The Korczyna pogrom of 1919 was the defining catastrophe in Sal Burnstein’s family history: a mob led by Polish army officers murdered his father, Abraham, and the violence dispersed a family whose surviving members would be devastated by the Holocaust. Recalled through a family photograph and the few who escaped, the pogrom links private bereavement to the larger history of antisemitic violence and mass displacement.

The attack in Korczyna

Abraham Burnstein was religious, orderly, and neither a Polish patriot nor sympathetic to the revolutionaries who had overturned the Russian Empire. Those distinctions offered no protection. A group of Polish army officers used the allegation that Galicia’s Jews were supporters of the Soviets and enemies of Polish independence as a pretext for the pogrom. The mob wrecked Abraham’s shop, dragged him through the streets, and hanged him in a Korczyna square while onlookers applauded. His attackers did not bother to ask what he believed.

The violence fell on a family already spread across several places. Abraham’s eldest son, Elyahu, had emigrated to the United States in November 1918 after returning from the war and learning that his fiancée had married someone else. Abraham’s daughters were away from home on the night of the pogrom: Agar lived in Kraków, Rebeca in Warsaw, and Linka with her mother. Their absence spared them from being found in the family home, though the narrative offers no certainty about what would otherwise have happened. Sal’s recollection imagines that the attackers might have raped them instead of killing Abraham, and that Abraham would not have survived the added grief.

The photograph and the survivors

On 12 April 1919, a family gathering in the Burnsteins’ Korczyna dining room was recorded in a photograph. Sara sits at the center beside the guest of honor; other relatives pose around the table, including Efraim, David and his wife with a baby, Linka, and Abraham’s older daughters with their husbands and children. The picture’s inscription, written in Sal’s mother’s hand, gives the date and place. Nearly three decades later, Sal still turns the photograph over to read it, and the image remains his way of finding himself in a family history broken by violence.

Of the sixteen people in the photograph, only two were alive by 21 May 1946. The pogrom killed Abraham; the catastrophe that followed the family’s dispersal claimed most of the others. Agar, David, and their relatives died at Plaszów; Moshe, Linka’s husband, died in the Warsaw Ghetto; Rebeca and her family, as well as Linka and hers, died at Auschwitz. The three Burnstein brothers who crossed the Atlantic were the only survivors from Korczyna. Elyahu’s earlier emigration and Efraim’s later decision to accept his brother’s offer and leave for America carried consequences far beyond their original circumstances.

Sal Burnstein’s life after the pogrom

Sal’s survival in the United States depended on that chain of departures. Efraim waited until Sal’s Bar Mitzvah before taking him with him to America. The book makes the counterfactual stark: without Efraim’s decision to emigrate, Sal would have remained in Europe and, like his mother and many of his siblings and relatives, might have died in a concentration camp. Instead, he became a Democratic congressman representing the American people. The pogrom is therefore not only the loss at the beginning of his family’s story; it is also the event against which his later political identity and American life are measured.

The photograph turns that history into something Sal can hold and revisit, but it cannot restore the people missing from it. His father’s murder and the later deaths of relatives make survival inseparable from absence: the family image preserves a moment of togetherness, while its small number of living subjects records how nearly the family was erased. The pogrom’s significance in the novel rests in that tension between a particular act of antisemitic violence and the long, unequal aftermath that determines who can remember it.