“One of the strongest literary renditions of the Shoah I know.”—Saul Friedlander, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Years of ExterminationI, one Henryk Stanislaw Wyrzykowski, Head Clerk of Closed Files, a department of one, work… in a forgotten well of ghostly sighs
This astonishing novel in verse tells the story of Henryk Wyrzykowski, a drifting, haunted young man hiding from the Vietnam War in the basement of a San Francisco welfare building and translating his mother’s diaries. The diaries concern the Jedwabne massacre, an event that took place in German-occupied Poland in 1941. Wildly inventive, dark, beautiful, and unrelenting, The Wherewithal is a meditation on the nature of evil and the destruction of war.
Philip Schultz is the author of eight poetry collections, including Luxury and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Failure. The founder of The Writers Studio, he has been teaching creative writing since 1971. He lives in East Hampton, New York.