The book by Nina Luszczyk-Ilienkowa and Anna Engelking is deeply fascinating in both it's magic and realism.
The magic, as it reports on a world where the good ingredients of the souls of all people live. And the reference here to "all people" is justified, the authors introduce us to a multiethnical universe of the eastern region of pre-WWII Poland with it's mosaic of faiths, social strata, national and geographical origins. The magic power of this world where - in one of the WWII period scenes - the German guard lets the - nominally the enemy - Polish thieving child go through the checkpoint with the words "Vater... Brot... Ich ferstehe" (Father... Bread... I understand), the world in which an old Jew has the power to resurrect a family of strangers from a bottom of despair and fortell the arrival of a newborn child.
The same magic leads us to a frozen hell where a maddened soldier, in other life a violinist of the Berlin opera, conducts with the frostbite deformed hands a symphony of falling bombs.
The book is available in Polish. Selected stories are available in American English (by translator's permission).
More about this book...
Nina Luszczyk-Ilienkowa
PINSK, ELEKTROWNIA. MAM 10 LAT / PINSK. THE RAILROAD STATION. I AM 10 YEARS OLD
edited by Anna Engelking
Publisher: "Swiat literacki", Izabelin 2004
148 x 210, 252 pages, paperback
ISBN 83-88612-39-5
link*www.swiatliteracki.com.pl*http://www.swiatliteracki.com.pl/cgi-bin/skrypty/index.pl****