Medallions

by Zofia Nalkowska, Diana Kuprel

Overview

Medallions is a collection of eight documentary stories originally published in Poland in 1946 that recount Nazi war crimes under the German occupation of the country. The author, Zofia Nalkowska, was a member of a special committee for the investigation of Nazi crimes in Poland, and the stories reflect facts she learned from victims and witnesses to atrocities inflicted on Polish civilians.

Considered a masterpiece of antifascist world literature, Medallions stands as the culmination of Nalkowska's literary style, a style the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz once described as "the iron capital of her art and one of the very few exportables in our national literature." More than mere historical record, Medallions offers the reader startling immediacy, the repetition of an event as it persists in the testimonial present, in the scars on the consciousness and conscience of individuals.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810117433
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	02/25/2000
Series:	Jewish Lives
Edition description:	1
Pages:	49
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

A novelist, dramatist, short-story writer, and essayist, ZOFIA NALKOWSKA (1884-1954) was a leading proponent of the avant-garde of her day. A resident of Warsaw, she was an active member of the Polish PEN Club, the first female member of the Polish Academy of Literature, and the patron of a popular Warsaw literary salon. Her life in occupied Warsaw during World War II is the subject of her Wartime Diaries and Medallions.

DIANA KUPREL has a doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Toronto. She is a postdoctoral fellow for the Literary History Project, University of Toronto, and editor in chief of Books in Canada: The Canadian Review of Books.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Professor Spanner
The Hole
The Cemetery Lady
By the Railway Track
Dwojra Zielona
The Visa
The Man Is Strong
The Adults and Children of Auschwitz

Editorial Reviews

"[A] powerful and important work." —Jewish Book World

From the Publisher