Americans Experience Russia analyzes how American scholars, journalists, and artists envisioned, ... more Americans Experience Russia analyzes how American scholars, journalists, and artists envisioned, experienced, and interpreted Russia/the Soviet Union over the last century. While many histories of diplomatic, economic, and intellectual connections between the United States and the Soviet Union can be found, none has yet examined how Americans’ encounters with Russian/Soviet society shaped their representations of a Russian/Soviet ‘other’ and its relationship with an American ‘west.’
The essays in this volume critically engage with postcolonial theories which posit that a self-valorizing, unmediated west dictated the colonial encounter, repressing native voices that must be recovered. Unlike western imperialists and their colonial subjects, Americans and Russians long co-existed in a tense parity, regarding each other as other-than-European equals, sometime cultural role models, temporary allies, and political antagonists. In examining the fiction, film, journalism, treatises, and histories Americans produced out of their ‘Russian experience,’ the contributors to this volume closely analyze these texts, locate them in their sociopolitical context, and gauge how their producers’ profession, politics, gender, class, and interaction with native Russian interpreters conditioned their authored responses to Russian/Soviet reality. The volume also explores the blurred boundaries between national identities and representations of self/other after the Soviet Union’s fall.
Publication View. 4471781. First-person liberties : the persona in the work of Witold Gombrowicz ... more Publication View. 4471781. First-person liberties : the persona in the work of Witold Gombrowicz and Abram Terc / (1987). Holmgren, Beth. Abstract. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Harvard University, 1987.. Includes bibliographical references. Publication details. ...
Americans Experience Russia analyzes how American scholars, journalists, and artists envisioned, ... more Americans Experience Russia analyzes how American scholars, journalists, and artists envisioned, experienced, and interpreted Russia/the Soviet Union over the last century. While many histories of diplomatic, economic, and intellectual connections between the United States and the Soviet Union can be found, none has yet examined how Americans’ encounters with Russian/Soviet society shaped their representations of a Russian/Soviet ‘other’ and its relationship with an American ‘west.’
The essays in this volume critically engage with postcolonial theories which posit that a self-valorizing, unmediated west dictated the colonial encounter, repressing native voices that must be recovered. Unlike western imperialists and their colonial subjects, Americans and Russians long co-existed in a tense parity, regarding each other as other-than-European equals, sometime cultural role models, temporary allies, and political antagonists. In examining the fiction, film, journalism, treatises, and histories Americans produced out of their ‘Russian experience,’ the contributors to this volume closely analyze these texts, locate them in their sociopolitical context, and gauge how their producers’ profession, politics, gender, class, and interaction with native Russian interpreters conditioned their authored responses to Russian/Soviet reality. The volume also explores the blurred boundaries between national identities and representations of self/other after the Soviet Union’s fall.
Publication View. 4471781. First-person liberties : the persona in the work of Witold Gombrowicz ... more Publication View. 4471781. First-person liberties : the persona in the work of Witold Gombrowicz and Abram Terc / (1987). Holmgren, Beth. Abstract. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Harvard University, 1987.. Includes bibliographical references. Publication details. ...
A study of the contributions, situation, and contemporary press reception of well-known Polish Je... more A study of the contributions, situation, and contemporary press reception of well-known Polish Jewish performers, composers, and musicians recruited for the two theatrical revue units attached to General Wladyslaw Anders' Second Polish Corps during World War II. Its argument focuses on how the Anders Army accommodated these acculturated Jewish cosmopolitan celebrities while doing little to combat the rampant antisemitism among the enlisted soldiers. The article also traces how one Jewish composer of modern swing, Alfred Longin Schutz, polemicized with Polish nationalists in the wartime press, asserting 1) that the music he and his colleagues produced was every bit as patriotic as the cavalry songs of the past; and 2) that Jews serving in the Anders Army had fully shared the hardships and achievements of gentile officers and soldiers.
This chapter focuses on the “Anders Army,” which was founded by General Władysław Anders after he... more This chapter focuses on the “Anders Army,” which was founded by General Władysław Anders after he was freed from the Lubyanka prison by the Stalinist government. It recounts the Anders administration's special invitations that were issued to touring Polish show troupes that were made up primarily of acculturated Jews in order to form two embedded theatrical revue units. It also speculates on the motives of why the Anders administration decided to spend precious resources on particular Jewish recruits. The chapter draws on the memoirs of performers and soldiers and the articles, reviews, and editorials published in the Polish-language wartime newspapers that was subsidized by the British army. It describes the Jewish recruits that represented the greatest performers of modern Polish popular music and comedy, such as Henryk Wars, Jerzy Petersburski, Henryk Gold, and Alfred Longin Schüt.
Kabaret literacki—‘literary cabaret’, a specific form of cabaret consisting of comedy sketches, m... more Kabaret literacki—‘literary cabaret’, a specific form of cabaret consisting of comedy sketches, monologues, and songs with satirical social and political content—was a revolutionary phenomenon in terms of Polish culture, Jewish culture, and notions of Polish national identity. It flourished mainly in Warsaw between the world wars —that is, in the capital of a newly independent nation that was also a great Jewish metropolis with a third of its residents identifying themselves as Jews or ‘of Jewish background’.1 This is not to claim that Warsaw held a monopoly on innovative, high-quality cabaret in Poland. The lively city of Lwów, long a centre for Polish theatre, offered stiff competition in the form of cabarets such as Ul and Chochlik and the very popular radio show, ‘Wesoła Lwowska Fala’. Nor did Warsaw’s kabaret literacki attract the many Varsovian Jews who resisted Polish acculturation for religious and/or political reasons. The most innovative Yiddish-language kleynkunst theatre...
ABSTRACT:This short essay presents an analytical update of how scholars, curators, and stewards a... more ABSTRACT:This short essay presents an analytical update of how scholars, curators, and stewards are responding to the xenophobic climate and nationalist censorship being generated by the current Polish government under the rule of the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party. I focus on two new groundbreaking publications on the involvement of rural Poles and the Catholic Church in carrying out a rural Holocaust in World War II; the POLIN Museum's exhibit boldly representing the March 1968 antisemitic campaign that resulted in the exodus of thirteen thousand Polish Jews; and the activism of two educated, dedicated stewards of Jewish heritage preservation in small-town Poland.
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Books by Beth Holmgren
The essays in this volume critically engage with postcolonial theories which posit that a self-valorizing, unmediated west dictated the colonial encounter, repressing native voices that must be recovered. Unlike western imperialists and their colonial subjects, Americans and Russians long co-existed in a tense parity, regarding each other as other-than-European equals, sometime cultural role models, temporary allies, and political antagonists. In examining the fiction, film, journalism, treatises, and histories Americans produced out of their ‘Russian experience,’ the contributors to this volume closely analyze these texts, locate them in their sociopolitical context, and gauge how their producers’ profession, politics, gender, class, and interaction with native Russian interpreters conditioned their authored responses to Russian/Soviet reality. The volume also explores the blurred boundaries between national identities and representations of self/other after the Soviet Union’s fall.
Papers by Beth Holmgren
The essays in this volume critically engage with postcolonial theories which posit that a self-valorizing, unmediated west dictated the colonial encounter, repressing native voices that must be recovered. Unlike western imperialists and their colonial subjects, Americans and Russians long co-existed in a tense parity, regarding each other as other-than-European equals, sometime cultural role models, temporary allies, and political antagonists. In examining the fiction, film, journalism, treatises, and histories Americans produced out of their ‘Russian experience,’ the contributors to this volume closely analyze these texts, locate them in their sociopolitical context, and gauge how their producers’ profession, politics, gender, class, and interaction with native Russian interpreters conditioned their authored responses to Russian/Soviet reality. The volume also explores the blurred boundaries between national identities and representations of self/other after the Soviet Union’s fall.