David A. Goldfarb

David A. Goldfarb is an independent scholar of Polish literature and literary theory, a literary translator from Polish to English, and a liaison for Polish authors to US publishers. His largest recent project is Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature, a monthly video series produced in collaboration with the Polish Cultural Institute New York since 2021, featuring conversations about Polish--and since 2022 Ukrainian--literature with scholars, critics, translators, and authors. As of the beginning of 2025, there are more than 50 episodes of the program available on YouTube. Since 2023, he has also been working as a writer on a documentary film project in development about the Negro Symphony Orchestra in Harlem (1937-40) and its Polish-Jewish conductor, Ignatz Waghalter. From mid-2010 to the end of 2013, he was Curator of Literature and Humanities Programming at the Polish Cultural Institute in New York, a diplomatic mission of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland. Prior to that he was an Assistant Professor of Slavic Literatures and Comparative Literature at Barnard College, Columbia University.

He holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has published articles on Bruno Schulz, Zbigniew Herbert, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Mikhail Lermontov, and East European cinema in East European Politics and Societies, Indiana Slavic Studies, Philosophy and Literature, Prooftexts, The Polish Review, Slavic and East European Performance, Jewish Quarterly, and book chapters on Bruno Schulz, Jozef Wittlin, Witold Gombrowicz, and Nikolai Gogol and Giuseppe Arcimboldo. He has written the introduction and notes for Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych" and Other Stories and Turgenev's Fathers and Sons for the Barnes and Noble Classics series, and for the Penguin Classics edition of "The Street of Crocodiles" and Other Stories by Bruno Schulz.

To find out about him and his work in Polish Literature, Russian Literature, Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, and Cultural Diplomacy take a look at his Curriculum Vitae, which provides convenient links to full-text versions of selected publications and reviews, conference papers, and course syllabi, as well as selected translations in a format familiar in the academic world.

Read an interview with David A. Goldfarb about Encounters with Polish Literature on the University of Toronto Arts & Sciences Alumni website.

Watch a video interview with David A. Goldfarb by Eva Hussain about "Encounters" and how he became interested in Polish literature.

Selected Publications

"Appropriations of Bruno Schulz." Jewish Quarterly 218 (Summer 2011).

"Eksplozja słowa"("Word Explosion"). Gombrowicz, nasz współczesny. Ed. Jerzy Jarzębski. Cracow: Universitas, 2010. 706-13.

“Pałuby in Bruno Schulz’s Workshop.” Bruno Schulz: New Readings, New Meanings. Bruno Schulz: Nouvelles Lectures, Nouvelles Significations. Ed. Stanisław Latek. Cracow: Polska Akademia Umiejętności, 85-94, 2009.

The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories (Penguin Classics) by Bruno Schulz, Fwd. Jonathan Safran Foer, Intro. David A. Goldfarb, Trans. Celina Wieniewska

Reviewed by Bill Martin from the Polish Cultural Institute on Bacacay: The Polish Literature Weblog.

Quoted by Chris Power on the Books Blog at the Guardian

Fathers and Sons (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by Ivan Turgenev, Intro. and notes David A. Goldfarb

"The Death of Ivan Ilych" and Other Stories (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by Leo Tolstoy, Intro. and notes David A. Goldfarb

"Gombrowicz's Binoculars: The View from Abroad" in Framing the Polish Home: Postwar Cultural Constructions of Hearth, Nation, and Self," Ed. Bożena Shallcross

Last updated April 10, 2025. If you have any suggestions or comments on this page or anything in this archive, please e-mail me.

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