Kosciuszko Foundation in Washington DC - Past Events

Lecture

Saturday, May 7, 2011, at 4:30pm

Henryk Grynberg  born in 1936 in Warsaw, Poland, is a child survivor of the Holocaust. From 1959 he worked for the State Jewish Theater in Warsaw as an actor. While the company was touring the US in 1967, he refused to return to Poland in protest against the regime's antisemitic campaign and the censorship of his writing. He has lived in America ever since.

Henryk Grynberg has published about thirty books of prose, poetry, essays, and drama depicting the Holocaust experience and the post-Holocaust trauma. Each new book is a further record of the fates of people who have been saved from oblivion by the writer. Written in his native Polish, his works have been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Hebrew, Swedish, Czech and Hungarian. He has received major Polish literary prizes, including the Tadeusz Borowski Fellowship (1966), The Koscielski Award (1966), The Alfred Jurzykowski Award (1990), and Jan Karski-Pola Nirenska Award (1996), and has been four time nominated for Poland's most prestigious "Nike" Literary Prize.

His collection Drohobycz, Drohobycz and Other Stories, published in English by Penguin Books, has received the 2002 Koret Jewish Book Award. Available in English are also: documentary tales Children of Zion (1997) and a two-part autobiographical novel The Jewish War and the Victory (2001).

Member of the American PEN since 1975, he has an honorary degree of Doctor of Hebrew Letters from Chicago's Spertus College.  Henryk Grynberg received his MA in Journalism at Warsaw University and MA in Russian Literature at UCLA. He has also received the Polish Government's Golden Cross of Merit (Zloty Krzyz Zaslugi) and the 2008 title of Distinguished Humanist from the Melton Center for Jewish Studies at the Ohio State University. He is currently working on his next book Pamietnik outsidera, which will be published soon.

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