Search results

Your search found 5 items
Sort: Relevance | Topics | Title | Author | Publication Year
Home  / Search Results
Author(s): Ilchuk, Yuliya
Date: 2024
Abstract: The contested historical memory of the Second World War in Ukraine has exposed an uneasy transition from an ethnolinguistic type of national identity to the idea of Ukraine as a political nation, expedited with the Revolution of Dignity in 2014. Many Ukrainian writers of non-Jewish origin began to write about the fate of Ukrainian Jews during the Holocaust. If a previous generation of post-Soviet Ukrainian writers have embedded Jewish characters and subplots about the Holocaust into their historical novels about colonization by the Soviet Union and the national struggle for independence during the war, the new generation of writers reveals a shift from the idea of a homogeneous “national memory” to an idea of the “multidirectional” memory of the Second World War which had a profound traumatic impact on all actors involved in it. The growing interest among non-Jewish Ukrainian writers in the contested history of the Holocaust has been shaped by the unexpected affinity seen between the suffering of Ukrainians at present and of Jews in the past, which unifies them in collective victimhood. This paper examines the contested memory of the Holocaust in Sofia Andrukhovych’s novel Amadoka (2020). The writer develops a complex narrative structure that captures the traumatic memory of Second World War from the perspective of different actors, showing that the extermination of Jews in Buczacz was a communal tragedy that can be represented only through a polyphonic act of remembrance taking place on a shared if uneven terrain. Employing two concepts from memory studies – dismemory and Postmemory – the analysis of the narrative construction of traumatic memory in Amadoka aims to show how literary narrative can capture trauma, on the one hand, and how trauma can shape identity, on the other.
Date: 2024
Abstract: The article deals with two legitimate cultures that were created in Poland after 1989. "Legitimate culture" means the axiological frame of reference that defines the criteria of prestige and dishonor, that is, the criteria of supreme values ​​and anti-values. No authority (in Poland or any other country) can exist without controlling legitimate culture. However, legitimate culture in Poland is threatened by a history of domestic violence against Jews (massive pre-war Polish anti-Semitism, the murder of Jews during the Holocaust, the murder and persecution of Jews in the post-war period). respect, any Polish authority must control Holocaust-related content. The first concept of Holocaust management, created within the framework of the first legitimate culture (corresponding to the legal and institutional arrangements of 1989–2005 and 2007–2015) treated the Holocaust and Polish attitudes toward Jews as: an affirmation of the need to weaken the “nation,” the religious community and other collective entities; a problem that each Pole individually solves on his/her own. The second legitimacy culture (2005–2007; 2015–2023) works to: recognize the Holocaust as a problem that only the Polish nation can resolve; criminalize claims that Poles murdered Jews; present (and justify) violence against Jews as a struggle against communism; and portray Poles helping Jews as the norm, which the majority met during the occupation. The first culture of legitimacy used the Holocaust to weaken the social bond; the second uses the Holocaust to reactivate nationalism. Both cultures are responsible for the current crisis of social communication, and therefore another legitimate culture is needed to emerge from this crisis.
Author(s): Bobako, Monika
Date: 2017