Bente Kahan (born 23 September 1958) is a Norwegian solo vocalist, actress, musician, director and playwright, best known for her renditions and productions of Yiddish folk music and plays. Since 2002 she has lived and worked in Poland.
Stefan Wiechecki (pen-name Wiech; 10 August 1896 – 26 July 1979) was a Polish writer and journalist. He is most fondly remembered for his humorous feuilletons, which chronicled the everyday life of Warsaw and cultivated the Warsaw dialect.
Stefan Wiechecki was born 10 August 1896. In inter-war Poland he collaborated with numerous Warsaw-based newspapers, initially as a court reporter. During numerous trials he documented typical personalities of the poorer, less-known part of the city with its distinctive culture, language and customs. With time he was given his own column in Express Wieczorny evening newspaper, where he published humorous sketches and feuilletons featuring personalities based on people taking part in trials he took part in. They gained much popularity and in late 1930s Wiechecki opened a chocolate shop in the borough of Praga, which became his main source of income.
During the Warsaw Uprising, he was cut off from his house on the other side of the river, in the Old Town. There he collaborated with numerous newspapers published in the Polish-held part of town, notably the Powstaniec. Sharing the fate of the rest of Warsaw's civilians, Wiechecki was forced out of the city after the end of the uprising. However, he returned soon after the town was retaken from the Germans and resumed his duties as a journalist. Some of his humorous stories were published in book form, while others continued to be published by Warsaw-based newspapers.
While criticised by linguists and Polonists for filling the Polish language with trash, he was nevertheless considered a classic of the Warsaw dialect, at that time suppressed by schools along with all other non-standard variations of the literary language. One of the scientists to defend him in numerous articles was Bronisław Wieczorkiewicz, who later published the first monograph on the dialects of Warsaw. A renowned Polish poet Julian Tuwim dubbed Wiechecki the Homer of Warsaw's streets and Warsaw's language, his feuilletons are also mentioned in the works of Antoni Słonimski, Stefan Kisielewski and Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska. He died 26 July 1979 in Warsaw, where he is buried. After 1989 one of the main pedestrian-only zones of downtown Warsaw was officially named the Wiech Passage in honour of Wiechecki.
Wiechecki's novel Cafe pod Minogą was filmed in 1956.
Antoni Słonimski (15 November 1895 – 4 July 1976) was a Polish poet, artist, journalist, playwright and prose writer, president of the Union of Polish Writers in 1956–1959 during the Polish October, known for his devotion to social justice.
Słonimski was the grandson of Hayyim Selig Slonimski, the founder of "ha-Tsefirah"- the first Hebrew weekly with an emphasis on the sciences. His father, an ophthalmologist, converted to Christianity when he married a Catholic woman. Słonimski was born in Warsaw and baptized and raised as a Christian. Słonimski studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In 1919 he co-founded the Skamander group of experimental poets with Julian Tuwim and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. In 1924 he travelled to Palestine and Brasil and in 1932 to the Soviet Union.
Słonimski spent the war years in exile in England and France, returning to Poland in 1951. He worked as contributor to popular periodicals: Nowa Kultura (1950–1962), Szpilki (1953–73) and Przegląd Kulturalny. He was an active anti-Stalinist and supporter of liberalization. In 1964 he was one of the signatories and the main author of the so-called Letter of 34 to Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz regarding freedom of culture. Słonimski died on 4 July 1976 in a car accident in Warsaw.
Jerzy Szaniawski (Zegrzynek, 10 February 1886 – 16 March 1970, Warsaw) was a Polish writer, playwright, and essayist; an elected member of the prestigious Polish Academy of Literature in the interwar period. He is best remembered for his series of short stories about the fictitious Professor Tutka, published in daily press in postwar Poland. During Stalinism his writing was temporarily banned as "ideologically adverse".
Ignacy Chrzanowski (5 February 1866 in Stok – 19 January 1940) was a Polish historian of literature, professor of the Jagiellonian University, arrested by the Nazis as part of the Sonderaktion Krakau and killed in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
His daughter was Hanna Helena Chrzanowska.