Piotr Paziński - Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature – S4E8

Piotr Paziński (b. 1973), is a key intellectual figure in the contemporary Jewish revival in Poland. He is an editor, essayist, writer and translator.

In 2009 he published his novella Pensjonat (The Boarding House), shortlisted for the Nike Award, Poland’s highest literary prize, and received the Paszport Polityki, the cultural award of the Polish weekly Polityka for literature, film, theatre, music and visual arts in 2009 and the European Union Prize for Literature in 2012. In 2013 published his second work of fiction based on his life experiences and Polish-Jewish memory, Ptasie ulice (Bird Streets), a collection of three short-stories and one novella on Jewish collective memory overshadowed by the Holocaust.

In this episode, we discuss the situation for Jewish families that never left Poland during the twentieth century and maintained their sense of Jewish identity all along and the phenomenon of the Jewish revival that peaked in the 1990s. We focus on his two works of autobiographical fiction that have been translated into English, The Boarding House and Bird Streets, which evoke images of prewar Jewish life as seen through the unavoidable lens of the Holocaust.

Learn more about this episode, and see the biography of the guest on the Polish Cultural Institute New York's website: https://bit.ly/3SvB18W

Access the playlist of the entire series:
https://bit.ly/47Q7xHL

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