Golden Harvest or Hearts of Gold? Studies on the Wartime Fate of Poles and Jews, edited by Marek J. Chodakiewicz, Wojciech J. Muszyński, Paweł Styrna (Washington DC: Leopolis Press, 2012); 370 pages.
2013; Issue: Holocaust Studies and Materials Linguagem: Inglês
10.32927/zzsim.840
ISSN2657-3571
Autores Tópico(s)Polish Historical and Cultural Studies
ResumoJust a few weeks after Golden Harvest by Jan Tomasz Gross and Irena Grudzińska-Gross appeared in bookstores, a collective response was published.Most of the authors are well known, with some of them actually being constant participants of the public debate in Poland throughout the last few years.Hence, they do not need an introduction.The introduction to the Studies on the Wartime Fate of Poles and Jews (as the subtitle reads) states that the authors sought "truths about those times" and that the essays present "the results of their historical research and analyses" (p.11).Then the editors did not omit to add that the collection "offers a corrective to the false and extreme portrayals of Polish-Jewish relations" (ibidem).So that there would be no doubt about their competence they add that "writers of these essays have been engaged in rigorous research, based on traditional logo-centric, and empirical constraints that scienti ic methodology requires, […] [the authors will offer] the reader an exhaustive and multifaceted portrayal of relations between the Christian majority and Jewish minority […]" (p.12).The comprehensive credo formulated by the two historians -Marek Jan Chodakiewicz and Wojciech Jerzy Muszyński -may be extracted already from the introduction.They write their truths of faith without quotation marks: "Because of Poland's isolation and the Polish scholars' complete absence from the Western scholarly exchanges and intellectual debates, the historical discourse concerning Polish-Jewish relations originated in the West in 1945, and has been dominated since, by Jewish voices, naturally driven to know and understand the greatest historical calamity that ever befell their people" (p.13).According to Chodakiewicz and Muszyński, the Holocaust is today roughly a "means to reach people's minds and to portray ugly conservative, traditionalist and conservative attitudes" (p.16).What more do these new "representatives of Polish science in the Western scienti ic milieu" offer in addition to their active defense of the principles of "Truth, Good and Beauty"?Well, not much, for the reader learns little after penetrating the mush of newspaper clichés, somehow familiar slogans about "cultural Marxism" and pleas against postmodernism and totalitarian tyranny, which the modern world is supposedly slipping into.Panic and fear certainly
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