In the Garden of Memory

Winner of the Nike Prize, Poland's most prestigious literary award

Joanna Olczak-Ronikier is one of Poland's most admired dramatists, screenwriters, and authors. In the Garden of Memory, her most acclaimed work, traces the lives of four generations of her own family-Polish Jews who were members of one of the country's most illustrious clans, noted for its achievements in business, politics, and culture-as they lived, struggled, and (mostly) survived through the turbulent twentieth century.

Rich with tales of bravery as well as poignant, sometimes comic anecdotes of everyday life, the book follows the family members as they scattered around the world to European spas, tsarist prisons, Soviet war camps, and the Royal Air Force. Tracing their roots to a renowned Austrian rabbi, the family members included an array of amazing characters. One became an industrial magnate who founded the Citroën automobile company in France; another was a Communist revolutionary who ended up being arrested, tortured, and executed by Stalin's police. One worked as an undercover agent, another as a zoologist in France. One became a notable Polish publisher, another a leading Freudian psychiatrist.

Inevitably, the tragic history of the Second World War and its catastrophic impact on European Jews looms darkly over the narrative, yet remarkably enough only two members of the clan were killed in the Holocaust. Today the survivors have continued the family journey around the world, including in the United States. Beautifully translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, In the Garden of Memory is ultimately the uplifting account of a family that never gave up hope and never gave in.

Author: Joanna Olczak-Ronikier
Publisher: Rivertowns Books
Published: 10/14/2025
Pages: 432
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.70lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 1.17d
ISBN: 9781953943705


Review Citation(s):
PW Booklife Reviews 08/18/2025
Kirkus Reviews 09/15/2025

About the Author
Olczak-Ronikier, Joanna: - Joanna Olczak-Ronikier was born in 1934 and is a highly acclaimed writer and journalist. In the Garden of Memory (W ogrodzie pamieci) won the Nike Annual Literary Prize in Poland in 2002 and was also shortlisted for the prestigious Wingate Literary Prize 2005, awarded by the Jewish Quarterly. She has also written plays for radio and theatre, as well as the screenplay for a major television serial about the history of a 19th-century Kraków family. In 1956, she cofounded the Piwnica pod Baranami Cabaret in Kraków, a literary and political gathering place that is popular to this day. Her grandparents, the Mortkowicz family, ran one of the best publishing houses and literary bookshops in Poland before World War Two.Lloyd-Jones, Antonia: - Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by many of Poland's leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as classics, biographies, essays, crime fiction, poetry and children's books. Her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International prize. For ten years she was a mentor for the Emerging Translators' Mentorship Programme, and is a former co-chair of the UK Translators Association.