Give me Łódź: Jewish communal life in a Polish manufacturing city

ABSTRACT

This article explores the development of the Jewish community of Łódź, Poland alongside changes in the city as a whole. From a small town at the start of the 19^th century, it became a major hub for textile factories, urban labor, and intercultural encounters by the end of the century. Jews experienced and contributed to the changes as workers, factory owners, and chroniclers. The article will examine how aspects related to Łódź’s character and evolution contributed to the wartime and postwar experiences of Jews there, arguing that the city provides a unique and important perspective on modern Jewish history.

KEYWORDS:

• Łódź
• Poland
• Jews
• Holocaust
• memory

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Michal Unger and the anonymous reviewer for the journal for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Julian Tuwim, ‘Łódź,’ Jarmark rymów (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1991), 152, translated in Antony Polonsky, “Julian Tuwim, the Polish Heine,” 24, The American Association for Polish-Jewish Studies http://www.aapjstudies.org/index.php?id=115 (accessed 12 April 2021).

2. Simon Susen, “The Place of Space in Social and Cultural Theory,” A. Elliott, ed., Routledge Handbook of Social and Cultural Theory (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014), 340.

3. Andreas Kossert, “’Promised Land’? Urban Myth and the Shaping of Modernity in Industrial Cities: Manchester and Lodz,” Christian Emden, Catherine Keen, and David R. Midgley, eds., Imagining the City, vol. 2 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006), 174.

4. Wiesław Puś, “The Development of the City of Łódź (1820–1939),” Polin: A Journal of Polish-Jewish Studies 6, (1991): 6.

5. Puś, 3.

6. Ibid., 6.

7. Ibid., 7.

8. Ibid., 5.

9. Ibid., 8.

10. Ibid., 16.

11. Julian K. Janczak, “The National Structure of the Population in Łódź in the Years 1820–1939,” Polin 6, (1991): 23.

12. A. F. Marks, Geograficheskii i statisticheskii karmannyi atlas Rossii (Russia: 1907), no. 10.

13. Michael F. Hamm, “Introduction,” Michael F. Hamm, ed., The City in Late Imperial Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 3.

14. Wiktor Marzec, Kamil Śmiechowski and Agata Zysiak, “The Beginnings: Entrance to the Industrial World 1897–1914,” Agata Zysiak, Kamil Śmiechowski, Kamil Piskała, Wiktor Marzec, Kaja Kaźmierska, Jacek Burski, eds., From Cotton and Smoke: Łódź—Industrial City and Discourses of Asynchronous Modernity 1897–1994 (Łódź: Kraków, 2018), 39.

15. Puś, 7.

16. Puś, 12.

17. Winson Chu, “The ‘Lodzermensch’: From Cultural Contamination to Marketable Multiculturalism,” Kristin Kopp and Joanna Niżyńska, eds. Germany, Poland, and Postmemorial Relations: In Search of a Livable Past (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 240–241.

18. Puś, 6.

19. Ibid., 7–8.

20. Puś, 7.

21. Puś, 10.

22. Avraham Wein, ed., Lodz’ ve-ha-glil, vol. 1, Pinkas ha-kehilot: Ensiklopediah shel ha-yeshuvim ha-yehudiim leman hivasdam ve’ad le’ahar shoat milhemet ha-olam ha-sheniyah, Polin (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1976), 8.

23. Puś, 11.

24. Yehiel Yeshiaia Trunk, “Łódź Memories,” translated excerpt from his seven-volume memoir Poyln, in Polin 6, 263.

25. Puś, 10–11.

26. Puś, 12.

27. Stanisław Leszewski, “The Role of the Jewish Community in the Organization of Urban Space in Łódź,” Polin 6, 32.

28. Robert E. Blobaum, Rewolucja: Russian Poland 1904–1907 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 38.

29. Blobaum, 24.

30. Paweł Samuś, “The Jewish Community in the Political Life of Łódź in the Years 1865–1914,” Polin 6, 94–103.

31. Piskała, 145.

32. Wiktor Marzec, Kamil Śmiechowski, Agata Zysiak, “The Beginnings: Entrance to the Industrial World 1897–1914,” From Cotton and Smoke, 52.

33. Ibid., 48.

34. Chu, 240.

35. I. J. Singer, The Brothers Ashkenazi, Joseph Singer, trans. (New York: Atheneum, 1980), 66.

36. Quoted in Ewelina Nurczyńska-Fidelska,”Andrzej Wajda’s Vision of ‘The Promised Land’,” John Orr and Elżbieta Ostrowska, eds., The Cinema of Andrzej Wajda: The Art of Irony and Defiance (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2003), 146–147.

37. Agata Zysiak, Kamil Śmiechowski, Wiktor Marzec and Kaja Kaźmierska, ‘Introduction,’ From Cotton and Smoke, 19.

38. Delphine Bechtel, “Urbanization, Capitalism, and Cosmopolitanism: Four Novels and a Film on Jews in the Polish City of Łódź,” Prooftexts 26 (2006): 100.

39. Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, “’I know who you are, but who I am – you do not know … ‘: Reading Yiddish Writers in a Polish Literary Context,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 29:3 (Spring 2011), 93.

40. Kossert, “’Promised Land’? Urban Myth and the Shaping of Modernity in Industrial Cities: Manchester and Lodz,” Imagining the City, 190.

41. Kamil Piskała, “The Interwar: Democratic Politics and Modern City between Two World Wars 1918–1923,” From Cotton and Smoke, 102–104.

42. Piskała, 136.

43. Piskała, 152.

44. Janusz Wróbel, “Between Co-Existence and Hostility. A Contribution to the Problem of National Antagonisms in Łódź in the Inter-War Period,” From Cotton and Smoke.

45. Oral Testimony of Herman Taube, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, RG-50.106 × 0182, 15 February 2010, part one.

46. Sara Selver-Urbach, Through the Window of My Home: Reflections from the Lodz Ghetto, Siona Bodansky, trans. (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1986), 16–28.

47. Selver-Urbach, 14.

48. Bechtel, 93–99.

49. Gordon J. Horwitz, Ghettostadt: Łódź and the Making of a Nazi City (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 2008), 5.

50. Robert Moses Shapiro, “Aspects of Jewish Self-Government in Łódź, 1914–1939,” Polin 6.

51. This paradox has been noted by many scholars, perhaps most piquantly by Ezra Mendelsohn, ‘Interwar Poland: Good for the Jews or Bad for the Jews?’ Chimen Abramsky, Maciej Jachimczyk and Antony Polonsky, eds., The Jews of Poland (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986).

52. Kamil Kijek, “Between a Love of Poland, Symbolic Violence, and Antisemitism: The Idiosyncratic Effects of the State Education System on Young Jews in Interwar Poland,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 30 (2018): 241–242.

53. Puś, 14 and 16.

54. Leszek Olejnik, “The Emergence of the Yiddish Press in Łódź (1904–1918,” Polin 6, 106.

55. Olejnik, 109 and Robert Moses Shapiro, ‘Łódź,’ YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (2010), https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/%C5%81odz (accessed 3/15/21).

56. Puś, 16–17.

57. Israel Gutman, “Introduction: The Distinctiveness of the Łódź Ghetto,” Isaiah Trunk, Łódź Ghetto: A History, Robert Moses Shapiro, ed. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), xxxi.

58. Laura Crago, ‘Łódź,’ Geoffrey P. Megargee, ed., The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, Volume II, Martin Dean, ed., Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe, Part A, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 76.

59. Although the official number registered was closer to 164,000, Michal Unger points out that many of the ghetto inhabitants did not register.

60. Trunk, Łódź Ghetto, 15, 305–307, 219.

61. Gutman addresses some of the scholarly debates surrounding Rumkowski in his “Introduction,” xxxii-xli. See also Michal Unger, “Holocaust Historiography and the Changing Image of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski,” Moreshet Journal 12, (2015). For more on issues surrounding his prewar activities, see Sean Martin, ed., For the Good of the Nation: Institutions for Jewish Children in Interwar Poland-A Documentary History (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2017), xiii-xv.

62. Trunk, Łódź Ghetto, 53, 111.

63. Gutman, “Introduction,” li-lii.

64. See Lucjan Dobroszycki, ed., The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto, 1941–1944 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985). His introduction explains the emergence, development, and staffing of the chronicle.

65. Michal Unger, ‘Łódź,’ The Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of the Ghettos during the Holocaust, volume I (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2009), 408–409.

66. Julie Spergel, “Gendered Experiences in Chava Rosenfarb’s The Tree of Life: A Trilogy of Life in the Łódź Ghetto,” Rosemary Horowitz, ed. Women Writers of Yiddish Literature: Critical Essays (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2015), 212.

67. Unger, ‘Łódź,’412.

68. Shimon Redlich, Life in Transit: Jews in Postwar Lodz, 1945–1950 (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2010), 33.

69. Gabriel N. Finder, “Child Survivors in Polish Jewish Collective Memory after the Holocaust: The Case of Undzere kinder,” Nick Baron, ed., Displaced Children in Russia and Eastern Europe, 1915–1953: Ideologies, Identities, Experiences (Leiden: Brill, 2016): 218–247.

70. Redlich, 20.

71. Redlich, 75–76.

72. Jacob Pat, Ashes and Fire (New York: International Universities Press, 1947), 17.

73. Dovid Feinzeig, Faith and Flight: A Young Boy’s Memoirs of the Prewar Shtetl, Shavuos in Ger, A Family’s Travels through Russia, Rebuilding in Postwar Poland and France (Lakewood, NJ: Israel Bookshop Publications, 2013), chapter 14.

74. Cited in Redlich, 64.

75. Shimen Dzigan, Der koyekh fun yidishn humor (Tel Aviv: Orli, 1974), 290–294.

76. Redlich, 21.

77. Henryk Grynberg, The Jewish War and The Victory (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001).

78. Gabriel Temkin, My Just War: The Memoir of a Jewish Red Army Soldier in World War II (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1998), 224–225 and Hanna Temkin, My Involuntary Journeys: A Memoir (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem Press, 2023), 336–337.

79. Ida Kaminska, My Life, My Theater, ed. and trans. Curt Leviant (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1973), 257–260.

80. Temkin, 225.

81. Dariusz Stola, “Jewish Emigration from Communist Poland: The Decline of Polish Jewry in the Aftermath of the Holocaust,” East European Jewish Affairs 47, no. 2–3 (2017): 171.

82. Stola, 172.

83. Stola, 177.

84. Stola, 180.

85. Redlich, 66.

86. Padraic Kenney, Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945–1950 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 77.

87. Ewelina Nurczyńska-Fidelska, “Andrzej Wajda’s Vision of ‘The Promised Land’,” John Orr and Elżbieta Ostrowska, The Cinema of Andrzej Wajda: The Art of Irony and Defiance (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2003), 153.

88. Nurczyńska-Fidelska, 158.

89. Sylwia Kadzmarek and Stanisław Liszewski, “The Role of Tourism in the Restructuring of the Łódź Region and in Creating a New Image of the City,” Stanisław Liszewski and Craig Young, eds., A Comparative Study of Łódź and Manchester: A Geography of European Cities in Transition (Łódź: University of Łódź, 1997), 253–257.

90. Helene Sinnreich, “Reading the Writing on the Wall: A Textual Analysis of Łódź Graffiti,” Religion, State & Society 32, no. 1 (2004): 53–58.

91. See for example:Gmina Wznaniowa Żydowska w Łodzi, http://kehilalodz.com/gmina-wyznaniowa-zydowska-w-lodzi/ and HaKoach, https://hakoach.eu/ (accessed August 31, 2023).

92. Joanna Michlic, ‘Łódź in the Postcommunist Era: In Search of a New Identity,’ John Czaplicka, Nida Gelazis and Blair A. Ruble, eds., Cities After the Fall of Communism: Reshaping Cultural Landscapes and European Identity (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2009): 281–303.

93. Chu, 239.

94. For more on the project, see: https://www.urbanforms.org/foundation/. For an examples of coverage of the project, see Jaime Rojo and Steven Harrington, “Huge Street Art Murals Transform City of Lodz in Poland,” The Huffington Post, 6/12/2013 updated Dec. 6 2017 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/large-murals-transform-lodz_b_3428241 (accessed May 31, 2020).

95. On some results of the project, see Iwona Jażdżewska, “Murals as a Tourist Attraction in a Post-Industrial City: A Case Study of Łódź (Poland),” Tourism 27, no. 2 (2017): 45–56.

96. About Dialogue Center, The Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in Łódź, https://www.centrumdialogu.com/en/about-us/about-dialogue-center (accessed 31 August 2023).

97. Svetlana Boym, The Off-Modern (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 3.

98. Boym, 49.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eliyana R. Adler

Eliyana R. Adler is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. As a social historian of the East European Jewish past, Dr. Adler is particularly interested in gender, education, religion, migration, and memory.