Paweł Huelle
Who Was David Weiser?
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“An intoxicating read,” “a masterpiece,” “novel of the decade,”“a book so good it’s fearsome” – this is just a random pick from the enthusiastic praise showered on Who Was David Weiser by the critics in Poland and abroad. Hailed as the best Polish novel of the 1980’s, translated into a number of languages, it made Paweł Huelle famous and granted him a secure position as one of Poland’s most important contemporary writers.
In 2000 it was adapted for the screen. According to the director, Wojciech Marczewski, Weiser (starring, among others, Marek Kondrat, Krystyna Janda, Piotr Fronczewski and Zbigniew Zamachowski) is a film about “memory, its terrible power and its fallibility.”
None of the interpretations of Paweł Huelle’s novel have solved the mystery of the little David Weiser. Who was he? Why did he draw his friends’ attention to himself? What truth was hidden behind his unusual ideas and experiments? And finally, why did he disappear all of a sudden?
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Marek Lasota
Wojtyła Denounced
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It is the first book presenting and analysing the material on the Pope-to-be preserved in the files of communist Poland’s secret services. The first document mentioning his name probably dates back as far as 1945 or 1946. From the 1940’s throughout the 1970’s Wojtyła and his friends were objects of regular surveillance. Marek Lasota shows what the main interests of the secret services were: Wojtyła’s career in the Polish church, his struggle for building a church in Nowa Huta – the communist-built, totally churchfree working class suburb of Krakow, or his involvement with the students and intelligentsia. The closing chapter describes the secret services’ actions during John Paul II’s first papal visit to Poland.
Drawing from materials from the Cracovian office of the Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (Institute for National Memory), he quotes extensively from original documents compiled by secret informers such as “Żagielowski”, “Marecki” or “Delta”, some of them recruiting from the Pope’s most trusted circle. The question whether their identity should be discovered is causing a heated debate in Polish church and society today.
The book also includes photos and scans of key documents. A fascinating read, it is an attempt to showcase the Polish social services’ patterns of thought and action, and the huge scale of their operations. It unearths many unknown facts and shows Karol Wojtyła’s life in a light very different from the numerous biographies of him as a pope.
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Elżbieta Adamiak
Women in the Bible
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In the Old Testament the author follows the tracks of women, both the primary heroines such as Eve, Sarah, Judith or Lot's Wife, and also figures less known or downright nameless, recalled by a single phrase such as „foreign wife” or „wise woman.” We find out about their heroic deeds and dramas, their tough situations, but also that in Israel women could fulfill leadership roles. The book also presents certain theological ideas relating to women and underscores that which in the biblical understanding of women is closest to the concerns of modern women. Elżbieta Adamiak shows that the role of women in the Bible, although often secondary and undervalued, is much larger than we think.
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