Poland is recalled in the novel through Sal Burnstein’s family history, preserved in a photograph from Korczyna. That image links his father’s murder to the later political work of a son who has built a life in the United States but still measures himself against the family left behind.

The photograph from Korczyna

On May 21, 1946, Burnstein takes a photograph from the first drawer of his Capitol desk and turns it over to read his mother’s inscription: “Korczyna, 12 de abril de 1919”. Nearly twenty-eight years have passed, yet the handwriting still moves him. The image contains almost all the Burnsteins, but its absences tell the family’s story as forcefully as the people pictured.

His elder brother Elyahu is missing because he emigrated to the United States in November 1918, after returning from the war and learning that his fiancée had married another man. Their father, Abraham Burnstein, is absent for a more brutal reason: he was killed in January 1919. The dated photograph thus holds together migration and murder, the two ruptures that divided the family.

Antisemitic violence and its pretext

Abraham was religious and orderly. He did not think of himself as a Polish patriot, but he had even less sympathy for the revolutionaries who had overturned the tsarist empire. That political distance did not protect him. A crowd destroyed his shop, dragged him through the streets, and applauded as he was hanged in a square in Korczyna.

The pogrom’s perpetrators invoked the claim that Galicia’s Jews supported the Soviets and opposed Polish independence. They did not bother to ask Abraham what he believed. The episode shows how collective accusation made Jewish identity itself a target: the crowd’s violence was not an inquiry into an individual’s politics but a punishment delivered without one.

A memory carried into public life

In 1946 Burnstein is a Democratic congressman, but the photograph in his desk remains his private measure of who he is. He has read its inscription hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times; returning to it is a way of returning to the family history behind his public identity. Poland therefore persists in the narrative not as a present-day homecoming but as the remembered site of loss that shapes Burnstein’s understanding of what has been done to his family.

That history also informs the account of Burnstein’s later political purpose. He is described as having emigrated as a child and as having lost his entire family to Nazi extermination; he is approached as a serious ally in efforts concerning a Madrid network protecting former Nazis. His family’s earlier persecution in Poland and the later destruction of his relatives are distinct episodes, but the novel places them within a continuing history of violence against Jews. The photograph makes that history personal: a name, a date, and a family portrait survive where the people themselves do not.