Synapsy Marii H.

With The Synapses of Maria H., Hanna Krall, the queen of Polish literary reportage, brings us a tale about the present entangled with the past – all told in her distinctive style. “It’s a story,” she contends, “about remembering and not remembering.” The eponymous synapses are the bridges that connect the recollection of past events with the perception of current experience.

The book presents biographical fragments of two women named Maria. The first is a Polish emigrant who has been living for years in the USA; the second is “the mother of her husband.” As dissimilar as the two women seem to be, both possess an incredibly strong instinct for survival.

The first Maria is Maria Twardokęs-Hrabowska, who was an active dissident in communist Poland. She survived internment, emigration, and the subsequent yearning for the familiar, for her homeland. She had to grapple with her own illness, and later with her son’s autism. She is a complex character, sensitive to reality. She’s also someone Krall had written about years earlier, in Katar sienny [Hay Fever], which went to press in 1981 – but then came martial law and the censor intervened and all extant copies were destroyed.

The second Maria is Maria Hrabowska, mother-in-law of the first Maria, a woman whose life was marked by two horrors. The first she experienced in occupied Warsaw. Despite the passage of years, her recollections of wartime atrocities, of the ghetto, of Umschlagplatz never lost any of their intensity. Even though memory and time can play tricks on us (“the mother of her husband doesn’t remember how her mother died”), traces of the past were not erased. Her second experience of terror came 60 years later, on September 11, 2001, as she was climbing down the stairs of one of the World Trade Center towers. The experiences of that day reminded her of the war: it was “as though I was walking through the Aryan side after leaving the ghetto.”

Reading this book we encounter the stories of these two women, all tangled together: some of the threads are intertwined, others are seemingly independent. But neither has an easy tale to tell.