The Book:

After the Holocaust, Helena Lipstadt’s survivor parents fled Poland vowing never to return. Decades later, after her parents’ deaths, she warily visits, then returns, again and again.

Walking on the city streets where her parents played as children, Helena begins to comprehend the interwoven culture of Jews and Poles. She honors her family’s layered history as she seeks and builds connections with the Polish people she meets.

In powerful prose and poems, Lipstadt looks at a bloodstained past with her heart’s eye.  Our Dark and Radiant Land is a map to a new place of seeing, where truth and reconciliation co-exist.

The Author:

Helena Lipstadt is the author of two chapbooks, Leave Me Signs and If My Heart Were a Desert. Her work has been generously supported by residencies at WUJS Arts Project, Arad, Israel and The Borderland Foundation, Sejny, Poland.

Lipstadt accepted Bedouin hospitality in a tent on the shoulder of Mount Sinai, sailed up the Nile River in a felucca, and in Poland, helped re-create a 17th century wooden synagogue. She designed and hand built her home in Maine.

Lipstadt was born in Berlin, Germany and now lives in Los Angeles, California and Blue Hill, Maine.