#she always said her mother's family were *absolutely* polonized she was read mickiewicz as a bedtime story etc.

[chicago-geniza]

There is exactly one (1) guy who has published anything about Jelonka's relationship to Jewishness, in an essay called "painful places" (or: "sore spots"; it carries both valences), and eventually I gotta cold email him to open a research dialogue but it's taking all of my willpower not to be like. "Why don't you mention the fact that her mother almost certainly died in the Łódź ghetto; there is unusually thorough documentation of her background, residences, work permit history, & her last record is a dismissal from a shoe factory job in summer of 1943, after deportations began. Why don't you mention that Jelonka took the sacrament and converted to Catholicism on Easter of 1944, and Himmler gave the order to liquidate the Łódź ghetto three months later. Why don't you mention that she returned not to Warsaw, where she'd spent most of her adult life, but to Łódź after the war. Of course Warsaw had been bombed to bits, but she could have gone anywhere else--she had friends all over, she had offers from other theaters. Do you not consider these details relevant to her suffocating silence and refusal to acknowledge even the antisemitism she faced as such after the war. Dude"