My Name is Stramer

Reviews / Votes

There's always an ebullience in the telling that reflects the indomitable spirit of the characters... The tone of the book is wise, world-weary and wry, and with an authenticity to its time that makes it feel like a rediscovered classic * The Times * Mikolaj Lozinski shows that ordinary people's lives can be as fascinating as a sensational story. A brilliantly written novel! -- Olga Tokarczuk, author of 'Flights' A masterpiece of foreshadowing... The last hundred pages are unbearably moving. The writing gets better and better, as you turn the pages faster and faster to find out what becomes of them. This is one of the great east European novels of our time * Jewish Chronicle * Lozinski has managed to write a novel we don't want to finish, we want to keep living in the Stramers' world. The protagonists' fates lead on, into a different Poland... Marvellous * Polityka * With freshness and lively humour... Lozinski crafts an epic that is as gripping as it is endearing * Le Monde * A great, compelling, and beautiful tale of a family, of the bonds that tie brothers and sisters, of support in every circumstance, no matter how complex... The Stramer family and their town of Tarnow are painted so vividly that it seems Mikolaj Lozinski has been given the divine talent of time travel * Vogue * Outstanding... This is the kind of book people wait to find: wise and brilliantly written... Lozinski has not written a novel about the Holocaust, but about the life that came before it * Newsweek * The reader is captivated from the novel's opening sentences and feels they are right in the middle of the Stramers' small apartment, sharing their longings, joys and fears * Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung * The author succeeds in lending even the tragic a light, sometimes humorous touch... An event * Neue Zuercher Zeitung * A vanished world is meticulously reconstructed in Mikolaj Lozinski's small-scale epic... A rich generational saga... Poignant * Irish Times * One can find a parallel, Polish-Jewish version of the Dubliners: the Stramers, of provincial Tarnow. Like Joyce's collection, the exquisitely written My Name is Stramer, by the writer and photographer Mikolaj Lozinski, narrates family life from the perspectives of different characters and focuses on the role of religion, personal aspiration and the influence of nationalism on a local community * TLS *