Harper 2005. Paperback, 256 pp.
A remarkable, multifaceted story made up of journal accounts, memories,
conversations and personal experience, The Bronski House is a paean to
Poland, a landmark in travel writing, and a family history – tied
together by the unique experience of returning from exile. In the summer of 1992, accompanied by Philip Marsden, the exiled
poet Zofia Hinska stepped into the Belorussian village where she had
spent her childhood. The Bronski House is in part the remarkable story
of what she found. It is also the story of her mother, Helena Bronska –
of her coming of age during the Russian revolution, her dramatic escapes
from Bolsheviks, Germans and partisans, of her love and loss in a now
vanished world. It brilliantly reconstructs a world which vanished in
1939 when Soviet tanks rolled into eastern Poland.