Close to Jedenew

Close to Jedenew, a place in their childhood, Anna, Marian and their friends play mother/father/baby and hide-&-seek; they build a tree-house where they are safe from danger. Summer by summer, childhood passes by.

Close to Jedenew, an imaginary village in Poland at the beginning of World War II, as the German occupying troops arrive, so morals leave, and the community bonding the Catholics and the Jews collapses. Farmers side with the occupying forces, singing and shouting as they spread fear and horror, plundering the farms of their neighbors, setting them alight.

Kevin Vennemann has found a language that enables him to describe this collapse of all the safety and certainty his characters had previously known in a manner in which the time and place of the action, war and peace, life and death, constantly intertwine in a most ingenious manner.