Who will win the battle over the estate of ‘The Partisan Artist’?

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When Elena Ragozhina discussed her family with friends, she would occasionally joke that her grandfather had one brother – and she was a descendent of the idiot.

Those brothers, Adolphe and Marcus Neyman, were born in Warsaw at the tail end of the 19th century and lived diametrically opposed lives after leaving the Polish capital as ambitious young men and seeking their fortunes elsewhere.

If I were to tell you that one of them, Adolphe, headed west while the other, Marcus, headed east, prizes would not be given for successfully guessing which of them ultimately enjoyed a comfortable life and which endured a tough, unjustly cruel one.

Yet as Elena’s daughter and Marcus’ great-granddaughter, Nadia Ragozhina, shows in her beautifully written, touching new family memoir “Worlds Apart” – about the two branches of her family – no Jews on the Continent were ever far from tragedy as the 20th century unfolded, whichever way they headed. Indeed, an alternative title for the book could have been “The Worst of Both Worlds: Nazi Death Camps and Soviet Gulags.”

If you can imagine a personal family history whose contrasting lives wouldn’t be out of place in a Herman Wouk or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn novel, you’ll get a sense of how rewarding “Worlds Apart: The Journeys of My Jewish Family in Twentieth-Century Europe,” to give it its full title, is.

A sketch of partisans by Bogen.
Alexander Bogen Foundation

The book became something of an odyssey for Ragozhina after the disparate branches of her maternal great-grandfather’s family finally met a decade ago in Geneva. That was when she first heard tales about what Adolphe’s daughters, Eva and Eugenia, experienced during World War II – when one of them lived in occupied Brussels and the other in British Mandatory Palestine – and saw how two ideologically driven decisions had led to such radically different lives.

When she combined this with her grandmother Anna’s stories of living in the Soviet Union through the bleakest days of communism (you know, as opposed to all those cheery ones), Ragozhina knew she had a story to tell.

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One of Alexander Bogen’s works.
Alexander Bogen Foundation

Tali Bogen in her grandfather’s apartment studio in Tel Aviv.
Hadas Parush

A portrait of the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever, by Bogen.
Alexander Bogen Foundation

‘Girl with a doll,’ 1943, by Alexander Bogen.
Alexander Bogen Foundation

‘Partisans,’ 1984, by Alexander Bogen.
Alexander Bogen Foundation

‘The Holocaust,’ 1970, by Alexander Bogen.
Alexander Bogen Foundation

The artist Alexander Bogen, in his Tel Aviv studio.
Alexander Bogen Foundation

Adolphe had migrated to Switzerland in 1905, changed the family name to Neuman and, after several years working at others, established his own successful watch factory in Geneva.