Memoir of a Polish Girl at the Time of the Russian Revolution (1914/1924). Expanded hardcover edition with additional photographs. Irene Rochas was born Aniela Tarnowicz in Warsaw in 1906, the youngest child in a large upper middle-class Polish family. With the outbreak of WW I in 1914, Irene and her family were stranded in Moscow, and with the further outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution, they were able to return to their homeland only after a delay of four years. Irene?s rediscovered narrative ?- written when she was fifty years old and set in the form of a novel ?- is a remembrance of those eventful years of her childhood in Moscow and Warsaw. In this sense, it is truly a ?memoir?. Yes, ?danse macabre? is the dance of death, the last waltz to which we are all invited. But Irene?s ?Danse Macabre? ?- with its inquisitive and empathetic tone... and its often searing imagery ?- is less a rumination on the inevitability of death and more a testament to the vibrancy of life itself. [340 pp., endnote, 30 plates]