S4E8 and all video recordings are available on our YouTube.

Encounters with Polish Literature is a video series for anyone interested in literature and the culture of books and reading. Each month, host David A. Goldfarb will present a new topic in conversation with an expert on that author or book or movement in Polish literature. More about the Encounters with Polish Literature series and the timeline.

Piotr Paziński (b. 1973), is a key intellectual figure in the contemporary Jewish revival in Poland. He is an editor, essayist, writer and translator. He graduated in philosophy from Warsaw University in 1999 with an MA on Immanuel Kant’s metaphysics and studied at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. In 2005 he defended his PhD thesis about James Joyce’s Ulysses at the Institute for Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL PAN). He has published two books in Polish on Ulysses: Labirynt i drzewo (Labyrinth and Tree: Studies on James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” Kraków 2005) and a fictitious travel guide for the Irish capital, Dublin z Ulissesem (Dublin with “Ulysses,” Warsaw 2008) with eighteen imaginary city walks and about 250 biographies of the persons mentioned in the novel.

In 2009 he published his novella Pensjonat (The Boarding House), shortlisted for the Nike Award, Poland’s highest literary prize, and received the Paszport Polityki, the cultural award of the Polish weekly Polityka for literature, film, theatre, music and visual arts in 2009 and the European Union Prize for Literature in 2012. The Boarding House is a story about young man who visits a small Jewish boarding house near Warsaw, where he used to spend his summer holidays as a boy. The plot covers several periods and revives the events of the past and triggers new conflicts and ideological discourses. It is full of numerous Jewish anecdotes and similes. In 2013 published his second work of fiction based on his life experiences and Polish-Jewish memory, Ptasie ulice (Bird Streets), a collection of three short-stories and one novella on Jewish collective memory overshadowed by the Holocaust. He has also published the collections of literary essays Rzeczywistość poprzecierana (Frayed Reality), Atrapy stworzenia (Imitations of Creation), Przebierańcy w nicości (Disguised in Nothingness). He has written articles on Judaism, and Jewish culture and history for many newspapers and magazines. He has translated short stories by Sh. Y. Agnon from Hebrew, receiving the Boy-Żelenski Prize for the best translation in 2016, and from English, Fania and Amos Oz’ Jews and Words. He has edited and co-edited books for the Midrasz Library and the Austeria publishing house, among them Salomon Maimon’s Autobiography, Lawrence Kushner’s The Book of Letters, Deborah Vogel’s Collected Writings, John Felstiner’s Paul Celan, and recently Petro Rychlo’s The Jewish Poets of Bukowina. He also coordinated the project of reprinting Isaac Cylkow’s 19th century Polish translation of the Hebrew Bible. From 1997-2019 he edited and co-edited Midrasz – the magazine of Polish Jews.

In this episode, we discuss the situation for Jewish families that never left Poland during the twentieth century and maintained their sense of Jewish identity all along and the phenomenon of the Jewish revival that peaked in the 1990s. We focus on his two works of autobiographical fiction that have been translated into English, The Boarding House and Bird Streets, which evoke images of prewar Jewish life as seen through the unavoidable lens of the Holocaust.

Piotr Paziński in English Translation:

Piotr Paziński. The Boarding House. Tr. M.J. “Tusia” Dąbrowska. Champaign, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 2018.

Piotr Paziński. Bird Streets. Tr. Ursula Phillips. Detroit: Vine Editions, 2022.