The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture by Samantha Baskind (review)

Abstract

Samantha Baskind’s The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture offers a profound, broad-ranging, multimedia analysis of American responses to the armed Jewish uprising against the Nazis in Warsaw from Passover eve, April 19, to May 16, 1943—a resistance, as is often pointed out, that lasted longer than the defense of Poland and almost as long as the Battle of France. Baskind examines American cultural responses ranging from a radio drama broadcast in June 1943, only weeks after the defeat of the insurgency and the killing or scattering of the Jews who had suffered and fought in the Warsaw Ghetto, to present-day visits to the United States Holocaust Museum and Memorial. The book generally follows the chronological unfolding of those responses, with chapters focusing on In the Presence of Mine Enemies (1959) and other television plays by Rod Serling along with Millard Lampell’s theatrical adaptations (1960 and 1964) of John Hersey’s seminal novel The Wall (1950); Leon Uris’s bestselling novel about the Warsaw Ghetto, Mila 18 (1962), in relation to his prior novel Exodus (1958) and its film adaptation (1960) about the armed conflict leading to the founding of the State of Israel; the late paintings (1990s) of Samuel Bak (b. 1933), a child-survivor of the Vilna Ghetto; and the comics of Joe Kubert, from the early 1970s to his graphic novel Yossel: April 19, 1943 (2011). In each case, Baskind judiciously adduces related materials, whether contemporaneous texts, parallels, and precedents from the history of art, later images attesting to the impact of the principle works under study, or “paratexts” (a term she borrows from literary theorist Gerard Genette), such as the AN DREW BUSH VSSAR COLEGE