Chopin’s Garden
The plane is lifting, the moon is the color of bright rust, glowing, misshapen, nearly full. Rivers of cars and strings of lights are shining below. I’ll be back in Poland tomorrow for the first time in fifty-one years.
Nadia Korczak, a professional musician living in New York, learns a secret from her dying father. Determined to find the whole truth, she takes his ashes back to a village on the banks of the Vistula River in Poland, a country she was forced to flee during World War II. There, she begins to search for a child her mother abandoned.
In the lives of the people she meets, Nadia discovers echoes of the war she escaped. As her search deepens and she learns the reasons behind her parents’ choices, she must grapple with the ways in which history has fractured her own life and the lives of her parents and fellow Poles.