A cycle of 18 poems by Leonard Neuger now in Swedish

Leonard Neuger: Amsagor för vuxna barn [Tall Tales for Grown-Up Children] Translated from Polish into Swedish by Jurek Hirschberg Illustrated by Maria Hordyj-Jönsson The original title: Wierutne bajki dla dorosłych dzieci Epix Bokförlag AB 2023 ISBN 978-91-7089-651-4, 80 pages

The King and the Nightingale – the first poem by Mascha Kaléko ever published in Swedish

Mascha Kaléko: Kungen och näktergalen [The King and the Nightingale] Translated from German into Swedish by Jurek Hirschberg Illustrated by Magda Korotyńska Afterword: Horst Schröder The original title: Der König und die Nachtigall Epix Bokförlag AB 2021 ISBN 978-91-7089-299-8, 40 pages Mascha Kaléko was born in 1907 as a daughter of Jewish parents in Chrzanów, […]

Emily Dickinson: Impossibility, like Wine

Emily Dickinson wrote her poem around 1864. She died 22 years later. She did not live to see her poem published. She did not live to see any of her poems published. Somebody has suggested that, while composing the poem, she was thinking of enchantment and exhilaration as the elements of her creative process. Somebody […]

A Survivor’s Journey: The Lusia Milch Story

A Survivor’s Journey: The Lusia Milch Story English, 103 minutes, 2020 This powerful documentary, the tale of Lusia Milch’s plight and survival, was first shown on 25 December 2020 on the occasion of her 90th birthday. She was the first one to watch it, accompanied by her closest family. Follow the account of her amazing […]

Izolda Lindberg Suslak, my friend

Izolda Lindberg Suslak (31 I 1942 – 12 IV 2019) Izolda was born in Saratov in Soviet Russia. She grew up in Vilnius, Lithuania and in Katowice, Poland, and in 1969 she moved to Malmö, Sweden, where she enriched our lives and our souls with her bright spirit and wonderful piano playing. On the 24th […]

Jurek Hirschberg: Auferstanden aus Ruinen

Johann Sebastian Bach: Six suites for solo cello, BMV 1007–1012 Played by Yo-Yo Ma. The Frauenkirche, Dresden, 31 January 2018. Auferstanden aus Ruinen Once, the Frauenkirche was reduced to rubble. Yet Yo-Yo Ma now plays Bach in the new old church. His instrument is an orchestra that lives inside his cello. He has even found […]

Opinions about treatises by Czesław Miłosz

A few opinions about treatises in verse by Czesław Miłosz, recently translated into Swedish: “In A Treatise on Poetry there is a short fragment, some forty verses long, that is dedicated to the Spirit of Times. This is the greatest poetic pronouncement that I know. Intellectually it borders to something unfathomable.” – joseph brodsky “At […]

Treatises in verse by Czesław Miłosz now in Swedish

The translations of all treatises in verse by Czesław Miłosz have been published in a bilingual Polish-Swedish edition (Czesław Miłosz, Traktater på vers, introduction and translation by Jurek Hirschberg, Bokförlaget h:ström – Text & Kultur, Umeå 2016, 412 pages). The volume is comprised of: A Treatise on Morals, A Treatise on Poetry, Six Lectures in […]

The Tarnopol pogrom 4–10 July 1941

In 1948, Salomon Hirschberg testified about the mass murder of Jews that had been perpetrated by the Germans and their Ukrainian henchmen in Tarnopol in July 1941, immediately following the withdrawal of the Soviet occupation forces and their replacement by the German ones. See an annotated English translation of the minutes of my father’s Polish language testimony. […]

Salomon Hirschberg’s account of the Tarnopol pogrom

Minutes of a witness testimony1 [Read the original testimony in Polish here.] Dr. Salomon Hirschberg, attorney, born in Tarnopol on 30 April 1903, son of Dawid and Fryderyka née Goliger, living in Katowice at Mickiewicza Street No. 2, Flat 4. Recorded by Natan Szternfinkiel, MA   The Germans entered Tarnopol on Wednesday 2 July 1941. For […]