The Wherewithal: A Novel in Verse

This astonishing novel in verse tells the story of Henryk Wyrzykowski, a drifting, haunted young man hiding from the Vietnam War in the basement of a San Francisco welfare building and translating his mother's diaries. The diaries concern the Jedwabne massacre, an event that took place in German-occupied Poland in 1941. Wildly inventive, dark, beautiful, and unrelenting, The Wherewithal is a meditation on the nature of evil and the destruction of war.

About the Author :
Philip Schultz is the author of nine poetry collections, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Failure. The founder and director of The Writers Studio, he has been teaching creative writing since 1971. He lives in East Hampton, New York.

Review :
"The Wherewithal is an extraordinary piece of writing. As in his earlier work Schultz uses the resources of fiction, verse, and reportage to create something at once novelistic and deliriously poetic. It's powerfully moving and disturbing both at the level of the small concrete details that form its basic building blocks and at the level of the larger decisions. The way it situates the Holocaust in the context of other theaters of violence and cruelty universalizes the catastrophe with a devastating forcefulness. It left me reeling." -- James Lasdun "Gripping, eloquent, moving, this is a powerful tale about what remains hidden and/or unspeakable in history." -- Elie Wiesel "Faced with so much that has been written about the Holocaust, this dense compelling morality tale is a daring feat. I've never read anything that so brilliantly reaches beyond the efforts of mass extermination by the Nazis to the American onslaught in Vietnam-and makes poetry out of it." -- Maxine Kumin "Philip Schultz's The Wherewithal is a book in which time has come undone. Taking place in San Francisco in 1968, it also reaches back to the Holocaust-specifically, the Jedwabne pogrom of July 1941, when Polish civilians killed more than 300 Jews. The Wherewithal is narrative as fever dream, chopped up, fragmented and stitched back together, less about realism than allegory." -- David Ulin - Los Angeles Times "Stunning...The Wherewithal is about evil and suffering and the human capacity for compassion." -- Adam Plunkett - The New York Times Book Review "In Philip Schultz's The Wherewithal the Holocaust is made personal. Profoundly lyrical, it is Schultz's great strength to create ugliness so profound as to reveal life's beauty. Reading it is to be swept in by its power. I am reminded of Rilke, who wrote that the artist, in order to see beauty must first see the horrible, that a single denial of the repulsive will force him out of the state of grace and make him utterly sinful. Philip Schultz lives forever in that state of grace. He has written a great book." -- Grace Schulman "The Wherewithal, by Philip Schultz, who won a Pulitzer for Failure, is a masterpiece. It takes a mysterious combination of humility, bravery, curiosity and skill to try to comprehend massive evil, and to illustrate that effort... an extraordinary volume of poetry. I repeat. We have been given a masterpiece." -- Barbara Berman - The Rumpus "The Wherewithal is distinguished for its ability to braid together strands of narrative while leavening the story with unexpected bursts of humor... direct and precise in its emotional articulations." -- Jacob Silverman, Poetry Foundation "This dark, deep book, full of emotion and motion, points forward, thinking in new ways about the Holocaust and its aftermath." -- The Jewish Book Council "Philip Schultz's The Wherewithal is an ambitious, bracing book about large-scale suffering...and human compassion." -- Will Schutt - The East Hampton Star "Schultz has found a way not only to make these many narratives inform each other but to do so in the service of what becomes the lyric celebration of the possibility of love and beauty and heroic action in the face of ultimate darkness... What is so remarkable about this poem is its symphonic orchestration of conflicting tones-of outrage and anger, passion and compassion, guilt and longing; its pitch-perfect depiction of both ultimate horror and the possibilities for moral triumph and human connection." -- Ronald L. Sharp - The Kenyon Review