Authors: Jarosław Zieliński i Jerzy S. Majewski

Pages: 436

Publishers: Agora SA and POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews

Impressive tenement houses of the bourgeoisie and run-down courtyards. Wealthy merchants, small-time money-grubbers and petty swindlers. Artistic Bohemia. Music seeping out of the elegant cafés and the hustle and bustle of the market square. Paperboys, peddlers, tzadikim, “iron kings”, cabaret artists, poets and criminals. Chmielna Street, the Nowolipki district, Leszno Street, Grzybowski Square, Stawki and Gnojna Streets.

All those people, all those scents, the music, the houses and the streets, the traces of human concerns and passions – all gone now, for the world of Jewish Warsaw is no more. It was lost forever, obliterated by the war.

Majewski and Zieliński – two eminent scholars specialising in the history of Warsaw – resurrect this world for us out of memories, press notes, books, documents and photographs. We walk down the streets, retrace the footsteps of Isaac Bashevis Singer, take a look into the cafés where Władysław Szpilman once played and listen to Józef Hen as he reminisces on the Nowolipie neighbourhood – the centre of his childhood world.