Genre: Non-fiction

Nobody Leaves

Regarded as a central part of Kapuściński’s work, these vivid portraits of life in the depths of Poland embody the young writer’s mastery of literary reportage

When the great Ryszard Kapuściński was a young journalist in the early 1960s, he was sent to the farthest reaches of his native Poland between foreign assignments. The resulting pieces brought together in this new collection, nearly all of which are translated into English for the first time, reveal a place just as strange as the distant lands he visited. 

From forgotten villages to collective farms, Kapuściński explores a Poland that is post-Stalinist but still Communist; a country on the edge of modernity. He encounters those for whom the promises of rising living standards never worked out as planned, those who would have been misfits under any political system, those tied to the land and those dreaming of escape.

The Story of a Disappearance

History of a Disappearance is the fascinating true story of a small mining town in the southwest of Poland that, after seven centuries of history, disappeared. Filip Springer (born 1982) is a self-taught journalist who has been working as a reporter and photographer since 2006. His journalistic debut—History of a Disappearance: The Forgotten Story of a Polish Town—was shortlisted for the Ryszard Kapuściński Literary Reportage Prize in 2011 and was nominated for the Gdynia Literary Prize in 2012. He was also shortlisted for the Nike Literary Prize in 2012 and winner of the third annual Ryszard Kapuściński fellows contest for young journalists. Sean Gasper Bye translation is a winner of Asymptote Journal’s 2016 Close Approximations Translation Contest. 

City of Lions

The book consists of two essays about the city now called Liviv, in Western Ukraine. Between the wars it was Lwów and part of Poland; until 1918 it belonged to Austro-Hungary and was known as Lemberg. Wittlin (1896–1976) lived in the city from 1904 to 1922, and wrote his essay in New York in 1946; Sands’ grandfather was born there, lost his whole extended family in the Holocaust, moved to Paris, and never spoke about it again. Sands has also written a much longer book, East West Street, in which the city has a central role –  several people had read and recommended it; and has made a film, My Nazi Legacy (referred to in City of Lions), about events in Poland and Ukraine during WW2, which is available online (and has also been shown on BBC4).

Grażyna read Wittlin’s Polish text online, and said his love of the city, and his humour, came across in his use of language. Tom commented on the rhapsodic ending to both essays, and Wittlin’s ornate, almost baroque style. Krystyna commented on the melancholy black-and-white photographs (historical and contemporary), while she’d been struck by the colour of the city when she visited. Magda commented on the sensual aspects of the book (aromas and food), Robin on the city’s historical layers – the example of a law professor who taught three different law codes in his career (Austro-Hungarian, Polish, Soviet).

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The notes to Wittlin’s piece are necessary, as so many of the passing references are completely unfamiliar to me, and to most English-speaking readers, I imagine. In Ulysses Joyce wrote about Dublin from a distance, and often critically. Wittlin also writes his city from a distance, but after much destruction and an orgy of death; perhaps that’s why he’s more forgiving of the city’s faults than Joyce is, for Dublin remained extant. He sketches; I’d have liked more on the grand station. He brings in personal stories, yet it’s not a memoir; I have little sense of the trajectory of his life. He says the title “was imposed by the publishers”; which publisher, what sort of readership? Perhaps Poles exiled from, forced out of the city in 1945.

Sands’ text acts as a kind of Afterword to Wittlin’s, offering context and referring back to it, while also offering new material, by way of Sands’ own experiences and histories. Writing at a greater distance from World War Two, he fills in details of German policy and actions against the Jews, information unavailable to Wittlin. He’s there, experiencing the present; Wittlin’s absent, remembering the past.

Regions of the Great Heresy: Bruno Schulz, A Biographical Portrait

Jerzy Ficowski, Regions of the Great Heresy, front cover

Sixty years after his murder by the Nazis, Bruno Schulz, one of the twentieth century’s greatest and most enigmatic writers, is experiencing a renaissance in part occasioned by this biography by the renowned Polish poet Jerzy Ficowski. Widely regarded as the world’s foremost authority on Schulz, Ficowski reconstructs the author’s life story and evokes the fictional vision of his best-known works, The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Including many of Schulz’s paintings and letters as well as new information on the Mossad’s removal of Schulz’s murals from Poland in 2001, this book will stand for years to come as the definitive account of the author’s tragic life. Developed for publication by The Jewish Heritage Project’s International Initiative for Literature of the Holocaust.