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Poland

Poland Book List

Cover of 'An Ordinary Life?'

An Ordinary Life?
The Journeys of Tonia Lechtman, 1918–1996
By Anna Müller

A Jew, Pole, daughter, mother, wife, Communist, migrant, Holocaust survivor, and refugee driven to fight for a better world. Ordinary or anything but? In Tonia Lechtman’s life, the lofty and the quotidian intertwined, making everything she did both monumental and mundane. Who was she?

Winner, Kulczycki Book Prize in Polish Studies. Awarded to the best book in any discipline, on any aspect of Polish affairs, from the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies · Honorable mention for the 2020 Heldt Prize for the best book by a woman in Slavic/East European/Eurasian Studies, awarded by the Association for Women in Slavic Studies
Cover of 'Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities'

Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities
Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840–1920
By Lenny A. Ureña Valerio

Ureña Valerio illuminates nested imperial and colonial relations using sources ranging from medical texts and state documents to travel literature and fiction. She analyzes scientific and medical debates to connect medicine, migration, and colonialism, providing an invigorating model for the analysis of Polish history from a global perspective.

Winner, Kulczycki Book Prize in Polish Studies. Awarded to the best book in any discipline, on any aspect of Polish affairs, from the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies · Honorable mention for the 2020 Heldt Prize for the best book by a woman in Slavic/East European/Eurasian Studies, awarded by the Association for Women in Slavic Studies
Cover of 'Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities'

Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities
Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840–1920
By Lenny A. Ureña Valerio

Ureña Valerio illuminates nested imperial and colonial relations using sources ranging from medical texts and state documents to travel literature and fiction. She analyzes scientific and medical debates to connect medicine, migration, and colonialism, providing an invigorating model for the analysis of Polish history from a global perspective.

Winner of the 2019 Oskar Halecki Prize from the Polish American Historical Association · Winner of the 2020 Wacław Lednicki Award in the Humanities from the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America (PIASA)
Cover of 'Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction'

Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction
By Grażyna J. Kozaczka

Through close readings of several Polish American and Polish Canadian novels and short stories published over the last seven decades, Kozaczka demonstrates how Polish American women writers have acknowledged their patriarchal oppression and tells the complex story of how they sought empowerment through resistive and transgressive behaviors.

Cover of 'Marta'

Marta
A Novel
By Eliza Orzeszkowa
· Translation by Anna Gąsienica Byrcyn and Stephanie Kraft
· Introduction by Grażyna J. Kozaczka

Of trailblazing Polish novelist Eliza Orzeszkowa’s many works of social realism, Marta is among the best known, but until now it has not been available in English. Easily a peer of The Awakening and A Doll’s House, the novel was well ahead of English literature of its time in attacking the ways the labor market failed women.

Winner, the 2017 Adele E. Clarke Book Award from Repronetwork
Cover of 'The Politics of Morality'

The Politics of Morality
The Church, the State, and Reproductive Rights in Postsocialist Poland
By Joanna Mishtal

The Politics of Morality is an anthropological study of the expansion of power of the religious right in postsocialist Poland and its effects on individual rights and social mores.

Cover of 'Between the Brown and the Red'

Between the Brown and the Red
Nationalism, Catholicism, and Communism in Twentieth-Century Poland—The Politics of Bolesław Piasecki
By Mikołaj Stanisław Kunicki

Between the Brown and the Red captures the multifaceted nature of church-state relations in communist Poland, relations that oscillated between mutual confrontation, accommodation, and dialogue. Ironically, under communism the bond between religion and nation in Poland grew stronger. This happened in spite of the fact that the government deployed nationalist themes in order to portray itself as more Polish than communist.

A Publishers Weekly Top Ten “Literary Essays” Title, Spring 2011
Cover of 'An Invisible Rope'

An Invisible Rope
Portraits of Czesław Miłosz
Edited by Cynthia L. Haven

Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) often seemed austere and forbidding to Americans, but those who got to know him found him warm, witty, and endlessly enriching. An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz presents a collection of remembrances from his colleagues, his students, and his fellow writers and poets in America and Poland.

Cover of 'The Origins of Modern Polish Democracy'

The Origins of Modern Polish Democracy
Edited by M. B. B. Biskupski, James S. Pula, and Piotr J. Wróbel

The Origins of Modern Polish Democracy is a series of closely integrated essays that traces the idea of democracy in Polish thought and practice. It begins with the transformative events of the mid-nineteenth century, which witnessed revolutionary developments in the socioeconomic and demographic structure of Poland, and continues through changes that marked the postcommunist era of free Poland.The

Co-Winner of the 2010 ASEEES/Orbis Book Prize for Polish Studies · Winner of the 2010 John Gilmary Shea Prize for a book on the history of the Catholic Church
Cover of 'Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter'

Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter
The Catholic Church and Independent Poland, 1914–1939
By Neal Pease

When an independent Poland reappeared on the map of Europe after World War I, it was widely regarded as the most Catholic country on the continent. Yet the relations of the Second Polish Republic with the Church proved far more difficult than expected.

Cover of 'The Law of the Looking Glass'

The Law of the Looking Glass
Cinema in Poland, 1896–1939
By Sheila Skaff

The Law of the Looking Glass: Cinema in Poland, 1896–1939 reveals the complex relationship between nationhood, national language, and national cinema in Europe before World War II. Author Sheila Skaff describes how the major issues facing the region before World War I, from the relatively slow pace of modernization to the desire for national sovereignty, shaped local practices in film production, exhibition, and criticism.

Cover of 'Holy Week'

Holy Week
A Novel of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
By Jerzy Andrzejewski
· Introduction by Oscar E. Swan
· Foreword by Jan T. Gross

At the height of the Nazi extermination campaign in the Warsaw Ghetto, a young Jewish woman, Irena, seeks the protection of her former lover, a young architect, Jan Malecki. By taking her in, he puts his own life and the safety of his family at risk.

Cover of 'The Clash of Moral Nations'

The Clash of Moral Nations
Cultural Politics in Piłsudski’s Poland, 1926–1935
By Eva Plach

The Clash of Moral Nations is a study of the political culture of interwar Poland, as reflected in and by the May 1926 coup and the following period of “sanacja.” It tracks the diverse appropriations and manipulations of that concept, introducing an important cultural and gendered dimension to understandings of national and political identity in interwar Poland.

Winner of the 2004 AAASS Orbis Book Prize
Cover of 'Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979'

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.

Cover of 'Framing the Polish Home'

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