Please join the East Central European Center and the Harriman Institute for a conversation with Mikołaj Grynberg and his translator Sean Gasper Bye. Moderated by Christopher Caes.

Confidential follows on the success of acclaimed photographer, psychologist, and writer Mikołaj Grynberg’s highly acclaimed short story collection, I’d Like to Say Sorry, but There’s No One to Say Sorry To, which was a finalist for numerous awards, including Poland’s most prestigious literary prize, the Nike, a National Jewish Book Award, the Sami Rohr Prize, and the National Translation Award in Prose for Sean Gasper Bye’s translation.

This powerful new novella is a darkly comic portrait of a Jewish family in today’s Poland, struggling to express their love for one another in the face of a past that cannot and will not be forgotten. The grandfather is a doctor, a Holocaust survivor who has now vowed to live only for pleasure. His son, born at the start of the war, becomes a well-respected physicist, but finds himself emotionally unable to attend conferences in Germany, despite the benefit it would give his career. The mother is loving but firm, though she has a secret habit of attending strangers’ funerals so that she can cry.

A masterpiece of concision, “Confidential” expands on one of the stories in I’d Like to Say Sorry . . . , tackling themes of memory and care, trauma and memory, as well as enduring anti-Semitism, with unforgettable power, emotional complexity, and Grynberg’s trademark black humor.

Mikołaj Grynberg is a photographer, psychologist, and writer of fiction and nonfiction. He is the author of Survivors of the 20th Century, I Accuse Auschwitz, and The Book of Exodus as well as I’d Like to Say Sorry, but There’s No One to Say Sorry To and Confidential, translated by Sean Gasper Bye (The New Press). He lives in Poland.

Sean Gasper Bye is a translator of Polish literature into English. Sean began learning Polish at university as a way of reconnecting with his roots. He fell in love with Polish literature, and has been translating it since 2012. He now works full-time as a literary translator, mainly on contemporary fiction and reportage, but also on historical texts and theater. He has translated books by authors including Małgorzata Szejnert, Szczepan Twardoch, Mikołaj Grynberg and others. His translations have won the EBRD Literary Prize and the Asymptote Close Approximations Prize; and been shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, a National Jewish Book Award, the Sami Rohr Prize and the National Translation Award. He has been a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow and Translator-in-Residence at Princeton University. Sean is active in supporting the literary translation community. He serves on the board of the American Literary Translators Association, is a founding member of the Cedilla & Co. translators’ collective, and is a mentor for emerging translators through the National Centre for Writing and the Yiddish Book Center. He lives in Philadelphia.

At 7pm on December 5, Grynberg’s film Proof of Identity will be screened at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. See here for more information.