The Polish Studies Initiative invites you to join us for a guest lecture featuring 2024 PSI grant recipient Dr. Diana Sacilowski (Ohio State U.).
Light refreshments will be available for attendees!
Abstract: In 1987, Piotr Szewc published Zagłada (Annihilation), a novel meticulously describing a day in the Polish-Jewish town of Zamość in 1934. Although what Szewc produced is ultimately imagined, conceived and created from pictures, stories, and the topography of the city, he brings to life a world full of everyday sensory details, giving this space a distinct shape and texture. This novel would go on to be considered an exemplary text of the themes, motifs, and general tenor of the literature of the early years of the Jewish “return,” a period that has witnessed a great revival in interest in Jewish culture and history in Poland. In this talk, I will discuss a recent trip to Zamość, funded by a grant from Ohio State’s Polish Studies Initiative, during which I mapped out Szewc’s novel onto the city to examine how the physical realities of Zamość today testify to its Jewish past—or don’t, as was primarily the case. In fact, Szewc’s novel is in many ways a monument to a world that has been largely rendered invisible, working against processes of forgetting and erasure to show this space as one that was lived in by, molded and shaped by, its once vibrant Polish-Jewish community. I will also discuss other places I visited during this trip, in Lublin and Kazimierz Dolny, comparing various sites and commemorative projects with what I saw in Zamość as well as Szewc’s text, in this way painting a more comprehensive picture of some of the complicated and multifaceted memorial processes and practices of the Jewish “return.”
About the Speaker: Diana Sacilowski is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University, where she teaches Polish language and various Slavic culture courses. She received her Ph.D. in Slavic Languages & Literatures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2021. Her primary interests include 19th-21st century Polish literature and culture, Central and East European Jewish culture, and Holocaust and memory studies. Diana was a recipient of a 2024 Polish Studies Initiative grant to support her current book project, which examines the aesthetics and implications of various modes of silence in Polish cultural texts of the last forty years that deal with Poland’s Jewish history.
