Novels
- The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman (1990)
- A Mass for the Town of Arras (1993)
- Self-portrait with Woman (1996)
- The Shadow Catcher (1997)
Non fiction
- The Polish Ordeal (1982)
Novels Book Covers
Non fiction Book Covers
Andrzej Szczypiorski Books Overview
The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman
In the Na*zi occupied Warsaw of 1943, Irma Seidenman, a young Jewish widow, possesses two attributes that can spell the difference between life and death: she has blue eyes and blond hair. With these, and a set of false papers, she has slipped out of the ghetto, passing as the wife of a Polish officer, until one day an informer spots her on the street and drags her off to the Gestapo. At times a dark lament, at others a sly and sardonic thriller, The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman is the story of the thirty six hours that follow Irma’s arrest and the events that lead to her dramatic rescue as the last of Warsaw’s Jews are about to meet their deaths in the burning ghetto.
A Mass for the Town of Arras
At the core of this novel is the true fifteenth century tragedy of, first, plague and hunger and, later, the brutal persecution of Jews and witches in the small French town of Arras. A Mass for Arras explores the personal and political consequences of fear, fanaticism, and fascism in the story of Jan, a young member of the intelligentsia. Arrogantly pious and full of revolutionary zeal, Jan wholeheartedly participates in the torments inflicted on the ‘outsiders’ in the name of moral and political righteousness. Yet when faced with escalating violence and, ultimately, his own downfall, he must choose between sincere commitment to the isolated village that adopted him and horror at a society gone mad. A Mass for Arras addresses themes of freedom and responsibility, individualism and conformity, and memory and loss. It is a moving account of a young man’s coming of age in a time of disease and death, a profound political allegory of life in an emergent totalitarian state, a chilling indictment of government sponsored repression and societal complicity, and a cautionary tale about the tendency of history to repeat itself, whether in fifteenth century France, postwar Poland, or somewhere still closer to our own time and place.
Self-portrait with Woman
Self Portrait with Woman: A Novel Written by Translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston Kamil, a Warsaw sociologist, is summoned to Geneva to participate in an oral history project about the collapse of Eastern European communism and resolves to tell his own story through a gallery of portraits of the many women he has loved. These reminiscences emerge against the broader canvas of circumstances and events that have shaped the past sixty years of Poland’s turbulent, tragic history. Soon he finds himself inexorably drawn to his interrogator from the ‘free’ world; the chronicler of his life, the keeper of his secrets, and his heart’s last hope for redemptive love. Self Portrait with Woman is at once a haunting and lyrical portrait of a man, of a country, and of the twilight years of an era. ‘In Polish novelist Andrzej Szczypiorski’s radiant new work, the affairs of the heart and the world are not so very different…
He exhorts those of us who know politics too well to set aside nightmare and dream, and find no other world than the one we can kiss in a lover’s hand.’ The Boston Globe ‘Szczypiorski turns one individual’s history into a powerful portrait of recent and timeless human dilemmas.’ Publishers Weekly ANDRZEJ SZCZYPIORSKI was born in 1924 in Warsaw, where he still resides. He fought in the Resistance Movement during the German Occupation of Poland, took part in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, and survived time in a concentration camp. He was introduced to the English speaking world with the publication of The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman, which was followed by A Mass for Arras, Self Portrait with Woman, and The Shadow Catcher. BILL JOHNSTON is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Second Language Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington. In 1999 he received a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship for Translation. His tr
The Shadow Catcher
Andrzej Szczypiorski is one of the major figures in world literature. In The Shadow Catcher, he tells the story of a boy who comes of age as the world around him begins to fall apart. At fifteen, Krzys is the adored and sheltered son of a wealthy Polish family; it is the moment just before World War II, which will forever change their lives, but Krzys is only partly aware of what is happening around him. He lives in a world shrouded in silent cries and fleeting whispers here his awakening into manhood is accompanied by a sense of imminent doom. The Shadow Catcher is a richly evocative, heartbreaking novel about the loss of innocence and the vanishing of the old world.
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