Modern and Radical

"Reading not only for sociological data but to excavate the assumptions and understandings common to a generation's social imagination, Kijek has produced, at one level, an endlessly rich, wideranging, and insightful ethnographic reconstruction of the lives and hopes of the Jewish generation that came of age in the 1930s. If that were all he had accomplished, that in itself would be enough to merit the wide attention the book will surely receive. But add to that the fact that it makes not one but by my count five major arguments about the trajectory of Polish Jewish political, religious, social, and cultural history in the 1930s, and this a work that nobody working on modern Jewish history can ignore."—Kenneth B. Moss, author of An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland

"By examining a treasure trove of documents—a huge collection of first-hand accounts written by Jewish youth in the 1930s as part of an essay competition— Kamil Kijek is able to show a fascinating contradiction. On the one hand, these texts reinforce the aforementioned pessimism and even despair. On the other hand, the people writing those documents were deeply embedded in a Polish-language culture, often to the point of being able to write only in Polish. . . . Kijek explores a community that was inexorably trending towards linguistic acculturation because of all the familiar forces of modernization (urbanization, a universal educational curriculum, mass popular culture), even as the politics of nationalism created a deepening chasm between each ethnic group."—Brian Porter-Szucs, author of Poland in the Modern World: Beyond Martyrdom