Swimming is like prayer:palms join and part,join and part,almost without end.--from "On Swimming"Without End draws from each of Adam Zagajewski's English-language collections, both in and out of print--Tremor, Canvas, and Mysticism for Beginners--and features new work that is among his most refreshing and rewarding. These poems, lucidly translated, share the vocation that allows us, in Zagajewski's words, "to experience astonishment and to stop still in that astonishment for a long moment or two."

    The year is 1969, and young Jimmy Koprowski returns from his stint in the airforce to Raysburg, his blue-collar Polish American hometown where nothing much happens beyond working at the steel mill, going to Mass, and getting drunk at the local PAC. Jimmy's efforts at rebuilding his life result in sleeping off hangovers in his parents' attic and drifting into a destructive affair with a married woman. But things change when his younger sister Linda decides to start an all-girl polka band, and Jimmy falls for the band's star clarinetist, Janice, whose young life is haunted by tragic events that happened before she was born. The threads of Jimmy's family life, the legacy of WWII Poland, and the healing power of music, language, and tradition all begin to converge.

    Book by

    The Ice Road is the gripping story of young Stefan Waydenfeld and his family, deported by cattle car in 1940 to the frozen wastes of the Russian arctic north.

    Widely regarded as the world's foremost authority on Schulz, Ficowski reconstructs the author's life story and evokes the fictional vision of his best-known works, The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Including many of Schulz's paintings and letters as well as new information on the Mossad's removal of Schulz's murals from Poland in 2001, this book will stand for years to come as the definitive account of the author's tragic life. Developed for publication by The Jewish Heritage Project's International Initiative for Literature of the Holocaust.

    A gifted book illustrator and illuminator, a skillful caricaturist, and a crusader for causes, this multifaceted artist ceaselessly defended the rights of Jews and advocated on their behalf.Skilled in medieval and Persian miniature painting, Szyk redirected his artistry during World War II into political cartoons that unmasked the face of the Nazi enemy and mobilized popular opinion. His caricatures became daily fare in newspapers and magazines throughout the United States. In 1942 alone, Szyk's war-driven cartoons were published in Esquire, Collier's, Look, Liberty, Time, the Saturday Review of Literature, and the Saturday Evening Post. One magazine reported that Szyk cartoons were as popular as Betty Grable pin-ups for troops heading overseas.The Art and Politics of Arthur Szyk places the extraordinary artist and his work into the context of the turbulent times in which he lived (1894-1951). Hundreds of illustrations -- rendered in the artist's original brilliant colors and painstakingly intricate detail -- were drawn from private and public collections around the world. The illuminations, paintings, prints, line drawings, lithographs, posters, magazine covers, and stamps are still vibrant and compelling. The political caricatures still resonate.

    Their candid and passionate writings not only reveal the personal struggles, ambitions, and dreams of fifteen young authors, they also offer remarkable insight into the nature of ordinary Jewish life in Poland during the years between the world wars. Later authors often view this moment through lenses tinted by nostalgia or horror. But these young writers, unaware of the catastrophic future, tell their life stories with the urgency and fervor of adolescents, coming of age during a period of manifold new opportunities and challenges. The autobiographies presented in the volume are selected from hundreds that were written for contests in the 1930s conducted by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, then based in Vilna. Nine male and six female authors write from a variety of circumstances that reflect the great diversity of interwar Polish Jewry -- some of the authors are ardently secular, and others devoutly religious; some are impoverished and others come from the working class or middle class; some are highly educated, and others self-taught. They come from big cities, small towns, and villages; they are Zionists, Bundists, communists; they espouse multiple political affiliations or none at all. Taking up the unusual task of writing an autobiography at the threshold of adulthood, these young authors also display different personalities, writing styles, and views of life. Originally written for a pioneering research project that hoped to address the challenges facing Polish Jewish youth, their words now speak across the chasm of history, providing unique testimony on Jewish life in the final years before the Holocaust.

    In this cultural, political and social history of British national identity - from the finest hour in the dark days of 1940 to the millennium celebrations of Blair's Britain - Richard Weight examines how the country's elite forged a popular modern Britishness in order to maintain morale during World War II and looks at what has happened to this curious construct in the years that followed.

    

    Jolluck relates and examines the experiences of thousands of civilians deported to the USSR following the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland in 1939.Upon arrival in remote areas of the Soviet Union, they were deposited in prisons, labor camps, special settlements, and collective farms, and subjected to tremendous hardships and oppressive conditions. In 1942, some 115,000 Polish citizens—only a portion of those initially exiled from their homeland—were evacuated to Iran. There they were asked to complete extensive questionnaires about their experiences.Having read and reviewed hundreds of these documents, Jolluck reveals not only the harsh treatment these women experienced, but also how they maintained their identities as respectable women and patriotic Poles. She finds that for those exiled, the ways in which they strove to recreate home in a foreign and hostile environment became a key means of their survival.Both a harrowing account of brutality and suffering and a clear analysis of civilian experiences in wartime, Exile and Identity expands the history of war far beyond the military battlefield.