Henryk Grynberg

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Henryk Grynberg (born July 4, 1936 in Warsaw ) is a Polish prose writer , poet , playwright and essayist living in the USA . He is considered to be one of the most important voices in contemporary Jewish-Polish literature.

Henryk Grynberg

Life

A childhood during the Shoah in Poland

Henryk Grynberg spent his childhood in the village of Radoszyna in eastern Mazovia . When the German occupiers in the summer of 1942 implemented the resolutions of the Wannsee Conference regarding the “ final solution to the Jewish question ” with murderous consistency - with mass deportations to the extermination camps - part of the Henryk Grynbergs family fled into the woods to hide there. The paternal grandparents were deported to Treblinka and murdered. Grynberg's younger brother "Buciek" gave the mother to a farming family because she had the hope that he would be safer there. “Buciek's” identity was revealed, the one and a half year old boy was extradited to the Germans and murdered. The family first spent the winter of 1942/1943 with a Polish farmer who was willing to take them in, and later in hiding on the estate in Radoszyna, where Grynberg's father had run the dairy farm. In the spring of 1943 the father succeeded in procuring “Aryan papers” for Henryk and his mother; he himself wanted to stay in the area he was familiar with and try to find shelter with farmers he knew. Henryk and his mother - with a false identity - were able to find accommodation with a family in Warsaw, but after the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto the situation became more and more dangerous and the risk increasingly difficult to calculate. Finally, the mother accepted the offer to give illegal lessons for board and lodging in a distant village in the east of the occupied country (the German occupiers had only provided elementary education for the Polish population). In this village, nine-year-old Henryk and his mother saw the arrival of the Red Army in late summer 1944.

Henryk Grynberg and his mother were the only survivors in the family. The relatives who had hidden in the forest had been killed by partisans . The father, Abram Grynberg, was killed by a Polish farmer in the spring of 1944 (see above all the 1992 documentary Miejsce urodzenia (“Birthplace”) by Paweł Łoziński and Grynberg's essay The Obligation , which tells of the making of this film).

In autumn 1944 mother and son first went to Dobre, the mother's hometown; later they moved to Łódź , which became a magnet for Jewish survivors immediately after the end of the war.

Studies, Yiddish theater, exile

From 1954 to 1958 Grynberg studied journalism at Warsaw University , one of his fellow students was Hanna Krall . From 1958 to 1967 he was an actor at the State Yiddish Theater Ida Kamińskas ( Państwowy Teatr Żydowski ). When, after the June War ( Six Day War ) in 1967, the smoldering anti-Semitism in the People's Republic of Poland became more and more open as a political instrument to suppress the opposition, Henryk Grynberg decided to leave the country. One opportunity arose when the Yiddish Theater was invited to New York for guest appearances in October 1967. From this tour he did not return to the People's Republic. At first he lived in Los Angeles, where his mother and stepfather had settled after a long and arduous emigration journey (Tel Aviv, Buffalo). In 1971 he graduated from the University of Los Angeles with a degree in Russian literature . When he received an offer to work on the editorial staff of the Polish magazine Ameryka , he moved to McLean near Washington (DC) , where he still lives today. After working at Ameryka , he switched to Voice of America , where he worked until 1991.

The literary work

Henryk Grynberg made his literary debut in 1959 in the magazine Współczesność . The theme of his life is the experience of the death sentence that has been passed on him and his family. The examination of this did not come to an end in 1945, however - which is more often found in literary testimonies about the Shoah - but continued beyond the end of the war. The continuation of the life story in the years after the war is essential for Grynberg's work: it describes the experience of the surviving Polish Jews who - in a society that is supposedly free from the evils of anti-Semitism, which has been branded as the disease of capitalism - soon had to experience renewed stigmatization, his own experiences with the censorship, which cut his texts exactly where they spoke of his "life topic" - and finally the experience of the renewed loss of home as a result of the anti-Semitic campaign that began in 1967 and with the "March events" of 1968 reached its peak.

The work of Henryk Grynberg is in the context of a broad debate that pervades the entire Polish - and especially the Jewish-Polish - literature: “Poland was the epicenter of the murder of European Jews - the extermination camps were on Polish soil, and the Polish Jews had most of the victims to mourn. Dealing with the mass murder of the Jews has therefore been a fundamental concern of Polish literature since the 1940s. "

Grynberg's most important texts include the story The Jewish War , published in the People's Republic of Poland in 1965 , which deals with the escape from deportation, the time in hiding in the forest, the time in Warsaw and the months in the eastern Polish village, as well as the Immediately following this narrative, Der Sieg , which was written in the USA and published in 1969 by the Parisian exile publishing house Kultura , the most important literary center of Polish emigration. (The two stories were published in 2001 by Wydawnictwo Czarne in one volume.)

Until 1987, Grynberg's works could only be published in exile publishers (Paris, London, Berlin). Since the fall of the Wall, his books have seen numerous new editions in Poland and are increasingly becoming the subject of literary studies. The recent reception of Henryk Grynberg's work reflects the process of “remembering after forgetting”.

“Henryk Grynberg's work can be described as a symbolic regaining of memory. Remembrance is the secret of salvation - this sentence of the Baal Shem Tov serves as the motto for one of the stories. Grynberg captures stories of Jews who fell victim to mass extermination and of those rescued, scattered all over the world. ”“ Polish-Jewish survivors of the Holocaust like Henryk Grynberg write autobiographical prose on the border of reality and fiction, in order to capture the unimaginable To move imaginable. "

In his essays, Henryk Grynberg et al. a. deals with the historical causes of anti-Semitism, with the consequences of a manipulative memory policy that falsifies the Holocaust, and with the complex questions of identity in the area of ​​tension between the Jewish-Polish problem. Two large essays are dedicated in particular to the Polish-language literature of the Holocaust, which Grynberg regards as the most important “eyewitness” in European literature.

Individual poems by Grynberg appeared in anthologies:

  • Polish poetry of the present
  • Lyric quintet. Five themes in Polish poetry
  • Henryk Grynberg - a portrait published by the Polish Institute in Leipzig

In the anthology dreams are free. The story The Volunteer appeared in a Polish reader . An excerpt from the essay Obsesyjny temat appeared - under the title The Subject of My Obsession - in the anthology Poland in Exile .

Grynberg, who considers himself a chronicler of the fate of Polish Jews , published over 20 books in the Polish language. He is considered "one of more than a dozen top poets and novelists of Jewish origin who exerted an important influence on contemporary Polish literature".

Henryk Grynberg is a member of the Polish Writers' Union SPP.

In April 2000 Henryk Grynberg was a guest at the Literary Colloquium Berlin together with Wilhelm Dichter. He described this stay in his essay On the beautiful blue Wannsee , which is permeated by the awareness that his appearance as a writer at the Wannsee cannot be separated from the resolutions of the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942. In this essay, the Wannsee becomes a cipher Horrible, the abbreviation for the mass murder, and Grynberg does not devote his attention to the gallery of writers' guests in the LCB, but to the photos and biographies of the “actors” who at the time gave the death sentence for him and his family.

Works in German translation

Prices

  • Kościelscy Foundation Prize
  • Tadeusz Borowski grant
  • Award of the Polish radio station "Free Europe" for the book "The Jewish War"
  • Prize from the magazine "Wiadomości" for the best book of 1975 ("The ideological life")
  • Prize of the Alfred Juryikowski Foundation 1990

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In: Grynberg: Inartistic Truth. Selected essays . Berlin 2014, pp. 297-318.
  2. ^ Henryk Grynberg , ed. from the Polish Institute Leipzig, 1995.
  3. ^ Ida Kamińska: My life, my theater , New York 1973, pp. 260f.
  4. ↑ a b Anja Tippner: "existence proofs": memory and trauma after the Holocaust in Henryk Grynberg, Wilhelm poet and Hanna Krall . In: Eastern Europe , year 2004, issue 1, pp. 57–74, here p. 57.
  5. ↑ Magdalena Marszałek, Alina Molisak (ed.): After forgetting. Appeals to the Holocaust in East Central Europe after 1989 . Kulturverlag Kadmos, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86599-125-6 , in particular the contribution by Magdalena Marszałek: Anamnesen. Explorations of memory in contemporary Polish literature and art , pp. 161–179, and p. 17. Cf. also the extensive study by Barbara Breysach: Schauplatz und Gedächtnisraum Poland. The extermination of the Jews in German and Polish literature . Wallstein, Göttingen 2005, ISBN 3-89244-981-3 .
  6. ^ Justyna Sobolewska : Henryk Grynberg , ed. from the working group literature polska2000, Villa Decius, Krakau 2000 (in the series of authors' books published on the occasion of the Frankfurt Book Fair 2000).
  7. ↑ The Holocaust in Polish Literature and Generation Shoah . In: Inartificial Truth. Selected Essays , pp. 142-191 and pp. 242-281, respectively.
  8. ↑ Reclam, Stuttgart 1973, ed. by Karl Dedecius.
  9. ^ Polish Library, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ed. by Karl Dedecius.
  10. ↑ Leipzig 1995.
  11. ^ Piper, Munich / Zurich 1993, ed. by Olga Mannheimer.
  12. ^ Polish Library, Suhrkamp Verlag 1988, ed. by Krzysztof Dybciak.
  13. ^ Henryk Grynberg , ed. v. Polish Institute Leipzig, 1995.
  14. ↑ Grynberg: At the beautiful blue Wannsee . In: Inartistic Truth , pp. 282–296.
  15. ↑ all prices according to "Henryk Grynberg", Polish Institute Leipzig 1995.
personal data
SURNAME Grynberg, Henryk
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish prose writer, poet, playwright and essayist
DATE OF BIRTH 4th July 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH Warsaw