Poetry. Jewish Studies. What good luck to finally have in English the writings of the brilliant Jerzy Ficowski, the poet who lived at least seventeen lives, fighting in the Warsaw Uprising, and later traveling for years with the Roma people through the roads of Poland, opposing his government, and watching the authorities ban his poems, a poet who translated from Spanish and Romanian and Yiddish and Roma, but most of all from the tongue of silence...Beautifully translated by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer, these poems also document the tragedy of the Holocaust, with the direct and uncompromising voice with which he reminds us of the great poets such as Różewicz and Świrszczyńska, while remaining, all the while, himself. Read a piece such as 'I was unable to save / a single life' in a bookstore, and I guarantee you will want to take this book with you, to keep it for the rest of your life.--Ilya Kaminsky Thanks to these brilliant, careful, inspired translations, we can now read Jerzy Ficowski, one of Poland's best kept secrets. This book is a marvel in its weird clarity and extraordinary range of styles and subjects, from the perfectly unassuming paradox of the title, all the way through to its final poems about bumblebees and Satie and mother nature, who scratches herself and 'shudders / with a tsunami.' How fortunate we are to have the unassailable evidence that all along, there was yet another genius of 20th century Polish poetry.--Matthew Zapruder

"Listen, Father Jerzy, today is September 14, your birthday. So if you are supposed to do something, this is the day!" So prayed Father Bernard Brien beside the bed of a dying man. As soon as the priest left the hospital room, the comatose patient opened his eyes and asked his wife what had happened. A few days later his medical team, after many tests, observed that his widespread cancer had completely disappeared. The doctors were astounded. The miracle moved Father Brien to write this book about Blessed Jerzy Popieluszko, to make the twentieth-century martyr better known. He presents an intimate portrait of the courageous Polish priest who changed his life and that of countless others. As the young and ardent chaplain of the Solidarity labor union, Father Popieluszko embodied the Polish people's resistance to Communism, and for this he was murdered in 1984, at the age of thirty-seven, by the Communist regime's security forces. Soon afterward Father Popieluszko was hailed as a martyr and a national hero, and his example inspired the Polish people to persevere in their struggle for political and religious freedom. Father Popieluszko's witness of spiritual resistance, deeply rooted in the life of Christ, retains its relevance and urgency in the twenty-first century. The young Polish priest who stood up to Communist totalitarianism at the cost of his life will embolden those who resist tyranny and defend human dignity.

Collections of interviews with notable modern writers

Becoming lean and fit is not a matter of training for a few weeks, like Rocky, to become a world champion. That only happens in Hollywood movies that portray professional athletes exercising for hours every day until they are exhausted. Real athletes never do that. They train only to the point that they can recover for the next day s training. Their progress comes in small increments, not heroic triumphs. Unfortunately, movies have persuaded people that they can become lean and fit virtually overnight. Even the weight loss and fitness industry bought into this distortion and began pushing people to become like Rocky. When that approach failed, because people were injuring themselves or burning out or jumping from one program to another, trainers began to entertain their clients instead of finding solutions to their problems. If you want to become truly lean and fit, you must work at it like an athlete, following a structured routine and that is easier and more pleasant than you may expect. The principles that work for athletes also work for ordinary people of all ages. Athletes, of course, have coaches. The Happy Body program, on the other hand, will teach you everything you need to know to be your own coach. This innovative program establishes, for the first time, exact scientific and testable methods and goals to engineer your own weight loss and fitness within precise time periods. That empowers you to self-correct your progress at every step. The Happy Body is a total health program, not just an exercise or diet plan. It will teach you to safely lose 1.0 to 2.5 pounds every week, and keep them off, without getting stuck at plateaus. You will have full control over the process, right down to the ounce. In addition to teaching you how to lose weight, the program will also help you to restore the flexibility and posture you had as a young child, and to be leaner, stronger, and faster than you have ever been. In essence, The Happy Body program will not only make you as youthful as you were at twenty, but twenty as you would have been if you had followed the program at that age.

This book is the first comprehensive monograph on Polish modern architect Jerzy Sołtan’s work including his designs, theory, and teachings in Poland and America based on extensive archival research and oral history interviews with former students. The Life and Work of Jerzy Sołtan takes the reader on a journey to both sides of the iron curtain, the communist Poland and the capitalist United States, contributing to the existing scholarship on modernism in post-socialist counties, on CIAM, and on Team 10. It pictures Sołtan as a central player in the history of modernism, building on his own contribution and on close relationships with Le Corbusier and Team 10. This book illustrates not only Sołtan’s work but also his life and how it influenced twentieth-century architecture. Looking in detail at his designs and texts enables the reader to discover how modern architecture tendencies can fit into a larger geopolitical context and how designs can be true manifestos to an architect’s theory. The reader will be immersed in a series of different contexts – from communist Poland, the vibrant academic atmosphere at Harvard to lively discussions on the future of modern architecture. This publication will be of particular interest for those studying modern architecture in Central Europe and in post-socialist countries, in particular Poland. Architects, designers, architectural and design students, and modern architecture enthusiasts will find this publication on the “last modernist” architect revealing new perspectives thanks to the unpublished and unresearched sources.

One of modern science's most famous and controversial figures, Jerzy Plebanski was an outstanding theoretical physicist and an author of many intriguing discoveries in general relativity and quantum theory. Known for his exceptional analytic talents, explosive character, inexhaustible energy, and bohemian nights with brandy, coffee, and enormous amounts of cigarettes, he was dedicated to both science and art, producing innumerable handwritten articles — resembling monk's calligraphy — as well as a collection of oil paintings.As a collaborator but also an antagonist of Leopold Infeld's (a coauthor of Albert Einstein's), Plebanski is recognized for designing the “heavenly” and “hyper-heavenly” equations, for introducing new variables to describe the gravitational field, for the exact solutions in Einstein's gravity and in quantum theory, for his classification of the tensor of matter, for some outstanding results in nonlinear electrodynamics, and for analyzing general relativity with continuous sources long before Chandrasekhar et al.A tribute to Plebański's contributions and the variety of his interests, this is a unique and wide-ranging collection of invited papers, covering gravity quantization, strings, branes, supersymmetry, ideas on the deformation quantization, and lesser known results on the continuous Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff problem.

Jerzy Grotowski’s Journeys to the East is an unusual collection of facts, quotations, and commentaries documenting the real and metaphorical journeys of the Polish theatre director and ‘teacher of performers’ into a geographical and cultural dimension which we used to and still call the Orient. Grotowski’s contacts and meetings with the East are placed here in the context of his biography. Painstakingly researched by Grotowski’s main biographer Zbigniew Osiński, this book is necessary reading for those interested in Grotowski’s deep relationship with the East and in the inspiration he drew from its various cultures. The book will appeal to all readers who feel a need to have a glimpse of the East from the perspective of one of the main theatre reformers in the twentieth century.

This tribute to the life of Jerzy Dobiecki, a Polish cavalry captain with the 18-ty Pułk Ułanów Pomorskich – the 18th Polish Pomeranian Lancers, is a story based on previously archived material, originally written by the Captain in Polish, that has been translated for the first time into English. The Captain’s chronicles bring to life eye-witness accounts of his regiment’s deployments during the Russo-Polish War between 1919 and 1921, one of several little-publicized wars in English and fought between Poland and her neighbors immediately following the 1914-1918 Great War. Eighteen years later, as Poland was invaded by Germany in September 1939, from his position on attachment to the Polish Ministry of Military Affairs in Warsaw, Captain Dobiecki kept a diary of battles as they developed across Poland during the first weeks of the Second World War. The diary records events as he, and what remained of the Polish military High Command, were evacuated to neighboring Romania when Poland was additionally overrun by Soviet forces from the east. His journal sheds light on his subsequent escape from internment across Europe to France and later on to Britain, where he served as a staff officer with the command of the Polish 1st Corps, formed in exile in Scotland. Following the end of hostilities in Europe in 1945 and upon return to Britain after the fighting on the continent, like thousands of other Poles commissioned under the auspices of the Polish Resettlement Corps, Jerzy had to decide whether to return to his native Poland or whether he should try to somehow rescue and bring to England what was left of his family – now trapped behind the iron curtain in eastern Poland, facing an uncertain future and severity under a Stalinist regime.

From Agate Nesaule, acclaimed by writers across the globe from Doris Lessing to Tim O’Brien, comes a long-awaited novel. In Love with Jerzy Kosinski is a story of courage and persistence, exploring in fiction the themes that gripped readers of Nesaule’s award-winning memoir, A Woman in Amber. After fleeing Latvia as a child, Anna Duja escapes Russian confinement in displaced persons camps and eventually arrives in America. Years later, she finds herself in a different kind of captivity on isolated Cloudy Lake, Wisconsin, living with her disarming but manipulative husband, Stanley. Inspired by the transformation of Polish-Jewish émigré Jerzy Kosinski from persecuted wartime escapee to celebrity author in America, Anna slips away from Stanley and Cloudy Lake in small steps: learning to drive, making friends, moving to Madison, falling in love, and learning to forgive. Readers will applaud the book’s power, the beauty of its prose, and its strong evocation of a woman gradually finding her way in the wake of trauma. Winner, the Chancellor’s Regional Literary Award, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater

The book contains three accounts of five public speeches and conversations with the public of two outstanding figures of theatre and performance, Jerzy Grotowski and Ludwik Flaszen, from 1993 to 1997. Their speeches concern their output and their current research. The content of Ludwik Flaszen's speech is very closely related to the output of Jerzy Grotowski. The accounts are written on the base of the author's detailed notes. The main subject of these narratives is their author, who quotes the speaking characters in the third person. In this way, all texts acquire a subjective character, akin to an essay, while remaining faithful to the overall message and content of the speeches and conversations cited in them. Juliusz Tyszka also uses this form of narration to describe the interpersonal context of Flaszen’s and Grotowski’s talks, including the content and tone of the questions asked, the reactions of listeners, etc. There is also room for short, concise characteristics of these two outstanding people and their interlocutors (who are themselves sometimes also notorious). This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of theatre and performance studies and professionals in experimental theatre and performance.