It was raining the day the teacher was supposed to arrive. This did not upset any of us, neither me, nor Felek, nor Jaś. Felek had grown a lot over the summer. He had just turned sixteen and could no longer fit into his gray uniform. The tailor should have already made him some new clothes, but mother had once again fallen ill. She had locked herself up in her apartments with old Kama, and again there was no one to come with us to Klasztorzyszcz. Jaś, always frail and thin, would go running around the park by himself; he was eight years old, four years younger than me. The rain didn't bother us, so we spent the whole day in the yard, and in the evening, smelling of wet cloth, sat down to dinner. There were dumplings with bacon and roasted cabbage with porridge. Miss Dora solemnly put down...
The Teacher
Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz (1894–1980), poet, prose writer, playwright, and translator, shuttled between cultures and languages to reap their symbolic resources for his art. He is best known today for a mesmeric, taboo-breaking sequence of short stories, some of which inspired films by Jerzy Kawalerowicz and Andrzej Wajda.
Jack J. B. Hutchens is a part-time lecturer of Polish literature and culture at Loyola University Chicago. He has published extensively on Polish literature, including an article titled “Julian Stryjkowski: Polish, Jewish, Queer” in Canadian Slavonic Papers, which won the 2019 Article of the Year Award from the Canadian Association of Slavists. He has also published a monograph entitled Queer Transgressions in Twentieth-Century Polish Fiction: Gender, Nation, Politics (2020). Hutchens recently participated in a Fulbright fellowship at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, where he also conducted research for a project on the author Jerzy Nasierowski. He is now working as a general contractor specializing in home improvement.
Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Jack J. B. Hutchens; The Teacher. The Polish Review 1 December 2023; 68 (4): 58–92. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/23300841.68.4.04
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