"A prolonged labor of love [and] a model of a kind of penetrating adoration."? Richard Bernstein, New York Times-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. 35 illustrations

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

Biographies & Memoirs

Ficowski, Jerzy

Arts & Literature

W.W.Norton&Company

About the Author\nJerzy Ficowski was born on September 4, 1924 in Warsaw. During the occupation he was a soldier in the Home Army and took part in the Warsaw Uprising. After the war, he studied journalism, philosophy, and sociology. One of the most original Polish poets of the 20th century, he published fifteen volumes of poetry, beginning with Lead Soldiers in 1948. His wanderings with Polish Roma at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s resulted in the monograph Gypsies on Polish Roads (1965) as well as translations from Romany of the poet Papusza. His interest in Jewish history and culture resulted in an anthology of folk poetry of Polish Jews, Raisins with Almonds (1964). He also translated into Polish poetry from the Romanian, Spanish, and Russian. His life-long fascination with the writings of Bruno Schulz began during the occupation. He later researched and collected materials about Schulz, finding and publishing many of his unknown manuscripts, prints and drawings. Ficowski's pioneering biography and analysis of Schulz's work is Regions of the Great Heresy (1967). In the '70s and '80s Ficowski was banned from printing and published in underground editions. His last volume of poetry, Pantareja, appeared in 2006, a few months before his death.\nJennifer Grotz is the author of three books of poetry, Window Left Open (Graywolf Press),The Needle (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), and Cusp (Mariner Books) as well as translator of two books from the French: Psalms of All My Days (Carnegie Mellon), a selection of Patrice de La Tour du Pin, and Rochester Knockings (Open Letter), a novel by Hubert Haddad. She teaches at the University of Rochester and directs the Bread Loaf Writers' Conferences.\nPiotr Sommer is a Polish poet, the author of Things to Translate (Bloodaxe Books), Continued (Wesleyan UP), and Overdoing It (Trias Chapbook Series). He has published poetry collections, books of essays on poetry, and poetry translations (Ashbery, Berryman, Cage, Koch, Lowell, O'Hara, Reznikoff, Schubert, Schuyler). He has won prizes and fellowships, and has taught poetry at American universities. He lives outside Warsaw and edits Literatura na rwiecie, a magazine of foreign writing in Polish translations.\n"What good luck to finally have in English the writings of the brilliant Jerzy Ficowski, the poet who lived at least seventeen lives, fighting in the Warsaw Uprising, and later traveling for years with the Roma people through the roads of Poland, opposing his government, and watching the authorities ban his poems, a poet who translated from Spanish and Romanian and Yiddish and Roma, but most of all from the tongue of silence...Beautifully translated by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer, these poems also document the tragedy of the Holocaust, with the direct and uncompromising voice with which he reminds us of the great poets such as Różewicz and Świrszczyńska, while remaining, all the while, himself. Read a piece such as 'I was unable to save / a single life' in a bookstore, and I guarantee you will want to take this book with you, to keep it for the rest of your life."--Ilya Kaminsky 
"Thanks to these brilliant, careful, inspired translations, we can now read Jerzy Ficowski, one of Poland's best kept secrets. This book is a marvel in its weird clarity and extraordinary range of styles and subjects, from the perfectly unassuming paradox of the title, all the way through to its final poems about bumblebees and Satie and mother nature, who scratches herself and 'shudders / with a tsunami.' How fortunate we are to have the unassailable evidence that all along, there was yet another genius of 20th century Polish poetry."--Matthew Zapruder 
Poetry. Jewish Studies.\nBook Description\nAn essential English debut of the award-winning poetry of the Polish author and WWII resistance fighter Jerzy Ficowski.

Everything I Don’t Know

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

World Poetry Books

Fiction. Translated from the Polish by Soren Gauger and Marcin Piekoszewski. Born in 1924 in Warsaw, Jerzy Ficowski is primarily known for his work on Bruno Schulz (Regions of the Great Heresy) and his poetry. Not having belonged to any literary school or circle, he occupies a peculiar place in Polish literature, and in these short stories and sketches he takes Schulz1s mythologization of reality, whereby fiction is a way of turning the quotidian into the fantastical and eternal, and reinterprets it to address the sense of loss and bleak landscape of postwar Poland. Effortlessly weaving memory, religious ritual, daily life, and the magical, Ficowski hints at a sinister presence lurking behind these dreamlike tales--a trace of ruin or disintegration always present as the narrator repeatedly struggles to link some aspect of a past that has been annihilated with a present that is foreign and hostile.

WAITING FOR THE DOG TO SLEEP

Short Stories & Anthologies

Twisted Spoon Press

Hardback book with dust jacket titled THE GYPSIES IN POLAND: History and Customs by Jerzy Ficowski. Published in 1989 by Interpress Publishers. Illustrated in black and white photographs/reproductions with a few in color. Bookseller since 1995 (ULG-3-bottom-R-flat) rareviewbooks

The Gypsies in Poland: History and customs

History

Europe

Interpress Publishers

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