Click above to enlarge
Official covers
The beautiful Jewish widow Irma Seidenman has three attributes that keep her out of the Warsaw ghetto: blonde hair, blue eyes, and excellent forged papers. But one day in 1943 an informer denounces her to the Gestapo - and in the thirty-six hours following her arrest unlikely links are forged between a chain of disparate people - Poles, Jews and Germans, with motives righteous and base -in the attempt to rescue her. Ranging back and forward in time, by turns tender, ironic, sad and funny, Szczypiorski constructs a pattern of intersecting lives in a masterly and deeply compassionate exposition, not just of Warsaw, but of all victims, persecutors and spectators alike in a world at war. Like a pebble dropped cleanly into deep water. The Beautiful Mrs Seidenman stirs ripples and echoes around the brief, bleak events that it describes... This magnificent novel, excellently translated, is both heart-wrenching and optimistic' Observer The authorial voice - now gentle, now sardonic, but always piercingly omniscient - creates an unforgettable group portrait' Kirkus Reviews 'There's a Jamesian tenderness towards the heroine and a rich celebration of her city which makes this subtle, surprising work a little masterpiece' Guardian
The beautiful Jewish widow Irma Seidenman has three attributes that keep her out of the Warsaw ghetto: blonde hair, blue eyes, and excellent forged papers. But one day in 1943 an informer denounces her to the Gestapo - and in the thirty-six hours following her arrest unlikely links are forged between a chain of disparate people - Poles, Jews and Germans, with motives righteous and base -in the attempt to rescue her. Ranging back and forward in time, by turns tender, ironic, sad and funny, Szczypiorski constructs a pattern of intersecting lives in a masterly and deeply compassionate exposition, not just of Warsaw, but of all victims, persecutors and spectators alike in a world at war. Like a pebble dropped cleanly into deep water. The Beautiful Mrs Seidenman stirs ripples and echoes around the brief, bleak events that it describes... This magnificent novel, excellently translated, is both heart-wrenching and optimistic' Observer The authorial voice - now gentle, now sardonic, but always piercingly omniscient - creates an unforgettable group portrait' Kirkus Reviews 'There's a Jamesian tenderness towards the heroine and a rich celebration of her city which makes this subtle, surprising work a little masterpiece' Guardian
Andrzej Szczypiorski
Born in Warsaw in 1924, Szczypiorski was a journalist and novelist. He took part in the Warsaw Uprising and was imprisoned after the fall of the Uprising in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. He died...
No Member ratings so far
Be the FIRST to rate this book!
