Wickwick is a small Finnish publishing company specialized in children's picture books, novels, and poems. The books reflect a warm and tolerant view of life, which offers a peaceful background for enjoying stories, both for children and adults. Current themes include: Survival, Generations, Helping, Power, Environment, and War & Peace.
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Polens Traum: Europa. Polens Zweifel: Europa. Polens Realität: Europa. über die Jahrhunderte hinweg bewegte Europa die Polen, bewegte Polen Europa. Diskussionen entbrannten, Heere marschierten, Bücher erschienen, Grenzen verschwanden und entstanden, immer wieder: die Suche nach Heimat, Vaterland, Europa. Jahrhundertelang stellten sich die Menschen zwischen Warthe, Weichsel, Bug und Dniepr die Frage nach dem Kontext der Nation: War es Europa, sein Westen, sein Osten, der Orient? Oder lag Polen im Mittelpunkt einer echt ostmitteleuropäischen Tradition – als Kernland der Sarmaten, der ewig Leidenden, als 'Zwischeneuropa' irgendwo zwischen Rom, Moskau und Byzanz? Beendet die Aufnahme Polens in die Europäische Union im Mai 2004 die Suche Polens nach dem Ort der Nation in Europa? Peter Oliver Loew zeichnet in einer Auswahl von Berichten, Essays und Gedichten aus zwei Jahrhunderten die Entwicklung des polnischen Europadenkens nach. Der Band enthält Texte von Stanislaw Leopold Brzozowski, Jan Parandowski, Józef ChalasiDski, Pawel Hertz, Jaroslaw Marek Rymkiewicz, Marcin Król, Johannes Paul II., Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Czeslaw Milosz und vielen anderen.
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Marcin Wicha (1972) is a Polish designer, illustrator, columnist, and writer. Having written a few books for children, he turned to adult non-fiction with a personal slant, of which the present book is the second instance, after his debut, How I Stopped Loving Design, was published to popular and critical acclaim in 2015, also by Karakter. Things I Didn't Throw Out is told in short, anecdotal chapters, collected in three sections: „My Mother's Kitchen”, „Dictionary”, and „Laughing at Appropriate Moments”, and forms a loose diptych with How I Stopped Loving Design, which focused on Wicha's father in the aftermath of his death (both books work as stand-alones, too).The book is a first-person account of processing grief through the objects his mother, Joanna, surrounded herself with while living and dying. The first part is mainly devoted to Joanna's books and how they formed a part of her life in its various stages. The second is a series of stories about objects (such as her typing machine and her ballpoint pens), mementoes, phrases and words that were important in Joanna's life and which allow us to construct an image of her as a person, a mother and a Jewish woman living in Communist Poland. The third, shortest one is a stark, unflinching report of her final illness and death.Wicha meditates on the obsolescence of objects after their owner dies. The book is a collection of memories of a difficult person who lived in a difficult time – Wicha realistically describes the material meanness of the Communist regime, the shortages, rudeness and the hoarding instincts shaped by post-war reality. Joanna's Jewishness, her devotion to work, her argumentative temperament, the clarity and no-nonsense quality of her opinions - all that accumulates into a fully fleshed-out character whose decline and death is then described in terse, unsentimental, yet very touching scenes. The result is cathartic.In the first section, Wicha deconstructs the post-war history of Poland in a series of chapters which transform his mother's bookshelves into an almost geological accumulation of many decades of sediment. During his childhood, in times of economic crisis, he has to stage a long war of attrition with a bookshop sales assistant in order to buy the new Tove Jansson book. In a long chapter analysing the caustic wit of Jane Austen's Emma, Wicha describes his mother's passionate relationship with that book, which always consoled her in times of low mood, but couldn't do the trick after her husband's death. He looks for the background stories in the little doodles on the margin, the tiny hole on one page, finds the history of socio-economic transformation of 20th century Europe in his mother's cookbooks, and mentions his mother's jokey ambition to move to Canada, reflected by her English textbook.The second section has a broader context of politics and history. Wicha describes politics as an excuse not to talk about personal problems; his mother's was a life spent with politics in the foreground, because there was no other way. Wicha explores the common, generational trauma of March 1968, when the remaining Polish Jews, frequently hiding their identity, were subject to a campaign of intimidation and social cleansing. In chapters seemingly about trivia, Wicha writes about the legacy of a community of people which was annihilated – about how they continue to be present in tasteless jokes, awkwardly-worded memorial signs, allusions during family gatherings. This section shows incredible sensitivity to the layers of global, local and personal histories that add up and intertwine.In the third section the short chapters are untitled, which adds to the fragmentary nature of the text and the impression that Wicha is barely holding it together. In between conversations with his mother's live-in Ukrainian nurse, doctors, paramedics and his mostly non-responsive mother, Wicha attempts to carry on and make sense of what is happening, give it meaning. The last six short chapters deal directly with his mother's death; they encompass the formalities and banal details that he has to attend to, the unbearable pain and helplessness, the need to keep going. Thus concludes this archeology of love, exasperation and grief, not without moments of dark humour.The book would be perfect for readers interested in: exploring the parent-child relationship, especially (but not exclusively) at the end of the parent's life, and issues of processing grief and remembering, or reading an off-piste exploration of the 20th century history of the Jewish community in Europe. Things I Didn't Throw Out is a wry and unsentimental account of the emotional and physical labour of a carer and an attempt to understand one's parent as a person with their own history, personality and temperament independent of parenthood. It is also a nuanced portrait of a woman who refused to compromise and continued to demand respect, who was sensitive to language and the complexities of history, society and politics. Some comparisons might include Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk, Cathy Rentzenbrink's Last Act of Love and Brian Dillon's In the Dark Room.
I wasted my childhood and youth. I didn't listen to the Rolling Stones or Depeche Mode. Graphic designers were my rock stars. At Piotr Wicha's house, slippers, pouffes and wall units are strictly prohibited. Export-rejected clogs make wooden noise with every step. Posters by Świerzy, Lego sets, father's drawing board and the recommendations column in a lifestyle magazine become carefully defended outposts in his war against the ugliness of Communist Poland. Then the architect's son becomes a designer. The political system changes. The chief enemy, however, is still the same, only clothed in more garish colours. 'Our logotypes are too small!', fret the clients. In the media emotions rank higher than facts, while discussions about colours give graphic designers heart attacks... 'Fall in love with design', entreat TV screens in Warsaw trams. Carefully planned space orders hotel guests around much more efficiently than security people. Whoever said that design was to make the world a better place? This collection of short, flamboyant texts resembles images in a caleidoscope, reflecting the esthetic face of Poland in the last forty years. It combines humour and erudition with a good dollop of literary talent. Marcin Wicha proves that design is by no means innocent. But even though designers often experience truly grotesque situations, their job never ceases to amaze and delight.
Galicia is an integral part of the Habsburg myth and the epitome of worldly seclusion, Eastern Jewish cultural traditions, the Kakan way of life and indescribable poverty. Even if the supranational entity called the Habsburg Monarchy, to which Galicia belonged between 1772 and 1918, no longer exists, the region lives on in literature. In addition to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Iwan Franko and Karl Emil Franzos, Joseph Roth, Bruno Schulz, Mascha Kaléko, Stanisław Vincenz, Józef Wittlin, Hnat Chotkevych, Zygmunt Haupt, Stanisław Lem, and Isaak Babel dealt with Galician themes. Today, Sophia and Juri Andrukhovych, Andrzej Stasiuk, Olga Tokarczuk, Martin Pollack, Tanya Maljartschuk, Taras and Jurko Prochasko, Ziemowit Szczerek, Natalka Sniadanko, Maxim Biller among others, do so. The book takes you to places of European history in the Southeast of Poland and in the West of Ukraine - from Krakow via Tarnow to Brody and from Lviv via Drohobych, Stanislau/Iwano-Frankiwsk and Boryslau to Zakopane. Marcin Wiatr reminds us that Galicia has historical lessons to teach us all in Europe.
Upper Silesia – a region in Poland with an eventful past, characterized by diverse cultures which influence each other and overlap. Here people live together, who feel themselves as Polish, German or Upper Silesian. Impulses for regional identity gives the multilingual literature. Here Joseph von Eichendorff, Max Herrmann-Neisse and Horst Bienek were born. Also Janosch has set a literary monument to his homeland, Tadeusz Różewicz lived and wrote here, Jaromír Nohavica sang about the region and director Kazimierz Kutz captured it in a film trilogy. The book literarily presents Upper Silesian places like Neisse/Nysa, Gleiwitz/Gliwice, Myslowitz/Mysłowice, Lubowitz/Łubowice and St. Annaberg/Góra Świętej Anny by examples of location, architecture, industry, landscape and mysticism.
“Noodle was one of the most important people in my life, despite weighing less than a kilogram and having four legs. I also think he was the only ferret in world history to visit every chapter of the Social and Cultural Association of Jews in Poland.” (page 17) The Pavilion for Small Mammals is the lightly fictionalised diary of contemporary Polish writer Patryk Pufelski. As a young, Jewish, openly gay zookeeper with a charming affinity for things past, his book offers answers to questions you didn’t know you had. How do you nanny a baby flamingo? Is being a vegetarian cyclist really enough to be an enemy of the Polish state? What does a friendship between a twenty-something-year-old, self-declared wannabe pensioner and an octogenarian Holocaust survivor look like? Spanning almost a decade, Pufelski chronicles his journey from dropping out of university to landing a zookeeping job of his dreams. He shares not only laugh-out-loud, self-deprecating anecdotes from his personal and professional life, but also offers moving pictures of his family history, the present-day Jewish community in Poland, and life as a queer person under a socially conservative government. All the while, animals leap off the page, not least pet ferrets, tarantulas and Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs. With seemingly effortless literary wit and endearing sensitivity to those around him – “all of them animals, some of them humans” – Pufelski’s Pavilion seems to be an effortless lesson on how the diary form can combine the personal with the political into an entertaining, heart-warming whole.
