Confidential follows on the success of acclaimed photographer, psychologist, and writer Mikołaj Grynberg’s highly acclaimed short story collection, I’d Like to Say Sorry, but There’s No One to Say Sorry To, which was a finalist for numerous awards, including Poland’s most prestigious literary prize, the Nike, a National Jewish Book Award, the Sami Rohr Prize, and the National Translation Award in Prose for Sean Gasper Bye’s translation.
This powerful new novella is a darkly comic portrait of a Jewish family in today’s Poland, struggling to express their love for one another in the face of a past that cannot and will not be forgotten. The grandfather is a doctor, a Holocaust survivor who has now vowed to live only for pleasure. His son, born at the start of the war, becomes a well-respected physicist, but finds himself emotionally unable to attend conferences in Germany, despite the benefit it would give his career. The mother is loving but firm, though she has a secret habit of attending strangers’ funerals so that she can cry.
A masterpiece of concision, Confidential expands on one of the stories in I’d Like to Say Sorry … , tackling themes of memory, trauma, and care, as well as enduring anti-Semitism, with unforgettable power, emotional complexity, and Grynberg’s trademark black humor.
A revelatory and richly varied collection of Poland’s greatest short stories, edited by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, and with a foreword by Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk
Witty, surprising and sparkling, this anthology is an essential exploration of Polish literature. Its thirty-nine superb stories run the length of the literal and imaginative creation of Poland, from 1918 (when Poland regained its independence after 123 years of colonization by the neighbouring empires) to the present.
The stories include ‘Miss Winczewska’, by the classic twentieth-century writer Maria Dabrowska (1889—1965), based on her experience of returning from the provinces to the destroyed capital when the war ended in 1945; and ‘In the Shadow of Brooklyn’ by Stanislaw Dygat (1914—1978), the comical tale of a young man’s envy of what he imagines to be his father’s success with women. At the contemporary end, it includes a story by Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk (1962-), ‘The Green Children’, a historical story set in 1656, narrated by a Scottish doctor who, as the Polish king’s physician, travels about the wilds of Poland and encounters two feral children.
Below are reflections by Jenny Robertson and Krystyna Szumelokova on two of the stories from the book.
Viewing the history of postwar Poland through the prism of his late mother’s hoarded possessions, Wicha’s affectionate, illuminating and side-splitting work paints portraits of both a formidable, singular woman and a nation that passed from the ravages of war through the chill embrace of the Iron Curtain.
‘I was complaining about some dull educational programme on Polskie Radio, and my mother said: ‘Not everything in life can be turned into a funny story.’ I knew it was true. But still I tried.’
An intimate, unconventional and very funny memoir about everything we leave behind.
Lamps, penknives, paperbacks, mechanical pencils, inflatable headrests. Marcin Wicha’s mother Joanna was a collector of everyday objects. When she dies and leaves her apartment intact, Wicha is left to sort through her things. Through them, he begins to construct an image of Joanna as a Jewish woman, a mother, and a citizen. As Poland emerged from the Second World War into the material meanness of the Communist regime, shortages of every kind shaped its people in deep and profound ways. What they chose to buy, keep – and, arguably, hoard – tells the story of contemporary Poland.
Joanna’s Jewishness, her devotion to work, her formidable temperament, her weakness for consumer goods, all accumulate into an unforgettable portrait of a woman and, ultimately, her country.
Edited by Helen Constantine, Warsaw Tales is an anthology of short stories and non-fiction set in the Polish capital. Beginning in 1911 with Boleslaw Prus’ Apparitions, the collected stories provide a chronological account of the city’s tumultuous and dramatic history. Each story captures a phase of Warsaw’s past, through the interwar period as a Polish republic, the Second World War and the city’s Nazi occupation, the post-war city in ruins and its rebuilding under the communist regime, and its new status as the capital of an independent Poland in 1989. With each story set in a specific part of the city, the collection becomes a guidebook to Warsaw’s temporal, spatial, and psychological geography.
This collection features a wide variety of authors including Boleslaw Prus, Maria Kuncewiczowa, Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Ludwik Hering, Zofia Petersowa, Marek Hlasko, Kazimierz Orlos, Hanna Krall, Antoni Libera, Zbigniew Mentzel, Olga Tokarczuk, and Krzysztof Varga.
For the next meeting we agreed on this occasion we’d each choose a piece of writing by Czesław Miłosz, and then discuss our choices.
Poems by Miłosz in Polish can be found at poezja.org and literatura, and in English translation at The Nobel Prize and poets.org (Academy of American Poets).
A Holocaust story as fascinating and compelling as it is terrifying and puzzling ― a book about aging and war crimes, pain and pride.
In the middle of summer, omnipresent heat radiates as a group of elderly people are remembering their youth. The story focuses on two sisters, Leokadia and Czechna, who live together in a retirement home not far from Warsaw. These are not ordinary stories they are sharing, because both of them spent time as children in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. At the center is Czechna, who at the age of 12 was saved from extermination by the notorious doctor Josef Mengele, the real-life Nazi officer and physician who was known as the “angel of death” for the experiments he conducted on prisoners, including twins and siblings.
This is a story both provocative and disturbing about the fear that lingers in victims. Was the sisters’ relationship with the executioner a desperate attempt to save their lives, or perhaps they harbor a hideous pride and sense of superiority over other prisoners? Rudzka’s extraordinary writing turns unsettling questions about memory and survival into art.
Marek Hłasko has been described as Poland’s angry young man of the 1950s. The Eighth Day of the Week is a story of two young people searching for a place to consummate their love, while Killing the Second Dog is an absurdist black comedy about the misadventures of two Polish would-be actors turned conmen in Israel.
NB The 1992 Minerva edition pictured includes two works of fiction by Hłasko, which are also available in separate editions.
This brief biography of Hłasko is taken from the Minerva book.
& this is a still striking a film poster from the late 50s for the film version of The 8th Day of the Week.
Marek Hłasko on wikipedia (English)
Set in early 1980s Poland against the violent decline of communism, a tender and passionate story of first love between two young men who eventually find themselves on opposite sides of the political divide—a stunningly poetic and heartrending literary debut for fans of Andre Aciman, Garth Greenwell, and Alan Hollinghurst.
When university student Ludwik meets Janusz at a summer agricultural camp, he is fascinated yet wary of this handsome, carefree stranger. But a chance meeting by the river soon becomes an intense, exhilarating, and all-consuming affair. After their camp duties are fulfilled, the pair spend a dreamlike few weeks camping in the countryside, bonding over an illicit copy of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. Inhabiting a beautiful natural world removed from society and its constraints, Ludwik and Janusz fall deeply in love. But in their repressive communist and Catholic society, the passion they share is utterly unthinkable.
Once they return to Warsaw, the charismatic Janusz quickly rises in the political ranks of the party and is rewarded with a highly-coveted position in the ministry. Ludwik is drawn toward impulsive acts of protest, unable to ignore rising food prices and the stark economic disparity around them. Their secret love and personal and political differences slowly begin to tear them apart as both men struggle to survive in a regime on the brink of collapse.
Shifting from the intoxication of first love to the quiet melancholy of growing up and growing apart, Swimming in the Dark is a potent blend of romance, post-war politics, intrigue, and history. Lyrical and sensual, immersive and intense, Tomasz Jedrowski has crafted an indelible and thought-provoking literary debut that explores freedom and love in all its incarnations.
~ taken from Good Reads
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A short review in The Guardian
Mariamne is an old Jewish peasant woman from Galilee. She is visited by a young Greek man who came to see her to talk about her late son. Mariamne spins her story in a colourful and blunt language of a simple, old woman of natural intelligence and dry sense of humour. In her eyes Judas was the nicest friend of her son’s. She can’t forgive John the Baptist for stealing the object of young Hoshi’s love or, years later, finding it hard to conceal his jealousy of Yehoshua’s growing popularity. According to her Hoshi didn’t see himself as a god or a saviour of the entire humankind, or even a prophet or a religious reformer – he thought of himself first and foremost as a doctor and perhaps a little bit of a folk sage.
At the beginning of the twentieth century the villagers of the Carpathian mountains lead a simple life, much as they have always done. The modern world has yet to reach the inhabitants of this remote region of the Habsburg Empire. Among them is Piotr, a bandy-legged peasant, who wants nothing more from life than an official railway cap, a cottage, and a bride with a dowry.
But then the First World War reaches the mountains and Piotr is drafted into the army. All the weight of imperial authority is used to mould him into an unthinking fighting machine, forced to fight a war he does not understand, for interests other than his own.
The Salt of the Earth is a classic war novel and a powerfully pacifist tale about the consequences of war for ordinary men. You can read a synopsis here.
Józef Wittlin, born in 1896, was a major Polish poet, novelist, essayist and translator. He studied in Vienna, where he met Joseph Roth and Rainer Maria Rilke, before serving in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War. His subsequent experiences inspired him to write The Salt of the Earth, which was first published in 1935 to great success: it was awarded the Polish Natural Academy Prize, won Wittlin a nomination for the Nobel Prize, and has since been translated into 14 languages. Józef Wittlin also translated Homer’s Odyssey into Polish, published several collections of poetry, many of which were strongly pacifist, and penned numerous essays including ‘My Lwów’, which is included in City of Lions, also published by Pushkin Press (and which we read in 2016). With the outbreak of the Second World War he fled to France and then to New York, where he died in 1976.
