In the ruins of an eastern-European, post-war city, a boy dies. He is the adopted son of Jadwiga, a woman who has relocated to the West, with thousands of others. They call themselves the pioneers, and they are hoping to rebuild their ruined country. Jadwiga cannot afford to mourn the boy’s loss properly, as she has two other children, daughters, to take care of. She has already experienced other losses, that of her best friend and her young husband, but they haven’t hardened her. She is an artist, and it is the ability to turn her pain into an object of art that she passes on to her three granddaughters. Fifty years after the events, her granddaughters seek their fortunes abroad, as pioneers and as artists: one goes to California, another to London, and the third to Australia, each escaping her demons. The story focuses on Dagny, a Californian sojourner, as she tries to understand her new place of residence. Dagny will have to reject traditional romance to become an artist, and ultimately go back to Poland, seeking to understand her grandmother, the strongest authority figure in her life.
At the heart of the narrative is the idea that past traumas haunt us, even if we do not know what it is that is causing the gnawing pain. There are forces larger than the individual self: the obligations placed on us by history, family, society. This Bildungsroman tells the story of a young woman who has to face those forces to forge her identity as an artist, following in the footsteps of other women in her family, despite the odds stacked against her.
At the heart of the narrative is the idea that past traumas haunt us, even if we do not know what it is that is causing the gnawing pain. There are forces larger than an individual self: the obligations placed on us by history, family, society. This Bildungsroman tells a story of a young woman who has to face those forces to forge her identity as an artist, following in the footsteps of other women in her family, despite the odds stacked against her.
At the heart of the narrative is the idea that past traumas haunt us, even if we do not know what it is that is causing the gnawing pain. There are forces larger than the individual self: the obligations placed on us by history, family, society. This Bildungsroman tells the story of a young woman who has to face those forces to forge her identity as an artist, following in the footsteps of other women in her family, despite the odds stacked against her.
At the heart of the narrative is the idea that past traumas haunt us, even if we do not know what it is that is causing the gnawing pain. There are forces larger than an individual self: the obligations placed on us by history, family, society. This Bildungsroman tells a story of a young woman who has to face those forces to forge her identity as an artist, following in the footsteps of other women in her family, despite the odds stacked against her.