Tonia Lechtman, a Polish Jewish woman living in the early twentieth century, could be any one of us. A member of a minority who continuously seeks space in mainstream society. A single mother overwhelmed with the shrinking possibilities of keeping her children safe. A migrant who left her home country hoping that her next destination would bring more options. A woman who became a refugee in a country she had chosen for her home, which now considered her an enemy. A woman who insisted on a right to a home. She was an ordinary woman who lived in extraordinary times.

My work on An Ordinary Life? The Journeys of Tonia Lechtman, 1918–1996 coincided with me beginning to teach jailed men in the United States, as well as working with formerly incarcerated men and women. I had just finished a book on the life of political prisoners in Stalinist prisons in Poland in the years following World War II; I thus moved from thinking and writing about the darkness and violence of the Stalinist government that sentenced Polish patriots to ten years’ confinement, to interacting with men in the United States who carried thirty- or forty-year sentences (or even life sentences without any possibility of parole) for drugs or gang violence.

Such crimes often emerged from the circumstances in which many of these men of color were destined to live; some among them were also wrongfully convicted. What I have learned from a select group of incarcerated or formerly incarcerated people was the power of self-reinvention and hope, and a deep sense of responsibility: for their families, for the students I brought to learn with them, and for their various real and imagined communities. I also learned that humanity is best discernible through vulnerability and a conscious decision to share life with others. This is where Tonia’s story fits in.