Alicia Nitecki

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Alicia Nitecki (2009)

Alicia Nitecki (born Alicia Wysocka  ; born January 2, 1942 in Warsaw ) is an American author and translator and professor of English literature at Bentley University in Waltham (Massachusetts) .

Childhood and Youth in Europe

From 1942 to 1944 Alicia Nitecki lived in Warsaw, which was occupied by the National Socialists , with her family, who belonged to the upper middle class. After the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944, she and her family were deported by the National Socialists to West Germany and finally lived in a labor camp in Lauterbach (Black Forest) until 1945 . After the end of the war, the family was taken to a Polish refugee camp in the canton of La Courtine , France near Nantes and then to Carqueiranne in southern France, where Alicia Nitecki attended a French elementary school until 1947.

In April 1948 the family came to England and moved frequently, which meant that Alicia had to change schools frequently. She passed her Eleven Plus exam at the Anglican School in Scalford in Leicestershire and after moving again to Derby , she attended a grammar school and later a Catholic school, from which she moved to the University of Sheffield in 1960 to study English literature to study.

After graduating from Sheffield, she first took part in a secretary course at the City of London College and then worked as a secretary and also as a babysitter, including for the family of the American literary scholar Richard Ellman, who suggested that she study English literature in the US and wrote her a recommendation. In 1966, Alicia Nitecki was accepted to the University of New York State at Buffalo .

Academic career in the USA

In Buffalo, Nitecki took the master’s exam and then moved to Kent State University in Ohio as a doctoral candidate, where she worked with JL Baird in 1976 to obtain a Dr. phil received his doctorate. Since 1980 she has been Professor of English Literature at Bentley University.

Nitecki's scholarly interest was in Middle English literature , but she soon became interested in Holocaust literature , especially after her first trip to Germany, where she visited the Flossenbürg concentration camp , where her grandfather had been imprisoned.

Her interest in Holocaust literature was with Tadeusz Borowski and other Polish writers who survived the Holocaust. She soon began doing Polish-English translations on a smaller scale, before translating Borowski's We Were in Auschwitz in 2000 and Henryk Grynberg 's Drohobycz in 2002 . Further translations:

  • Halina Nelken: And Yet, I Am Here , transl. Nelken, Nitecki, University of Massachusetts Press, 1999 (Paperback 2001)
  • Tadeusz Drewnowski: Postal Indiscretions: The Correspondence of Tadeusz Borowski , transl. A. Nitecki Northwestern U. Press, 2007
  • Mieczyslaw Lurczynski: The Old Guard , trans. A. Nitecki SUNY Press, planned for 2009

Nitecki has also published numerous articles in American and German magazines and has lectured on both Middle English literature and the Holocaust in depictions by Polish authors.

She is married to Zbigniew Nitecki and has one daughter

Major works

  • Figures of Old Age in Fourteenth Century English Literature , in Aging and the Aged in Medieval Europe , edited by Michael M. Sheehan. Pontifical Institute Press, 1990.
  • Recovered Land , The University of Massachusetts Press 1995 ISBN 0-87023-976-7
  • Jakub's world: a boy's story of loss and survival in the holocaust (with Jack Terry), Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. ISBN 0-7914-6407-5

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Born as Alicia Wysocka, later she received the name of her stepfather Korzeniowski, until she married Zbigniew Nitecki.
  2. ↑ The stay in Lauterbach and subsequent visits there in the 1990s are described in the Lauterbach-im-Schwarzwald chapter of her book Recovered Land .
  3. ↑ see also: Hans Hekler: After more than 45 years Lauterbach rediscovered - an unusual look at a difficult time in D'Kräz , Contributions to the history of the city and space Schramberg, No. 29 (2009), pp. 2-9
  4. ↑ Topic of the dissertation: The Presence of the Past: the Sense of Time in the York Cycle of Mystery Plays . 1976
  5. ↑ She had previously translated individual chapters from Grynberg's book for various magazines.
personal data
SURNAME Nitecki, Alicia
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American author and translator
DATE OF BIRTH January 2, 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH Warsaw