Family History of Fear A Memoir

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.

Agata Tuszyńska is the author of six collections of internationally translated poetry, a biography of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Vera Gran: The Accused, and Bruno Schulz’s Fiancée. Tuszyńska is the recipient of the Polish PEN Club Ksawery Pruszyński Prize, a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, a Fulbright scholarship, and won the Canadian Literary Award for Holocaust Literature for Family History of Fear. Her books have been translated into a dozen languages. She lives in Toronto, Warsaw, and Paris.
www.agatatuszynska.com

Charles Ruas was born in China and graduated from Princeton University and the Sorbonne. He is a specialist in French and English comparative literature. He is the author of Conversations with American Writers, and has translated Michel Foucault’s Death and the Labyrinth: Raymond Roussel as well as Pierre Assouline’s An Artful Life: A Biography of D. H. Kahnweiler 1884-1979 and Hergé: The Man Who Created Tintin. He was awarded by the French government the Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. Ruas lives in New York City.