Podcast
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Philip Schultz will speak about The Wherewithal: A Novel in Verse (Harcourt, 2014). This is the astonishing story of Henryk Wyrzykowski, a drifting, haunted young man hiding from the Vietnam War in the basement of a San Francisco welfare building and translating his mother’s diaries. The diaries concern the Jedwabne massacre, an event that took place in German-occupied Poland in 1941. Wildly inventive, dark, beautiful, and unrelenting, The Wherewithal is a meditation on the nature of evil and the destruction of war.
I, one
Henryk Stanislaw Wyrzykowski,
Head Clerk of Closed Files,
a department of one,
work . . .
in a forgotten well of ghostly sighs
Philip Schultz
(DePaul University)
The 1939 Society Lecture in Holocaust Studies
Philip Schultz is founder and director of the Writers Studio, a private school for fiction and poetry writing in New York City. He earned a B.A. from San Francisco State University and an M.A. from the Iowa Writers Workshop. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Failure (Harcourt, 2007), winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. These poems give voice to failures of many kinds and yet they are full of tenderness, empathy, and heartbreaking honesty, giving equal praise to the joy of life. He has also published a memoir entitled My Dyslexia (Norton, 2011), in which he recounts his difficulties with the debilitating language disability, and his struggles to overcome it. Schultz has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Israel, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in poetry, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry. He lives in East Hampton, New York, with his wife, the sculptor Monica Banks, and their children.
Sponsored by the:
UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies
Cosponsored by the:
UCLA Department of History
UCLA Department of Germanic Languages
UCLA Department of English
