The Wherewithal: A Novel in Verse

Book excerpt: “Gripping, eloquent, moving, this is a powerful tale about what remains hidden and/or unspeakable in history.” —Elie Wiesel I, one Henryk 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.