Sunday, October 19, 2025 at 3:00 PM
Politics and Prose
5015 Connecticut Ave NW
Washington, DC 20008

Monday, October 20, 2025 at 6:00 PM
The New School
The Bob and Sheila Hoerle Lecture Hall
University Center, UL105
63 Fifth Avenue New York, NY
Please, RSVP

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.

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.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

“A stunning family memoir . . . that reads less like a conventional memoir and more like an intimate cultural history. . . . This is a triumph of remarkable breadth and capacity, and those drawn to history and lived memory will be enthralled.”—Publishers Weekly BookLife (Editor’s Pick)

“Like a great Russian novel bursting with colorful, wildly different characters, In the Garden of Memory presents the human side of the long, rich, poignant, story of Poland from the late 19th century through partition and two world wars. Olczak-Ronikier’s relatives are impassioned rebels and patriots; poets, translators, psychiatrists and writers; women struggling to nurture their professional ambitions despite the burdens of gender; and entrepreneurs in publishing and bookselling. We get to know each of them as they navigate the precarious dissonance of being proudly Polish and Jewish. It’s a masterful, multi-generational portrait of a family that endures even as their world descends into chaos.”—Annik LaFarge, author of Chasing Chopin: A Musical Journey Across Three Centuries, Four Countries, and a Half-Dozen Revolutions

“Powerful memories from a masterful chronicler of a sprawling family living through the glories and tragedies of Poland over the 19th and 20th centuries.”—John Darnton, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting for his reporting on Poland

Olczak-Ronikier “tells the story with a tender matter-of-factness that makes it come alive . . . Indeed, nothing in this wonderful tale is obvious, nothing is predictable.”—The Spectator

“The saga of their lives and the four generations who followed them reads like an epic novel . . . a coherent, moving, and fascinating story.”—Marcia Weiss Posner, Jewish Book Council

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.

MORE:

Finding a purpose in family’s terrible tale by Richard Bernstein
In The Garden of Memory Part One: Overture by Peter L.W. Osnos
In The Garden of Memory Part Two: Poland’s Spring by Peter L.W. Osnos
In the Garden of Memory: A Family Memoir by Joanna Olczak-Ronikier
In the Garden of Memory by Joanna Olczak-Ronikier
New Music Bay Area present In the Garden of Memory

The event is co-organized with the Polish Cultural Institute New York.