Family History of Fear

Agata Tuszyńska, one of Poland's most admired poets and cultural historians, grew up blonde, blue-eyed, and Catholic in post-WWII Communist Poland. But when she was nineteen, her mother told her the truth--she was Jewish. Living in a country beset by anti-Semitism, Tuszyńska was at first unhinged, ashamed, and humiliated. In this profoundly moving and resonant work, she investigates her past and writes of her journey to uncover her family's history--of her mother entering the Warsaw Ghetto at age eight and finally escaping just before the uprising; 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 other relatives and their mysterious pasts--as she tries to make sense of the hatred of Jews in her country. In so doing, Tuszyńska chronicles not only her discoveries but her acceptance of a radically different definition of self.