ABSTRACT
Warsaw 1988. Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz makes her first trip to Poland, where her father was born 85 years earlier. The country to which he was deported from Nazi Germany as a Polish citizen in 1938. Poland is in the grip of a communist regime that will only fall a year later. Buildings are gray, streets are clean, and stores are stocked with a strange array of goods, many shoddily made. She reaches the Krasinski Gardens, where Warsaw Jews once strolled on Sabbath afternoons, now full of local children at play. From all directions, Polish washes over her, a language that she rarely heard as a child, but has surprisingly begun to understand.
