In the Garden of Memory

Joanna Olczak-Ronikier reconstructs the history of her Polish-Jewish family across five generations, beginning with her great-great-grandfather Lazar Horowitz, chief rabbi of Vienna born in 1804. Drawing on letters, diaries, and photographs preserved in an attic trunk, the memoir traces merchants, doctors, and Warsaw publisher Jakub Mortkowicz through the 1905 Russian Revolution, the interwar cultural scene, the Holocaust, and postwar Communist Poland.