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Author Tuszyńska, Agata, author.

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

Publication Info. New York : Alfred A. Knopf, [2016]

Copies

Location Call No. Status
 Middletown, Russell Library - Adult Nonfiction  940.5318 TUS    Check Shelf
 New Britain, Main Library - Non Fiction  929.2 T87    Check Shelf
 Portland Public Library - Adult Department  BIOG TUSZYNSKA, AGATA    Check Shelf
 Simsbury Public Library - Non Fiction  929.2089 TUSZYNSKA    Check Shelf
 West Hartford, Noah Webster Library - Biographies  B TUSZYNSKA AGATA T    Check Shelf
Edition First American edition.
Description xi, 381 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Note "This is a Borzoi book published by Alfred A. Knopf"--Title page verso.
"Originally published in Poland as Rodzinna Historia Leku by Wydawnictwo Literackie, Krakow, in 2005" -- copyright page
Summary Every family has its own history. Many families carry a tragic past. 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 the stories of suffering and heroism could be told. In Family History of Fear, 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. Tuszyńska has written 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" (only from her Polish Catholic father, and then, always in derision), 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 profoundly moving and resonant 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 and her mother, 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 father, 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. She writes of her discoveries and of her willingness to accept a radically different definition of self, reading the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer, opening up for her a world of Polish Jewry as he became her guide, and then writing about his life and work, circling her Jewish self in Lost Landscapes: In Search of Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Jews of Poland. A beautiful and affecting book of discovery and acceptance; a searing, insightful portrait of Polish Jewish life, lived before and after Hitler's Third Reich.
Language In English, translated from the French version of a text originally in Polish.
Contents The secret -- Our home -- Perlowa Street -- Leczyca -- Zamutek -- Dela -- Remembering -- Frania -- Marys -- March -- Addresses -- My family.
Subject Tuszyńska, Agata.
Tuszyński family.
Jews -- Poland -- Biography.
Warsaw (Poland) -- Intellectual life.
Tuszyńska, Agata. (OCoLC)fst01503290
Tuszyński family. (OCoLC)fst01670111
Intellectual life. (OCoLC)fst00975769
Jews. (OCoLC)fst00983135
Poland. (OCoLC)fst01206891
Poland -- Warsaw. (OCoLC)fst01204515
Genre/Form Biographies.
Biography. (OCoLC)fst01423686
Added Author Ruas, Charles, translator.
Added Title Rodzinna historia lęku. English
ISBN 9780375413704 (hardcover ; alk. paper)
0375413707 (hardcover ; alk. paper)
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