I'd Like To Say Sorry, But There's No One To Say Sorry To
I'd Like To Say Sorry, But There's No One To Say Sorry To
Join us for our September Power of Words Series program with Mikolaj Grynberg, author of I'd Like To Say Sorry, But There's No One To Say Sorry To, along with translator Sean Gasper Bye.
Mikołaj Grynberg is a psychologist and photographer who has spent years collecting and publishing oral histories of Polish Jews. In his first work of fiction, Grynberg recrafts those histories into little jewels, fictionalized short stories with the ring of truth. Both biting and knowing, I’d Like To Say Sorry, But There’s No One To Say Sorry To takes the form of first-person vignettes, exploring the daily lives and tensions within Poland between Jews and gentiles still haunted by the Holocaust. In “Un-necessary Trouble,” a grandmother discloses on her deathbed that she is Jewish, passing on to her family the fear and struggle of what to do with this information. In “Cacophony,” Miron and his son Jurek demonstrate how heritage is both accepted and denied. In “My Five Jews,” a non-Jewish narrator remembers her own antisemitism, ruefully noting that one is left to say “I’m sorry” to. Each of the thirty-one stories is a dazzling and haunting mini-monologue that highlights a different facet of modern Poland’s complex and difficult relation-ship with its Jewish past.
Sean Gasper Bye is a translator of Polish literature, focusing on contemporary fiction and literary reportage. His translations have won the EBRD Literary Prize, been shortlisted for the Warwick Women in Translation Prize, and long listed for the National Translation Award. He is a former Princeton University Translator-in-Residence and National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow. He lives in Philadelphia.
This event was brought to us by the Jewish Book Council.