ABOUT THE BOOK

Marian Ray was not a man who talked easily about himself.

Born in the small Polish village of Frankamionka, he was still a boy when war, fire, hunger, displacement, and forced labor tore through his family’s life. What he carried from those years came out only in fragments — over brandy, around kitchen tables, beside a pool in Florida, and in the quiet final days of his life.

In Marian Ray: The Man from Frankamionka, James Andrzej gathers those fragments into a deeply personal tribute to his father: a survivor, immigrant, husband, father, and grandfather who built a life in America from almost nothing.

Part memoir, part family history, and part act of remembrance, this is the story of one man’s endurance — and of the generations made possible because he survived.