Bogdan Wojdowski (1930–1994)

Bogdan Wojdowski was the pen name of Dawid Wojdowski, born to a traditional Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland. His father Szymon Jakub Wojdowski was an upholsterer and joiner who spoke Yiddish to Dawid and his younger sister Irena; but his mother spoke Polish to them, and they received a Polish-language education. As a teenager during the Nazi invasion of World War II, he took the more Polish-sounding pseudonym "Bogdan Kamiński." Together with half a million other Jews, his family was forced into the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940. After two years, Dawid-Bogdan and Irena were separately smuggled out of the Ghetto and hidden, but their parents died. After the war ended, in light of the anti-Semitism in Poland, he melded his pseudonym's first name with his birth surname and became known as Bogdan Wojdowski. He returned to his devastated home city, completed secondary school, then studied Polish language and literature at the University of Warsaw. He worked as a journalist and teacher, and struggled to become a writer under the Communist regime. In 1957, the state censors altered his first book Wakacje Hioba (Job's Summer), and delayed its publication by five years. In 1964, he lost his last permanent job and had to work as a freelancer. In 1971, he published his masterwork, the novel Chleb rzucony umarłym (English translation, Bread for the Departed). Two years later, he married Maria Iwaszkiewicz. After the fall of communism in 1989, he hoped for a revival of Jewish cultural life and founded the journal Masada; however, it went out of business after the first issue. In 1993, he published his famous essay, "Judaizm jako los" (Judaism as Fate), which he had worked on since 1989. Throughout his adult life, Wojdowski suffered from the aftermath of his experiences in the Holocaust. In 1994, he took his own life by hanging himself from a window curtain rod. Bread for the Departed was first published in English in 1997 and is now recognized as a classic of Holocaust literature.