Youth

Leopold Tyrmand was born to a Polish Jewish assimilated secular family^[4] in Warsaw, son to Mieczyslaw Tyrmand and Maryla Oliwenstein. His father had a wholesale leather business.^[3]

His paternal grandfather, Zelman Tyrmand, was a member of the management board of Warsaw's Nożyk Synagogue.^[4]

In 1938 he matriculated at Warsaw's Jan Kreczmar Gymnasium. He went to Paris, where he studied for a year at the faculty of architecture at the Académie des Beaux-Arts, the Academy of Fine Arts. There he met for the first time Western European culture and American jazz. Both of these fascinations left a lasting mark on his work.^[3]

World War II

Tyrmand was on vacation in Warsaw when the War broke out, so he interrupted his studies and worked in smuggling in the area of the Western Bug, helping people to cross from Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union.^[3]

Tyrmand later managed to flee to Vilnius as a refugee, and after the Soviet occupation of 1940, he began working with local media, most notably with Prawda Komsomolska, a Soviet propaganda medium. During this time, he met the Polish journalist Andrzej Miłosz (brother of the Polish writer Czesław Miłosz). At that time Andrzej Miłosz was collaborating with the Home Army (a movement of Polish Resistance), and reproached Tyrmand for writing for a Russian propaganda outlet.^[3]

During the war, Tyrmand was a resistance fighter in Poland. In spring 1941 he was arrested by the NKVD secret police in Vilnius and sentenced to 8 years in prison. However, he managed to escape from a bombed train after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June of that year. Tyrmand escaped from Russia to later return to Vilnius, identifying as a French citizen.^[3]

To escape the Holocaust, Tyrmand traveled on false papers to Germany. He worked as a waiter while in Germany;^[5] an experience he wrote about in his semi-autobiographical novel "Filip".

He tried to escape to neutral Sweden, but was caught in Norwegian port of Stavanger, and sent to the Grini concentration camp in Norway, where he managed to survive the rest of the war.^[3]

After World War II

After the war and before he returned to a devastated Poland, Tyrmand worked with the Norwegian Red Cross.^[3]

Emigration and life in United States

Tyrmand emigrated to the United States in 1966. In the United States, Tyrmand lived in New York City and New Canaan, Connecticut, until 1976.

In 1971, he married Mary Ellen Fox, a doctoral candidate at Yale University.^[3]

Mary Ellen Tyrmand co-authored a book, published in Poland in 2012 titled: "Tyrmandowie Romans Amerykanski." The book traces their relationship via the letters to each other beginning with their meeting in 1970 until his death.

Tyrmand regularly published essays in American periodicals such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, Commentary and The American Scholar.^[7]

He became the co-founder and vice-president of the Rockford Institute, a conservative foundation critical of American publishing values and their apparent bias toward liberal writers. Tyrmand also served as editor of Chronicles of Culture, an anti-communist, paleoconservative journal.^[2]

Death

Tyrmand died of a heart attack in Fort Myers, Florida at the age of 64 on March 19, 1985. He was survived by his wife, Mary Ellen, and his children, Rebecca and the investor and consultant Matthew Tyrmand.^[1][2][4]

Hotel Ansgar

Collection of war short stories published in 1948.^[3]

Diary 1954

Diary 1954 (Polish: Dziennik 1954) is a semi-autobiographical chronicle that analyzes the life in the Communist Poland and exposes the lies and absurdities of Soviet Russia backed regimes.^[7]

Although Tyrmand had put aside work on the book, he resumed it after an independent media outlet (Tygodnik Powszechny^[6]) he was collaborating with was forced to close after refusing to publish an obituary and mourn Stalin's death.^[6][7]

The Man With White Eyes

The Man With White Eyes (Polish: Zły) is a crime and romance novel in which the protagonist fights organized crime anonymously in Warsaw to defend the weak.^[3][5]

Published in 1955, The Man With White Eyes broke with the socialist realism in Poland by showing that under an officially promoted image of Warsaw, a world of crime existed untouched by an inefficient police.^[9]

The book was Tyrmand's biggest success^[3] and one of the most successful novels in Poland in the 1950s,^[5] to the point that it ran out copies in weeks and it reached up to 10 and even 20 times the purchase price in the black market.^[10]

Later it became also an international hit (especially in the Eastern Bloc) and was translated into more than 20 European languages.^[9]

Seven Long Voyages

Seven Long Voyages (Polish: Siedem Dalekich Rejsów) was completed in the late 1950s.

The Polish government didn't allow its publication accusing the book of being "pornographic and supportive of private initiative".^[3]

Social and Emotional life

Social and Emotional Life (Polish: Życie Towarzyskie i Uczuciowe) was finished in the first half of the 1960s.

The novel is critical of the moral environment of the Polish intelligentsia of the time, exposing them as servile and subservient to the regime.

The book is written in the form of a "roman à clef", which is a novel with fictional characters that can be easily identified as counterparts of real-life people, in this case, names from the Polish cultural scene at the time.^[3]

Tyrmand had aspirations for the book to become his magnum opus, but the government didn't allow its publication, and despite eventually being published in Paris, the book went mostly unnoticed.^[3]

Other books

Tyrmand books include Kultura Essays, Explorations in Freedom, Notebooks of a Dilettante, and On the Border of Jazz.