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The most recent review of Nowolipie Street: http://yiddish.forward.com/articles/167608/jozef-hen/ (Translated from the Yiddish by Krystyna Boron)
Yiddish Forward/Literature
Warsaw - Gone Forever
By Michael Krutikov
Published January 31, 2013, issue of February 15, 2013
The writer Józef Hen belongs to the last generation of Polish-Jewish writers who grew up in Warsaw before the Holocaust. His memoir Nowolipie Street was published in Polish more than twenty years ago and has been translated into several languages. Finally, this masterpiece has become accessible to the English reader, and moreover in a beautiful translation by Krystyna Boron.
Hen is a prolific author, with many publications in various genres: screenplays, biographies, novels, essays, memoirs. He is proud of the fact that almost his entire life he has supported himself as an independent author and did not need to work in any government or public institution. Thus he was carefully independent of the Communist regime.
His life story is representative of the small number of Polish-Jewish intellectuals who had the good fortune to survive all the troubles of the twentieth century. This means that a series of miracles happened to save his life. Born in 1923 into a relatively well-to-do Jewish family (his family name was Cukier), Józef Hen grew up in the center of the former Jewish Warsaw. And in his memoir, with great diligence he brings back from the dead this theater of Jewish life in its smallest details. As one of the last witnesses of that time, he holds as his moral and artistic duty to observe a last remembrance of his neighbors and family, almost all of whom perished in the Holocaust.
When the Germans captured Warsaw, Hen was 16 years old. He was lucky to escape to the Soviet Union, first to the Ukraine, where he labored on the highway between Lvov and Kiev, and then to Uzbekistan, where he almost died from hunger. Saved by army service, he returned to Poland as an officer of the Soviet backed Polish Peoples Army.
Hen describes his youthful literary origins as a contributor to The Little Review, created by Janusz Korczak in 1926, and which ran until 1939. After the war, Józef Hen found a more or less quiet corner in the Polish literary world, although from time to time he had to endure persecution. Angering the anti-Semites, he refused to abandon Poland, although his mother had moved to Israel.
In his literary taste Hen is quite conservative. He holds out for realism and loves European classics, especially Russian and French literature. And precisely these classics make Nowolipie Street very engaging. This book is an echo of Marcel Proust’s epic novel Remembrance of Things Past. The smallest details of the former Jewish Warsaw community in his hands acquire a unique value, because this life has disappeared without a trace. The daily bustle of a Warsaw courtyard with its numerous Jewish and non-Jewish inhabitants is portrayed both photographically and artistically. But the final line of each description or episode remains the same: "I do not know how they died."
Hen possesses a strong power of memory, which has become more vivid in middle age. He holds it as natural for an old Jew to come back to his childhood in his literary creation. But his descriptions have more than a literary artistic value. He fixes exactly the different cultural and social changes which took place in the life of Polish Jews in the course of the 1920s and 1930s. The signs of assimilation were everywhere. For example, he mentions that many residents of his courtyard had with time ceased to build Succot booths on that holiday. They also became less careful in observing kosher rules and the Sabbath.
"[To me] there was never any conflict between the Jewish history in the Bible and the Polish history. Quite the opposite, one supported the other in my heart. Both histories were quite similar: in both everything proceeded from a position of power–to collapse." So Hen described growing up "between two worlds"–the Jewish and the Polish. His father, who came from a religious family and worked his way up from locksmith to relatively prosperous businessman, never learned to read Polish, while his son devoured hundreds of Polish books and wrote his own stories in Polish from the age of eight.
Hen studied in a private Jewish school (gimnazjum) and was quite involved with Polish culture. But despite being rooted in this culture, he felt like an orphan. He says in passing about his school: "There is no plaque to commemorate our school; too few of us survived to try to put it up." And this is the leitmotiv of the entire book: the theater of life was destroyed and no one remained even to create a memorial plaque for the perished people.
Yiddish Forward/Literature
Warsaw - Gone Forever
By Michael Krutikov
Published January 31, 2013, issue of February 15, 2013
The writer Józef Hen belongs to the last generation of Polish-Jewish writers who grew up in Warsaw before the Holocaust. His memoir Nowolipie Street was published in Polish more than twenty years ago and has been translated into several languages. Finally, this masterpiece has become accessible to the English reader, and moreover in a beautiful translation by Krystyna Boron.
Hen is a prolific author, with many publications in various genres: screenplays, biographies, novels, essays, memoirs. He is proud of the fact that almost his entire life he has supported himself as an independent author and did not need to work in any government or public institution. Thus he was carefully independent of the Communist regime.
His life story is representative of the small number of Polish-Jewish intellectuals who had the good fortune to survive all the troubles of the twentieth century. This means that a series of miracles happened to save his life. Born in 1923 into a relatively well-to-do Jewish family (his family name was Cukier), Józef Hen grew up in the center of the former Jewish Warsaw. And in his memoir, with great diligence he brings back from the dead this theater of Jewish life in its smallest details. As one of the last witnesses of that time, he holds as his moral and artistic duty to observe a last remembrance of his neighbors and family, almost all of whom perished in the Holocaust.
When the Germans captured Warsaw, Hen was 16 years old. He was lucky to escape to the Soviet Union, first to the Ukraine, where he labored on the highway between Lvov and Kiev, and then to Uzbekistan, where he almost died from hunger. Saved by army service, he returned to Poland as an officer of the Soviet backed Polish Peoples Army.
Hen describes his youthful literary origins as a contributor to The Little Review, created by Janusz Korczak in 1926, and which ran until 1939. After the war, Józef Hen found a more or less quiet corner in the Polish literary world, although from time to time he had to endure persecution. Angering the anti-Semites, he refused to abandon Poland, although his mother had moved to Israel.
In his literary taste Hen is quite conservative. He holds out for realism and loves European classics, especially Russian and French literature. And precisely these classics make Nowolipie Street very engaging. This book is an echo of Marcel Proust’s epic novel Remembrance of Things Past. The smallest details of the former Jewish Warsaw community in his hands acquire a unique value, because this life has disappeared without a trace. The daily bustle of a Warsaw courtyard with its numerous Jewish and non-Jewish inhabitants is portrayed both photographically and artistically. But the final line of each description or episode remains the same: "I do not know how they died."
Hen possesses a strong power of memory, which has become more vivid in middle age. He holds it as natural for an old Jew to come back to his childhood in his literary creation. But his descriptions have more than a literary artistic value. He fixes exactly the different cultural and social changes which took place in the life of Polish Jews in the course of the 1920s and 1930s. The signs of assimilation were everywhere. For example, he mentions that many residents of his courtyard had with time ceased to build Succot booths on that holiday. They also became less careful in observing kosher rules and the Sabbath.
"[To me] there was never any conflict between the Jewish history in the Bible and the Polish history. Quite the opposite, one supported the other in my heart. Both histories were quite similar: in both everything proceeded from a position of power–to collapse." So Hen described growing up "between two worlds"–the Jewish and the Polish. His father, who came from a religious family and worked his way up from locksmith to relatively prosperous businessman, never learned to read Polish, while his son devoured hundreds of Polish books and wrote his own stories in Polish from the age of eight.
Hen studied in a private Jewish school (gimnazjum) and was quite involved with Polish culture. But despite being rooted in this culture, he felt like an orphan. He says in passing about his school: "There is no plaque to commemorate our school; too few of us survived to try to put it up." And this is the leitmotiv of the entire book: the theater of life was destroyed and no one remained even to create a memorial plaque for the perished people.