Focusing on the close reading of Eva Mekler's two novels, Sunrise Shows Late (1997) and The P... more Focusing on the close reading of Eva Mekler's two novels, Sunrise Shows Late (1997) and The Polish Woman (2007), set in Poland, Germany, and the United States, this article considers Mekler's constructs of Polish Jewish and Polish Jewish American identity that the author situates at the fraught intersection of gender, Polishness and Jewishness as she reflects on diasporic variations of the Polish Jewish American migration story. Mekler, a Jewish American writer born in Poland immediately after World War II, deploys the trope of passing as Polish or passing as Jewish and engages the second generation's memories of the Holocaust as she explores the effects of war trauma on her female characters. Permanently positioning her characters, some of whom come from secular assimilated Jewish families, between Polishness and Jewishness, she rejects any possibility that they could identify themselves simultaneously as Polish and Jewish. They may only exist within the troubled spaces...
Over two years ago, on a Sunday in November, I won the race to grab the New York Times Magazine, ... more Over two years ago, on a Sunday in November, I won the race to grab the New York Times Magazine, my favorite part of the Sunday edition, before other interested family members got to it. I immediately turned to the last page to read the “Lives” feature, to which I am seriously addicted. And that Sunday—November 24, 2013—I really hit pay dirt. Already the byline, Joann Klimkiewicz, made my heart beat faster. I had never heard of Klimkiewicz, but she had a Polish name—not such a common occurrence on the pages of the illustrious New York Times—and her mini biography got me even more excited. She was identified as a digital producer at New York Public Radio and as working on her first novel about three generations of Polish American women.1 What a tremendous discovery, I thought: a new budding Polish American fiction writer! As I read, her short article already promised the pleasures of her prose:
... Page 3. "The Silent One" 45 female narrative of wifehood and motherhood while strug... more ... Page 3. "The Silent One" 45 female narrative of wifehood and motherhood while struggling to become Americans. Thomas S. Gladsky and Rita H. Gladsky praise Krawczyk for her efforts to "capture the evolution of ethnicity and the particular identity of the eth nic woman ... ...
... Page 3. "The Silent One" 45 female narrative of wifehood and motherhood while strug... more ... Page 3. "The Silent One" 45 female narrative of wifehood and motherhood while struggling to become Americans. Thomas S. Gladsky and Rita H. Gladsky praise Krawczyk for her efforts to "capture the evolution of ethnicity and the particular identity of the eth nic woman ... ...
This article analyzes the representation of sexual assault perpetrated on Polish women in World W... more This article analyzes the representation of sexual assault perpetrated on Polish women in World War II fiction written by immigrant or ethnic writers. A close reading of five novels, Ruta Sepetys’s Salt to the Sea (2016), Janina Surynowa-Wyczółkowska’s Teresa, Dziecko Nieudane (1961), Eva Mekler’s Sunrise Shows Late (1997), W. S. Kuniczak’s The Thousand Hour Day (1966), and Romain Gary’s A European Education (1960), suggests that writers deploy one of two narrative schemas in the construction of wartime rape, and in each case the storyline pattern significantly influences the function rape scenes perform within the novel. In the plots favoring a third-person point of view, rape scenes, usually just brief episodes, establish homosocial relationships among men while little attention is paid to the victims. On the other hand, in first-person narratives, the accounts of sexual assault may become the driving force of the entire plot.
Compared to other Polish emigrant cohorts, the broadly understood Solidarity emigration to the US... more Compared to other Polish emigrant cohorts, the broadly understood Solidarity emigration to the USA and Canada of the early 1980s occupies a distinctive place. Their literary output produced for the most part in English came quickly and entered the mainstream book market already at the turn of the century. Even though their fiction deployed fairly typical themes of dislocation, emigrant experience and construction of immigrant identity in the receiving country, its uniqueness rests in the two-fold vision of two very closely related generations: the first generation emigrants who left Poland as adults, as well as their children, classified as the generation 1.5, who experienced growing up in two countries. In their semi autobiographical fiction, writers representing the older generation such as Eva Stachniak and Czesław Karkowski, devote much of their work to justifying the decision to emigrate and attempt to position their successful characters within the narrative of the American dr...
Focusing on the close reading of Eva Mekler's two novels, Sunrise Shows Late (1997) and The P... more Focusing on the close reading of Eva Mekler's two novels, Sunrise Shows Late (1997) and The Polish Woman (2007), set in Poland, Germany, and the United States, this article considers Mekler's constructs of Polish Jewish and Polish Jewish American identity that the author situates at the fraught intersection of gender, Polishness and Jewishness as she reflects on diasporic variations of the Polish Jewish American migration story. Mekler, a Jewish American writer born in Poland immediately after World War II, deploys the trope of passing as Polish or passing as Jewish and engages the second generation's memories of the Holocaust as she explores the effects of war trauma on her female characters. Permanently positioning her characters, some of whom come from secular assimilated Jewish families, between Polishness and Jewishness, she rejects any possibility that they could identify themselves simultaneously as Polish and Jewish. They may only exist within the troubled spaces...
Over two years ago, on a Sunday in November, I won the race to grab the New York Times Magazine, ... more Over two years ago, on a Sunday in November, I won the race to grab the New York Times Magazine, my favorite part of the Sunday edition, before other interested family members got to it. I immediately turned to the last page to read the “Lives” feature, to which I am seriously addicted. And that Sunday—November 24, 2013—I really hit pay dirt. Already the byline, Joann Klimkiewicz, made my heart beat faster. I had never heard of Klimkiewicz, but she had a Polish name—not such a common occurrence on the pages of the illustrious New York Times—and her mini biography got me even more excited. She was identified as a digital producer at New York Public Radio and as working on her first novel about three generations of Polish American women.1 What a tremendous discovery, I thought: a new budding Polish American fiction writer! As I read, her short article already promised the pleasures of her prose:
... Page 3. "The Silent One" 45 female narrative of wifehood and motherhood while strug... more ... Page 3. "The Silent One" 45 female narrative of wifehood and motherhood while struggling to become Americans. Thomas S. Gladsky and Rita H. Gladsky praise Krawczyk for her efforts to "capture the evolution of ethnicity and the particular identity of the eth nic woman ... ...
... Page 3. "The Silent One" 45 female narrative of wifehood and motherhood while strug... more ... Page 3. "The Silent One" 45 female narrative of wifehood and motherhood while struggling to become Americans. Thomas S. Gladsky and Rita H. Gladsky praise Krawczyk for her efforts to "capture the evolution of ethnicity and the particular identity of the eth nic woman ... ...
This article analyzes the representation of sexual assault perpetrated on Polish women in World W... more This article analyzes the representation of sexual assault perpetrated on Polish women in World War II fiction written by immigrant or ethnic writers. A close reading of five novels, Ruta Sepetys’s Salt to the Sea (2016), Janina Surynowa-Wyczółkowska’s Teresa, Dziecko Nieudane (1961), Eva Mekler’s Sunrise Shows Late (1997), W. S. Kuniczak’s The Thousand Hour Day (1966), and Romain Gary’s A European Education (1960), suggests that writers deploy one of two narrative schemas in the construction of wartime rape, and in each case the storyline pattern significantly influences the function rape scenes perform within the novel. In the plots favoring a third-person point of view, rape scenes, usually just brief episodes, establish homosocial relationships among men while little attention is paid to the victims. On the other hand, in first-person narratives, the accounts of sexual assault may become the driving force of the entire plot.
Compared to other Polish emigrant cohorts, the broadly understood Solidarity emigration to the US... more Compared to other Polish emigrant cohorts, the broadly understood Solidarity emigration to the USA and Canada of the early 1980s occupies a distinctive place. Their literary output produced for the most part in English came quickly and entered the mainstream book market already at the turn of the century. Even though their fiction deployed fairly typical themes of dislocation, emigrant experience and construction of immigrant identity in the receiving country, its uniqueness rests in the two-fold vision of two very closely related generations: the first generation emigrants who left Poland as adults, as well as their children, classified as the generation 1.5, who experienced growing up in two countries. In their semi autobiographical fiction, writers representing the older generation such as Eva Stachniak and Czesław Karkowski, devote much of their work to justifying the decision to emigrate and attempt to position their successful characters within the narrative of the American dr...
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