HARBOR SPRINGS, Mich., June 24, 2004 (PRIMEZONE) -- Unlike the Warsaw Uprising, few people in Lodz, Poland, wish to talk or remember what happened in the Lodz ghetto during the Holocaust. As a matter of fact, its history is a secret only whispered about in Lodz and suppressed by its city government in 1994. Through Constance Cappel's new book, A Stairwell in Lodz, the reader learns the what and why behind one of history's darkest past.
Through "faction," a literary style that sets fact against fiction, the book tells the story of three Polish, Jewish and American women who live in the shadow of the ghetto's history and, more specifically, in the shadow of its horrors. Set in 1994 in the former Lodz ghetto, the book follows how these three women grapple with the transitional period of Polish history after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Although they live in separate apartments off a common stairwell in a Soviet-style bloc building, they know little of each other's secrets. They pass each other daily, yet misjudge and apply stereotypes to each of their lives, their past and their true selves.
"A Stairwell in Lodz documents the reason why neither Poles nor Jews want to talk about the Lodz Ghetto," says Cappel, a former Newsweek investigative reporter who lived in the former Lodz ghetto for two and a half years as a business advisor for the U.S. Peace Corps from 1994 to 1996. The book offers snatches into the life-changing events in the Lodz ghetto and its lasting blow to the human lives left forever changed by its horrors. Compelling and unforgettable, this is another cause for literary celebration and an emotionally charged remembrance of humanity's dark past.
About the Author
Constance Cappel lived and worked in Poland from January 1994 to June 1997. She first served as a business advisor for the Peace Corps in the huge and mysterious city of Lodz, Poland, and lived in the former Lodz Ghetto, site of the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe and the second-largest ghetto in Poland. She stayed in Poland after her Peace Corps tour of duty and moved to Warsaw where she worked as the head of the real estate agency for Price, Waterhouse. Dr. Cappel received her doctorate degree from the Union Institute & University where she is now an adjunct faculty and vice president of the Graduate Alumna Board. A Stairwell in Lodz is the second time that Dr. Cappel used the experimental form of interspersing fact and fiction in alternating chapters. She calls this form "faction," while others might call it "creative nonfiction."
A Stairwell in Lodz * By Constance Cappel
Publication Date: 5/24/2004
Trade Paperback; $21.99; 282 pages; 1-4134-3716-8 * Cloth Hardback;
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