In the Garden of Memory

<p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>Winner of the Nike Prize Poland's most prestigious literary award</span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>Joanna Olczak-Ronikier is one of Poland's most admired dramatists screenwriters and authors. </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>In the Garden of Memory </em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>her most acclaimed work traces the lives of four generations of her own family-Polish Jews who were members of one of the country's most illustrious clans noted for its achievements in business politics and culture-as they lived struggled and (mostly) survived through the turbulent twentieth century. </span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>Rich with tales of bravery as well as poignant sometimes comic anecdotes of everyday life the book follows the family members as they scattered around the world to European spas tsarist prisons Soviet war camps and the Royal Air Force. Tracing their roots to a renowned Austrian rabbi the family members included an array of amazing characters. One became an industrial magnate who founded the Citroën automobile company in France; another was a Communist revolutionary who ended up being arrested tortured and executed by Stalin's police. One worked as an undercover agent another as a zoologist in France. One became a notable Polish publisher another a leading Freudian psychiatrist.  </span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>Inevitably the tragic history of the Second World War and its catastrophic impact on European Jews looms darkly over the narrative yet remarkably enough only two members of the clan were killed in the Holocaust. Today the survivors have continued the family journey around the world including in the United States. Beautifully translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>In the Garden of Memory </em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>is ultimately the uplifting account of a family that never gave up hope and never gave in.</span></p><p></p>