Forthcoming
Homecoming: Holocaust Survivors and Greece, 1941-1946
Kateřina KrálováChronicles the lives of the Jews of Greece who returned after surviving persecution, combat, and exile during World War II.
During World War II the Jews of Greece went into hiding, survived as far-flung refugees, fought as partisans, or were deported to Nazi death camps from which few returned. Though they wanted more than anything to return home, those who did faced isolation, anguish, deprivation, and hostility in the midst of the Greek Civil War. Their stories, which rarely feature in histories of the Holocaust, raise important questions about the aftermath of the war across Europe. Based on exhaustive archival research, and new testimonies and interviews with Holocaust survivors across several continents, this book brings new understanding of the genocide.
"A moving account of an important coda to the Holocaust in Greece: the difficult return of the very few Greek Jewish survivors to their homeland. More than half of those who returned stayed only briefly. This book tells us why and shows what Greece—and its Jews—have lost as a result."
K. E. Fleming, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust and author of Greece: A Jewish History.
About the Authors
Kateřina Králová is professor in Contemporary History at the Balkan, Eurasian and Central European Studies Department of the Institute of International Studies at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. Her publications include Stegnosan ta dakrya mas:Ellines prosfyges stin Tsechoslovakia (Our tears dried up: Greek refugees in Czechoslovakia) and Das Vermächtnis der Besatzung: Deutsch-griechische Beziehungen seit 1940 (The legacy of the occupation: German-Greek relations since 1940).
Making and Unmaking Literature in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna Ghettos
Sven-Erik RoseWriting in Nazi ghettos - within, at the limits of, and against an array of literary conventions.
Making and Unmaking Literature in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna Ghettos is the first study devoted to how little-known but essential authors grappled with the extreme destitution of ghetto existence by writing within, at the limits of, and against an array of literary scenarios, tropes, plot lines, and generic conventions, including those of nature lyric, modernist interior monologue, the realist social novel, the detective story, and the gothic horror tale.
Contending with starvation, disease, desperate housing conditions and the looming threat of being murdered, inhabitants of ghettos in Poland nonetheless made them sites of rich Jewish cultural production. Rose’s readings of literary works from the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna ghettos reveal how authors asserted their humanity by insisting on writing works of literature. In such radically dehumanizing circumstances, however, their recourse to established literary genres was not naïve. Rather, ghetto authors brilliantly meditated on the grotesque incongruities between established literary models and the extreme conditions of ghetto existence. This book shows Nazi ghettos, while places of great suffering and misery, also to be places of profound literary thinking.
About the Authors
Sven-Erik Rose is Professor of German and of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis. His first book, Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789–1848, was awarded the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association for Jewish Studies in the category of Philosophy and Jewish Thought.