Janina Katz

Janina Katz (2 March 1939 – 18 October 2013) was a Polish-Danish writer. A Polish Jew, she emigrated to Denmark in 1969. In 1991, she published her first collection of poems Min mors datter (My Mother's Daughter).
Biography
Katz was born into a Jewish family in Krakow in 1939. Most of her relatives died in concentration camps but she was smuggled out of a Polish workers camp to live with a Polish couple she called her "war parents" who brought her up as a Catholic. After the war, she lived with her mother who had survived imprisonment in various concentration camps.
After studying sociology and literature at Krakow University, Katz worked as a literary critic in the 1960s. In 1969, she emigrated to Denmark with her mother during the period of antisemitism after the Six-Day War in 1967 when the Soviet Union sided with the Arabs. For the next 13 years, she worked at the Royal Danish Library as a translator from Polish. She was 52 when she published Min moders datter (1991), her first poetry collection. Written in Danish, the work expressed her guilt at being one of her family's few survivors as well as the difficult relationship she had with her mother, abandoning her country and her mother tongue.
In 1993, she published her biographical novel Mit liv som barbar (My Life as a Barbarian), describing her life until her mother's death in 1987. It concludes with the words: "Life is a story. But only the luckiest of us are able to write it up." In 2006, she published another poetry collection Min spaltede tunge (My Split Tongue, 2006) and in 2009 the novel Længsel pa bestilling (Longing to Order), a romance about a Jewish girl from Denmark who meets Sammy on a trip to Israel. In 2008, she wrote another collection of poems, this time in Polish: Pisane po polsku. She translated it into Danish herself as Skrevet på polsk (Written in Polish). It contains reflections on her childhood in Poland during the holocaust, many of them sorrowfully negative: "Hvor lang er ikke denne liste/ af uindbudne gæster/ til mit ikke-bryllup?" (How long is then this list/ of uninvited guests/ to my non-wedding?)
All in all, her works combine sadness with humour. In particular, her short story collection Den glade jødinde og andre historier (The Merry Jewess and Other Stories, 1998) contrasts Jewish melancholy with surreal magic realism and the grotesque.
Awards
In 1998, she received the Beatrice Award for her oeuvre from the Danish Academy.
Works
Poetry
1991: Min moders datter
1992: Mit uvirkelige liv
1993: I mit drømmeland
1995: Scener fra det virkelige liv
1996: Uden for sæsonen
1998: Blandt andet
1999: Varme steder
2002: Det syvende barn
2004: Landskabet der blev væk
2006: Min spaltede tunge
2010: Tilbage til æblerne
2011: Skrevet på polsk
2013: Endnu ikke allerede
Novels
1993: Mit liv som barbar
1997: Putska
2001: Fortællinger til Abram
2005: Drengen fra dengang
2008: Længsel pa bestilling
For children
2001: Mit liv som syfiluter
Bibliography
Polish bibliography 1988 - 2001
References
1939 births
2013 deaths
Writers from Kraków
People from Kraków Voivodeship (1919–1939)
Writers from Copenhagen
Danish women novelists
20th-century Danish translators
21st-century Danish translators
Danish women poets
Danish children's writers
Danish women children's writers
20th-century Polish Jews
Jagiellonian University alumni
20th-century Danish poets
20th-century Danish women writers
20th-century translators
21st-century Danish women writers
21st-century Danish poets
Polish emigrants to Denmark