I’m a writer in search of depth. Of character. On and off the page I long to travel, to find people who illuminate. I want to learn from them, and share their stories, and maybe a few of my own, and in this way explore the spaces of overlap in our world.
I’ve been published in the Los Angeles Times, USA Weekend, the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post, among others. With a background in entertainment and sports writing, I’ve interviewed such figures as Matt Damon, Robert De Niro, and Andre Agassi. My hope now is to transition into human interest pieces and longer-form projects.
A son of immigrants, I was raised in America and studied journalism and English at the University of Houston. While working toward my degree I became one of the youngest full-time staff writers in the history of the Houston Chronicle when the newspaper hired me to cover sports at the age of 19. Later, I moved between Los Angeles and New York, continuing to write under the name Josh Gajewski. In recent years, however, I’ve embraced my given name while finding a fascination with Poland, the country of my bones, and where I’ve been at work on two book projects…
Old World Avenue
The story of an old man, a young man, and a book that binds them. The story of their meeting across paper, language, and time. This begins one winter when I arrive to Warsaw from New York to visit my grandmother, and find a red book in a random shop. The Polish Complex by Tadeusz Konwicki, it’s called. “Konwicki? In English? Where did you find this?” my grandmother asks when she sees it. She’d known the author and his wife, she tells me, back when they were young and just starting out as artists in a ruined city.
And together then, we begin to travel — back to those times, those ruins, and to love stories and works of art born out of there. As these conversations and coincidences unfold, we travel also to Warsaw’s oldest cafe, and we ask about him there, about this Konwicki who set us off on such a journey, this writer who hasn’t written for decades but who long ago was known to have come around.
“He’ll be here in twenty minutes,” a waiter says, glancing at the time. A moment within a meditation — of Warsaw, of finding inspiration in a changing world, and of the ways a book or piece of art can breathe, can become a window where once there was a wall.
The Soldier Project
Presently I’m at work on a second book which also takes place in Poland. This, the story of four British soldiers who find themselves in Warsaw during the German occupation of World War II. Escaped prisoners of war, these young men develop a kinship with an unfamiliar country, and everlasting bonds with the people who hide and help them — my family among them.
“Anyway, I’ll be taking a break soon, but before I do, I’ll sigh softly about something I think about often. In thirty or forty years will someone reading my writing feel a sudden closeness to a person who lived so long ago, who had his own twisted life, who was almost persistent in his pursuit of something or other, and who in the end achieved nothing? Will that future reader perceive a sort of spiritual and intellectual affinity — if only in the sense of humor — with some man by the name of Konwicki?”
— T.K., written the year I was born
“What kind of miracle are you waiting for?”
“The miracle of understanding. Lately, that’s what I’ve been looking for. That’s all that absorbs me.”
- Tadeusz Konwicki, The Polish Complex
Photos by Jan Gajewski, Dawid Sadowski