Author's debut novel explores her Polish roots

As the refugee crisis continues, much is currently – and rightly – being written about the migrant experience. Comparisons have been made to the huge displacement of people in Europe after the Second World War – and this earlier upheaval is part of the inspiration for a new book by Rotherham-based writer Karola Gajda.

Gajda grew up in Doncaster to Polish parents who came to the UK after the Second World War and their experiences feature in the narrative of her debut novel Are My Roots Showing? The book is a gentle romantic comedy about 39-year-old Yorkshire-born Pole Magda Mikolajczyk who after a relationship break-up leaves England to go to work in Warsaw and explore her Polish heritage.

Gajda was a stand-up comedian in London for many years, before moving back to Yorkshire when she got married seven years ago, and the book grew out of a theatre piece she created and took up to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival ten years ago. “During the show I cooked the audience a Polish meal, beetroot soup – my hands were bright pink by the end of the run – and I talked about my Polish background,” she explains. “It was a funny piece about what it was like being a Polish Yorkshire immigrant in the 1970s and 80s, but it was also about identity and how history can shape us.”

After a successful summer in Edinburgh, Gajda did a short run of the piece in 2006 at the Arts Theatre in London where a literary agent saw it and suggested she write a novel. “While the show was extremely factual and autobiographical, the book is much more fictionalised, although I did look very much at my own life when I was writing it,” she says. “But like the show, it is a mixture of comedy and tragedy.”

In Warsaw, the book’s protagonist Magda, who Gajda says is very loosely based on herself (she describes her as “a more intense version of me”) meets up with Polish relatives she hasn’t seen for a while, including her super high-achieving dentist cousin Dagmara and her eccentric aunt Basia, known as AB. They, along with Magda’s mother back in Yorkshire, are conspiring to help Magda find romance, and preferably a husband, while she is in Poland. It is a hugely entertaining, funny, heart-warming and often moving read.

Gajda touches on the changes that have taken place in Warsaw – emerging from the grim Communist era into a stylish modern city – from her own experiences of travelling there while growing up. And Gajda’s stand-up roots are certainly showing – there is some fine comic observation of human foibles and she is particularly astute on the complexity of family relationships.

The historical stories of both her parents are woven in to the novel. Her mother spent several years in a gulag in Siberia during the war – deported by Stalin from Eastern Poland (now Belarus) when the Soviet Union invaded; 1.7 million Poles were displaced altogether.

“My mother didn’t really like to talk about it very much, but she did occasionally mention things,” says Gajda. “When she was drawing the curtains at night and she’d suddenly say ‘the wolves would come howling up to our huts’ you’d get a flash of her past. The experience obviously had 
a huge impact; it really marked her. She experienced extreme poverty as a child and she wanted to provide for us. Having food on the table was very important.”

Her mother’s family was split up with her grandfather being sent separately to another gulag; it was assumed he had died but after the war the Red Cross contacted her to say that he was now living in England, working in a mine near Doncaster. She then travelled to Yorkshire where she met Gajda’s father who had grown up in a different part of Poland.

Too young to fight, he had worked on a German farm during the war. When hostilities ended, as a displaced person, he was given the option to emigrate – Australia and Canada were on offer but he chose to go to England – and he also found himself in the close-knit postwar Polish community of south Yorkshire.

“I think as immigrants my parents were both quite fearful and always wanted to blend in,” says Gajda. “I remember helping them with their English – they didn’t want to get things wrong. They were both fluent in English but spoke it with a strong Polish-Yorkshire accent. We always spoke Polish at home and my sister and I went to Polish school at the weekends which I absolutely hated but now wish I had worked harder at.

“I grew up feeling quite different – we were a bit of a novelty in the 1970s and 80s – and I was always conscious that there was this other culture I was part of.”

Sadly both Gajda’s parents have died since she first started on her novel and they were not aware she was writing it. But they were always very supportive of her creative endeavour, she says – although they worried it might not provide her with financial security, a view that was entirely understandable given their own wartime experiences. They were also a little bewildered at where all her creativity came from.

Gajda, however, knows its origins. “It comes from them,” she says. “I am sure that had their lives been different and not so disrupted by the war, they might have been artistic too, but those sides to them were never developed or nurtured. I could see latent creativity in both of them in different ways.”

Are My Roots Showing? is published by Cirrus on May 25 and will be available on Amazon as an e-book for £2.99, and print on demand for £10.

FACT FILE

Karola Gajda trained at the Jacques Lecoq Theatre School in Paris and was a stand-up comedian in London for many years. She says that while she would like to perform again she doesn’t think she will go back to stand-up. “I think I’m a different person now, but seeing great stand-up and learning what you can talk about was great training.” She is currently writing her second novel which she describes as “another fictional comedy”. Having spent years honing her first book has been good preparation. “I like telling stories and I really love comedy, and now I have more of an awareness of the novel form.”