'Betty O’Neill grew up knowing very little about her father, Antoni. She knew that he had fled Poland after World World Two, that he had disappeared overnight when she was just an infant, and that his brief reappearance when she was a young adult had been a harrowing, painful ordeal.
'Fifty-five years after he deserted her family, Betty becomes determined to solve the mystery of her absent father and discover exactly who was Antoni Jagielski.
'When her search takes her to Poland, Betty unexpectedly inherits a family apartment from the half sister she never knew – a time capsule of her father’s life. Sifting through photos and letters she begins to piece together a picture of her father as a Polish resistance fighter, a survivor of Auschwitz and Gusen concentration camps, an exile in post-war England, and a migrant to Australia. But the deeper she searches, the darker the revelations about her father become, as Betty is faced with disturbing truths buried within her family.
'Honest, compelling, and meticulously researched, The Other Side of Absence is an elegant debut memoir of resilience and strength, and of a daughter reconciling the damage that families inherit from war.' (Publication summary)
'Jonathan Raban notes that when he returns from a trip, ‘I spend most of my time forgetting rather than remembering until I feel I can write about it … in other words, [I seek] a memory that is not over polluted by irrelevant details’ (Raban 2004, 59). In her haunting and haunted memoir The Other Side of Absence: Discovering My Father’s Secrets, Betty O’Neill, however, makes it her business never to forget a single detail of her quest to the truth about her father’s secret life; and when she returns from several trips to Poland to discover the complex identity of the man she barely knew, her obsessive search demands she record every particular and instance of her investigation. Fact, however murky, not imagination, is her quarry.' (Introduction)
'The realisation that our parents are not exactly who we understood them to be can be a profound rite of passage. For some it comes with no forewarning: a random event leads to an accidental disclosure, or substantiates an old rumour. For others this realisation takes shape in a less acute though no less transformative manner. With The Other Side of Absence: Discovering my father’s secrets, Betty O’Neill pieces together her family history in an effort to learn more about her father, a stranger she briefly encountered when she was nineteen. What began as an innocuous exercise at a writers’ retreat would evolve into a three-year research project through which the author uncovers the riveting story of Antoni Jagielski – resistance fighter, Holocaust survivor, unsettled postwar migrant, and absent father.' (Introduction)
'The realisation that our parents are not exactly who we understood them to be can be a profound rite of passage. For some it comes with no forewarning: a random event leads to an accidental disclosure, or substantiates an old rumour. For others this realisation takes shape in a less acute though no less transformative manner. With The Other Side of Absence: Discovering my father’s secrets, Betty O’Neill pieces together her family history in an effort to learn more about her father, a stranger she briefly encountered when she was nineteen. What began as an innocuous exercise at a writers’ retreat would evolve into a three-year research project through which the author uncovers the riveting story of Antoni Jagielski – resistance fighter, Holocaust survivor, unsettled postwar migrant, and absent father.' (Introduction)
'Jonathan Raban notes that when he returns from a trip, ‘I spend most of my time forgetting rather than remembering until I feel I can write about it … in other words, [I seek] a memory that is not over polluted by irrelevant details’ (Raban 2004, 59). In her haunting and haunted memoir The Other Side of Absence: Discovering My Father’s Secrets, Betty O’Neill, however, makes it her business never to forget a single detail of her quest to the truth about her father’s secret life; and when she returns from several trips to Poland to discover the complex identity of the man she barely knew, her obsessive search demands she record every particular and instance of her investigation. Fact, however murky, not imagination, is her quarry.' (Introduction)
