History of a disappearance : the story of a forgotten Polish town / Filip Springer ; translated from the Polish by Sean Gasper Bye.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Springer, Filip, 1982- author.

Contributor:

Bye, Sean Gasper, translator.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Poland--History.

Poland.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (211 pages)

Edition:

First Restless Books paperback edition.

Place of Publication:

Brooklyn, New York : Restless Books, [2017]

Language Note:

Translated from the Polish.

Summary:

Lying at the crucible of Central Europe, the Silesian village of Kupferberg suffered the violence of the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, the World War I. After Stalin's post-World War II redrawing of Poland's borders, Kupferberg became Miedzianka, a town settled by displaced people from all over Poland and a new center of the Eastern Bloc's uranium-mining industry. Decades of neglect and environmental degradation led to the town being declared uninhabitable, and the population was evacuated. Today, it exists only in ruins, with barely a hundred people living on the unstable ground above its collapsing mines. Springer catalogs the lost human elements: the long-departed tailor and deceased shopkeeper; the parties, now silenced, that used to fill the streets with shouts and laughter, and the once-beautiful cemetery, with gravestones upended by tractors and human bones scattered by dogs. In Miedzianka, Springer sees a microcosm of European history, and a powerful narrative of how the ghosts of the past continue to haunt us in the present--Provided by the publisher.

Contents:

All the resurrections

The bottle

Kupferberger gold

Daddy isn't there

O Lord, make no tarrying

They went away

Photographs I

Westward, or All the deaths of Barbara Wójcik

Ueberschaer's tomb

The second cemetery

Long live Mikołajczyk!

Postscript

The last ones

Don't touch the graves

There was this fear

The Germans are coming

Whose fault

That evil woman

The church

The manor house

The brewery

The letter

Photographs II

All Miedzianka's treasures

The town is gone

Epilogue.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

9781632061164

1632061163