Poland: Memoirs and Scenes
Jehiel Isaiah Trunk
1949
Nighttime at the home of I. L. Peretz, and Shimon (aka Bernard) Kratko appears like a vision. Who masterminded an audience with Peretz, I can’t tell you, but it was all that mattered now, as if nothing had gone before:
I defer to the specialist to resolve Kratko’s ultimate status for the history of art, but I’ve never come across an artist’s force…
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Creator Bio
Jehiel Isaiah Trunk
Born near Warsaw and descended from a prominent Hasidic family, Jehiel Isaiah Trunk married into one of Poland’s richest Jewish families. Despite his inherited wealth and prestige, Trunk was a committed Bundist, and as an essayist, critic, and author himself, he made considerable contributions to the Jewish cultural scene in early twentieth-century Poland. Upon the German invasion of Poland, Trunk and his wife fled, finding their way to New York in 1941. There he began to work on Poyln, his seven-volume memoir.