 | Wydawnictwo Literackie
Cracow 2006
123 x 196
216 pages
paperback
ISBN 83-08-03827-1
Translation rights: Wydawnictwo Literackie |
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Michał GłowińskiA Footbridge Over Time
Excerpt
A Footbridge Over Time is the latest volume by Michał Głowiński, eminent historian of literature and for almost ten years a popular writer of fiction too. His Black Seasons (1998), a memoir of the war years when as a Jewish child he was hidden in German-occupied Warsaw, was nominated for the Nike Award. A Footbridge Over Time contains stories about his native “Small Town”, in other words Pruszków, a place outside Warsaw on the “tiny, narrow, shallow River Utrata”, the miniature universe of his childhood and early post-war youth. These are stories of his family, friends and neighbours, the places in his personal geography and the events in his life. Like Asmodeus, Głowiński goes for sentimental strolls, lifts covers to peer into the well of time and recovers from memory images of the past life of the Small Town’s Polish and Jewish citizens. Yet the shadow of catastrophe hangs over the idyllic land of his childhood: the fate of those who were murdered and those who fled the Holocaust and left the Small Town for good often features in his stories. Głowiński often uses personal themes. “The autobiographical threads running through the book and all the events sourced from the history of my own family are fully in line with the truth,” he confirms. But, as he admits, he is also willing to combine the real and the unreal, fact and fiction, often stylises his account to suit the theme, and plays with literary allusions, producing as much a documentary as an almost fictionalised portrait of the Small-Town life that is now a thing of the past. The first part of his story about the Small Town, The Story of a Single Poplar, came out in 2003.
Marek Zaleski
Michał Głowiński (born 1943) is an expert on the history and theory of literature. He is a professor at the Polish Academy’s Institute for Literary Research, the author of some definitive papers on Polish communist newspeak as well as fascinating essays.
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