Leo Lipski

Leo Lipski , originally Leo Lipschütz (born July 10, 1917 in Zurich ; died July 7, 1997 in Tel Aviv-Jaffa ), was a Jewish-Polish prose writer. His work is mainly autobiographical and describes his stay in Soviet camps, his physical handicap and the loss of his family and friends in the Holocaust .

life and work

Leo Lipschütz was born in Zurich into a Jewish family of Polish origin. He spent his childhood and youth in Krakow , where he graduated from high school, studied psychology and philosophy at the local university and made his debut in magazines as a man of letters. In 1939 he fled to Lviv , where he was arrested by Soviet authorities and sent to a labor camp in 1940. As a member of the Polish army , he was able to leave the USSR . In Tehran, he fell ill with typhus and encephalitis and was discharged from the army. After briefly studying in Beirut , he settled in Tel Aviv and lived in what would later become Israel in impoverished circumstances. At this stage in his life he was paralyzed on one side and typed his works with one hand into the typewriter, later using a dictaphone . In 1975 he took a trip to Paris, where he was cared for by the poet and translator Łucja Gliksman (1913-2002).

His autobiographical novel Niespokojni ("The Restless") describes the author's young intellectual and erotic experiences. The work began in Krakow before the Second World War and was published in 1952 in the Polish émigré magazine Wiadomości . Dzień i noc (“Day and Night”, 1957), which describes 24 hours in a Soviet labor camp from the perspective of a Jewish doctor's assistant, and the short story Piotruś (“Peterchen”, 1960), the protagonist of which sees himself forced out of poverty in the Tel Aviv market were published in the émigré magazine Kultura in Paris, see also Biblioteka Kultury . Sarni braciszek ("The Little Deer Brother"), a swan song to the lost world of Krakow Judaism, and a collection of short stories from the Gulag were the first of Lipski's works to appear in the Polish underground press . After the fall of communism, all of Lipski's works were published in Poland, including the short story collection Śmierć i dziewczyna (“Death and the Maiden”, 1991). The volume Paryż ze złota (“Paris of Gold”), published posthumously in 2002, contains memories of his trip to France, correspondence and prose fragments.

Lipski's work has been translated into various languages. It is saturated with an ambiguous symbolism and speaks of loneliness, suffering, humiliation and the evil in a world in which all cultural and religious values ​​have proven to be relative and cannot offer a path to salvation. According to the judgment of Polish literary critics, Lipski is one of the greatest Polish authors of the 20th century.

In 1996 Leo Lipski was awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta . His estate is in the Archives of Polish Emigration in the library of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń .

Web links

Commons : Leo Lipski  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Short biography The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe