The House at Ujazdowskie 16: Jewish Families in Warsaw After the Holocaust
Just after the Second World War, a poet wrote in a Yiddish newspaper in Poland, “No more, these streets of mine are no more. There are no Warsaw Jews left.”
And yet, in buildings throughout the city, surviving Jews continued to make the capital their home. Karen Auerbach’s book, The House at Ujazdowskie 16: Jewish Families in Warsaw After the Holocaust, traces the history of ten families that were neighbors in one building as a case study of Jewish life in the postwar Polish capital. These neighbors shared bonds of political passion and publishing work, friendship and casual acquaintance, and a common Jewish background that led to an understanding of where they had come from and what they had lost in wartime. Based on interviews with family members, intensive research in archives, and the families’ personal papers and correspondence, Auerbach’s book shows how these families’ histories underscore the paths by which Polish Jews sought entrance into 19th and 20th century Polish society, and the ambiguous fate of those aspirations.
About the Speaker
Karen Auerbach is the Kronhill Lecturer in East European Jewish History at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She previously taught at the University of Southampton in England, Virginia Tech, and Brown University. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Michigan and at Yad Vashem. Starting in 2014 she will be an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
Karen Auerbach was the recipient of the Aleksander and Alicja Hertz Memorial Fellowship at the YIVO Institute in 2007.