The Upright Heart chronicles the return from Brooklyn of a Jewish man,
Wolf, to his native Poland soon after World War II. He is haunted by the
memory of his Catholic lover, Olga, whom he abandoned to marry a woman
of his own faith and start a new life in America, and who perished
sheltering the parents and younger sister he left behind. Harassed on
the streets of postwar Poland, Wolf is watched over by the spirits of
those who died during and after the war but have yet to let go. His
story is woven together with those of others, living and dead, Catholic
and Jew, including the deceased students of a school for girls, a
battalion of fallen German soldiers, and an orphan boy who wanders the
streets of Krakow, believing in a magic pill he has conjured up as a way
to survive.
Set amid the ruins of the Holocaust and the Nazis' total war, this
haunting novel is at once a page-turning drama and a meditation on what
it means to be human, part of a community, alive. The Upright Heart's
dreamlike qualities and fluent lyricism draw the reader toward a
consecrated realm, while its narrative force guides the story into the
present, where survivors and their children, beset by the devastations
of the past, struggle alongside the dead to perceive and appreciate the
beauty of that which remains and that which might yet be.
Julia Ain-Krupa is the author of Roman Polanski: A Life in Exile
(Praeger, 2010). She was born and raised in New York City, and spent her
early years in Krakow, Poland. In 2012, she received a creative writing
Fulbright scholarship to Poland, where this novel was conceived. She
lives in Tel Aviv and New York City.
"Stylistic virtuosity, penetrating emotional power, and a
post-apocalyptic vision ... a brilliant literary achievement... . Julia
Ain-Krupa gives us something luminous." --Philip K. Jason, Jewish Book
Council
"The Upright Heart is unlike anything I have ever read. It is hard for
me to put into words how it is remarkable because, in surprising ways,
this book exists in a place beyond words. It takes place in Poland. It
is a family saga, a ghost story, and a perfect love story. World War II
is the sinkhole around which the characters and events revolve, faster
and faster-a feeling familiar to those of us who still have nightmares
about the Holocaust. At the end of the tunnel are light, and stars, and
understanding. I cried constantly while reading it, and remembered
again, fleetingly, that life is impossibly precious, that reading is
religion; it is one of the best things I've read." --Liana Finck,
author of A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York
"The Upright Heart is a poetic, beautifully written novel that
presents, in a moving way, the fates and memories of both Catholics and
Jews creating their new reality in post -World War II Poland. The gifted
young author shows here an unusually well-tuned sensibility." ⎯Irena
Grudzinska Gross, Princeton University
