Horizon Information Portal

e-branch

Home

My Account/Renew Loans

Find Magazine Articles & more

Family history of fear : a memoir / Agata Tuszyńska ; translated by Charles Ruas from the French of Jean-Yves Erhel.

by Tuszyńska, Agata.

View full image

Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.

Tuszyńska, Agata.

Tuszyńska, Agata -- Family.

Jews -- Poland -- Biography.

Warsaw (Poland) -- Intellectual life.

9780375413704 (hc.)

Rodzinna historia lęku. English

First American edition.

xi, 381 pages : illustrations, portraits, genealogical tables ; 24 cm.

"Originally published in Poland as Rodzinna historia lęku ... This translation is based on the French edition originally published in France as Une histoire familiale de la peur ... in 2006"--Title-page verso.

Like the author's mother, many Poles did not tell their children a complete story of their wartime exploits - of the underground Home Army, the tragedy of the Warsaw Uprising, the civil war against the Communists. Years had to pass before these stories of suffering and heroism could be told. Agata Tuszyńska, one of Poland's most admired poets and cultural historians, writes of the stories she heard from her mother about her secret past. A powerful memoir about growing up after the Second World War in Communist Poland - blonde, blue-eyed, and Catholic. The author was nineteen years old and living in Warsaw when her mother told her the truth - that she was Jewish - and began to tell her stories of the family's secret past in Poland. Tuszyńska, who grew up in a country beset by anti-Semitism, rarely hearing the word "Jew" was unhinged, ashamed, and humiliated. The author writes of how she skillfully erased the truth within herself, refusing to admit the existence of her other half. In this book, Tuszyńska investigates her past and writes of her journey to uncover her family's history during World War II - of her mother at age eight entering the Warsaw Ghetto for two years as conditions grew more desperate, and finally escaping just before the uprising, and then living hidden on the other side. She writes of her grandfather, one of five thousand Polish soldiers taken prisoner in 1939, becoming, later, the country's most famous radio sports announcer; and of her relatives and their mysterious pasts, as she tries to make sense of the hatred of Jews in her country. An affecting book of discovery and acceptance and a searing portrait of Polish Jewish life, lived before and after Hitler's Third Reich.

Erhel, Jean-Yves.

Horizon Information Portal 3.24_8902M

© 2001-2013 SirsiDynix All rights reserved.

Horizon Information Portal