Reckoning with the Jewish Past on Stage and on the Page in Immediate Postwar Germany and Poland

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

In the immediate postwar years, rife with reconstruction and reconstitution of Jewish identity and communities across the devastated landscape of Europe, a handful of locations remarkably became sites for the creation and performance of new and old material on Jews and Jewishness. Marking both a return to a prewar moment and a performed insistence on a Jewish future, this postwar material and performance cohered around Jewish artists suddenly confronted by the utter void of the ethnic and cultural diversity that had until so recently existed, built over a century or more of cultural cohabitation across Central and Eastern Europe. This panel examines three such artists, and the performances and writings they produced in the immediate aftermath of the Shoah: playwright and poet H. Leivick; German-Jewish actress Mathilde Einzig; and renowned actress, and daughter of the “Mother of the Jewish Stage,” Ida Kamińska. Each of these Jewish artists in their own way brought Jewishness back into public life in their respective locales, creating new works of theatre, poetry, and memoir that served as powerful commentaries on the Holocaust, its repercussions, and the challenges of rebuilding Jewish lives and communities in its wake.

Sub Unit

• Interdisciplinary, Theoretical, and New Approaches

Chair

• Avinoam Patt, University of Connecticut

Individual Presentations

• Among the Saving Remnant: a Yiddish Poet on ‘Accursed German Soil’ - Joel Berkowitz, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

• Baptized in the Water of the Main River: The Life and Career of Mathilde Einzig, 1886-1963 - Max Lazar, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Pre-war darling, post-war spy: Ida Kamińska as Ethel Rosenberg in 1954 - Rachel Merrill Moss, Northwestern University