Two contrasting, intensely personal accounts of the harrowing twentieth-century history of Central Europe deftly navigate the shadowy territory between memoir and fiction. One is Hanna Krall’s Chasing the King of Hearts, the real-life protagonist of which, Izolda Regensberg, returned to Poland in the 1980s from Israel, where her linguistic isolation left her bursting to tell her story. She approached Krall, a celebrated Polish journalist, who fashioned her experiences in Nazi-occupied Warsaw into this compelling novella.After Izolda’s husband, Shayek, is taken by the Nazis, she sets out on a seemingly impossible mission to rescue him from a concentration camp. Her “good” (i.e. not obviously Jewish) looks enable her to pass for a Catholic Pole (though the solemnity