Pani Stefa and the Orphans Out of the Shadow of Korczak

At a moment when communists were engineering a New Man, and Zionists a New Jew, a doctor and a teacher devoted themselves to a social experiment: raising a new child. Their orphanage is set amidst the desperate poverty of Jewish Warsaw; often the children are not orphans, but rather children of mothers unable to care for them, making their way out of rat-infested rooms with dirt floors or frozen cellars. In this polyphonic work of literary non-fiction, Magdalena Kicinska shifts the gaze from the legendary Dr. Korczak to the inscrutable Pani Stefa. Artfully – in a style reminiscent of Hanna Krall and Agata Tuszynska – the author pieces together a story of a life: a Polish Jewess who spoke French but not Yiddish; a pedagogue who was as demanding as she was self-sacrificing; a lonely woman who rarely in her life had a moment of privacy. In doing so, Kicinska shows us how it is sometimes the drama of history’s minor characters, which can cast the most penetrating light on their world.

A graduate of the Faculty of Journalism and Political Science at the University of Warsaw. She is the author of Stefania Wilczynska's biography, Pani Stefa. Since January 2019 she has been working as the editor-in-chief of the monthly Pismo. Opinion Magazine. In February 2019, her first poetry collection Means of Transport was released. She lives in Warsaw. Sean Gasper Bye’s translations from Polish include The King of Warsaw by Szczepan Twardoch and Ellis Island: A People’s History by Malgorzata Szejnert. He studied Polish at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London and spent five years as literature and humanities curator at the Polish Cultural Institute New York. He is a winner of the Asymptote Close Approximations Prize and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship.

Contents
Author
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements from the Janusz Korczak Association of Canada
Introduction
Chapters1-17
Timeline
Selected Bibliography