Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Mikolaj Lozinski is a Polish novelist, screenwriter and photographer. He has received several awards for his writing, including the Polityka Passport and the Koscielski Foundation Award. My Name is Stramer, his third novel, was shortlisted for the prestigious Nike Literary Award and has been translated into 16 languages. Lozinski lives in Warsaw. Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by many of Poland's leading contemporary novelists, including Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk and Artur Domoslawski. In 2018 she was honored with Poland's Transatlantyk Award for the most outstanding promoter of Polish literature abroad.There's always an ebullience in the telling that reflects the indomitable spirit of the characters... The tone of the book is wise, world-weary and wry, and with an authenticity to its time that makes it feel like a rediscovered classic
The Times
Mikolaj Lozinski shows that ordinary people's lives can be as fascinating as a sensational story. A brilliantly written novel!
- Olga Tokarczuk, author of 'Flights',
A masterpiece of foreshadowing... The last hundred pages are unbearably moving. The writing gets better and better, as you turn the pages faster and faster to find out what becomes of them. This is one of the great east European novels of our time
Jewish Chronicle
Lozinski has managed to write a novel we don't want to finish, we want to keep living in the Stramers' world. The protagonists' fates lead on, into a different Poland... Marvellous
Polityka
With freshness and lively humour... Lozinski crafts an epic that is as gripping as it is endearing
Le Monde
A great, compelling, and beautiful tale of a family, of the bonds that tie brothers and sisters, of support in every circumstance, no matter how complex... The Stramer family and their town of Tarnów are painted so vividly that it seems Mikolaj Lozinski has been given the divine talent of time travel
Vogue
Outstanding... This is the kind of book people wait to find: wise and brilliantly written... Lozinski has not written a novel about the Holocaust, but about the life that came before it
Newsweek
The reader is captivated from the novel's opening sentences and feels they are right in the middle of the Stramers' small apartment, sharing their longings, joys and fears
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
The author succeeds in lending even the tragic a light, sometimes humorous touch... An event
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
A vanished world is meticulously reconstructed in Mikolaj Lozinski's small-scale epic... A rich generational saga... Poignant
Irish Times
One can find a parallel, Polish-Jewish version of the Dubliners: the Stramers, of provincial Tarnów. Like Joyce's collection, the exquisitely written My Name is Stramer, by the writer and photographer Mikolaj Lozinski, narrates family life from the perspectives of different characters and focuses on the role of religion, personal aspiration and the influence of nationalism on a local community
TLS
A richly evocative and moving portrait of an ordinary Polish Jewish family in the years preceding the Second World War
Though he returned from America penniless, Nathan Stramer still daydreams of a better life. Raising six children with his wife Rywka in a poor area of Tarnów, he chases hare-brained schemes to make money while she fantasises about a trip to the seaside.
Meanwhile, their children are taking steps out into a changing world. Rudek, the eldest, sets his passions aside for a practical job; Rena falls in love with a married man, and Hesio and Salek get ever more involved with Communism.
While Nathan and Rywka try to hold the centre of their raucous family life, national conflicts begin to escalate, and something sinister creeps into the Stramers' world that they don't yet understand.