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Book Review of The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman

The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman
reviewed on + 289 more book reviews


The title character, The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman, is not the central character of this meditative novel. Irma Seidenman is a Jewish widow of a radiologist with blond hair and blue eyes trying to survive outside of the ghetto in 1943 Warsaw. Her existence allows author Ardzej Szczypiorski to write as an omniscient narrator zooming in on the lives of loosely connected characters in wartime, sometimes weaving in and out of chronological order to describe their ultimate fate. It reads as a tribute to Polish identity and nationalism, an interesting read on the list of 1001 books you must read before you die.