This book by Józef Wrobel, which originated as a doctoral dissertation at Kraków University, is the first attempt at a comprehensive synthesis of a subject Gewish themes in Polish literature) which is still a thorny one today; certain uncertainties and a structure which could have been more clearly organized are thus understandable faults: in the introduction, the author himself anticipates some criticism on these lines. Following the suggested guidelines in Błoński's famous article, which encouraged the recognition of a ‘Jewish school’ in Polish literature, in which Jewish themes play as important a role as some other important motifs in contemporary Polish literature-the peasant motif, that of the eastern borderlands (kresy), and that of Galicia,-the Jewish motif is one aspect of the present-day ‘search for roots’ in Poland. The book's material, the author says, is drawn from

The book is divided into six chapters, the first of which is devoted to the many attempts at commemorating the pre-war Jewish shtetl; the second is devoted to the relationship between the Jews and Communism (this is based almost entirely on the essay Żydzi a komunizm by Abel Kainer (pen-name of Stanislaw Krajewski)); the third chapter, ‘Job's Books', is divided into five sections and is concerned with the period of Nazi occupation and the extermination of Polish Jews. The last three chapters discuss the works of Henryk Grynberg, the exodus of 1968, and the current condition of the remaining Jewish writers.

The first chapter, ‘The Lights of Shabbat are Turned off', a title borrowed by Aleksander Hertz, is dedicated ‘to the attempts of writers who were outside Poland at the time of the war to resurrect the world of the dead’ (p. 10), and discusses, above all, the works of Julian Stryjkowski and Kalman Segal.