Poetic, witty, and ever so faintly surreal, Sefer delicatelyexplores the legacy of the Holocaust for the postwar generation, ageneration for whom a devastating history has grown distant, bothtemporally and emotionally. The novel's protagonist, Jan Sefer, is a psychotherapist living in Vienna--someone whose professionallife puts him in daily contact with the traumas of others but who hasfound it difficult to address his own family background, especially hismemories of his father. With its fragmentary structure and itspreference for hints rather than explanations, the novel belongs to therealm of the postmodern, while it also incorporates subtle elements ofmagical realism.

Born in 1945 in Kraków, Ewa Lipska was for many yearsthe poetry editor of the literary magazine Pismo, which she co-founded,and was active in Poland's Nowa Fala, or New Wave. Her manyprizes include the Koscielski Fund Award, the Robert Graves Pen ClubAward, and Pen Club Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement. Her poetryhas been widely translated, into Hebrew as well as into Europeanlanguages. Barbara Bogoczek is a freelance translatorand interpreter based in London. Tony Howard isprofessor of English at Warwick University. Together they havetranslated works by numerous Polish authors-Ewa Lipska, TadeuszRózewicz, Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, Hanna Krall, and manyothers-into English.