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Stubborn Life

Hardship and Hope in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Poland

Franceska Michalska

The current war in Ukraine gives this story a renewed urgency and relevance for our current time
Will appeal to a very wide audience, all those interested in Ukraine, history, medical biography, inspiring stories of female empowerment, of resilience, of feminism, of life-affirming true stories of human strength and endurance
Franceska Michalska was born in 1923 in Kamieniec Podolski, Ukraine. This is her memoir of surviving the great famine of 1931–32 before falling victim to growing Stalinist terror and the mass deportation of Poles from the region to Kazakhstan. After walking for 8,000 km and suffering unspeakable hardships, she finally arrives in Poland and becomes a doctor
Writing in a heartfelt yet matter-of-fact style, Michalska brilliantly evokes daily life under Russian occupation. Now more than ever, this memoir reads like a warning against history repeating, while at the same time offering a testament to human strength and to hope
US-based translator currently lives in Philadelphia and has been a Translator-in-Residence at Princeton University, a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, and Literature and Humanities Curator at the Polish Cultural Institute New York
Sean Gasper Bye’s translations of Polish literature have been awarded the EBRD Literature Prize and the Asymptote Close Approximations Prize