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The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture
Published by: Indiana University Press
200 Pages
- eBook
- 9780253005090
- Published: February 2011
$9.99
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In stark contrast to the widespread preoccupation with the wartime looting of priceless works of art, Bożena Shallcross focuses on the meaning of ordinary objects—pots, eyeglasses, shoes, clothing, kitchen utensils—tangible vestiges of a once-lived reality, which she reads here as cultural texts. Shallcross delineates the ways in which Holocaust objects are represented in Polish and Polish-Jewish texts written during or shortly after World War II. These representational strategies are distilled from the writings of Zuzanna Ginczanka, Władysław Szlengel, Zofia Nałkowska, Czesław Miłosz, Jerzy Andrzejewski, and Tadeusz Borowski. Combining close readings of selected texts with critical interrogations of a wide range of philosophical and theoretical approaches to the nature of matter, Shallcross's study broadens the current discourse on the Holocaust by embracing humble and overlooked material objects as they were perceived by writers of that time.
The Totalized Object: An Introduction
On Jouissance
1. A Dandy and Jewish Detritus
2. The Material Letter J
On Waste and Matter
3. Holocaust Soap and the Story of Its Production
4. The Guilty Afterlife of the Soma
On Contact
5. The Manuscript Lost in Warsaw
6. Things, Touch, and Detachment in Auschwitz
Coda: The Post-Holocaust Object
Acknowledgments and Permissions
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Bożena Shallcross is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. She is author of Through the Poet's Eye: The Travels of Zagajewski, Herbert, and Brodsky and editor (with David L. Ransel) of Polish Encounters/Russian Identity (IUP, 2005).
"As those who remember the personal trauma of the Nazi invasion and genocide are increasingly few, the only remaining traces of human suffering lie in objects that reify that suffering. Ordinary objects of Holocaust victims can reflect individual martyrdom, and Shallcross (Slavic languages and literature, Univ. of Chicago) looks at this in her meticulous, novel analysis of the writings of Zuzanna Ginczanka, Wladyslaw Szlengel, Elzbieta Nalkowska, CzeslawMilosz, Jerzy Andrzejewski, and Tadeusz Borowski. Applying Heidegger's notions of temporality and objective existence and Derrida's, Freud's, Lucan's, and Todorov's concepts of morality, the author tenderly elevates the ordinary objects—e.g., a penknife fabricated by a camp prisoner—pointing out how cradling such objects, in the face of deadly danger, gave hope to the dying of 'bearing witness ... both on their behalf and against the perpetrators.' Here, as aptly as she has in her previous work, Shallcross looks at depictions of the depths of suffering through the 'dispossession' of belongings when a prisoner entered a concentration camp. This is a brilliant analysis. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. —Choice"
~D. Hutchins, Buena Vista University
"Shallcross's book is a significant contribution to current discussions of the Shoah, providing important insights into a broad range of themes that linger at a core of our debates."
~H-Poland
"Shallcross's illuminating study . . . underlines the way objects can relay information in a subliminal, almost visceral, but ambivalent way."
~Russian Review
"In analyzing the artifacts of writers who took up the ethical and precarious charge of testifying to the destruction engulfing and surrounding them, Shallcross has written an important book."
~H-Judaic
"Shallcross's book is intelligent, articulate . . . and for all its lucid and detached analysis, deeply moving. It is itself now a document of the Holocaust, at once concerned with the desperately important business of vivifying the past and those who constituted it."
~American Historical Review
"Here, as aptly as she has in her previous work, Shallcross looks at depictions of the depths of suffering through the 'dispossession' of belongings when a prisoner entered a concentration camp. This is a brilliant analysis. ...Highly recommended.October 2011"
~Choice
"Shallcross . . . is to be congratulated for bringing to the attention of the world these literary remnants by translating these Polish-lanaguage testimonies and interpreting them with great learning and skill."
~Chicago Jewish Star
"Brilliant and ambitious . . . approaches [the] topic from a fresh and intellectually challenging perspective. . . . Shallcross's book is surely the most sophisticated analysis of Polish Holocaust literature ever written."
~Madeline G. Levine, University of North Carolina
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