My Way to the Moon

Descrição

More than sixty years ago, the son of an emigrant, who had recently arrived in Brazil from a devastated by war Europe, received from his father as a birthday gift a science fiction novel, the story of man´s first expedition to the Moon and the settling down there of a society of Selenites. Today, the boy of those days, describes his own way to the moon. History made him follow a path of life in which the frontier between what is real and what is unreal was not clearly marked, a way that involved the most painful and absurd experiences of the 20th century. Angolan by birth, whose father was Polish and his mother German, the son of a prisoner of Auschwitz, displaced by war, stateless, adopted by Brazil, he constructed his full and creative citizenship in the country of his adoption, without abdicating from his Angolan, Polish and German identity. The temptation to transform this legacy of memory into fiction must have been very strong. But Tomasz Lychowski opted for the testimony of a chronicler and that of a poet, of an archeologist of memory who recuperates and registers facts and recognizes its origin, the one on Earth as well as the one in Heaven. In this account it is the people who stand out, for Tomasz Lychowski is above all the chronicler and the poet of encounter, who recognizes the grace in the Other and who knows how to be grateful. (Henryk Siewierski).