Rather than having spent the last 50 years coming to terms with the magnitude of evil of the Holocaust, this book is about a country that, according to the author, has largely ignored its participation and attempted to minimize its national memory of the event.

Scholarship on the civilization of Polish Jews has tended to focus on elite culture and canonical literature; even modern Yiddish culture has generally been approached from the perspective of 'great works'. This volume of Polin focuses on the less explored but historically vital theme of Jewish popular culture and shows how, confronted by the challenges and opportunities of modernity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it blossomed into a complex expression of Jewish life. In addition to a range of articles on the period before the Second World War there are studies of the...