Films, Screenplays, Plays, and Novels by Leigh Podgorski
Novels
The Women Debrowska
Download Chapter One of The Women Debrowska
(© 2010. Adobe Acrobat .pdf, 195k)
Anatola Debrowska, assistant professor of developmental skills, has a family spinning off into three separate orbits and a life spiraling down into mind-numbing tasks when the 25 year old son she gave up at birth suddenly appears on her doorstep setting her upon a journey to mid 18th century Poland and the eventual reunification of not only her disjointed family but herself.
The reunion does not go smoothly. But when Pyotr, closed and cryptic, returns abruptly to the East Coast with the pronouncement in Polish: “I am nothing,” on the advice of her sister, Clarisse, Anatola follows. Finding him disheveled and drunken in his boyhood home, and determined not to lose her son a second time, Anatola trundles him off to her Aunt Alka’s house. There, Alka shows them a treasure trove of Debrowska-Debski archives left by Frances, Alka's mother, the sisters’ grandmother. Eventually, Anatola is able to break through Pytor’s defenses, convincing him to help in the archaeological dig through the family annals.
The archives: letters, diaries, and Frances’ enigmatic poetry, lead Anatola on a journey that begins in Debowiec, Poland in January 1756 at the foot of the Lazy/Debowiec Bridge on the eve of a serf uprising led by Waclaw Mikus and Maciej Debski. The serfs are massacred; Mikus is captured, but the dashing Maciej Debski escapes – stumbling upon Barbara Ulanski, eight years old, out riding and caught unawares at the edge of history. Though still a child, Barbara falls deeply in love with Maciej. It is a love that will endure for seventeen years and will define the Debrowski-Debski clan through the next two and a half centuries.
The Women Debrowska follows the family as it is torn apart by loyalists and revolutionaries, riches and poverty, oppression and war and the partitions of a beloved homeland. Interwoven with the personal story is the history of a nation, uplifted by the great visions of the Age of Enlightenment and Polish Kings such as Jadwiga and Kazimerz the Great, and an endearing spirit of hope that refused to be conquered, a spirit unique to the Polish character during even her darkest most hopeless hours.
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