Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded

by John Z. Guzlowski, Charles Adès Fishman (Foreword by)

Overview

Winner 2017 Benjamin Franklin GOLD AWARD for POETRY.
Winner 2017 MONTAIGNE MEDAL for most thought-provoking books.

"A searing memoir." — Shelf Awareness

"Powerful...Deserves attention and high regard." — Kevin Stein, Poet Laureate of Illinois

"Devastating, one-of-a-kind collection." — Foreword Reviews

"Gut-wrenching narrative lyric poems." — Publishers Weekly

"Taut...beautifully realized." — World Literature Today

In this major tour de force, John Guzlowski traces the arc of one of the millions of immigrant families of America, in this case, survivors of the maelstrom of World War II. Watch the book trailer at www.polww2.com/EchoesTrailer

Raw, eloquent, nuanced, intimate—Guzlowski illuminates the many faces of war, the toll it takes on innocent civilians, and the ways in which the trauma echoes down through generations.

His narrative structure mirrors the fractured dislocation experienced by war refugees. Through a haunting collage of jagged fragments—poems, prose and prose poems, frozen moments of time, sometimes dreamlike and surreal, other times realistic and graphic—Guzlowski weaves a powerful story with impacts at levels both obvious and subtle. The result is a deeper, more visceral understanding than could have been achieved through descriptive narrative alone.

This is the story of Guzlowski's family: his mother and father, survivors of the war, taken as slave laborers by the Germans; his sister and himself, born soon after the war in Displaced Persons camps in Germany; the family's first days in America, and later their neighbors in America, some dysfunctional and lost, some mean, some caring and kind; and the relationships between and among them all.

As Guzlowski unfolds the story backwards through time, he seduces us into taking the journey with him. Along the way, the transformative power of the creative process becomes apparent. Guzlowski's writing helps him uncouple from the trauma of the past, and at the same time provides a pathway for acceptance and reconciliation with his parents.

Ultimately, then, this is a story of healing.

Because America is a land of immigrants with myriad and varied pasts, Guzlowski's story may reflect pieces of your own family's history, though details will of course differ. Something similar may also be the hidden story of one of your friends, or a colleague at work, or the sales clerk or waiter who serves you one day…or even, like Guzlowski, your professor of English literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781607720232
Publisher:	Aquila Polonica
Publication date:	07/25/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	200
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Over a writing career that spans more than 40 years, John Guzlowski has amassed a significant body of published work in a wide range of genres: poetry, prose, literary criticism, reviews, fiction and nonfiction.

His poems and stories have appeared in such national journals as North American Review, Ontario Review, Rattle, Chattahoochee Review, Atlanta Review, Nimrod, Crab Orchard Review, Marge, Poetry East, Vocabula Review. He was the featured poet in the 2007 edition of Spoon River Poetry Review. Garrison Keillor read Guzlowski's poem “What My Father Believed” on his program The Writers Almanac.

Critical essays by Guzlowski about contemporary American, Polish, and Jewish authors can be the found in such journals as Modern Fiction Studies, Polish Review, Shofar, Polish American Studies, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, and Studies in Jewish American Literature.

His previously published books include Language of Mules (DP Press), Lightning and Ashes (Steel Toe Books),Third Winter of War: Buchenwald (Finishing Line Press), and Suitcase Charlie (White Stag/Ravenswood). Guzlowski's work has also been included in anthologies such as Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust (Time Being Books), Cherries with Chopin (Moonrise Press), Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration (Editions Bibliotekos), and Longman Academic Reading Series 5 Student Book (Pearson Education ESL).

Guzlowski's most recent book, Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded, won the Gold Award for Poetry at the 2017 Benjamin Franklin Awards, and the 2017 Montaigne Medal of the Eric Hoffer Awards as one of the most-thought provoking books of the year. It got excellent reviews from many reviewers, including Publishers Weekly, World Literature Today, Harvard Review, Shelf Awareness, the current Poet Laureate of Illinois, and a past Poet Laureate of Virginia. Winner of the Illinois Arts Council's $7,500 Award for Poetry, Guzlowski has also been short-listed for the Bakeless Award and Eric Hoffer Award, and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and four Pushcart Prizes. He has been honored by the Georgia State Commission on the Holocaust for his work.

In reviewing Guzlowski's book Language of Mules, Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz wrote, “Exceptional…even astonished me…reveals an enormous ability for grasping reality.”

Born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, Guzlowski came to America with his family as a Displaced Person in 1951. His parents had been Polish slave laborers in Nazi Germany during the war. Growing up in the tough immigrant neighborhoods around Humboldt Park in Chicago, he met hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead horses, and women who had walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians. In much of his work, Guzlowski remembers and honors the experiences and ultimate strength of these voiceless survivors.

Guzlowski received his B.A. in English Literature from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Purdue University. He is a Professor Emeritus of English Literature at Eastern Illinois University, and currently lives in Virginia.

Bio of Charles Adès Fishman
Charles Adès Fishman, who wrote the Foreword to this book, is an award-winning poet, editor and Emeritus Distinguished Service Professor of English & Humanities, State University of New York. While his extensive oeuvre spans a broad spectrum of topics, he has particular interest in the Holocaust and the Jewish experience. Among his many credentials, Fishman has served as a poetry consultant to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. for more than twenty years.

Other Books by John Guzlowski:
Suitcase Charlie
Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: White Stag/Ravenswood (2015)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1508975523
ISBN-13: 978-1508975526
Lightning and Ashes
Paperback: 96 pages
Publisher: Steel Toe Books (2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0974326453
ISBN-13: 978-0974326450
The Third Winter of War: Buchenwald
Paperback: 36 pages
Publisher: Finishing Line Press (2007)
ISBN-10: 1599241749
ISBN-13: 978-1599241746
Jezyk mulów i inne wiersze/Language of Mules and Other Poems
Translated into Polish by Bohdan Zadura
Paperback: 109 pages
Publisher: Katowice: Biblioteka Slaska (2002)
Language: Bilingual Polish/English
ISBN 83-87849-38-3
Language of Mules
Paperback: 32 pages
Publisher: DP Press (1999)
Language: English
No ISBN

Table of Contents

FOREWORD by Charles Adès Fishman • xv

PREFACE
Where I'm Coming From • xvii
My People • xx

BOOK I. HALF A CENTURY LATER
Dreams of Unhurried Memories • 2
The Wooden Trunk • 3
***
My Parents Retire to Arizona • 9
A Good Life • 10
Windows Without Scars • 11
What My Father Believed • 12
My Mother's Hair • 14
My Father's Mother Asks Him to Forget the War • 15
My Mother Talks About the War • 16
I. My Mother Reads My Poem “Cattle Train to Magdeburg” • 16
II. How Her Mother and Sister Died • 17
III. The Beets • 18
IV. Liberation • 20
V. What the War Taught Her • 22
Why My Mother Stayed with My Father • 23
A Garden in the Desert • 24
My Mother's Optimism • 25
At the End: My Father • 26
I. My Father Dying • 26
II. Pigeons • 27
III. A Sonnet About Dying • 28
At the End: My Mother • 29
I. My Mother Prays for Death • 29
II. How Can I Ask My Mother • 30
III. Dying in a Blue Room in Arizona • 31
Souls Migrating in the Rain • 32

BOOK II. REFUGEES
Refugees • 36
The Happy Times and Places • 37
First Snow • 39
***
Mother Tells Me How She Met My Father • 41
The Day I Was Born in the Refugee Camp • 42
Lessons • 44
My Father's First Day in America • 46
Promised Land • 47
I. Coming to America, 1951 • 47
II. The Farms of Buffalo, New York • 48
III. Winter in America • 49
Looking for Work in America • 50
I. What My Father Brought With Him • 50
II. I Dream of My Father as He Was When He First Came Here Looking for Work • 51
III. His First Job in America • 52
Polish Triangle, Chicago • 53
All the Clichés about Poverty are True • 54
Friends in America: A Sonnet about Charity • 55
A Letter to My Mother from Poland, October 4, 1952 • 56
My Mother's Sister After the War • 57
Later in the Promised Land • 61
Me in America, 1952 • 62
Stories My Sister Danusia Told Me • 64
I. Poor Adaś • 64
II. Sweet Little Birds • 65
III. The Storm • 65
Friends in America: Polack Joe's Story • 66
The Stories My Grandmother Told My Mother • 68
Family Life After the War • 70
Fussy Eaters • 71
Whistling • 72
A Young Soldier from Częstochowa • 73
Here's What My Mother Won't Talk About • 74
Chores • 75
Friends in America: The Polish Captain of Lancers • 76
Danusia • 78
Friends in America: Murdertown • 80
The Evil that Men Do • 84
My Father's Prayer • 86
Two Worlds of Language • 88
I. Missing Pieces • 88
II. Dumb Polacks • 89
III. Kitchen Polish • 90
IV. My Grandparents • 91
The Old Country • 94

BOOK III. THE WAR
Landscape with Dead Horses, 1939 • 96
September 1, 1939: The Day World War II Began • 97
Fear (A Poem Based on a Story by Tadeusz Borowski) • 99
***
My Mother Before the War • 101
My Father Before the War • 102
There Were No Miracles • 104
The German Soldiers • 105
I. German Soldiers Moving East • 105
II. German Soldiers Come to a Polish Village • 106
III. German Soldiers Stealing from the Dead • 107
IV. What the German Soldiers Left Behind • 108
My Mother Was 19 • 110
Cattle Train to Magdeburg • 112
My Father Talks about the Boxcars • 113
Grief • 114
A Cross of Polish Wood • 115
My Mother's First Winter in Germany • 116
Sisters in the Labor Camps • 117
Hunger in the Labor Camps • 118
I. What My Father Ate • 118
II. What a Starving Man Has • 119
III. Among Sleeping Strangers • 120
IV. The Germans Who Owned Them • 122
A Story My Mother Heard in the Slave Labor Camp • 123
The Work My Father Did in Germany • 124
A Life Story • 125
My Father Tells a Story • 126
Brief History of a Mother's Sorrow • 127
My Father's Teeth • 128
The Forests of Katyń • 129
Third Winter of War: Buchenwald • 130
My Mother's Dreams in Wartime • 142
What My Father Knows About Killing • 143
Today the Gypsies Are Burning • 144
Temptation in the Desert • 145
Photos of Dead Mothers • 146
The Bombing of Magdeburg • 147
Pietà in a Bombed Church, Magdeburg • 148
His Dead Eye • 150
Worthless • 151
War and Peace • 152
In the Spring the War Ended • 153

EPILOGUE
The Story Behind the Poems • 155
In Heaven • 159

APPENDIX
”Red Poppies on Monte Cassino” • 161

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS• 163

AUTHOR BIO • 165

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS• 167
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Editorial Reviews

Some books take a lifetime to write, yet they can be read in one sleepless night, filled with tears of compassion and a heaviness of heart. John Z. Guzlowski’s book of poetic memoirs is exactly such a book: an unforgettable, painful personal history, distilling the horrors of his parents’ experiences in German labor and concentration camps into transcendent artwork of lucid beauty… The book is an historical and literary revelation...It should be considered on a par with the work by giants of Holocaust literature – memoirs by Primo Levi, or stories by Tadeusz Borowski. http://cosmopolitanreview.com/echoes-of-tattered-tongues/

Winter 2016 Cosmopolitan Review

Guzlowski should join the annals of the great recording angels, not just for his unsparing yet compassionate language but also because he makes clear what is so easy to forget: that no matter how many years pass, such events never do.

Lola Haskins

These are poems whose images and metaphors have undergone the finest grinding, becoming crystal lenses to magnify the inner and outer lives of his parents. The clear poetic/narrative voice is remarkably strong yet elegant—this is not a random collection but the story of a family across generations dealing with the consequences of world war. We have through Guzlowski's persona a refugee child trying to make sense of the world with parents trying to make sense of their lives after the war's work camp. Guzlowski's book is a magnificent elegy to civilian lives lost or shattered in war and thereafter. Guzlowski has successfully undertaken a monumental, moral obligation. www.polandww2.com/images/MEDIA_ROOM/NewsAndReviews/2015/BibliotekosReview-2015-12-27.pdf

Bibliotekos

Book Trailer of the Day: Echoes of Tattered Tongues. A searing memoir by the poet who, with his Polish parents—who worked as slave laborers in Nazi concentration camps—were refugees and settled in the U.S. in 1951. Book Trailer at https://youtu.be/eTCWlnyx8vw (http://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=2664#m30988)

Shelf Awareness

John Guzlowski’s rugged poems rise like a land-bridge emerging from would-be oblivion to connect continents, generations, and a deeply felt personal present with the tragic, implacable history of the twentieth century.

Stuart Dybek

Like most immigrant kids, John Guzlowski never wanted to write about his Polish parents and the world they left when they came to America.... Unlike most stories of this kind, however, Guzlowski’s is told mostly in poems, which forces the author to wield formal control over a material that’s painful and distressing. Luckily for us, in Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded (Aquila Polonica, 2016), Guzlowski writes taut poems—he cares about the narrative as much as the voice or the image....These beautifully realized lines not only showcase Guzlowski’s poetic sensibility but also keep the poem from slipping into sentimentality.... Guzlowski aims to write not only about his parents’ lives “but also about the lives of all those forgotten, voiceless refugees, DPs, and survivors that the last century produced, no matter where they came from.” In doing so, he appeals to our shared desire to understand how the present continues to be shaped by the past. http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/book-reviews/channeling-other-review-echoes-tattered-tongues-john-guzlowski

World Literature Today

Exceptional…even astonished me…reveals an enormous ability for grasping reality.

Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz

Brings us face to face with what we cannot allow ourselves to forget.

Jared Carter

It's hard to read this book. Not because the prose is in any way turgid or the poetry difficult in that pretentious way that once was the fashion. It's hard to read this book because it is so honest. So clear. Like a crystal clear day you get in the cold sunlight of winter...it shines…like seeing into people's souls… This is a book to hold and to hug, to stroke softly.

Martin Stepek

A formally coherent, challenging, and important book, chronicling the lasting scars of one family with deftness and narrative depth. Guzlowski is often bluntly direct, and occasionally lyrically oblique, but both to great effect. Emily Dickinson admonished poets to tell it slant, and Guzlowski certainly takes her advice, but he also sometimes ignores it in favor of Chekhov’s equally sage admonishment to tell the most monstrous events in the coldest and most direct fashion. www.polandww2.com/images/MEDIA_ROOM/NewsAndReviews/2016/Echoes-HarvardReview2016-9-8Highlighted.pdf

Harvard Review

"Deeply moving. John Guzlowski has written a powerful, lasting, and sometimes shocking book, one in which prose and poetry join hands to document a felt comprehension of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis in WWII. He tells the stories his parents would have told had they not been living them. Thus these pages honor his forebears and indeed all those who were in the camps. The stories will haunt you but we must read them or fail to grasp what humans can do to humans. Anyone who wishes to consider himself or herself knowledgeable about the world in which, for better or for worse, we live, will read this superb book."

Poet Laureate of Virginia (2010-2012) - Kelly Cherry

An experimental yet deeply satisfying mongrel at the intersection of poetry, history, biography, and memoir—in the same vein as Art Spiegelman’s MAUS, but with poems instead of pictures...It progresses in three movements, each movement delving deeper into the past—unfolding memory and uncovering missing pieces of the historical record: from his parents’ twilight years, to mid-century—John’s childhood—when they left the DP camp in Germany and emigrated to America, and finally, to the War itself, and the root of the deep unhappiness his parents carried with them to the grave. Guzlowski’s attempt to learn and feel the origins of his parents’ pain thus brings us into closer emotional touch with the entirety of the War in Europe, widening by necessity from the particular to the general. It is a unorthodox way of telling such a story: though there are many examples of poems written by poets who experienced the camps firsthand, examples of secondhand histories told in verse are thin indeed. And yet it works, in ways that defy analysis or easy summary. Guzlowski’s empathy and imagination are extraordinary, at times truly shocking. His verse, which brings to mind variously Charles Bukowski, Charles Simic, and Philip Levine, has a vernacular concreteness and clarity that is all the more startling when it breaks sharply with realism, and he deftly captures those quirks of personality that bring characters into full view. Less than halfway through the book, I had unconsciously slipped from thinking What a novel way to tell this story to I can’t imagine how else it could be told. And as if that weren’t enough, Aquila Polonica Publishing deserves great credit for producing a book that is a beautiful artifact, from its cloth and leather binding, to its creamy paper, to the stunning photographs that accompany the text. In every respect, Echoes of Tattered Tongues is an achievement that deserves wide recognition and long remembrance. https://asitoughttobe.com/2017/02/26/a-lesson-about-the-stones-that-wait-to-rise-in-our-hearts-a-review-of-john-guzlowskis-echoes-of-tattered-tongues/

As It Ought To Be Blog, February 26, 2017 - Eric Kroczek

"A wonderful book and a very important one. Unwaveringly lucid and luminous poems...leave his readers with no safe perches yet show them how to mourn and praise. Extraordinary."

Charles Ades Fishman

"Remarkable blend of academic scrutiny with stark, uncompromising humanity. What I find fascinating is Guzlowski’s ability to always say something new…balancing overarching social commentary with the smallest, heart-wrenching details."

Atticus Review, on Guzlowski's earlier work. Atticus Review, September 3, 2013, http://atticusreview.org/featured-po - Michael Meyerhofer

I could not praise it enough—masterfully done. Reads almost like a novel.

Gregory F. Tague

Powerful...Deserves attention and high regard. To read these poems is to lift the lid on history and risk a step inside. One not only suffers the furnace but also endures, like the poet himself, the human will to counter history’s inferno with an awful fire all its own. The poet’s spare voice sings as austerely as his parents’ trunk cobbled of Buchenwald wallboards. These poems do not flinch even as they take and give a punch: each note the pitch of absence given body, each silence a terrible waiting answered by singed arrival.” - See more at: http://www.polandww2.com/echoes-of-tattered-tongues/echoes-of-tattered-tongues-praise#sthash.2I3ItxwY.dpuf

Poet Laureate of Illinois - Kevin Stein

Review and extensive interview with author, www.polandww2.com/images/MEDIA_ROOM/NewsAndReviews/2016/Echoes-WarLiteraturetheArtsDec2016InterviewAssembled.pdf

War

The son of two Nazi concentration camp prisoners, John Guzlowski was born in a Displaced Persons camp and immigrated to Chicago with his little sister and Polish mother and father shortly after WWII. This devastating, one-of-a-kind collection uses poems and short essays to reveal unspeakable moments from his parents’ wartime experiences, and the less-than-open arms America mostly extended to millions of families fleeing the ruins of Europe.

Foreword Reviews, Spring 2016; https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/echoes-of-tattered-tongues/ - Matt Sutherland

Guzlowski's book is essential for anyone wanting fully to understand ethnicity in America. Through authentic and meticulously observed and recorded details, Guzlowski reaches the universal. All readers, of any ethnicity or life experience, will find something to identify with in these pages. This is an excellent, important, and highly recommended book. www.polandww2.com/images/MEDIA_ROOM/NewsAndReviews/2016/DanushaGoskaReview-2016-2-15CompiledHighlighted.pdf

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