I’d Like to Say Sorry, but There’s No One to Say Sorry To
Stories
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- €10.99
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- €10.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards
Finalist, National Translation Award in Prose
An exquisitely original collection of darkly funny stories that explore the panorama of Jewish experience in contemporary Poland, from a world-class contemporary writer
“These small, searing prose pieces are moving and unsettling at the same time. If the diagnosis they present is right, then we have a great problem in Poland.” —Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Prize laureate and author of Flights
Mikołaj Grynberg is a psychologist and photographer who has spent years collecting and publishing oral histories of Polish Jews. In his first work of fiction—a book that has been widely praised by critics and was shortlisted for Poland’s top literary prize—Grynberg recrafts those histories into little jewels, fictionalized short stories with the ring of truth.
Both biting and knowing, I’d Like to Say Sorry, but There’s No One to Say Sorry To takes the form of first-person vignettes, through which Grynberg explores the daily lives and tensions within Poland between Jews and gentiles haunted by the Holocaust and its continuing presence.
In “Unnecessary Trouble,” a grandmother discloses on her deathbed that she is Jewish; she does not want to die without her family knowing. What is passed on to the family is fear and the struggle of what to do with this information. In “Cacophony,” Jewish identity is explored through names, as Miron and his son Jurek demonstrate how heritage is both accepted and denied. In “My Five Jews,” a non-Jewish narrator remembers five interactions with her Jewish countrymen, and her own anti-Semitism, ruefully noting that perhaps she was wrong and should apologize, but no one is left to say “I’m sorry” to.
Each of the thirty-one stories is a dazzling and haunting mini-monologue that highlights a different facet of modern Poland’s complex and difficult relationship with its Jewish past.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The vital English-language debut from Grynberg, a photographer, psychologist, and oral historian, features 31 first-person vignettes narrated by Jews and gentiles in Poland who belong to the generation born after the Holocaust. Through these monologues, the speakers struggle with survivor's guilt as they come to terms with the horrors of the ghettos and the camps as experienced by their family and friends. Common themes among them are wanting to forget the past so as to belong to the living and feeling alienated in the present by both family and fellow countrymen. In "An Elegant Purse," the speaker is determined to find her grandparents' graves. As it dawns on her that her mother was Jewish, she has a new purpose: "I'm learning how to be a daughter all over again." "Procession" tells the story of a woman whose grandfather mistakenly believed the French would protect his family, but they were arrested and everyone, except the narrator's mother, died in Auschwitz. As a photographer, Grynberg knows the value of capturing a moment in time; through these narratives, the reader sees, as translator Bye notes, "something we might not have seen with our own eye." These views of a tragic past are brought sharply into focus. Correction: This review has been updated to better reflect the range of first-person accounts contained in the book. It has also been corrected; an earlier version misgendered one of the character.