In The Garden of Memory

Part Seven: John Darnton on the Book, the Land and People it Portrays

John Darnton, won a Pulitzer Prize for his New York Times coverage of Poland in the tumultuous years leading to the end of the Communist era. He is a bestselling novelist and author of the memoir “Almost a Family.”

Not far into In the Garden of Memory, a masterful family memoir by the Polish writer Joanna Olczak-Ronikier, I came across a passage that stopped me in my tracks. Janina Horwitz, the author’s irrepressible grandmother, who was denied entrance to Warsaw’s Imperial University because she was a woman, attends a “Flying University” in 1890. Olczak-Ronikier explains that this “clandestine institution” consists of “secret lectures given by the best university professors” in private homes in defiance of the tsarist authorities.

I had no need of the explanation. Nearly one hundred years later, covering Poland for the New York Times, I went to a number of Flying University sessions. They were still held in secret, still run by professors and still in private homes. Everyone knew about them – perhaps they were quietly tolerated by the wobbly communist bureaucrats. (Even Pope John Paul II, in his earlier incarnation as Karol Jozef Wojtyla, attended them.) Only now the classes were to thwart the historical lies of a different outside oppressor, the Soviet Union.

Plus ça change…

Historical continuity, and historical disconnections, are central to this powerful compilation of memories compiled by the granddaughter of a woman who was herself the granddaughter of a Viennese rabbi. It is largely the story of women: the great-grandmother, Julia, widowed early with nine children, and the grandmother, Janina, born in “the Congress Kingdom” – the Russian partition centered on Warsaw – who became an eminent high-end publisher of Polish literature. And her own mother and father.

The other members of the family spread throughout Europe, producing some notable achievers, such as the automobile entrepreneur named Citroën, but this particular branch of the family sank its roots in Poland. Hanging over everything is the irreducible fact that the family is Jewish.

The building blocks of recollection are hard to come by. Children are too self-centered to quiz their elders about the past. Books disappear, records go up in smoke, portraits are destroyed and piles of her grandmother’s notebooks are burned during the Warsaw Uprising. But somehow Olczak-Roniker manages to recreate and fully inhabit her family’s world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For much of that time, Poland had technically ceased to exist, except in peoples’ longings and imaginations, during the years of partition by Austria, Prussia, and Russia.

Questions abound. Why did this educated young man end up emigrating to Poland to labor as a scribe for a company exporting salt from the Polish mines? Why did the unconventional marriage of a spirited young woman fall apart in Paris? Why did one brother turn into a dyed-in-the-wool communist agitator? The author is often forced to speculate, but she does so with such magnanimity and intelligence that her deductions are credible.

Something about the book has touched a nerve in Poland, where it has become a bestseller. It may be because it depicts the crossroads and complicated decision making that befell people in those times, especially those on the outskirts of society. So many complications. What names do you give your children? Do you “Polonize” them? What language do you speak? Russian, German, Polish, Yiddish? What schools do you send them to? Where do you worship?

All these questions, of course, were stand-ins for the larger issues of assimilation and rejection. It was a time in which smaller questions merged into the overall question of who you were, and the answers you chose to give were often fateful.

This family chose assimilation. But their assimilation never truly succeeds. Writing of her mother’s birth certificate, recorded in the “registry for non-Christian denominations,” the author says she feels a sense of guilt. “Is it because I am being disloyal? I do not know. After all, my family never hid their ethnic origin, so I am not betraying any secrets, yet I am writing at some length about things they were reluctant to talk about. They were so proud of their Polishness that they preferred not to emphasize what a short distance separated them from the Jewish world they had run away from.”

This is not a Holocaust book. It does not end in tragedy. The family survives, the women living in the provinces under assumed names, the father in Warsaw with incriminating documents untouched in his desk. The act of recreating the lost world and the family that inhabited it was an act of self-preservation. “Maybe the time has come at last to rid myself of the genetically encoded sense of fear and shame that is hidden deep in my soul,” Olczak-Ronikier says. “It is high time to uncover the tracks and to resurrect the names of all those people who died so long ago.”

In Poland, perhaps more than in other countries, multiple histories coexist. There is the official history, proffered by the occupying power, riddled with lies. There is the underground history, passed along from mouth to mouth, which everyone knows is true.

When I lived in Warsaw, from 1979 to 1982, during the exhilarating years of Solidarity and the depressing years of martial law, the Soviet Union mandated the teaching of Russian in schools, pretended that communism had taken root organically, and insisted that it benefitted the Polish people. The people, however, yearned for the English of movies and rock music, knew that the Red Army had camped out across the river to let the Germans massacre the Home Army during the war, and felt economically exploited by the giant next door.

Then there’s the Jewish past, now completely wiped out. And the Polish romantic past – an amalgam of conspiracies and insurgencies, with snatches of poetry from Adam Mickiewicz, music by Chopin, and the fanatical nationalism that comes from living 123 years in a country not on any map.

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October 14 is the official on-sale date for “In the Garden of Memory: A Family Memoir.” It is available on order in hardcover, trade paperback, and ebook formats from bookstores everywhere and online from Bookshop.org, Amazon and BN.com. This is the final piece in a Substack series about the book, including the translator’s introduction, an especially chilling excerpt and portraits from my additional research about the characters. There is much more to read at https://thegardenofmemory.com.

On Sunday, October 19 at 3 P.M. Antonia Lloyd-Jones and I will be in conversation about the book at Politics & Prose, 5015 Connecticut Avenue NW in Washington.