The People Write! Polish Everyman Autobiography, 1918-1950

My research focuses on autobiographies written between the two World Wars by peasants, workers, and other ordinary people in Poland. In the 1920s, Polish sociologists devised memoir competitionsoffering prizes for the best memoirs by members of a given social groupas a way to collect personal narratives by workers, peasants, youth, minorities, the unemployed, and others. This Polish method of sociological research, as it came to be known overseas, exceeded researchers expectations: by the 1930s, memoir competitions had sparked a flourishing culture of life-writing in milieus ranging from peasant youth groups to Yiddishist cultural circles, while published memoir compilations of so-called social (or competition) memoir became best-sellers, were widely discussed in the press, and won prestigious literary prizes. Using an interdisciplinary and transnational approach, my project will position social memoir against the larger backdrop of the mid-20th centurys fascination with documentary representations of the little man. Based on original sources from Polish and American archives, including hundreds of unpublished memoirs, my research will result in a monograph provisionally entitled The People Write! Polish Everyman Autobiography from the Great Depression to the Holocaust. Exploring how such everyman autobiographies deployed connections between the personal and the political, my book will contribute to the social, cultural, and political history of East Central Europe; to the intellectual history of transatlantic social science; and to the interdisciplinary field of narrative/autobiography studies. Approaching the memoirs as a conversation among scholars, their marginalized subjects, and the reading public, it will trace this conversation across time and space, considering its impact on the Polish public sphere, on transatlantic social science, and on new forms of life-writing emerging from the crucible of World War II, notably Holocaust testimony. Ultimately, I approach social memoir not only for what it can tell us about interwar Poland, but for what it can reveal about the global repercussions of local narrative practices. An examination of how personal narratives have been deployed and contested in the public sphere between roughly 1930 and 1950 can, I argue, help illuminate shifting global discourses of human rights, social justice, and political ethics before and after World War II.

My research has focused on autobiographies written between the two World Wars by peasants, workers, and other ordinary people in Poland. In the 1920s, Polish sociologists devised memoir competitionsoffering prizes for the best memoirs by members of a given social groupas a way to collect personal narratives by workers, peasants, youth, minorities, the unemployed, and others. This Polish method of sociological research exceeded researchers expectations: by the 1930s, memoir competitions had sparked a flourishing culture of life-writing in milieus ranging from peasant youth groups to Yiddishist cultural circles, while published compilations of such memoirs became best-sellers, were widely discussed in the press, and won prestigious literary prizes. Based on the collection and analysis of thousands of documents from Polish and US archives, including hundreds of unpublished memoirs, my project explores how the authors of memoirs used personal narrative to challenge the boundaries of subjecthood and citizenship in 1930s Poland; how Polish social scientists advocated for an engaged and collaborative scholarship stressing the voice and agency of ordinary people; and how Polish Jews transformed social memoir during and after the Holocaust into the genre we now think of as testimony. Exploring how such everyman autobiographies deployed connections between the personal and the political, my study raises broader questions about the uses of personal narrative in 20th-century science and its role in shaping and contesting global discourses of subjecthood, rights, and justice.