I'd Like to Say Sorry, but There's No One to Say Sorry To

Thirty-one brief monologues, none longer than a few pages and each closing on a pointed line, in which anonymous Polish Jews, many of them children or grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, talk to a listener who never replies. Silence runs through many of them: a daughter who begs in vain to be taken to her relatives' grave, a woman who turns to state archives to find the grandparents her parents kept from her. Others carry an inherited fear: a man who promised his dying mother never to reveal his origins, a girl sent off to nuns after a neighbour's insults in 1968, a woman who has hidden who she is from husband and children ever since her family handed her to Poles in 1940. Some speakers disown their Jewishness, some conceal it, a few make jokes against Jews themselves.

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About the book

Form

Short stories

Length

128 pages in the original

Genres

Historical (assigned by AI)

Set in

Poland

First published

2017 by Wydawnictwo Nisza

Author's age

51 when first published

ISBN

9788362795505 (original)

9781620976838 (The New Press, United States)