Family History of Fear
  • Published: 18 May 2017
  • ISBN: 9780385721967
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $35.00

Family History of Fear

A Memoir

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The affecting true story of one woman's discovery and acceptance of her history; a searing portrait of Polish Jewish life before and after the Third Reich.

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.
  • Published: 18 May 2017
  • ISBN: 9780385721967
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $35.00
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Praise for Family History of Fear

  • "A wrenching journey in search of memory and identity." --Kirkus Reviews
  • "A telling historical anecdote, practically overflowing with meaning.... As much a personal history as it is a piece of psychic archeology.... Not only a memoir or work of restorative personal history. It's an act of un-erasure." --The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  • "A family saga meticulously re-created.... A chapter from the history of Polish-Jewish relations based on the author's and her family's experience.... A reportage-style excursion to the past and an attempt to figure out which parts of this past stay in our memory and consciousness.... A literary account of searching for one's identity." --Ryszard Kapuściński, author of The Soccer War and Imperium
  • "A tragic story about a woman's search for identity.... When Tuszyńska is describing life under Hitler and her search to find the people who knew her family, she writes horror with great power in spare prose." --Publishers Weekly

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