Sadness Without Shame

When I was a child growing up in Ohio, my parents seemed like exotic creatures from another world. They’d come to this country from Eastern Europe, after World War II, and the stories they told of childhood seemed like folk tales from a distant time.

Gypsies and Cossacks were characters in these stories, as were Talmudic scholars who studied all day while their wives struggled to keep food on the table. Cataclysm and upheaval were part of life. The only certainty was that nothing was ever the same--not even the country you lived in. My mother and her mother grew up on the same piece of property but in different countries, as the Austro-Hungarian Empire gave way to Czechoslovakia. If they hadn’t been uprooted from that piece of property, I would have been born in the Soviet Union; my children would now live in Ukraine.

No wonder I loved wandering through old graveyards in the southern Ohio countryside of my youth, finding the surnames of my friends and classmates etched on stones that were almost 200 years old, a miraculous link between past and present. This was truly solid ground, I felt, not anything like the seismic land my parents had left behind. Yet, perhaps inevitably, I eventually felt compelled to return with my 70-year-old mother to her hometown, hoping to find some remnants of that vanished world.

I bring up my own history because it led me to approach with trepidation “The Bronski House: A Journey Back,” the story of a woman’s return, at 70, to the village where she’d been born, which had been in Poland and is now part of Belarus. She, too, wound up a refugee, spending much of her adult life in comfortable exile, overlooking a bay in Cornwall, England. And she, too, was part of that world where “Germans and Russians came and went; borders shifted like the tide, washing everyone up in different towns, in different countries.”

I asked myself: Would the territory seem too familiar? Or would it seem so different as to be irrelevant? What was the point of reading about this kind of personal expedition if it wasn’t your own?

I realized I must have been infected by the voguish antipathy that has blossomed in direct proportion to the numbers of memoirs that are being published. It’s almost as though there’s a feeling in some prominent corners of the literary world that the sheer volume of real-life personal stories proves that the memoir is inherently suspect.

As it turned out, I quickly became absorbed in “The Bronski House”--not necessarily because of any particular similarities or departures from my own history but because it is very well done.

The Bronski family lived melodramatic lives filled with displacement and death. But fascinating lives aren’t enough to make a good book (that’s the valid criticism of the memoir explosion). Someone has to know how to tell the story. And Philip Marsden is a very good storyteller. A British author, Marsden is especially known for his travel writing. He has a lovely, evocative style, marked by the travel writer’s wistful appreciation for other places and peoples, a novelistic instinct for narrative.

He met the poet Zofia Ilinska when he was a child, summering with his parents in a village in Cornwall. She was the mysterious foreigner who lived in a big house on a hill, a house filled with souvenirs of distant places as well as feelings that were both alien and alluring to the little English boy. Of this place called Braganza, Marsden writes: “I knew that some profound sadness lived in its more remote corners, not an English sadness--a hushed thing, a ‘don’t go too close dear’ sadness; this was a sadness without shame, something noble, a sadness that could face its own depths, a sadness rooted in truth--a sadness that was also the springboard for joy.”

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Zofia was no mournful recluse, though. She and her husband owned two hotels to which she would take young Philip and his brother. She was an able horsewoman, a game (but lousy) sailor and a writer of “witty lyrical poems about amorous unicorns, talking lobsters and the strange gentlemen who stayed in her hotels.” Though she was 40 years old when Marsden was born, they became friends. He was an eager audience for her stories; she showed him at an early age what his passion would be--to be a listener and a teller of stories about faraway places himself.

Like many such friendships, theirs drifted as Marsden grew up and didn’t often return to the family vacation spot. They did stay in touch, however, and one day, on a return visit to Braganza, he found her surrounded by a pile of papers. They belonged to her mother, Helena, who left behind hundreds of pages about her life: diaries, letters, short stories.

Much as Zofia had already captured Marsden’s imagination, her mother floored him. Even her heritage was tantalizing--Polish Catholic landowners on her mother’s side, Irish nobility on her father’s. Her story was almost impossibly dramatic: the displacements of Europe brought to life by a beautiful young woman. A touch of Tolstoy, a little Chekhov and more than a little “Gone With the Wind.”

The appeal wasn’t lost on a romantic like Marsden. “ . . . for me, living in flatter decades, in a quieter corner of Europe, her world represented everything that had been lost, a place of slow villages, muddy livestock and unfenced fields, of time passing with only the backdrop of the seasons, of lives exaggerated--exaggerated in wealth, in poverty, in suffering--lives buffeted by a history no one seemed to control: Helena’s was a bigger world, a crueler world, a world of half-mad nobles living on borrowed time, of noble persons living outside time, another Europe.”

But he was drawn by something else, by a picture of Helena at 19, extraordinarily beautiful, impossible to ignore. “Zofia pointed a finger at it. ‘You see here the way she is toying with the necklace, below the neck? She used to say that was the way to make a man fall in love with you.’ ”

Marsden confesses that it wasn’t just lost history that charged him. “My interest was much more commonplace. It had just as much to do with the way Helena toyed with her necklace.”

After going through Helena’s things, however, Marsden went about his business, traveling around the world and writing about it. He hadn’t left Helena behind, though. Within the next two years, he found himself on the road yet again, this time in the company of 70-year-old Zofia, in search of the world she and Helena had left behind. They travel back to Mantuski, the estate Helena built with her husband. En route, the present constantly collides with the recent past and the long-ago. On the way to the house of Zofia’s grandparents, they find a collective farm, where a large digital gauge regularly notes the radiation level from Chernobyl.

In “The Bronski House,” Marsden has carefully reconstructed Helena’s life--not journalistically, step by step, but novelistically, with scenes that convey historic detail and psychological insight into a certain social class. Helena lived through two world wars, the 1917 Russian Revolution and early widowhood. She would live in poverty and heroically drive her family across a dangerous border. Yet she remained the daughter of a mother who taught her pieties and a father who reminded her--even as World War I was breaking out--that it’s a woman’s duty to look her best. And she never shook her aristocratic origins; as she and Zofia were fleeing the Nazis, they realized neither one of them knew how to make a cup of coffee. Even in the worst of times, they’d always had servants.

When Marsden once asked Zofia where Helena’s inner strength came from, Zofia replied, “It all comes down to polot.”

She explained: “It doesn’t translate. Lot means flight, of course, like the Polish airline, and there is a sense of weightlessness about it. But it’s also a certain charm, a panache, something to do with being dashing and brave--appearing to fly through hardship!”

Perhaps the most poignant sections of the book take place at Mantuski, the family home. Life there was lonely and backbreaking but also spectacular, not just because it was beautiful but because it was somewhere to belong. Helena and Zofia spent only a fraction of their lives there, but it would retain a powerful symbolic hold, a place where, briefly, in the middle of turmoil, they flourished. This elegiac story brings it all to life again.