Tuszyńska Agata - Family History of Fear: A Memoir

Vera Gran: The Accused

Lost Landscapes: In Search of Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Jews of Poland

FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION , MAY 2017

Translation copyright2016by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Poland as Rodzinna Historia Lku by Wydawnictwo Literackie, Krakw, in 2005. Copyright 2005 by Agata Tuszyska and Wydawnictwo Literackie. This translation is based on the French edition originally published in France as Une histoire familiale de la peur by ditions Grasset & Fasquelle, Paris, in 2006. Copyright 2005 by Agata Tuszyska, copyright 2006 by ditions Grasset & Fasquelle. This translation originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2016.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

Tuszynska, Agata, author.

[Rodzinna historia leku. English]

Family history of fear : a memoir / Agata Tuszynska ;

translated by Charles Ruas from the French of Jean-Yves Erhel.

pages cm

1. Tuszynska, Agata. 2. Tuszynski family. 3. JewsPolandBiography.

4. Warsaw (Poland)Intellectual life. I. Ruas, Charles, translator. II. Title.

DS134.72.T87A313 2016

929.2089'9240438dc23 2015020551

Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN72196

Ebook ISBN87587

Author photograph Krzysztof Jabonowski

Translator photograph Kelly McCormick

Cover design by Kelly Blair

Cover photograph courtesy of the author

www.anchorbooks.com

v4.1_c1

ep

TO MY PARENTS

IN MEMORIAM

Marilyn Goldin

(19412009)

Who began the translation of this work before illness took her away.

Victoria Wilson

Charles Ruas

Agata Tuszyska

I

The Secret

THE PARENTS

T his book has been in me for years. Along with this secret. From the instant I found out I was not who I thought I was. From the moment my mother told me she was Jewish.

I was born in Poland, in Warsaw, several years after the war. I had blue eyes and blond hair, a source of great pride to my mother, whose own eyes and hair were dark.

Today, I realize she wanted a Polish child, for fear of the fate her daughter might inherit otherwise, a fate like her own. And even though the war was officially part of the past in a new socialist Poland, where everyone was equal by definition, she resolved to obscure her origins.

We are our memory. We are what we remember. And what others remember about us.

Even more than that, I often find myself thinking, we are our lapses of memory. We are what we forget, what in self-defense we blot out of our memory, chase from our consciousness, avoid in our thinking. We conceal memories to make life easier or lighter, so it will not hurt.

I do not remember when my mother told me she was Jewish. I remember nothing about itnot the day, nor the season, nor the place; not whether we were sitting at the table or by the window; not the tone of her voice, nor the color of her words. I have no memory of any such conversation. Maybe she told me that she hid in a cellar during the war. That was not unusualmany Poles were forced to hide in cellars or attics. Maybe she said she had to run away from the Germans, escape, like many othersPoles who were hunted down by the Nazis, rounded up at work, machine-gunned in the streets and forests, sent to the camps.