IN THE GARDEN OF MEMORY

An award-winning Polish family history gets its first U.S. publication. 

First printed in Poland in 2001, Olczak-Ronikier’s saga was hailed as an instant classic, winning the nation’s most prestigious literary prize, the Nike Literary Award. This edition has been beautifully rendered into English by the esteemed Antonia Lloyd-Jones, the former co-chair of the United Kingdom’s Translators Association. The multigenerational history tells the story of the Olczak-Ronikier’s family across three generations. While the branches of the family tree extend into a myriad of directions, offering readers a plethora of biographical vignettes, the main figures in the narrative’s first generation are the author’s great-grandparents, Gustav and Julia Horwitz, who were both born in the 1840s. The Horwitz family, as readers learn, was one of the most important in European Jewry. Descendents of the tribe of Levites, Horwitzes produced “long dynasties of priests and scholars” for centuries. Gustav and Julia’s nine children receive the spotlight in the book’s chapters detailing the second generation, which counts among its members communist revolutionaries, targets of Joseph Stalin’s purges, and acclaimed book publishers. The final generation covered—those born in the early 20th century—includes Holocaust victims, World War II soldiers, and postwar citizens who navigated the Cold War on both sides of the Iron Curtain. While the Holocaust and its lasting impact takes center stage, this is not just a story of victimhood; the work introduces family members such as Ryszard Bychowski, a wartime refugee who declined an opportunity to settle in California and instead joined Britain’s Royal Air Force, dying as a war hero. Also highlighted is Olczak-Ronikier’s mother, Hanna Mortkowicz, a famed Polish poet and novelist in her own right, who rebuilt the family’s publishing house “out of the ashes, like the phoenix” after World War II.

While this is a work of a nonfiction, backed by a scholarly reference section and referencing primary source documents and oral histories throughout every chapter, Olczak-Ronikier’s eloquent history deftly weaves hundreds of stories together into a poignant, cohesive narrative that offers the pleasures of fiction—which is unsurprising, given the author’s background as one of Poland’s most celebrated dramatists and screenwriters. In this chronicle of a prominent Jewish family, Olczak-Ronikier’s extended genealogy is intimately tied to a broader history of Europe from the mid-1800s through World War II, providing a revelatory consideration of the Continent through the lens of Polish Jewry. The book offers the fascinating perspective of assimilated Jews who “dropped religious practices and Yiddish” and were active in Polish independence movements, political debates, urban life, and literary culture yet “were never entirely accepted by the Polish elite and could never be equal.” While the work assumes readers will have a basic knowledge of Polish history, this potential obstacle is mitigated by an introduction by Lloyd-Jones, who provides historical context for a non-Polish audience. The book’s engaging text is accompanied by a treasure trove of family photographs, letters, diary entries, and other historical ephemera peppered throughout each chapter. These visual elements combine with the author’s engrossing storytelling to create an intimate, yet sweeping, saga.

A poignant, tour de force story of survival across multiple generations of a Jewish family.