Karen Kirsten with Alysia Abbott: Irena's Gift

Weaving mystery, history and memoir, Irena’s Gift is the captivating account of one woman’s personal quest to uncover the unspoken and give voice to her family’s secret war-torn history.
From the glittering concert halls of interbellum Warsaw and the vermin-infested ghetto where an SS officer is convinced to save a Jewish child’s life, to the author’s upbringing in a Christian home, this is the story of resilience, sacrifice, Jewish identity, intergenerational trauma, and the secrets we keep to protect ourselves and those we love. For readers of When Time Stopped by Ariana Neumann, I Want You to Know We’re Still Here by Esther Safran Foer, and House of Glass by Hadley Freeman.
In 1942, in German-occupied Poland, a Jewish baby girl was smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto in a backpack. That baby, Joasia, knew nothing about this extraordinary event until she was thirty-two, when a letter arrived from a stranger. She also learned that the parents who raised her were actually her aunt and uncle. Joasia kept this knowledge hidden from her own daughter, Karen—until an innocent question unexpectedly revealed the truth.
Determined to understand the generational trauma that cloaked her family in silence, her own origins, and to help heal her mother’s pain, Karen set out to unearth decades of secrets and piece together a hidden history—from the glittering days of pre-war Poland to the little-known Radom Pr*son, where of 500 resistance members tortured, only 10 survived, her grandfather the only known Jewish one. There, Karen finds answers, yet not easy ones.
As she exposes her family’s saga of love and betrayal, countless brushes with death, precarious hiding places, and the astounding negotiation with an SS officer who saved her mother’s life, Karen must reconcile the complicated, multi-faceted truths behind human behavior.
Irena’s Gift weaves together a mystery, history, and memoir to tell a story of sacrifice, impossible choices, impossible odds, and the way trauma reverberates throughout generations. Yet it is also a story of resilience and bravery, revealing how love and hope, too, can not only prevail through the worst imaginable circumstances, but resonate through time.

Karen Kirsten is an Australian-American writer, refugee advocate, and Holocaust educator who lectures on the topics of hatred and reconciliation around the world. Her work has appeared in Salon.com, The Week, The Jerusalem Post, WIEZ in Poland, Boston's National Public Radio station, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, and her Best American Essays-nominated piece, “Searching for the Nazi Who Saved My Mother’s Life,” was selected as a Narratively Best Ever story. Raised in Australia by a mother who was a Holocaust survivor-turned born again Christian and grandparents who silenced her questions about concentration camps, Karen lived amongst refugees who were hiding horrible secrets while trying to rebuild their identities. After discovering her grandparents were not her biological grandparents, she traveled the globe to uncover her family’s hidden past. She has lived in five countries across three continents and now calls Massachusetts home. She can be found online at KarenKirsten.com.

Moderator Alysia Abbott is the author of Fairyland, A Memoir of My Father, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and an ALA Stonewall Award winner, a winner of the Madame Figaro Prix Heroine, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards. In 2022, she was awarded an artist grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She grew up in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the only child of gay poet and writer, Steve Abbott. As a journalist, essayist, and critic, she's written for The Boston Globe, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Vogue, Marie Claire, TheAtlantic.com, TriQuarterly, and Psychology Today, among other publications. She holds an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction from New School University and was a contributing producer at WNYC Radio. Her first full-length book, Fairyland was completed with the help of a Ragdale Fellowship and the wonderful staff at W.W. Norton and is currently being made into a feature film. The French edition of Fairyland was published by Edition Globe on March 12, 2015 with a series of events in Paris. Additionally, the book has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Polish, and Portuguese.

Alysia is also co-founder of The Recollectors Project, dedicated to remembering parents lost to AIDS and supporting the children they left behind. You can learn more about this project by listening to her interviews on The Leonard Lopate Show and Here & Now.

Formerly the Director of the Boston Literary District, she now runs GrubSreet’s Memoir Incubator Program in Boston.

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