Magdalena Waligórska

Cur(at)ing History

In the past few decades, Poland has seen a growing number of attempts to reclaim its Jewish past through traditional forms such as historiographic revision, heritage preservation, and monument building. But a unique new mode of artistic, performative, often participatory “memory work” has been emerging alongside these conventional forms, growing in its prevalence and increasingly catching the public eye. This new genre of memorial intervention is characterized by its fast-moving, youthful, innovative forms and nontraditional venues and its socially appealing, dialogic, and digitally networked character as opposed to a prior generation of top-down, slow moving, ethnically segregated, mono-vocal styles. It also responds to the harsh historical realities brought to light by scholars of the Jewish-Polish past with a mandate for healing. This article maps the landscape of this new genre of commemoration projects, identifying their core features and investigating their anatomy via three case studies: Rafał Betlejewski’s I Miss You Jew!; Public Movement’s Spring in Warsaw; and Yael Bartana’s Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland. Analyzing their temporalities, scopes, modalities and ambiences, as well as the new visions for mutual identification and affiliation that they offer Poles and Jews, we approach these performances not as representations, but rather as embodied experiences that stage and invite participation in “repertoires” of cultural memory. Different from simple reenactments, this new approach may be thought of as a subjunctive politics of history—a “what if” proposition that plays with reimagining and recombining a range of Jewish and Polish memories, present-day realities, and future aspirations.

Jewish Heritage and the New Belarusian National Identity Project

Focusing on three contemporary grassroots initiatives of preserving Jewish heritage and commemorating Jews in Belarus, namely, the Jewish Museum in Minsk, Ada Raǐchonak’s private museum of regional heritage in Hermanovichi, and the initiative of erecting the monument of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in Hlybokae, the present article discusses how local efforts to commemorate Jews and preserve Jewish heritage tap into the culture of political dissent, Belarus’s international relations, and the larger project of redefining the Belarusian national identity. Looking at the way these memorial interventions frame Jewish legacy within a Belarusian national narrative, the article concentrates in particular on the institution of the public historian and the small, informal social networks used to operate under a repressive regime. Incorporating the multicultural legacy of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth into the canon of Belarusian national heritage and recognizing the contribution of ethnic minorities to the cultural landscape of Belarus, new memory projects devoted to Jewish history in Belarus mark a caesura in the country’s engagement with its ethnic Others and are also highly political. While the effort of filling in the gaps in national historiography and celebrating the cultural diversity of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania overlaps in significant ways with the agenda of the anti-Lukashenka opposition, Jewish heritage in Belarus also resonates with the state authorities, who seek to instrumentalize it for their own vision of national unity.

Remembering the Holocaust on the fault lines of East and West-European memorial cultures: the new memorial complex in Trastsianets, Belarus

ABSTRACT The article addresses the emerging memorial spaces on the fault lines of the post-Soviet and Western memorial cultures. Taking as a case study the Memorial Complex in Trastsianets, located on the fourth biggest site of Nazi mass killing in Europe, it analyses the way Belarus revisits its memorial paradigms and factors the Holocaust into its national narrative. Looking at the political underpinnings of the project, rivaling artistic visions and the transnational diplomatic efforts involved, the article examines how different stakeholders negotiate the symbolic significance and material appearance of this major but little known Eastern European Holocaust site.

‘A Picnic Underpinned with Unease’: Spring in Warsaw and New Genre Polish-Jewish Memory Work

Poland, whose pre-war Jewish population of 3.5 million was decimated during World War II and further reduced by anti-Semitic incidents in the post-war Polish republic, has only a small Jewish presence today, but over the last two decades has come to recognize and work through the painful Jewish past with an increasing intensity. After Communism fell and this past was released from state censorship, there was a flood of publicly suppressed information — accompanied by public expressions of collective memory — regarding the 1000-year history and violent destruction of Poland’s Jews. Spurred by new scholarly and journalistic writings, as well as the visits of foreign Jews (many with Polish roots), the 1990s and early 2000s saw public spaces reassigned some of their former Jewish meanings through official memorial forms like ceremonies, signage, renovation of historic sites and monuments (Kapralski, 2001; Meng, 2011; Murzyn-Kupisz and Purchla, 2009). A flagship project representing such official memorial efforts is the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which opened in Warsaw in 2014. Other, more grassroots forms of remembering were also growing up in response to and alongside these, in the realms of tourism and heritage brokering (Gruber, 2002; Lehrer, 2013; Waligorska, 2013). But in parallel fashion — and picking up speed in the mid-2000s — another kind of memory work was beginning to claim public attention. Social and cultural ‘interventions’ undertaken by artists, academics, youth groups and other culture brokers, began to create provocative spaces of dialogue and self-reflection, in staged installations or happenings in which individuals were asked to participate in active, social, critical forms of remembering.

In Search of Polin: Chasing Jewish Ghosts in Today’s Poland

Binem Heller, seen as a liberation. The great value of this book lies in the numerous quotations of Yiddish poetry and literature, and in translating them Ruta has introduced to a Polish readership new perspectives on Jewish experiences after the Holocaust. The poetry and literature explored here show the history of survivors in a different light than that usually offered by more familiar historical documents such as the press, memoirs, or testimonies. In writing about life in the shadow of the Holocaust, Ruta does not shirk from the tragedy of the topic at hand: in one particularly heartbreaking poem, the author Guta Guterman sits happily drinking red wine on a joyful New Year’s Eve until she suddenly notices “through the frothy scarlet, her murdered sister.” Ruta also writes about the trauma of those Yiddish writers who, having come back home after the war, were confronted with the post-Holocaust reality of a land long held deep in their hearts. She writes eloquently about the ways in which Jews tried to cope with the “landscape of death” they encountered upon their return. Once again, Ruta moves beyond the presentation of dry descriptions and instead brings to life a set of deeply felt human emotions. This is a book that will be of interest not only to literary experts, but to all researchers interested in Jewish life in Poland both during and after the Second World War, regardless of their specialisation. It deserves to be considered essential reading for all scholars working on the history of the Jewish community in post-war Poland.

The Jewish-theme whodunnit in contemporary Poland and Germany

This article offers a comparative perspective on the intersection of popular fiction and national paradigms of representing the Jewish “other” in Poland and Germany, using as an example the contemporary Polish and German crime novels dealing with Jewish history or featuring Jewish characters. Looking at how a literary genre, which relies on strict conventions of representing crime and punishment, fictionalises the history of antisemitism or anti-Jewish violence, I adopt principles of translation theory to map the ways crime fiction transposes Jewishness for a popular reader. Given the particular function of crime fiction as both potentially escapist and reflecting the moral and social codes of a given society, I examine how Jewish-theme crime novels in Polish and German frame Jewish suffering in narratives of retributive justice, offering the reader a “magical” experience of relief, and how they mirror desires, anxieties and taboos of contemporary Polish and German society.