Galicia matters in the novel as two different places joined by a name: the Spanish region associated with Manuel Arroyo’s return and with the story’s wider political geography, and the Polish Galicia from which Sal Burnstein’s family came. The distinction gives personal weight to the novel’s account of anti-Jewish violence and to Burnstein’s later involvement in efforts to expose a Madrid network sheltering former Nazis.

Two Galicias

The novel explicitly distinguishes the Galicia of Burnstein’s origins as the “other Galicia,” the Polish one. That qualification prevents the name from collapsing two separate histories into one: Spanish Galicia belongs to the geography of the Republican exile and the plot’s routes through Spain, while Polish Galicia is the setting of Burnstein’s family memory and the violence that shaped him.

The contrast also links places that the story’s political history brings into contact. Burnstein’s origins connect the American congressional investigator to eastern European Jewish experience, while the Madrid network he helps pursue belongs to a postwar system of protection for former Nazis. Galicia is therefore not simply a regional label; the same name points toward distinct communities and sharply unequal experiences of war and persecution.

Burnstein’s family history in Polish Galicia

On May 21, 1946, in his Capitol office in Washington, Sal Burnstein takes out a family photograph. He turns it over and reads the date and place written in his mother’s hand: Korczyna, April 12, 1919. The image gathers the Burnstein family, but it also records absences. His elder brother Elyahu had emigrated to the United States in November 1918, after returning from the war and discovering that his fiancée had married someone else. Their father was killed the following January.

Abraham Burnstein was religious and orderly. He did not consider himself a Polish patriot, but neither was he sympathetic to the revolutionaries who had overturned the Russian Empire. That distinction did not protect him. A mob, citing the claim that Galicia’s Jews supported the Soviets and opposed Polish independence, destroyed his shop, dragged him through the streets, and applauded as he was hanged in a square in Korczyna. The mob did not ask what he believed. The family photograph’s date, written by his mother, places the intimate record of a household beside the violence that broke it apart.

From inherited loss to political action

When Manuel Arroyo is told that Burnstein has contacted his associates, he learns that the congressman is acting both for himself and for a powerful New York lobby of Jewish businesspeople and financiers, most of them originally from Polish Galicia. Burnstein emigrated to the United States as a child; the Nazis later exterminated his entire family. Arroyo is told that revenge motivates him, but that he is a serious and trustworthy ally.

The information Burnstein receives concerns a network operating in Madrid that protects former Nazis. Its source is Meg Williams, whose work for committees supporting the Spanish Republican cause and Spanish exiles has made her an influential activist. The novel thus connects the Polish Galicia of Burnstein’s family history to the Spanish setting of postwar Nazi protection through a chain of exile, political organizing, and intelligence. The geographical distinction matters precisely because it does not erase the distance between the places: it shows how the memory of persecution in one Galicia can inform action against impunity in another country.