Miron Bialoszewki's "Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising" at WORD Bookstore in Brooklyn

"Tuesday, August 1, 1944, was overcast, wet, not too warm." So begins Miron Bialoszewski's urgent recounting of the Warsaw Uprising, in which the Polish capital launched a sixty-three day long insurrection against its Nazi German occupiers, profoundly changing the course of the Second World War. Bialoszewski charts the course of the revolution, its idealistic and optimistic origins, its dangers and perils, and its eventual outcome, which left the once-bustling metropolis of Warsaw in a state of ruin, with a death toll of over 200,000 people.

Although best known for the critically-acclaimed poetry that he began publishing in the 1940s, Miron Bialoszewski's career spanned decades and genres: he was at various times a journalist, dramatist, poet, and memoirist. A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising deftly combines these styles to create what poet Czeslaw Milosz called "a faithful, antiheroic, and nonpathetic description of disintegration." This vital narrative takes us deep behind German lines, where Bialoszewski dodges sniper bullets and witnesses the burial of the deadall from the eyes of a hapless young man, unwittingly thrust into the fray after leaving to run an errand for his mother. Bialoszewski's impressionistic prose, with its seamless leaps back and forth in time, its muscular, staccato sentences, and its colloquial speech, renders it a work of profound realism. Madeline G. Levine has extensively revised her 1970 translation and passages that were unpublishable in Communist Poland have been restored.

Join NYRB Classics in celebrating the publication of the first unexpurgated, English-language edition of this immortal classic with an all-star panel.

NYRB Classics WORD Bookstore And The Polish Cultural Institute New York present Miron Bialoszewki's "Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising" with Madeleine G. Levine, Alissa Valles, Timothy Snyder and Edwin Frank

Monday, November 16, 2015
7:00 pm

WORD Bookstore
126 Franklin Street
Brooklyn, NY

Admission: Free entry

www.polishculture-nyc.org