Danse Macabre

Memoir of a Polish Girl at the Time of the Russian Revolution (1914/1924). Expanded hardcover edition with additional photographs. Irene Rochas was born Aniela Tarnowicz in Warsaw in 1906 the youngest child in a large upper middle-class Polish family. With the outbreak of WW I in 1914 Irene and her family were stranded in Moscow and with the further outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution they were able to return to their homeland only after a delay of four years. Irene's rediscovered narrative -- written when she was fifty years old and set in the form of a novel -- is a remembrance of those eventful years of her childhood in Moscow and Warsaw. In this sense it is truly a memoir. Yes danse macabre is the dance of death the last waltz to which we are all invited. But Irene's Danse Macabre -- with its inquisitive and empathetic tone... and its often searing imagery -- is less a rumination on the inevitability of death and more a testament to the vibrancy of life itself. [340 pp. endnote 30 plates]