The Polish Woman - 9781882593996

The Polish Woman, set in New York and in Poland, is the story of a search for the identity of an attractive young woman who appears to be a possible survivor of the Holocaust - or perhaps a cunning scam artist. When 29-year-old Karolina Staszek appears in the office of a New York Jewish lawyer, Philip Landau, in 1967, her hair wet from the cold December rain, she seems so helpless and sincere. Yet Philip does not believe her strange story - that she is the long-lost child that his Uncle Jake had paid a Catholic family to hide on its farm near Lublin, Poland, during the World War II Nazi occupation.
Jake survived the Holocaust, but believed his daughter had not. It seemed too farfetched to Philip that more than 20 years later and a month after Jake's death, she would show up, claiming she was now living in New York and by chance had read Jake's obituary and recognized his photo in the newspaper. Was she a scheming Pole who saw an opportunity to inherit Jake's fortune?
Even after the woman recalls the names of Jake's dead wife, Rachel, and the daughter, Chava, Philip retains his suspicions. The Landau family sends Karolina and Philip to Warsaw, Lublin and surrounding farm areas to search surviving records and interview residents who may remember the Landaus or the family that raised Karolina as their own, the Staszeks.
As they pursue blind leads and tantalizing but inconclusive ones - at archives, with old Lublin neighbors and with a priest and an elderly housekeeper at a church near the Staszeks' old farm - and as they encounter post-war Polish anti-Semitism, Philip and Karolina are drawn to each other. Finally they locate a man who worked on a farm adjoining the Staszeks' and who, in a startling climax, recalls witnessing events that unravel the mystery of Jake's child - and set the course of Karolina's and Philip's love and lives.