In stark contrast to the widespread preoccupation with the wartime looting of priceless works of art, Bozena 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, Wladyslaw Szlengel, Zofia Nalkowska, Czeslaw Milosz, 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.

The vulnerability of material objects as Holocaust texts

About the Author

Bozena Shallcross is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. She is author of Through the Poet's Eye: The Travels of Zagajewski, Herbert, and Brodsky and editor (with David L. Ransel) of Polish Encounters/Russian Identity (IUP, 2005).

Reviews

Shallcross's book is a significant contribution to current discussions of the Shoah, providing important insights into a broad range of themes that linger at a core of our debates.

* 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 *



Book Information
ISBN 9780253355645
Author Bozena Shallcross
Format Hardback
Page Count 200
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press
Weight(grams) 431g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 24mm