13 Stradomska Street ― A Memoir of Exile and Return

"Potok is blind but he makes us see not only the pre-World War Two landscape from which he and his family fled, but also how and why and at what price." ?Jay Neugeboren, author of Max Baer and the Star of David and Imagining Robert

"Potok explores the long reach of both his family's 1939 escape from Poland and his own blindness in this thoughtful and elegant memoir." ?Elinor Langer, author of Josephine Herbst and A Hundred Little Hitlers

By recalling the harrowing events of his family's flight from their Warsaw home and business while escaping the invading Nazis, Potok reveals that the most traumatic event of that perilous border crossing was the action of his father who, at the last minute, suddenly exits their car and escapes across the frontier ahead of his family. His father's inexplicable betrayal and abandonment to save himself haunts Andrew Potok for the rest of his life.

Late-in-life, Potok is drawn into a reclamation battle for his family's Warsaw property. On his return to postwar Poland, he encounters a virulent Polish anti-Semitism that still seethes in his birthplace. His ongoing lawsuit becomes emblematic of the book's central theme: there is no closure for survivors of the Holocaust, there is no resolution and no justice for either victims or perpetrators, no compensation for the Shoah and concomitantly, no forgiveness.

Andrew Potok was a successful visual artist until he went blind in his forties. He then turned to writing and published Ordinary Daylight, Portrait of An Artist Going Blind, My Life With Goya, and A Matter of Dignity. He lives in Vermont.