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SUMMARY:"My Name is Stramer" book talk
UID:https://instytutpolski.pl/newyork/2026/10/01/my-name-is-stramer-book-talk-2/
LOCATION:
DTSTAMP:20261029
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Warsaw:20261029
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Warsaw:20261029
DESCRIPTION:October 29, 2026 at 12:15 PM - 1:45 PMColumbia Harriman InstituteMarshall
D. Shulman Seminar Room, 1219 International Affairs Building420 W 118th
Street, 12th floor, New York, NY 10027In person, free admission, register
by 4pm on October 28, 2026 in order to attend this event.
East Central European Center, the Harriman Institute, Literary Translation
at Columbia, the Polish Cultural Institute New York, the Adam Mickiewicz
Institute, and the Polish Ministry of Culture invite for a book talk by
author Mikołaj Łoziński and translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Susan
Bernofsky and Ronald Meyer will serve as discussants. The event will be
moderated by Małgorzata Mazurek.
Though he returned from America penniless, Nathan Stramer still daydreams
of a better life as he struggles to make ends meet back the small Polish
town of Tarnów. Raising 6 children with his wife Rywka, he chases
hare-brained schemes to make money while she fantasizes about a trip to the
seaside. Crammed into a 2-room apartment on down-at-heel Goldhammer Street,
the family gets by on very little, and everyone has to pitch into
Nathan’s latest ventures, including an ill-fated Stramer family café.
As the years pass, their children begin to take steps into a changing
world. Rudek, the eldest, sets his passions aside for a practical job; Rena
embarks on an affair with a married man, and Hesio and Salek become ever
more involved with Communism.
While Nathan and Rywka try to hold the centre of their raucous family life
together, national conflicts begin to escalate in Europe, and sinister
forces creep into the Stramers’ world that they don’t yet understand.
Bursting with humor and pathos, My Name is Stramer is a beautiful, loving
evocation of a vanished world. Internationally acclaimed as one of
Poland’s foremost writers, Mikołaj Łoziński tells the tragic story of
the interwar years through the ordinary triumphs and struggles of a
sprawling Polish-Jewish family.
Mikołaj Łoziński is a Polish novelist, screenwriter, and photographer.
He has received several awards for his writing, including the Polityka
Passport and the Kościelski Foundation Award. His third novel, My Name Is
Stramer, was shortlisted for the prestigious Nike Literary Award and has
been translated into 16 languages. Łoziński lives in Warsaw.
Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by many of Poland’s leading
contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as classics,
biographies, essays, crime fiction, poetry and children’s books. She is
best known as a translator of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk. For ten years
she was a mentor for the Emerging Translators’ Mentorship Program and is
a former co-chair of the UK Translators Association.
Susan Bernofsky is a much-lauded translator of modernist and contemporary
German-language literature, including Robert Walser, Franz Kafka, Thomas
Mann, and Jenny Erpenbeck. She directs Literary Translation at Columbia.
She holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Washington University and a PhD in
Comparative Literature from Princeton University.
Ronald Meyer is the translator of Akhmatova’s My Half-Century: Selected
Prose (Ardis, Northwestern, Overlook, 1992-2013) and Dostoyevsky’s The
Gambler and Other Stories (Penguin, 2010). He is co-translator, with Mark
Serman, of Iryna Malyshko’s From Donetsk to Kyiv: My War Journey (HURI,
forthcoming). He is currently translating The Laboratory, the collected
prose fiction of Polish poet Anna Frajlich.
The book talk is co-organized by East Central European Center, the Harriman
Institute, Literary Translation at Columbia, the Polish Cultural Institute
New York, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, and the Polish Ministry of
Culture.
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