Customer Reviews

The Jewish War and The Victory (Jewish Lives)

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Henryk Grynberg is a Polish Jewish novelist, essayist, playwright, and poet who, since 1967, has lived in the United States. Considered to be one of the most important contemporary émigré authors writing in Polish, Grynberg published a collection of short stories, a volume of poetry, and a novel before leaving Poland. Afterwards he continued to publish poetry and prose abroad, mostly on the Holocaust and post Holocaust experience of the Polish Jews. Because of communist censorship his works were absent from the official Polish book market for nearly twenty years, but have been translated into French, Hungarian, German, Italian, Hebrew, Czech, Swedish and Dutch and, since 1987, were again published in Poland.
The Jewish War (Żydowska wojna) is an autobiographical novel that tells the story of the annihilation of the narrator's immediate family, relatives, neighbors and of his own and his mother's unlikely survival. The narrator's father's death in 1944 - not at the hands of the Germans but of a Polish bandit - is the painful center of the narration. The rest is an account of fear, humiliation, terror and the memory of terror with an occasional miracle, a helping hand. The narrator's persecution by deadly memory makes survival into another kind of war, more pernicious because devoid of any hope for peace.
The novel is divided into two parts, entitled respectively "Father" and "Mother." Part One recounts the narrator's father's struggle to save his family, their escape hours before a transport to the Treblinka death camp, the loss of the narrator's younger brother who is too heavy to be carried and too young to run. It is filled with details of the family's various hiding places: barns, cow sheds, houses, dugouts in the woods, and with accounts of deaths, near deaths, narrow escapes, being hunted down, bribery of potential traitors, starvation. Part One ends with the narrator's departure for the city where he and his mother hope to survive using false identity papers that enable them to pass for Christian Poles. The father, grandparents, aunts, and an uncle remain in the forest. None survive. Part Two recounts the period of hiding with the mother, their near suicide, the dangers and tribulations of life on "Aryan papers." The narrator, still only a little boy, learns that even the way he knocks on the door can be interpreted as distinctly Jewish and in order not to be discovered he needs to knock "briefly and energetically." At the novel's end the mother and the son are marched by the German soldiers along a road to nowhere with dozens of other survivors. In one of the rare comments the narrator describes their guilt for having survived and the accompanying paradoxical realization that in fact they are as if dead because if they were killed at that moment, under assumed names, no one would know who they really were.
His next novel, Zwycięstwo (1969; translated as The Victory, 1993), was written in California and published in Paris. In the same year the book received the Paris Kultura literary prize. Victory received an award in the Wiadomości poll for the best Polish book of the year 1970 written and published abroad.
A continuation of the plot of The Jewish War, it is the story of the narrator's life in Poland in the years immediately following the liberation. The Victory describes the uncertainty and renewed humiliation in the life of the few Jewish survivors. Marked by persecution, the narrator's reconstructed family - his mother and stepfather - lead a frail existence. As in Grynberg's other novels, the first person narration takes the reader back in the time to the place of the plot in a particularly compelling way.

Each of Grynberg's novels is, in his own comparison, a refugee's single suitcase that has to hold everything. Critics agree that some of his novels read like protocols, transcripts of testimonies, reportages. And yet all mark their literary and not merely documentary value. Had they been even a trifle more literary, stylized, they could be judged as pure fictions, as `just novels.' As it is, their form is almost transparent, giving up its horror filled content without ornamentation. As Grynberg himself affirms: "Economy and modesty of means in Holocaust literature seem to me truly obligatory. The dimensions of the Holocaust are such that they require distance. The closer one is, the less is visible." It is significant that Grynberg writes in his native Polish even after having lived in the United States longer than in Poland. He attributes his salvation from the Holocaust to his knowledge of Polish, literally his mother's tongue. German is to him the language of murder, Yiddish is dead, and Polish remains the appropriate medium because it is the language of the witnesses. "It would be better if I wrote in English, French, Spanish," Grynberg claims, "I would be much happier writing in Hebrew and I would be much better off if I wrote in German. But my medium, my main component are words which I received from my mother's lips." His self-conscious condition of witness, exile, writer, and Jew affords him a specific perspective that he interprets as a concrete responsibility to be on the side of those who were wronged, symbolized by the the annihilated Jews from Dobre: " I search for them, I persuade them and sometimes they return in order to exist a little on my lonely pages."
Henryk Grynberg's novels speak directly about that which for years had been-whether because of censorship, hypocrisy, or pain-unspeakable.

It's hard to beat "Mother's" review of this volume, but I'd just like to describe to the potential buyer what he/she will be encountering.

These are, to be clear, two books bound in one volume. Since the second is a sequel to the first, and given the opportunity of tweaking the text a bit, the author has done some editing to tighten up the narrative for the new edition. The first book, "The Jewish War," was originally published in English as "Child of the Shadows," and is now a bona fide rare book. In the revised version, the author has eliminated some fictional elements. The second book, "The Victory," contained some overlap from the first, and, now that they are published in one volume, he has reduced some duplicate material. I have the single volume of "The Victory" and did an A-B comparison with the new version, and I can tell you that there is very little changed in the first couple of pages.

The two books reflect where they were written. The first, written in Poland in 1965, rather carefully seeks to not overly offend the authorities with charges of Polish anti-Semitism and anti-Russian sentiment. To be sure, truth is truth, and where the Poles are not to be let off Scot free, they are certainly not. The Russians, entering the country, greet the refugees with a friendly hello.

The second book, written at the beginning of the author's self-exile in California in 1968, is far more direct in detailing post-war atrocities and anti-Semitic words and actions. You might, in fact, want to forgive the author if he suddenly became virulently critical of Poles and Russians now that he had the freedom to do so. But he remains eminently fair: If a person or party shows any compassion and even puts their butt on the line to be genuinely helpful, it is so depicted. In a word, honesty is Grynberg's ultimate moral compass. In fact, he guides the reader through the ethical quandaries that necessarily arise in a post-war environment with a very sure hand.

In both books the prose is spare but still lucid -- occasionally reminiscent of Hemingway. You may find yourself setting the book down momentarily to sort through the scene just presented in order to make some judgments of your own. Some characters may make some judgments, but never the narrator -- things are what they are. It's this way that the author involves the reader completely.