Lecture and Book Promotion of "Courage and Fear. Non-Heroic Narratives of Occupied Lwów" in New York

Courage and Fear is a study of a multicultural city in times when all norms collapse. Ola Hnatiuk presents a meticulously documented portrait of Lviv’s ethnically diverse intelligentsia during World War Two. As the Soviet, Nazi, and once again Soviet occupations tear the city’s social fabric apart, groups of Polish, Ukrainian and Jewish doctors, academics and artists try to survive, struggling to manage complex relationships and to uphold their ethos. As their pre-war lives are violently upended, courage and fear shape their actions. Ola Hnatiuk employs diverse sources in several languages to tell the story of Lviv from a multi-ethnic perspective and to challenge the national narratives dominant in Central and Eastern Europe.

The outcome is an image of Lwów that is, frankly, unsurpassed in its intellectual and emotional richness, in Polish or for that matter in any other language that I know.
Timothy Snyder

Thoughtful, insightful, exceptionally well researched and moving at the same time, Courage and Fear is the book that plunges the reader into the depth of the history in one of the most contested places on the European map.
Serhii Plokhy

Ola Hnatiuk is a professor at the University of Warsaw and at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. She also served in the Polish diplomatic corps (2006–2010). She is the recipient of numerous awards, including Polonia Restituta (Republic of Poland highest state award), the Antonovych Foundation Award for fostering Polish-Ukrainian cultural cooperation, and the Pruszynski Polish PEN-Club Award. Her book Courage and Fear (originally published in 2015) received awards in Ukraine and in Poland.

The event is the New York launch of prof. Ola Hnatiuk’s book Courage and Fear published by the Academic Studies Press of Boston in cooperation with the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and the Jan Nowak-Jezioranski College of Eastern Europe. Book signing will follow the lecture.

The event is organized by the Polish Cultural Institute New York, the American Friends of the University of Warsaw, the University of Warsaw, the Brooklyn Public Library, the Jan Nowak-Jezioranski College of Eastern Europe, the Academic Studies Press and in cooperation with the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in New York and the New Eastern Europe.

The English edition of Courage and Fear has been made possible by the generous grant of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Poland.

Monday, November 18, 2019
7:30 pm (book sale from 7.00 pm)
Brooklyn Public Library, Central Library, Dweck Center
10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, NY 11238

The event is free and open to the public.
RSVP by November 15 at nyc.office@instytutpolski.org