Bird Streets

On the occasion of the publication of the English translation of Piotr Paziński’s collection of four novellas Bird Streets (Ptasie ulice, 2013), author Piotr Paziński and translator Ursula Phillips discuss the work with Professor Antony Polonsky. Set within the Warsaw ghetto, Bird Streets tells four connecting stories. The novel recaptures vestiges of a culture once abundantly present but now abjectly absent. This “post memory” sparks hidden remnants, echoes, and signs, and clings to underground whisperings. While not a Holocaust memoir, Bird Streets touches all four narrators intrigued by a world not quite lost. This world of generations past continues to speak. The book’s tone is not bleak though. It is wistful and reflective, with irony and gentle humor.

The book is Paziński’s second work of fiction, following The Boarding House (Pensjonat, 2009), which appeared in English in 2018. The eponymous Bird Streets refer to the pre-war names, several still surviving, of streets in the Muranów or Northern District of central Warsaw where many Jews lived before 1939 and which were enclosed in the Ghetto in November 1940. Following the forced transportation of the Jewish residents to extermination camps and the crushing of the Ghetto Uprising (19 April-16 May 1943), the area encompassed by the Bird Streets was razed to the ground. Hidden remnants, echoes and signs can still be found, especially underground.