Jewish Poland—Legends of Origin

This is a study of legend as a form of historical imagination and understanding in relation to a particular place understood as a geographical location, metaphysical landscape, and materialized settlement. By looking at the legends of a Diaspora (Jews) in a place (Poland) where they developed a vibrant community in the course of a millennium, this book illuminates a vernacularprocess of place-making.

~Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

Bar-Itzhak's book on Jewish origin legends, which were created and nominated in Poland, is a pioneering and outstanding contribution to Jewish and Polish histography, as well as to general folklorists. Its conclusions divert the much discussed problem of legend versus history (fantasy versus reality) to the essential role of local legends in promoting an ethnic identity. Historians, folklorists and anthropologists will be grateful to the author for her innovative shift of focus.

~Dov Noy

Haya Bar-Itzhak enables us to deeply understand the place of Poland in the Jewish imagination. Well we should, if we are to fathom the meaning of the Jewish Diaspora experience, and the formation of identity through narrative. The legends she offers intriguingly mesh history and belief, and she masterfully analyzes them to reveal the Jewish past and Jewish destiny.

~Simon Bronner

A poignant portrait of the Polish Jewish life as duly recorded and exegetically revealed in selected traditional legends, brilliantly retrieved and effectively translated from often arcane sources written in Hebrew, Yiddish, German, and Polish. A highlight is an astute and subtle analysis of Agon's literary reworkings of several of these legends showing how the necessarily transitory and precarious Diaspora existence, eventually decimated by the Holocaust, pointed towards the hope of realizing the Zionist dream of the establishment of the state of Israel. A sophisticated folkloristic explication de texte at its best.

~Alan Dundes