The Jewish Body in Polish Modernist Prose, 1918–1939, and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Tradition

Interwar Polish modernist prose employed two strategies in its response to traditional images of the Jewish body. The first attempted to expose the problematic nature of earlier representations by showing that their construction was, above all, changeable and dependent on the point of view of individual writers. The second saw these literary conventions and images as a cultural resource which needed to be deconstructed. These two strategies established a distance from how artistic clichés and social stereotypes were previously used and uncovered the cultural genesis of systems which sought to understand and reflect reality. In this sense, the new ways of observing and reading the Jewish body in the literature of the interwar period were an essential part of the modernist revision of the world-view of the nineteenth century.