2023 Aquila Polonica Article Prize Winner
Barbara Milewski, Daniel Underhill Professor of Music at Swarthmore College, and Bret Werb, Music Collection Curator at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum have won the 2023 Aquila Polonica Article Prize for their article “Chopin’s Żydek, and Other Apocryphal Tales,” Journal of Musicology (2022) 39 (3): 342–370.https://doi.org/10.1525/jm.2022.39.3.342
The biennial Aquila Polonica Article Prize is given to the author of the best English-language article published during the previous two years on any aspect of Polish studies. Administered by the Polish Studies Association (“PSA”), which appoints the independent judges, the award carries a $500 honorarium donated by Aquila Polonica Publishing.
About the Winning Article:
Through an in-depth and robust analysis, Barbara Milewski and Bret Werb explore the attitude of Fryderyk Chopin to Jewish music. Drawing on a rich array of sources, they trace the birth and development of the narrative that has seen Chopin as genuinely interested and inspired by Jewish musical traditions.
As Milewski and Werb show, this narrative has been sensitive to the changing historical context, leading to the perception of Chopin as either a friend of Jews or an anti-Semite. Through a rich and impressive analysis, the authors challenge these narratives. By getting back to the sources and building on ethnographic accounts, they provide a new and complex interpretation, putting Chopin in a broad socio-cultural context.
The article is engaging and beautifully written, and offers a compelling model of an interdisciplinary analysis that uncovers historical realities that broaden our understanding of central themes in Polish studies.
“The honor was a wonderful surprise, as it is a competitive award that is not discipline specific,” says Milewski, who is on leave from Swarthmore in 2024 to serve as the Joyce and Arthur Schechter Fellow at the USHMM’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. “The award panel includes distinguished judges from different fields of academia who work in various international higher educational settings,” she says.
The article required years of archival work and research across a range of fields, including Polish history, Jewish history, Polish 19th-century literature, folklore studies, musicology, and ethnomusicology.
Honorable Mention – In addition to the winning article, the Award Committee also awarded Honorable Mention to the following two articles:
Tomasz Frydel, “The Polish Countryside as a Gray Zone: Village Heads and the Meso Level of the General Government, 1939–1945,” East European Politics and Societies 37, no. 1 (2023): 202–228. https://doi.org/10.1177/0888325420977651
Karolina Watroba, “Blind Spots on the Magic Mountain: Zofia Nałkowska’s Choucas (1926),” The Slavonic and East European Review, 99.4 (2021), 676-698. https://doi.org/10.5699/slaveasteurorev2.99.4.0676
“It is our very great pleasure to congratulate Professor Milewski and Mr. Werb. We also want to congratulate our two honorable mentions, Tomasz Frydel at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Karolina Watroba at All Souls College, University of Oxford,” said Aquila Polonica president Terry Tegnazian. “And of course, we wish to thank this year’s prize committee, which consisted of Natalia Jarska, Chair, Robert Pyrah and Agata Tumiłowicz-Mazur, for their hard work and thoughtful commentary.”
The prize will be presented the evening of November 30, 2023, during PSA’s annual meeting and reception at the national convention of the Association for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies (“ASEEES”).
Keely Stauter-Halsted, immediate past PSA president and current treasurer, commented, “The prize committee reported that it was extremely difficult to make a choice because there were so many strong articles. What a nice problem for our field to have! The existence of this prize helps to highlight the accomplishments of our membership.”
POSTSCRIPT: In February 2024, Swarthmore College announced that Professor Barbara Milewski, co-winner of the 2023 Aquila Polonica Article Prize, has been named the Joyce and Arthur Schechter Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies.
The Fellowship provides her the opportunity to complete research on her manuscript exploring music making in the Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps. Professor Milewski emphasized the importance of knowing Polish history. While researching Chopin, she explored how Poles used music to preserve a sense of national identity, even when no Polish state existed between 1795 and 1918. In much the same way, Polish political prisoners used music to maintain a sense of their identity in the concentration camps during WWII. Read the article online or in pdf….
