New Directions in the History of the Jews in the Polish Lands by Polonsky Antony Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland by Lehrer Erica (review)

Abstract

SEER, 99, 2, APRIL 2021 380 (pp. 114, 135 and 149). Gleichschaltung, we are told, permeates not only history politics but ‘all other aspects of life in Russia’. However, social science literature uses Gleichschaltung to describe one specific political system, that of the Nazi regime in Germany under Hitler. By applying it to Russia today, Weiss-Wendt clearly indicates that he regards Putin’s political system not as authoritarian, but as totalitarian. It is a pity that such a serious historian as Anton Weiss-Wendt has burdened this well-researched book with so many elements of the political pamphlet. University of Oslo Pål Kolstø Polonsky, Antony; Węgrzynek, Hanna and Żbikowski, Andrzej (eds). New Directions in the History of the Jews in the Polish Lands. Jews of Poland. Academic Studies Press, Boston, MA, 2018. lxviii + 501 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $149.00. Lehrer, Erica and Michael Meng (eds). Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN, 2015. vii + 299 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. £23.99 (paperback). These two fascinating publications analyse the changing cultural landscape in the growing understanding of the Jewish past and present in contemporary Poland from various theoretical, historical, sociological, anthropological, museological and architectural points of view. Unlike many earlier publications on Polish Jewry in post-1945 Poland, the books do not concentrate on the past and the magnitude of loss, but rather on the present and, even more importantly, on the possible future. In other words, instead of ‘chasing Jewish ghosts in Poland’ or chasing ‘vanishing traces’, both volumes offer ‘new directions’ in understanding the current process of change based on solid historical, sociological and cultural bases in reconstructing, restoring and memorizing Jewish communities in today’s Poland. New Directions is a collection of thirty-seven expanded articles which were presented as papers at a conference in May 2015 to introduce the academic community to the permanent exhibition at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. The collection, edited by leading scholars Antony Polonsky, Hanna Węgrzynek and Andrzej Żbikowski, includes papers by researchers from Poland, the US, the UK, Israel, Germany, France, Russia and Lithuania. The collection represents not only a highly insightful introduction to the strategies behind the creation of the museum but also, and more importantly, shows the progress that has been made, only relatively recently, in the history of Jews in the Polish lands. REVIEWS 381 The POLIN Museum opened on 19 April 2013 and quickly became one of the iconic sites in Warsaw, partially due to its stunning architecture and its location in the highly symbolic Muranów district where the Warsaw Ghetto was established in November 1940. POLIN is located next to the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, near a statue to Jan Karski, a passageway named after Irena Sendler, a few hundred metres away from a bunker on 18 Miła Street where the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising committed suicide instead of being captured by the Germans, and a few hundred metres from the Umschlagplatz from which Jews from the Warsaw ghetto were transported to Treblinka extermination camp. Thus, the location itself represents a link between real places where the tragedy of Warsaw Jews took place during World War Two and their commemorative narratives that find their expression in the museum. POLIN was designed as a narrative museum, so relies on telling a story through objects, audio/visual material and also reconstructions, which include the spectacular painted ceiling and bimah (timber-frame roof) of the synagogue in Gwoździec built in 1650 that was destroyed completely by the German army in 1941. The museum contains ten galleries — ‘Forest’ (the origins of Polin which in Hebrew means ‘rest here’), ‘First Encounters (960–1500)’, ‘Paradisus Iudaeorum (1569–1648)’, ‘The Jewish Town (1648–1772)’, ‘Gwoździec Reconstruction’, ‘Encounters with Modernity (1772–1914)’, ‘On the Jewish Street (1918–39)’, ‘Holocaust (1939–45)’, ‘Post-War Years (1944 to the present)’ and ‘Legacy’. POLIN is, however, much more than a narrative space and a visual experience. It is also an active civic institution hosting cultural events, conferences, book presentations and workshops that attract large numbers of participants, and classes about the Polish-Jewish past...