Chapter 2 Summary

Maryna flees Warsaw with her husband Bogdan and son Piotr to the village of Zakopane in the Tatra Mountains in a quest for health. The artist Jakub Goldberg, actor Tadeusz Bulanda, and the schoolmaster Julian Solski and his wife Wanda accompany her. It is this journey and group of people are the seed of their later emigration to America. They build themselves simple rustic huts to live in, and their time is taken up with the basic routines of daily life - cleaning, chopping wood, collecting fruits and potatoes to eat - with time in the evening for reading Shakespeare aloud. Long a favorite summer destination for these families, none has ever spent a winter there.

The physician Henryk later joins the group as they discover that their summer idyll in the mountains also involves snowstorms and hardships in the winter. Maryna writes...