Results of Sunday’s run-off for Poland’s presidency show that the country’s electorate is evenly divided between the pro-European center-left government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk and the nationalists aligned with the Law and Justice Party, whose candidate, Karol Nawrocki, a historian and former boxer, received 50.9 percent of the vote. The reformist candidate, Rafal Trzaskowski, the mayor of Warsaw, got 49.1 percent.

The Tusk government sets policy, but its actions can be stymied by the president and have been repeatedly since it reclaimed power in 2023.

There is an important reality to remember. The country is united in the recognition that Russia is the greatest threat to Poland’s security, and defense spending is and will be an overriding priority across the political spectrum.

Donald Trump’s do-si-do with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and his threats to NATO are the reason last week’s piece was called “Where Good Times Are Not Taken for Granted.”

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As a reporter during the Cold War years, I visited and wrote about Poland many times, most notably in June 1979, when Pope John Paul II toured his homeland for the first time, an epic event that made it clear that Soviet control was destined to end.

I have been back as Poland joined the European Union and NATO and developed a robust economy. Younger Poles, in particular, are completely Western European in style and culture, with, of course, a recognition of Russia’s menace and the war in neighboring Ukraine.

My interest in Poland comes from my family’s history there. I came to the United States as an infant in 1944 and was intrigued by the heritage my mother and father had left behind. On my mother’s side my great-great-grandparents had nine children, six girls and three boys, every one of whom lived, by any measure, eventful lives. One boy committed suicide when he was 20.

At gatherings of my Warsaw and Krakow cousins, we guessed that there are dozens of direct descendants living today in Poland, France, and the United States.

Given that so many American Jews with Central and Eastern European backgrounds lost all their relatives in the Holocaust or can’t really trace their ancestors’ lives before arriving in the U.S., I have found the history and endurance of our close family fascinating, with so many achievements to mark and challenges to overcome.

In October, Rivertowns Books (in association with Platform Books) will publish In the Garden of Memory by Joanna Olczak-Ronikier, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, for the first time in the U.S. Here, from the forward I have written for this edition, is the background to the book and a sense of its contents.

The book is about events in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, published just after the millennium. It received Poland’s top literary prize and was published in Great Britain in a brilliant English translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. It was also published in France, Holland, and Germany. This is its first publication in North America.

It tells the story of a large family in a historical memoir based in Warsaw and Krakow but with a reach across Europe and the United States. The time frame includes the Holocaust, but it is not a horror story. Some did suffer terror and torture in the Stalin era, and the family was scattered or in hiding in World War II. And yet, somehow it endures in succeeding generations to this day.

To read it now evokes the sensibility of midcentury American Jewish writers of fiction and nonfiction — Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Bernard Malamud, and Susan Sontag — with meticulous detail, wit, irony, and literary merit that enhances its value as an exploration of human nature.

What else makes this a book that has lasting literary appeal? Richard Bernstein, writing in The New York Times in 2005, said that the book “gained its broad audience in Poland partly because the clan described in it is one of Poland’s most illustrious, but also because its members were deeply involved in the central events of the 19th and 20th centuries.”

He describes the extensive dramatis personae as “almost Tolstoyian.” (To assist readers, a descriptive character list and family tree will be attached to Lloyd-Jones’s introduction to this edition.) The famous opening line of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This is a happy family in many ways but also one profoundly challenged by the tumultuous events of its time.

And finally, Poland at the center of Europe, surrounded and occupied over time by Russia, Germany, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, emerged with distinctive qualities of romantic courage and idealism that severely and repeatedly stressed its existence.

The author, Joanna Olczak-Ronikier, lives in Krakow. In the cover photograph taken during the summer of 1939, weeks before the Nazis invaded Poland, Joanna was four years old; my brother, Robert, was eight; and our cousin Ryszard, who served as a navigator in the Polish branch of the Royal Air Force and would be killed in a crash in 1944, was seventeen.

There are descendants of our family in Poland and the United States today who carry on the traditions of the intelligentsia that is our heritage. In this way, we connect with our past and reckon with the extraordinary good fortune of having endured when so many Jews and others did not.

There is more to say about the book and related stories I have discovered while working on the project. I will be writing about them in the months ahead.

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Annik LaFarge, author of Chasing Chopin: A Musical Journey Across Three Centuries. Four Countries, and a half-Dozen Revolutions has just finished reading the book. Here is her comment:

"Like a great Russian novel bursting with colorful, wildly different characters, In the Garden of Memory presents the human side of the long, rich, poignant, story of Poland from the late 19th century through Partition and two World Wars. Olczak-Ronikier’s relatives are impassioned rebels and patriots; poets, translators, psychiatrists and writers; women struggling to nurture their professional ambitions despite the burdens of gender; and entrepreneurs in publishing and bookselling. We get to know each of them as they navigate the precarious dissonance of being proudly Polish and Jewish. It’s a masterful, multi-generational, portrait of a family that endures even as their world descends into chaos."

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