Family History of Fear

Agata Tuszyń ska, 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, Tuszyń ska 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, Tuszyń ska chronicles not only her discoveries but her acceptance of a radically different definition of self.