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I Rest My Case
Mark Verstandig
Northwestern University Press, 2002
Mark Verstandig's compelling epic spans pre-Holocaust Jewish culture in Eastern Europe and its post-war reformation in Australia.

His personal story interweaves the vast forces of politics and history with intimate details of the shtetl--from the pre-war intricacies of Galician society and the textures of a traditional Jewish education, to the agonizing contradictions of Polish-Jewish relations and the complexities of post-war Jewish politics.

His account of the displaced persons camps where 'transit Jews' awaited their chance to emigrate is a signifigant contribution to a little-known aspect of post-war history.

With his gift for observation and his acute powers of analysis, Mark Verstandig has achieved the rare feat of telling the story of his people through his own history. Part autobiography, part Holocaust literature, part sociological analysis, I Rest my Case is a fine achievement.
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Ignacy Paderewski
Poland
Anita Prazmowska
Haus Publishing, 2009
The thirteenth of President Wilson's Fourteen Points of 1918 read: "An independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant." Ever since the Third Partition in 1795 brought Polish independence to an end, nationalists had sought the restoration of their country, and the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 did indeed produce the modern Polish state. The Western Allies saw a revived Poland as both a counter to German power and a barrier to the westward expansion of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia—a role the Polish army fulfilled by defeating a Soviet invasion in 1920. But caught between two powers and composed of territory taken from both of them, Poland was vulnerable, and in 1939 it was divided up between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The highest profile Polish representative at the Conference was the pianist and politician Ignacy Paderewski (1860-1941), the "most famous Pole in the world", whose image had done much to promote the Polish cause in the West. But he was joined by the altogether less romantic figure of Roman Dmowski (1864-1939), whose anti-Semitic reputation Paderewski took pains to distance himself from when seeking support in the United States.
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Impact of Migration on Poland
EU Mobility and Social Change
Anne White, Izabela Grabowska, Pawel Kaczmarczyk, and Krystyna Slany
University College London, 2018
How has the international mobility of Polish citizens intertwined with other influences to shape society, culture, politics, and economics in contemporary Poland?

The Impact of Migration on Poland offers a new approach for understanding how migration affects sending countries and provides a wide-ranging analysis of how Poland has changed, and continues to change, since accession to the European Union in 2004. The authors explore an array of social trends and their causes before using in-depth interview data to illustrate how migration contributes to those causes. They address fundamental questions about whether and how Polish society is becoming more equal and more cosmopolitan, arguing that for particular segments of society migration does make a difference. While the book focuses mainly on those who have stayed in Poland, and their contacts with Poles in other countries, it also analyzes Polish society abroad, a concept that is a far more accurate description than “community” in countries such as the UK.
 
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Imperial Russian Rule in the Kingdom of Poland, 1864-1915
Malte Rolf
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021

After crushing the Polish Uprising in 1863–1864, Russia established a new system of administration and control. Imperial Russian Rule in the Kingdom of Poland, 18641915 investigates in detail the imperial bureaucracy’s highly variable relationship with Polish society over the next half century. It portrays the personnel and policies of Russian domination and describes the numerous layers of conflict and cooperation between the Tsarist officialdom and the local population. Presenting case studies of both modes of conflict and cooperation, Malte Rolf replaces the old, unambiguous “freedom-loving Poles vs. oppressive Russians” narrative with a more nuanced account and does justice to the complexity and diversity of encounters among Poles, Jews, and Russians in this contested geopolitical space. At the same time, he highlights the process of “provincializing the center,” the process by which the erosion of imperial rule in the Polish Kingdom facilitated the demise of the Romanov dynasty itself.

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In the Beginning Was the Ghetto
Notebooks from Lodz
Oskar Rosenfeld
Northwestern University Press, 2002
From February 1942 to July 1944, Oskar Rosenfeld served in the statistics department of the Lodz ghetto. A playwright and journalist, he kept his own notes on life and conditions in the ghetto for a fictionalized account he hoped to write one day. Though Rosenfeld eventually perished at Auschwitz, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto projects his voice at last to the wider world.
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In the Shadow of the Swastika
Hermann Wygoda
University of Illinois Press, 1998
He was known first as a Warsaw ghetto smuggler, then as Comandante Enrico. He traveled under false identity papers and worked at a German border patrol station. Throughout the years of the Holocaust, Hermann Wygoda lived a life of narrow escapes, daring masquerades, and battles that almost defy reason.
 
Unique among Holocaust memoirs, In the Shadow of the Swastika, now in paperback, celebrates the memory of a man who received decorations from three Western powers and who, years later, was honored posthumously by the Italian city he helped to liberate.
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Inheriting the Holocaust
A Second-Generation Memoir
Paula S. Fass
Rutgers University Press, 2011
In Inheriting the Holocaust, Paula S. Fass explores her own past as the daughter of Holocaust survivors to reflect on the nature of history and memory. Through her parents' experiences and the stories they recounted, Fass defined her engagement as a historian and used these skills to better understand her parents' lives.

Fass begins her journey through time and relationships when she travels to Poland and locates birth certificates of the murdered siblings she never knew. That journey to recover her family's story provides her with ever more evidence for the perplexing reliability of memory and its winding path toward historical reconstruction. In the end, Fass recovers parts of her family's history only to discover that Poland is rapidly re-imagining the role Jews played in the nation's past.

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Institutions And The Fate Of Democracy
Germany And Poland In The Twentieth Century
Michael Bernhard
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005

As democracy has swept the globe, the question of why some democracies succeed while others fail has remained a pressing concern. In this theoretically innovative, richly historical study, Michael Bernhard looks at the process by which new democracies choose their political institutions, showing how these fundamental choices shape democracy's survival.

Offering a new analytical framework that maps the process by which basic political institu-tions emerge, Bernhard investigates four paradigmatic episodes of democracy in two countries: Germany during the Weimar period and after World War II, and Poland between the world wars and after the fall of communism.

Students of democracy will appreciate the broad applicability of Bernhard's findings, while area specialists will welcome the book's accessible and detailed historical accounts.

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Intimations
The Cinema of Wojciech Has
Annette Insdorf
Northwestern University Press, 2017
In this first study in English of a master of Polish cinema, Annette Insdorf explores Has’s thirteen feature films with the same deep insight of her groundbreaking book on Krzysztof Kieslowski, Double Lives, Second Chances (Northwestern, 2013).
 
Wojciech Has’s films are still less known outside of his native Poland than those of his countrymen Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Zanussi, and Krzysztof Kieslowski. Yet thanks to his singular vision, many critics rank Has among the masters of world cinema. Some of his movies have developed a cult following, notably The Saragossa Manuscript, the favorite film of the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia, which has been praised by directors such as Luis Buñuel, Francis Ford Coppola, and Roman Polanski.
 
Has’s films reveal the inner lives of his characters, which he portrays by giving free rein to his own wildly creative imagination. In addition toThe Saragossa Manuscript, his diverse and innovative filmography includes The Hourglass Sanatorium, a vividly surreal depiction of Hassidic life in Poland between the world wars; The Noose, a stark poetic drama about a lucid alcoholic who knows he will not be able to kick the habit; and How to Be Loved, in which an actress remembers her wartime past.
 
Has made disparate but formally striking movies infused with European strains of existentialism and the avant-garde. With many of his films being restored and rereleased, new generations of film lovers are discovering his artistic genius. Intimations: The Cinema of Wojciech Has is the definitive guide in English to his work.
 
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Irish Drama in Poland
Staging and Reception, 1900-2000
Barry Keane
Intellect Books, 2016
Irish Drama in Poland is the first book to broadly assess Irish drama’s impact on both Poland’s theatrical world and its cultural and literary heritage in the twentieth century. With a wide-ranging analysis—from Yeats, Synge, O’Casey, and Behan, to Wilde, Shaw, and Beckett—this engaging study explores the translation, production, and reception of Irish plays in Poland. Barry Keane presents readers with the historical and literary context for each production, allowing readers to understand the many ways Irish theater has informed Poland’s theatrical and literary heritage. Including a foreword by translation scholar Michael Cronin, Irish Drama in Poland drives home the importance of exploring intercultural contexts, allowing readers a more informed understanding of European culture and identity.
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