Family History of Fear

Book excerpt: It wasn’t until she was nineteen that Agata Tuszyńska, one of Poland’s most admired poets and cultural historians, discovered that she was Jewish. In this profoundly moving and resonant work, she uncovers the truth about her family’s history—a mother who entered the Warsaw Ghetto at age eight and escaped just before the uprising; a father, one of five thousand Polish soldiers taken prisoner in 1939, who would become the country’s most famous radio sports announcer; and other relatives and their mysterious pasts—as she tries to make sense of anti-Semitism in her country. The poignant story of one woman coming to terms with herself, Family History of Fear is also a searing portrait of Polish Jewish life, before and after Hitler’s Third Reich.