"In The Garden of Memory"

Part One: Overture

This is the first of what will be seven pieces about Joanna Olczak-Ronikier’s book In the Garden of Memory: A Family Memoir to appear here, alternating with posts about other subjects through the summer and the early fall, leading to the book’s publication on October 14.

The next piece in the series will be the English translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s introduction to this edition, followed by an excerpt from the book featuring Maks Horwitz, a major character whose fate, political and personal, is an especially powerful piece of the broader saga.

Other parts — I call them “sidebars” — are expansions of the stories of two characters in the book, based on extraordinary details of their lives I have uncovered in research about them. One is Jan Ryszard Bychowski, my first cousin, who flew with the Polish branch of the Royal Air Force and was killed in a 1944 crash. The other is John Mish, who I learned was a recipient of the King’s Medal for his wartime intelligence services in India and who played a crucial role in guiding my parents to Bombay, where I was born.

Each, in very different ways, was heroic.

Finally, at my request, John Darnton, who won a Pulitzer Prize at the New York Times for his coverage of Poland in the years when the trade union Solidarity challenged Communist rule in the 1980s, will offer an appreciation of the book, sharing how it reads to an American who is not Polish but knows and understands Poland and its people well.

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In the Garden of Memory is the chronicle of a large Polish family with branches across Europe and the United States and what happened in their lives across two centuries. That family was my mother’s, Marta Bychowski Osnos. The author of the book was my mother’s cousin and a friend to all of us lucky enough to know her.

The book won Poland’s top literary prize, the Nike, when it appeared just after the millennium. The English translation by Lloyd-Jones (who is also a translator of the Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk) was published in the UK, and translations appeared in France, Holland, and Germany.

Now, for the first time, it is being published in the United States by Rivertowns Books in collaboration with Platform Books and will be available in print and ebook versions. Karl Weber, the publisher of Rivertowns Books, and I are bringing it to a vast new potential readership because it has literary narratives of triumph and tragedy, love and loss, irony, and wit, the ingredients that make family sagas compelling. These comments from the first American readers compare it to great Russian novels “bursting with colorful, wildly different characters” and consider its character portrayals and memories to be “masterful.”

That this happens to be my mother’s family is obviously a factor in my interest in the book, and my admiration. But the decision to republish it after a quarter-century recognizes that it has the makings of a classic account of a great range of human experience.

As Richard Bernstein wrote in the New York Times in 2005, the book “gained its broad audience in Poland because the clan described in it is one of Poland’s most illustrious, but also because its members were deeply involved in the central events of the 19th and 20th centuries.”

This is the place to say that the family was Jewish. The history of Jews in Poland is dominated, even overwhelmed by their virtual annihilation in the Holocaust during World War II. But the family in this book had accomplishments before the war; displayed courage, ingenuity, and luck during the conflict; and reconnected after the war, never losing touch with their identities but with far more than their religious affiliation to define them.

Today, there are dozens of members of Olczak-Ronikier’s family in Poland and elsewhere, and the book has enabled them to embrace their inheritance of life stories, culture, and values they share.

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Because Poland — the nation — was carved up for 123 years among the empires of Russia, Prussia, and Austria and was reunited only at the end of World War I, many of the Jews in the American and European diaspora were confused about where their ancestors had lived. Was it, for example, Russia’s Poland, Russia’s Ukraine, or Russia’s Baltics? So their unifying identity tended to be Judaism, and wherever they lived, they endured the consequences of antisemitism. Their common language was Yiddish.

The family at the center of this book lived in Warsaw, and Polish was their main language (although Russian was required until 1918). They also spoke German and French. The matriarch was Julia Horwitz, the daughter of a wealthy salt merchant — in an era when salt was an especially valuable commodity. Her husband, Gustav, was the scholarly son of an eminent Austrian rabbi, who worked for his father-in-law. He died at the age of thirty-eight, so it was Julia whose influence on her nine children was the strongest.

There were six girls and three boys, born between 1868 and 1881. (One of the sons committed suicide at the age of twenty.) The spectrum of relatives ranged from Amelia, the mother of the founder of France’s Citroen automobile company, to Kamilla, who while studying medicine in Zurich was a friend of V. I. Lenin, the leader of Russia’s Bolshevik revolution.

As the book recounts, Kamilla needed a bicycle, and Lenin suggested she take his, “a lady’s model.”

“He merely asked her to return it quickly because he had borrowed it from the neighbors. Kamilla was in such a hurry to get back that she fell into a ditch and damaged the valuable vehicle. Lenin was upset: ‘How am I going to look those people in the eye now?’ he asked.”

We hope to support the book by telling readers where and how to find it in stores across the U.S. and online. We are also developing a website that will include a full family tree, and other material about the family, the times in which they lived, and where they are now.

Joanna Olczak-Ronikier, is now ninety. She lives in Krakow,, where we visited her in May on the top floor of a building on a quiet tree-lined street with apartments for her daughter, Kasia, her granddaughter Miriam and four of her five great-grandchildren.

Joanna is on the right. My wife, Susan is on the left. I am at her shoulder.. Miriam Synger, Jonna’s grandaughter and four of her five great-grandchildren complete the picture.

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