Healing by Haunting: Jewish Ghosts in Contemporary Polish Literature

The motif of Jewish ghosts in contemporary Polish prose is the point of departure for this article, which analyzes, more broadly, the ways in which the element of the fantastic can be employed as a response to trauma and as a means of coming to terms with difficult knowledge. Concentrating on the topoi of Poland as a space contaminated with suffering, and haunting as a form of retributive and restorative justice, this article looks at how the fantasy of the Jewish return can be seen as a response to current historical debates about the Polish implication in anti-Jewish violence and the dispossession of Jews during and after the Holocaust. The new, experimental language of loss developed in this contemporary Polish writing, labeled here as traumatic surrealism, is considered both in its aesthetic and moral context as a vehicle to express the transgenerational impact that the Holocaust has had on Poles and a therapeutic medium which, by providing a fantasy of avenging or repairing the past harm, allows an imaginary rapprochement of the victims and those who inhabit the spaces of their death.