![]() ![]() Misha’s sudden death sends Jaryk on a journey halfway across the globe that will plunge him into an increasingly complicated political drama. But Jaryk, who has finally met a woman he might trust with a glimpse of his past, lets him fly to Calcutta alone. Invited to participate, Misha eagerly accepts. ![]() Jaryk and his older friend, Misha, first met in a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw and now they’re the only two of its former residents able to testify to the heroism of its director, a historical figure named Janusz Korczak, who spurned an opportunity to save himself and accompanied his young charges to the gas chamber.Ĭhakrabarti writes that his title refers to a play by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, “about a dying child living through his imagination,” that Korczak staged at the orphanage in 1942 - an attempt to comfort his beloved boys and girls, to “prepare them for what was to come.” Chakrabarti uses this historical footnote to envision a whole new fictional production, organized 30 years later by an Indian academic trying to save an endangered village whose inhabitants have fled the violent birth of the new nation of Bangladesh. ![]() The haunted man at the heart of Jai Chakrabarti’s A PLAY FOR THE END OF THE WORLD (Knopf, 304 pp., $27) is one of the few survivors of a generation, a Polish immigrant in New York who can’t forget the makeshift family that was transported to Treblinka without him. ![]()
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