ABSTRACT
Born Józef Henryk Cukier in 1923, Józef Hen is a writer of Jewish extraction who spent most of the war in the Soviet Union, where he eventually joined the Ludowe Wojsko Polskie (Polish People’s Army) under Soviet command. He got his literary start as a writer for military publications. He was never a ‘communist’ writer, but his wartime credentials provided him with a good entrée into the Polish literary scene, and for a number of years he was president of the Polish Writers Union. Hen is a ‘man’s writer’, his favourite topics being based on his wartime experiences, sports stories and male-female relationships seen from the male point of view. In a sense he reminds one of the earlier American ironist Ring Lardner (1885–1933), except that his stories often have an uplifting conclusion, as in the present story, in which rough characters show an unexpected streak of humanity. His work has with time come to be more appreciated, and his memoirs about growing up Jewish in interwar Warsaw, Nowolipie Street , have just been translated into English. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315883724/f1ec34ee-0050-45f0-bb21-227ec0c07bdd/content/ufig19_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
