The Crime and the Silence by Anna Bikont, Book Tour in America

"The Crime and the Silence is an astonishing act of investigation and documentation [...]. A terrifying and necessary book, unsparing in its detail, but deeply heartening as an act of historical reclamation." - Julian Barnes

"Bikont combines the persistence and energy of a journalist with the humanity and care of a poet." - Timothy Snyder

"A daring exposure [...] Bikont's fearless research-she even confronted the brothers known to have led the Jedwabne murders-makes this a fantastic book. It was first published in Poland in 2004, and the European Book Prize it won in 2011 (for the French version) should be only the first of many awards for this significant work." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Bikont has performed an extraordinary journalistic feat in documenting this terrible, historically contested atrocity." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Jan Gross's hugely controversial Neighbors was a historian's disclosure of the events in the small Polish town of Jedwabne on July 10, 1941, when the citizens rounded up the Jewish population and burned them alive in a barn. The massacre was a shocking secret that had been suppressed for more than sixty years, and it provoked the most important public debate in Poland since 1989. From the outset, Anna Bikont reported on the town, combing through archives and interviewing residents who survived the war period. Her writing became a crucial part of the debate and she herself an actor in a national drama.

Part history, part memoir, The Crime and the Silence is the journalist's account of these events: both the story of the massacre told through oral histories of survivors and witnesses, and a portrait of a Polish town coming to terms with its dark past. Including the perspectives of both heroes and perpetrators, Bikont chronicles the sources of the hatred that exploded against Jews and asks what myths grow on hidden memories, what destruction they cause, and what happens to a society that refuses to accept a horrific truth.

A profoundly moving exploration of being Jewish in modern Poland that Julian Barnes called "one of the most chilling books," The Crime and the Silence is a vital contribution to Holocaust history and a fascinating story of a town coming to terms with its dark past.

Anna Bikont is a journalist for Gazeta Wyborcza, the main newspaper in Poland, which she helped found in 1989. For her articles on the crimes of Jedwabne and Radzilów, she was honored in 2001 with Poland's most prestigious award in journalism, the Press Prize. In 2011 she received the European Book Prize for Le crime et le silence, the French version of The Crime and the Silence. In 2008 and 2009, Bikont was a Cullman Fellow of the New York Public Library.

Alissa Valles is a poet and the co-translator of the collected poems and prose of Zbigniew Herbert, as well as the translator of other modern Polish poets, including Aleksander Wat, Miron Bialoszewski, and Ryszard Krynicki.

 

Thursday, October  15

Yale University, New Haven, CT

Friday, October 16

The New School, New York, NY

Monday, October 19

with translator Alissa Valles

Politics and Prose

5015 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC 20008

7:00 PM

Thursday, October 22

with David Samuels, literary editor, Tablet magazine

The Museum of Jewish Heritage (co-hosted by the 92nd St Y)

36 Battery Pl, New York, NY 10280

7:00 PM

Sunday, October 25

Princeton University

Monday, October 26

with Dr. Irena Grudzinska Gross

Princeton University

4:30 PM

Wednesday, October 28

with Prof. Antony Polonsky and translator Alissa Valles

Harvard University

4:15 PM

Thursday, October 29

with Dr. Irena Grudzinska Gross and translator Alissa Valles

Boston University

6:00 PM

Further details to be confirmed.

www.polishculture-nyc.org