the materiality of Laskier’s text. Judging from the documentary value of our contributions, two texts deserve utmost attention: Hanna Gosk’s proceedings of her research in Leo Lipski’s archive, resulting in the edition of Paryż ze złota… [The Golden Paris…], and Michał Wachula’s text on the minor labour camp located next to Cable Factory in Cracow.
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Narrations of the Shoah 2016, no. 2: The Topoi of the Shoah
No. 2 (2016)This issue puts forward a series of articles focusing on the tropes of the Shoah and includes contributions of Jagoda Budzik, Sławomir Buryła, Justyna Kowalska-Leder, Katarzyna Kuczyńska-Koschany, Marta Tomczok, and Paweł Wolski. These authors consider the topos of the Shoah with regard to its theory and modern impact, present it as a critical tool capable of analysing both literary personal accounts and popular culture in a subtle way, and indicate the recent increase in number and diversity of the tropes of the Shoah (visible not only in Polish literature, but also in literature in Hebrew). Moreover, they postulate the necessity for writing a dictionary of the tropes of the Shoah and suggest how an entry to such a collection should look like. We proudly publish the first Polish translation of an article by Bracha L. Ettinger, a renowned psychoanalyst and descendant of Polish survivors (“Transcryptum: Memory Tracing In/For/With the Other”; a critical introduction by Anna Kisiel). What the reader of this issue might find interesting as well are the important texts either verifying or reconsidering the connections between the Shoah and Zofia Nałkowska’s Medallions (Arkadiusz Morawiec), and Stanisław Lem’s A Memoir Found in a Bathtub (Agnieszka Gajewska). Finally, this issue includes Anita Jarzyna’s important article which focuses on children’s and young adults literature devoted to the Shoah, which has recently gained in popularity, and discusses the role of animals.
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The Canon of the Shoah
No. 1 (2015)Narracje o Zagładzie (in English: Narrations of the Shoah) is an academic journal published annually devoted to interdisciplinary studies on the Holocaust, with a special emphasis put on literary studies, film studies, and history. The journal not only publishes re-editions and translations of documents, but also presents the newest narrations of the Shoah and critical commentaries. The issues are thematic (the first issue is devoted the cannon of the Shoah, the following one – to the topoi of the Shoah). It invites both articles directly related to the theme of the issue and interviews, reviews, prose, poetry, and drama.
