My Name is Stramer

Co-sponsored by the Polish Cultural Institute New York; additional support provided by the Ministry of Polish Culture and Adam Mickiewicz Institute Though he returned from America penniless, Nathan Stramer still daydreams of a better life, as he struggles to make ends meet back in the small Polish town of Tarnów. Raising six children with his wife Rywka, he chases hare-brained schemes to make money while she fantasizes about a trip to the seaside. Crammed into a two-room apartment on down-at-heel Goldhammer Street, the family gets by on very little, and everyone has to pitch into Nathan’s latest ventures, including an ill-fated Stramer family café. As the years pass, their children begin to take steps into a changing world. While Nathan and Rywka try to hold the center of their raucous family life together, national conflicts begin to escalate in Europe, and sinister forces creep into the Stramers’ world that they don’t yet understand. Author Mikołaj Łoziński tells the tragic story of the interwar years through the ordinary triumphs and struggles of this sprawling Polish-Jewish family. Join us for a discussion with Łoziński about the newly-released English translation of his historical fiction novel My Name is Stramer, in a discussion led by Irena Grudzińska Gross. Mikolaj Lozinski is a Polish novelist, screenwriter and photographer. He has received several awards for his writing, including the Polityka Passport and the Koscielski Foundation Award. My Name is Stramer, his third novel, was shortlisted for the prestigious Nike Literary Award and has been translated into 16 languages. Lozinski lives in Warsaw. Irena Grudzińska Gross emigrated from her native Poland after student unrest of 1968. She has taught East-Central European history and literature at Emory, New York, Boston, and Princeton universities. Her books include Golden Harvest with Jan T. Gross, Oxford University Press, 2012, Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets, Yale University Press, 2009, and The Scar of Revolution: Tocqueville, Custine and the Romantic Imagination, University of California Press, 1995. She has edited books on literature and the transformation process in Central and Eastern Europe and published numerous book chapters and articles on these subjects in the international press and periodicals. YIVO Institute for Jewish Research 15 West 16th Street, NYC Located in the Center for Jewish History Directions & Parking Doors open 30 minutes before the start of the program. All public programs are wheelchair accessible. This program will also be livestreamed on Zoom for those who cannot attend in person. The Zoom livestream will take place at 6:30pm ET. (What time is that for me?) Download Zoom » Zoom FAQs For questions about this program, please contact: [email protected]