Polish Jewish Editor Wins Prize for Novel
The editor of a Polish Jewish monthly was awarded a European Union Prize for Literature for a novel that deals with Holocaust memory.
Piotr Pazinski, the editor of the Warsaw-based Midrasz, won the award for his novel “Pensjonat” (“Boarding House”), which was published in Poland in 2010.
The awards, announced Tuesday at the Frankfurt Book Fair, recognize “the best new or emerging authors in the EU.” Each of the 12 winners receives some $7,000 in prize money.
“On the surface, the plot of ‘Pensjonat’ is fairly straightforward, describing a day trip to a boarding house outside Warsaw by a young man,” the award announcement said. “But it is no ordinary boarding house: the residents are Jews who survived the Holocaust, and so everything that occurs here is like a dream about the past, a summoning-up of ghosts, a resurrection of not just people but also events, debates and ideological arguments from long ago.”
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