Reading (in) the Holocaust. Malgorzata Wójcik-Dudek
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Małgorzata Wójcik-Dudek
Reading (in) the Holocaust
Practices of Postmemory in Recent Polish Literature for
Children and Young Adults
Translated by Patrycja Poniatowska
Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche
Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available online at
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of
Congress.
The Publication is funded by Ministry of Science and Higher Education of
the Republic of Poland as a part of the National Programme for the
Development of the Humanities (years 2016–2019). Grant number
21H 17 0260 85 (0260/NPRH6/85/2017).
The research grant was carried out at the University of Silesia in Katowice.
ISSN 2364-1975
ISBN 978-3-631-80862-7 (Print) ∙ E-ISBN 978-3-631-82292-0 (E-PDF)
E-ISBN 978-3-631-82293-7 (EPUB) ∙ E-ISBN 978-3-631-82294-4 (MOBI)
DOI 10.3726/b17001
© Peter Lang GmbH
Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften
Berlin 2020
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About the author
Małgorzata Wójcik-Dudek (PhD) is a lecturer at the University of Silesia in Katowice. Her academic activities focus on the teaching of Polish literature at primary and high school levels, literature of children and young adults, and changes in cultural representations of the past in the Polish education.
About the book
The book deals with the issue of the Holocaust in the Polish literature for children and adolescents. Drawing upon some of the leading Polish authors of the twentieth and the twentieth-first centuries, the author reveals the historical, ideological, and cultural entanglement of their works. The main focus of the book is to search for reasons behind the outpouring of interest in the Holocaust noticed in the most recent Polish literature for younger readers. Among these reasons, the author lists the Polish local and historical context, the new approach to issues traditionally seen as taboo, the development of memory and postmemory narratives, and the postmodern shift from a discursive totality and universalist explanations.
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Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without the patience of many people. My special thank-you for the privilege of benefitting from this human virtue, which is less than self-evident in our times, goes to Professor Ewa Jaskółowa and Professor Sławomir Jacek Żurek, who kindly made time to read the book, discuss it with me and offer their generous comments. I am also deeply grateful to Professor Lucyna Aleksandrowicz-Pędich for her insightful scholarly editing and to Dr Patrycja Poniatowska for her painstaking work on the translation. Last, but not least, I thank my Loved Ones for their patience and support, which I felt daily when writing this book.
Table of Contents
Chapter One Mount of Remembrance
Educational Practices vis-à-vis the Holocaust
The Ethical Challenge of Reading about the Holocaust at School, or on the Importance of Context
Chapter Two Jan Brzechwa’s Pan Kleks Series: An Alternative Reading
Games with Akademia pana Kleksa
Between the See-Saw and the Scaffold: 1946
Growing up, or “the Disenchantment of the World”?
Younger Siblings of the Academy, or, on the Books That No One Reads
The Difficult Case of Tryumf pana Kleksa
The Fairy Tale that Does Not Uplift
Chapter Three The Architecture of Biography: The Case of Korczak
Between Memorials and Literature: From Mapping the City to Mapping Memory