One of the cool things about the nascent Commentary blog Contentions, is that the contributors are able to mine and make available classic pieces from 60 years of Commentary magazine archives in the course of writing today's posts. Not a bad resource to say the least.
Today Sam Munson links to a recently translated review of a compilation of the work of Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski:
Tadeusz Borowski, short-story writer, poet, and kapo in Auschwitz, took his own life at the age of 29. He left behind him one of the most important bodies of literary work about the Holocaust, a corpus doubly important for its proximity to the abyssal horrors of the camps and for its author’s tremendous literary talent—a confluence at times missing in the larger sphere of such literature.
The book is now available just in German I guess, but Munson is able to reach back to Commentary's publication, the first in English, of one of Borowski's best known short stories, This Way for the Gas. It's all good, and the Contentions blog has become a daily stop.
Posted by dan at February 16, 2007 8:55 PM