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City of Lions

Portrait of a City in Two Acts: Lviv, Then and Now

Author Jozef Wittlin, Philippe Sands

Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Paperback

$19.95 US

Steerforth Press | Pushkin Press

5.13"W x 7.74"H x 0.49"D | 5 oz | 24 per carton

On sale Sep 12, 2023 | 176 Pages | 9781805330011

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“A loving, sensuous, but also gently ironic reconstruction of a lost city” — LA Review of Books

A timely reissue of the classic portrayal of the Ukrainian city of Lviv by 2 authors in 2 acts, separated by time and circumstance

With an illuminating preface by Eva Hoffman and stunning new photographs by Diana Matar, City of Lions is a powerful and melancholy evocation of Ukraine in the twentieth century, with a special resonance for today.

Lviv, Lwów, Lvov, Lemberg. Known by a variety of names, the City of Lions is now in western Ukraine. Situated in different countries during its history, it is a city located along the fault-lines of Europe's history.

City of Lions presents two essays, written more than half a century apart - but united by one city.

Józef Wittlin's lyrical paean to his Lwów, written in exile, is a deep cry of love and pain for his city, where most people he knew have fled or been killed.

Philippe Sands' finely honed exploration of what has been lost and what remains interweaves a lawyer's love of evidence with the emotional heft of a descendant of Lviv.

Józef Wittlin, born in 1896, was a major Polish poet, novelist, essayist and translator. He studied in Vienna, where he met Joseph Roth and Rainer Maria Rilke, before serving in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War. His experiences during that war inspired him to write The Salt of the Earth, which was first published in 1935. It was awarded the Polish National Academy Prize, won Wittlin a nomination for the Nobel Prize, and has since been translated into 14 languages. Józef Wittlin also translated Homer's Odyssey into Polish, published several collections of poetry, many of which were strongly pacifist, and penned numerous essays including 'My Lwów', which is included in City of Lions, also published by Pushkin Press. With the outbreak of the Second World War he fled to France and then to New York, where he died in 1976. View titles by Jozef Wittlin

Philippe Sands View titles by Philippe Sands

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"[Wittlin's essay My Lwów is] for many Poles the definitive evocation of one of their great lost cities. . . a loving, sensuous, but also gently ironic reconstruction. . . Sands’s perspective is closer to that of the contemporary reader, who struggles with the juxtaposition between beauty, faded grandeur, and whimsical visions of a cosmopolitan past on the one hand, and savage mass murder on the other." —Los Angeles Review of Books

"Congratulations to Pushkin Press for bringing lovely, haunted Lviv to a new audience." — Times Literary Supplement

"A walk down memory lane, a meditation on time, politics and remembrance." — Dublin Review of Books

"Wittlin takes us on a detailed tour of the city... well-illustrated." — East-West Review

"Beautiful and disturbing songs in prose." - Kazimierz Wierzyński

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