Uchodźcy, and: Z głowy (review)

Books made their way to supermarket shelves while bookstores became supermarkets. Secretaries' secrets, revelations of famous men's wives, sons, daughters, concubines, and prostitutes, all sold like hotcakes. Anyone could become an author: politician, charlatan, conman, spy, murderer, thief—as long as he was or could be subject of a scandal. . . . There were more authors than readers and yet all who wrote made money. All except for the writer, who was a drop in the flood of print, of printmania, of books in hard and soft covers, in every size and color, on every possible and impossible subject.

(Uchodźcy 93, my translation)

Such was Henryk Grynberg's assessment of the state of American literature in 1964 when he first visited the United States. Forty years later he published his confessions, in which he embedded the autobiographical material that had appeared earlier as the short story "Uncle Morris."

In the age of post-literature, do we dare ask whether autobiography is literature? The recent publication of two autobiographies by Polish authors living in the United States nonetheless prompts such an inquiry. The novelist, poet, and essayist Henryk Grynberg came to America to stay in 1967, and the playwright and prose-writer Janusz Glstrok;owacki arrived here in the wake of martial law in 1982. Both write in Polish and publish in Poland, are well known in Europe, and enjoy a select readership in the United States. Grynberg's works have been translated into most European languages and Hebrew, with four titles available in English: The Jewish War, The Victory, Children of Zion, and Drohobycz, Drohobycz. Głowacki's plays—Hunting Cockroaches, Antigone in New York, The Fourth Sister—have been performed in the United States and internationally. Last year both writers came out with ostensibly similar books. Grynberg's Uchodzcy (Refugees), unlike much of his work, deals not with the Holocaust directly (although it does take on anti-Semitism) but with the author's peripatetic postwar existence, while Głowacki's Z głowy (Off the Top of My Head) shuttles back and forth between his years in Poland and his life and career in emigration. Both books are similar in length (about 250 pages), both were published by Warsaw's Świat Książki, and both focus on or mention in passing a plethora of postwar Polish intelligentsia and artists—well-known writers, actors, filmmakers, painters, and professors—as well as many figures unknown to the public at large: drunkards, named and nameless prostitutes, thieves, hobos, and sexual deviants. In several cases the two categories overlap. In addition to being autobiographical, the two books are picaresque narratives in which a string of adventures is linked by the person of the narrator, who may ormay not be present as a character. But they contain as well a sharp, unforgiving critique of both the Communist past and the capitalist present, whether in Poland or the United States.

Both Głowacki and Grynberg remind those younger Poles who don't know and the older Poles who may have forgotten how unfreedom tasted. Głowacki recalls the nightmare that haunted him for the first few years after his arrival in America (Grynberg describes an identical nightmare in his essay "Duty"): "I would travel briefly to Poland, and when I was about to leave, they would takemy passport away. I told a few friends about the dream and it turned out that it was a classic. All emigrants, including Czeslaw Milosz, have had that dream" (Z głowy, 191, my translation). They both describe the grueling, humiliating—and now inconceivable—interrogations ordinary citizens in general and writers in particular had to undergo whenever they applied for a passport, an exit visa, an entry visa, even a transit visa. Obtaining an apartment or a pound of beef also demanded a supple spine and offered material for a study in the grotesque. While now the elaborate and maddening nature of these proceedings may seem of little relevance...