| Popis: |
Erica L. Tucker's Remembering Occupied Warsaw: Polish Narratives of World War II is based on fieldwork that the author, an anthropologist, conducted in the Warsaw neighborhood of Żoliborz in the late 1990s. Drawing on some 25 life-history interviews, Tucker asks "how older ethnic Poles recollected and narrated the outbreak of war, the German occupation, and postwar recovery" in a series of chronologically organized chapters (4). Żoliborz, of course, is not just any Warsaw neighborhood. Famous before the war for its modern housing and fashionable inhabitants (including many intellectuals, officers and civil servants), today it stands out as one of the few districts to have withstood the Nazis' destructive frenzy: whereas 92% of Warsaw's left bank was in ashes by 1944, Żoliborz, miraculously, survived largely intact. Today, strolling among its pre-war villas and flower-filled courtyards, one has the feeling of having stepped back into a vanished world, and Tucker appealingly conveys something of its genius loci, expressing great affection for the place and its inhabitants. Her subjects, meanwhile – exceptional among Warsavians, and far from typical among urban Poles of this generation – inhabit not only the same neighborhood, but in some cases, even the same homes they lived in as children. Such continuity in a city (and country) marked by urban destruction and displacement, Tucker writes, allows her to explore the role of place in memory, a theme that threads through the study. And yet, Tucker never convincingly explains how the experiences of the district's residents, exceptional in so many respects, relate to broader patterns of experience among "ethnic Poles." |
