"Gripping, eloquent, moving, this is a powerful tale about what remains hidden and/or unspeakable in history." —Elie Wiesel
I, oneHenryk Stanislaw Wyrzykowski,
Head Clerk of Closed Files,
a department of one,
work...
in a forgotten well of ghostly sighs
This astonishing novel in verse tells the 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.
