Memoir of a Polish Girl at the Time of the Russian Revolution (1914-1924). Irene Rochas was born Aniela Tarnowicz in Warsaw in 1908, the youngest child in a large upper middle-class Polish family. With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Irene and her family were stranded in Moscow, and with the further outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution, they were able to return to their homeland only after a delay of four years. Irene's rediscovered narrative - written when she was fifty years old and set in the form of a novel - is a remembrance of those eventful years of her childhood in Moscow and Warsaw. In this sense, it is truly a "memoir," but, as the reader will see, it is also much more than that. Yes, "danse macabre" is the dance of death, the last waltz to which we are all invited. But Irene's "Danse Macabre" - with its inquisitive and empathetic tone... and its often searing imagery - is less a rumination on the inevitability of death and more a testament to the vibrancy of life itself. 339 pp., 27 plates]