Long-time seasonal Chilmark residents and Washington DC authors Jean and Michael
Levin will present a reading/multi-media summary of their book ‘A Border Town in
Poland: A 20th Century Memoir’ that combines vivid family oral history with their 40-year
struggle to tell this fascinating globe-spanning tale.

They will highlight their quests seeking to grasp the full history behind the adventures, photos, documents and
translated letters their book contains. They also will recount the remarkable post-2021
publication events which brought Jean back on short notice to Poland in Fall 2023 —
and what emerged from that trip to a now “Jew free” town.

Hirsch Bieler’s (1900-1985) first-person saga of displacement, resilience, loss and hope
in serial “promised lands” resonates in a world again facing closed borders,
antisemitism, hatred of others and floods of refugees. His dramatic life story of vanished
worlds recounts an odyssey from early life in Polish-Prussian border town Grajewo,
through starvation and smuggling on WWI’s Eastern Front, to his new life and
entrepreneurial rise in Weimar Germany/Hitler’s Third Reich. In 1936 he fled from
Leipzig Germany with his concert-pianist wife and young daughter to Tel Aviv (British
Mandate Palestine) and eventual US citizenship.

The book’s first-person voices end with heartbreaking letters from Hirsch’s parents and
brother trapped in Soviet, then Nazi, Poland (1939-41). The narrative concludes with an
epilogue of global family survival, reunification and love.

The Jean and Michael met at the University of Pennsylvania and married in Oxford England. He is
an environmental lawyer and writer juggling three vocations. Jean’s career has spanned
teaching, writing, consulting, entrepreneurial, and non-profit roles, including a
pathbreaking eldercare handbook and directing an on-line clearinghouse for long-
distance family caregivers (2005-2018). In 2017 they began to mine their source
material to produce Two Pianos: Playing for Life (2018–), a multimedia concert
documentary with live classical music about Jean’s mother Anna and her colleagues
concertizing under and after the Third Reich in which Hirsch makes a cameo
appearance.

“Surviving by smuggling, entrepreneurship, obtaining papers legal and otherwise, are
rendered like a major thriller. Resonates with every descendant of those who came to
America fleeing persecution for a better life.” – Main Line Times

“An important addition to 20th century history. A vivid and energizing oral history, now
published in its full glory.” — Oxford University Alumni Magazine.

This program is brought to you in collaboration between the VH and OB libraries and will take place in the Community Room at the Oak Bluffs Library

CONTACT: Anne McDonough  508.838.4459  amcdonough@clamsnet.org