Polish-Jewish Popular Culture: Press and Popular Literature in the 1930s

In Jewish life in Poland, the period from 1918 to 1939 was an era of progressive linguistic Polonization. Important landmarks in this process were the appearance of the daily press after 1918 and then the advent of the mass circulation press addressed to the wider audience in the 1930s. The emergence of the institutions of popular Polish-Jewish culture testifies to the growing numbers of Jews who used Polish as a Jewish vernacular language.

The aim of my paper will be a description of the interwar Polish-Jewish sensational daily “5-ta Rano” published in Warsaw in the years 1931-1939 as well as literature published in its columns in the context of ongoing linguistic and cultural changes.

The daily will be interpreted as one of the principle sources indicating the main modern areas of Jewish communication in Polish and documenting the expansion of this communication from the public to the private sphere. A wide range of serialized novels “derived from Jewish life” offered by the daily signalled the growing interest in narratives in Polish set in an environment well familiar to the Jewish reader.