S5E11 and all video recordings are available on our YouTube.

Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian 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 and Ukrainian Literature series and the timeline.

Hanna Krall (b. 1935) is a pioneer in the field of Polish reportage. She began publishing in the mid-1950s in Życie Warszawy (Warsaw Life) and later in Politika until martial law in 1981, when she began publishing in the independent Catholic weekly, Tygodnik Powszechny, underground, and working in film. After the fall of Communism in 1989, she began writing for Poland’s leading independent daily, Gazeta Wyborcza. She is a Holocaust survivor and is best known for her work on the Holocaust and its aftermath for individuals who survived the war in hiding as she did, whose lives illustrate the broad effects of the war on the population as a whole. Her most well-known book is To Outwit God (published earlier in English as Shielding the Flame), an extended interview with Warsaw Ghetto Uprising leader, Marek Edelman.

In this episode we look primarily at her work, Chasing the King of Hearts, about a woman who goes to great lengths to find her husband who has been arrested and taken to a camp near Vienna, and about their lives after the war in Poland and in Israel. We look at two stories from her collection, Proofs of Existence, included in the translated volume The Woman from Hamburg and Other True Stories, “The Dybbuk,” about a man haunted by the spirit of his half-brother, killed in the Warsaw Ghetto, and “Hamlet,” about Andrzej Czajkowski, a concert pianist who is himself haunted by feelings of guilt and betrayal derived from his experience hiding in a wardrobe as a child during the war. We look closely at passages from the author’s work with an eye toward her sparse language and efficiency of style, and the ethical implications of her approach to reportage.

Hanna Krall in English translation:

Hanna Krall. Chasing the King of Hearts. Tr. Philip Boehm. Afterword by Mariusz Szczygieł. New York: Feminist Press (CUNY), 2017.

Hanna Krall. The Subtenant / To Outwit God. Tr. Jarosław Anders, Joanna Stasińska, and Lawrence Weschler. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1992.

Hanna Krall. The Woman from Hamburg and Other True Stories. New York: Other Press, 2006.

Biography in the The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women                                                               

Sean Gasper Bye is a translator from Polish. He has translated books by authors including Małgorzata Szejnert, Szczepan Twardoch, Mikołaj Grynberg and others. His translations have won the EBRD Literary Prize and the Asymptote Close Approximations Prize; and been shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, a National Jewish Book Award, the Sami Rohr Prize and the National Translation Award. He has served as Interim Executive Director of the American Literary Translators Association, a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow and Translator-in-Residence at Princeton University.

David A. Goldfarb, Host & Producer
Bartek Remisko, Curator and Executive Producer
Natalia Iyudin, Producer