Andrzej Szczypiorski

A Warsaw sociologist is summoned to Geneva to participate in an oral-history project about the collapse of Eastern European communism and resolves to tell his own story through a gallery of portraits of the many women he has loved. These reminiscences emerge against the broader canvas of circumstances and events that have shaped the past sixty years of Poland's turbulent, tragic history. Soon he finds himself inexorably drawn to his interrogator from the "free" world, the chronicler of his life, the keeper of his secrets, and his heart's last hope for redemptive love. Self-Portrait with Woman is at once a haunting and lyrical portrait of a man, of a country, and of the twilight years of an era.

An extraordinary novel covering a few days in Warsaw in 1943...or covering most of the 20th century, depending on how you see the book. Although concerned with rescuing Mrs Erma Seidenman--a Jew who has been passing as Aryan--from the Gestapo, the book is not a thriller, or an action story. Its consideration of our responsibility for other people is deep, complex, profoundly honest, and troubling to most honest readers. As fine a work of art as has been produced anywhere in the world in the last quarter of the 20th century.

"In the Nazi-occupied Warsaw of 1943, Irma Seidenman, a young Jewish widow, possesses two attributes that can spell the difference between life and death: she has blue eyes and blond hair. With these, and a set of false papers, she has slipped out of the ghetto, passing as the wife of a Polish officer, until one day an informer spots her on the street and drags her off to the Gestapo. The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman is the story of the thirty-six hours that follow Irma?s arrest and the events that lead to her dramatic rescue as the last of Warsaw?s Jews are about to meet their deaths in the burning ghetto. A handful of people conspire in Irma?s escape, forming into a pattern of intersecting lives and miraculously defying the duress of time to leap from the present into the past and forward into the future: eighteen-year-old Henryczek Fichtelbaum, condemned by his Jewish looks to be hounded from every hiding place until he returns to embrace death in the ghetto; his little sister, Joasia, who owes her survival first to Suchowiak, a small-time thug who smuggles her out for a price, and then to Sister Weronika, who manages to overcome her dislike of Jews in order to guide the child onto the path of salvation; Kujawski, the Polish patriot who tailors smart riding breeches for German officers; and Stuckler, the SS man who speculates about the nature of harmony and truth"--The publisher.