Polish-Jewish Borderlands

The book presents Polish-Jewish cultural contacts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from an interdisciplinary perspective. Using methods from Jewish, cultural, and literary studies, Prokop-Janiec takes a topographical approach by focusing on selected places, institutional spaces, and texts from the borderland.

Her reflection begins from changes in the understanding of the borderland phenomenon that happened in recent decades. Transformations within anthropology and the development of a new conceptual framework in Jewish cultural studies provide an opportunity for reinterpreting modern multilingual Jewish culture and its relationships with non-Jewish cultures. The monograph covers rarely considered areas of literature, such as mass-circulated Polish-Jewish newspapers, Polish-Jewish serialized novels, textbooks, and children's literature. Transformations within anthropology and the development of a new conceptual framework in Jewish cultural studies provide an opportunity for reinterpreting modern multilingual Jewish culture and its relationships with non-Jewish cultures.

"A fundamental and essential work for anyone interested in this subject" - Prof. Sławomir Buryła, University of Warsaw

Eugenia Prokop-Janiec is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. A historian of literature and culture, she focuses primarily on modern Polish literature and Polish-Jewish literary and cultural contacts. She has authored several books about Polish and Polish-Jewish literature: Polish-Jewish Literature in the Interwar Years (2003), Literatura i nacjonalizm (2004), Literatura & etnologia (2019).