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 Figures of Memory Polish Holocaust Literature of the “Second Generation” alina molisak Memory will not resurrect anyone, Not even on paper ?DH:; 7GD9H@N More radically than any other modern event, the Holocaust marks a new stage in human history, even if it is possible, following Tadeusz Borowski or Zygmunt Bauman, to seek its roots within European civilization.1 Repeatedly we observe not only the consequences of a profound crisis of civilization but also a stubborn persistence of the Holocaust experience in everyday life. The internal shock to the individual, which occurred on the most profound spiritual plane, has led to a disdain for the value of the life of the Other.2 Alan Rosenberg and others have pointed out that the Holocaust was an event that has actually transformed culture and that the communal memory of the Shoah is socially constructed.3 In this context questions about responsibility for the memory of the Holocaust and the ways in which this memory—and forgetting—are shaped arise with increased urgency. James E. Young, in his seminal study on representations of the Shoah in literature, emphasizes that we are now dealing with multiple historical, ideological, religious, and linguistic contexts , which tend to dominate their subject matter.4 Young underlines the multiple meanings of the Holocaust, pointing out that the consequences of the Shoah can only be described post factum, yet even at the time of  ;>H6@  literary language. Nevertheless, next to the radically innovative writings of Nałkowska and Borowski, traditional narrative modes were also used (Dąbrowska, Iwaszkiewicz, Rudnicki). Some authors were unable to let go of stereotypes and clichés (e.g., Andrzejewski in Wielki Tydzień [Holy Week]).7 Despite the recent nature of the events, it was characteristic for most of the works published at that time to adopt a common perspective on Jewish and non-Jewish experience of the war in Poland. The radical difference in the Jewish experience was not yet perceived, and the Holocaust was represented against the background of the presumed commonality of experience of living in an occupied country. Also, the writings about the ghetto uprising glorified heroic acts, thereby inscribing it within the martyrological formula of traditional “Polish” patriotism. Another characteristic feature of this literature, as noted by Jan Błoński many years later, was that “one could, especially in the postwar decades, count on the fingers of one hand the number of literary works that described the Polish society’s attitudes toward the Jewish Holocaust. It is not simply that literature is helpless in the face of the genocide. The subject was a hot potato, and writers were afraid of finding themselves in conflict with the sentiments and the expectations of their readers.”8 In the third stage the paths of different writers began to diverge. Starting from the mid-1950s there was a growing tendency to produce images of the war focused on the non-Jewish experience (Roman Bratny, Jerzy Andrzejewski, and others). On the other hand, the subject of the Holocaust has never been abandoned by writers born into Jewish families or those who identified as Jews (for example, Stanisław Wygodzki, Adolf Rudnicki, Artur Sandauer, Krystyna Żywulska, and Ida Fink); for many, the Holocaust has remained the central subject. For non-Jewish Polish writers, however, especially in the 1960s, the Jewish experience became increasingly marginal. It should also be noted that in the wake of the wave of antisemitism that swept Eastern Europe in 1968, a number of texts with strong antisemitic undertones (such as Bratny’s Dawid, syn Henryka (David , Henry’s son), or Stanisław Ryszard Dobrowolski’s Głupia sprawa (A silly matter) were published in large editions. A distinctly different kind of writing was produced by authors such  ;>H6@  born after the war.11 One should note, however, as does Jakov Lind, that the danger of such expansion of the canon is that from now on all literature on any Jewish subject may legitimately be referred to as Holocaust literature.12 Hungarian writer Imre Kertész has also pointed out a certain change, or perhaps a deformation of perspective, in Holocaust literature, which in his view dates back to the 1980s: “A certain conformity about the Holocaust has set in: there is Holocaust sentimentality and a Holocaust canon, a taboo system about the Holocaust, and a ceremonious language that is part of this phenomenon; the Shoah products are sought out for the Shoah consumers.”13 The Nobel Prize laureate does...

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