National Network for Equitable Library Service

An exquisitely original collection of darkly funny stories that explore the panorama of Jewish experience in contemporary Poland, from a world-class contemporary writer. Mikolaj Grynberg is a psychologist and photographer who has spent years collecting and publishing oral histories of Polish Jews. In his first work of fiction—a book that has been widely praised by critics and was shortlisted for Poland's top literary prize—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, through which Grynberg explores the daily lives and tensions within Poland between Jews and gentiles haunted by the Holocaust and its continuing presence. 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 relationship with its Jewish past.