In her first instalment of her column ‘Beyond Brave Little Blighty’, REECA editor Sofia Johanson considers filmic representations of Nazi occupation in Eastern and Western Europe, through the lens of Dutch and Polish examples.

Columnist Alice Wright reviews Olga Tokarczuk’s 2009 novel Drive Your Plow, an astonishing amalgam of murder mystery and dark feminist comedy.

Sam Rubinstein explores themes of displacement and Polish-Jewish searches for belonging in Maurycy Szymel’s inter-war poetry

In his column ‘Between Wars, Between Identities’, Sam Rubinstein explores key issues of early twentieth-century Ashkenazi Jewish poetry, including antisemitism in Eastern Europe prior to the Holocaust, literary debates over the use of local vernaculars in Jewish poetry and expression, and Jewish nationalism and the beginnings of the Zionist movement. In this first column, he takes a look at the divide in Polish Jewish literary circles over language choice, and how key actors reconciled language with their evolving identities.