13 Stradomska Street

"I was deeply stirred and instructed by 13 Stradomska Street. Rare enough to find a book that reads wholly, convincingly honest, a memoir that doesn't try to tunnel away from unwelcome truth via exit routes of bad faith. But Andrew Potok's book is more than a fine memoir. It's also a profound meditation on human evils, on the Poland in the heart, on the persistence of the unforgivable, and on the intelligent human labor to live rightly nevertheless. I cannot recommend it too highly." --Todd Gitlin, an American writer, sociologist, communications scholar, novelist, poet, and public intellectual, is the author of sixteen books, including The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars; The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage; Inside Prime Time; The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left; and Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street "A terrific book! I could not put it down. I admire the way the book turns back and forth between the author's childhood memories and his blind journey back to Poland, weaving between the personal and the political. Potok knows how to draw the reader into his story. Take for example the opening narrative with its deft evocation of childhood smells and Jewish cooking in Poland; the moving imagined conversations with his dead grandparents; the difficult, complex analysis of his father's almost disastrous actions at the Lithuanian border in flight to freedom during the war; and above all his profound and deeply layered account of hatreds he encounters, both before and after the War."--Roger Porter, author of three books on the subject of autobiography, The Voice Within: Reading and Writing Autobiography; Self-Same Songs: Autobiographical Performances and Reflections; and Bureau of Missing Persons: Writing the Secret Lives of Fathers. "This is a remarkable and memorable book in which horror is leavened by humor, and betrayal and venality by the riches of discoveries that come with time... and always, always, with a thoughtful, probing of the ways the past both imprisons us and sets us free." Potok is blind but he makes us see, as never before, not only the pre World War Two landscape from which he and his family fled, but of how and why and at what price, despite all, they survived." Jay Neugeboren, is the author of Max Baer and the Star of David, A Novel, and other award-winning novels (The Stolen Jew, Before My Life Began, 1940, The American Sun & Wind Moving Picture Company, and Poli); nonfiction (Imagining Robert, Transforming Madness); and four collections of prize-winning stories. "A civilized man in an uncivilized world, painter Andrew Potok examines the long reach of both his family's 1939 escape from Poland and his own encroaching blindness in this powerful and elegant memoir." -- Elinor Langer, author of Josephine Herbst: The Story She Could Never Tell and A Hundred Little Hitlers: The Death of a Black Man, the Trial of a White racist, and the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement in America"