TYRMAND Leopold

Born on 16 May 1920 in Warsaw into a Polonized Jewish family; son of the craftsman Mieczysław Tyrmand and Maria Oliwenstein. He completed his advanced secondary education at the J. Kreczmar Secondary School in Warsaw in 1937. He started writing literary pieces during his school years. In 1938, he left for France, where he spent a year studying architecture at L'École nationale et superiere des Beaux Arts de Paris. During this period, he contributed jazz reviews to the Polish press. He was in Warsaw at the outbreak of World War II. In autumn 1939, he left the city for Lwów (Lviv) before reaching Wilno (Vilnius) on 16 October that year. During the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, he worked for the "Prawda Komsomolska" newspaper, where between July 1940 and April 1941 he published anonymously numerous texts in the column Na kanwie dnia (A picture of the day). He also contributed pieces on sports and edited the weekly youth supplement, "Prawda Pionierska". At the same time, he was involved in underground activities, collaborating with the periodical "Za Naszą i Waszą Wolność", which was run by the District Office of Information and Propaganda of the Union of Armed Struggle. In April 1941, he was arrested by the NKVD having been accused of collaboration with a Polish nationalist organization and was sentenced to eight years imprisonment. In June that year, he escaped from a train during the evacuation of the Łukiszki (Lukiškės) Prison as Germany invaded the city. After returning to by then German-occupied Vilnius, he went into hiding on the Aryan side, thus avoiding the ghetto. He then stayed in various locations including Cudzieniszki (now Belarus) until February 1942 before subsequently volunteering for labour in Germany, as he feared being denounced to the authorities and having his Jewish heritage revealed. He used a forged French passport issued under the name de Tyrmand. He initially worked as a translator in an industrial plant near Wiesbaden before joining the railways. He was then an assistant librarian in the local cultural administration, a hotel waiter, and draughtsman in Frankfurt (Main). When the bombardment of the city began, he left for Vienna where he earned a living as a servant, stoker and shoeshiner. In June 1944, he became a seaman on the German cargo ship the SS Charlotte Cords, which was headed for Gothenburg. While in the Norwegian port of Stavanger, Tyrmand fled the ship. In August, he found a job working on breaking up a ship in the Oslofjord. He had wanted to join the resistance movement but having – most probably – been denounced, he was arrested and placed in the Grini concentration camp near Oslo. Following the capitulation of Germany, he remained in Norway, where he worked in various jobs, including as a warehouse operative and then as a Polpress journalist in Oslo. He then moved to Denmark, where he worked for the Red Cross. Following the recognition of Poland's communist-led Provisional Government of National Unity, he briefly returned to Poland in August 1945 as a representative of the International Red Cross and delegate of the Norwegian embassy before returning to Oslo. He subsequently worked until March 1946 in the press office of the Polish Embassy in Copenhagen. After returning permanently to Poland in 1946, he was a journalist at the Press and Information Agency before being dismissed from his post in 1947 for publishing a text that was deemed to have been pro-Western. He then collaborated with the newspapers and periodicals "Express Wieczorny", "Stolica" and, briefly, "Słowo Powszechne", which he departed following a disagreement with its editor, Bolesław Piasecki. In 1947, he organized the first official jazz concert held in Poland and became the president of the Polish Jazz-Club. He was a member of the Journalists' Trade Union of the Republic of Poland (ZZDRP), which later became the Association of Polish Journalists – SDP); Tyrmand's membership was revoked in 1949. Between 1946 and 1948, he was involved in the Jazz Club of the Warsaw YMCA. He made his debut as a prose writer in 1946 with the short story Niedziela w Stavanger (Sunday in Stavanger), which appeared in the weekly "Przekrój" (nos 82-88; published under the name: Leonard Tyrmand). The same year, he published the article Co to jest jazz? (What is jazz?) in the music periodical "Ruch Muzyczny" (no. 19; under the name: Leopold Tyrmond). His articles, music reviews and theatre reviews appeared in publications including "Dziś i Jutro" (1946-47 and 1952), "Dziennik Polski" (1946-48), "Przekrój" (1946-1957, including here translations from the English of P.G. Wodehouse's prose works in 1957), "Odra" (1949) and "Odrodzenie" (1948-49). He was a member of the editorial board of "Przekrój" from 1947 until his dismissal in 1949 as a result of a comment on a boxing match between Poland and the USSR. His membership of the ZZDRP was also revoked. He was baptised into the Catholic Church in the early 1950s. Around this time, he began a relationship with Ryszarda Stemler. From 1950 until 1953, he was a regular contributor to the Catholic weekly "Tygodnik Powszechny", where he had a regular music and theatre review column, Z teatrów warszawskich (Notes from Warsaw's theatres) and another regular column, Listy z Warszawy (Letters from Warsaw), which he published under the by-lines Jan Andrzej, Kr., and Stanisław Kowalski. Following the dismissal of the weekly's editorial board, he earned a living from casual jobs, including working as a tutor to Krystyna Okólska, who served as the inspiration for the figure of Bogna who featured in the diary that he kept from 1954. Excerpts from those writings were subsequently broadcast on Radio Free Europe. In 1955, he married Małgorzata Żurowska, a student at the Academy of Fine Arts. They divorced in 1957. In 1955, he again became a contributor to periodicals, publishing in, among others, "Nowa Kultura" (1955-56), "Po prostu" (1955), and "Przegląd Kulturalny" (1955-56). From 1955 to 1957, he was founder, organizer, artistic director and compère of jam sessions held in Warsaw, including the inaugural Jazz Jamboree held at the Stodoła student club, while he also organized the first jazz concerts held in Krakow, Lodz and Sopot. He served as director of the annual Jazz Jamboree festival until 1965. He joined the Polish Writers' Union (ZLP) in 1956; his membership was revoked in 1967. In 1957, he visited London and then Paris, where he established contacts with the editorial board of the periodical "Kultura". Between 1957 and 1964, he again collaborated with "Tygodnik Powszechny". In 1959, he married the future fashion designer Barbara Hoff; they divorced in 1967. He left Poland in March 1965, initially travelling around Europe, including Austria, Yugoslavia, Italy and Germany, before reaching France, staying at the Polish Literary Institute in Maissons-Lafitte. In September 1965, he visited his mother in Israel, where he was awarded a US State Department grant and a Ford Foundation scholarship, enabling him to travel to the United States in January 1966. He visited numerous states, giving talk and lectures, for which he was attacked in the Polish press. During his time in the US, he met various figures including Irving Stone, Erskine Caldwell, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth. During this period, he met the "Time" journalist Beverly De Luscia, with whom he was in a relationship for several years. He applied for permanent residency of the US. He was a regular contributor to the Paris-based periodical "Kultura" (1967-70) and the London-based "Wiadomości" (1967-76). In protest at the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces in August 1968, he gave up his Polish citizenship. The same year, he travelled to France and visited editorial board of "Kultura" in Maissons-Lafitte. Around this time, he started writing in English. His essays, column pieces, articles and reviews appeared in "The New Yorker" (1967-70), as well as in "The Reporter" (New York), "The New York Times Magazine", "The Wall Street Journal", "The Atlantic Monthly" (Boston), "Interplay" (New York), "National Review" (New York), and "The New Leader" (New York). He also wrote for "Die Zeit" (Hamburg), "Kontinent" (Berlin) and "Criticon" (Munich). Between 1966 and 1970, he gave talks at numerous universities on communism and Eastern European states' foreign policy. In 1967, he initiated the Ingersoll Foundation Prize, which is awarded to outstanding writers. The inaugural laureate was Jorge Luis Borges. In 1968/69, he spent a year as a visiting professor a Columbia University in New York, where he lectured on the history of nineteenth-century Polish novels. He then prepared an edited volume commissioned by "Kultura" (published 1970). He was subsequently employed in the Dean's Office at the State University of New York at Albany. He travelled around Europe in 1969, which resulted in the English-language essay volume Notebooks of a Dilettante. In 1970, he signed a contract with the Chicago Tribune – New York News Syndicate to provide commentary on current affairs in the US. The same year, he received a grant to attend the MacDowell Colony, enabling him to work on his writing in Peterborough, New Hampshire. In 1971, he married the Yale doctoral researcher in Spanish studies Mary Ellen Fox in a Jewish ceremony. He then settled in New Canaan, Connecticut. During this period, he started work on preparing the publication of his Dziennik 1954 (1954 Diary), which was serialized in the London-based "Wiadomości". In 1976, he started publishing in the Washington-based periodical "The American Scholar" and was subsequently invited to collaborate with the Rockford College Institute, Illinois, where he was appointed vice president in 1977. In 1976, he moved to Rockford, near Chicago, where be founded the bi-monthly (and later monthly) "Chronicles of Culture", which discussed literature, culture and art (the first issue appeared in 1977). He was editor-in-chief both at this periodical and "The Rockford Papers", which was initially a quarterly, then a bi-monthly before becoming a monthly. In 1978, he served as the United States delegate at the AIMS economic conference in the United Kingdom. In the early 1980s, he became a member of the Philadelphia Society, an association of conservative intellectuals. During this period, he continued to write for "The Wall Street Journal" (1978-83), "The National Review" (1980-83), "The Policy Review" (1982), "The Washington Inquirer" (1982), "The Commentary Magazine" (New York, 1982-83), and "The Washington Times" (1984). In 1980, he and his wife travelled to Mexico. In 1982, he travelled to Europe and China, where he was a member of the press delegation sent by the office of President Ronald Reagan. He was the recipient of numerous awards, including the M. Grydzewski "Wiadomości" prize in 1974 and the George Washington Honor Medal of the Freedoms Foundation w 1981. He died on 19 March 1985 of a heart attack in Fort Myers, Florida. He is buried at the Wellwood Jewish cemetery in Pinelawn, Long Island. He had two children with Mary Ellen Tyrmand, the twins Rebecca and Matthew (b. 1981).