Review of Your Roots Cast a Shadow: One Family’s Search Across History For Belonging

Untangling Roots and Dispelling Shadows

Caroline Topperman’s book, Your Roots Cast a Shadow: One Family’s Search Across History For Belonging, is one of the most engaging and fascinating examples of memoir or life writing I’ve read in years. To be even more precise with regard to the genre Topperman is working in, I might say the book belongs to the subclass of personal genealogy projects. However, ascribing the latter category to a book that weaves together an authorial memoir, biographical writing involving members of her immediate and extended family, as well as Poland’s and Europe’s 20th Century landmark events, would mean overlooking the very skillfulness of Topperman’s craft. This is to say that she manages to gather different strands of her Polish family’s past (Catholic on one side, Jewish on the other), and uses them to reflect — in ways that are both personal and informed by a solid understanding of history and society — on Poland’s current and once again turbulent political reality. Topperman brings together the past and present, the personal and public, in a lively, highly readable and important text. 

Your Roots begins with an account of Topperman’s move in 2013 to Warsaw, Poland. The author and her husband Pawel had been living in Vancouver after getting married. Both grew up Toronto, were it appears they knew one another since their late teens. Their decision to move from Canada to Poland, a country that gained its independence from the USSR in December of 1989 — that is, less than 25 years ealier, would strike any casual reader as odd. The move is perplexing for several reasons: First, Toperman identifies as Jewish (through her mother), and as everyone, especially anyone Jewish, knows, the Holocaust decimated Poland’s Jewish communities. For all intents and purposes, 800 years of Jewish life and culture in Poland came to end with the Holocaust and the murders and betrayals by local peoples of Jewish neighbours and those non-Jewish Poles who attempted to save them. Among the ones who survived the Holocaust and remained—because of an ideological affinity to Communism (as was the case with Topperman’s die-hard socialist grandfather)—the intensified anti-Semitism and discriminatory removal of Polish Jews from high-status positions in the late 1960s under the guise of anti-Zionism (following the Six-Day-War in 1967) left Poland not merely Jew-less, but also made it anathema as a country for Jewish people considering immigration. Your Roots offers essential lessons for today’s readers, who may or not may be aware that rising anti-Semitism in the current moment has its ideological roots in Soviet Communist-era anti-Zionist rhetoric and anti-Semitic propaganda. 

The second reason Topperman’s move to Poland is surprising and intriguing is because of the things North American readers still assume about a country that was behind the iron curtain just 35 years ago. These assumptions are mostly related to living standards and access to manufactured goods, but also to Polish culture more broadly. I’ll never forget Polish-Canadian Eva Stachniak’s award-winning novel, Necessary Lies, and the drabness her protagonist, Anna, encounters in early 1990s in Poland. After a decade of living in Canada, Anna is acutely aware that Poland is dark, steeped in a tragic past; Canada is future-bound, a beautiful, vast, modern country. 

Yet the Poland Topperman arrives in defies expectations. Russians would tend to joke about Poles, saying that Polish is not a nationality, but a profession. There is some truth to this framing. Urban Poles are well-educated and highly entrepreneurial. The country’s progress since gaining its independence is nothing short of stupendous. Topperman describes all of it, and it’s eye-opening. For instance, she has no difficulty finding anything she and her husband require in Warsaw. A wonderful variety of sophisticated foods (traditional or French, let’s say), everyday goods, and rentals are actually much more affordable in Warsaw. With her background in theatre and dance, Topperman is also able to attend shows and performances regularly because they are a fraction of the cost when compared to ticket prices in Canada. She discovers that excellent and efficient medical care is easier to access in Warsaw than in Canada. A travel enthusiast (or more accurately, a rolling stone), she’s also counting on taking frequent trips by car and plane to other European capitals, like Paris — a city beloved by both of her parents. In short, living in Poland promises to be fulfilling, nourishing for the soul, for both Caroline and Pawel in ways that Vancouver and Toronto weren’t. 

There is one other very compelling reason for the couple’s relocation: Caroline and Pawel’s longing to reconnect with immediate and extended family. Pawel has an uncle and cousins in Poland. In turn, Caroline has her father Wojtek’s brother, Andrzej, his wife, and their children. Topperman is particularly eager to reestablish ties with family on her father’s side. She aims to mend the painful, nearly two-decades-long rift that occurred when her father’s father, Franciszek Wichrzycka, cut ties with his son and by extension with his daughter-in-law and grandchildren, once it became clear that Wojtek would not return to Poland with his Jewish wife in the wake of the country’s resurgent anti-Semitism in the late 1960s. 

Topperman also has her mother’s brother, KT (successful as a businessman, but otherwise a miserable man, brought down by the death of his second wife, and by a host of personal failings). For a while after arriving in Warsaw, Topperman also has her maternal grandmother, the accomplished but difficult, high-strung Paula. Topperman mines her family members’ histories, but to her credit, she’s doesn’t hide their warts. Paula is complex, determined, and a force to be reckoned with (she managed to get accepted into medical school during the war, and later completed a doctorate in hematology), but she’s not especially likeable. By the time of Topperman’s move to Poland, the paternal grandparents, Franciszek and Wandeczka (Wanda), have passed. This doesn’t dissuade Topperman from reconstructing their lives in scrupulous, affecting detail. 

To sum up this particular impetus for Topperman’s unconventional move from West to East: she is searching for her roots. In her own words,

There are some deeply unsettling things happening in the world right now. Scary people are using their bullhorns to talk about history and roots in dangerous ways that are clannish and exclusive.

This is a slippery slope….Our history, our roots, is deeply planted. It’s vital that we not let those roots be wrenched from the ground, let alone used to clobber others. (8)

Topperman is no armchair activist. In Poland, she takes part in protests against right-wing nationalists, regressive anti-abortion laws, and in support of LGBTQ+ rights, more stridently even when the populist and national-conservative political party, PIS (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość [Law and Justice]), comes to power in 2015. It’s her political awareness that in part compels her to look for and tell her parents’ and grandparents’ stories. As she explains, her history is made of others’ histories, the good and awful stuff they endured and witnessed.The same is true of her identity, her sense and convictions about who she is. In short, she is the Polish-Canadian daughter of two exceptional people. Her mother, Marysia (née Topolski), was an elegant red-headed Jewish woman, a gifted artist, who had studied and worked in Paris, spoke many languages, wrote for the CBC, and other publications (as a teenager, Topperman watched as her mother sought out Jerzy Giedroyc in Paris about submitting an important piece to his literary and political journal, Kultura) before her death from cancer in 1995. Topperman’s Polish-Catholic father, Wojtek Wichrzycka, was an engineer who worked on major road construction projects in Iraq. At one point, he held the post of director of the laboratory for the international highway that was being built to connect Iraq to Europe. He was a true Renaissance man, who loved to travel and cultivated an appreciation for different cultures and diverse forms of art. 

A quick confession regarding the special appeal Your Roots has for me follows: Topperman’s tracing of her grandparents’ experience during WWII overlaps with my own parents’ stories of surviving the Holocaust as Soviet-era Jewish children. Both of my parents were very young when Nazi Germany began its invasion of the Soviet Union with Operation Barbarossa (launched on June 22, 1941). Like Topperman’s maternal grandparents, who were orginally from Lwow (part of Poland from 1919 to 1939, and now called Lviv, a city in western Ukraine), my mother and father along with their parents were evacuated to the Asian parts of the USSR, including Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. In fact, my father never forgot the Uzbek he learned as child refugee. So although my parents were already in the world during WWII, unlike Topperman’s, the description in Your Roots of her grandparents’ hazardous journeys to escape the encroaching Nazi army touched a nerve. There are other parts of this book I strongly relate, as I go on to explain below.

The young couple, Fryderyk and Paula Toperman, first separately and then together after reuniting in Mariupul, made their way through panicked crowds and pandemonium to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, via Taganrog (by small, motorized boat), Rostov-on-Don (by train), and finally Astrakhan (by barge along the Volga River). Below are a few snippets from Topperman’s detailed descriptions of what her grandparents encountered en route: 

Once the group arrived in Taganrog,…they haggled with local fishermen over selling their boat for a few coins and some dry bread before making their way to the train station, which as overflowing with thousands of evacuees, all just like the ten travelers—clamouring to get on any available transportation. There was not rooms for any amount of money, and it seemed that basic sanitation was now a thing of the past….(p. 52)

Here’s another regrettably short excerpt from that same journey in the chapter about the early life of the author’s dziadzio Fryderyk:

Only the madness they encountered in Astrakhan made the chaos of Stalingrad [or Volgograd, where Fryderyk and Paula initially planned to meet up] look tame. By now, all ten in the group [consisting of Topperman’s grandparents and friends they encountered along the way] had succumbed to the lice infestation plaguing all evacuees….At the train station, Paula sold her last gold ring and a few trinkets to buy passage for all of them to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, via the border city of Orenburg. (pp. 54-55)

Of course, Fryderyk and Paula Toperman were among those fortunate enough to survive the Nazi onslaught of Poland (an attentive reader might notice that the original surname had a single ‘p’; this name change, according to the author, is a story in itself, and one that comes to symbolize the series of displacements endured by East European Jewish survivors, as well as the need for subterfuge in their journeys to safety and resettlement). Topperman gives us a harrowing glimpse of the fate suffered by Jews in Lwów, after Germany broke the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression agreement that was originally intended to divide up Europe between the newly-made German and Soviet empires. The pact ended on June 22, 1941. It took only a week for the invading Nazis to drive the Soviets out of the city.  

On June 30, 1941, six days after Fryderyk and Paula evacuated Lwów, the Wehrmacht officially occupied the city, and on July 1, the pogroms began. The infamous waves of persecution drove Jews from their apartments, forced them to clean the streets on their hands and knees, and targeted Jewish women for humiliation — stripping, beating, and raping. These violent riots that succeeded in killing thousands of Jews were carried out by [Polish] locals, Ukrainian nationalists, and Nazi death squads. (p. 50)

Topperman toggles artfully between her lived experience in Poland and her grandparents’, parents’, and other relatives’ stories. The former contains her personal feelings about her new life, as well as keenly observed features of Polish traditions, values, and attitudes. Given that she identifies as Jewish (albeit, secular), she’s naturally attuned to what Poles have to say about migrants, and how they feel regarding differences in religion and race. These parts of the book are detailed and lively—and Topperman definitely satisfies most readers’ curiosity about the state of the country’s politics and society between 2013 and 2017 (she returns to Canada in March of 2018). 

The chapters dedicated to her family members, are absorbing narratives. Topperman is dealing with complex people, who’ve lived through taxing and fraught circumstances. Furthermore, as in real life, the author always reaches a point at which she’s at a loss to explain why some of them made certain choices, acted in ways that caused harm to other members of the family. For instance, at some point after the war, Topperman’s maternal grandfather, the smart and charming Fryderyk, acquired a mistress (or perhaps several), thereby straining his marriage. His affair, and generally, his various efforts to get some distance from his wife, had lasting consequences for Paula and daughter Marysia; the latter would exhaust herself trying to mollify her histrionic mother. 

As already mentioned, Franciszek Wichrzycka, Topperman’s paternal grandfather, severed all ties with his son after Wojtek and Marysia refused to return to Poland in the late 1960s (instead, the couple sought refuge in Sweden in 1970, where Marysia’s parents were already waiting, having been chased out of Poland by a vicious spike in anti-Semitic repression). Franciszek never did mend his relationship with Wojtek, even years later, when the family was living in Canada. Franciszek never met his grand-daughters, Caroline and her sister. Most disturbingly, he forbade Wandeczka and Andrzej, Wojtek’s older brother, from contacting any of them. 

I must say, there’s something of the infernal Polish temperament about Franciszek’s inability to get over his son’s decision — one, after all, that was motivated by a wish to safeguard his Jewish wife. Remarkably, Poles are always willing to die for a cause they deem worthy. Tragically, uber-idealistic Poles tend to bash themselves recklessly against the hillock they deem worthy of great personal sacrifice.

One senses that Topperman is torn when it comes to writing about Franciszek and Wandeczka, the grandparents who refused to acknowledge she existed because they resented what they saw as their son’s betrayal of Poland, a country Franciszek had dedicated himself to rebuilding after WWII. The picture of what transpired in the 1960s was radically different for Fryderyk and Paula, however.

The events of 1960s Poland represented a turning point that, like the Holocaust, shaped the future of my family. Both grandfathers — one Polish Catholic, one a Polish Jew — faced hard choices that would color not only their lives but the lives of their descendants and a family for generations.

How Franciszek felt about the impact of his actions I will never know. I know that the punishing events of 1968 would become ingrained in Fryderyk’s mind even more than the war years, and that’s saying something. The war years had been influenced by outside forces that displaced and murdered millions of peoples across Europe and elsewhere. Poland’s move in 1968 to purge Jews from the country was something else entirely, and for him, what began as scapegoating that led to outright expulsions [of Jewish elites] was unforgivable. This was his home country turning its back o him. (pp. 155-56)

Topperman sets her feelings aside to narrate Franciszek and Wandeczka’s story. There are two reasons for this: first, this story remains part of who she is; second, it sheds some light on a unique corner of Polish history, its industrial-economic relations with countries in the Middle East, that few readers may know about. 

When WWII started, Wandeczka and Franciszek, along with their two young sons, were living in Kabul, Afghanistan. They lived in a large villa with staff and the family’s own chef. Franciszek was the head engineer for part of Afghanistan’s AH1 Highways, the Kyber Pass, whose section was meant to connect Kabul to Jalalabad. The highway was ultimately completed in the 1960s, but its beginnings were no less momentous. According to Topperman, Francizek, “with the help of several thousand workers under his command….completed hundreds of kilometers of the road, including tunnels and bridges” (p. 90). Franciszek was under contract with the League of Nations (later transformed into the United Nations), who were assisting developing countries with major infrastructure projects, such as road construction. The Wichrzycka family couldn’t return to Poland until 1944. By then, the Soviets had driven out the Nazis. It strikes me as ironic that during WWII Afghanistan was safer than just about any other country in Europe (with the exception of Switzerland).

There is a final interesting twist in Your Roots, one that involves both of the author’s grandfathers. Franciszek and Fryderyk had known each other, and even maintained a steady correspondence before their children Wojtek and Marysia (respectively) even met. Topperman has the opportunity to peruse several of the letters the men exchanged. She includes one from Franciszek to Fryderyk in Your Roots. That her grandfathers were acquaintances may not actually be that strange. They were peers, entrusted with major projects. Both were highly accomplished, highly valued engineers. Topperman observes: 

By 1960, Franciszek and Fryderyk had been in similar circles for years — Fryderyk on the building and coal mining track while Franciszek focused on road building….What I see in the[ir] correspondence is how much Franciszek and Fryderyk had in common. Both men were highly intelligent, forward-thinking dreamers who loved building and creating….these proud Polish men wanted to make the world a better place (p. 149).   

These fortuitous ties between her grandfathers are deeply meaningful to Topperman. She is a descendent of both men, after all.

Topperman relies on Fryderyk’s book, an amateur historian’s careful reconstruction of events during and after WWII, to write her own. She incorporates letters she managed to gather, those written by parents and grandparents, as well as interviews she conducted. This documentary material adds considerable value to her book, especially as she never fails to provide cogent, well-summarized, information that contextualizes accounts of those who witnessed world-historical events. In all, Topperman moves adroitly between the past and present — sustaining readerly interest from chapter to chapter.

Yet in essence, Your Roots is a loving tribute to her parents, the formidable people they were and the joyful life they built with their children. Topperman attributes many of her passions to her parents — their refined taste in art, as well as objects of beauty, such as architecture, furniture, and decorative accessories for their home. She writes of family vacations in Europe: Switzerland, Austria, France, and Spain. There were visits with her grandparents in Bad Homburg, Germany, and hiking the Taunus Mountain Range with Fryderyk. Topperman describes the mother-daughter trip to Paris, and her mother’s penchant for exploring off the beaten tourist paths. She waxes nostalgically of the road trips she went on with her parents and grandparents — all squeezed into one car: “Our car was always filled with provisions, clothing, food, whatever we would need. Wherever we went, we were a self-sufficient group” (p. 270). 

Such recollections, related with love and a yearning for childhood and adolescence with her parents, evoked some fond memories of my own, particularly of my father traversing the Alps en route from Italy to Austria in a tiny Fiat, loaded with all of our earthly belongings. My father was a gifted navigator. In all the years I knew and drove with him, he never once lost his way. For this memory, and for much else besides that I discovered in Topperman’s book, I am very grateful.