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.
