Louise Steinman

“I had gone to Poland to learn hard truths and rescue hope,” writes Kathleen Balgley, an American literature professor, the daughter of an Irish Catholic mother and a Polish-Jewish father who distanced himself from his Jewish lineage. Balgley’s desire to reclaim that lost history propels her, as a Fulbright scholar, into the looking glass world of 1980’s communist-era Poland. Her soulful remembrance of that sojourn and her attempt to recover her family’s story—at a time in Poland when discussion of Polish-Jewish relations and Polish anti-Semitism were taboo—is honest, nuanced, haunting, at times hilarious. Letters to My Father is a rigorously researched, beautifully written tale about identity and belonging."