Korczyna is the family home and site of catastrophe in Saul Burnstein’s memories: the town where a photograph made on 12 April 1919 records the Burnsteins together, and where an anti-Jewish pogrom soon destroyed that household. The place matters not as a setting for the novel’s present-day action but as the point of origin for a history of murder, dispersal, and survival that made Saul’s later life in the United States possible.

The family photograph

On 21 May 1946, in his Capitol office in Washington, D.C., Congressman Saul Burnstein again took out a photograph from the first drawer of his desk. On its back, in his mother’s handwriting, was the date and place: “Korczyna, 12 de abril de 1919”. The picture showed the modest celebration of Saul’s Bar Mitzvah, held on the Saturday after his thirteenth birthday. Unlike the lavish celebrations Abraham and Sara had arranged for their other sons, this one was a small meal attended by Saul’s siblings and a synagogue ceremony. With Abraham dead and Saul’s eldest brother Elyahu already in New York, Efraim spoke the blessing.

The photograph held the whole family at a last moment of togetherness. Sixteen people had posed in the dining room of their home in Korczyna. Sara sat beside Saul at the table; Efraim and David stood behind them, with David’s wife holding a baby; Linka, the youngest sister, stood beside Efraim. Their two older sisters sat with their husbands and five children. Saul returned to the image repeatedly, reading in it both the people present and the absences that would define the family’s future.

Pogrom and dispersal

The family’s separation began before the photograph. In November 1918, Elyahu emigrated to the United States after returning from the war and learning that his fiancée had married someone else. In January 1919, a group of Polish army officers instigated a pogrom under the pretext that Galicia’s Jews supported the Soviets and opposed Polish independence. Abraham, a religious and orderly shopkeeper who was neither a Polish patriot nor sympathetic to the revolutionaries who had overthrown the tsarist empire, was not asked about his politics. The mob wrecked his shop, dragged him through the streets, and applauded as he was hanged in a square in Korczyna.

After her husband’s murder and the ruin of the business, Sara prepared to move with her daughter Agar to Kraków. The family photograph records the Bar Mitzvah meal that she could still give Saul before the household dispersed. The novel makes the loss concrete through the absences surrounding that occasion: Elyahu was already in America, and Abraham was dead. It also notes that none of Abraham’s daughters was at home on the night of the pogrom. Saul believed that, had they been there, the attackers might have raped them rather than killed their father; he also believed Abraham would have died sooner or later, unable to endure the calamity of his daughters’ suffering.

Survival and its counterfactual

In 1946, Saul calculated that twenty-seven, perhaps almost twenty-eight, years had passed since the photograph was taken. Of the sixteen people pictured in Korczyna, only two were alive by then. Saul’s own survival depended on a chain of decisions made after the pogrom: Efraim accepted Elyahu’s offer to go to America, but waited until Saul’s Bar Mitzvah before taking him along. Without that delay and departure, Saul imagined, he would have been murdered in Plaszów with Sara, Agar, David, David’s wife, and their children; other relatives died in the Warsaw Ghetto or Auschwitz. Only the three brothers who crossed the Atlantic survived from the Burnstein family of Korczyna.

That counterfactual links the local violence in Korczyna to Saul’s later position as an elected Democratic representative in the United States. The photograph is at once family keepsake and measure of what his political life cost in lives left behind. Korczyna endures in the narrative as the name attached to the date on its reverse: a home remembered through a single image, and the place from which survival began with separation.