Conversation with a Countryman

Raised Catholic in an assimilated Jewish family from Warsaw, Antoni Slonimski was a Polish poet, journalist, playwright, translator, and literary activist. The grandson of prominent religious thinker and writer rabbi Chaim Zelig Slonimski, he was a cofounder of the Skamander group of experimental poets and a frequent contributor to several periodicals, writing regular columns and reviews on theater, arts, and social satire. Slonimski spent World War II in exile in Paris and London, and served for several years in senior positions at UNESCO and the Polish Cultural Institute. Upon returning to Poland in the early 1950s, he was a leading member of the intelligentsia and head of the Union of Polish Writers, serving as a voice of criticism and liberalization. Although a victim of the wave of antisemitism that overtook Poland in 1968, Slonimski decided to stay in Poland. He was killed in an automobile accident in Warsaw.