The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman [Paperback]

andrzej szczypiorski (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2, 1991

Beautiful Irma Seidenman has three attributes that keep her out of the Warsaw ghetto: blonde hair, blue eyes and excellent forged papers. But one day an informer denounces her to the Gestapo, and in the 36 hours following her arrest, unlikely links are forged between a chain of disparate people.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

For the reader seeking immersion in recent Polish history, this intensely Catholic, unabashedly patriotic European bestseller is a rare find. The central incident is the arrest of Mrs. Seidenman, a Jewish widow living under an assumed identity in Warsaw during World War II. She is betrayed by a former acquaintance and arrested by the Naxis, but her friends' determined efforts lead to her release. There are other, equally compelling tales. One is of Sister Weronika, a nun who hides Jewish orphans during the war, fervently training them to accept a new Catholic identity. Another concerns Wladyslaw Gruszecki (formerly Arturek Hirschfeld), one of Sister Weronika's charges, who becomes more anti-Semitic than even the Poles. Still another concerns Henryczek Fichtelbaum, killed in the Jewish ghetto, and his friend Pawelek Kyrnski, a Catholic teenager who finds it miraculous simply that he survived the war. An exceptional storyteller, Szczypiorski passionately re-creates the tumultuous war years for us, also providing insight into the current resurgence of Polish nationalism and Solidarity.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Grove. Jan. 1990. c.240p. tr. from Polish by Klara Glowczewska. ISBN 0-8021-1140-8. $18.95. f Szczypiorski here links case histories from Nazi-occupied Warsaw to show the world of those not sent to the camps--both Polish gentiles and Jews who changed identities and "passed." These survivors lived with the horror of what was happening to their friends and families and with the constant anxiety of being at risk themselves. While theirs was not the most immediate horror of the Holocaust, they experienced an insidious deadening of the soul more closely linked to Polish history. The narrative zigzags through this history at will, a distancing device that accentuates the isolation of the characters. Though individual lives connect, some are literally, and absurdly, dead ends. In this novel without a hero, the Jewish widow Mrs. Seidenman is a recurring motif. While she survives Nazi capture and Communist purge, her heart is lost before she even enters these pages. A sad book, translated into graceful English.
-Rob Schmieder, Boston
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 204 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (January 2, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679732144
• ISBN-13: 978-0679732143
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,296,357 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful, poignant book, June 6, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman: A Novel (Andrze Szczypiorski) (Paperback)

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 . . . . .

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A poignant account of wartime as experienced by the innocent, December 18, 1997

By 

[e-mail] (Flint, Michigan 48423) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman: A Novel (Andrze Szczypiorski) (Paperback)

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.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Not So Simple Tale, March 9, 2003

By 

Dana (Natick, Massachusetts United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman: A Novel (Andrze Szczypiorski) (Paperback)

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.