Booksology In the Garden of Memory: A Family MemoirBy Joanna Olczak-RonikierTranslated by Antonia Lloyd-JonesRivertowns Books, 428 pp.
Reading Joanna Olczak-Ronikier’s book about her family, I was reminded of my first morning in Poland on a reporting assignment in 1981. I had coffee with the BBC’s Polish Warsaw bureau chief, who asked me if it was my first trip to Poland. Offering a measure of my need for guidance, I said, “It’s actually my first trip to Eastern Europe,” at which he promptly corrected me: “You still haven’t been there.” It was not the last time I would be reminded by Poles that geography aside, Poland was part of the West, with its Latin alphabet and its Church of Rome (then home to a Polish pope).
Olczak-Ronikier’s book is about Polish Jews whose lives bore little resemblance to those of my grandparents, though they, too, lived in the Russian-governed northeast sector of 19th-century Poland. My grandparents used Yiddish as their primary language, received limited if any secular education and, harboring little hope for their future in the Tsarist empire’s Pale of Settlement, left it for America. In this they fit the general profile of the vast majority of Polish Jewish immigrants to this country, and certainly the common image of them. Olczak-Ronikier’s Polish Jews do not.
In the Garden of Memory was published more than 20 years ago in Polish, won Poland’s highest literary prize and was translated and published in the U.K. not long after. It has now been published here (the American publisher, Peter Osnos, is a member of the family) and we are the richer for it.
It is the story of the Horwitzes of Warsaw, a well-to-do Jewish family who lived an experiment in modernity, a secular assimilated Jewish identity. They did not seek to be “Jewish within the gates of their homes and outside loyal subjects of the king,” as one 19th-century formula put it, but rather Jewish by ancestry and ethnicity, worldly in outlook, culturally Polish, and religiously indifferent both indoors and in public.
They were a part of Polish society reminiscent of some German or Italian Jews, Jews from a Poland mentally farther west than its placement on the map would suggest.
The story begins with the marriage of the author’s great-grandparents, Gustav Horwitz and Julia Kleinmann, in 1867. She was the daughter of a prosperous Warsaw importer of salt; he was the son of a Viennese rabbi and had completed a doctorate in philosophy and religion, having written a dissertation on Baruch Spinoza. She knew several European languages and came with an ample dowry.
They had nine children, spoke German at home and started their eldest son in a Jewish school. When Gustav died and left Julia widowed at age 37, family circumstances forced Julia to forgo the comforts of the bourgeoisie for several years until an inheritance restored her to her prior station. As a widow, Julia reoriented her children’s lives. While she did not formally renounce Judaism or take up Catholicism, she ceased religious observance, changed the household language to Polish and sent the remaining children to Polish schools.
Among Julia’s children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and their spouses were capitalists and communists, doctors, professors, journalists and writers. The last group is especially important to the author’s project, as Olczak-Ronikier’s grandparents founded a bookstore and publishing house in Warsaw. They were champions of Polish literature and traveled in elite literary circles. Her grandmother, a daughter of Gustav and Julia, was also a writer and translator, as was their daughter (Olczak-Ronikier’s mother). Between memoirs and diaries, letters and published accounts, the Horwitz family left Olczak-Ronikier with a wealth of sources to describe their often tragic experience of the 20th century.
Maksymilian Horwitz-Walecki, the author’s great-uncle, was a leading Polish communist who took his family to Moscow in the 1930s hopefully and obediently, in reality just in time for Stalin’s purges. The book includes a picture of him after his “interrogation” (a euphemism for torture) that left him visibly drained of any trace of revolutionary zeal or energy.
Olczak-Ronikier often concludes a family episode drawn from memory, hers and others, with questions. She is an experienced journalist, playwright and screenwriter and knows the limits of her knowledge. What did her parents, running the bookstore and publishing house, make of their own Jewish ancestry? “At home I never heard anyone mention trouble with anti-Semitism, which must after all have affected my family in the inter-war years, just as it affected other assimilated Jews,’’ she writes. “But there were the numerus clausus (a ceiling on the number of Jews admitted to institutions), the segregation of Jewish students who were obliged to sit in a separate area of the university lecture halls, and open insults by colleagues at the university…Did my mother never experience any unpleasantness at school? Or at college? How could my grandfather bear the insults that dogged him throughout his life? How did my grandmother feel? Nothing was ever said about it. My relatives preferred to nurture the good memories than remember the bad ones.”
When the Germans occupied Warsaw, the author recalls her grandmother sorting out an issue with the Gestapo concerning some old left-wing political literature that had been found in her possession. When she protested against the way she was spoken to and a German replied that Jews deserved no better, she let him have it:
“(S)he stood up and loudly declared that she was proud of her origins, that her father was a native of Vienna, a doctor of philosophy and a student of the humanities. She saw no reason to be ashamed of her ancestors, who deserved the highest respect,” Olczak-Ronikier writes. Whether she had encountered a rare humane German, or impressed him with her command of German, the author confesses she does not know; for some reason she was not shot dead on the spot. But it is interesting to read how she weighed her own merit and claim to “the highest respect.” Culture and intellect counted for much; they were the currency of self-esteem in the family, if not in their slice of Warsaw Jewish society.
When word began to spread in 1940 that the Germans planned to order all Jews in Warsaw to the ghetto, young Joanna (she was born in 1934) recalls her anger at the prospect of the family’s books being confiscated and the thought that “all Jews” included them:
It was a shock. To this day I can remember screaming wildly: “It’s not true! I’m not a Jew! I don’t want to be a Jew!” My fury was underlined with a terrible sense of humiliation, I must already have been quite well indoctrinated with anti-Semitic feeling. “What’s so awful about it?” said my grandmother calmly. “Better think how fortunate you are. You will have to seek your friends among decent people only.” She did not yet know that in a short while the modest, old-fashioned word “decency” would change its meaning and start to signify heroism.
When the order to go to the ghetto did come, she and her mother and grandmother went on the run instead. She describes being sheltered by several Poles, including Catholic nuns who, in 1943, offered the Jewish girls in their care the opportunity to take First Communion, so as to fortify their claim to a non-Jewish identity, or to refrain from doing so, depending on their parents’ preference. (The author was the product of the family’s first mixed marriage and had been baptized as an infant.) There were several changes of hiding place brought about by blackmailers who threatened to betray them unless they paid up. They were obliged to pay but also to move. Blackmailers could not be trusted to keep their secrets.
Of all the family’s stories and encounters with the dark side of the 20th century, Olczak-Ronikier saves the most moving for last. Her cousin Riś (Ryszard Bychowski) managed to get to the United States with his parents. He passed up a college education at the University of California to enlist in a Polish wing of Britain’s RAF. In letters home to his father, a psychoanalyst, Riś wrote of both his commitment to the battle against Nazi Germany (Polish airmen were famed in England as brave voluntary defenders of that country during the Battle of Britain) and his weakening commitment to Poland. “I am already determined not to return to Poland. I do not want to be a second-class citizen ever again and I do not want my son not to have the same chance as others,” he wrote. “But above all I’m afraid of knowing the whole truth about the reaction of Polish society to the extermination of the Jews.”
It was the result of his conversations with his fellow Polish volunteers. Jews, they complained, had been welcoming to the Soviet Red Army when it occupied eastern Poland (sparing Jews there from certain death at German hands). “In a long conversation I told one of my best colleagues here that I sometimes wonder if I made a fundamental blunder by coming here,” he wrote. “(B)ut I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t a mistake. It was worth coming if only to hear from his lips that he is grateful to Hitler for solving the Jewish question. I think that seriously, not ironically it was worth it to have my eyes opened for once and for all, finally and utterly.” A couple of months later, cousin Riś was navigator aboard a British warplane that crashed on landing, killing him at age 22.
The author’s Jewish roots are far removed from her life, and many of the book’s cultural references—to poets of the Young Poland movement at the turn of the 20th century, for instance—will be unfamiliar to readers of this English translation. Is it a Jewish book? I will leave that as a question, as the author herself does at many points. There is much to this family story that is universal. The early years of Julia’s widowhood when the children do without many pleasures, followed by the inheritance that pays for luxurious travel and the confident pursuit of husbands for her daughters with dowries funded, read like a Jewish Victorian novel. The descriptions of Russia in 1937 are terrifying. Her account of the years of hiding from the Germans is powerful.
By my count, more members of the Horwitz family were imprisoned in the Gulag than died in the Holocaust. One of Gustav and Julia’s children, the geologist Ludwik (or Lutek) Horwitz, refused to comply with German orders to Jews to wear badges and move to the Warsaw ghetto. For a spell he was tolerated and continued his research—the author suspects this may have been because his German was impeccable—but he was ultimately sent east and murdered.
A remarkable number of the Horwitzes survived and reunited after the war. The life to which they had been raised was so rich in art and poetry, so cosmopolitan and materially comfortable, that it is easy to see how they missed seeing the catastrophes that loomed ahead. At least there were gifted storytellers among their ranks.
Robert Siegel is Moment’s special literary contributor.
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