Wymuskany alfons i dostojna madam – nikczemny duet doskonały? Postaci stręczycieli i stręczycielek w międzywojennej literaturze jidysz .
The Spruce Pimp and the Stately Madam – the Perfect Dastardly Duo? Portrayal of Panderers and Panderesses in Interwar Yiddish Literature

Summary/Abstract: The presented article reports on a fragment of broader research conducted as part of a doctoral dissertation entitled “Sold. Polish and Jewish Narrations on Sex Workers and Human Trafficking in the Polish Territories, from the Beginning of the 20th Century to 1939.” The interpretative analysis focuses on literary portrayals of male and female members of the criminal underworld, actively engaged in abducting young women with the intent of coercing them to work in brothels. The cooperation between such characters was often presented in literature as a fine-tuned mechanism relying of rigidly defined rules: the functions and tasks performed by particular individuals being determined by the culturally ingrained divisions into “male” and “female” roles. The literary “villains” and “villainesses” coinhabit the space of the unterwelt, but do not compete with each other as the underworld’s structure is strictly patriarchal (similarly to the space of the discourse, which is also subject to research scrutiny). I proceed to interpret the outlined problems against examples drawn from literary texts by Yiddish authors writing during the interwar period (H. D. Nomberg, M. Alperson, Sh. Ash, and others)

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