This question repeatedly appears in each learner's mind. If you want to master a new language, you need to operate within its key components-reading, listening, vocabulary, grammar, writing, and speaking.

Lying at the crucible of Central Europe, the Silesian village of Kupferberg suffered the violence of the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, the World War I. After Stalin's post-World War II redrawing of Poland's borders, Kupferberg became Miedzianka, a town settled by displaced people from all over Poland and a new center of the Eastern Bloc's uranium-mining industry. Decades of neglect and environmental degradation led to the town being declared uninhabitable, and the population was evacuated. Today, it exists only in ruins, with barely a hundred people living on the unstable ground above its collapsing mines. Springer catalogs the lost human elements: the long-departed tailor and deceased shopkeeper; the parties, now silenced, that used to fill the streets with shouts and laughter, and the once-beautiful cemetery, with gravestones upended by tractors and human bones scattered by dogs. In Miedzianka, Springer sees a microcosm of European history, and a powerful narrative of how the ghosts of the past continue to haunt us in the present--Provided by the publisher.

The English-language debut of a major Latin American writer.

A vibrant Jewish community flourished in Poland from late in the tenth century until it was virtually annihilated in World War II. In this remarkable anthology, the first of its kind, Harold B. Segel offers translations of poems and prose works—mainly fiction—by non-Jewish Polish writers. Taken together, the selections represent the complex perceptions about Jews in the Polish community in the period 1530-1990.

Poland's strong Catholic faith engendered in its literature a lively awareness of the Devil and a love of the supernatural. The Devil is a popular figure in Polish fantastic fiction, and we see him in many different roles and guises: from the personification of pure malice to a pitiful, unfortunate individual and even a patriotic hero. The Dedalus Book of Polish Fantasy offers the best of this tradition from the Romantics to the new generation of authors writing in post-communist Poland.