Life
My Name is Stramer review: ‘One of the great east European novels of our time’
Mikołaj ŁoziNski’s fifth novel is a masterpiece of foreshadowing and, surely, a future Pushkin Press classic
August 21, 2025 14:42
Mikołaj ŁoziNski’s fifth novel is a masterpiece of foreshadowing and, surely, a future Pushkin Press classic
August 21, 2025 14:42Mikołaj ŁoziNski was born in 1980. He published his first novel Reisefieber, in 2006. His semi-autobiographical novel The Book, was published in 2011 and helped him, he said, understand how Judaism had influenced his family. My Name is Stramer, his fifth novel, first appeared in Poland in 2019 and has now been translated by the astonishingly prolific Antonia Lloyd-Jones for Pushkin Press, who have done so much to introduce British readers to great central European and Soviet writers such as Antal Szerb, Stefan Zweig and Isaac Babel.
My Name is Stramer is the story of a large Jewish family, Nathan Stramer, his wife Rywka and their six children. They live in an overcrowded two-room apartment in interwar Tarnów, in south-east Poland, 80 kilometres east of Kraków, where the most successful of the children later go to university. The early chapters are filled with a cast of Jewish working-class characters: labourers, rope dealers, tradesmen and lamplighters, Anszel, the one-eyed porter and Mejer the Mute.
It’s a novel of two halves. The first half tells the story of Nathan’s struggle to make a living, the children’s schooldays and their time at university. Nathan had gone to New York to make his fortune, but, as ever, he failed, and returned to Poland, unlike his brother Ben, who stayed, and made good. Late in his life, Nathan still dreams of New York, of what could have been. His story is summed up in one devastating sentence: “So was it worth trying at all, he thought, as he lay in bed for days on end, crushed by each of his failed business ventures”. He opens a café. The result is entirely predictable. Day by day he loses customers. “Finally nobody came.”’ Nathan is like Tevye, except without any of the dairyman’s charm or humor.
The children can barely tolerate their father with his rages and depression, but they love their mother, Rywka, who singlehandedly keeps the family together. She dreams of the holiday to the seaside Nathan once promised her, but “meanwhile only the years had swum by”.’
“She couldn’t remember the last time he’d taken her anywhere.”
The second half of the novel follows the family into the next stage of their lives. The children leave home, get married, become parents, find work, and, crucially, many join the Communists. Salek even goes off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. For Rywka, the loss of her children becomes unbearable. Each time one of them leaves home is another huge blow. “Rywka looked at the group photo that had stood on the chest of drawers for all those years. It had moved house with them, but without its frame, which they had sold.”
The mood of the novel darkens. There is talk of the rise of Nazism, antisemitism grows in Poland and then Poland is invaded from west and east. The noose tightens around them all. The novel becomes a masterpiece of foreshadowing. Every time a character speaks of hope, you know it will never come to pass. Or will it? As the Stramer family is scattered, who will survive and how? The last hundred pages are unbearably moving. The writing gets better and better, as you turn the pages faster and faster to find out what becomes of them. This is one of the great east European novels of our time.
My Name Is Stramer
by Mikołaj Łozinski
Pushkin Press
To get more from Life, click here to sign up for our free Life newsletter.