Overview
WINNER, ZIBBY AWARDS FOR BEST FAMILY DRAMA & BEST STORY OF OVERCOMING
Weaving mystery, history and memoir, Irena’s Gift is the captivating account of one woman’s personal quest to uncover the unspoken and give voice to her family’s secret war-torn history.
From the glittering concert halls of interbellum Warsaw to the vermin-infested prison where an SS officer is convinced to save a Jewish child’s life, to the author’s upbringing in a Christian home, this is a story of resilience, sacrifice, Jewish identity, intergenerational trauma, and the secrets we keep to protect ourselves and those we love. For readers of When Time Stopped by Ariana Neumann, I Want You to Know We’re Still Here by Esther Safran Foer, and House of Glass by Hadley Freeman.
"Irena’s Gift interrogates the messy complexity of family, both its tenderness and nurture but also its corrosive anger and rejection.” —GERALDINE BROOKS, New York Times bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner
“I'm here to find an SS officer,” I told the muscled man in uniform peering at me through the sentry window at the Berlin Archives.
“The man saved my mother,” I added in German, smiling at the guard almost apologetically.
In 1942, in German-occupied Poland, a Jewish baby girl was smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto in a backpack. That baby, Joasia, knew nothing about this extraordinary event until she was 32, when a letter arrived from a stranger. She also learned that the parents who raised her were actually her aunt and uncle. Joasia kept this knowledge hidden from her own daughter, Karen—until an innocent question unexpectedly revealed the truth.
Determined to understand the generational trauma that cloaked her family in silence, her own origins, and to help heal her mother’s pain, Karen set out to unearth decades of secrets. Piecing together a hidden history—from the glittering days of pre-war Poland to the little-known Radom Prison, where of 500 resistance members tortured, only 10 survived, her grandfather the only known Jewish one—Karen finds answers, yet not easy ones. As she exposes her family’s saga of love and betrayal, and the astounding negotiation with an SS officer who saved her mother’s life, Karen must reconcile the complicated truths behind human behavior.
Irena’s Gift weaves together a mystery, history, and memoir to tell a story of sacrifice, impossible choices, impossible odds, and the way trauma reverberates throughout generations. Yet it is also a story of resilience and bravery, revealing how love and hope, too, can not only prevail through the worst imaginable circumstances, but resonate through time.
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