Agata Tuszyńska

A Family History of Fear

Excerpt

Agata Tuszyńska, previously known for tracing other people’s life stories, has this time done a reconstruction of her own history, the shadow of which has been with her as a silent presence throughout her life. Born into a Polish intelligentsia family, as a child her closest relatives, and especially her mother, protected her from the difficulties relating to her origins and dual identity, but years later she became aware of an issue that had been part of her life from the very start. The question mark over the past on her mother’s side of the family had always been ready and waiting for the question that was never asked. Eventually, before that question could be expressed, an unsolicited answer appeared, and Tuszyńska, then aged 19, found out the family secret – that her mother was Jewish. From then on this knowledge lived inside her, but, as something unwanted, refused to let itself be fully understood. “Years had to pass before I found the strength to take this information on board,” she writes. Being ready to take it on board meant being ready to ask further questions and look for the answers, track down the past and come to terms with it, with her relatives, and finally with herself. Her need to get to the bottom of the family secret came with time, and this book is the result – a chronicle of her family and of her own personal identity, a record of the journey she had to make to become reacquainted with herself, and to accept herself.
The book consists of portraits, episodes, conjectures and facts, all of which combine to create the history of Tuszyńska’s family on both sides – that of her father, the famous sports commentator and journalist Bogdan Tuszyński, and her mother, Halina née Przedborska, daughter of a Jewish couple from Łęczyca. Thanks to family friends and her mother Dela Goldstein-Przedborska’s foresight, Halina survived the war and entered post-war history by erasing the past from her memory, or at least the most painful aspects of it. She developed a new history and a new life, as well as a reluctance to remember her own earlier fate. In this sort of new reality we can try to cut ourselves off and escape from the past – but history comes marching along behind us, demanding explanations and resurrections. This is what happened in Agata Tuszyńska’s case. From the moment her mother betrayed her (and thus her daughter’s own) identity to her, history wouldn’t let her rest, until trace after trace, date after date, name after name, and face after face it had all been discovered, filled in and restored. Thus the author (and the reader along with her) finds out about the origins of her family in Łęczyca, the war experiences of her mother, grandmother and all her numerous relatives, of whom (a rarity) several young people were saved and set up their own homes, continuing the history of people who had been doomed to destruction.
Tuszyńska’s book is a private one, personal and necessary to the author as therapy, a way of finding herself and telling herself her own story. But it’s interesting for us too, as we follow the reconstructed twists of fate experienced by both families, the landscapes of memory. However, this book has value not just as an account of some extraordinary events. It belongs to the trend of autobiographical literature penned by the so-called second generation of survivors, the children of those who were doomed to die but who managed to survive.
“This book has no ending because it’s still going on. Another reason why there is no ending is because I do not want to make the choice of a single heritage.” However, does she really have to make this choice? The most important thing has already been done: forgotten, abandoned lives have been named, rescued and extracted from nonentity, like beads strung on a thread of common history; each one has taken the place due to it within the family history, even if, as the author calls it, it’s a history of fear.

- Dorota Krawczyńska