Call for articles for volume 28 of Polin: Studies in Polish-Jewry on 'Jewish Writing in Poland'.

In a path-breaking article 'Hebrew-Yiddish-Polish: A Trilingual Jewish Culture' published in 1989 in The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars Chone Shmeruk argued that

[i]n addition to the traditional religious culture that was still predominant in Poland between the two world wars, three modern
post-Enlightenment cultural systems existed among Polish Jewry. They were generally distinguished by linguistic and ideological characteristics. The cultural systems in the Jewish languages--Hebrew and Yiddish--were usually identified with defined Jewish nationalist ideologies. Hebrew culture relied on Zionist ideology, whereas modern Yiddish secular culture was built primarily by Bundists and their adherents, and to a lesser extent by Zionist socialists, Folkists, and those Jewish communists who did not advocate the assimilation of Jews.

Alongside these two cultural systems, there also existed a 'Polish cultural system in which the 'striving for Jewish self-preservation [was]
less apparent'. Shmeruk distinguished between 'the thin stratum of Polish intelligentsia of Jewish descent, including renowned Polish writers, who were totally assimilated into Polish culture and identified themselves as Poles--even despite certain sporadic expressions of Jewish
self-identification to which they were pushed by hostile forces over which they had no control' and those Jews 'whose exclusive or partial cultural language was Polish' but who were either 'Zionist in ideology or nonaffiliated and politically apathetic' and who 'certainly never denied their Jewish identity'.

He concluded:

The true and great power of this culture lay not in isolation of these linguistic areas but in their interaction, an interaction that included
the traditional religious cultural system as well. The full picture of the culture of Polish Jews can only be perceived by approaching it as a
polysystem in which the power of its components comes from the force of their mutual, dynamic interaction, and not in their isolation.

Research on trilingual Jewish culture in Poland has advanced since Shmeruk wrote his article, but some issues still wait to be examined. In this volume of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, we should like to investigate writers from each of these groups in order to examine how
they saw their Jewish (and sometimes Polish) identity and what they thought of the writers in the other linguistic or cultural camps. We will
use the interwar years as the reference point, but would also like to include material on the period before the first world war and after 1945
until today. We invite contributions in English, Polish, Yiddish or Hebrew and we will make translate those not in English. Preliminary
proposals, approximately one page long should be sent to Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska mag@poczta.umcs.lublin.pl by 31 December 2011.

The editors of the volume:
Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, Maria Curie-Sklodowska-University, Lublin
Antony Polonsky, Brandeis University, Waltham, Mass.
Eugenia Prokop-Janiec, Jagiellonian University, Krakow
Slawomir Zurek, John Paul II Catholic University, Lublin