“One of the strongest literary renditions of the Shoah I know.”—Saul Friedlander, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Years of Extermination
I, one
Henryk Stanislaw Wyrzykowski,
Head Clerk of Closed Files,
a department of one,
work…
in a forgotten well of ghostly sighs
This astonishing novel in verse tells the story of Henryk Wyrzykowski, a drifting, haunted young man hiding from the Vietnam War in the basement of a San Francisco welfare building and translating his mother’s diaries. The diaries concern the Jedwabne massacre, an event that took place in German-occupied Poland in 1941. Wildly inventive, dark, beautiful, and unrelenting, The Wherewithal is a meditation on the nature of evil and the destruction of war.
