Salt of the Earth

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Józef Wittlin came into my life by chance. When I was invited to travel to the Ukrainian city of Lviv to deliver a lecture, a colleague in Warsaw sent me a photocopy of Mój Lwów,[1] a slim volume published in Polish in 1946. The author, an émigré poet, born in 1896 in the small Polish village of Dmytrów, reached the United States in his forty-sixth year. I did not speak Polish, but appreciated the grainy black-and-white photographs of buildings. They seemed significant to Wittlin. I wandered around the city in search of the monuments that touched him, a fine introduction to a city that melded pre-war Austro-Hungarian and interwar Polish style.

By the time of my second visit to Lviv a year later, I obtained a Spanish translation of Wittlin’s book, published with the assistance of his daughter Elizabeth, who lives in Madrid. My understanding of Spanish is bare, but with the help of a friend from Barcelona I was able to appreciate the magical quality of Wittlin’s lyrical prose. His words brought to life a world that was lost yet deeply present. Reassuring, full of life and energy and hope even during the dark periods from which he emerged, Wittlin opened up the imagination, helped me to feel what it might have been like to occupy those spaces at the time he walked them. He brought the past alive, and made it even more relevant.

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