The Conscientious Historian (Paperback, 2nd ed)

History is in the making when a young Polish postgraduate student of history, Karol Baranowski, attends a conference in Warsaw in the days following the fall of communism. While at the conference, he meets Joanna, a Polish-American Jew, with whom he forms a fateful association. When he stumbles upon a murder in which he is implicated, Karol finds himself on the run, not only from the law but from history and from himself. Years later, now an eminent historian, Karol travels to the small Mazovian town of Wysziadów to pay his respects at the funeral of his great aunt. While there, he meets a mysterious man who breaks years of silence to tell Karol his story. As he listens in wonder and horror to the man’s tales of deception and murder, of pogroms and lies, and of secrets best left untold, his own history, which is one he would sooner forget, comes back to haunt him. Soon, everything Karol thought he knew about history, about himself, about his mother and father, blurs in and out of focus as his mind pulsates with crazy visions peopled with heroes and villains from Poland’s troubled history. Forced into searching for the answers to questions no one has yet asked, Karol finds himself with uncertain identity in the underworld of prostitutes and beggars, thieves and murderers. Here, he faces his final struggle in an effort to retain his grip on reality in a world where nothing is as it seems.