Filip Springer (born 1982) is a self-taught journalist
who has been working as a reporter and photographer since 2006. His
journalistic debut—History of a Disappearance: The Story of a
Forgotten Polish Town—was shortlisted for the Ryszard Kapuscinski
Literary Reportage Prize in 2011 and was nominated for the Gdynia
Literary Prize in 2012. He was also shortlisted for the Nike
Literary Prize in 2012 and winner of the third annual Ryszard
Kapuscinski fellows contest for young journalists.
Sean Gasper Bye is a translator of Polish, French, and
Russian literature. He has translated work by some of Poland’s
leading nonfiction writers, including Malgorzata Szejnert, Pawel
Smolenski, and Lidia Ostalowska. An excerpt from his translation of
History of a Disappearance won the Asymptote Close Approximations
Prize in 2016. He lives in New York.
“Filip Springer's History of a Disappearance: The Story of a
Forgotten Polish Town is a searching work of historical journalism
that tracks the life and death of a tiny Silesian mining village.
Translated from Polish, it is a memorial to a town that seemed
constantly subject to the brutal whims of history, a force that
Springer memorably visualizes as "a beast that knew only how to sow
chaos and destruction.”… Thanks to his fascinating history,
Kupferberg seems unlikely to fade from memory.”
—Hank Stephenson, Shelf Awareness, starred review
“With persistence that may amount to obsession, [Springer] has
recovered the story of the town’s life and times and chronicled the
melancholy history of its several disappearances. In a nice
tactical move, he has set the place and its people before us in the
present tense, an approach that has truly taken distance out of the
past.… Characters [are] vividly captured by Springer.… a very rich
narrative…. the account continues and teems with neighborhood
events and the doings of people we have come to know. It also
includes many ghoulishly absurd tales of Soviet enterprise — a
genre in itself…. Some of the most striking parts of this wonderful
book are interstitial sections of personal testimony concerning
various events and situations. It is testimony infused with fear,
prejudice, hope, evasiveness, and denial…. I call this a great
book, a superb work of intelligence, originality, and tremendous
enterprise.”
—Katharine A. Powers, Barnes & Noble Review
“The desire to uncover the truth about why Miedzianka, a provincial
mountain-top town in Lower Silesia with a history stretching back
700 years, literally vanished from the face of the earth between
the 1960s and 1980s, turns a journalistic search for documentary
evidence into an existential quest of epic proportions. Was the
town simply swallowed by the mountain beneath it, the victim of
extra-ordinary geology, or was it deliberately demolished by
politicians with dark secrets to hide? Written in the popular
Polish reportage genre, rather than as literary fiction, the book
nevertheless possesses many features of a thriller: mystery,
tension, suspense, horror – all of which are admirably conveyed by
the English translation. History of a Disappearance is a tale of
traumatic loss for the people who once lived in Miedzianka.… The
book’s most significant achievement is therefore its restoration of
individuals—not normally the focus of writers of history or
ideologues of change. A town forgotten by the end of the 20th
century has been resurrected.”
—Ursula Phillips, European Literature Network
“I chose the winning translation of Filip Springer by Sean Gasper
Bye because I found the subject matter totally gripping—it’s set in
1944, when the Soviet counteroffensive has reached the Vistula
River—and the prose itself is satisfyingly dense, and it has what I
look for in any good translation, a very convincing voice.”
—Margaret Jull Costa, Judge’s Citation, Asymptote’s 2016 Close
Approximations Translation Contest
“Although he is trained as a journalist and photographer, Filip
Springer’s work offers an example of how truth can be even more
enthralling than fiction. In his most celebrated piece so far,
History of a Disappearance (Polish: Miedzianka. Historia znikania),
he delved into the stories of a small town that has been completely
wiped off the face of the earth, as though it had never existed. By
exploring the deeply personal and moving stories of this town and
its former inhabitants, Springer gives readers an illuminating
journey through the challenges that Poland has faced as a country
as well.”
—Lani Seelinger, Culture Trip
“What happened to Miedzianka? That’s the question the Polish
journalist Filip Springer set out to answer in History of a
Disappearance: The Story of a Forgotten Polish Town. Springer combs
through archival records, hunts down personal correspondence, and
collects a series of interviews to try to preserve the history of a
town that history erased. It’s a very thorough examination,
oscillating between big picture historical/geopolitical context and
telling the stories of the individual lives, stories that almost
sound like segments from This American Life. Despite the thorough
research, Springer does not limit himself to a dry, distant
reporter’s writing style—he inserts himself into the reporting at
the occasional appropriate moment, he comments, he guesses, he uses
artful metaphor and repetition. It’s obvious on the page that
Springer has fallen in love with the town, with its story. Some
chapters read like a brochure for a place that no longer
exists.”
—Graham Oliver, Ploughshares
“It’s a strange but true facet of history that for several periods
of many years, Poland didn’t exist. Situated between Germany and
Russia, it occupied an unfortunate position, caught between two
aggressive, ambitious nations. On multiple occasions, it was
occupied and absorbed by one or the other in one of their expansive
incantations, for all intents and purposes ceasing to exist as an
independent country in its own right. History of a Disappearance
looks at this phenomenon from Poland’s tricky history as a sort of
microcosm, through the lens of a single town in Lower Silesia,
called Miedzianka…. Journalist Filip Springer writes a researched,
detailed work of “reportage”: a popular form of Polish nonfiction
literature that uses elements of fiction writing (what we’d
consider narrative nonfiction) in a long-form, journalistic
reporting style. It’s an excellent translation of a sad if hopeful
story. Springer creates a detailed picture of the little town and
its big personalities, showcasing the character of both place and
inhabitants, both of which could so easily be swept under the rug
of a long history in a tumultuous region…. It’s a wonderful read,
rich and strange, shining a light on layer after layer of dusty
history in a place that’s seen, and been, so much…. Something was
there once, withstanding tumultuous history for a very long time,
and we’d do well not to forget it.”
—What’s Nonfiction?
"Americans needn’t look abroad for stories like that of the village
of Kupferberg. We’ve got plenty of places like Centralia,
Pennsylvania, to keep us awake at night. But there is something
about layering those stories over a history that extends far back
beyond the the reach of American cultural memory. For Americans our
ecological disasters are part of our ongoing and glorious
zeitgeist, deeply felt, but quickly forgotten, as one might expect
of a people with no past (or a past kept locked in the back of a
deep, dark closet) and an overblown sense of manifest destiny. It’s
Sean Gasper Bye’s unpacking of the before and the burden of memory
that struck this reader square in the chest."
—M. Bartley Seigel, Words without Borders
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