When Andrew Potok was eight he fled with his family from Warsaw, leaving home and business to escape the invading Nazis. The family made it to American, but Andrew's memories of violence, Jew hatred, and betrayal--including that of his father--erupted into nightmares and eventually formed the backdrop of his rich, though at times turbulent, life as an artist and writer. When, late in Andrew's life, a Polish lawyer offers to help him reclaim property in Krakow that was wrongfully inherited by a relative, he and his wife revisit Poland, with its still-virulent anti-Semitism. The visit awakens long-dormant memories and provokes deep reflections on the nature of evil. The ongoing lawsuit becomes emblematic of the book's central theme: There can be no closure for survivors of the Holocaust--no justice for either victims or perpetrators, no compensation, and no forgiveness.
"I was deeply stirred and instructed by 13 Stradomska Street. Rare enough to find a book that reads wholly, convincingly honest, a memoir that doesn't try to tunnel away from unwelcome truth via exit routes of bad faith. But Andrew Potok's book is more than a fine memoir. It's also a profound meditation on human evils, on the Poland in the heart, on the persistence of the unforgivable, and on the
Todd Gitlin, an American writer, sociologist, communications scholar, novelist, poet, and
"A terrific book! I could not put it down. I admire the way the book turns back and forth between the author's childhood memories and his blind journey back to Poland, weaving between the personal and the political. Potok knows how to draw the reader into his story. Take for example the opening narrative with its deft evocation of childhood smells and Jewish cooking in Poland; the moving imagined
Roger Porter, author of three books on the subject of autobiography, The Voice Within: Rea
"'This is a remarkable and memorable book in which horror is leavened by humor, and betrayal and venality by the riches of discoveries that come with time. . . and always, always, with a thoughtful, probing of the ways the past both imprisons us and sets us free.' Potok is blind but he makes us see, as never before, not only the pre-World War Two landscape from which he and his family fled, but o
Jay Neugeboren, the author of Max Baer and the Star of David, A Novel, and other award-wi
