Fiction. Translated from the Polish by Soren Gauger and Marcin Piekoszewski. Born in 1924 in Warsaw, Jerzy Ficowski is primarily known for his work on Bruno Schulz (Regions of the Great Heresy) and his poetry. Not having belonged to any literary school or circle, he occupies a peculiar place in Polish literature, and in these short stories and sketches he takes Schulz1s mythologization of reality, whereby fiction is a way of turning the quotidian into the fantastical and eternal, and reinterprets it to address the sense of loss and bleak landscape of postwar Poland. Effortlessly weaving memory, religious ritual, daily life, and the magical, Ficowski hints at a sinister presence lurking behind these dreamlike tales--a trace of ruin or disintegration always present as the narrator repeatedly struggles to link some aspect of a past that has been annihilated with a present that is foreign and hostile.

Jerzy Ficowski (October 4, 1924, Warsaw - May 9, 2006, Warsaw) was a Polish poet, writer and translator (from Yiddish, Russian and Romani). During the German occupation of Poland in World War II, Ficowski who lived in W?ochy near Warsaw was a member of the Polish resistance. He was a member of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK), was imprisoned in the infamous Pawiak and took part in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. His codename was Wrak and he fought in Mokotów region. Following the uprising, Ficowski entered a camp with other survivors of the battle. After the war, Ficowski returned to Warsaw and enrolled at the university in order to study philosophy and sociology. There he published his first volume of poetry, O?owiani ?o?nierze (The Tin Soldiers, 1948). This volume reflected the Stalinist atmosphere of the early postwar Poland, in which heroes of the Armia Krajowa Warsaw Uprising were treated with suspicion at best, arrested and executed at worst, together with the sense of a new city arising on the ashes of the old. His early works show the influence of Julian Tuwim. Later he became interested in the poems of the interwar period, with elements of fantasy and grotesque. In the later period his poems reflected various moral and social aspects of life in the People's Republic of Poland. From 1948 to 1950 Ficowski chose to travel with Polish Gypsies and came to write several volumes on or inspired by the Roma way of life, including Amulety i defilacje (Amulets and Definitions, 1960) and Cyganie na polskich drogach (Gypsies on the Polish Roads, 1965). He was the member of the Gypsy Lore Society and translated the poems of Bronis?awa Wajs (Papusza). He was interested in many aspects of international poetry. He translated the poems of the Spanish poet, Federico García Lorca, and he was also a known specialist of Jewish folklore and Jewish poetry, becoming an editor of the Jewish poem anthology Rodzynki z migda?ami (Raisins with Almonds, 1964). Ficowski devoted many years of his