Praise for I’d Like to Say Sorry, but There’s No One to Say Sorry To:
"Sean Gasper Bye’s crisp phrasing renders in poignant English Grynberg’s tales of missed connections and disconnection. Here, whole lives seem to shift within pithy sentences—between sentences, even. These brief stories mesmerize with vignettes and short sharp phrases whose truth exceeds an all-too-neat binary of fiction/nonfiction. With a photographer’s eye and a historian’s gift for teasing out patterns, Grynberg tempts us into a rapprochement with our own, troubled pasts, with the parts of our pasts we most shudder to recall. To read these stories is to see humanity at its worst and yet never to lose a conviction about what we might long for."
—Jury of the 2023 National Translation Award
“Drop everything and get a copy of Mikołaj Grynberg’s collection of short vignettes, I’d Like to Say Sorry, but There’s No One to Say Sorry To.”
—Religious News Service
“Grynberg’s fiction debut is a sobering glimpse into a particularly difficult kind of diaspora life. For Grynberg, the book is a way of asserting belonging in a country that has tried to deny its Jewish history and its complicity in Jewish persecution.”
—The Forward
“Grynberg’s writing is sharp, edged with a sarcastic wit and a touch of black humour, yet underlined by an air of tragedy. . . . I’d Like to Say I’m Sorry is not only insightful, but also an important read.”
—Canadian Jewish News
“I’d Like to Say Sorry, but There’s No One to Say Sorry To revisits the plight of the second and third post-Holocaust generations without any documentary constraints. . . . These soliloquies of doubt, grief, rage or sheer bewilderment appear without gloss or commentary, as minimalist micro-dramas. . . . [Mikołaj Grynberg’s] speakers span many stages of life and states of mind, flexibly captured in the salty, speedy English prose of Sean Gasper Bye.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Wrenching, astonishing, surprisingly humorous. . . . Polish photographer/psychologist Mikołaj Grynberg alchemizes his documentary nonfiction into a superb collection of 31 short stories poignantly revealing the Polish Jewish experience.”
—Shelf Awareness
“This is a real bomb of a book. . . . Written with an amazing eye for detail, with crisp conciseness. . . . And everything here is seasoned with a heavy sprinkling of spot-on black humour.”
—European Literature Network
“The vital English-language debut from Grynberg, a photographer, psychologist, and oral historian, features thirty-one first-person vignettes narrated by Jews and gentiles in Poland who belong to the generation born after the Holocaust. . . . Grynberg knows the value of capturing a moment in time; through these narratives, the reader sees, as translator Bye notes, ‘something we might not have seen with our own eye.’ These views of a tragic past are brought sharply into focus.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A moving and often wryly funny portrait of Polish Jewishness. . . . At times witty, at others devastating, Grynberg’s first foray into fiction is a major triumph.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Grynberg writes with a careful, almost stoic format. . . . His style is both erudite and cautious. . . . Like cracking an egg open, Grynberg peels away the outer, protective layers of ego, leaving bare the pathos of bigotry and the relentless striving toward understanding.”
—New York Journal of Books
“A poignant short story collection about being a Polish Jew.”
—Foreword Reviews
“Grynberg renders the specific and universal messiness of individuals and families trying to connect, avoiding connection, and longing to find some kind of peace in complexity.”
—Maia Ipp, contributing editor of Jewish Currents
“Mikołaj Grynberg’s characters yearn for connection, though the relationships with their family, their people, and their country, are fraught. One of the most brutal of Grynberg’s vignettes describes the casual inherited anti-Semitism of children. But what becomes of these children when their parents, late in life, reveal that they are Jewish? How do they make sense of who they are and where they belong in the world? An absolutely gripping, emotionally exhausting book. Highly recommended.”
—Goldie Goldbloom, author of On Division
“The incredible vividness of these monologues, the realism, the sadness and the black humor, all combine into an enthralling, multi-faceted story of Jewish and Polish fate. . . . I’ll come back to this book, and I’m sorry I can’t take any of these stories as fiction. All of it is true. Unfortunately.”
—Wojciech Szot, Zdaniem Szota
“It is with a lump in my throat that I read these luminous cameos. Such a range of voices, often revealing for the first time what had been hidden for a lifetime. In Grynberg, psychologist and artist by equal measure, they have found a vessel into which they can pour their hearts. With exquisite clarity, his spare prose lays bare the conundrums with which they have lived and died—as Jews in postwar Poland.”
—Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews
★ 2022-04-13
A series of monologues describing Jewish life in contemporary—and not-so-contemporary—Poland.
Grynberg, a photographer and psychologist as well as a writer, is known in his native Poland for his oral histories: collections of interviews with Polish Jews about their experiences. His first work of fiction—and his first work to appear in English—makes use of those interviews as a jumping-off point. The book takes the form of a collection of fictionalized monologues, each no longer than three or four pages. In several of them, the speakers are surprised to learn that they themselves are Jewish when older relatives reveal the truth that, for years, they’d been hiding. In one, a boy only learns he’s Jewish after his grandmother sends him off to a Jewish summer camp. In another, three little girls pretend they’re hiding through the war in a cellar, where their antisemitic father is surprised to find them. In a note at the end of the book, Grynberg’s translator, Bye, describes the book as “not so much polyphonic as clamorous.” It’s an apt description; the collection, in which dozens of voices clamor to be heard, is a moving and often wryly funny portrait of Polish Jewishness. Grynberg has zeroed in on a particular generation—one that is once or twice removed from the Holocaust, the children or grandchildren of survivors. Taken as a whole, the collection traces the commonalities as well as the differences among all these experiences. And while the result can be grim, Grynberg’s deft, light touch also provides a sense of levity, hope, and even laughter.
At times witty, at others devastating, Grynberg’s first foray into fiction is a major triumph.
