Books in the Polish and Polish-American Studies Series series

The Grasinski Girls were working-class Americans of Polish descent, born in the 1920s and 1930s, who created lives typical of women in their day. They went to high school, married, and had children. For the most part, they stayed home to raise their children. And they were happy doing that.

A comparative study of Polish migrants in the Ruhr Valley and in northeastern Pennsylvania, The Borders of Integration questions assumptions about race and white immigrant assimilation a hundred years ago, highlighting how the Polish immigrant experience is relevant to present-day immigration debates.

During Poland's century-long partition and in the interwar period of Poland's re-emergence as a state, Polish writers on both sides of the ocean shared a preoccupation with national identity. This analysis of these forgotten works examines the immigrant community's own competing visions of itself.

Few places in the world carry as heavy a burden of history as Auschwitz. Recognized and remembered as the most prominent site of Nazi crimes, Auschwitz has had tremendous symbolic weight in the postwar world. Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration is a history of the Auschwitz memorial site in the years of the Polish People's Republic. Since 1945, Auschwitz has functioned as a memorial and museum. Its monuments, exhibitions, and public spaces have attracted politicians, pilgrims, and countless participants in public demonstrations and commemorative events. Jonathan Huener's study begins with the liberation of the camp and traces the history of the State Museum at Auschwitz from its origins immediately after the war until the 1980s, analyzing the landscape, exhibitions, and public events at the site. Based on extensive research and illustrated with archival photographs, Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration accounts for the development and durability of a Polish commemorative idiom at Auschwitz. Emphasis on Polish national martyrdom at Auschwitz, neglect of the Shoah as the most prominent element of the camp's history, political instrumentalization of the grounds and exhibitionsthese were some of the more controversial aspects of the camp's postwar landscape. Professor Huener locates these and other public manifestations of memory at Auschwitz in the broad scope of Polish history, in the specific context of postwar Polish politics and culture, and against the background of Polish-Jewish relations. Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration will be of interest to scholars, students, and general readers of the history of modern Poland and the Holocaust.

The Clash of Moral Nations is a study of the political culture of interwar Poland, as reflected in and by the May 1926 coup and the following period of "sanacja."

Contains essays that trace the idea of democracy in Polish thought and practice. This book covers the transformative events of the mid-nineteenth century, which witnessed revolutionary developments in the socioeconomic and demographic structure of Poland. It also covers the changes that marked the postcommunist era of free Poland.

Polish emigres have written poignantly about the pain of exile in letters, diaries, and essays; others, more recently, have recreated Polish-American communities in works of fiction. But it is Danuta Mostwin's fiction, until now unavailable in English translation, that bridges the divide between Poland and America, exile and emigration. Mostwin and her husband survived the ravages of World War II, traveled to Britain, and then emigrated to the United States. Mostwin devoted her scholarly career to the study of immigrants trapped between cultural worlds. Winner of international awards for her fiction, Danuta Mostwin here offers two novellas, translated by the late Marta Erdman, which are the first of her works published in English in the United States.Deeply melancholic and moving in its unsentimental depiction of ordinary people trying to make sense of their uprooted lives, Testaments presents two powerful vignettes of life in immigrant America, The Last Will of Blaise Twardowski and Jocasta. This timely publication provides an introduction to Mostwin's work that will ensure that she is recognized as the creator of one of the most nuanced and deeply moving pictures of emigration and exile in Polish-American literature.

At the height of the Nazi extermination campaign in the Warsaw Ghetto, a young Jewish woman, Irena, seeks the protection of her former lover, a young architect, Jan Malecki. By taking her in, he puts his own life and the safety of his family at risk.

When an independent Poland reappeared on the map of Europe after World War I, it was widely regarded as the most Catholic country on the continent. Yet the relations of the Second Polish Republic with the Church proved far more difficult than expected.

Contains essays that trace the idea of democracy in Polish thought and practice. This book covers the transformative events of the mid-nineteenth century, which witnessed revolutionary developments in the socioeconomic and demographic structure of Poland.

Moving beyond a traditional study of Polish dramatic literature, Taking Liberties is a masterful intellectual history of what may be called patriotism without borders: a nonnational form of loyalty compatible with the universal principles and practices of democracy and human rights.

The Politics of Morality is an anthropological study of the expansion of power of the religious right in postsocialist Poland and its effects on individual rights and social mores.

Through close readings of several Polish American and Polish Canadian novels and short stories published over the last seven decades, Kozaczka demonstrates how Polish American women writers have shown a strong awareness of their patriarchal oppression, which followed them from Poland into America.

Urena Valerio illuminates nested imperial and colonial relations using sources ranging from medical texts and state documents to travel literature and fiction. She analyzes scientific and medical debates to connect medicine, migration, and colonialism, providing an invigorating model for the analysis of Polish history from a global perspective.