Urbanization, Capitalism, and Cosmopolitanism: Four Novels and a Film on Jews in the Polish City of Łódź

This article examines a variety of literary representations of Jewish life in Łódź, beginning with Władysław Stanisław Reymont's seminal Polish novel The Promised Land (1898) through the German and Yiddish work of Jewish authors such as Joseph Roth, Yisroel Rabon and I. J. Singer in the 1920s and 1930s. These works all draw upon Łódź's teeming social and ethnic diversity to create vivid portraits of Jewish protagonists operating within the multilingual arena of the city. The article also discusses Andrzej Wadja's 1974 cinematic adaptation of Reymont's work in light of postwar preoccupations with Polish identity, ethnicity and anti-semitism.