Word: marek
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...Marek Hlasko was seven years old when the Nazis invaded Poland. He was 13 when the Communists took over. He worked as a bellboy in a Warsaw hotel, put in six years as a taxi driver. Out of his experiences he wrote savagely realistic short stories that made Polish Reds wince. A tall, blond, flop-haired youngster who resembled the late Hollywood hero, James Dean, Hlasko headed a coterie that was analogous to Britain's Angry Young Men and the Beat Generation of the U.S. The difference was that Hlasko had more to be beat about-a fact that...
Moral Atrophy. Seven months ago Party Leader Wladyslaw Gomulka's Red government, which wants to silence all "destructive" criticism but hesitates to act too precipitately, gave Marek Hlasko a passport to visit Western Europe. In Paris he was interviewed by the weekly L'Express. Was he a Communist? "There is no such thing as a Communist." What were the differences between France and Poland? "I think that people here are able, at least to some extent, to get an element of joy out of life." What was it like to live under Communism? "The misfortune...
...Soon Marek Hlasko was sampling the joys of the free life. He moved in with friends who edited the Polish exile review, Kultura. Receiving sizable royalties from Western publishers, he traveled to West Germany and Italy in a beat uniform of blue jeans and cowboy shirt, boasted that he had run through $4,000 in just a few weeks of high living on the Riviera. He reportedly fell in love with German Actress Sonia Ziemann, who had starred in the movie version of The Eighth Day of the Week...
...while, the heat was building up against him at home. The Soviet Union denounced him in the Literary Gazette. A provincial Polish town burned his books. The Warsaw party daily Trybuna Ludu blasted him as a disciple of George Orwell, "that classical master of anti-Communist pamphleteering." Marek Hlasko wrote an answering letter that Trybuna Ludu refused to publish. "It was not I who made Warsaw," said Hlasko bitterly, "that Warsaw that was for so many years a city without a smile; it was not I who made the Warsaw in which people trembled with fear...
...public Puccini was not the whole man, as Marek and others have shown. As a child, he lived with his widowed mother and seven brothers and sisters in harsh poverty. His father, one of a long line of musicians, had been a church organist, but Giacomo started studying organ with little enthusiasm ("Your son," said an early teacher to his mother, "is meat which does not wish to be salted"). In time he showed a talent for composition, was shipped off on a scholarship to the Milan Conservatory. He was a good but not brilliant student. After graduation he stayed...