Ewa Kuryluk

Frascati

Excerpt

Frascati is a street in a beautiful area of Warsaw that survived the ravages of the war, after which people connected with the new, communist regime came to live there. However, this book of memoirs by Ewa Kuryluk, a writer and painter who for many years has lived in Paris and New York, is about far more than just her private homeland, family place and closest relatives, or a paradise destroyed by “history let off its chain” (as a Polish essayist once defined the twentieth century). In this book the childhood idyll is permeated with an incomprehensible sense of threat. Gradually the private codes of the household members on Frascati Street become comprehensible to the reader (as they did in the past to the author). She tells the story of her own mother, Miriam Kohany, who adored the poetry of Trakl; she was a Polish-German Jew who escaped from the ghetto in Lwów and was saved by her future husband, the author’s father. Miriam only betrayed the secret of her origin to her daughter when she (Ewa) was forty years old. She never became free of fear, and was tormented throughout her life by recurring psychoses – it is Miriam who is the real heroine of this book. But there are others too: Ewa’s father, Karol Kuryluk, was an unusual man, a left-wing editor from Lwów and organiser of the 1936 anti-fascist Congress in Defence of Culture. He was an underground activist during the occupation, and after the war he was cultural attaché in Vienna, then minister of culture, but he soon fell into disfavour. Another leading character is Ewa’s brother, Piotr, a wunderkind blighted by schizophrenia who spent almost his entire adult life in hospitals and institutions for the mentally ill. The book also features friends, real ones and false ones, and a panorama of human fates, records of encounters with Polish anti-Semitism and Polish everyday life, in the past and nowadays, seen not just from the viewpoint of a flat on Frascati Street. We have a pilgrimage to modern-day Lwów – Lviv in Ukraine – in her parents’ footsteps, and to Israel in search of newly discovered relatives.
Kuryluk’s book is the record of recovered but traumatised memory, an unending labour of mourning for her deceased parents and brother, a chapter in the history of a new Herodotus; it has the dimension of a post-modern tragedy, the only history of humanity possible these days, viewed “from the inside” and from the perspective of the victims. This superbly literary book is a historical record and an excellent example of personal documentary literature. It arouses sympathy and alarm, and leads to understanding.

Marek Zaleski
 
Ewa Kuryluk (born 1946) is a painter and graphic designer, installation artist, art historian, essayist and writer. She lives in Paris.