25 Facts About Leopold Tyrmand

Leopold Tyrmand was a Polish novelist, writer, and editor.

Leopold Tyrmand served as editor of an anti-communist monthly Chronicles of Culture with John A Howard.

Leopold Tyrmand died of a heart attack at the age of 64 in Florida.

Leopold Tyrmand was born to a Polish Jewish assimilated secular family in Warsaw, son to Mieczyslaw Tyrmand and Maryla Oliwenstein.

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

Leopold Tyrmand went to Paris, where he studied for a year at the faculty of architecture at the Academie des Beaux-Arts, the Academy of Fine Arts.

Leopold 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.

Leopold 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.

Leopold Tyrmand escaped from Russia to later return to Vilnius, identifying as a French citizen.

Leopold Tyrmand worked as a waiter while in Germany; an experience he wrote about in his semi-autobiographical novel "Filip".

Leopold Tyrmand tried to escape to neutral Sweden, but was caught in Norwegian port of Stavanger, and sent to the Grini concentration camp in Norway, where he managed to survive the rest of the war.

In 1950, during the years of Stalinism in Poland, Leopold Tyrmand was removed from the editorial board of the popular Przekroj magazine for a review of a boxing tournament in which he criticized the Russian judges for their pro-Soviet bias and unfair decisions that spurred protests among the boxing fans that led to police intervention.

In 1954 Leopold Tyrmand started a diary and, due to the frustration associated with forced inactivity, he transferred his writing to this diary which recounts the first three months of 1954.

Leopold Tyrmand organized festivals and concerts, and released a monograph on jazz.

Leopold Tyrmand was instrumental in popularizing jazz in communist Poland, and was considered the "guru" of the Polish jazz movement.

Leopold Tyrmand helped to start and coined the name of "Jazz Jamboree" in 1958, a Polish jazz festival that continues to this day as one biggest and oldest of its genre in Europe.

In 1961 "Filip" was the last novel that Leopold Tyrmand managed to publish in Poland, but only after many delays.

Finally, Leopold Tyrmand was able to get a passport after being denied one since 1958.

Leopold Tyrmand regularly published essays in American periodicals such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, Commentary and The American Scholar.

Leopold Tyrmand became the co-founder and vice-president of the Rockford Institute, a conservative foundation critical of American publishing values and their apparent bias toward liberal writers.

Leopold Tyrmand served as editor of Chronicles of Culture, an anti-communist, paleoconservative journal.

Leopold Tyrmand died of a heart attack in Fort Myers, Florida at the age of 64 on March 19,1985.

Leopold Tyrmand was survived by his wife, Mary Ellen, and his children, Rebecca and the investor and consultant Matthew Tyrmand.

Leopold Tyrmand had aspirations for the book to become his magnum opus, but the government didn't allow its publication, and despite eventually being published in Paris, the book went mostly unnoticed.

Leopold Tyrmand books include Kultura Essays, Explorations in Freedom, Notebooks of a Dilettante, and On the Border of Jazz.