The book by Nina & and Anna Engelking is deeply fascinating in both it's magic and realism.

The magic, as it reports on a world where live the good ingredients of the souls of all people. 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 solder, in other life a violinist of the Berlin opera, conducts with the frostbite deformed hands a symphony of falling bombs.

In reading the book we can join the vision of always the same towns, the same streets, the world of innumerable souls, present in flesh or only in the shadow of the memory, but present, but always forming a lasting whole. We can perhaps compare what Nina Iljenkowa i Anna Engelking did for Pinsk - preserving the memory of the city and the people - with what Bruno Schultz achieved with his stories centered in Drohobycz.The book is fascinating in it's realism, as some of the stories inherit directly from a 19th century realism of Dickens. One has the the feeling of a seemingly cold and objective prose screaming to the Creator "this did not suppose to be like this!".

The book is available in Polish. Selected stories are available in American English (by translator's permission). Inquiries from publishers are welcome.

Read a sample chapter translation