Henryk Grynberg

Henryk Grynberg was born in 1936 in Warsaw, Poland. A survivor of the Nazi occupation, he spent the years 1942 to 1944 hidden by Polish families while evading German forces. He and his mother were the only members of their family to survive the war. After the war, Grynberg lived in Łódź and Warsaw.

Grynberg earned a master's degree in journalism from Warsaw University in 1959, the same year he published his first story, which was later collected in his debut volume, The Antigone Crew, released in 1963. His early career connected him to the Jewish Theatre in Warsaw, where he developed as an actor alongside his writing. In 1967, while touring the United States with the Jewish State Theater company, Grynberg chose not to return to Poland, an act of protest against the communist regime's antisemitic propaganda and its censorship of his work. That same year he appeared on Broadway, with credits including Mother Courage and Her Children and Mirele Efros.

Following his defection, Grynberg pursued graduate studies at UCLA, completing a master's degree in Russian Literature in 1971. He subsequently settled in Washington, D.C., where he worked for the U.S. Information Agency, including a role with Voice of America, for twenty years. He also revealed to the FBI, when applying for U.S. citizenship and for his position at the agency, that Polish intelligence had attempted to recruit him in October 1956, an episode he described as lasting no more than five months and resulting in no substantive collaboration.

As a writer, Grynberg authored more than thirty books of prose and poetry as well as two dramas, working in the forms of the novel, short story, poem, and essay. His writing centered on the Holocaust and its aftermath, earning him recognition as a chronicler of the fate of Polish Jews. His works drew heavily on biographical and autobiographical material, with Jewish narrators whose personal experiences were interwoven with those of other survivors. Several of his books appeared in English translation, among them Child of the Shadows, later reissued as The Jewish War and the Victory by Northwestern University Press; its sequel, The Victory; Children of Zion, translated by Jacqueline Mitchell; and Drohobycz, Drohobycz and Other Stories, translated by Alicia Nitecki and published by Penguin Books in 2002. His books were also translated into French, German, Italian, Hebrew, Dutch, Czech, Hungarian, and Swedish.

Grynberg received all major Polish literary prizes and the 2002 Koret Jewish Book Award. Four of his books, including Drohobycz, Drohobycz, Memorbuch, Monolog polsko-żydowski, and Uchodźcy, were nominated for Poland's Nike Literary Award. His essays and articles appeared in publications including Commentary, Midstream, and Soviet-Jewish Affairs. In the early 1990s, Grynberg returned to Poland with filmmaker Paweł Łoziński, who documented Grynberg's search for information about the wartime fate of his father, Abram Grynberg. That documentary, Miejsce urodzenia, was released in 1992. In July 2024, Grynberg published an article in the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs titled Worse than Again, addressing the resurgence of antisemitism in contemporary public discourse.