Author Event with Greg Dinner, "A Requiem for Hania"

Join the JAAMM Series for an afternoon with Greg Dinner, author of “A Requiem for Hania.”

There are secrets in one’s life that if revealed can change the lives of all around. A Requiem For Hania is a story of secrets, and a story of who we are, who we were once meant to be. What we were once meant to be. Inspired by a true story, structured not in chapters but ‘movements’ based purposely on musical form, the book follows three primary characters: 

In 1942, young Hania Stern is caught up in the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto, surviving when so many others do not survive, escaping when others do not escape. But escape is not release. Hers is the story of a soul lost, and a soul found.

In 1968, Pawel Weisz, a composer and teacher in Warsaw, knows little of his own past and what he does know he denies. At a time of great protest and attempted change in a Communist state at a crossroads, Pawel falls in love, a forbidden love with a radical young Jewish violinist. But the repressive State and the times in which the two men fall in love prevent the possibility of such. Their love finds them too late, leading to loss, to great pain, to exile.

And in 2006, Agniezka Janiec, an actor in Warsaw, seeking herself through her art, discovers at the death of her grandmother, Hannah Kielar, secrets that push her into a journey of discovery: about her Grandmother, about Warsaw in the Ghetto years, about where she comes from and who she is. About those lost, and those found.

A Requiem for Hania is a story of identity, of loss, of rediscovery. It is a story about friendship, about music that illuminates our common humanity, about the pain of the past and the potential for the present and for the future. It is finally a story of where we all come from, who we are…and where we ultimately are going as we find ourselves, as we grieve and as we celebrate.