Current Projects

JSPPS

ibidem is one of the most prolific European publishers of Russian and East European studies, currently publishing six academic book series and one scholarly journal in this field.

We are excited to soon be adding another flagship title to this strong list, launching the new 'Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society’ (JSPPS), complementing our thriving book series 'Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society' (SPPS).

SPPS has published more than 120 titles in English, German, and Russian language over the past ten years, containing extensive, new empirical research on a broad variety of – partly understudied – aspects of communist history and the post-Soviet transitions. Edited by Andreas Umland (Kyiv, Ukraine), SPPS has become one of Germany’s most comprehensive resources on the recent history and current affairs of the newly independent states of Central and Eastern Europe, the Southern Caucasus, and Central Asia.

With our new periodical ‘Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society’ (JSPPS), we hope to further extend the possibilities for researchers in the field to disseminate their work. Featuring scholarly papers and review essays in English, German, and Russian, JSPPS is designed to fill a glaring gap in Germany’s current scientific journals landscape, which contains only few specialized journals on Soviet and post-Soviet affairs. JSPPS will also provide an outlet for non-German scholars wishing to publish their research with a German academic publisher heavily engaged in the international marketing of its products.

The first issue of JSSPS, which will be out in spring 2015, accepts submission on the following topic now:

The Russian Media and the War in Ukraine

The Russian war in Ukraine has been accompanied, fuelled, and legitimized by a Russian information war campaign that is unprecedented in its scope and nature. This Russian state-media propaganda campaign has been surprisingly successful in disguising and distorting the nature of the war and shaping the way it is perceived and understood, both in Russia and be­yond. This special inaugural issue of JSPPS sets out to launch an interdisciplinary discussion on the Russian information warfare being waged in parallel with the military war in Ukraine.

Submissions can be directed to jspps@ibidem-verlag.com or to head editor Julie Fedor on julie.fedor@unimelb.edu.au

The Editors:

Julie Fedor is Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Russia and the Cult of State Security (Routledge, 2011); co-author of Remembering Katyn (Polity, 2012); and co-editor of Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013) and Memory, Conflict and New Media: Web Wars in Post-Socialist States (Routledge, 2013).

Andriy Portnov is currently Guest Lecturer at the Humboldt University of Berlin. His publications include Histories for Home Use: The Polish-Russian Ukrainian Triangle of Memory (in Ukraine, 2013; Yuri Shevelov Prize); Historians and their Histories: The Faces and Images of Ukrainian Historiography in the 20^th Century (in Ukrainian, 2011); Ukrainian Exercises with History (in Russian, 2010); Between ‘Central Europe’ and the ‘Russian World’ (in Ukrainian, 2009); and Scholarship in Exile: The Scholarly Activity of Ukrainian Emigration in Inter-war Poland 1919-1939 (in Ukrainian, 2008; Jerzy Giedroyc Prize).

Andreas Umland is a researcher of contemporary Russian and Ukrainian politics with a focus on the post-Soviet extreme right, at the National University of ‘Kyiv-Mohyla Academy’, Ukraine, and the Eichstaett Institute for Central and East European Studies, Germany. He is also initiator and co-director of a Master’s program in German and European Studies administered jointly by Kyiv’s Mohyla Academy and Jena’s Schiller University.

Memory is Our Home

ibidem is proud to soon be publishing 'Memory is Our Home', a stunning, important memoir on the life of a Jewish family from Poland across the two World Wars. Suzanna Eibuszyc's awe-inspiring creation, which will be published in 2015, has received unprecedented levels of support even long before publication.

Here below is a selection of the comments made by academics, activists, and fellow authors on Eibuszyc's incredible feat:

This is an extraordinary document, unique in many ways. Its freshness and honesty bring to life with exceptional clarity and immediacy the struggle for survival of those at the bottom of the social and economic scale during this terrible period.

Adam Zamoyski, award-winning British historian, author of the best-selling epic ‘1812. Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow.’

Suzanna Eibuszyc's relatively recent discovery of her mother's writings is a miracle for all of us who do not want to break the chain of witness. ‘Memory is Our Home’ reminds us of a truth that the holocaust, sadly, confirmed: Traumatic, total loss creates an absence that can only be retained as memory, and that memory is best made back into a presence through thoughtful words. Diaries such as Roma Talasiewicz-Eibuszyc's are this particular memory's mother tongue.

Al Filreis is Kelly Professor of English and Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania.

In this haunting and brave book, Suzanna Eibuszyc bears witness and pays tribute to what Jewish families, especially women, endured in Poland before, during, and after the Holocaust through her mother’s journals that she has lovingly and beautifully transcribed. Eibuszyc’s mother’s story is compelling and poignant; it will both move and educate readers.

Janice Eidus, award-winning novelist, author of ‘The War of the Rosens’ and ‘The Last Jewish’.

This book is such a tremendous accomplishment. The small details of Eibuszyc’s mother’s survival constantly amazed me. Powerful in its simplicity, the pages are all about the smallest things – the details about finding shelter, surviving cold and hunger, and how much a person can take. It says so much about the importance of not forgetting, or ensuring that the Jewish legacy survives, that the Jewish culture and contribution to Poland are not erased.

Marcy Dermansky, Author of ‘Bad Marie’.

Thank you, Suzanna Eibuszyc, for opening a window to your mother's life and heart so we can also observe our own. This is an exciting, interesting, and important piece of reading. I always ask myself: How much do I let the past - my father's past - be present in my life. I know that if I don't tell his story and carry on the torch, it is like murdering all our family members again. Eibuszyc’s writing beautifully combines the personal with the national, the past with the present, and the fathers’ stories with their children's. Reading a memoir like this tells the story of so many people; reading it can help heal a lot of generations who carry this unbelievable tragedy in their lives.

Shatit Shoshi. Professor at Bar Ilan University, Israel.

This is a book to pick up if you want to remember the past and look for hope for the future. In a moving and touchingly written fashion, Suzanna Eibuszyc tells the story of life before, during, and after the Holocaust in Poland. By weaving her own story with that of her mother’s survival, Eibuszyc touches us with the sweet memories as well as the haunting details of victimization and overcoming enormous obstacles for three generations of Jews in Europe and then the US.

Elaine Leeder, Professor of Sociology, Sonoma State University.

A deep, moving, and historically rich account of a Holocaust story common to many survivors, yet still little known and documented. This meticulously written memoir, which combines historical background with personal reflection, helps to rescue this story from obscurity and thereby offers truly groundbreaking insight into the history of World War II and the Holocaust.

Eibuszyc offers a vivid and intimate portrait of a working class Jewish childhood and adolescence in Warsaw before following the young protagonist through her flight to Soviet occupied eastern Poland after the Nazi invasion of 1939 and her struggle for survival in Soviet Central Asia—a harsh exile that, ironically, proves to be Polish Jewry’s single best chance for escaping the catastrophe that engulfed East European Jews during the second world war.

Beshert is among the very few English language memoirs that recount what remains—astonishingly—the great untold story of the Holocaust: The remarkable fact that the majority of those Polish Jews who managed to survive the Holocaust did so not only in the death machine of Nazi occupied Europe, but in remote corners of the Soviet Union. Their dramatic experiences have been marginalized in the historiography and collective memory of the Holocaust, deemed less tragic and central than the stories of the ghettoes, camps, hiding, and partisans.

Atina Grossmann. Professor of History, Cooper Union. Author of ‘Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany’.

This is an interesting story of the persistent hope for a new world by a young Jewish woman who faced the terrible events that shaped 20th century Polish Jewish existence and, alone among five siblings, survived to recount a full life.

Kenneth Waltzer, Director of Jewish Studies, Michigan State University.

This is a remarkable memoir of a Jewish working class woman in Poland, told with great compassion and sincerity, reflecting an ability to both love and criticize the life she recalls. This memoir offers an enriching experience for historians and scholars of social studies as well as for general readers. The force of Roma’s personality, her determination to escape the Nazis and to survive and return to her family members who stayed in Poland represents not only a personal story but the narrative of many Jews.

Halasz Ofer. Max and Rita Haber Professor, Avraham Harman, Institute of Contemporary Jewry.

I found myself so moved by this story that I have had difficulty writing about it without sentimentality. Suzanna Eibuszyc’s translation of her mother’s diary is a searing account of a family destroyed by the Nazis and the Soviets. Bershert traces what it meant to be a young Jewish woman from a poor family during that dark period. Through Suzanna’s narration of Roma’s diary, we feel the poverty of the squalid Jewish section of Warsaw. The gripping account includes details about political factions among the Jews, the risks Jews took to avoid capture, the difficulties of staying connected to family, and the persistent hunger. Against a background of despair and inevitable deportation, we meet teenagers who try to live normal lives. They are thwarted by rigid class differences as well as by the war. Nevertheless, Roma tries to find comfort and even love. We witness what she witnesses—the secret abortions and deliveries in the midst of the Nazi campaign to murder Jews. Roma’s escape to Soviet Russia leaves her with unresolved guilt. Beshert is a vividly told story of Polish Jews who suffered the oppression of both Hitler and Stalin.

Myrna Goldenberg. Professor, English Department at Montgomery College.

This Memoir fascinates from the early paragraphs. Rarely has a book been written that pencils so bleak a portrait of the Poland that had been cloaked in the secrecy of life under Germany’s iron fist. Even for those who lived those years in the rest of occupied Europe it presents an unfamiliar, stark black and white vision of hell.

Rudy Rosenberg, author of ‘And Somehow We Survive’.

I found this memoir extremely moving. I am amazed at Roma Talasiewicz-Eibuszyc's power of recalling the subtle nuances of daily life before and after the war, the tremendous hardships she faced from an early age, and how those hardships continued to affect her life after the war.

Roma was truly a remarkable woman, one who was extremely perceptive about what she had gone through and, with the passage of time, was able to construct a narrative of her wartime losses.

Arlene J. Stein. Department of Sociology, Rutgers University.

This is an important autobiography, the kind one seldom finds nowadays. Talaszowic-Ejbuszyc has written a most compelling and illuminating memoir. In her straightforward style, she encompasses life in its totality. It is highly recommended.

It is a rare intellectual treat how Roma eloquently intertwines her personal and family history with the prevailing general, socio-political conditions and popular workers’ movements of the Jews in Poland. We learn in minute details, without them becoming dull or boring, what life was like for her poor working-class family with a widowed, single mother who together with one son became the main breadwinners. Her descriptions are so vivid that one can actually touch the poverty and feel her immense loss when her mother dies–twice.

She masterfully infuses the astonishing hardships with some lighter aspects of a working-class girl’s life, including personal life; the ambition to better herself, to learn, to belong, to be active politically; the measure of intimate, private satisfactions, and even affairs of the heart where social class status painfully intrudes. Roma’s last memories of the final good-byes with her family members are unforgettable, especially, the painful parting with her beloved, young nieces and nephews.

Judy Weissenberg Cohen, editor womenandtheholocaust.

There is a famous Chasidic saying ‘In the End is the Beginning’ which I had in mind as I read Suzanna Eibuszyc’s refined translation of her late mother’s moving memoir ‘Beshert – It was Meant to Be’. The end of each handwritten word penned in Polish by her mother, in her Los Angeles apartment, became a new beginning of her daughter Suzanna’s translation. Her mother had fulfilled her daughters’ request to write about her life as a Jew in Warsaw from 1917. ‘My daughters have convinced me to write about my life.’ And what a life!

I was very moved by the brutal honesty in Suzanna’s description of her family life. Like her mother, reading this remarkable translation, is ample testimony to her daughter’s equal measure of courage: to enter that world, to enjoy the legacy bequeathed to her and her daughter to live with hope in the future. That is how it was meant to be in the end, the beginning of the new generation – it is Beshert.

George Halasz, Editorial Board of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry.

In a decade when the last live testimonies of the Holocaust are vanishing swiftly, Roma Talasowicz-Eibuszyc’s memoir tells of Jewish life during the horrible reality of the Holocaust. Roma felt strongly that she had to pass on her legacy, and I believe likewise that it is beshert (meant to be) to resonant with large audiences before these memories fade completely from their consciousness.

Dina Ripsman Eylon, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief ‘Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal’.

I was heartened to learn about ‘Beshert-It Was Meant to Be’. It provides so much explanation and historical understanding that, for the first time, I have a palpable understanding of my parents’ complicated and poverty-stricken lives in Warsaw and how they endured their many hardships in Saratov and Uzbekistan. The descriptions of life in the various places answered so many questions about how people coped with the loss of family and friends, uncertainty, unrelenting labor, diseases and displacement. I will keep a copy of this book as an ‘heirloom-reference book’ for my family to read so they can have a fuller understanding of our family history.

Anne Lukawiec Lukas, Kol Israel Generations.

Suzanna Eibuszyc, in her translation of her mother's diary, makes it eminently clear why we indeed need yet another World War II memoir. It recounts in exquisite simplicity and detail what it was like to be Jewish in post World War I Warsaw. With meticulous attention to detail, the author paints a rich background of the political climate where the poverty, hunger, fears, courage, and daily survival of the Jewish person is challenged. This memoir resonates deeply in everyone whose life has been touched by events beyond their control.

Rita B. Ross, author of ‘Running from Home’.

Roma's memoir is very compelling. Even in the midst of total desperation she was always able to find a glimmer of hope. It is my firm belief that it will touch the lives of all who read this amazing story.

Aaron Elster, Holocaust survivor and author of ‘I Still See Her Haunting Eyes’.

This is one of the most moving pieces that I have had the honor of sharing on The Jewish Writing Project site. The world, I think, needs to hear your story.

Bruce Black. Founder, The Jewish Writing Project.

You can find out more about the book and about Suzanna Eibuszyc's work here.