The Poles in Vienna in the literary works of Radek Knapp (original) (raw)
Related papers
Polish Novel in the 20th Century
2015
The present book “Poland – History, Culture and Society. Selected Readings” is the third edition of a collection of academic texts written with the intention to accompany the module by providing incoming students with teaching materials that will assist them in their studies of the course module and encourage further search for relevant information and data. The papers collected in the book have been authored by academic teachers from the University of Łodź, specialists in such fields as history, geography, literature, sociology, ethnology, cultural studies, and political science. Each author presents one chapter related to a topic included in the module or extending its contents. The book contains the extensive bibliography.
Przegląd Socjologiczny 68(4), 2019
Reading Władek Wiśniewski's autobiography in the third volume of thomas and Znaniecki's The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, not entirely neglecting the economic factor, it is worth paying attention to a very interesting and not uncommon reason for leaving the homeland, that is "an escape". Its various current modalities can be placed on the continuum between "an escape from" and "an escape to". Using analytical tools developed by Fritz Schütze, which were created much later, but largely inspired by achievements of the Chicago School of Sociology with thomas and Znaniecki as its major researches, it can be shown that Władek's primary reason for leaving the country was to free himself from tense family relationships. they were based on exploitation and distrust, full of hypocrisy and injustice; a desire to move away from home in order to break with an image of his own identity in the eyes of his Significant Others-as a person who is not worthy of respect, a drunkard and loser. thus, the main hypothesis of this article (emerging from analysing constellations of events in his life) is: Władek Wiśniewski's motives for leaving the homeland and going overseas are not only and
Thoughts of a Polish Jew: To Kasieńka from Grandpa is a document of a personal and family memory, authored by Artur Lilien-Brzozdowiecki (1890‒1958) in 1944/45. This memoir, which was written in Polish and translated to English for the family circulation alone, now becomes a public asset. Lilien invites his new-born granddaughter to encounter her family, generations of Polish Jewry: merchants, lease-holders, bankers, industrialists, politicians, communal leaders, army officers, scholars, physicians, artists, and art collectors. They dwell in a broad Jewish and Christian world, integrated into the national life of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Habsburg Empire, and the Second Polish Republic. The reader is encouraged to enjoy reminiscences of this worthy life and bitter choices that challenged Polish—particularly Galician—Jewry in the twentieth century.
2014
Artur Sandauer (1913–1989), Ida Fink (1921–2011) and Hanna Krall (born 1935) represent three literary generations of modern Polish-Jewish authors, three different paths of life and three various attitudes to writing. Nevertheless, their autobiographical fiction shares an important common feature: they alternate the first- and third-person narration in the process of creating the author’s self-portrait. These changes of perspective seem to constitute a textual representation of the complex Jewish-Polish (or Polish-Jewish) cultural and ethnic identities of the writers. In Artur Sandauer’s writings they also reflect the author’s tendency to look at himself from without, the tendency stemming both from his situation of a Jew assimilated into Polish culture and of his critical approach towards what he considered the “inauthentic” identity of a Jew-Pole. In Ida Fink’s autobiographical novel The Journey (1990) extensive use of the third-person narration (interchanging with the first-person one) reflects the situation of someone hiding their identity during the Holocaust, forcing alien, non-Jewish identities on themselves as the only chance to survive. Finally, in the autobiographical novel by Hanna Krall The Subtenant (1985) the identity of the main character, who had lived through the Holocaust as a child, remains split into two conflicting personalities, thus showing far-reaching aftermath of the Shoah. Here, the alternation of the first-, third-, and occasionally also second-person narration is a textual representation of the psychical trauma as well as a metaphor of the ambivalent attitude towards Jews and the Holocaust in the post-war Polish culture.
2017
The article deals with the subject of knowledge about Serbia and the Serbs in Poland at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. This knowledge was reconstructed on the basis of travel reports, memoirs, notes published both in the press and the books. The collected materials allow us to observe the slow evolution of the representations of the Serbs. The first reports and news can be counted as exotic presentations in the orientalizing mode of the Balkans, but over time new motifs were emerging, highlighting certain similarities between the Poles and the Serbs, such as history, slavic origin, and peculiar combative features of character. The aim of this article is to present to contemporary audience the unknown images and perceptions of the Serbs in the Polish press.
Prooftexts, 2006
Urbanization, Capitalism, and Cosmopolitanism: Four Novels and a Film on Jews in the Polish City of Lodz This article examines a variety of literary representations of Jewish life in Lodz, beginning with Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont's seminal Polish novel The Promised Land (1898) through the German and Yiddish work of Jewish authors such as Joseph Roth (Hotel Savoy), Yisroel Rabon (Di gas, The Street) and I. J. Singer (Di Brider Ashkenazi, The Brothers Ashkenazi) in the 1920s and 1930s. These works all draw upon Lodz's teeming social and ethnic diversity to create vivid portraits of Jewish protagonists operating within the multilingual arena of the city. The article also discusses The Promised Land (Ziemia Obiecana), Andrzej Wajda's 1974 cinematic adaptation of Reymont's work in light of postwar preoccupations with Polish identity, ethnicity and anti-Semitism?.
Acta Poloniae Historia , 2017
The merit of Tropics of Vienna consists in illustrating the peculiarities and dependencies of the fin-de-siècle (e.g. the disappearance of traditional lifestyles, the clash between industrialization and the agrarian remnants, the massive migration from rural to urban areas) by highlighting the marginal groups of Viennese society and, consequently, by ascribing them a pivotal role in the politics of the time. As we shall see next, the book brings into attention writers of German expression, virtually unknown to the English speaking world. On this account, and, given that the book presents authors whose ideas represent timeless reflections on power and its exercise, on utopian socialism, and on the mutual influences existing between the host society and the immigrant, Tropics of Vienna is a ‘must-read’ for the contemporary audience.