Barbara Pawlic-Miśkiewicz, Performance of Identity of Polish Tatars: From Religious Holidays to Everyday Rituals (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2018), 287 pp., illustrations, index. ISBN 978-3-631-67280-8.Performance of Identity of Polish Tatars presents the Tatar community in Poland from the perspective of the eponymous interdisciplinary brand of performance studies which is heavily augmented by anthropological research. The study's methodology, together with the historical background of the group and their religion are given, but its primary focus is Tatar religion-based rituals and traditions. As the oldest Muslim community in the country, the Polish Tatars base their ethnic identity on a religion that encompasses all walks of life. Nevertheless, having been separated from what could be called their religion's mainstream for so many centuries, they have incorporated in syncretic fashion elements of the traditions from the neighboring Catholic and Orthodox populations of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Author Pawlic-Miśkiewicz is upfront about her own involvement in the community, having recovered her Tatar identity through marriage to a prominent religious leader within it and so moving to a center where the community still thrives. This gave her privileged access to the community's members whom she interviewed and whose views she copiously documents in this rich study. (cg)Thaddeus V. Gromada and Janina Gromada-Kedroń, Indeks/Index to “Tatrzański Orzeł”/ “The Tatra Eagle,”1947–2018 (Hasbrouck Heights, NJ: Tatra Eagle Press, 2019), 150 pp. ISBN 978-1-7923-2141-2.The Index to “The Tatra Eagle” is an extraordinary research tool listing all texts published by this quarterly in its over seventy-year history. To make searches easier, the articles indexed are sorted into thirteen categories such as “Popular Academic/Scholarly Articles,” “Columns,” “Highlander Folklore—Culture,” “Folk Tales,” “Podhale in Polish Literature and Poetry,” “Obituaries,” and several others. The category labels are bilingual, reflecting the languages used in the quarterly. It is not surprising, then, that two introductions—a Polish and an English one—open the Index's listings. The English introduction by Thaddeus V. Gromada focuses on the genesis of The Tatra Eagle and its close connection to the Gromada family, starting with Jan Gromada and Aniela Pudzisz Gromada who emigrated from Poland in the 1920s and settled in New Jersey. They managed to transmit to their children, Thaddeus and Janina, their love of the Podhale homeland with its vibrant folk culture. With the support of their parents, Thaddeus and Janina began publishing The Tatra Eagle in 1947 and continued to do so until 2018. The Tatra Eagle, as emphasized by Anna Brzozowska-Krajka in her Polish language introduction, became an important diasporic publication focused on the regional culture of Polish Highlanders and its connection with Polish literature and culture. Brzozowska-Krajka also underscores the importance of the quarterly in the construction of the Góral identity in the U.S. and Canada. This Index is of great value to any researcher interested in construction and expression of ethnicity of a group with a very strong link to a particular geographic region of Poland. (gk)Tomasz Mróz, Plato in Poland, 1800–1950: Types of Reception, Authors, Problems [Platon w Polsce, 1800–1950: Typy recepcji, autorzy, problemy] (Baden-Baden: Academia Verlag, 2021), 480 pp., bibliography, appendix. ISBN 978-3-89665-946-0.This book, a valuable addition to the history of Polish philosophy, concentrates on Plato's reception, not the reception of different forms of Platonism, in Polish philosophical thought over a period of 150 years, between 1800 and 1950. In his introduction, Tomasz Mróz identifies the texts he analyzes as “the work of Polish historians of philosophy, philosophers and sometimes philologists who confronted the problem of Plato, Platonism, and the dialogues, and who used Plato's works in their own studies” (p. 16). The book is divided into three parts, which reflect the “three chronological stages of Plato's reception” (p. 15). It discusses such thinkers as Władysław Tatarkiewicz, Wojciech Dzieduszycki, Władysław Witwicki, Wincenty Lutosławski, Stefan Pawlicki, and many others. Mróz underscores emphatically that his purpose was not to use the contemporary point of view to evaluate the past reception of Plato in Poland, but rather to reveal the importance of texts on Plato in the fabric of Polish intellectual history. (gk)Maja Trochimczyk, The Rainy Bread: More Poems from Exile (Los Angeles: Moonrise Press, 2021), 124 pp., illustrations. ISBN 978-1-945938-47-4.In a detailed Introduction to her poetry collection which includes over sixty poems, Maja Trochimczyk provides a thorough account of her inspiration for many of her poems within this volume. She traces the origins of many of the texts to her family's and friends’ personal recollections of the tragic moments in Polish national history: World War II, the Nazi and the Soviet occupation. In several narrative poems, Trochimczyk outlines the often heartbreaking stories of her relations who suffered both from the Soviets and Germans. In a lyrical memory of her mother, the speaker in “Slicing the Bread” reveals the war scars that her mother has carried till the end of her life. The poet writes, “Thirty years after the war, / her mother stashed paper bags with sliced, dried bread / on top shelves in her Warsaw kitchen. / Twenty, thirty bags—enough food for a month. / Don't ever throw any bread away, her mother said. / Remember, war is hunger.” (p. 36). Trochimczyk grouped her poems into six distinct parts with titles such as Destinations, Nowhere, Hunger Years, and Resilience. The Introduction's family stories are paired up with a family photography album which brings the subjects of the poems closer to the reader. This volume focuses on a story of one Polish family with their struggles and pain drawn against the canvas of the national suffering, but it is also a testimonial to the courage and perseverance of ordinary Poles as well as a celebration of familial love. (gk)Olga Tokarczuk, The Lost Soul [Zgubiona dusza], translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, with illustrations by Joanna Concejo (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2021), 48 pp. ISBN 978-1-64421-034-5.A picture book for adults is probably the best way to describe this beautifully published book combining a very brief, only one page long, story by Tokarczuk with exquisite illustrations by Joanna Concejo. Tokarczuk consciously uses fairy tale conventions to tell the story. She begins with a familiar “Once upon a time” as she builds a story of a modern Everyman, aptly named John, who suddenly discovers that everyday routines and a constant focus on completing mundane tasks, have led him to the loss of self. John understands that somehow he has become separated from his soul, and thus the meaning of life alludes him. The story's lesson suggests a way of regaining the sense of life, reconnecting with one's soul, and possibly regaining happiness. The book's true strength lies in Concejo's sensitive illustrations. She carries the reader/viewer from the opening sequence of illustrations depicting a wintery park viewed from above where we can discern very small human figures. With each subsequent picture Concejo moves us closer to the subject, the man and his soul presented as a female child. The book design simulates an old album or a scrapbook, with all the pages printed on sepia paper with most of the illustrations using a grey scale which changes strategically in the second part when color is introduced as John's lost soul gets closer and closer to him. An addition, several translucent pages add depth and the sense of layering to the illustrations. It is a book that can be read in a few minutes but studied and enjoyed for many hours. (gk)Anna G. Piotrowska, Music, City and the Roma under Communism (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 219 pp., illustrations, bibliography, index. ISBN 978-1-5013-8081-5.Anna G. Piotrowska, a professor of musicology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, found inspiration for her study of Roma street musicians in her personal memories of the street music performed by Roma buskers while she was growing up in the city of Kraków. In her study, Piotrowska, briefly outlines a history of the Roma in Poland with their first appearance in the fourteenth century, but concentrates on the role Romani musicians played—creating the soundscape of the city of Kraków. Their interactions with the Polish inhabitants of the city, with its tourists, and with the communist authorities are of particular importance to the author. She analyzes in detail the rise to fame and the subsequent fall from favor with the communist authorities of the ROMA folkloric ensemble styled after the well-known Mazowsze and Śląsk groups promoting Polish musical traditions. The final part of the study is devoted to a fascinating portrait of Stefan Dymiter (1938–2002) known as Corroro, a disabled Romani violin virtuoso who for decades performed with his band in Floriańska Street and the Main Square. Neither Corroro, who was blind, nor the members of his band, who were not, could read music, but the band members were familiar with a vast repertoire of tunes. Piotrowska writes that most of the time “they performed pieces commonly associated with the stereotype of ‘Gypsy music’ or—even more broadly—linked with the ‘Gypsy culture’. . . . ” (p. 158). In the Epilogue, Piotrowska traces the influence of Romani musicians on Polish contemporary popular music. (gk)Anna Kuligowska-Korzeniewska, Polska “Szulamis”: Studia o teatrze polskim i żydowskim (Warsaw: Akademia Teatralna im. Aleksandra Zelwerowicza, 2018), 680 pp., illustrations, bibliographical references, name index, cumulative index of titles, index of Yiddish titles. ISBN 978-83-944934-7-9.It is by now a truism that power relations in most societies mean that some types of evidence will be privileged over others, or even that some will not be considered at all. In this book on theatre as a form of complex social interaction, Anna Kuligowska-Korzeniewska confronts lacunae in scholarship, questions reductive claims about the past, and examines familiar concepts with fresh eyes. She recovers from oblivion the Awangarda Theatre that operated in the Łódź ghetto, delves into Jerzy Jurandot's farce, Miłość szuka mieszkania [Love seeks a home, 1942], that played to packed houses in the Warsaw ghetto, reminds us that theatre performed a seminal role in rebuilding Jewish culture in postwar Poland, and offers correctives to the permanent exhibition at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Much of the richness of her book comes from the application of transcultural analysis to topics ranging from theatre censorship to strategies of audience involvement and identification. The book's center of gravity is a study of Abraham Goldfaden's Shulamis, Daughter of Jerusalem (1880), the first Yiddish drama to be translated into Polish. Set in ancient Judea, the plot combines Talmudic legend with popular Hebrew narratives. Starring Polish actors and Jewish vocalists, the Polish translation premiered to great success in Warsaw in 1887. It quickly became a staple of the theatre repertoire in the Kingdom of Poland, attracting large Jewish and Polish audiences, while also, in Kuligowska-Korzeniewska's interpretation, challenging nation-centric assumptions about Polish theatre. (hf)Stefan Otwinowski, Wielkanoc, edited by Beata Bińko (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny im. Emanuela Ringelbluma, 2018), 198 pp., illustrations, bibliographical references. ISBN 978-83-65254-73-3.What can drama tell us about Holocaust memory that we do not already know? Isn't drama merely a second-class resident of a grey zone between history and memory? These are some of the questions addressed in this critical edition of Stefan Otwinowski's Wielkanoc [Easter, 1946]. Written between 1941 and 1945, Easter is one of the earliest plays in any language to raise issues of empathy, solidarity, and responsibility in the Holocaust context. The prologue captures the increasingly hostile atmosphere in prewar Poland toward Jews; the three acts that follow test the much-vaunted Polish ethos of self-sacrifice during World War II. Easter was published in early 1946, but it took some time to locate a willing theatre director. There was a general consensus that staging a Holocaust drama was a risky business. When it finally opened in October 1946, three months after a pogrom in Kielce, Easter played in an aura of vehement controversy, generating heated debates that are comparable to those that surrounded Tadeusz Słobodzianek's Jedwabne-themed play, Nasza klasa [Our class], in 2009. Underpinned by the concept of imaginative literature as the mnemonic art par excellence, the 2018 edition returns Easter to circulation after some seventy years of cultural neglect. A reprint of the original edition is accompanied by articles by Ewa Koźmińska-Frejlak, Anna Kuligowska-Korzeniewska, Dorota Jarecka, and Tomasz Żukowski. The volume is a welcome and much needed publication. Perhaps it is not too much to hope that an expanded edition will include a reading of Easter through lenses of gender and sexuality. (hf)