This is a book of short stories. A few (From Ghetto to Ghetto / Z getta do getta, "The Return / Powrot) are directly connected with the author's memories of the Holocaust years. The rest are about the post-war years and present the biographies of a handful of well-known personalities from those times. The author's aim is not to depict particular individuals, but rather to characterise the general atmosphere of the realities in the People's Republic.
Readers of Proust will be in no doubt that the title is a reference to one of his best-known motifs. But why has the madeleine been made of such an unsuitable ingredient? To find out you will have to read the last story in the book.
"This book is a journey through the memory." (Dorota Jovanka Cirlic)
Michał Głowiński, (b. 1934), theoretician and historian of literature, professor in the Institute for Literary Research (IBL) at the Polish Academy of Sciences, author of a fundamental series of papers on Communist new-speak in Polish, has emerged as an interesting essayist.
- Michał Głowiński,
Brown-bread Madeleine / Magdalenka z razowego chleba
Wydawnictwo Literackie, Krakow 2001
translation rights: Michał Głowiński, rights available
145 x 205, 216 pages, paperback
ISBN 83-08-03100-5