Communist Poland

Sara Nomberg-Przytyk’s “memoir in piece” is one of the most important ego documents of a Polish-Jewish woman’s life in the twentieth century. Nomberg-Przytyk spreads out before us the richness and contradictions of Polish-Jewish existence in communist Poland. Her multi-layered life is filled with immense personal and communal losses during the Holocaust, post-war pains and joys of love, marriage, and motherhood, and swift success as a Jewish female investigative journalist under the communist regime. Nomberg-Przytyk, a descendent of a religious Jewish family from Lublin, an Auschwitz survivor, a communist believer who would undergo an ideological transformation in the 1960s during the anti-Zionist/anti-Jewish campaign, poignantly shows how an individual’s life suffers at the hands of great historical forces. Nomberg-Przytyk’s memoir, impressively annotated, is a must-read for everyone in the fields of European History, the Holocaust, Gender, and Memories studies.

-- Joanna Michlic, University College London

Communist Poland: A Jewish Woman’s Experience is a breathtaking memoir of Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, a Polish Jewish journalist born and raised in an Orthodox family during rabid anti-Semitism in Catholic Poland before WWII, imprisoned at Auschwitz, committed to communism in her naïve desire to rid Poland of anti-Semitism and social inequities, then destroyed by the same communism for being a Jew, and forced to emigrate to Israel stripped of the citizenship of the country to which she devoted most of her life and all of her professional passions. The book editors Holli Levitsky and Justyna Włodarczyk created a masterful text providing extraordinary rich and nuanced historical detail and context to Sara’s memoir. Both the memoir and the extensive historical annotations make this text an important insightful historical document about those dramatic times, with superb quality of writing – making the book hard to put down.

-- Bohdan Oppenheim, Loyola Marymount Univer