Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on October 28, 2026 in order to attend this event.
Please join the East Central European Center, the Harriman Institute, Literary Translation at Columbia, the Polish Cultural Institute New York, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, and the Polish Ministry of Culture for a book talk by author Mikołaj Łoziński and translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Ronald Meyer and Susan Bernofsky will serve as discussants. The event will be moderated by Małgorzata Mazurek.
Though he returned from America penniless, Nathan Stramer still daydreams of a better life as he struggles to make ends meet back the small Polish town of Tarnów. Raising 6 children with his wife Rywka, he chases hare-brained schemes to make money while she fantasizes about a trip to the seaside. Crammed into a 2-room apartment on down-at-heel Goldhammer Street, the family gets by on very little, and everyone has to pitch into Nathan’s latest ventures, including an ill-fated Stramer family café.
As the years pass, their children begin to take steps into a changing world. Rudek, the eldest, sets his passions aside for a practical job; Rena embarks on an affair with a married man, and Hesio and Salek become ever more involved with Communism.
While Nathan and Rywka try to hold the centre of their raucous family life together, national conflicts begin to escalate in Europe, and sinister forces creep into the Stramers’ world that they don’t yet understand.
Bursting with humor and pathos, My Name is Stramer is a beautiful, loving evocation of a vanished world. Internationally acclaimed as one of Poland’s foremost writers, Mikołaj Łoziński tells the tragic story of the interwar years through the ordinary triumhs and struggles of a sprawling Polish-Jewish family.
Mikołaj Łoziński is a Polish novelist, screenwriter, and photographer. He has received several awards for his writing, including the Polityka Passport and the Kościelski Foundation Award. His third novel, My Name Is Stramer, was shortlisted for the prestigious Nike Literary Award and has been translated into 16 languages. Łoziński lives in Warsaw.
Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by many of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as classics, biographies, essays, crime fiction, poetry and children’s books. She is best known as a translator of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk. For ten years she was a mentor for the Emerging Translators’ Mentorship Program and is a former co-chair of the UK Translators Association.
Susan Bernofsky is a much-lauded translator of modernist and contemporary German-language literature, including Robert Walser, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, and Jenny Erpenbeck. She directs Literary Translation at Columbia. She holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Washington University and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University.
Ronald Meyer is the award-winning translator of Anna Achmatova, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Anton Chekhov. He was the Director of the MA Program in Russian Literary Translation at Columbia University for over 20 years. He is a member of PEN America’s Translation Committee. He holds a Ph.D. in Russian Literature, with a minor in Polish literature, from Indiana University.
