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    Holy Week: A Novel of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
    Holy Week: A Novel of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
    Holy Week: A Novel of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
    Ebook238 pages5 hours

    Holy Week: A Novel of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

    By Rebecca L. Oxford, Oscar E. Swan and Jan T. Gross

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    About this ebook

    At the height of the Nazi extermination campaign in the Warsaw Ghetto, a young Jewish woman, Irena, seeks the protection of her former lover, a young architect, Jan Malecki. By taking her in, he puts his own life and the safety of his family at risk. Over a four-day period, Tuesday through Friday of Holy Week 1943, as Irena becomes increasingly traumatized by her situation, Malecki questions his decision to shelter Irena in the apartment where Malecki, his pregnant wife, and his younger brother reside. Added to his dilemma is the broader context of Poles’ attitudes toward the “Jewish question” and the plight of the Jews locked in the ghetto during the final moments of its existence.

    Few fictional works dealing with the war have been written so close in time to the events that inspired them. No other Polish novel treats the range of Polish attitudes toward the Jews with such unflinching honesty.

    Jerzy Andrzejewski’s Holy Week (Wielki Tydzien, 1945), one of the significant literary works to be published immediately following the Second World War, now appears in English for the first time.

    This translation of Andrzejewski’s Holy Week began as a group project in an advanced Polish language course at the University of Pittsburgh. Class members Daniel M. Pennell, Anna M. Poukish, and Matthew J. Russin contributed to the translation; the instructor, Oscar E. Swan, was responsible for the overall accuracy and stylistic unity of the translation as well as for the biographical and critical notes and essays.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOhio University Press
    Release dateDec 1, 2006
    ISBN9780821442203
    Holy Week: A Novel of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
    Author

    Rebecca L. Oxford

    Rebecca L. Oxford, University of Maryland, USA Professor Emerita and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher, now guides dissertation research methodology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA.  

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    • 5/5
      This is a beautifully structured story, put together in the manner of Steinbeck, each part sliding smoothly into the next. It's very short, but packs a lot of action into its 120-odd pages. I also believe it's one of the more realistic novels I've read about the Holocaust. The author doesn't try to make a hero out of anyone, not even the Jewish woman whose plight drives the plot. None of the characters here -- Jews, Poles, Germans -- come off well. They are all selfish even when they try not to be. Irena is bitter and abrasive, and Jan is weak. But I think that's how people would really be in wartime, in an overcrowded city occupied by a foreign power, where you have a hard time of it even getting enough to eat. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the Holocaust. In fact, I would probably put it on my top ten list of Holocaust novels. It's short as I said, and written simply, so a novice would not be intimidated by it. I also think it could be very easily adapted for the stage, and have been tempted to write a play of the story.

    Book preview

    Holy Week - Rebecca L. Oxford

    Holy Week

    Chapter 1

    JAN MALECKI HAD NOT seen Irena Lilien for quite some time. As late as the summer of 1941, they still had seen a good deal of each other. By that time, the Liliens had been driven out of their home in Smug; but the German occupation authorities were not yet taking harsher measures against the Jews, so the Liliens, having paid off the necessary people, had avoided confinement in the Warsaw Ghetto. They had even managed to rescue some of their things, and with this remainder of their belongings, still quite sizable and valuable, the entire family moved closer to

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