A Thousand Peaceful Cities

"If laughter actually is the best medicine, fortunate readers of this wonderful novel will surely enjoy perfect health for the rest of their days."—Kirkus Reviews[/i] A comic gem, Jerzy Pilch's A Thousand Peaceful Cities[/i] takes place in 1963, in the latter days of the Polish post-Stalinist «thaw.» The narrator, Jerzyk («little Jerzy»), is a teenager who is keenly interested in his father, a retired postal administrator, and his father's closest friend, Mr. Traba, a failed Lutheran clergyman, alcoholic, and would-be Polish insurrectionist. One drunken afternoon, Mr. Traba and the narrator's father decide to take charge of their lives and do one final good turn for humanity: travel to distant Warsaw and assassinate the de facto Polish head of state, First Secretary of the Polish United Workers' Party, Wladyslaw Gomulka—assassinating Mao Tse-tung, after all, would be impractical. And they decide to involve Jerzyk in their scheme… Jerzy Pilch[/b] is one of Poland's most important contemporary writers and journalists. In addition to his long-running satirical newspaper column, Pilch has published several novels, and has been nominated for Poland's prestigious NIKE Literary Award four times; he finally won the Award in 2001 for The Mighty Angel[/i]. His novels have been translated into numerous languages.David Frick[/b] is a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley.