The Homeless

Tomasz Judym was born in a slum in Warsaw. Against all odds, he has become a doctor, and he finds that his driving motivation to treat disadvantaged people like those he grew up with is at odds with the expectations of his peers. He sees the unhealthy working and living conditions of the working class in twentieth-century Poland wearing on those around him, even as he strives to help them. As he battles alone to do the kind of work that boards of health and other agencies do today, Dr. Judym wrestles inwardly with feelings of inferiority and revulsion caused by his difficult childhood. His mission takes him out of the city and into the countryside, bringing him into conflict with his other desires, and the love that he feels for a sympathetic woman whose background differs fundamentally from his own.

The Homeless combines concrete detail about social issues—the urgent need for public hygiene and access to medical treatment, the effects of industrialization on health and the landscape, and the disinterest that people in power have in the disadvantaged—with beautiful, artistic passages of prose that sensitively probe the characters’ inner lives. The title comes not from the obvious reference to the impoverished people Dr. Judym concerns himself with, but from the unmoored status of the protagonist, the woman he loves, a mysterious engineer friend of his, his brother, and many others who find themselves rootless—emotionally and physically alienated by class divides and the social upheaval of industrialisation. The Homeless is a portrait of the time and place it was written—Poland on the precipice of the twentieth century—that speaks to our current time and place.

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