The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Contemporary Jewish Writing in Poland: An Anthology Antony Polonsky and Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, Eds.
Brooke Horvath

Antony Polonsky and Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, eds. Contemporary Jewish Writing in Poland: An Anthology. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2001. 349 pp. $60.00.

The third volume in Nebraska’s Jewish Writing in the Contemporary World series, Contemporary Jewish Writing in Poland gathers stories and novel excerpts along with a few dozen poems by “postwar ‘Polish-Jewish’ writers.” Such writers are defined by the editors as those who work in Polish, treat Jewish material, “define themselves as Jews and stress their ties with Jewish culture.” That these writers are “contemporary,” however, may be misleading: eight of the collection’s twelve authors are dead, and the youngest of the four still alive was born in 1937. Although the collection contains many pages of fiction already available in English (by Adolf Rudnicki, Ida Fink, Stanislaw Benski, and Bogdan Wojdowski), it likewise introduces to American readers several previously untranslated writers: Henryk Grynberg, Julian Stryjkowsi, Stanislaw Wygodzki, Artur Sandauer, Zofia Grzesiak, Leo Lipski, Hanna Krall, and Antoni Slonimski. The selections, perhaps unsurprisingly, focus mostly on prewar Jewish life, the Holocaust, and postwar efforts to come to grips with that catastrophic horror and loss. Cumulatively, these twelve authors create a vivid chronicle of what Rudnicki calls the “Apocalypse . . . people grew used to.” And yet, Bogdan Wojdowski avers, this apocalypse, exposed, must cause the world “to bite down on its fingers to stop itself from crying out in horror.” Between these two assessments—between what Stanislaw Wygodzki describes as “the silence and its voice”—can be found the tortured heart of this anthology. A handsomely produced book that includes a glossary and detailed publication histories as well as a substantial introduction and informative headnotes that should help orient readers historically, biographically, and thematically, Contemporary Jewish Writing in Poland tells stories both atrociously familiar and startlingly unexpected. [Brooke Horvath]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Contemporary Jewish Writing in Poland: An Anthology Antony Polonsky and Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, Eds. Brooke Horvath Antony Polonsky and Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, eds. Contemporary Jewish Writing in Poland: An Anthology. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2001. 349 pp. $60.00. The third volume in Nebraska’s Jewish Writing in the Contemporary World series, Contemporary Jewish Writing in Poland gathers stories and novel excerpts along with a few dozen poems by “postwar ‘Polish-Jewish’ writers.” Such writers are defined by the editors as those who work in Polish, treat Jewish material, “define themselves as Jews and stress their ties with Jewish culture.” That these writers are “contemporary,” however, may be misleading: eight of the collection’s twelve authors are dead, and the youngest of the four still alive was born in 1937. Although the collection contains many pages of fiction already available in English (by Adolf Rudnicki, Ida Fink, Stanislaw Benski, and Bogdan Wojdowski), it likewise introduces to American readers several previously untranslated writers: Henryk Grynberg, Julian Stryjkowsi, Stanislaw Wygodzki, Artur Sandauer, Zofia Grzesiak, Leo Lipski, Hanna Krall, and Antoni Slonimski. The selections, perhaps unsurprisingly, focus mostly on prewar Jewish life, the Holocaust, and postwar efforts to come to grips with that catastrophic horror and loss. Cumulatively, these twelve authors create a vivid chronicle of what Rudnicki calls the “Apocalypse . . . people grew used to.” And yet, Bogdan Wojdowski avers, this apocalypse, exposed, must cause the world “to bite down on its fingers to stop itself from crying out in horror.” Between these two assessments—between what Stanislaw Wygodzki describes as “the silence and its voice”—can be found the tortured heart of this anthology. A handsomely produced book that includes a glossary and detailed publication histories as well as a substantial introduction and informative headnotes that should help orient readers historically, biographically, and thematically, Contemporary Jewish Writing in Poland tells stories both atrociously familiar and startlingly unexpected. [Brooke Horvath]

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