Author: Cezary Harasimowicz
Illustrator: Marta Kurczewska
Year: 2018
Publisher: Zielona Sowa
Place of publication: Warszawa
Pages: 199
ISBN: 9788380737716
Cezary Harasimowicz’s story is the saga of a family of Mirabelle plum trees which have grown in Warsaw’s neighbourhood of Muranów since the 1920s. The book depicts many significant events from the history of Warsaw. Muranów attracts Warsaw’s inhabitants as a district tied to the Jewish community. Before the war, social and economic life flourished there. However, during the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, the area was fenced off and became a ghetto. Its Jewish residents only seemingly did not participate in the post-war reconstruction of the district from the ruins; their ghosts kept visiting their former homes, as they do today. The reader learns about the fates of Dorka, Chaim, Mr. Friedman, Noam, Staszek, Dorotka, and subsequent generations of Varsovians, and in the process gains an exhaustive vision of occasionally difficult interpersonal relationships inscribed within an equally difficult history of twentieth-century Poland.
Mirabelle’s events are set within a very wide time-frame. The young reader can learn about the golden age of Muranów and the wealth of its Jewish residents in the 1920s and 1930s, its destruction in World War Two, the Holocaust – and other historical eras. The description of the post-war period is not limited to the “charms” of Socialism or the race to rebuild the capital. Instead, it encompasses the student protests and Anti-Semite sentiments of March 1968 as well as the introduction of martial law in 1981. Moreover, the author refers to stories told by the current residents of Muranów that former Jewish inhabitants sometimes “come back home”. The ghosts of Dorka, Chaim, Rebeka, Joshua and other Jews who used to live in Warsaw make their presence known after the war, keeping watch over the young Maciek-Noam, who was able to survive Shoah thanks to Irena Sendler’s help.
It could seem that the story of the Mirabelle plum trees ends on the last pages of Harasimowicz’s book. However, in keeping with the atmosphere of his story, life keeps regenerating, and the Mirabelle manages to return to Muranów. Although a luxury apartment building stands in its original growing place today, a few hundred meters away another generation of the same tree was planted on Saturday, 22 September 2018. The tree had “emigrated” to Washington, D.C., in the pockets of Dorotka, Maciek-Noam and Wojtuś who had left Warsaw, and its grafts returned to Poland to be planted in Muranów again.
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