Andrew Potok is an intense, vigorous, sensual man--and a gifted painter. Then, passing forty, he rapidly begins to go blind from an inherited eye disease, retinitis pigmentosa. Depressed and angry, he rages at the losses that are eradicating his life as an artist, his sources of pleasure, his competence as a man. He hates himself for becoming blind. But as he will ultimately discover, and as this remarkable memoir recounts, it is not the end of the world. It is the beginning.Ordinary DaylightThis the story of Potok's remarkable odyssey out of despair. He attempts to come to terms with his condition: learning skills for the newly blind, dealing with freakish encounters with the medical establishment, going to London for a promised cure through a bizarre and painful "therapy" of bee stings. He wrestles with the anguish of knowing that his daughter has inherited the same disease that is stealing his own eyesight. And then, as he edges ever closer to...

"Potok is blind but he makes us see not only the pre-World War Two landscape from which he and his family fled, but also how and why and at what price." —Jay Neugeboren, author of "Max Baer and the Star of David" and "Imagining Robert""Potok explores the long reach of both his family's 1939 escape from Poland and his own blindness in this thoughtful and elegant memoir." —Elinor Langer, author of "Josephine Herbst" and "A Hundred Little Hitlers"When Andrew Potok was eight he fled with his family from Warsaw, leaving home and business to escape the invading Nazis. The family made it to American, but Andrew's memories of violence, Jew hatred, and betrayal—including that of his father—erupted into nightmares and eventually formed the backdrop of his rich, though at times turbulent, life as an artist and writer.When, late in Andrew's life, a Polish lawyer offers to help him reclaim property in Krakow that was wrongfully inherited by a relative, he...