Mapping Emotional Displacement: Individual and Collective Placemaking among Jewish Youth in Interwar Polish Cities

• In Event: Urban Transformations and Cultural Negotiations: Space, Identity, and Power in Interwar Eastern Europe and the USSR

Abstract

The Interwar Period and the emergence of the Second Polish Republic marked a new era in Polish-Jewish history and created a complex environment in which emotionally-charged narratives of Polish identity collided with individual and collective histories of Jewish placemaking. In this context, contested ideological spaces played a critical role in determining how Polish Jews, particularly youth, responded to antisemitism in an increasingly hostile environment. How did conflicting narratives of 'Polishness' and 'Jewishness' shape the sense of self among Jewish-Polish youth and contribute to emotional experiences of belonging or displacement? What was the relationship between individual and collective imaginations of place in this process? Drawing from the collection of published and unpublished memoirs written by Jewish youth in Poland and archival materials from the YIVO Institute, this paper aims to examine these questions through an interdisciplinary lens by drawing on emotional geographies and philosophies of displacement. Despite the growing interest in emotional geographies in Poland (see Karlińska et al. 2022, Bruns 2022, Scaglia 2020), literature on emotional geographies of the interwar period remains fragmentary, particularly in the context of minority groups in interwar Poland. This paper aims to fill this gap, by reconstructing an emotional geography of interwar Poland within the context of intercultural relationships and tensions. This environment presents an intriguing backdrop for exploring the relationship between individual processes of place making and collective identity narratives in post-conflict societies.

Author

• Sophia Jewell, U of Alberta (Canada)