The clock is ticking on the Kickstarter deadline for a project to make a partially animated documentary film about Jan Karski, the Polish resistance hero who tried to bring the Holocaust to light at a time when many people found the reports they were hearing too hard to believe. It’s called Karski & The Lords of Humanity.
The film being made by Sławomir Grünberg has raised $38,216 of its $45,000 goal at the time of this writing with 55 hours left to go, so for those of you who aren’t poor literary bloggers whose day job is writing about cuddly pets (but who actually hasn’t received his first paycheck yet) you have no reasonable excuse not to contribute.
The film’s Kickstarter site has a lot of information as well as clips and interviews with the director. You can check out the film’s official website and can read Literalab’s review of Karski’s incredible and devastating wartime experiences in his Story of a Secret State.
Week of CE short stories
There has been a veritable flurry of translated short stories from Central Europe (and Southeastern, yeah, I know, but it gets annoying specifying all these geographical distinctions. You know what I mean) this week. First there was Czech Tomáš Zmeškal’s “Vision of Hitler” in B O D Y, which you definitely should read.
Now comes the latest issue of Ozone Park, Winter 2013: (DIS/RE) LOCATIONS, which includes “The Disciple of Professor Kowalski” by Slovak Lukáš Luk and translated by Magdalena Mullek. Oddly, like Zmeškal’s story, this one starts with a reference to madness and spiritual awakening, though after that it veers in a different though likewise strange, disturbing and very funny direction. It turns out that Lukáš Luk is a pseudonym for an author shrouded in anonymity (actually it says he “cultivates a persona of anonymity” but I just wanted to say he was “shrouded”). The same issue has the much more terse and impressionistic “Why We Cry So Much” by Bosnian Melina Kamerić and translated by Jennifer H. Zoble.
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