Five years ago, it was clear to author Judy Batalion that she was not done with the determined, resilient young Jewish women she had come to know so well through work on her award-winning bestseller, “The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos.”

“I became very interested in this period. I knew there was more there, and I wanted to further explore the world that had created these audacious, stylish young Jewish women,” Batalion said.

This quest led her to Poland’s capital, Warsaw — the “Paris of the North” during the interwar period. Moving back in time several years to before the Nazi ghettos and partisan fighters featured in “The Light of Days,” she encountered a city of nearly 1.2 million residents bubbling with art, culture, and nightlife, while concurrently contending with political instability and growing right-wing nationalism and pro-Nazi sentiment.

It is in this Warsaw of 1938 that fictional characters Fanny Zelshinsky and Zosia Dror live in Batalion’s new novel, “The Last Woman of Warsaw,” published on April 7.

Batalion told The Times of Israel that after writing a memoir and then the nonfiction “The Light of Days,” she was ready to produce this prequel novel.

“I consider myself genre-fluid,” quipped Batalion.

She has created a high-stakes “odd couple” narrative featuring two young women trying to find love and figure out what is truly important to them in a world that is beginning to collapse around them.

Fanny is the extremely fashionable only child of divorced parents, both from successful industrialist families. A French student at the university, she is captivated by photography and wants to change majors if she can get her photography professor to appreciate her work and sign a permission form. Her goal is to become a recognized photographer so she can become financially independent — and thereby perhaps avoid marrying the young man she is engaged to.

Zosia, a devout Labor Zionist, has left the countryside to move to Warsaw following pogroms in her town that resulted in catastrophe for her family. Having decided that Zionist socialism is the answer to the Jewish question, she rises quickly in the movement’s ranks and hopes to secure a nearly impossible-to-obtain visa to Palestine.

Fanny lives in an upscale Warsaw neighborhood and mingles with non-Jews. Zosia, dressed in frayed clothing and subsisting on meager meals, lives in a commune in the old Jewish quarter.

Despite their glaring differences, the two meet and team up to search for the missing Wanda Petrovsky, a legendary photographer (likely modeled on the leading female Polish photographers of the era, such as Zofia Chomętowska). Petrovsky happens to be both Fanny’s photography professor and a top leader of Zosia’s Zionist movement, who Zosia believes may have a visa and an important message for her.

“The Last Woman of Warsaw” is about many things, one of which is how........

© The Times of Israel