Bread for the Departed (Chleb rzucony umarłym)

Abstract

About the Author: Bogdan Wojdowski was born into the Jewish family of an upholsterer and carpenter in 1930 in Warsaw. Due to the war and Holocaust he changed his first name from Dawid to Bogdan. Wojdowski belongs to the main group of witnesses of the Holocaust in Poland, having spent three years in the Warsaw Ghetto. He survived as a child (like Henryk Grynberg, Hanna Krall or Wilhelm Dichter) when he was at the age of twelve placed on the Aryan side of Warsaw outside of the ghetto. Wojdowski graduated from the Department of Polish Studies at Warsaw University, worked as a reporter, literary critic, essayist and teacher. He was the co-editor of the Polish weekly Przegląd Kulturalny (1954–1956), co-operated as a reporter for the weekly Wieś (1951–1954), and the Jewish paper Fołks-Sztyme (1971–1974) in Yiddish and Polish. Wojdowski, although generally considered as a part of Generation ’56 or Współczesność (named after the cultural magazine of the same name), denied belonging to any literary group or programme. He made his debut with the drama Ramsynit or the Egypt Parable (Ramsynit, czyli przypowieść egipska, 1959), followed by theatre critiques, and short stories (Job’s Vacation [Wakacje Hioba], 1962). In his novel Bread for the Departed (Polish book of the year 1971) he processed his traumatic experiences in the ghetto. Having achieved international acclaim, the book was translated into English in 1998 with the euphemistic title Bread for the Departed (literally “Bread Tossed to the Dead”) belongs to best known literary works on the Holocaust. Most of Wojdowski’s prose is more or less directly devoted to his wartime experiences. After committing suicide on the fifty-first anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising on April 19th, 1994 he was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw.