The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture
Bozena Shallcross
In stark contrast to the widespread preoccupation with the wartime looting of priceless works of art, Bożena Shallcross focuses on the meaning of ordinary objects—pots, eyeglasses, shoes, clothing, kitchen utensils—tangible vestiges of a once-lived reality, which she reads here as cultural texts. Shallcross delineates the ways in which Holocaust objects are represented in Polish and Polish-Jewish texts written during or shortly after World War II. These representational strategies are distilled from the writings of Zuzanna Ginczanka, Władysław Szlengel, Zofia Nałkowska, Czesław Miłosz, Jerzy Andrzejewski, and Tadeusz Borowski. Combining close readings of selected texts with critical interrogations of a wide range of philosophical and theoretical approaches to the nature of matter, Shallcross's study broadens the current discourse on the Holocaust by embracing humble and overlooked material objects as they were perceived by writers of that time.
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About Bozena Shallcross
Reviews for The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture
H-Poland
Shallcross's illuminating study . . . underlines the way objects can relay information in a subliminal, almost visceral, but ambivalent way.
Russian Review
In analyzing the artifacts of writers who took up the ethical and precarious charge of testifying to the destruction engulfing and surrounding them, Shallcross has written an important book.
H-Judaic
Shallcross's book is intelligent, articulate . . . and for all its lucid and detached analysis, deeply moving. It is itself now a document of the Holocaust, at once concerned with the desperately important business of vivifying the past and those who constituted it.
American Historical Review
Here, as aptly as she has in her previous work, Shallcross looks at depictions of the depths of suffering through the 'dispossession' of belongings when a prisoner entered a concentration camp. This is a brilliant analysis. ...Highly recommended.October 2011
Choice
Shallcross . . . is to be congratulated for bringing to the attention of the world these literary remnants by translating these Polish-lanaguage testimonies and interpreting them with great learning and skill.
Chicago Jewish Star