The Exile Mission
The Polish Political Diaspora and Polish Americans, 1939–1956
By Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann
At midcentury, two distinct Polish immigrant groups—those Polish Americans who were descendants of economic immigrants from the turn of the twentieth century and the Polish political refugees who chose exile after World War II and the communist takeover in Poland—faced an uneasy challenge to reconcile their concepts of responsibility toward the homeland.The new arrivals did not consider themselves simply as immigrants, but rather as members of the special category of political refugees.
History · American History · Polish and Polish-American Studies · Nationalism · Race and Ethnicity
The Grasinski Girls
The Choices They Had and the Choices They Made
By Mary Patrice Erdmans
The Grasinski Girls were working-class Americans of Polish descent, born in the 1920s and 1930s, who created lives typical of women in their day. They went to high school, married, and had children. For the most part, they stayed home to raise their children. And they were happy doing that. They took care of their appearance and their husbands, who took care of them.
Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979
By Jonathan Huener
Few places in the world carry as heavy a burden of history as Auschwitz. Remembered as the most prominent site of Nazi crimes, Auschwitz has had tremendous symbolic weight in the postwar world. Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration is a history of the Auschwitz memorial site in the years of the Polish People’s Republic.
Polish History · Holocaust · Poland · Polish and Polish-American Studies · Jewish History
Traitors and True Poles
Narrating a Polish-American Identity, 1880–1939
By Karen Majewski
During Poland’s century-long partition and in the interwar period of Poland’s reemergence as a state, Polish writers on both sides of the ocean shared a preoccupation with national identity. Polish-American immigrant writers revealed their persistent, passionate engagement with these issues, as they used their work to define and consolidate an essentially transnational ethnic identity that was both tied to Poland and independent of it.By
History · American History · World and Comparative History · European History · Polish and Polish-American Studies · Nationalism · Race and Ethnicity
Framing the Polish Home
Postwar Cultural Constructions of Hearth, Nation, and Self
Edited by Bożena Shallcross
As the subject of ideological, aesthetic, and existential manipulations, the Polish home and its representation is an ever-changing phenomenon that absorbs new tendencies and, at the same time, retains its centrality to Polish literature, whether written in Poland or abroad. Framing the Polish Home is a pioneering work that explores the idea of home as fundamental to the question of cultural and national identity within Poland’s recent history and its tradition.In
Literary Criticism, Eastern Europe · Poland · Polish and Polish-American Studies
