Joanna Olczak-Ronikier’s IN THE GARDEN OF MEMORY: A Family Memoir — Antonia Lloyd-Jones (translator) in conversation with Peter L.W. Osnos
Monday, October 20, 2025, 6:00PM to 8:00PM (EEST)
Location: The Bob and Sheila Hoerle Lecture Hall
University Center, UL105; 63 Fifth Avenue; New York, NY
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. The book won the 2002 Nike Prize, Poland’s most prestigious literary award, and now is published in the United States for the first time.
Coming to the New School on October 20th to discuss this remarkable book are Antonia Lloyd-Jones, its translator, and Peter L.W. Osnos, the publisher responsible for bringing it to America. A day earlier, there will be a chance to attend the discussion about the book at Politics and Prose in Washington D.C.
The Book: IN THE GARDEN OF MEMORY: A Family Memoir
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.
Speakers:
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. She is best known as a translator of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk. For ten years she was a mentor for the Emerging Translators’ Mentorship Program and is a former co-chair of the UK Translators Association.
Peter L. W. Osnos is the author of An Especially Good View: Watching History Happen, the coauthor of Would You Believe . . . The Helsinki Accords Changed the World? and the editor of George Soros: A Life in Full. He is the founder of the publishing house PublicAffairs and a former publisher of the Times Books imprint at Random House, where he was previously a senior editor and associate publisher. Prior to his career in book publishing, Osnos spent eighteen years at The Washington Post, where he was a correspondent in Saigon, Moscow, and London and served as foreign editor and national editor.
Presented by the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS) and the Creative Writing Program at The New School for Social Research and the Polish Cultural Institute New York.
