One may be lost, that others may be found...So let the music touch your heart.
There are secrets in one’s life that if revealed can change the lives of all around. A Requiem For Hania is a story of secrets, and a story of who we are, who we were once meant to be. What we were once meant to be.
Inspired by a true story, structured not in chapters but ‘movements’ based purposely on musical form, the book follows three primary characters over three generations:
In 1942, young Hania Stern is caught up in the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto, surviving when so many others do not survive, escaping when others do not escape. But escape is not release. Hers is the story of a soul lost, and a soul found.
In 1968, Pawel Weisz, a composer and teacher in Warsaw, knows little of his own past and what he does know he denies. At a time of great protest and attempted change in a Communist state at a crossroads, Pawel falls in love, a forbidden love with a radical young Jewish violinist. But the repressive State and the times in which the two men fall in love prevent the possibility of such. Their love finds them too late, leading to loss, to great pain, to exile.
And in 2006, Agniezka Janiec, an actor in Warsaw, seeking herself through her art, discovers at the death of her grandmother, Hannah Kielar, secrets that push her into a journey of discovery: about her Grandmother, about Warsaw in the Ghetto years, about where she comes from and who she is. About those lost, and those found.
A Requiem for Hania is a story of identity, of loss, of rediscovery. It is a story about friendship, about music that illuminates our common humanity, about the pain of the past and the potential for the present and for the future. It is finally a story of where we all come from, who we are...and where we ultimately are going as we find ourselves, as we grieve and as we celebrate.
With echoes of William Styron's 'Sophie's Choice', Wladyslaw Szpilman's 'The Pianist', Sebastian Barry's 'The Secret Scripture' and Elena Ferrante's exploration of female friendship in 'My Brilliant Friend', this is a novel not simply of the Warsaw Ghetto, or Warsaw in the protests of 1968, but a story of our world today, a story of each of us.
A novel of the Ghetto.
A novel of ourselves.
A Requiem for Hania
Author and screenwriter Greg Dinner grew up in Colorado, studied in New York, Paris and London before moving to Los Angeles to work in film. In 1984 he resettled in London, working for more than thirty-five years as a film executive, produced screenwriter in film and television and lecturer in film and ethics at film schools around the world. He now lives in the west of Ireland with his wife of forty-years, his hooligan blue-eyed collie and several mad chickens. A Requiem for Hania is his third novel.
