Selected text
Books. All my life books have been my hobby. First fairytales. All kinds of them. Then my first book was ‘The Heart of a Boy’ by Amicis [Edmondo De, Italian writer, 1846-1908]. Many people were raised on it at that time. Those were short stories in which there was always some poor person, and in the end that person was always rewarded by fate – he or she would come out the winner. Then came a period of adventure books. I read almost all the novels by Karl May [1842-1912, German writer, author of popular adventure books about Native Americans and the Wild West]. And, in 1937, 1938, I suddenly started discovering great literature. I remember that it started with the French writers of literature and Alexandre Dumas. I also read Ehrenburg’s [16] ‘13 Pipes’ and ‘The Love of Jeanne Ney.’ In 1939 or in early 1940 my father gave me the ‘Silent Don’ [epic novel about the Don Cossacks; consecutive volumes in 1928, 1932, 1940, by Mikhail Sholokhov (1905-1984), Russian novelist and Nobel prize winner] to read. All that, of course, in Polish translation. Then came Romain Rolland [1866-1944, French writer and Nobel prize winner] and his ‘Colas Breugnon’ [1918], a book I’ve loved ever since and which I reach for every time I feel blue. Generally, however, no one recommended books to me. I took some off the shelf myself, I borrowed others.
Period
Interview
Janina Wiener