“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?

Paweł Huelle is a novelist and poet. He was born in Gdańsk in 1957 and graduated in Polish Philology at the University of Gdańsk. He worked as a university lecturer, journalist and director of the Gdańsk Polish Television Centre. Honoured with many prestigious literary awards, Huelle is one of the most successful contemporary Polish writers.
His first novel Who Was David Weiser (1987) was hailed by the critics as “the book of the decade,” “a masterpiece” and “a literary triumph” and has been published, among others, in Germany, Spain, France and Finland. It is a story of a mysterious disappearance of a Jewish boy during his summer vacations. Many years later Dawidek’s friend sets out to investigate the events that came to shape his entire life. The novel has been described as a coming-of-age story, an adventure novel or even as a philosophical treatise.
Like Who Was David Weiser, Huelle’s next two books Stories for a Time of Relocation (1991) and First Love and Other Stories (1996) are set in his home town of Gdańsk and its environs, even though they are concerned with different historical periods and social milieus.