Henryk Grynberg

He is a novelist, short-story writer, poet, playwright and essayist who had authored more than thirty books of prose and poetry and two dramas.

The note "Collaboration with Communists," so prominently placed, directs undue attention to a very short and meaningless episode in my biography.

in Russian Literature and moved to Washington, D.C., where Grynberg worked for the U.S. Information Agency (particularly for Voice in America) for a period of twenty years.

In his works - written both while in Poland and in the United States – Grynberg narrated the stories of “those who died during the war and of those who survived to live afterwards in Lodz, Warsaw, or New York, struggling to come to terms with their own memory and with the fact that others did not remember.” His works were described as characteristically abundant in “biographical and autobiographical material”, where his Jewish protagonists are the narrators whose personal experiences were “supplemented by the experiences of other ‘survivors’”.

Grynberg’s books have been published in English translation, namely novels, Child of the Shadows (Vallentine Mitchell, London, 1969) - reedited as "The Jewish War and the Victory" (Northwestern University Press, 2001); the sequel, The Victory (Northwestern University Press, 1993); documentary prose, Children of Zion (Northwestern University Press, 1997), translated by Jacqueline Mitchell, and "Drohobycz, Drohobycz and Other Stories" (Penguin Books, 2002) translated by Alicia Nitecki, edited by Theodosia Robertson.

[1][7] Grynberg's books were also translated into the French, German, Italian, Hebrew, Dutch, as well as Czech, Hungarian, and Swedish languages.

[2] In July 2024, in an article in the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs entitled "Worse than Again", Grynberg lamented the recrudescence of virulent antisemitism camouflaged as anti-Zionism.

Back then, most of them couldn’t even imagine that a multimillion-strong ethnic group could be demonized and systematically annihilated by such advanced and seemingly cultured and civilized segments of humankind.