The Homeless

＂Although he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature four times, Stefan Żeromski’s work is not as widely known outside Poland as it should be. Thus this elegant translation is most welcome . . . A beautiful, prescient story.＂
--Celia Jeffries, author of Blue Desert

＂This novel was written more than 100 years ago, but its focus on economic inequality makes it abundantly relevant to today’s world . . . Powerful, moving, kaleidoscopic.＂
--Times Literary Supplement

Beautifully translated from the Polish by Stephanie Kraft, this new edition includes an Introduction by Jennifer Croft and Boris Dralyuk.

Tomasz Judym was born in a slum in Warsaw. Against all odds, he has become a doctor, and he finds that his driving motivation to treat disadvantaged people like those he grew up with is at odds with the expectations of his peers. He sees the unhealthy working and living conditions of the working class in twentieth-century Poland wearing on those around him, even as he strives to help them. As he battles alone to do the kind of work that boards of health and other agencies do today, Dr. Judym wrestles inwardly with feelings of inferiority and revulsion caused by his difficult childhood. His mission takes him out of the city and into the countryside, bringing him into conflict with his other desires, and the love that he feels for a sympathetic woman whose background differs fundamentally from his own.

The Homeless combines concrete detail about social issues--the urgent need for public hygiene and access to medical treatment, the effects of industrialization on health and the landscape, and the disinterest that people in power have in the disadvantaged--with beautiful, artistic passages of prose that sensitively probe the characters’ inner lives. The title comes not from the obvious reference to the impoverished people Dr. Judym concerns himself with, but from the unmoored status of the protagonist, the woman he loves, a mysterious engineer friend of his, his brother, and many others who find themselves rootless--emotionally and physically alienated by class divides and the social upheaval of industrialization. The Homeless is a portrait of the time and place it was written--Poland on the precipice of the twentieth century--that speaks to our current time and place.

Stefan Żeromski (1864-1925) was born near Kielce, Poland into a family that was aristocratic but not wealthy. He was a great lover of landscape, and imagery from his home region, which included the Holy Cross Mountains, is prominent in his work. He was employed briefly in a famous spa town that was the model for the spa in The Homeless, and then he became a librarian. As he developed into a prolific writer, he led many social and educational movements that pushed back against restrictions imposed by the powers that occupied Poland before the country was freed after World War I; at one time he and his wife hosted an orphanage and an underground Polish school in their home. In the 1920’s Żeromski was a leading contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Distinguished in his own time, known as ＂the conscience of Polish literature,＂ he was deeply mourned when he died in 1925.

Stephanie Kraft is the author of No Castles on Main Street and the translator of two Polish novels, Stone Tablets by Wojciech Żukrowski and Marta by Eliza Orzeszkowa (along with co-translator Anna Gąsienica-Byrcyn). She was a newspaper reporter and freelance writer for forty years and travelled annually to Poland for more than thirty years. Kraft lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.