Diary 1954

Leopold Tyrmand, a Polish Jew who survived World War II by working in Germany under a false identity, would go on to live and write under Polands Communist regime for twenty years before emigrating to the West, where he continued to express his deeply felt anti-Communist views. Diary 1954written after the independent weekly paper that employed him was closed for refusing to mourn Stalins deathis an account of daily life in Communist Poland. Like Czes?aw Mi?osz, Vclav Havel, and other dissidents who described the absurdities of Soviet-backed regimes, Tyrmand exposes the liesbig and smallthat the regimes employed to stay in power. Witty and insightful, Tyrmands diary is the chronicle of a man who uses seemingly minor modes of resistanceas a provocative journalist, a Warsaw intellectual, the ""spiritual father"" of Polish hipsters, and a promoter of jazz in Polandto maintain his freedom of thought.