A Little Annihilation by Anna Jannko
Thanks to Sabrina Greene of World Editions, I am giving away one print copy of ‘A Little Annihilation’ by Anna Jannko
.Description Little Annihilation by Anna Jannko
In this reflection on second-generation trauma, Anna Janko examines her mother’s memories of witnessing her family’s murder in 1943 Poland.
June 1, 1943, Eastern Poland. Within just a few hours, the village of Sochy had ceased to exist. Buildings were burned. Residents shot. Among the ruins remained a single house and a few survivors. One of these was nine-year-old Teresa Ferenc, who saw her family murdered by German soldiers, and would never forget what she witnessed the day she became an orphan. The horror of that event was etched into her very being and passed on to her daughter, author Anna Janko.
A Little Annihilation bears witness to both the crime and its aftershocks—the trauma visited on the next generation—as revealed in a beautifully scripted and deeply personal mother-daughter dialogue. As she fathoms the full dimension of the tragedy, Janko reflects on memory and loss, the ethics of helplessness, and the lingering effects of war.
Praise Little Annihilation by Anna Jannko
“Scenes from the war live on as trauma in the memory of the next generation. A Little Annihilation by Anna Janko is an extraordinarily personal and powerful account of how the worst wartime atrocities affect ordinary people and are seldom recorded in the official histories.”―OLGA TOKARCZUK, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
“A powerful meditation…though deeply personal, Janko’s narrative is also a compelling work of philosophic reflection, a signal contribution to contemporary efforts to think about our relationship to the past.”―Katarzyna Bartoszyńska, Asymptote
“A Little Annihilation explores war and the relentless grind of history on a human scale―and as such, it is a haunting word of warning for the present and the future.” ―European Literature Network
About Anna Jannko
Anna Janko is one of the best-known contemporary Polish writers. A poet and literary critic, Janko has twice been nominated for the Nike Literary Prize (2001, 2013). She has also been nominated for the Angelus Central European Literature Award in 2008 and again in 2016, where A Little Annihilation was a finalist. She has won multiple awards and literary prizes including the City of Gdańsk Book of the Year (1981) and the Dresden Independent Writers’ Society Prize (1993) for her entire poetic oeuvre. A film based on A Little Annihilation, under the title A Minor Genocide, was released in 2017. It won major prizes at international film competitions in New York and Calcutta and received the Humanitarian Award in 2019.
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Giveaway Little Annihilation by Anna Jannko
This giveaway is open to the U.S. only and ends on July 10, 2020 midnight pacific time. Entries are accepted via Rafflecopter only.
Profound, meaningful and memorable book. My favorite era and reading books of this unforgettable period is vital.
Sounds like a powerful, heart-rendering story. Thanks.
Sounds fascinating
This looks like a really good book. I have added it to my TBR list. My grandmother was from a Polish village of 350 people in Galicia, 5 km. from Brody, which is now in the Ukraine. Her home was the field kitchen for all the armies, during WWI. She learned Hungarian and Russian to add to her native Polish and German from the different soldiers. She told of gas attacks and Cossacks coming with food for everyone. Her two sisters still lived in the village during WWII. My mother’s cousin remembers watching in horror and fascination, when the Jewish inhabitants were forced from the village by the Nazis. He was 8 years old. Nazi snipers were on the rooftops of the only entrance and were shooting the Jewish people as they tried to flee. Later, my aunt, her husband and son had to flee in the middle of the night, because a neighbour reported, that they were helping Jewish people. The neighbour wanted my aunt’s barn and the few quilts, that the Jewish people left behind. Their house, along with the rest of the village homes, but for 3, were all blown up and burned. Other cousins lost their lives, when they were shot in a barn by Ukrainian forces practising ethnic cleansing, a few days before Christmas.