The book deals with the issue of the Holocaust in the Polish literature for children and adolescents. Drawing upon some of the leading Polish authors of the twentieth and the twentieth-first centuries, the author reveals the historical, ideological, and cultural entanglement of their works. The main focus of the book is to search for reasons behind the outpouring of interest in the Holocaust noticed in the most recent Polish literature for younger readers. Among these reasons, the author lists the Polish local and historical context, the new approach to issues traditionally seen as taboo, the development of memory and postmemory narratives, and the postmodern shift from a discursive totality and universalist explanations.
The book analyses the ideological and philosophical basis of Zionism, i.e. how Zionism solved the most important problems of Jews in the last decades of the 19th century: the problem of assimilation, the philosophical principles of national identity, the idea of self-liberation and the conception of the Jewish state. Another problem discussed in this book is how the religious idea of «Return to Zion» became both philosophical and political goals. All considerations are based on the analysis of the source texts of the protagonists and founders of Zionism (Hess, Pinsker, Herzl and Nordau). Zionism is also shown in the perspective of its strength and weakness, as well as its importance for Jewishness in general.