God's Horse and the Atheists' School

by Dichter, Wilhelm; Levine, Madeline G.

• ISBN13: 9780810127937
• ISBN10: 0810127938
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-02-29
• Publisher: Northwestern Univ Pr

Summary

God's Horse(1996) and The Atheists' School(1999), Wilhelm Dichter's novelistic memoirs, are both striking for their spare, precise prose and for the fullness with which they inhabit the perspectives of, respectively, a young boy trying to survive the Holocaust in hiding and an adolescent in the turbulent world of post-war Poland. The books openly address a rarely documented phenomenon a Jew who, having escaped death in Nazi-occupied Poland, ascends into the upper echelons of Polish society as a committed Communist. After the war, the narrator becomes the stepson of a rising star in the petroleum ministry. He tries to gain acceptance by becoming a propagandist, but he can't help wondering if those who constantly warn of a renewal of Jewish persecution may be right.

Author Biography

Wilhelm Dichter was born in what is now Ukraine in 1935 and survived the war as a hidden child. He lived in Poland until coming to the United States in 1968 in the last emigration of Polish Jews. Both his first book, Kofi Pana Boga (the Polish edition of God's Horse, 1996), and Szkota bezboznikw (the Polish edition of The Atheists' School, 1999) were nominated for Poland's prestigious Nike Prize. The third volume of the trilogy, Lekcja angielskiego ("English Lessons"), was published in 2010. He lives in the Boston area. Madeline G. Levine is the Kenan Professor of Slavic Literatures Emerita at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Among the many books she has translated from Polish are A Scrap of Time and Other Stories by Ida Fink (Northwestern, 1995), The Woman from Hamburg and Other True Stories by Hanna Krall (2005), and several volumes of prose by Czeslaw Milosz.

Table of Contents

GodÆs Horse
Before Everything
Polish Times	p. 7
Russian Times	p. 14
Under the Bed in Boryskw
On Panska Street	p. 21
Under the Bed	p. 28
In the Garret	p. 33
In the Attic	p. 39
In the Well	p. 45
Right After the War
On Stalin Street	p. 53
Mother and Michal	p. 73
Repatriates	p. 81
Antidote
At Winkler's	p. 99
In a Formerly German Apartment	p. 106
Repossession	p. 120
The Oil King's Son
In the Morning	p. 135
Noontime	p. 141
Afternoon	p. 145
Sunday Afternoon	p. 150
Evening	p. 154
Night	p. 160
In Power
Farewell to Trzebinia	p. 167
Over the Butcher Shop	p. 169
At Queen Jadwiga School	p. 175
Two Michals	p. 183
The AtheistsÆ School
Myopia
A Funeral Procession	p. 203
The Ophthalmologist	p. 207
Examination	p. 215
The Grand Hotel	p. 217
Pan JózioÆs Gallery	p. 221
There Was Nothing Between Us
A Drop of Socialism	p. 229
A Ship in the City	p. 244
Christiania	p. 255
Latin Lessons	p. 264
Let Us Love One Another
Birthday Conversations	p. 289
No Help from Anywhere	p. 306
The Death of a Communard	p. 313
Certificate of Maturity
Under the Linden Tree	p. 329
Graduation	p. 343
Parade	p. 357
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