In the Memory of the Forest - Hardcover

Charles T. Powers

3.93

475 ratings by Goodreads

9781862300088: In the Memory of the Forest

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1862300089 ISBN 13: 9781862300088

Publisher: Anchor Books, 1997

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When the body of Tomek, a young distillery worker, is found brutally murdered in the forest outside Jadowia in Poland, his boyhood friend, Leszek, decides to uncover the mystery behind Tomek's death. Assuming the role of amateur sleuth, Leszek embarks on a clue-finding mission that takes him from country to city, into the grimy offices of once-powerful bureaucrats, and face-to-face with the Catholic Church's pious and impotent priests. And as Leszek moves closer to the truth, he is confronted with another strange mystery: the disappearance of stones from the foundations of the town's oldest houses. The further Leszek is drawn into this mystery, the deeper into the past he must search for answers about his people, the grim tragedy of the Holocaust, and ultimately, his own identity. In the Memory of the Forest is a haunting, evocative novel that explores the impact of a murder on a community, and of history and the fate of the Jews in Poland during World War II on a people.

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Review:

Even in the days after the collapse of Communism, the Poland of Charles Powers's novel is an "old country in an old Europe," a place that harbors the stories and secrets of a complex and tortured history. When a young farmer named Leszek starts looking into the unexplained murder of a childhood friend in his small hometown of Jadowia, he is led into a dark terrain, and begins to uncover difficult truths about war crimes committed by members of his own family. It's a complex, literary detective story, rendered in precise, jewel-like prose. Powers, who died in 1996, knows whereof he speaks: a journalist for the Los Angeles Times for more than twenty years, he served as the paper's Eastern European bureau chief from 1986-1991.

About the Author:

A native of Missouri, Charles T. Powers (1943-1996) started his career writing for The Kansas City Star. A former Niemen fellow at Harvard University, he spent twenty years as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times, twelve of those as a correspondent in Africa. Powers served as the newspaper's Eastern European Bureau chief in Warsaw from 1986 to 1991, where he fully immersed himself in Polish culture. For the last five years of his life, he lived in Bennington, Vermont, where he completed In the Memory of the Forest, his only book.

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