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You are a human animal. You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello, this is Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm.

This is the third show in our four-part series, A Month of Miwosh,

which honors Nobel Prize laureate Cheshua Miwosh, who is 87,

and whose most recent book, Roadside Dog, has just been published by Faris Strauss and Giroux.

Of Polish descent, Miloche enjoyed an idyllic childhood in Lithuania, but his homeland was savaged,

first by the Russian Revolution and then by the Second World War.

He survived the Nazi destruction of Warsaw, where he lived during the war.

Today's program will discuss Milosh's years of exile and defection after the war and his immigration to Berkeley.

At an international festival of poets and scholars held at Claremont McKenna College,

poet Robert Haas and I talked about Milosh's life and work.

Haas is most recently the author of Sun Under Wood, published by Echo Press.

This is Robert Haas, talking about Miwosh after the war.

In 1945, 1946, a coalition government was formed, clearly dominated by the Polish Communist Party and under the direction of the Russian Communist Party.

And Miwos was invited to join the government as a minor diplomatic official.

He and his friends debated how to behave.

It looked like this government was going to be there forever.

Many Eastern Europeans in the way that Milan Kundra has described in his novels were euphoric

about the socialist future, it seemed, the time of the creation of socialism and a new freedom.

...