Mosaic: a Chronicle of Five Generations

Description

This remarkable true story begins in the Polish city of Krakow in 1890 and spans one hundred years and four continents. God blessed Lieba and the devout Jewish patriarch Daniel Baldinger with eleven children, and this richly textured portrait follows their lives down the decades, through the terrifying years of the Holocaust, to the present time. Lives that personify the struggles and hopes of their century. Mosaic is compelling storytelling at its best: from the fascinating detail of Polish-Jewish culture and the rivalries and dramas of family life, to its moving account of lives torn apart by war and persecution, this is an extraordinary story of a family, and of one woman's journey to reclaim her heritage.

Diane Armstrong is a child Holocaust survivor who arrived in Australia from Poland in 1948. An award-winning journalist and bestselling author, she has written six previous books. Her family memoir Mosaic: A chronicle of five generations, was published in 1998 and was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Non-Fiction as well as the National Biography Award. It was published in the United States and Canada, and was selected as one of the year's best memoirs by Amazon.com. In 2000, The Voyage of Their Life: The story of the SS Derna and its passengers, was shortlisted in the New South Wales Premier's Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Her first novel, Winter Journey, was published in 2004 and shortlisted for the 2006 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. It has been published in the US, UK, Poland and Israel. Her second novel, Nocturne, was published in 2008 and won the Society of Women Writers Fiction Award. It was nominated for a major literary award in Poland. Empire Day, a novel set in post-war Sydney, was published in 2011, and The Collaborator, set in Hungary and Israel, was published in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom in 2019. Diane has a son and daughter and three granddaughters. She lives in Sydney. Photo credit: Jonathan Armstrong