Customer Reviews

The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman: A Novel (Andrze Szczypiorski)

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I bought two copies of this book years ago so I could share it with a good friend and have someone to talk to about this wonderful, disturbing story. Sad to say, she's yet to read it. I've read it three times over the years and am moved and haunted still by the realism of the characters and their struggles for dignity and life. One day, I'll meet someone else who has read this book, and over a long cafe break, we'll discuss the imagery, the painful courage of the protagonists, and the latter day realities the Holocaust has left behind . . . . .

The American perception of life during World War Two is cast in images of women working, doing jobs traditionally reserved for men, of busy factories, constantly turning out munitions of war, ration books, victory gardens, and pictures of heroic looking young men in uniform occupying places of honor on walls, mantelpieces, and end tables all over America. The reality and horror of war was far away - not so for Mrs. Irma Seidenman.

Andrzej Szczypiorski's The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman is a novel set in Nazi-occupied Poland during WW II. Born in Warsaw in 1924, Mr. Szczypiorski fought in the Polish Resistance, took part in the Warsaw uprising in 1944, and served time in a German concentration camp. Drawing on his wartime experience, Szczypiorski assembles a montage of characters struggling for survival in wartime Warsaw, cleverly knitting their experiences within the lives of his main characters, Pawelek Kry ski and Irma Seidenman.

Mrs. Seidenman had been a neighbor of the Kry skis before the war. A beautiful Nordic looking woman, Irma has been able to elude the Nazis, dodging the fate of the rest of Warsaw's Jewish community. Irma possesses two crucial attributes, blue eyes and blonde hair, that have, with the help of forged papers, established her as Mrs. Maria Magdalena Grotomska, the widow of a Polish Army officer. With the help of Pawelek, who is obviously in love with her, she has been able to blend in with the rest of the Polish population, until one fateful day, when she rounds the corner of a Warsaw building and comes face to face with Bronek Blutman. Blutman is a Nazi toady, a nefarious Jew who is surviving by fingering Warsaw Jews who have escaped the Nazi net.

Using the narration of Mrs. Seidenman's rescue, Szczypiorski, interjects the lives of a collage of Warsaw's inhabitants caught up in the terror of the Nazi occupation. His prose successfully instills the sense of despair felt by Pawelek's friend Henio as he decides to return to the ghetto. It is through Szczypiorski's eloquence, we experience the dignity of judge Kujawski and the conniving tactics of Lolo, we pity the Jewish lawyer Fichtelbaum and hate the consciencelessness of the Gestapo officer Stuckler.

Szczypiorski's novel exposes the American audience to a harsher reality of the War. His vignettes draw a poignant picture of individual responses to the Nazi terror in an easily readable style that transports the reader into the lives of his characters. The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman is an enlightening account of the War experience viewed from the perspectives of the many innocents trapped in its inhumanity.

The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman is one of the most beautifully written novels I have ever read. The author deftly weaves together several people's lives which converge during the same time period. There are no distilled characterizations of heroes or demons; rather, fairly ordinary and yet complex people who are trying to figure out how to live and survive in Nazi occupied Warsaw. To further exemplify how ordinary the characters are, Szczypiorski projects each person into their future to let the reader know what will become of him or her. This can be an artifical plot device but in this case, it is highely effecting. Moreover, it does not take the reader so much out of the present, rather it helps one to better undertand the complexity of each character--no matter how "simple" he or she may seem. This is a very full reading experience. It is thought provoking, affect laden and a really well told story. I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in the Holocaust and/or Poland.

The book is about the human side of each of us. It is about the inner feelings, fears and desires. The catalyst is the danger of living in the wartime Poland. The holocaust that brings the worst and the greatest in people. It is also about the passage of time. Time is the great equalizer. In the end it does not matter; the horrors and the happines, the crimes and the heroism. The book is very truthfull. Author knows how to reach the depths of ones soul. One of the best books I have ever read.

Figaro Magazine was right: "superb and staggering." Mrs Seidenman is at the epicenter of a collapsing world. She is beautiful and cultured, yet otherwise unremarkable. A disconnected cast of mostly ordinary, yet often remarkable, men women and children swirl about her on the brink of extinction. Seemingly underwritten, this telling of a horror for the ages almost sneaks up on you and gathers momentum until the very last page. It left me dazed and a little wiser.

I just finished reading this book aloud to my wife. "Beautifully written" would be too little praise for this piece of fine literature. I found it reminiscent of Tolstoy at his best, but it stands on it's own. Andrzej Szczypiorski tells the story, not of Mrs. Seidenman, but of humanity. The only thing that I can compare this book to is the film "Decalogue" by his fellow Pole Krystof Kieslowski. It is full of, how shall I put it?, perhaps "tenderness" for the plight, and the beauty, of people with all of their humanity. Like Tolstoy, he does it without sentimentality and allows us to see beyond the surface of each character. And, also like Tolstoy, he does so with words, sentences, paragraphs, that seem to flow effortlessly.

Do not be decieved that this is merely a novel "about" the holocaust, or Poland, or Catholicism. It is about people. From the sympathetic whore who gives shelter to a desperate Jewish boy to the Nazi who orders the deaths of Jews. We discover that neither the whore nor the Nazi could have done anything other than what they did.

A wonderful writer. A wonderful book. Not just a good read but a great experience.

I read this book a couple of years ago while I was serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Poland. It took a long time to build up to it. I thought, please not another book about the Holocaust but I found it to be a fascinating account and I can't recommend it highly enough. So many of the western treatments of the subject simplify the Holocaust into black and white (evil Germans and Poles, innocent Jewish victims). Szczypiorski writes about complex characters struggling with life, love and survival. The evil or virtue of an individual is not based naively on his or her ethnic heritage but on how well he or she manages to salvage a sense of humanity. In a sense, they're all victims of this savage war and ethnic cleansing operation. We find heroes and heels among Poles, Germans and Jews. It makes us ask ourselves how we would react in a situation few of could imagine in our most horrific nightmares. It makes Spielberg's "Schindler's List" look particularly banal, and downright insulting to his Polish hosts by portraying them only as whores and anti-Semites. The American public deserves a richer picture of Poland during the War and Szczypiorski provides it

Beautiful and touching story of Mrs. Seidenmann, who by a money driven fellow traitor Jew gets straight in the arms of Nazi, later escapes death thanks to help organized by friends and neighbors, only to face the harsh reality of '68 Poland years later. Stripped of the mother land, memories and old friends, her soul forever lost.
Szczypiorski delivers a real, accurate diversity of Polish society through stories of various individuals, their life paths and fates. Polish prewar and after war society, the suffering, confusion of war, and tragedy for many even after the war ends.

The book deals with the years of the German occupation of Poland, it is about the fate of a handful of people who either qualify as good people in these years, or as bad people, and above all the author seems to be interested in people who are neither good nor bad, who seem bad and turn out good, or who are indifferent and turn out heroes.
The fate of Mrs Seidenmann is not at the centre. It is true, it involves the fates of different other people insofar as they try to betray or save her. But one might equally say that the lives of the other people around her are as important as hers or even more important. For Mrs S. is in herself not very important, she is just a dignified Jewish widow who looks absolutely Aryan, and thus gets out of the hands of the Gestapo. There is her neighbour Pawel, a German socialist Mueller, who finally goes to the SS-officer in charge, Stuckler, to liberate Mrs S.. Later on, Mrs S. lives in Paris, Pawel as an older man visits her and talks about his love for her, otherwise Mrs. S. is not too relevant, she is in a way the catalyst of the story.
Pawel in his disillusioned dedication to the matter of the Poles demands more interest. Then there is his Jewish friend, Henio Fichtelbaum, who escapes from the ghetto for about one year, then we see him exhausted spending a night in a public toilet, out of which he is unexpectedly liberated by a young prostitute, who feeds him and makes love to him, which makes him strong enough to go back into the ghetto to expect inevitable death. Another outstanding figure is Judge Romnicki, a wise and good man, who saves the life of little Joasia Fichtelbaum, who later goes to Israel and is happy to give birth to a girl, not a boy. The judge survives the war and dies peacefully. Then there is the tailor Kujawski, an inherently good and decent man, who made a lot of money while working for a Jewish tailor before the war, then he made the trousers for the German officers, he bought works of art, paying a decent price to it and thus enabling a lot of people to survive. Then there are so-called bad people, like the bandit Wiktor Suchowiak, who nevertheless becomes the instrumet of good in that he delivers little Joasia safely to Pawel's mother and defends her against the informer Beautiful Lolo, whom he meets after the war in a leading position, in which he once again humiliates him. Then there is a deeply symbolic scene in which the mathematician Prof. Winiar is shot at random outside the ghetto wall with a merry-go-round running.
Szczypiorski gives an impression of the times through the minds of several contemporaries. It is unpathetic, yet one feels how much he is shaken by the events. I find Sz.'s sense of objectivity and his fairness remarkable. He has a clear moral sense, which is very simple - with regard to the wise judge he sums up: "For what is man's greatest and least easily attainable wisdom if not the ability to call good that which is good and evil that which is evil" (94). Sz. uses to give us a glimpse of the future of one person so that we begin to judge people"s behaviour like him - from afar. A remarkable and human book!

This one is along the lines of The Pianist. It's well written, and provides another view into a time that I still can't fathom.