Although there has been a growing interest in Poland’s Jewish past during the last forty years, many cultural texts from this period treat the subject with some form of reticence and are filled with gaps, blank spots, and silences. This presentation will explore one form of such silence; the elision of characters’ Jewishness and the avoidance of the term “Jew.” This talk will posit elision and silence as a strategy both Jewish and non-Jewish writers used to underscore the inherent generalizations and stereotypes of the word “Jew” in Polish discourse and to express fractured, multivalent Polish- Jewish identities.
