Jerzy ficowski biography

In Warsaw – 9 May 2006 in Warsaw) was a Polish poet, writer, ethnographer and translator (from Yiddish, Russian, Romani and Hungarian).
Jerzy Ficowski was a poet, writer, columnist, and translator.
Born on 4 September 1924 in Warsaw, Jerzy Ficowski maintained close ties with his home town throughout his life.

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The Subject and his Biographer

If any writer could be reasonably called doomed to oblivion, it would be Bruno Schulz. Schulz was born in 1892 in Drohobycz1 in Austrian Galizia, in the family of assimilated Jewish merchants. As a young man Schulz studied art and architecture in Vienna (where he unsuccessfully applied to join the Academy of Art in 1923), then architecture in Lviv, but did not graduate. After World War I he started working as an art teacher in King Władysław Jagiełło Gymnasium in his home town Drohobycz (already part of Poland). Before he started to think about writing, Schulz revealed himself as an artist with an album of cliché-verre, Xięga bałwochwalcza (The Booke of Idolatry). Encouraged by his friend, philosopher Debora Vogel, to publish his prose (which was written primarily as postscripts in Schulz’s letters to Vogel), Schulz contacted Zofia Nałkowska, an outstanding novelist and a prominent figure of Polish literary life at that time, who, enchanted by his writing, decided to support his efforts and helped him publish his book entitled Cinnamon Shops

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Read
Ficowski's poetry here
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More on Ficowski here
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jerzy ficowski
Jerzy Ficowski was born in 1924 in Warsaw, and was a distinguished poet, prose writer, scholar and translator (from Yiddish, Russian and Roma). During the German occupation of Warsaw in World War II, Ficowski served in the Home Army (AK) and took part in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. He has published some twenty volumes of poetry since his debut in 1948, and one book of short stories: Waiting for the Dog to Sleep. His poetry has been illustrated by Marc Chagall, and his 1979 collection of poems, A Reading of Ashes, has been called the most moving account of the Holocaust written by a non-Jew. A major scholar of Roma history and culture (his book Gypsies in Poland: History and Customs is a seminal work in the field), he translated Roma folk tales into Polish (Sister of the Birds and Other Gypsy Tales), and was one of the most active translators of Yiddish literature in postwar Poland.

Starting in 1946, Ficowski dedicated a vast amount of time to reassembling
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Childhood
Young Jerzy Ficowski with his parents and sister Krystyna (to his right), photographer unknown
Born on 4 September 1924 in Warsaw, Jerzy Ficowski maintained close ties with his home town throughout his life. He and his younger sister Krystyna (1925-1998) were raised “amongst lilacs, jasmines and greenery”, in a house at 47 Filtrowa Street, to which he would later recollect in his poems Kirá and Zaległości (Overdues).
Their father, Tadeusz Ficowski (1893-1958), a lawyer and civil servant, was an enthusiast and propagator of the Esperanto and Paraglot artificial languages. He also wrote philosophical essays (those that survived the war were published by Jerzy Ficowski in a collection entitled Wielka ameba (The Great Amoeba), with a preface by Leszek Kołakowski. His mother Halina, née Średnicka (1897-1971), worked as a civil servant.
It was in his father’s library where young Jerzy found a collection of Julian Tuwim’s poems. They inspired him to explore the world of Mickiewicz, Słowacki and other poets, while his parents expected him to train as a painter or m