 | | Scriptum
Kielce 2002
© Jadwiga Maurer
144 x 202
392 pages
paperback
ISBN 83-88825-05-4
rights available |
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Jadwiga MaurerDoppelgangers
Excerpt
Doppelgangers is the retrospective collected prose of Jadwiga Maurer, bringing together her entire literary output. It consists of twenty-two pieces in all, mainly long short stories. Presented in chronological order, they make up a more extensive story of an autobiographical nature. Maurer is interested in a particular version of the fate of the surviving Polish Jews. It concerns the ones who left the country immediately after the war (like the author, who was then a teenager), and ended up in western Germany as former Nazi concentration camp prisoners. Specifically, it is about the Jewish displaced persons who settled in post-war Munich, where most of the stories in Doppelgangers are set, and who studied and did their best to make the leap into so-called normal life there. So the environment Maurer focuses on is a group of Munich university students who speak to each other in Polish, and also several Jewish families from the heroine’s parents’ generation who have settled in Munich. Maurer describes how temporary the atmosphere there felt, and the incredible hunger for life that broke through. Her heroes want as soon as possible to gain a diploma from a German educational institution, highly regarded in the outside world, and emigrate to the United States or Israel. The ”Doppelgangers” of the title are no more than a gallery of alien, but at the same time personal incarnations. By taking a close look at other people and by presenting the wide range of fates experienced after the war by those who escaped the Holocaust, the narrator-heroine tries hard to understand herself. The others (the Doppelgangers) are her mirror.
Dariusz Nowacki
Jadwiga Maurer was born in Kielce. As a Jewish child she was hidden in a Catholic convent in Slovakia. After the war she and her parents left for Munich, where she studied Slavonic philology. Since 1968 she has been a university professor in the USA, currently at the University of Kansas. She has been writing stories since the 1960s.
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