Polanim: From Poland to Israel - Hardcover

Polanim is a work of reportage, not the website that shares its name, built on Karolina Przewrocka-Aderet's talks with Polish Israelis.

Each chapter follows one kind of experience. Some people fled antisemitism before the war, some could not bear the ruined Poland that came after it, and some were forced out in 1968.

Two countries, seventy years

Through these lives the book tracks how Polish Jews lived from the 1920s through the 1990s, and what each arrival found in Palestine and later Israel.

The author, a Polish journalist, lived in Israel for years and reported from there for Tygodnik Powszechny.

From the publisher

Polanim's literary journalism/reportage draws on extensive interviews with Israelis of Polish origin and their children, with each chapter organized around a particular experience of Poland and of Palestine/Israel, or around memories passed on. Some had gotten away from pre-war antisemitism, some found post-war devastated Poland unbearable, and some were pushed out in 1968.

Through those individual experiences, Przewrocka-Aderet gets at Jewish life in Poland from the 1920s into the 1990s, and at their experiences in Palestine/Israel of these Polanim.

Leaving at and arriving at different moments, they also differed in social class, education, gender, political affiliation, and age at the moment of emigration-but they also differed in the unpredictable variety of human experience beyond any social categories.