Joanna Rudniańska

A Window Onto the Crossroads

Excerpt

The sub-title of A Window Onto the Crossroads speaks for itself and tells us what is in this book. It is a set of short stories set just before or during the Christmas holidays. The seven independent stories are linked by the figure of the Christmas Eve Angel, who appears to people who are at a turning point in their lives and declares that their wishes will be fulfilled. The main characters usually want to escape from whatever trouble they are in, but the Angel does not always help them directly or in quite the way they would have hoped. You have to work hard for a miracle, which usually means considering your actions carefully, facing up to reality, and then looking for ways to resolve your problems.
There is plenty of magic here, as there should be in Christmas stories, but Joanna Rudniańska wants to show that the real magic is what a person has inside him – the ability to give, forgive and be self-sacrificing. And love, of course. Rudniańska wraps her moral message in some curious tales, such as a story called Atelier Rotwand about a young married couple, Agnieszka and Krzysztof. Their problem is that they cannot have children. To dull the pain, they throw themselves into their professional passions – she does academic work and earns a living at a photography studio inherited from her adoptive mother, and he is a doctor. One day Agnieszka finds out that her husband is cheating on her and has a small son. When she encounters the Angel, she asks him for a happy family for the child, as she wants to divorce her cheating husband. Meanwhile on Christmas Eve Krzysztof comes home with the child, because his mother has gone abroad with another man. And so a miracle occurs, based on the one Agnieszka herself experienced years before when she lost her own mother.
A Window Onto the Crossroads is designed to stir the emotions. It is full of warmth and sympathy, but free of excessive sentimentality or pathos, thanks to the author’s way of softening her protagonists’ tragic experiences with a large dose of humour. Thus as he goes about selecting who to help, the heavenly visitor appears in the off-putting guise of a tramp. Only those who are not disgusted by him or afraid of him are worthy of a miracle. One of the heroines, Ewa, who is battling a terminal illness with dignity and despite her son’s wishes gives up the gift of life to someone more needy, would not have been friendly to the Angel “if he had been some well dressed guy”.
This is not just a very successful product for a special time of year, but ready material for a television series.

Marta Mizuro

Joanna Rudniańska (born 1948), a mathematician by training, started by writing science fiction stories for children, and has won the international Janusz Korczak prize.