On June 14, 1888, Mrs. Mering's fête, including the first jumble sale in history.
-- "To Say Nothing of the Dog" (1998)
by Connie Willis

From "The Book of Fictional Days"
Know when something that did not really happen
occurred? Send it to fictiondays@yahoo.com.

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Today in Literary History
On this day in 1933, Jerzy Kosinski was born, as Jerzy Lewinkopf, in Lodz, Poland. Kosinski's father changed the family name at the beginning of World War II in an effort to escape persecution as a Jew. As described later in Kosinski's international bestseller "The Painted Bird" (1965), this plan went horribly wrong. When 6-year-old Jerzy became separated from his parents he was given up for dead; in fact, he spent the next three years roaming the Polish countryside, witnessing and suffering such atrocities that he was struck dumb, recovering his speech only years later when, now reclaimed by his parents from an orphanage and enrolled in a school for the handicapped, he was jolted back to speech by a skiing accident.

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