Brigid Pasulka was recently awarded the 2010 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for her debut novel A Long, Long Time Ago & Essentially True, the melancholy weaving of two strains of a Polish family’s history.

A faculty member at Whitney M. Young Magnet School in the West Loop, Pasulka drew on her experience living in Krakow in the mid-’90s for the tale of Beata, a young woman trying to make it in the “New Poland” of the late 20th century, and for the World War II-era love story of Beata’s grandparents, renowned beauty Anielica and a war hero known as the Pigeon.

Beata, whose plainness has earned her the nickname “Baba Yaga,” after the folk-tale witch, left her home village for Krakow following her grandmother Anielica’s death. Through the eyes of this village girl, Pasulka explores the tricky, contradictory terrain of the contemporary metropolis, where bribe money helps university students more than test scores, and foreign men use foreign currency to buy the bodies of visa-hungry Polish girls. Rapid modernization and the promise of opportunity elsewhere threaten to overtake history’s place in the minds of the country’s student population, who refuse to remember what older generations can’t forget.

Beata boards with her aunt Irena, a woman raised on the hardship and revolutionary fervor of the old country. Irena keeps a tenuous peace with her daughter, Magda, a would-be prosecutor firmly on the side of Poland’s forgetful generation. An impassioned cinephile, Beata takes a passive, moviegoer’s approach to life: working two jobs and sleeping atop a mattress growing fat with American dollars, she’s neither happy with her stagnant life nor able to channel her ambivalence into ambition, or motion.

Told in alternating chapters is the brief and possibly tragic love story of Anielica and Pigeon, a man with “golden hands” who wooed his future wife by rebuilding her family’s home around them. Despite the deliberately folkloric tone of their tale, Pasulka indulges in neither allegory nor magical realism.

What she creates is something far better in its anti-epic believability: a slow-burning, often awkward romance between two people who contend with constricting propriety, long separation, and the violence of World War II before they can marry.

The tales reconnect in a third-act revelation that is somehow neither convincing nor surprising. Though it doesn’t turn out to be the deus ex machina that it first appears, it lacks some of the grace and seamlessness of the rest of Pasulka’s work. Nevertheless, it’s impossible to grudge either Anielica or Beata the ambiguously hopeful conclusion to their genuinely moving stories.