Book Reviews Ghetto Heroes Square in Kraków / Photo by annaspies / Flickr Piotr Florczyk’s From the Annals of Kraków (Lynx House Press, 2020) narrates the searing realization of an almost unnoticed absence, a regret urging us to learn about what we missed. This, his second full-length volume of poems in English, shows that the shadow of the Holocaust continues to touch generations born in the late decades of the twentieth century. In his case, the desire to learn how his Jewish neighbors lived and what happened to them merged with his desire to honor the memory of his grandparents who were slave laborers during World War II. His poems are thus a “song . . . certificate of authenticity.” An answer to the deniers, they go beyond postmemory mourning and anger. Orchestrated by palimpsests, they create a multitiered lieu de mémoire and a multivoiced narrative for Kraków’s Holocaust victims. We hear the victims’ testimonies, Florczyk’s reaction to them, and his Holocaust tour guide’s information. We are with him at the USC Shoah Foundation where he gathered testimonies, during his visits to the Kraków ghetto and surrounding camps, and at memorial sites nearby. Of the squares in which Jews lived and died, he writes: “the square not a blank page then / or the proverbial do-over / but one script / placed atop another script – like / so – where / the present meets that which was and could’ve been.” Who speaks words so terrible... Continue reading at 'World Literature Today'
[ World Literature Today | 2021-04-28 20:24:52 UTC ]
The National Book Awards are getting a rewrite.New rules announced Tuesday include a "long list" of 10 nominees to be offered for each of the four competitive categories before being narrowed to the traditional five finalists. And the pool of judges will be expanded beyond writers to include... Continue reading at Crains New York
[ Crains New York | 2013-01-15 00:00:00 UTC ]
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