Leopold Tyrmand

Leopold Tyrmand (May 16, 1920 – March 19, 1985) was a Polish novelist, writer, and editor. Tyrmand emigrated from Poland to the United States in 1966 and five years later married an American, Mary Ellen Fox. He served as editor of an anti-communist monthly Chronicles of Culture with John A. Howard. Tyrmand died of a heart attack at the age of 64 in Florida.

Life

Youth

Leopold Tyrmand was born to a Polish Jewish assimilated secular family in Warsaw, son to Mieczyslaw Tyrmand and Maria (Maryla) née Mańska or Oliwenstein. His father had a wholesale leather business.

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

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.

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.

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.