Joanna Olczak-Ronikier is one of Poland’s most admired dramatists, screenwriters, and authors. In the Garden of Memory, her most acclaimed work, traces the lives of four generations of her own family—Polish Jews who were members of one of the country’s most illustrious clans, noted for its achievements in business, politics, and culture—as they lived, struggled, and (mostly) survived through the turbulent twentieth century. The book won the 2002 Nike Prize, Poland’s most prestigious literary award, and now is published in the United States for the first time.
Coming to the New School on October 20th to discuss this remarkable book are Antonia Lloyd-Jones, its translator, and Peter L.W. Osnos, the publisher responsible for bringing it to America. A day earlier, there will be a chance to attend the discussion about the book at Politics and Prose in Washington D.C.
Presented by the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS) and the Creative Writing Program at The New School for Social Research and the Polish Cultural Institute New York.
Rich with tales of bravery as well as poignant, sometimes comic anecdotes of everyday life, the book follows the family members as they scattered around the world to European spas, tsarist prisons, Soviet war camps, and the Royal Air Force.
Tracing their roots to a renowned Austrian rabbi, the family members included an array of amazing characters. One became an industrial magnate who founded the Citroën automobile company in France; another was a Communist revolutionary who ended up being arrested, tortured, and executed by Stalin’s police. One worked as an undercover agent, another as a zoologist in France. One became a notable Polish publisher, another a leading Freudian psychiatrist.
Inevitably, the tragic history of the Second World War and its catastrophic impact on European Jews looms darkly over the narrative, yet remarkably enough only two members of the clan were killed in the Holocaust. Today the survivors have continued the family journey around the world, including in the United States. Beautifully translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, In the Garden of Memory is ultimately the uplifting account of a family that never gave up hope and never gave in.
Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by many of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as classics, biographies, essays, crime fiction, poetry and children’s books. She is best known as a translator of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk. For ten years she was a mentor for the Emerging Translators’ Mentorship Program and is a former co-chair of the UK Translators Association.
Peter L. W. Osnos is the author of An Especially Good View: Watching History Happen, the coauthor of Would You Believe . . . The Helsinki Accords Changed the World? and the editor of George Soros: A Life in Full. He is the founder of the publishing house PublicAffairs and a former publisher of the Times Books imprint at Random House, where he was previously a senior editor and associate publisher. Prior to his career in book publishing, Osnos spent eighteen years at The Washington Post, where he was a correspondent in Saigon, Moscow, and London and served as foreign editor and national editor.
The Transregional Center for Democratic Studies: TCDS’s transregional and cross-departmental research and study programs, conducted both at home and abroad, bring together civic-minded students, junior and senior scholars, and civil society actors from various regional contexts. Our activities — region-based institutes, workshops, conferences, talks, and fellowships — are designed to further strengthen social and human capital, i.e., individuals and organizations concerned with the promise and sustainability of democracy. Our flagship projects have been the annual Democracy & Diversity Graduate Summer Institutes (held in Poland since 1991 and also in South Africa from 1999 to 2015), aimed at a rigorous quest for a more textured understanding of the precariousness of democracy as it arises almost everywhere.
Polish Cultural Institute New York, established in 2000, is a diplomatic mission to the United States serving under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland. The mission of the Polish Cultural Institute New York is to share Polish heritage, history and art with American audiences, and to promote Poland’s contributions to the success of world culture. The Institute does so through initiating, supporting and promoting collaboration between Poland and the United States in the areas of visual art, design, film, theater, dance, literature, music, and in many other aspects of intellectual and social life. The Institute’s main task to ensure Polish participation in the programming of America’s most important cultural institutions as well as in large international initiatives.
The Institute works with renowned cultural and academic centers and opinion leaders operating on the American market. Its main partners include such prestigious organizations as Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Museum of Modern Art, PEN American Center, the Poetry Society of America, the National Gallery of Art, Yale University, Columbia University, Princeton University, the Harvard Film Archive, the CUNY Graduate Center, the Julliard School of Music, the New Museum, the Jewish Museum, La MaMa E.T.C. and many others. For more than fifteen years, it has presented Americans the achievements of outstanding Polish artists, including the filmmakers Andrzej Wajda and Jerzy Skolimowski; the writers Czeslaw Milosz, Adam Zagajewski and Wislawa Szymborska; the composers Krzysztof Penderecki, Witold Lutoslawski and Mikolaj Gorecki; theater artists Krystian Lupa, Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeusz Kantor; the visual artists Krzysztof Wodiczko, Katarzyna Kozyra, Alina Szapocznikow and many other important figures in the arts. The Institute initiates and actively participates in debates around the humanities in the broad sense, including those concerning history and the today’s most important social and political occurrences.
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Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by many of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as classics, biographies, essays, crime fiction, poetry and children’s books. She is best known as a translator of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk. For ten years she was a mentor for the Emerging Translators’ Mentorship Program and is a former co-chair of the UK Translators Association.
Peter L. W. Osnos is the author of An Especially Good View: Watching History Happen, the coauthor of Would You Believe . . . The Helsinki Accords Changed the World? and the editor of George Soros: A Life in Full. He is the founder of the publishing house PublicAffairs and a former publisher of the Times Books imprint at Random House, where he was previously a senior editor and associate publisher. Prior to his career in book publishing, Osnos spent eighteen years at The Washington Post, where he was a correspondent in Saigon, Moscow, and London and served as foreign editor and national editor.
Elzbieta Matynia is Professor of Sociology and Liberal Studies, and founding director of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS).
I am a sociologist and historian of ideas, and my work at the crossroads of political and cultural sociology aims to illuminate how dramatic shifts in past and present social imaginaries shape and furnish our future at the local, national, and transregional levels.
At the center of my interests is the state of today’s democracy, which – while still aspirational – has been failing large segments of citizenry whether in the United States, East and Central Europe, or Sub-Saharan Africa. My research explores peaceful transitions to democratic order in various parts of the world, gender equality and democracy, and the challenges faced by democracies that have emerged with a legacy of violence.
My early book, "Grappling with Democracy: Deliberations on Post-communist Societies (1990-1995)" (1996) is a rare document of semi-clandestine debates on building a democratic order by dissident intellectuals in the countries of the newly defunct Soviet bloc. "Performative Democracy" (2009) examines a potential in political life that easily eludes theorists – the indigenously inspired enacting of democracy by citizens – and identifies the conditions for civic performativity in public life. "An Uncanny Era: Conversations between Václav Havel and Adam Michnik" is a discussion between two iconic dissidents of Eastern Europe, Václav Havel and Adam Michnik, on the precariousness of democracy and early signs of its retreat. The book was listed among the eight Times Higher Education Books of 2014. The essays "How to Kill a Democracy" (2019), and "Is Liberal Democracy Already History?" discuss further democratic retreat and decline. In my research and teaching I often explore the arts as a site of social reflection, knowledge, and civic agency (“1989 and the Politics of Democratic Performativity” in the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society), “Architectures of Gender,” “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” “The Promise of Active Freedom,” “Tribute to a Bridge,” and “Democracy’s Endgame?”). I am currently working on a book, “Democracy After Violence.”
I received my MA in literature and philosophy and PhD in sociology from Warsaw University, and came to the United States for post-doctoral studies at the New School’s Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science. Soon after I arrived in NYC, the Polish government imposed martial law upon a society that 16 months earlier had organized the Independent and Self-governing Trade Union Solidarity, a workers-led movement unique in the Soviet Bloc that ultimately launched a long-running rights revolution throughout the region. Unable to go back to Poland under martial law, I taught at Bard and Sarah Lawrence Colleges and was then offered a junior position at The New School for Social Research.
As head of TCDS, I developed international fellowship programs in critical studies of democracy and launched the Democracy & Diversity Graduate Summer Institutes open to civic-minded junior scholars for rigorous cross-cultural study on the critical issues facing today’s world (see a one-minute video-lecture here). I am a member of the editorial board of the Social Research International Journal. And am honored to have recently received the 2023 Courage in Public Scholarship Award, established in 2014 by the NSSR/Europe Collective.