Julian Stryjkowski (1905–1996)

Julian Stryjkowski was born Pesach Stark to a Jewish family in Stryj, Austro-Hungarian Empire, later Poland (present-day Stryi, Ukraine). His parents were Hanah Stark and Cwi Rosenmann, a religious primary school teacher. He passed his matura exam in 1925 and earned a doctorate in Polish literature in 1932 from Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów. He made his literary debut in 1928 with a short story published in the Zionist Chwila (Moment) magazine. After leaving university, he worked as a Polish language teacher in a high school in Płock. He joined the outlawed Communist Party in 1934 and was jailed for political activism in 1935-1936. Upon his release, he moved to Warsaw, where he worked as a journalist. He also began preparing a Polish translation of Louis-Ferdinand Céline's novel Mort à credit (Death on the Installment Plan). After Nazi Germany's 1941 invasion of the USSR in World War II, he fled east to Soviet-occupied territory. He eventually reached Moscow in 1943 and started to work for a Polish weekly magazine. He adopted the pen name Julian Stryjkowski, which became his official name after the war. It was at this time that he started writing his greatest novel, Głosy w Ciemności (Voices in the Dark, 1956). This was the first volume of a tetralogy that later included Austeria (1966), Sen Azrila (Azril's Dream, 1975), and Echo (1988), depicting the vanished Jewish life prior to World War I. Stryjkowski returned to Poland in 1946 and joined the Polish Press Agency. Between 1949 and 1952, he headed the agency's bureau in Rome; he was deported from Italy after publishing Bieg do Fragalà (Race to Fragala, 1951), a strongly pro-Communist novel. Upon his return to Poland, he was named co-editor of Twórczość (Creation), a literary journal devoted to modern literature, a position he held until his retirement in 1978. In 1966, he quit the Communist Party along with other notable Polish writers of the time, in protest against the suppression of art, science, and culture. As a result, his works were no longer published in Poland, and his writings could only be found in the underground press. In 1969, he went to the USA on a scholarship from the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He made a short trip to Israel in the late 1970s. In 1975, he was finally allowed to publish again. In 1993, he received the Jan Parandowski Award from the Polish PEN Club.