Jerzy Andrzejewski’s Holy Week: Testing Religious Ethics in Times of Atrocity
Jerzy Andrzejewski wrote the novella Holy Week at the time of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This real-time Polish fictional response immediately raised critical controversy. Whereas some critics saw it as an inadequate representation of the Holocaust, others considered the 1945 version a product of so...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Oxford University Press
2019
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| In: |
Holocaust and genocide studies
Year: 2019, Volume: 33, Issue: 2, Pages: 225-243 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Jerzy Andrzejewski wrote the novella Holy Week at the time of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This real-time Polish fictional response immediately raised critical controversy. Whereas some critics saw it as an inadequate representation of the Holocaust, others considered the 1945 version a product of socialist realism. Here the author argues that Andrzejewski’s wartime fiction investigates the viability of his Catholic existentialist orientation during a time of terror. While his wartime essays and his correspondence with Czesław Miłosz reflected Andrzejewski’s struggle to maintain his faith in human brotherhood, his fiction traced the disintegration of Grace-given faith in the commonality and dignity of all human beings. The stories progress from a tragic ending of friendship to the failure of spiritual resistance and ultimately to the complete moral collapse of the Polish community. The unflinching depiction of the failure of Catholic Poles before their responsibility to extend neighborly love to their doomed Jewish neighbors communicates Andrzejewski’s insistence on the Catholic obligation to love one’s neighbor. |
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| ISSN: | 1476-7937 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Holocaust and genocide studies
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/hgs/dcz025 |