Aleph = Academy
Younger Siblings of the Academy, or, on the Books That No One Reads
The Difficult Case of Tryumf pana Kleksa
The Fairy Tale that Does Not Uplift
Chapter Three The Architecture of Biography: The Case of Korczak
Between Memorials and Literature: From Mapping the City to Mapping Memory
The Year of Korczak, or on the Troublesome Invasion of Memory
From a Tactician to a Strategist: A Modern Take on Korczak
Chapter Four Micronarratives from the Peripheries of the Holocaust
Micronarratives and Counter-History, or on Overcoming Oppression
The Holocaust According to Anne Frank
Girls’ Narratives: Intimist Writing and the Holocaust
The Fairy Tale and the Holocaust
Chapter Five Motherhood in the State of Emergency
Between the Yiddishe Mame and Medeą
The Metonymy of Mother: The Sliska Street Case
The World without Mother: Patterns of Storytelling
Hunger/Satiety: Mother and Affect
The Animal Point of View: Another Version of Motherhood
Polish Mothers and the Rituals of Hospitality
Chapter Six Space Management and Postmemory
Sacred Landscape
Non-place: The Disneyland of Memory
Chapter Seven The Dybbuk Versus Facebook
The Dybbuk: A Case Study of Kotka Brygidy by Joanna Rudniańska
Facebook: A Case Study of Wszystkie lajki Marczuka by Paweł Beręsewicz
Close Strangers: An Attempt at a Conclusion
Studies in Jewish History and Memory
Edited by
Lucyna Aleksandrowicz-Pędich
Volume 14
←10 | 11→
Chapter One Mount of Remembrance
Radio: And then the Germans marched into Warsaw and said that Poland wasn’t Poland anymore, and Warsaw wasn’t its capital but a rubble-filled hole in the ground …
Little Metal Girl: Dead right, a hole! A shithole. I hate this city. The tube, wrrr, the trams, bruu, stinking buses, and wherever you’re headed, you go over dead bodies, dead bodies, dead bodies!
Dorota Masłowska: Między nami dobrze jest1
Aleksandra Ubertowska argues that the above passage from Dorota Masłowska’s play is an affirmation of posthistoricity in the sense of “the atrophy of ‘grand narratives’ […] which lay claim to imposing order on the magma-like, amorphous reality, to forcing it into a coherent shape and meaning.”2
Ubertowska is right, but her remark deserves some elaboration. The point is that the words of the Little Metal Girl reverberate with the summa of contemporary Polish socio-national projects, whose implementation is far from successful. The methodology of parochial, nationalistically-coloured patriotism has apparently failed, along with the concept of ethical-aesthetic education, if aims and destinations are only reached “over dead bodies” and in the rhythm of Julian Tuwim’s celebrated “Locomotive.”3
