The new year at the POLIN Reading Room begins with a meeting about the book titled 'Hanna and Dorota.' Michał Nogaś will talk with Ewa Mańkowska. The book was published by EMG Publishing.

January 15, 2025 (Wednesday), 6:00 PM
📅 meeting in the main hall
👭 'Hanna and Dorota' is a story about the friendship of two painters, Hanna Rudzka-Cybisowa and Dorota Seydenman, a story of friendship for life and death.
📖 The description of the lives, works, and friendship of the two painters is accompanied by a lavishly recreated historical and cultural background of Poland and Europe, particularly Kraków, Warsaw, and Paris in the 19th and 20th centuries.
📖 The heroines of Mańkowska's book are among the first Polish artists to paint professionally, members of the Paris Committee – a group of creators commonly known as the 'kapists' – whose centenary of departure to France, a journey that was a shocking extravagance at that time, we celebrate this year.
📖 Dorota Seydenman, a woman from Warsaw, known to her friends as Dusia, is the sister of Aniela Steinsbergowa – the first female lawyer in Galicia, a legend of the opposition during the PRL, defender of Kazimierz Moczarski, Jacek Kuroń, and Adam Michnik, and a collaborator of KOR. Hanna Rudzka-Cybisowa is the first woman to obtain the title of professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, the wife of Jan Cybis.
📖 'This is a book about the friendship of two women – a Pole and a Jewess, united by their love for art, ambitions, and the pursuit of freedom and independence. But it is also a fast-paced story about the world of assimilated wealthy Jewish families, about the Kraków bohemia of the 1920s, the kapists, and the crazy Paris, finally about Polish anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, blackmailers, and the Righteous. Reading this book is engaging, delightful, but also painful.'
Małgorzata Omilanowska-Kiljańczyk
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