La guerra degli ebrei (Zydowska wojna), Rome: Edizioni E/O, 1992.
Ritratti di famiglia (Szkice rodzinne), Florence: Giuntina, 1994.
Hungarian:
Ideológiai élet [Życie ideologiczne; życie osobiste], Budapest: Múlt és Jövő, 2002.
Grynberg Henryk
A novelist and short-story writer, poet, playwright and essayist who has won many prestigious literary awards and is the author of more than twenty books, this chronicler of the fate of the Polish Jews was born in 1936. Henryk Grynberg and his mother were the only survivors from their whole, large family. He spent the years 1942-1944 in hiding places and on "Aryan papers". After the war, he lived in Lodz and Warsaw. He became an actor in the Warsaw Yiddish Theatre company; he defected while the company was touring the USA in 1967, and he has lived in America ever since. Grynberg published his first story in 1959; it was later included in his debut collection, The "Antigone" Crew (1963). In the works that he published in Poland, as in those that he was able to publish as an emigré (without worrying about the censor), he told the stories of those who died during the war and of those who survived to live afterwards in Lodz, Warsaw, or New York, struggling to come to terms with their own memory and with the fact that others did not remember. As one of his protagonists asks: "How can people live when everything that made life worth living is dead?" This is also the principal theme of his poems, which combine to make up the long lament of a survivor who lives to cultivate the memory of those who were murdered, who becomes a "keeper of the graves" in a world infested with nihilism and materialism, a world increasingly indifferent to the fate of the victims. Grynberg makes abundant use of biographical and autobiographical material. His Jewish protagonists are usually the narrators, but their personal experiences have a metaphorical dimension and are usually supplemented by the experiences of other "survivors". Grynberg's books are short and written in a scrupulously economical language where both sarcasm and lyricism sometimes appear. Each new book is a further record of the fates of people who have been saved from oblivion by the writer in the conviction that doing so is not only the duty of literature towards the victims of the Holocaust, but also a confirmation of the sanctity of human life itself.
There are more than 28,000 publishers registered in Poland. However, the market is highly concentrated. The 200 largest publishing firms still hold almost 98 per cent of it. More »
