Classrooms and Barrooms: An American in Poland

CLASSROOMS AND BARROOMS An American in Poland

DAVID J. JACKSON

Classrooms and Barrooms An American in Poland

David J. Jackson

HAMILTON BOOKS A member of THE ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHING GROUP

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Copyright © 2009 by Hamilton Books 4501 Forbes Boulevard Suite 200 Lanham, Maryland 20706 Hamilton Books Acquisitions Department (301) 459-3366 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America British Library Cataloging in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Control Number: 2008942001 ISBN: 978-0-7618-4383-2 (paperback : alk. paper) eISBN: 978-0-7618-4384-9

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To My Family

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: City of Colors

ix

1

Kresowa

1

2

Choosing Łódź, Heading for Wrocław

7

3

Return to Kresowa

16

4

(Dis)Orientation

20

5

Friendly Fulbrighters

26

6

To Work in Łódź

31

7

Meanwhile, Back at Kresowa

36

8

Poland for the First Time

42

9

Names and Pictures

47

10

Polka, Polka, Polka

51

11

A Great Day of Teaching

56

12

Warsaw, London, and Oxfordshire

61

13

Another Bar

67

14

A Day on Piotrkowska Street

70

15

Wigilia

74

16

My Grandfather’s People

80 v

vi

Contents

17

Comments

84

18

Fitting In

88

19

Christmas and Boxing Day

94

20

Poland, Slovenia, and Austria

98

21

Fighting Poland

103

22

Three Good Classes

107

23

Zbyskuuuu . . .

114

24

Breaking Glass

118

25

Firsts and Lasts

121

Conclusion: Warsaw One More Time

127

References

131

Acknowledgments

There are many individuals and organizations I must thank for their positive contributions to this work. First, of course, I could not have had the experiences I write about in this book without the Fulbright Grant, so I thank the Polish-U.S. Fulbright Commission and the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars. I also thank the Department of American Studies and Mass Media at the University of Łódź for inviting me to teach in their fine program. I especially thank Elżbieta H. Oleksy and Wiesław Oleksy for helping to make my Fulbright semester happen. I wouldn’t have thrived without the friendship and help of colleagues in Łódź as well, including Paulina Matera, Aleksandra M. Różalska, Dorota Golańska, Magdalena Marczuk-Karbownik, Beata Duchnowicz, and David LaFrance. Of course, there is no teaching without students, so I thank the 132 students I had the pleasure to teach American politics to for their curiosity and intelligence. Many of my family and friends in the U.S. read chapters of the book in various stages of completeness and offered helpful comments. These include my parents Jim and Barb Jackson, as well as my brother and sister Jim and Jean Jackson. My sister in law Kendra Jackson read them as well. Others who offered insights include Candace Archer, Stefan Fritsch, Becky Mancuso, Jim Fracassa, Moira Fracassa, Julie Jozwiak, Steve Florek, Elena Fracassa, Kathy Bruce, Glen Biglaiser, John Fischer, Marc Simon, Maria Simon, Becky Lentz-Paskvan, Mark Jakubowski, Fred Sampson, Randy Krajewski, Margaret Dramczyk, Susana Peña, Tony Martinico, Steve Engel, Eleanor Lazowski, and Sherri Cherry. David Wilson deserves special thanks for reading the completed manuscript and making hundreds of helpful suggestions. He is a great editor and friend. Becky Lentz-Paskvan read it all too, and made many helpful corrections. Any errors are the fault of the author. vii

Introduction: City of Colors

From September, 2007 to February, 2008, I taught political science courses in the Department of American Studies and Mass Media at the University of Łódź in Poland as a Fulbright Fellow. I found the experience incredibly rewarding in terms of my teaching, my interactions with Polish colleagues and other American Fulbrighters, and most importantly, the relationships I developed with the Poles I met outside the classroom. Fulbright awards are often misunderstood. I certainly misunderstood the program before I applied for one. The majority of Fulbrights are given to professors for the purpose of teaching. I had always thought that most of them were research-oriented grants to go to another country and study it, but I was wrong. I also didn’t know how difficult it is to win a Fulbright because the commission is pretty secretive about the acceptance rates. But I do know that the goals of the program are very noble. According to the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars, which administers the program, Senator Fulbright proposed the exchanges in order to promote “mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries of the world.” I certainly tried to acquire and promote that understanding while I was in Poland. Eastern Europe is considered by some people to be something of a “consolation prize” in the Fulbright sweepstakes, in that awards in Western Europe are much more difficult to win. In other words, the Commission might say: well, you wanted to go to Germany, England or France, but they couldn’t fit you in, so how about Slovakia? I know something like that happened when a professor from Ohio applied to teach in Finland, but was offered Estonia instead. What the heck, the Fulbright Commission seems to have thought, the Baltic is the Baltic. ix

x

Introduction: City of Colors

On the other hand, none of the Fulbrighters I met in Poland had been sent there as their second choice. In fact, each had specific reasons for wanting to teach, do research, or make films in Poland. So, who knows? I do know that the Polish city I was offered a Fulbright is considered by many to be the “booby prize” of that country because a former Fulbrighter who taught there told me so. I know this also because I know something about Poland’s cities. Kraków in the south is a charming, medieval university town with Europe’s second oldest university; Warsaw is a bustling world capital; Gdańsk in the north is a city rich in history, famously as the center of the Solidarity movement that helped to topple communism; Poznań in the west is a thriving, business-driven city with more than a little German influence. On the other hand, Łódź is…well, none of the above. The facts of Łódź are pretty simple: Poland’s second largest city is the down-on-its-luck former textile capital of the country. Over 800,000 people live in this relatively young city that grew up with the industrial age. It is not a medieval city; there is no central square. At one time it was known as the city of the “four cultures”—Polish, German, Jewish and Russian. But no more. Almost all of the city’s inhabitants are now ethnic Poles. Among the last vestiges of its cosmopolitan past are a very large Jewish cemetery and a few Russian Orthodox churches. Its architecture ranges from ghastly communist-era apartment blocks to the charming Art Nouveau of the main street, Piotrkowska. Some less objective descriptions tell a bit more of the real story. One of Łódź’s most famous nicknames is the Manchester of Poland. Some Americans have called it the Cleveland or Pittsburgh of Poland. One guide book calls Łódź gritty, sprawling and unpleasant. A former Fulbrighter who actually liked the place said, “Łódź is a city of colors: grey, grayish, dark grey, light grey . . .” A student I know who studied Polish there said, “It doesn’t give you much to like, but I love it.” For five months I lived and taught in this unique place called Łódź, Poland. While I was there I took notes about my experiences: from the sometimes disorienting orientation in September, to the sad flight back to the States in February; from the challenges presented by insane Polish bureaucracies, to occasional triumphs in the classroom; from chance encounters with Poles and Americans on the streets and in lines at kiosks, to the development of a real friendship with the bartender at the most political pub I have ever frequented. Those experiences and many more are recounted in these pages. But first things first. The stories I present here are not at all literal transcriptions of exactly what happened. While I made every attempt to accurately write about my experiences in Poland, I did not record conversations or take

Introduction: City of Colors

xi

notes as things happened. Often I recalled them days or weeks later. Sometimes I combined in one story events that in fact occurred over two or three nights. Sometimes I changed names and minor details to protect people’s identities. But these stories do accurately reflect the spirit if always the letter of my time in Poland. So, while not a work of journalism, I believe this is a work of truth nonetheless. Also, I make no claims that these experiences are somehow reflective or representative of the “real” Poland, whatever that might mean. Somebody else going to the same places I visited in Poland will likely have very different experiences. These are just some very interesting things that I did, and that I wanted to write down. In his excellent, and controversial, work A Russian Journal, John Steinbeck cautions his readers that he has not written “the” Russian story, but merely “a” Russian story. I believe that is true of my stories of Poland. Steinbeck also had to admit that his Russian Journal was a somewhat superficial work, and I must confess the same thing. My time in Poland was relatively short, and my lack of language skills limited me to certain kinds of experiences. I believe many of them are very interesting and even insightful, but I know they would have been very different had I stayed longer and been able to speak the language. But Steinbeck was also limited by the communist government in terms of who and where he was allowed to visit. I faced no such limitations, and I made a real effort during my time in Poland to go to places where I would find interesting people who might tell me the truth. I should also note that while the stories presented here form a more or less linear tale of what happened during my time in Poland as a Fulbright Lecturer, I have also included some material about my previous visits to Poland, my ancestral connections with the place, as well as some thoughts concerning sentimentality and coincidences that came up when I was just starting to write about my time in Łódź. If the book sometimes has more of an episodic rather than thematic feel, it is because just about every chapter was written in such a way that it could also stand alone as a vignette about some matter involving my interpretation of things Polish. It will be evident that I loved my time in Poland, so it is important to point out that I am very far from an objective observer of things Polish and Polish-American (a distinction whose significance to me has grown greatly due to my time in the Motherland). My mother’s ancestry is one hundred percent Polish-American and I was raised in a family steeped in Polish-American traditions: Sunday morning polka radio; home-made kiełbasa at Christmas and Easter; close attention to Poland’s struggle for independence, and much, much more. So I went to Poland as a sympathetic friend, and I returned as one as well.

xii

Introduction: City of Colors

This is not to suggest that everything that I did in Poland was an unadulterated joy or that I do not have some complaints. Of course not. But I was perhaps fated to enjoy things in Poland more than an American without Polish connections might have been. Of course, it might be that my expectations and hopes were higher because of my Polish connections. So disappointment might have been a greater possibility for me than for other American Fulbrighters going to Poland. This possibility of being disappointed may keep many Polish-Americans from visiting Poland: I hope the stories presented here will help convince more people, including Polish-Americans, to visit. And, I was not disappointed; not in the least. In fact, I kept waiting for something truly bad to happen to me, and it never did. After I returned to the U.S., I ate lunch with a colleague and she asked me which aspects I didn’t like very much. I had no ready answer. The internet connection in my apartment was unreliable sometimes? The students who lived above me occasionally threw loud parties and played god-awful pop music? A few of the students cheated on the final exam? Night fell at 4:00 P.M. in December? These are irritations, not problems. Sometimes I think I should have stayed longer than for just one semester. Regret, now that’s a problem. I doubt that it would have been very difficult to get an extension of my time in Poland, but I elected not to apply for one, and sometimes I regret it. I came back home when I did because by doing so I would have seven months where I did not have to teach a single class. There were also a lot of good reasons to stay, but I eventually rejected them all. When I first returned I felt pretty bad about the decision. I really felt like I should have asked to stay, to teach for another semester. While I did everything I said I would do, and even a bit more, I still felt like I was leaving something important behind, and unfinished. But during the conversation with my colleague about what I didn’t like, I came up with a simile for how I felt about my return, which helped me process my mixture of feelings into something useful: it felt like breaking up. But it felt like breaking up with a great woman without falling out of love. In fact, we still have a great deal of affection for each other and plan to see one another again in the very near future. Once I had a simile, I felt better, and I felt like I wanted to re-live, or at least preserve the memory of the experiences, and that’s why I wrote down all of this. Of course, I also thought other people might find these experiences at least a little bit enlightening and entertaining. But that is for the reader to decide.

Chapter One

Kresowa

“Do you like Litzmannstadt?” the old man asked. I couldn’t believe he’d said it. Nobody calls “Łódź” that. That’s the name the Nazis gave it after the conquest in 1939, after the German general who tried (and failed) to take the city during the First World War. “Jeszcze raz?” I said (“One more time?”) “Do you like it here in Litzmannstadt?” he repeated. “I like Łódź,” I said. And so went one of my first conversations in a bar that would become my home away from home during my Fulbright Lectureship at the University of Łódź. The day had begun auspiciously enough, given that it was my busy teaching day: three hour-and-a-half lectures between 11:20 and 6:00. For some reason I felt really happy on my way to classes. I’d bought some tram tickets at the green “Ruch” kiosk and felt my usual pleasure at getting the right kind and proper number (I’m not blaming the clerks for the occasional failure. The villain is my very faulty Polish). The tram ride was uneventful, and after I’d disembarked I’d stopped at a little store that seemed more down-and-out than those around it, especially the clean and shining Żabka-chain convenience store across the street. The little store was cold and dark and far from wellstocked, but I decided to buy some grapes for lunch. I didn’t want a full kilogram of grapes and I’d forgotten how to say “half” and had left my pocket dictionary back in my apartment. I asked for grapes and after the very old woman behind the counter said “how much?” in Polish I placed my hands about two feet apart and said, “kilo.” Then I moved them to about a foot apart, and waited. She said, “poł kilo” (“half a kilo”). I repeated it and resolved to remember it. She smiled and packed up my grapes. 1

2

Chapter One

As I crossed the park in front of my office it seemed like there was less dog poop than usual on the sidewalks. The sun wasn’t shining, but everything felt bright anyway. Normally I do not feel this good on my way to classes, in Poland or the U.S.A. My neurotic personality, even after fifteen years of teaching, causes me to repeat in my head, “I hate teaching. Why do I do this?” It’s an unproductive response to nerves, I suppose, but it’s gotten me through so far. Then I always feel great after classes are finished. Whether they went well or not I feel an incredible sense of relief, and if they went well (which is often), I feel triumphant. Feeling good and happy before classes is not a normal feeling for me. Classes went well in an unspectacular kind of way. No obvious light bulbs going off over students’ heads or incredibly clever metaphors from me; just three solid, content-rich lectures. After my final class of the day, one of my students invited me to Wigilia, Polish Christmas Eve, at her parents’ home. I thought that was very cool of her and I looked forward to experiencing a truly special Christmas with a Polish family. I made my way to what at the time was my favorite Polish restaurant in Łódź, and it was busy with people attending the international film festival there, a great event for the city. But what was especially gratifying to me that night was that the wait staff I’d dealt with before appeared to be happy to see me, because I actually tried to speak some Polish with them. And, during less busy times in the restaurant, I paid close attention to their instructions and incorporated some of what they taught me into subsequent “conversations.” After dinner, I decided to visit a bar called Kresowa, located on Narutowicza Street, just off Piotrkowska, which is the main drag in Łódź. Estimates vary about how many bars, pubs and clubs are located on or near the three kilometer pedestrian section of Piotrkowska, but a number I’ve heard more than once is 165, and it seems plausible. I wanted to visit this particular bar for two reasons. First, my friend and fellow Fulbrighter Tony had recently asked me a rather pointed question about whether I was meeting any Poles. I offered my students and colleagues as evidence that I was, but I knew that wasn’t what he had meant. He’s been coming to Poland for close to thirty years, and he counts the friends he’s made outside of the professional setting as one of the great joys of having spent so much time in the country. Where better to meet real Poles than in real local a bar, I thought? The second reason I chose this particular bar was because it came highly recommended by the usually reliable and always sarcastic In Your Pocket guide. Here is what they wrote about the place: A locals bar with a mixed clientele from the lower rung of the social ladder. Stained and stinking from years of beer and cigarettes this is the drinking expe-

Kresowa

3

rience Polski style; watch barflies playing chess while telling the story behind their latest street-battle injury. Trams roar by outside the glass windows and framed pictures of Poland’s ceded Eastern territories hang from scabby wallpaper. A great place to prop up the bar and listen to local drunks rant and ramble about all that is wrong with the world. We love it.

How could I resist such a recommendation? I almost didn’t make it inside the bar. The heavy glass and steel door was very difficult to open, and I was so embarrassed by my hard push, its refusal to budge, and the heads of the few men at the bar turning to watch me fail that I almost walked away. I pushed harder and propelled myself, stumbling a little, into a very dark and cold bar. Again, I almost turned around and walked out. But I summoned the courage and sat down on one of the rickety wooden barstools. I sat next to an older man, maybe 65 or 70, who had his cell phone out and was playing a tinny version of “The Logical Song” by Supertramp, and talking with the bartender. When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful, A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical. And all the birds in the trees, well they’d be singing so happily, Joyfully, playfully watching me. But then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible, Logical, responsible, practical.

I don’t speak much Polish, but the combination of content clues and what I do know made it obvious the old guy really loved his Supertramp, especially this particular song. The bartender looked to be in his mid forties, with thinning salt and pepper hair and a tough scowl that seemed to say, “I dare you to try to order a beer.” I instantly thought he looked like a journeyman bass player who’s always available for one more small arena tour with the remnants of some 1970s rock band. His strikingly beautiful black-haired lady-friend sat at the corner of the bar smoking cigarettes and agreeing with the Supertramp fan. The barkeep’s girlfriend tried to pacify the old man when a group of young men sitting at the heavy wooden picnic-style tables began to play some truly awful music on the jukebox. The young men wanted the bartender to turn up the jukebox, but the sound remained about the same after he visited the volume switch behind the bar. I sat there for quite a few minutes just taking it all in and waiting for the bartender to ask me what I wanted to drink. When he finally did ask me, he met my request with scowls and grunts as if he didn’t understand my Polish. I know my Polish is terrible, but I also know that I know how to order my first

4

Chapter One

beer, how to properly ask for another beer, how to say, “I feel like a beer” and “gimme a beer,” and so on. In other words, I know how to ask for a beer in Polish. Finally he pointed to a tap, I nodded, and he poured me a half-liter of Warka, which cost five złoty, or about two dollars. Everyone in the bar kept their coats on because the place was so cold. The young men who played the jukebox talked pretty loudly and drank a few shots of wódka, but they didn’t seem like they were interested in making any trouble. Finally, the old Supertramp fan said something to me in rapid Polish. I replied with, “Przepraszam, nie rozumiem” (“I’m sorry, I don’t understand”). This phrase became my constant refrain in Poland. He responded in broken English (much less broken than my Polish) that he thought it was okay I didn’t understand. He asked me where I was from, and after I replied that I was an American, he said, “America bad.” “Good and bad,” I answered. Then he asked me to name my favorite American President. “Franklin Roosevelt,” I said. I was being deliberately provocative. I was warned by a former Fublrighter that I could expect to get in many arguments with Polish professors if I brought up F.D.R. They would argue that the Allies had sold out Poland to the Soviets at Potsdam and Yalta, while most Americans would respond that Stalin had committed to free elections for Eastern Europe (whether or not he ever intended actually to deliver them), and that the deals were the best we could have expected. As a Polish-American my sympathies are almost always with the Poles on these questions, even if logic suggests that the Allies’ militarily taking on the Soviets in 1945 might not have been the best idea. But I felt like provoking the Supertramp fan. “F.D.R. good for America,” he replied, “much bad for Poland.” At that the bartender became as friendly as he had previously been surly. He began translating for me and the Supertramp fan. His attitude flipped like a switch, and I didn’t (and still don’t) know why. “Who do you think will be the next president?” he asked on behalf of the old man. I told him Barack Obama, but I really hadn’t formed an opinion. In fact, avoiding part of the longest presidential election in U.S. history had become one of my favorite parts of my time in Poland. “No way,” he said through the bartender. Then, literally, “Sir wants you to know America won’t elect a black man.” “Please tell him I disagree,” I said, and the bartender complied. The drunk dismissed me with a wave of his hand and a roll of his eyes.

Kresowa

5

“He says history will not change overnight,” the bartender said. Then the bartender asked me why I was in Łódź. I answered that I was a visiting professor at the University of Łódź. He wanted to know what I teach and in what language: Political science and English, of course, I answered. Then a very fat man with a grey beard and blue suspenders walked in. The barkeep told me he’s the boss man, the owner of the bar. The owner disappeared into the darker back section of the place, and a few minutes later some lights came on and I could see the whole thing. The In Your Pocket guide hadn’t been entirely correct. The pictures on the wall were not maps of lands Poland had ceded after World War Two. They were pictures of Marshall Józef Piłsudski, numerous prints of Piłsudski’s portrait, and one of the Marshall on horseback. There was also a bronze relief of the great leader, a few drawings and even a black and white photograph. “Lewo or prawo?” the old man asked me, in reference to my politics—left or right? “Lewo,” I said. “Don’t tell him,” he said and nodded across the bar to where the owner had sat down to a cup of hot tea and a plate of steaming pierogi. He drank his tea from a mug with the letters “PiS” printed on it—“Prawo i Sprawiedliwość” or “Law and Justice,” the right-of-center political party defeated in the October parliamentary elections. “I won’t,” I said. “It’s okay. You can,” the bartender assured me. Then he wanted me to know that there was much more to him than just tending bar in this Polish nationalist tavern: he is a musician, and he writes and sings in English. “I want to sing songs even better than Bob Dylan,” he said. He even sang a couple of his songs for me. He just belted them out from behind the bar. I thought he was pretty good, in a rough and bluesy way. Sometimes it was hard to understand all of the lyrics, but his passion for his songs was infectious, and so I liked them very much. He asked me if I wanted a copy of his CD. I answered that of course I did. He ran out to his car and got me the recording. His name was written on the disc: Zbyszek Nowacki. I said his name out loud. He seemed very pleased with my pronunciation, which is actually quite good, and often gets me in trouble. Poles sometimes quite reasonably expect that I can speak more Polish than I can. His attitude was a 180 degree turnaround from less than an hour before. Maybe this is why they say if you have two Poles, then you will have at least three opinions. Each has so many of his own.

6

Chapter One

While Zbyszek was out at his car, I’d put seven złoty in the jukebox—this bought ten songs. I chose Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love,” a Polish sea shanty, Led Zeppelin’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Cohen’s “Everybody Knows,” and some Supertramp, of course. When I sat back down at the bar, the old man asked me, “Do you like Litzmannstadt?”

Chapter Two

Choosing Łódz´, Heading for Wrocław

When I applied for the Fulbright Lectureship during the Fall of 2006 I was required to answer a question about which university I preferred. Specifically, I could rank up to three. Since I had a previously existing relationship with the American Studies and Mass Media program at Łódź, having attended conferences there in 2001 and 2006 and having stayed in e-mail contact with the leaders of the program, including it in my choices should not have been a difficult decision. But it was. Before the closing party of the 2006 conference, I had dinner with the chair of American Studies at Warsaw University. He’d made it clear to me that I should consider applying there, and he described what sounded like a dynamic program, with productive colleagues and excellent students. His description of the apartment I could use as just a tram ride, then a bus ride, and finally a short walk from the program office was a little unnerving, but at the time the excitement of Warsaw had the grimness of Łódź beaten hands down in my mind. But I put neither Łódź nor Warsaw as my first choice of destinations. Instead, even though I knew no one there, I listed Jagellonian University in Kraków as my first preference, for what seemed like several good reasons. First, Jagellonian is the second oldest university in Europe, with a great reputation in Poland and elsewhere. Also, and most importantly, it’s located in Kraków, my favorite city in Poland. I ranked Warsaw second and Łódź third. I felt a little guilty about this ranking, given that the University of Łódź had provided the reason for two of my visits to Poland, but I really love Kraków and Warsaw. When I received notification that I was assigned to Łódź for a year I was only a little disappointed because, deep down, I had known it was coming. My mother thought it made good sense to return to Łódź because from my 7

8

Chapter Two

description she said it sounded a lot like Detroit, where I’d done my B.A. and Ph.D. I knew that was true, and that I really didn’t belong at the Harvard of Poland, but still . . . Before formally accepting my assignment, I decided to do a little further research on the American Studies program at Łódź. Their website proved quite handy for this because it lists the names and American university affiliations of the past half-dozen or so Fulbrighters who taught there. I “cold-emailed” a few of them, and was scared to death by what some of them had to say. The first former Fulbrighter to return my e-mail was far from satisfied with his time in Łódź. He informed me that the classes are too large (over 80 students in each); the students talk or do pretty much anything else they feel like throughout lectures; they cheat brazenly, and justify it because they take too many classes. In fact, he said, cheating is ingrained in the academic culture, and there is an adversarial relationship between students and professors. He complained that the Polish university bureaucracy is a tremendous burden, and giving out grades will take away days of your life. He also claimed that Poles are thieves, racists, and prone to violence—any polite outward appearances to the contrary. Anyone who initiates contact with you is not to be trusted because he is doing so just to get something from the rich American. Naturally these comments substantially dampened my enthusiasm for spending a year in Łódź. He also suggested that I read a series of articles that were published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, written by a Fulbrighter who’d spent a year teaching in the American Studies program at Łódź. These thoughtful and well-written pieces confirmed much of what the first former Fulbrighter had said about the academic culture and class sizes. On the plus side, he didn’t mention thievery and violence, and indicated that his wife and children seemed to get along well in Poland. In our e-mail exchanges he suggested that I sign up for the year—he certainly didn’t want his comments to stop me from having what could be a very different experience—and if I didn’t like it just to leave after a semester. That seemed to me like a shifty thing to do, but he assured me that such selfish behavior was very much in keeping with the Polish way. These communications left me devastated. Something I thought I’d wanted suddenly seemed like the worst idea in the world. Luckily, two more former Łódź Fulbrighters painted a slightly better picture. An historian informed me that, in his opinion, too many Fulbrighters view the award as an “academic vacation.” He said he viewed it as an opportunity to work, which he said he most assuredly had done while he taught at Łódź. He said curtailing poor classroom behavior, which he didn’t believe was much more rampant in Łódź than at most U.S. universities, was as simple as briefly stopping class and

Choosing Łódz´, Heading for Wrocław

9

reminding the offenders that attending class was a voluntary activity. I took his point. I hate these classroom confrontations, but in my experiences they are almost always successful. Finally I talked with a fairly prominent American scholar, who also happens to be the editor of a political science journal to which some colleagues and I had recently submitted a paper. When she returned my phone call, she thought I’d called to discuss the submission, and seemed pretty relieved when I said I’d called to talk about Łódź. She told me that she’d loved it. She found the students intelligent and engaged, enjoyed the apartment she’d been provided, and was pleased with the social interactions she’d had with her colleagues in the semester she’d spent there. Well, that settled it for me: I’d spend only a semester instead of a year, but I’d ask officially for the reduction in time, and not just leave my hosts hanging. It was readily granted. With profound ambivalence I departed for Poland. In retrospect, it’s a little embarrassing how much stock I put in other people’s opinions of Poland. But by committing myself for only one semester I believed I’d done something smart. I’d reduced the probability of the worst possible outcome: being stuck for a whole year in a place and situation I hated. Of course I also reduced the probability of the best possible outcome: spending a year in a place I loved. Such is the nature of compromise. Having been to Poland several times, I know my preferred flight: KLM from Detroit to Amsterdam, then Amsterdam to Warsaw. As a Fulbrighter this option was not available to me. Fulbrighters are subject to a law called the Fly America Act. It means we must use U.S. carriers to and from our host countries. The law was written in 1974, and it might need a little updating. It is perfectly within the law for me to pay an American airline to put me on a Lot Polish Airlines flight, but I may not pay the Polish airline directly. So that’s what I did: I paid $1,300 to United to put me on their partner’s plane when I could have paid $800 to fly KLM. My flights over were easy ones: Detroit to Chicago, then Chicago to Warsaw. The hours on the planes were even relatively pleasant, except that during the Detroit to Chicago run I sat next to a toddler who cried all the way. I tried to sympathize with the little girl, imagining how baffling and unpleasant a flight must be for a young child. I also knew that I was about to experience five months of new and sometimes unpleasant experiences, so not letting the first small irritation get to me seemed like a good idea. Surprisingly, the Chicago to Warsaw flight even took off on time. It was a very full flight, and we were jammed in tight. I had requested an aisle seat,

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but even that was of little benefit. I pitied the poor folks in the center and middle seats, including the Polish woman seated to my right. She was small in stature, so that helped. She was also very kind to the big American seated next to her. For example, she told the flight attendant before I could that I did not speak Polish when the attendant asked me what kind of wine I wanted with my dinner. But how had she known? The most interesting experience on the flight probably shouldn’t have happened, and wouldn’t have happened if I’d have minded my own business. Two young Polish women were seated in front of me (I guessed they were returning home after summer jobs in the States), and between the gap in the seats I could see what the girl to my right was doing with her cell phone. She was clearing out her text messages, which appeared to be of two varieties. One set was from someone named James, while the other group came from “Mazurkas,” clearly a screen name. James wrote his messages in English, and they were all about how he’s still in love with her, how he’s “sorry for everything,” wishes she’d forgive him, and just wants to see her just one more time. She glanced at each, and then coolly deleted them one after another. The messages from “Mazurkas” were in Polish, and she appeared to save them all. It seemed the summer fling was being deleted in favor of the boyfriend back in Poland. I felt sorry for James, for what he thought he’d lost, and for “Mazurkas,” for what it appeared he was getting back. The other interesting feature of the flight didn’t require any surreptitious peering. Everyone on the airplane, except maybe those sitting in first class, could hear the drinking Poles seated a few rows in front of me. The airline brought the trouble on themselves when the flight attendants rolled the little cart of duty-free items down the aisle. What looked to be a father and son purchased a big bottle of vodka after dinner and decided to finish it on the flight. As the other passengers slowly drifted off to sleep, and the lights over the other seats went out one by one, the light over the vodka drinkers’ seat stayed on. Of course their conversation became louder as they drank more, and the flight attendants came around once in a while to ask them to be quiet. There had been complaints, they said. The drinkers were polite and full of smiles when being chastised, but they went right back to their bottle and their loud conversation when the flight attendants left. I fell asleep before they did, but when the cabin lights went on for breakfast, I noticed the bottle was empty. The drinkers woke up and ate their breakfast, apparently none the worse for wear. I remembered some advice from the first guidebook to Poland I’d ever read: never, under any circumstances, try to out drink a Pole! September 18, 2007 was my first day in Poland as a Fulbrighter. I arrived in Warsaw mid-morning and took a taxi to my hotel. I was pleased with myself for being savvy enough to reject the offers of the corrupt cabbies who

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snare unsuspecting tourist into paying five times the normal rate for a ride downtown. Of course, I’d become savvy only through experience, but more on that later. Normally I stay at the MDM Hotel in Warsaw, which is located on Plac Konstytucji and is surrounded by some of the best social realist architecture in Poland. The housing “estate” was one of the first big new economic developments built by the Polish communist government after the war, and it opened in 1952. Of course, every inch of the ground floors of the communist era buildings is now filled with commercial capitalism at its neon finest, but it makes an interesting mix. The staid stone and imposing facades of the 1950s buildings, replete with much larger than life reliefs of workers, teachers and peasants, mix surprisingly well with the bright lights of KFC and Samsung. Before leaving for Poland this time, though, a great thing had happened, which caused me to switch hotels. Most of the friends I’d harangued over the years with arguments about why they just had to visit Poland, and do so soon, were actually planning to come this time, especially those with any Polish roots at all. So I decided to stay in a different hotel in a different section of the city as a sort of scouting mission. It seemed to me that the MDM had gotten a little big for its britches lately, often asking just a little less for a night than the posh Marriott hotel just a few blocks north. The cab ride felt a suspiciously long, but I couldn’t be sure because I wasn’t exactly clear about where the hotel I’d chosen, the Ibis Stare Miasto (Old Town), was located. I knew it was near the Old Town, but I wasn’t sure just how close. The route we took felt a little circuitous, but it cost only 30 złoty (the ride to the MDM usually costs about 25), so I decided I probably hadn’t been ripped off. And, in retrospect, I suppose the suspicion that I might be being ripped off was probably a product of the high level of doubt about Poles that I’d acquired from the paranoid writings and conversations I’d had with former Fulbrighters about Łódź. I decided it would be crucial to overcome that if I were to enjoy my time in Poland. As it turns out, the Ibis Stare Miasto is actually closer to Warsaw’s New Town, but it was an easy walk to both. I had a night to myself, before a day of meetings and receptions at the U.S. Embassy. I checked into my room, laid down on the bed and went to sleep. I know this is the worst thing to do for jet lag, but I did it anyway. I woke up several hours later, and knew I would have a hard time getting to sleep that night. I decided to walk through the New and Old Towns, find some dinner, and visit a bar in the basement of the Adam Mićkiewicz museum that I like. I figured a few beers would help chase away the jet lag. I ate at a restaurant called “Boruta,” which is Polish slang for the devil (and which was the surname of one of our parish priests when I was growing up!).

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The middle-aged woman who usually works behind the bar in the basement of the museum was there when I came in, and she corrected my Polish pronunciation, just as she’d done on a few previous occasions. Then she played comedian. I asked for a “duże” (“large”) beer. First she held up a very small glass and I said no. Then she held up a half-liter glass, and I said no again. Then she held up a liter glass, and I said yes. But then she pointed at the entire keg and laughed, and I said, “nie dzię kuje!” (“no thanks!”). Back in my hotel room after dinner and drinks I wrote the following in my journal: “Well, even if nothing else good happens, at least I had a good meal in the New Town area of Warsaw: delicious bowl of żurek and green-colored pierogi with cabbage and mushrooms. Best pierogi ever. They played odd, moody, echo-filled Polish rock, including a shuffling sixties-rock version of ‘Głęboka Studzienka’ that had great vocal harmonies.” A few things came to mind after reading that entry written nearly at the time the events happened. The pierogi and soup were, in fact, great. The version of Głęboka Studzienka’, which is usually performed as a waltz by polka bands in the United States, was indeed terrific. More importantly, the negative tone of my comments was pretty shocking to me in retrospect. I guess I really feared the possibility of an unrelentingly negative semester in Poland and had decided to accept whatever few good things happened as surprising gifts. I knew part of the pessimism came from some of the bad things I’d been told about Łódź, but I knew there was a deeper source of it as well, which made it a little less embarrassing. In 1984, when I was 15 years old, I’d volunteered to work on my first presidential campaign—for Walter Mondale. Well, we all know what a failure that campaign turned out to be: a 49 state loss! However, I remember reading in one of the news magazines how Mondale had steeled himself for defeat. They said he imagined the worst possible outcome, and this made anything short of pure tragedy feel more like success. I’ve thought about a lot of other things in my life that way too. It gives a sense of control—a sense that I can handle anything but the absolute worst, which, mercifully, life rarely provides. So Walter Mondale’s realism influenced my approach to Poland as well. The first day of the orientation was interesting and fun. It took place at the U.S. Embassy, located on Ujazdowskie Street. I had brief chats with most of the other Fulbrighters and found out they were in Poland for myriad reasons: some filmmakers were going to Łódź; some graduate students were staying in Warsaw, while others were spreading out around the country. One was writing her dissertation about oscypek—smoked sheep’s cheese from the Tatra Mountain Poles, called Górale—and one of my favorite Polish foods. A few were recently-minted B.A.s there to be teaching assistants in English

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programs, while a few were, like me, professors there just to teach. The orientation consisted mostly of a series of “do’s and don’t’s” related to different aspects of Polish life as seen by the American Embassy. Health: drink the water, but at the very least let the taps run for a while before filling your glass, and consider boiling it. Bottled water is cheap and good, so it might be a good idea to buy that. Food from street vendors is dangerous (e-coli), but most restaurants and supermarkets can be trusted. I thought of Anthony Bourdain’s comment that you’re more likely to be poisoned by the hotel breakfast buffet than the street food, but I let it pass. We were given health insurance cards and telephone numbers to call if we needed assistance. We were told Polish dentistry is quite good and inexpensive. Someone asked why he’d seen so many people with terrible teeth, and another Fulbrighter commented, with some contempt, that even if it’s cheap not everybody can afford it. I offered that even if it’s cheap some people are still afraid of the dentist. That got a little laugh. Politics: There’s an election in October. Stay out of it. All current Polish political parties have roots in Solidarity or in the old Communist Party. The governing right-leaning party, Law and Justice, called early elections to solidify their power. Their social democratic opposition, Left and Democratic, has image problems because of all the former communists in their midst. Civic Platform is right of center and very neo-liberal in its economic leanings. There are others, such as the nationalist and sometimes anti-Semitic League of Polish families, but these three are expected to be the top vote getters. Poles will ask us about why the U.S. requires them to get visas in order to visit. It is because of the high rejection rate: about 26 percent of applicants are turned down. Until the rejection rate comes down, an expedited process cannot be implemented, even if Poland was part of the “coalition of the willing” in Iraq and might have expected some favorable treatment in return. No one from the Embassy actually said that last part. Safety: Crime rates in Poland and the U.S. are about the same. If you get drunk in a bar and get a chair broken over your head, the Embassy can only do so much to help you out. Stay out of the bars. The security chief admitted he’d only been on the job for a few months. It was a mistake for him to admit that. Some of the Fulbrighters have been coming to Poland for extended stays for more than 20 years. His claim about the crime rates elicited howls of disapproval and clarification. Property crime might be as high, but violent crime is much lower, they argued, and he agreed. After the orientation, a few of us went to a bar located in the former Pewex store complex that one of the more Polish-seasoned Fulbrighters knew about. During the course of our conversations, I admitted that I’d put together a

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fairly poor paper on Canadian women’s attitudes toward the U.S. just so I could attend a gender studies conference in Poland in 2006. While my companion was a serious feminist scholar, my intrusion into her area of expertise didn’t offend her all that much, and as a future professor she liked seeing how we could use the resources at our disposal to travel where we wanted. We made it an early night because we had to get on the bus early the next morning for the long ride to Wrocław. The next day I rolled out of bed at 5:45 to catch a cab to the Etap Hotel where we were to meet the bus for the trip to the southwestern Polish city of Wrocław (formerly the German city of Breslau), where the major orientation was to take place. We departed at 7:00, and it took until 1:30 to get to Wrocław, with only one stop. Polish roads and Polish traffic! On the way to Wrocław Andrzej Dakowski, the director of the PolishAmerican Fulbright Commission, showed us a movie: Andrzej Wajda’s “Man of Marble.” It is a fascinating movie about a young film-maker played by the beautiful Krystyna Janda, who is trying to make her student film in the 1970s about a bricklayer who once was lauded by the communist government, but eventually was removed from history. After his downfall they put his statue in storage, thus the title. Showing the film was a smart move on Dakowski’s part: it made the trip go more quickly and it put some of us in a more sympathetic frame of mind. At our one stop, I talked with two of the Fulbrighters, each with more than 20 years of experience with Poland. They discussed the fact they were both in Poland when Chernobyl happened and how difficult it had been to get any good information from the government about what they should do, and then they’d learned that the government was recommending against taking the form of treatment that they were secretly taking themselves, and administering to their families. How much better things are now, I thought. We arrived in Wrocław and discovered pretty quickly that we were staying in dorms. They were pretty spartan accommodations: bedroom, half-kitchen (sink, no stove), and toilet with shower. I feared this might be what I was going to get in Łódź, but decided it would be adequate for 15 weeks. During the first day of meetings in Wrocław, we heard a lecture by the Rektor of University of Wrocław on the current condition of Polish universities. In Poland the Rektor is elected by the faculty. I could only imagine how destructive a fight that could produce among our faculty. He told us there are just too many students and not enough faculty and physical space. Where have I heard that before, I thought. Students who pass the entry exam pay no fees, while students who do not may attend the university if they pay. I’d never before heard of doing things that way.

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Then the Rektor mentioned the articles from the Chronicle of Higher Education that had been very critical of the students and of the American Studies program at the University of Łódź. He said he was happy the columns had been written, and that they had served as a wake-up call for Łódź and should serve as a wake-up call for the rest of Polish higher education. It was disheartening to hear confirmation of the criticism, but good to hear that Łódź might have changed some of its ways because of it. After the discussions, a few of us walked to a very nice hotel bar for a drink before dinner. I brought up the critical columns, and Dakowski said the worst of what I’d heard about Łódź was untrue. He said I would have to see for myself. He seemed a little surprised that I had contacted former Fulbrighters at the department in Łódź, and he said that a particularly disgruntled former Fulbrighter was actually unhappy because he’d racked up a $10,000 phone bill that he hadn’t wanted to pay. That was news to me. I began to realize that was how my five months in Poland was going to be: a slow revelation.

Chapter Three

Return to Kresowa

Kresowa had caught my imagination, and I so liked the bartender Zbyszek and the odd cast of characters that I decided to return for another visit a few days after my first. When Zbyszek had told me during my first visit that he wanted to write and record songs better than Bob Dylan’s I’d told him that somebody already had: Phil Ochs. There was something about Kresowa that seemed to encourage the passionate expression of opinions, and I clearly wasn’t immune to it. I’m not even sure I believe the claim, but I would have been willing to defend it to the end at Kresowa. Zbyszek had said he’d never even heard of Phil Ochs, and I’d promised to return with a disc. So when I returned to Kresowa, I brought with me a compilation of Phil’s music I’d burned from my collection. I own nearly every recording Ochs ever produced. I walked in around 8:00, and Zbyszek was behind the bar and he greeted me with a sort of “touchdown” hello: both hands up, but palms out. A little odd, I thought, but I greeted him with enthusiasm too. The place was packed, warm and bright, which was quite a contrast from my first visit. I sat down at the bar, and after a few minutes he poured me a beer and I gave him the disc. At first he looked baffled by the spelling of the name, “Phil Ochs,” but then after a few seconds he understood it and said it like this: “Feel Oaks.” He wanted me to tell him about Phil, so I did, sparing no happy or grim detail. I told him all about how Ochs had been the king of the 1960s politicallyoriented folk underground in Greenwich Village and that he’d killed himself in 1976, with a few highlights in between: the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, after which Ochs had had his tombstone carved; his 1973 concert for Salvador Allende—a concert that Dylan saved from ruin just by agreeing to perform at it. I told him how Dylan had once admitted that neither 16

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he nor anybody else could match Ochs’s topical song output, and also about the famous incident where Phil criticized Dylan’s music while they were riding in a taxicab and Dylan threw him out of the car and said, “you’re not a folksinger, you’re a journalist.” I told him about Ochs’s descent into alcoholism and madness. Zbyszek listened—really listened—to it all, between his duties pouring drinks for the rowdy crowd. “Wow,” he said after each twist and turn of the Ochs story, which in some ways is the American story of the 1960s and 70s. “It was a real life,” he said. “Yes, it was,” I replied. “I am looking forward to hearing this,” he said and put the disc in a duffle bag he kept behind the bar. Then I told him that I had really enjoyed listening to his music, and that I’d sent some songs to my friends in the U.S. and they had all reacted favorably too. He made two fists, pounded one lightly on the bar and said, “yes!” I quoted some of his lyrics that I liked, and pointed out which songs my friends in the U.S. had liked the most. He seemed very pleased, which was cool because I wasn’t sure he’d have wanted me to disseminate his recording. Then he disappeared through the kitchen behind the bar for about twenty minutes and his girlfriend Ania took over. I drank two beers while he was gone. When he returned he gave me a cigar. He said it cost one złoty, 30 groszy — about 50 U.S. cents, but he wasn’t asking me to pay for it. It tasted better than it should have, but I’m pretty sure I was smoking shredded communistera newspapers. Then a small object hit me on the shoulder. It bounced off me and landed on the bar and I picked it up: it was a broken cigarette lighter decorated with a cartoon of a very erect penis wearing a condom. The woman who threw it looked like quite a wreck, with greasy blonde hair and several broken teeth. Her tight blue top revealed too much of her sagging breasts. I put two and two together and told her “nie dzię kuje” (“no thank you”), and her smile disappeared as she angrily retrieved the lighter. “Never mind her,” said Zbyszek, “only trouble.” Then one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen in Łodź walked into the bar and sat down next to a strong-looking bald guy who looked like he wanted to kick someone’s ass—anyone would do. She was young, maybe twenty five, and she had long brown hair and big brown eyes. Her eyes had a twinkle that I instantly recognized as both playfulness and trouble. Her thick sweater couldn’t completely conceal the fact that she had enormous breasts. She spoke flirtatiously with the bald man and he bought her a half-litre of Warka and a shot of vodka. I thought this girl likes to drink, as she threw back the shot and made pretty short work of the beer.

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After a few minutes the big man walked over and sat down next to me. “I hear you speak English,” he said. I told him I did. He told me he worked in Warsaw in public relations for Media Markt, an electronics store. He said he really wanted to be a journalist. Even though he was big and brutal looking and he gestured pretty wildly when he talked, he also seemed really sincere, and almost kind. He apologized frequently for his English, but I assured him I understood everything he was saying. He told me he commuted two hours each way from Łodź to Warsaw every day, but he did it so he could spend more time with his sons, who were six and twelve years old. He said he very much loved his sons, but he very much did not love his wife. They stay together for the children. He admitted to a very strong attraction to the beautiful brown-haired woman, and I agreed with him that she was well worth a try. I was pretty sure he’d take one before I did. We chatted for a while and it became clear that this fellow had been in trouble with the law for “anger management” issues. He said he gets in fights at football and rugby matches, but he teaches his sons to be both thinkers and fighters (“Platonic guardians?” I offered. He wisely let it pass). He said he had served six months in the French Foreign Legion but chose not to sign up for the standard five year commitment. I believed him. He got really mad when some men he did not like started talking to the beautiful young woman. He said, “We call them ‘lefties’ because they shake your hand with the right hand, but steal from you with the left.” He demonstrated the move by shaking my hand and pulling my hat out of my coat pocket. I told him I understood. We drank a few beers that I bought, and then he said, “Poles disgust me.” I asked him what he meant. “Everyone now is anti-communist. No way it is possible,” he said. “I’m not sure I understand,” I said. “Now people remember they were anti-communist,” he said, “even party members.” “Aha,” I said, “People want to remember themselves as they wish they had been.” “Yes! Yes! That is it,” he said excitedly. I wished we could have talked some more, but it was approaching 10:30, and I didn’t want to miss the last tram. I said my goodbyes to Zbyszek and my new friend. I left a five złoty tip as I was leaving, and my new friend picked it up and gave it back to me as if I’d dropped it accidentally. I told him it was a tip for good service, and he seemed to understand. Zbyszek seemed to understand too, even though good tips are uncommon in Poland. Then another prostitute threw an empty Marlboro box at us. The big man yelled at her in Polish, but she just laughed.

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“She is nothing,” he said. His name is Dariusz, but he goes by Darek. He followed me out of the bar onto the street, and walked with me as far west as Piotrkowska. As he was putting my Polish phone number into his cell-phone, a car ran the red light on Narutowicza and smashed into another. He laughed and yelled, “Polish drivers!” He was really insistent that we should drink together again. I told him I would like that very much. But we never did. In fact, no one I met in Poland when he was drunk in a bar who said we should get together again ever called, or came back to Kresowa. I was not offended by this at all. The great Polish poet Czesław Miłosz explains it best: Perhaps . . . Polish men dislike themselves so intensely, in their heart of hearts, because they remember themselves in their drunken states?

If Miłosz is right, why would a Polish man want to phone up and drink again with a stranger? Poland was beginning to make perfect sense to me, on its own terms.

Chapter Four

(Dis)Orientation

At the orientation in Wrocław our rooms were located in identical fifteenstory cement dormitory towers built in the 1980s. They are named “kredka” and “ołówek,” “chalk” and “pencil,” and, not surprisingly, they are not beautiful buildings. But we each had our own little suite, with two bedrooms, a small kitchen, and a bathroom. They appeared to be built for four inhabitants during the school year. The rooms were spartan and utilitarian, but they soon felt like home sweet home, especially after the Herculean efforts of our student guides from the University of Wrocław achieved internet connections for each of us. The trams that run in the center of the major street next to the dorms produced a good deal of racket as they banged over some imperfection in the track. Because it was still warm, the rooms felt much more comfortable with the windows open, which, of course, didn’t make it any quieter. Dogs barked nearly constantly too, and students living on the higher floors threw a few loud parties. I decided these were the kinds of small annoyances, like the crying child on the flight over, that I couldn’t allow to get to me if my time in Poland was to be successful, so I tried to ignore them. The street on which the trams run was built over an airfield the Nazis constructed with slave labor near the end of World War II. Breslau, as the Germans knew Wrocław, was supposed to be a final holdout against the Red Army’s approach from the east. Tens of thousands of slave laborers died from exhaustion, Nazi bullets and Allied bombing during construction of the airfield, and one of the only uses to which it was ever put was for the flight out for the Nazi general who was supposed to lead the defense of the city. So, in Wrocław, as in so many places in Poland, history often lives right under your feet. 20

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21

In Wrocław we mostly attended lectures and language classes. But we did have a day set aside for tourism, and in typical Polish fashion we got much more than our money’s worth: the day was long and filled with detailed explanations of every site we visited. Wrocław is located in Lower Silesia, Śląsk in Polish. The area became part of the modern Polish state only after World War II, when eight million Germans were moved out, and six million Poles, many from what is now part of Ukraine, were moved in. Many of the Poles came from the city of Lwów (in Ukrainian, Lviv), and they brought their cultural treasures with them, including a panoramic painting of the Polish defeat of the Russians at the Battle of Raclawica in the Kościuśko Uprising of 1794. The Panorama is one of the most popular cultural tourist attractions for Poles, behind only Częstochowa we were told. We did not visit the Panorama on our day of tourism, however. That was saved for later. First we visited a huge wooden Evangelical church in Świdnica. It is called The Peace Church because it was built in honor of the peace of Westphalia of 1648, which had permitted Lutherans to build a small number of churches in the Catholic portions of the Holy Roman Empire, although the church itself is only about 300 years old. Not surprisingly, in a country where less than one percent of the population is Protestant, there are not many members of the congregation, and now the church is used mainly for special events and as a tourist attraction. The best part of the visit was learning from my new friend Tony, a professor of architecture, some of the details of how such a massive wooden structure could have been built three hundred years ago, and built very quickly with the use of almost no nails. It seems some of the techniques are not that different from those used by post and beam barn builders in the 19th century in the U.S., who also used no metal in the framing of their buildings. We were served a sack lunch on the bus on our way to our next destination: Włodarz. The night before our day of tourism we were warned by our student guides to bring a jacket, because we would be spending some time in a cool place. Rumors circulated among the Fulbrighters, and we concluded we would be visiting either a shady place in higher elevation, or going down into caves. Worrisome to me, given my mild-to-medium claustrophobia (I can ride in elevators easily, but I don’t like small airplanes, and I hate caves), the consensus was that we would be going underground. And the consensus turned out to be correct. The group had begun to bond sufficiently that gentle fun could be made of my fear of caves and their impending presence in my life. Some of the women sympathized with my condition and assured me it would be perfectly acceptable if I chose to stay outside while everybody else went in. I told them I appreciated their sympathy, but I wanted to test myself. What a fool I was.

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The caves at Włodarz were built by the Nazis in the Sudeten Mountains, and it turns out that nobody is quite certain why they did it. Well, more accurately, nobody is quite certain why the Nazis forced slave laborers to dig these caves. Somewhere on Earth somebody might know the answer, because the Red Army confiscated the contents of the cave and shipped them back to the Soviet Union at the end of the war. Modern day visitors who do not know anything about the caves are not told before they enter that nobody knows what they were used for. We were given hard hats at the creaking steel door that covers the entrance. Once the door is closed, the only light comes from incandescent light bulbs strung from the ceiling every twenty feet or so. The walls are rough and damp, and you can hear the sound of dripping water coming from many different directions where secondary and tertiary pathways break off from the central tunnel. It was quickly apparent that it would be very easy to get very lost in this complex. Our English-speaking tour guide began with a joke. “Are any of you afraid of ghosts?” he asked us. We murmured a bit, and a few of us said we weren’t. “Good,” he said, “because my name is Casper.” During the tour of the caves, we went from one unfinished or semi-finished room to another, while Casper asked us why we thought it might have been built. The shape of the first of these rooms reminded me of the first gas chamber at Auschwitz, and I feared the worst about why they were not telling us what the caves were used for. I surmised they wanted to wait until we were back outside to tell us we had visited an underground death camp. Deep within the complex, there is a small monument to the thousands who died building it, but there is no mention of its being used as a death factory, so about halfway through our visit I rejected my theory about how the Nazis had used the caves. I also quickly gave up caring very much. As we moved more deeply within the facility, the passage narrowed and the ceilings got lower. I was forced to duck at a number of junctures, as were people much shorter than my six feet one. The tour had become monotonous and annoying. Each new room with its accompanying question about its use irritated me more than the previous one. Clearly my claustrophobia was manifesting itself as anger. I tried to keep my breathing deep and even; I didn’t want to hyperventilate. Then we reached a dock, with several aluminum rowboats moored to it. Yes, a dock. Part of the complex has flooded, and evidently the climax of the tour involves cramming too many people into each boat and paddling down a very narrow tunnel. I don’t know why I agreed to get into the boat. Smarter people

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than I stayed at the dock saying, “No thanks. We’ll just wait for you here.” How wise they were. The first several hundred feet of the boat ride were the worst. One passenger seated at the rear of the boat was given a small paddle to control direction. This seemed unnecessary since the narrowness of the tunnel barely allowed the boats room to move more than a few inches from side to side. Forward progress was made by pulling on ropes which were hung next to the electric lines that fed the bulbs. To prevent electrocution, we were warned not to pull on the electric line, only the rope. At several points in the tunnel the clearance was so low that nearly everyone had to lean as far back as they could, or put their heads between their legs. Then after a few hundred feet of the most miserably claustrophobic experience of my life, our little over-full boats popped out of the tunnel into a flooded room with forty or fifty feet of clearance to the ceiling, and enough surface space for our boats to float and not come within ten or twenty feet of each other. To say I found this room a welcome respite is a serious understatement, but then I remembered we had to go out the same way we had come in. As we recovered from the journey, Casper asked us what we thought the big flooded room could possibly have been used for, but by this point I don’t think any of us was very much interested. “Nazi swimmin’ hole?” I muttered. As we made our way back through the narrows, I was euphoric because I knew that the cave visit was nearly over, save for the retracing of our steps out. I was so relieved, I felt like singing. I possess a deep, if flat, baritone, and it rang off the walls of our narrow tunnel as I sang out: The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down Of the big lake they called ‘Gitche Gumee’ The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead When the skies of November turn gloomy With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty. That good ship and true was a bone to be chewed When the gales of November came early.

The reaction of the other Fulbrighters was just what I’d expected: much laughter and a little singing along. It was also generational. The more seasoned among us knew the song well. They were the ones who sang along, and encouraged me to sing more verses. “We should sing to where the boat sinks,” said one. “We have to at least meet the old cook,” said another.

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I think the younger ones might have thought we were singing a sea shanty from the 18th century, and later that night I thought about my choice of songs, wishing I’d chosen the “Gilligan’s Island” theme instead. Even though it predates the “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” it would have had more universal appeal. “Next time,” I thought, and laughed about the unlikelihood of repeating the singular experience of forty Fulbrighters in a flooded cave. We ate our second lunch at a massive German house in Morawa. We were the guests of a very gracious 80 year-old German woman. She was born in the house when the land it sits on was still part of Germany, but she fled as the Red Army approached in 1945, and she was able to return only in 1989, after the fall of communism. The communists had used the house for, among other things, military purposes, and there’s a stone carving of a Polish eagle in the back yard. Because the communists carved the eagle, it lacks the royal crown, but when the system fell, someone painted the crown back on. A bit of the red paint is still visible. The house is now used for many purposes, primarily in service to the local community. In order to regain limited possession of the house, the old German had to negotiate a deal with the new Polish government. She’s allowed to live there now—I don’t think she owns the place -- and she runs a kindergarten in it. When communism ended so did free kindergarten, so she and her staff provide a vital service for the local community. Our final destination was a railroad and Harley Davidson Motorcycle museum in Jaworzyna Śląska. The man who owns it is really passionate about his bikes and trains, but his operation is severely underfunded. He owns dozens of train engines and other rolling stock. The buildings he stores them in are beautiful old brick behemoths, and his prized possession is a massive 19th century steam locomotive that actually operated on the Polish rails until the 1970s. He bought the building and much of the stock from the government, which was keen to unload it all because they had no idea what to do with it. With enough money and marketing, I thought this place could attract tens of thousands of tourists, like the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. The owner is trying many clever ideas to attract people, especially people with some money. He rents out space in old sleeper cars by the night. Most interestingly, he is planning to put on an exhibition of the conditions the local Germans endured in the trains leaving Silesia after the war, as well as what the Poles endured in coming to Śląsk. They all traveled in boxcars, and he plans to display one of each kind. We ate our third meal at the museum: grilled sausages, salads and .67-liter bottles of Polish beer. I was already stuffed from the two previous meals, but the smoked sausages were especially delicious, and nothing tastes better after smoked Polish sausage than a couple of cold beers.

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It was well after dark by the time we returned to Chalk and Pencil. Some of us wanted to drink a few beers and talk over what we had experienced. We asked our student guides where we should go, and they pointed out a studentoriented place across the street from the dorms as the nearest bar likely to be open on a Sunday night. We invited them to join us, and a few did. The students were at first reluctant to let us purchase drinks for them, but eventually they relented. After I’d had a few beers and a shot of Żubrówka vodka I asked one of the guides just what in the Hell they were thinking about in taking us to the caves. “I have been there before,” he said very earnestly, “it is quite interesting.” “And you went back down today?” I asked, incredulously. “Of course,” he said. Absolutely mind-boggling, I thought, but I let it drop. We drank for a bit, but the long day had tired us out, and we had breakfast and classes the next morning starting at 8:00. We ended up calling it a pretty early evening. I went to my little room and went right to sleep, and I’m happy to say I didn’t dream at all, not even about being trapped underground.

Chapter Five

Friendly Fulbrighters

The orientation in Wrocław finished with a charming closing ceremony. Previous experiences in Poland had taught me that the Poles believe in ceremonies of all kinds, and sometimes you have to be ready to say a few words or sing a song. Mercifully, none of that happened this time. During the orientation there had been two language classes: beginner and advanced. Of course, I took the beginner’s class and learned much from a very good teacher named Krzystof Wróblewski, who used humor and group activities very effectively. By the end of the class he even had us playing Scrabble with the 32-letter Polish alphabet! It’s not overstating the case to say the language class was inspirational, after what I’d heard about Polish professors and the hostile relationship between professors and students. I decided that if my students had experienced professors like Wróblewski, then the main thing I would have to worry about would be trying to live up to very high standards. During the closing ceremony, the two teachers of Polish distributed certificates of completion to each of their students. Wróblewski shook each of our hands as he presented us with our “diplomas.” The diminutive and beautiful female teacher of the advanced class hugged each of her students after the presentation, and I felt a little jealous. After the ceremony I learned from some of the advanced students that their teacher would soon join the two million Poles living abroad, so her goodbyes might have been about more than the end of her short summer course in Polish for Americans. In total there had been 20 hours of language training and 25 hours of history and culture lectures. My new friend Tony and I noted that we were the only two Fulbrighters who did not skip a single session, and we were justifiably proud of ourselves, because, unfortunately not every one of them had been enlightening or interesting. 26

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Besides the languages classes, the best thing about the orientation was meeting and finding out about the projects of some of the other Fulbrighters. Trevor and Ashley Banks, with their 16 month old daughter Anna, were spending the year in Łodź too. He is a filmmaker, and he really wants to attend film school at New York University. After we had been in Łodź for a while I sent him a clip from the old Jon Lovits animated series The Critic, where there is an image of the N.Y.U. film school’s alleged motto: Lights, Camera, Unemployment. I think he thought it was funny. Later the director Ang Lee told him essentially the same thing about job prospects during the Cameraimage Cinematography Festival in Łodź in November. They were living in Łodź so he could finish work on a couple of his films having to do with Poland, and, he hopes, to start and finish another. Interestingly, he is not directly connected to the film school, which is one of the good things for which Łodź is known. Sometimes its nickname is “Holly- Łodź,” even though I can’t imagine two more different places than Tinseltown and the Manchester of Poland. Another Fulbrighter won the coveted position at the Film School, which given Trevor’s incredible Polish language skills and work ethic seemed like a mighty injustice to me. The Banks are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints—Mormons. But I don’t think Trevor really likes being called a Mormon because he uses “L.D.S.” as the abbreviation. He speaks excellent Polish because he spent two years in Poland as a missionary. The funniest story he told me about his missionary experiences involves a play on the Polish word for Mormons: Mormony. Trevor said that he had asked an old man in Polish if he knew about the Mormony. Switching to English, the old man replied enthusiastically, “Mormony, more trouble!” Trevor and I think about many of the same topics, but in very different ways. It’s not that we disagree, but as a film-maker he thinks visually, while as a political scientist, I think in linear terms, with one sentence following the other. An idea he had for a film about Poland’s adjustment to E.U. membership demonstrates his way of thinking. He wanted to tell the story through doors: he wanted a door installed in his communist-era apartment building, but the workers had none that would fit because no two doorways in the entire building are exactly the same size. So he planned to film the workers as they measured the doorway, planed the door, and made the installation. I thought it sounded like a brilliant idea. Were I to investigate the difficulties of Poland’s transition to E.U. membership, I would write a thirty page paper with a hundred footnotes. Trevor, Anna and I traveled together on the train from Wrocław to Łodź. Trevor was extremely helpful in buying my train ticket. My limited Polish skills combined with a clerk’s residual communist notion of customer

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(non)service often leaves me with the wrong kind of ticket, if not to the wrong destination. But Trevor took care of everything, and I was very grateful. He also struck up a conversation with some Poles in our compartment about the Polish identity, and translated their responses for me. A young woman studying to become a dentist was the most willing to talk with him. At first she seemed to define the Polish identity in a completely negative way: she made a list of everything she identified with the United States and said Poland was most definitely not all of those things. In more positive terms she defined Polish-ness as speaking the Polish language. I wondered if that meant she would consider Trevor a Pole, but Trevor. and many other American Polish speakers I discussed it with subsequently, assured me that it is nearly impossible for a non-native speaker ever to sound truly and completely fluent in the language. Along with the Banks’s, I met an architecture professor from the University of Detroit Mercy named Tony Martinico during the orientation. The funny thing is I attended U.D.M. from 1987 to 1991 and never once met him then, even though he is a protégé of the father of one of my best friends. Our academic experiences have some odd parallels, separated by about twenty years. He also attended the University of Detroit, as it was known before it merged with Mercy College in 1990. He majored in political science back then, and it turned out we had shared a professor or two, twenty years apart. Then he went on to graduate study in political science at Wayne State University in Detroit, which is where I took my Ph.D. As it turned out, we’d shared some professors there too. Architecture is his “second” career, which he says is quite common. Even though it required traveling 5,000 miles, I’m really glad we met, and I’m certain we will remain friends. After I moved to Łodź, we remained in e-mail contact and it seemed not much was going right for him in Warsaw, where he was spending two semesters teaching at the Politeknik University. The apartment he was provided turned out to be unacceptable, and he had to move out of it anyway so that some Syrian exchange students could use it. Three prospective apartments had already fallen through, including one where Tony thought the rent quoted to him was in złotys, but the landlord wanted dollars. This is a difference by a factor of only about 2.5! He took it all in stride. He’s been leading student exchanges to Poland for nearly 30 years, so he knows how things sometimes can go, and because he is good friends with the people in charge of his program, he did not believe they were trying to screw him. He stayed for a while in a hotel owned by the university, and once told me, “My room is on the sixth floor, but the elevator only goes to the third and a half floor. Don’t ask . . .” Fulbright awards attract professors with a wonderfully diverse set of interests. Kevin Christianson teaches English Literature at Tennessee Tech, and

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we bonded over sausages and beers in the dorm at Wrocław. We also listened to some Polish-American polka music I had on my laptop. Anyone who likes polka is all right with me, and Kevin seemed to really like polka. He had taught in Poland before, and he seemed to know a lot about how the higher education system works. I learned from him, although it might not have been the lesson he intended to teach, that everything is negotiable in Poland. Course load, teaching schedule, topics—everything is up for grabs. I also learned from Kevin a completely different perspective on Polish students than I had received from the former Fulbrighters I’d contacted back home. “What a lot of people think of as cheating is just collaborative learning,” he said. It sounded a little naïve to me at the time, but he followed it up by telling me that he found the students to be mostly well-behaved and honest, and that a quick public reprimand in front of their peers usually straightened out the others. In other words, despite decades of teaching it seemed Kevin still possessed the proper mixture of optimism and realism. Penn State English Professor Matthew Wilson and his wife and daughter were sent to Łodź too. He came to teach African American literature. That can’t be an easy subject to teach to Poles, who, unless they have visited the U.K. or U.S.A., have likely had almost no experiences with blacks of any kind, including African Americans. It seemed to me you might as well try to teach Martian literature, given how little Poles would understand. But Matthew had taught in Poland before, from 1984 to 1987, so he knew what he was in for. His wife Marian was teaching English at the University too, and once I ran into her on Piotrkowska. Our conversation almost immediately turned to how Poles deal with race, and she said something pretty insightful. “Some Poles think they aren’t racist because they have never done anything terrible to black people, even though they’re pretty sure they don’t like them. But there’s a difference between never having dealt with diversity, and not being racist.” Finally I was pleased to meet Alex Gerber, a graduate student in sociology at the University of Michigan. She’s writing about women’s rights issues in Poland as they relate to the country’s accession to the European Union. She let me read one of her articles and I learned how loaded a word “equality” is in Polish political discourse because of its association with the communist times. I learned from her that you can’t take anything for granted in Poland, even (maybe especially?) the meaning of words. Alex is really smart and sarcastic and we had a very funny moment just looking at each other incredulously during an orientation lecture about contemporary Polish government policy toward ethnic minorities. If there was a lecture worthy of skipping, this would have been it. The young professor read the lecture in a monotone, from the seated position. My first thought was if

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this is what Polish students are used to, then they’re going to love my teaching style, which is much more extemporaneous and interactive. But then I remembered the wonderful teaching style of Krzystof Wróblewski. The young professor began with a table showing the number of various ethnic minorities in Poland. More accurately, his tables showed the almost complete absence of ethnic minorities in Poland. But after that revelation there were still 75 minutes remaining in the lecture. Alex and I unintentionally looked at each other, and I nearly burst out laughing about the upcoming discussion of policies toward a non-existent issue. When I accepted the Fulbright, I thought about what I really hoped to achieve from the experience. It’s all about people: students; other Fulbrighters; and, of course, Polish colleagues and others. So I was gratified that from the Wrocław orientation it appeared I had at least laid the groundwork for good relationships with some interesting Americans. Successfully teaching and establishing strong relationships with Poles still looked very daunting, however. But I was starting to feel better about the Polish experience because it was becoming my Polish experience, and it wasn’t at all like the horror stories I’d heard.

Chapter Six

To Work in Łódz´

My first day of duty in 2007 at the University of Łódź was both baffling and enlightening. There was so much confusion, related to both my teaching schedule and the requirements to become a recognized professor at the university. Paulina Matera, my “opiekun,” (“shepherd”) proved amazingly adept at navigating the university bureaucracy, and I cannot imagine getting through everything without her assistance. During the summer, Paulina had asked me if I could teach four classes: Canadian Government; American Government; Media and Politics; and, Gender and Politics. My first reaction was that four classes in one semester seemed like a pretty heavy load, given that I teach only five courses over two semesters at my home university, Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Second, and more importantly, I informed her that I’m in no way qualified to teach Gender and Politics! But I understood why they thought I could teach it. In the summer of 2006 I’d attended the European Gender Research Conference held at the University of Łódź. I presented a paper on differences between Canadian men and women’s attitudes toward the United States (women like us a lot less). Did I deceive them into thinking I was a bona fide gender researcher with this presentation? Perhaps. But I proposed, wrote and presented the paper in large part because I wanted to attend another conference in Poland, even if it meant straying a bit from my realm of “expertise.” But my bluff had been called. Fortunately I managed to get out of teaching Gender, and thought I was down for teaching just three classes. At the orientation in Wrocław, Paulina sent me an email informing me that my teaching schedule would include three classes, each to be taught on Wednesday in the form of an hour and a half lecture. She did not write that these would be my only classes, but she didn’t mention any others either. At the University of Łódź there are 15 weeks of instruction, so my total number 31

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of hours in the classroom would be 67.5. This didn’t bother me at all, because in a semester in which I teach three classes at B.G.S.U. I’m actually in the classroom for 112.5 hours, as our courses require 2.5 contact hours per week. But when I arrived at the University of Łódź and began talking with various Polish and American colleagues, I learned that I would be required to teach on several Saturdays too, at least one class and probably two. At most that would mean 24 additional hours of instruction, for a total of 91.5, which would still involve fewer hours in the classroom than I was used to back home. But I was unenthused about the prospect of weekend teaching. First, what I’d heard about the Saturday students enrolled in the so-called “extramural” classes did not sound very promising. In the main, these classes are offered for those who did not pass the normal university admissions exam, but were willing to pay for the opportunity to attend. So I believed I would be dealing with a much less gifted group of students. However, I’d also heard that many of the extramural students are part-time, working students—what we’d call non-traditional students in the U.S. Many of them live and work in Łódź, but others travel from long distances, take multiple classes on the weekend, then return to their hometowns on Sunday afternoons. Because I’ve taught at various community colleges and extension campuses of universities, I’ve taught many non-traditional students in my career. Often they are my best students—perhaps not as intellectually prepared as regular students, but able to make up this deficiency with hard work and actual “real world” experiences. Because of this I wasn’t overly worried about the quality of students in weekend classes, but I just didn’t want to teach on Saturdays or Sundays. Not working on weekends is so ingrained in me as an American, that I really, really didn’t want to do any teaching on Saturdays and Sundays, let alone do a lot of it. I know that any normal working person who hears a professor complain about his teaching schedule, even the somewhat more onerous Polish teaching schedule, is probably unimpressed and not particularly sympathetic. I mean, 91.5 hours is just over two full forty-hour work weeks, right? Well, not quite. Of course, we must schedule office hours too: time for individual consultations with students. Universities vary, but a typical rule is to have the same number of office hours as you have classroom hours. Then, too, there is the time needed to prepare lectures and other course materials, but honestly you can do that during the office hours, because until the end of the semester brings on fear of the final exam, students almost never come to office hours. Also, if I were back at my home university, I would be on the hook for several hours a week for doing what we call “service.” That means attending meetings. Department meetings, committee meetings. We have committees

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33

for everything: to distribute merit pay; to buy books for the library; to keep the undergraduate and graduate curricula up to date; to hear student appeals of grades, and on and on. Most of this committee work is the thankless but essential activity that keeps a department, a college and a university functioning. I was pretty sure I’d have to do none of that in Poland. What value would a non-Polish speaker add to a curriculum committee in Poland? Then there is the question of research. The old cliché “publish or perish” is still largely true, especially to earn tenure and promotion from the lowest rank of assistant professor to the mid-level (and job security) of associate professor (full professor is the highest rank). For a political scientist this process involves the collecting and analyzing of data (in my case, usually survey data), and the writing and revising of papers and books. The revising part is the worst, because revisions are prompted by the double-blind peer review process employed at most professional journals: the evaluators of your submission do not know who wrote it, and you are not informed of the names of reviewers. Naturally this allows for a level of directness (some would say cruelty) in the reviews that would be absent had reviewer and writer known each others’ identities. In theory it also leads to more fair and objective reviews. The point is, the process can sting. I would have to continue working on my research while in Poland. So, in the end, my point is simple: professors do more than teach. Do we work 85 hours a week like a corporate attorney or chief financial officer? Of course not, but we are not compensated like them either. In fact, teaching is one of the few jobs about which I hear people consistently say that a great part of our compensation should be the satisfaction we derive from the success of our students. I certainly understand why people think that way, especially given how many teachers (myself included) can wax starry-eyed about the pure joy of watching the proverbial light bulb go on over the head of a struggling student, or the joy a better student brings to your office along with his or her law or graduate school acceptance letters. Student success feels great, but money and free time are pretty desirable too. So my expectations of how much teaching I was going to have to do in Poland were confused from the beginning. How much deception, or maybe just negotiation, was involved on the Polish side has remained a mystery to me. Deception and negotiation require a lot of organization, and that’s something that seemed to be in short supply at Polish universities. Things get done, but they seem to get done at the last minute. And things change, sometimes in a big way, with little explanation or warning. For example, between 2007 and 2008 the amount of time off between winter and spring semesters at the University of Łódź was reduced from the entire month of February, to about two weeks. This wrought havoc with one of my office mate’s plans to return

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to the States. Nobody told him the change was coming; it just came and he had to deal with it. As I was being assigned classes and learning something about how the system functions, I was most concerned about how many weekend extramural classes I would be assigned. In the end I was assigned three weekend classes, but it turned out not to be as bad as that. I was to teach American Government to both first year and advanced students. But rather than require two separate lectures to 25 students each, the course was combined into a large lecture of 50 students, which made it by far my largest class. I was also assigned a “monographic lecture” on the topic of the relationship between politics and mass media in the U.S. Of course I had no idea what that meant, so my Polish colleagues explained it to me. It’s a special course for advanced students where the professor provides a reading list and a final exam: no class meetings between the first and last day of the semester. So I just chopped in half the content of my regular Media and Politics class, and packaged it as a monographic lecture. As it worked out, I would actually be responsible for teaching three hourand-a-half classes for fifteen weeks, and one hour-and-a-half class for eight weeks (but on weekends, precious weekends . . .). In total I would administer and grade five sets of final exams, because of the “monographic lecture.” By some measures (number of discrete courses), that’s a lot more than I would teach back home, but in terms of actual time in the classroom it turned out to be about the same. While it was hardly a vacation, it wasn’t excessive. Thinking of the advice from fellow Fulbrighter Kevin Christianson, after it was all over I wondered how much of my schedule I could have negotiated. I’ve decided my opiekun knew all along I would have significant weekend teaching responsibilities, but her reasons for not telling me had less to do with deception than something I think I’ve detected in the Polish character. Rather than disappoint or anger me by telling me all of the facts, she just left out some crucial information. Did it protect her? I suppose so. But this happens in lots of situations. I would see a student in the hallway and say to her, “see you this afternoon, right?” and she would answer in the affirmative. It turned out that affirmation didn’t necessarily indicate she was coming to class. Was it a lie? Not really, at least not a big one. But it made the interaction as smooth as possible for the moment, even if it might have damaged the long-term relationship. During lunch in Warsaw with my friend Tony I came up with what I thought was a pretty accurate description of one of the difference between Polish and American cultures. I said American culture is based on “telling.” We seem to feel the need or obligation to tell everyone everything they need (or sometimes don’t need) to know about a situation. “Hi, I’m Sherry and I’ll

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be your server today. Our specials today include . . .” In Poland the culture is based on “asking.” If you need to know something, you better ask someone because no one is going to volunteer it. It sometimes seemed people thought it might be insulting to tell you something without your having asked because to do so assumes your ignorance. I also think Poles take more than a little pleasure in watching Americans struggle. But Paulina Matera helped me with so many other tasks, it’s difficult to thank her enough. She set me up with the payroll office so my salary could be directly deposited to my bank account (I’ve heard some Fulbrighters end up getting paid in big stacks of cash). She saw me through the process of setting up my bank account, and she chose a bank with branches and ATMs located near my apartment. She registered me with the city authorities—a strange process required of everyone living in Poland. She signed me up for internet service in my apartment. She helped me avoid a second physical examination, and she served me dinner on my second night in town. She spent two full working days helping me, and she tolerated my sense of humor along the way. Before our visit to the city offices for registration, Paulina warned me repeatedly that I had to bring my passport with me. But about 25 minutes into our thirty minute walk between the university and the city offices, I said, “I don’t need to bring any paperwork for this process, do I?” She took me completely seriously and said, “I told you to bring your passport!” “Oh, I did,” I said, “I was just kidding.” “Perhaps we should just drop you off with the police,” she said with a slight smile. “But then who would teach all these weekend classes?” I replied.

Chapter Seven

Meanwhile, Back at Kresowa

After a discussion with some of my students, I returned for my third visit to Kresowa. They had invited me to attend the American Studies Student Association meeting on a Thursday night, and I’d happily accepted. The topic was an overall assessment of the Bush administration. They meet every other week, and it’s supposed to be an opportunity to speak to each other in English about an important American topic. My students told me that too often they lapse into Polish, so having me there would force them to speak English. They also thought I might know something about the topic. I encouraged the students to think positively about the Bush administration—especially their success in getting their legislation passed (tax cuts, No Child Left Behind, the Iraq War resolution). My goal was to encourage them to think about the relative success or failure of any U.S. administration based on objective criteria, not on whether they agreed with the policies. After meeting with the students, I walked the ten minutes west on Narutowicza St. to Kresowa. The crowd was small, and I noticed the beautiful brown-haired woman. Zbyszek the musician was not working behind the bar, but his lady-friend Ania was. I ordered a beer, she poured it, and collected the five złoty coin. A bald man was sitting between me and the beautiful woman. He spoke to me in English. “Are you from America?” I frequently wondered how Poles always seemed to know where I was from, even before I’d said anything. While I was in Poland I dressed in black and didn’t wear tennis shoes. Sneakers and bright colors usually give Americans away. I tried not to smile, and I always hung my coat up on a rack where one was available. Grinning people in seats with their coats draped over them are almost always Americans. 36

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“Yes, I’m an American,” I told him. “I love America. I lived there for two years. In Orange County. I love it! Lots of money!” “Indeed,” I said, “what do you do now?” “I became doctor,” he said, as if it were something that had happened to him, rather than something he’d sought. I wasn’t sure I believed him. It might well have been something he’d just told the beautiful brown-eyed girl. “Doctors are useful,” I said, “Unlike professors.” We talked a bit about why I was in Poland and whether Barack Obama would win the American Presidency. Poles seem fascinated with the prospect of an African American president. In fact, a student once said to me, “Four hundred years of racism just evaporates like that?” I’d told him it was a bit more complicated. Then Zbyszek the bartender/musician arrived. He greeted me in his usually enthusiastic way. “But I’m sick,” he said, “the flu.” I said, “you probably shouldn’t be in here then.” He said the boss insisted, and anyway it was safer for Ania if he were around. He said he would try to stay for only a short while because he had go to the apteka to get some pills. He had many private Christmas parties to play. I asked him if he had any public performances coming up, but he said no. Then he turned a little bit serious. “I listened to the CD you gave me.” “Yes..?” I said. “I listened to it many times . . .” “Yes . . .” “I liked many of the songs. The structure. The lyrics. Many of them were beautiful. And some were so much about politics.” I nodded—I’d included only a handful of political songs on the Phil Ochs disc I’d given him because I wasn’t sure he’d understand all the American 1960s references, and besides I think Phil’s personal stuff is more enduring. “But the other songs . . .” “The other songs . . .” I repeated. “They were very painful,” he said, “Feel Oaks was hurt . . .” he said. “He was,” I said. “I could hear his end coming,” he said, “He sounded like he knew the end was coming for him.” I told him I regretted having told him the whole story of how Phil Ochs lived and died -- that it might have biased his judgment. He assured me that it had helped him to understand the songs, that he really liked many of them, but he was struck with how sad and desperate Ochs sounded in the personal songs

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near the end of his recording career. He said he could have figured out just from the songs that things did not end well for Phil Ochs. Then Zbyszek was called away by the boss man. He wanted another bowl of bigos, it appeared, and to have a quiet word with Zbyszek about something important. So I went to the jukebox and played some Leonard Cohen, Led Zeppelin and Joe Dassin. Then the bald man talking to the prettiest woman in Łódź spoke to me again in English. “You are from where?” he asked. “Ohio,” I said. “Never been there,” he said. “Of course not,” I said, “why would you?” “Not what I mean. All of America is great. Do you live in a city?” I told him I lived close to Detroit, assuming he might not know about Toledo, the city in which I actually reside. “I have been to Detroit,” He said, “much like Łódź.” I agreed with his assessment, but added, “Less crime in Łódź.” Then the beautiful brown-haired woman spoke a lot of bitchy-sounding Polish to him. Chastened, he told me he had better pay more attention to his girlfriend, otherwise she would get mad. I told him I understood. I said talking to me or talking to her should be an easy choice. He laughed in agreement. Then one of the songs by Joe Dassin I had played on the jukebox came up. A man to my left said, “French music?” “Yes,” I said, “I love Joe Dassin.” “He died very young.” “He did,” I agreed, “I think he was only 40 or so when he died in 1980.” “It reminds me of my university days here,” he said. “They were not always very good times. You know, today is a very special day for Poles of my generation,” he said. He had thinning grey hair and was a little bit heavyset. He also spoke the best English I’d heard in Poland outside of a university. “Why is today special?” I asked. “Today in 1981 Jaruzelski gave his speech,” he said. “Today is the anniversary of martial law?” I asked. “A very bad day for us,” he said, “I was studying law at University of Łódź when it happened . . .” “Were professors targeted?” I asked. “They were,” he replied. “It was terrible. I lost many professors, so I left my studies.” “Where did you go?” “Many places, but eventually to Belfast.”

Meanwhile, Back at Kresowa

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“Do you still live there?” “I do.” “Are you a lawyer?” “No, no, no . . .” he said with a rueful smile, “I work in a factory. It is really nothing.” It was very sad how he dismissed the value of his job because even though it paid well, he didn’t consider it to be important at all. “All work is worthy,” I said. “It is nice of you to say that, but it is not true,” he said. “Excuse me,” I said and went to the jukebox to play some more tunes. “Please play some Supertramp,” he said. I asked him to repeat himself. I explained how on my first night at Kresowa an older man had explained his love for Supretramp. He assured me he was no relation and had never met the man. I told him the man had called Łódź “Litzmannstadt” and he assured me the man was just being provocative, not a Nazi. “Poles love to argue,” he said. The coincidence was pretty remarkable, but I let it pass as four drunk members of the same family crowded around me at the jukebox wanting to select their own songs off my złoty. Evidently they weren’t big fans of my choices, but they were very entertaining with their criticism. Entertaining in a very assertive, very Polish way, that is. When they were sitting at their table they would sing along with the Leonard Cohen a little, and the Zeppelin a lot. They yammered at me in very fast Polish at the jukebox, and I had absolutely no idea what they were saying. Then they pointed at the number pad on the machine to indicate they wanted to choose some songs. I pushed in a quick few numbers, then left them two of my credits. I sat back down at the bar and chuckled about the whole thing. The Northern Irish Pole—his name was Sławomir, rolled his eyes about his countrymen. “Do you know why this pub is called ‘Kresowa?’” he asked. “I really don’t,” I admitted. “I will try to explain,” he said. “You know at one time Poland had a much different shape on the map?” “Yes,” I said. “Well, we had lands in the east—in Ukraine, Belarus,” he said. “Those lands were called the Kresy. This bar—the Kresowa—is named for those lands.” Poland, of course, had lost those lands after World War II. In exchange they’d received lands to the west, from Germany. For example, all of the Poles were moved out of Lwow in Ukraine, and all the Germans were moved out of Breslau. The cities were then renamed Lviv and Wrocław, respectively.

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“Polish history is very fascinating,” I said. “It really is,” he agreed, before a recently arrived patron who had been listening to us interrupted. They spoke much Polish, and then Sławomir said to me, “He said I should tell you Lithuania and Ukraine are very free, and so are we.” I didn’t really understand that, but I said “rozumiem” (”I understand”) anyway. It was near the time of the final trams, and I didn’t want to miss my ride home, so I made to leave. Sławomir said he would like to talk to me again the next night, and I promised I’d be back, even though I had to teach the following day, on Saturday. As I left Kresowa, “Rock ‘n Roll” was playing, and the drunk family was seeming to enjoy it. The beautiful brown-eyed woman was singing along phonetically, and bouncing around on her barstool. I waved goodbye to her and her boyfriend. On the way to the tram stop I stopped at a middle eastern restaurant for some takeaway food—“na wynos” in Polish. A waitress who had served me before brought me an English-language menu, which I thought was very kind of her. I ordered my food, and sat at the bar with my beer and waited. Then two Polish lads showed up and ordered shots of śliwowitz—Serbian plum brandy with 70 percent alcohol. Of course one of them started talking to me. He said he’d just returned to Łódź from England, and would I drink a shot with them? He said today was a great day in Polish history. To him martial law represented the beginning of the end of communism. They were just about the same age as my students, so they hadn’t had to live through it, which I thought made it easier for them to look back on it in a more detached way, but I didn’t want to fight with them about it. I agreed to drink a shot with them. We drank shots of śliwowitz, then my food arrived. I tried to leave, but they wanted to drink another shot. This time Polish vodka. It tasted better than the śliwowitz, but it was still pretty sharp. They were completely wasted—they were following the shots with big Polish beers—and wanted to keep on talking, even though their part of the conversation was descending into pure gibberish. The waitress finally convinced them to let me go in peace. More accurately, she distracted them for a few minutes so I could sneak out. By then it was too late for the trams. I walked to Plac Wolności (Freedom Place), which is a small circular park at the top of Piotrkowska Street, with a tall statue of Tadeusz Kościuśko in its center. I thought about Poland in 1981, when Jaruzelski announced martial law, and how awful Łódź must have been then. Evidently the winter was brutally cold that year, and I doubt anyone thought of Łódź as a city of colors. Twenty six years ago I was just 12 years old, and Poland was eight years away from freedom. I remembered President Reagan telling us to put a light in the window for Poland, and how

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even though my family consisted entirely of committed New Deal Democrats, we’d done so. I took a cab back to my apartment. It cost 13 złoty and 50 groszy. I gave the driver 20 złoty and told him to keep the change. He looked to be about 50. I wondered what he’d been doing 26 years before, but I didn’t ask. I just wanted to go inside and eat my dinner.

Chapter Eight

Poland for the First Time

When I hear my friends speak of what Poland was like during the communist times, and immediately after the fall of the system, I regret that I didn’t get to see the place first-hand during those periods. My first visit to Łódź, and Poland for that matter, didn’t come until October, 2001. The chairman of my Department had forwarded to me an announcement for an American Studies Conference at the University of Łódź. It expressed a particular interest in Canadian topics, which appealed to me because I am interested in Canadian government and politics, particularly cultural protection policy. I prepared a proposal for the 2001 conference, received my acceptance, bought the tickets and looked forward to visiting this mythical place called Poland. After the terrorist attacks of 9-11, my mother tried to convince me not to fly across the Atlantic in early October. I had my own fears and doubts, but I went anyway. We departed from the old international terminal at Detroit Metropolitan airport. Of course, security-screening was heightened, and I arrived for the flight many hours before the scheduled departure. Too many hours, as it turned out, because I was forced to wait in the dingy lounge area for more than three hours before my flight even boarded. I looked over the few other passengers waiting for the flight to London Heathrow, and one compact, nervous middle-aged man caught my attention. With his short, salt and pepper hair and olive skin, I profiled him quickly as an Arab. He paced nervously near the big windows where you could see the flights take off and land. I wondered what evil plan he might be hatching, but I also tried to convince myself that the security-screening would have detected anything suspicious about the nervous little man. I even went and stood near him at the window for a few moments, hoping he would say something so I could detect his ethnic origins through his accent, but he didn’t speak. 42

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43

The flight over was great because it was nearly empty. I had a row of three seats to myself, and they served me two vegetarian curry dinners. It was one of those planes where each passenger had his own TV screen built into the back of the seat in front of him, so I was able to watch movies during most of the flight. It was most comforting to laugh away with Blazing Saddles for what must have been the twentieth time. I did think it was a strange choice to show on a flight, but I was pleased that British Airways hadn’t censored any of the movie’s incredibly offensive language. Heathrow, of course, was a complicated and miserable experience that included a bus ride to change terminals and additional security-screening. Our flight to Warsaw was operated by the Polish national carrier Lot, and it was definitely no frills. We packed onto the smaller plane, and as the flight attendants began serving snacks, I noticed the nervous man from Detroit Metro sitting a few aisles in front of me. I could hear him speaking in Polish with the flight attendants, and I felt pretty ashamed for my attempt at profiling him back in the States. I wasn’t ashamed just because I’d profiled the wrong guy, but that I’d thought that way at all. When I arrived in Warsaw I made most of the mistakes an American can upon visiting Poland for the first time. A middle-aged man in a black leather jacket approached me and asked me in English if I needed a taxi. I told him I did, but I had to change money first. He waited patiently while I did so. Then he drove me in his unmarked Mercedes to the Bristol Meridien Hotel on Nowy Świat St. The ride was disillusioning, mainly because I’d never seen so much graffiti anywhere, and I’m no stranger to big cities. The ride cost around 100 złoty. At the time I thought it was a decent price, because with the exchange rate at 4.25 złoty to the dollar, the ride cost less than $25.00. It was only later that I read in a guidebook (I hadn’t brought one with me, and actually bought my first guidebook to Poland in Warsaw) that I had made a series of rookie mistakes. First, the cabbies who approach you at the airport are part of a criminal syndicate and charge many times the fair rate for a cab ride from Okęcie to the city center. Second, the exchange rate at the airport is much lower than at kantors in other parts of the city. Third, the Bristol Meridien, even with a decent exchange rate pushing the nightly rate under $150 is not the sort of place to stay if you actually want to meet anyone other than foreign businessmen or visiting government officials. Finally, get used to graffiti when you visit Poland: it’s everywhere. I’ve often wondered if the potentially disappointing contrast between the imagined Poland and the real one is part of the reason why more PolishAmericans don’t visit the mother land. Getting ripped off in the airport by someone you’ve imagined somehow to be your “brother” in a place you’ve

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romanticized as a land of happy and hardworking peasants is a real downer. Viewing grey city walls covered in graffiti that, in the main, you don’t understand (and what you do understand are the occasional swastikas and stars of David) is a hard welcome to the place of your ancestors. I’ve had to learn to take Poland as it is. During my first night in Warsaw it was still warm enough for some of the pubs and restaurants in the Old Town to keep open their outdoor sections. Polish Golden Autumn it is called. I stopped for a beer at the first place I saw, just past Zygmunt’s Column at the entrance to the Old Town off Nowy Świat. Inevitably I thought about my Polish grandparents and how much I’d like to tell them about my visit to the motherland, but they were long gone. After a few beers, I walked around the Old Town and stood mesmerized for a few moments in front of two pictures posted near the central square. One is an aerial shot of the Old Town after the 1944 Uprising, and there is not one undamaged building to be seen for miles. The second is of General Eisenhower walking in the demolished square. Eisenhower once said he thought post-war Warsaw was one of the saddest things he’d ever seen, and that he didn’t see how it could ever possibly be rebuilt. But the Poles did rebuild it, in the most ambitious post-war reconstruction project in all of Europe. The next day, Sunday, I took a Polski Express bus to Łódź. We were let out at Plac Dąbrowskiego and I hailed a taxi. The driver didn’t speak much English, but I had written down the address of the American Studies program at the University and he took me there, somewhat skeptically. He was right to be skeptical, because the place was deserted. Naturally the conference was being held somewhere else, but I hadn’t bothered to write down where, and the driver certainly didn’t know. He said, “idea,” and drove me to a pool hall, upstairs from which there was an internet cafe. I sent a quick e-mail to the conference organizer, hoping he would respond with directions within the five minutes I would be at the computer. Of course he did not, and none of the few English-speakers in the place knew anything about the conference. We drove around Łódź for a while thinking about what to do next. I was just about to suggest he take me to a hotel, when he said, “idea,” again, and drove to a rather brightly colored (by Łódź standards, anyway) ten or fifteen story tower on Kopcinskiego Street. The sign on the awning said the Polish for University of Łódź Conference Center and Hotel. It just had to be the right place, I thought, and it was. I tipped the cabbie generously, and even with that the fair was less than a third of what I’d paid for much less time and mileage in Warsaw. The young conference manager told me I’d tipped way too much by Polish standards, but after I explained all the circumstances of my journey, he agreed the tip was fair. But he warned me to watch out for Polish cabbies. Where were you in Warsaw? I thought.

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Most of the conference participants came from Europe, with a few Americans and Canadians thrown in for good measure. The opening night dinner consisted of roast pork, kasza and beets. I ate the roast even though I was a vegetarian, because I didn’t want to have a fuss made over my food preferences. I told Wiesiek Oleksy, the professor in charge of the proceedings, that normally I was a vegetarian, and he replied, “but not an extremist, I see.” Two Brits, a Canadian, a Finn and I talked over dinner about wanting to find the nearest bar as soon as we were finished eating. A student told us the closest place was just a block away, but that we wouldn’t like it. He described it as seedy. We decided to try our luck. It was, without a doubt, the seediest bar I’d ever been in, with a cement floor, wobbly wooden chairs, and unmatched formica tables. It was unheated, and a grumpy old Pole sat behind the beaten wooden counter filling drink orders and serving allegedly Chinese food from big filthy pots on the stove in the kitchen. On the plus side, the price was right: 3.5 złoty for a half liter of beer—less than ninety cents. The Brits, Finn, Canadian and I were delighted when some other conference participants made their way to the dirty place. Soon the international academics outnumbered the local drunks. They stared at us a little, but if they were inclined to threaten us in any way I’m sure the owner would have made them back down because of how much we were contributing to his bottom line on a Sunday night. We shared our adventure with the student managers of the conference the next morning, and they said we really should try Piotrkowska Street. This is the pedestrian heart of Łódź, with hundreds of “nice” bars. They said it was a ten minute walk, but when we tried it later in the evening I was introduced to another Polish phenomenon: dramatically underestimating the time it takes to walk between two points. It took us half an hour walking at a brisk pace. We sat in the outdoor section of a bar/restaurant called Quo Vadis. We were seated near two women in Polish Army uniforms. The Canadian in our group—a hearty old Nova Scotian with a red face and more of a brogue than one would expect from someone from New Scotland—walked right up to the women and asked playfully, “make love not war?” Of course they had no idea what he was talking about, but they smiled. He chided us single guys in the group about our reticence in not talking with these decidedly non Englishspeaking girls, but after about half an hour, they left, and he let it drop. Later in the evening, he ran off a pimp who offered us “many women” with a blunt, “NOT interested!” During the three nights we were in Łódź the little group of us drank together every night and bonded the way foreign travelers often do. Our last night in Łódź we drank shots and beers at the seedy bar until closing. Our train to the Warsaw airport left the next morning at 6:00, but that didn’t slow

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us down. The student organizers had called for taxis the night before, and they were waiting for us at 5:15 when we poured our hungover (or were we still drunk?) bodies downstairs. There were two taxis. The first one, with two Brits as passengers, took off into the darkness as the Old Nova Scotian and I were still getting into the second one. No one had told the driver where to take us, and he was exasperated when the first cab drove off. I think he’d intended to follow him to our destination. “Where!? Where!?” he asked. I searched my mind for the right words for train station. “Stacja pociągu?” I ventured. “O.K.!” he said, and we drove off. What an introduction to Poland, I thought. Three days in a city no tourist buses ever visit. Even as the upset taxi driver was taking us away, I felt like my life with Łódź was just beginning.

Chapter Nine

Names and Pictures

My friend Trevor visited my classes one Wednesday to recruit subjects for an art project with which he was involved. He had to get 200 Polaroid photos of English speakers and a brief audio recording of each person saying their name and anything they might want to say about their name. He chose a poor day to recruit, because attendance was terrible. Fewer than half the students in the first two classes showed up, while the third— American Government—had its usually good attendance. I left the room while he did the photographing and recording because I wanted the students to know it was voluntary, and that non-participation would not affect their grade in any way. That’s such an American “ethics in research and education” thing to do. I don’t think it even crossed the minds of the students to care if their final grade—based as it is on one exam—would go up or down whether or not they let Trevor photograph and record them. After the American Government class, a German exchange student invited Trevor and me to her dorm because she was sure she could recruit many of the foreign students living on her floor. She was so enthusiastic and interested in the project, and Trevor was so far from his 200 photo quota, there was no way we could turn down her offer, even though she lived on the third floor of the dorm (in the U.S. it would be the fourth), and there was no elevator. She walked up and down the hall knocking on doors and explaining the project. Trevor set up shop in the hallway, and the students came to him. A Turkish girl said her mom just made up her name. A Frenchman said he looked up his name once and found that only 35 people in all of France had the same one. Yet, it still disappointed him there were so many. A Spaniard complained that his parents had given him the third most common name in Spain. Between my classes and the dorm, Trevor bagged over thirty subjects, leaving him only about a hundred short of his quota. 47

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“I owe you dinner at the Vietnamese place for this,” Trevor said. “Not tonight,” I said, “let’s go to Raz Na Wozie.” “What’s that?” he asked, “I mean, I know what the name means, but . . .” “It’s a restaurant and bar I used to go to every week. They’ve got a bartender who juggles, and after nine there’s dancing and karaoke.” “Polish food, I assume?” “Yes. Almost nothing over ten złoty.” We rode the Pomorska tram to Plac Wolności for the short walk down to Ulica Rewolution 1905, the street on which Raz Na Wozie is located. “That student of yours is really something,” Trevor said. “Yeah. Smart, beautiful, energetic . . . How old do you think she is?” “She told me,” he said, “she’s 23. Of course I’m not looking, but she’s by far the prettiest German woman I’ve ever seen.” We both had a good laugh at that. We arrived at Raz Na Wozie around 9:00 and sat on a rough hewn wooden bench beside an equally rustic looking table. Polish countryside is the theme of Raz Na Wozie’s decoration, with a real fireplace and a blazing fire adding much to the charm. We were seated next to two drunk middle-aged Polish women, obviously on the prowl: overweight and showing too much skin, wearing too much make-up, seductively smoking (or so they probably thought). They said something in Polish to both of us, but only Trevor understood. “What did they say?” I asked. He pointed to something behind us and whispered that we should both look at it so they wouldn’t think we were talking about them. So we both turned our heads toward the wall behind us, and he pointed as he talked. “They said ‘you can only get one drink here tonight. One beer,’” he said. “What the Hell does that mean?” “I don’t know,” he all but whispered. Then the waiter came over. He was a nice English speaking kid who’d served me before. I ordered a beer and potato pancakes with gulasz. Trevor ordered the same, but discussed with the waiter, in Polish, which salads were available. He settled on red cabbage and beets. I was knocking back beers at a pretty decent pace, as the food took an uncharacteristically long time to arrive, and the room filled with beautiful women and enthusiastic men. The music had started almost immediately after we arrived. The Wednesday music at Raz Na Wozie is usually decent: no thumping Euro dance music, but instead mainly Polish pop and the occasional ballad for slow dancing. “There sure are a lot of beautiful women in here,” Trevor commented. “Sure are,” I said, “but I don’t expect I could find a wife here.” That was a reference to an ongoing line of semi-serious conversation between Trevor and me about how young he is to be married (26) and how old I am not to be (38),

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and how the difference is partly religion-based. He took my kidding about his religion very well, and once in a while threw in a barb about Catholicism, or the morals of a lapsed Catholic. “You never know,” he said. I cited the hackneyed “Miss Right versus Miss Right Now” joke, and we both had a good laugh. I liked to test Trevor with crudity and drinking, and he never judged me too harshly. He once told me he had been the designated driver throughout high school, so he was probably used to it. I believe he must have privately prayed for my soul, and just as is the case with my feelings toward my mother’s efforts in that area, I appreciated it. The unattractive women at the table next to us went to sit by the fire while we were eating our dinners. They were replaced by a diminutive and stunning redhead and her slightly larger brunette friend. I guessed them to be in their late twenties, maybe early thirties. I leaned toward Trevor, nodded my head slightly in their direction, and quietly said, “wow . . . ,” mainly in reference to the redhead. “The redhead is staring at you and smiling,” he said. “I think she’s looking at you.” “No, it’s definitely you,” he said, “I think she likes your beard.” I decided there was a possibility that could be true. Red and red. Czerwony i czerwony. I sneaked a glance at her. She most definitely was looking at me and smiling. I managed a feeble smile back. Why does this stuff make me so nervous, I wondered. Then they played “the song.” The song is “It Is Already Evening” by a relatively new Polish group called Feel. It’s a power pop song in the style of Creed, with Eddie Vedder-style vocals that I almost certainly would not like if performed in English by an American band. But I loved it while I was in Poland. I heard the song everywhere while I was there: in cabs to and from the airport, on TV at the pool hall, on jukeboxes, even coming out of a lower floor in the dorm while we were walking up the stairs for the photos and recording. I’d pointed it out to Trevor at the time, but he couldn’t really hear it. I was glad they were playing it during dinner. “That’s the song,” I said. “Oh sure, I know it,” he said, “it’s playing everywhere now isn’t it?” “I really like it,” I said. “You should ask her to dance,” he said. I considered doing the unthinkable and actually asking her to dance, but before I even had to make up my mind, an older man had her out on the floor. “You are such a wimp,” Trevor said, “If you don’t ask her to dance I can’t be your friend anymore.” I knew he was kidding. “I’m just kidding,” he said, “but you really should ask her.”

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She sat back down, and the older guy and his older friend joined them at their table. “Now I’m screwed,” I said. “That means nothing. You don’t even know if she likes them.” “I suppose,” I said, and sneaked another glance at the redhead. God, she was beautiful, I thought: reddish blonde hair, blue eyes, an off both shoulders blue knit top, with blue jeans and brown boots. Then I thought she may have patted the bench next to her in a “why don’t you sit here?” kind of way. “Did you see that?” Trevor asked. “Go sit down with her.” I started to get up, but the older man was taking her back out on the dance floor. She looked back at me with a “you had a chance, sucker” look. “Let’s get out of here,” I said as I finished off my fifth half liter of Tyskie. “If you leave here without at least talking to her, we can’t be friends anymore.” I appreciated his support. “Okay, when she comes back,” I said. “I’m going to go outside and call Ashley,” Trevor said. “Do it!” I did it. Of course she didn’t speak a word of English. The older man she’d been dancing with actually translated for us. That was awkward. I told her I thought she was beautiful, and she blushed. That just made her seem even cuter. I told her I wasn’t a very good dancer. She told me her name was Ewa. I told her my name, and gave her my business card. My business card! I felt like such a dummy! Then the DJ played Ryszard Rynkowski’s “Jedzie Pociąg z Daleka,” which is a song about riding on a train. Polka bands in the U.S. play it, but their title is “Anywhere but Warsaw,” because that is where the singer asks the train to take him in the chorus. Almost everybody in the room got up to dance to this one, and we snaked around the room as a great train. At least I got to put my hands on Ewa’s hips and watch her beautiful little behind wiggle as we moved around the room. When the song ended, a younger guy grabbed Ewa’s arm for the next dance. I gave up. I met Trevor at the door as he was coming back in after his call to his wife. “We should go,” I said, “we don’t want to miss the last tram.” “Did you even talk to her?” he asked. “I did,” I said. “What’s her name?” he asked skeptically. “Ewa,” I said, “but tonight’s not going to be my night. Too much competition.” “We’ll never get you married this way,” he said. We both had a good laugh. “Sure we will,” I said, “just not tonight.”

Chapter Ten

Polka, Polka, Polka

Because my mother liked polka music, I grew up listening to all the greats: Li’l Wally, Happy Louie, Marion Lush, Eddie Blazonczyk, The Dynatones. It should be pointed out that these are Polish-style polka musicians, not German, Slovenian or Czech. These distinctions are often lost on non-ethnic ears, but they are very real and significant in terms of everything that matters about music: instrumentation, tempo, and, of course, the language of the lyrics. I have rarely been more offended than when a public TV station in Detroit tried to woo Polish-American contributors by showing a fine documentary about the history of Poles in America, then offering Frank Yankovic recordings as premiums for contributions. “Yankovic is Slovenian,” I yelled at the TV, and even called the station to complain. I suggested they wouldn’t dare offer Mexican Mariachi music after a documentary on Cuban Americans. Of course, when I was in my teen years I rejected polka music with a passion. The great Chicago polka musician Eddie Blazonczyk sings of doing the same thing when he was young: Later on while in high school I rock and rolled and I was cool Mom and dad said, “Edziu, co to jest?”

(“Eddie, what is that?”)

My mom doesn’t speak Polish and she is of a generation to appreciate some rock and roll, so she was not as upset by my rejection of polka, but I believe the idea was the same. Everyone flees from cultural products their parents like, while their parents just have to hope for their kids to return. Just as Eddie B. did in the song and in real life, I too returned to polka music. In fact, by the time I was in my early thirties I was the host of my own polka radio broadcast in Detroit. 51

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A part-time polka DJ is one of the things I am meant to be, even though I’ve only ever done it for a year total; two different six month stints to be exact. But they were great times, and the perfect excuse to expand my polka collection to over a thousand recordings. Even though I tried not to, I became, especially around my Polish-American friends who do not like polka music, the kind of Polish-American no one particularly likes. I mean The Proselytizer. The Proselytizer just can’t understand how any Polish-American doesn’t love polka music. He plays music for them every time he gets the chance, claiming polka isn’t just stupid dance music. “Listen to these lyrics!” he says. He talks them into going to dances, with the belief that they’ll convert after hearing just a few good songs. Once he’s been to Poland, the Proselytizer gets even worse. Now he wants his friends not just to hear polka bands play at the Knights of Columbus Hall down the street, but he wants them to visit the Mother Land too. At the very least he insists that they watch Wajda and Kieślowski films (especially the Dekalog) to get a sense of the Polish soul. In retrospect I marvel at my friends’ tolerance of my preaching. The preaching must have had some positive effects because many of my friends planned to visit me during my time in Poland as a Fulbright lecturer, and most of them actually showed up. Heather and Marco were the first to arrive, in mid-October. Mid-October was a great choice of times to visit. The weather was still reasonably warm, and their host was in good spirits because he’d already met all of his students and found them to be not all that different from students back in the States. In fact, I was starting to doubt the critiques some of the former Łódź Fulbrighters had offered, and wondering why I had taken them so seriously. My friends Alex and Tony met up with us, which initiated a pattern for these visits in Warsaw. We’d start out for dinner and drinks at Pub 7, a nautical themed bar off Plac Konstytucji, near the MDM Hotel. True to their characters Tony would be gracious and interested, and Alex would be inquisitive and friendly with my friends. Then we’d walk up Marszalkowska Street and Tony would explain the architecture and Alex would take care of the politics. Next, we’d cross the Saski Gardens and stop for a moment at the Tomb of the Unknown. Then we’d cross the square in front of the Tomb, and Tony would suggest a short-cut to the Old Town that by-passed the construction on Krakowskie Przedmieście Street. Sometimes we elected to stumble through the construction in order to see the churches and commercial buildings of that impressive street. Often Alex would leave us there and head home, saying she’s not a late night kind of person. We’d make it to the Old Town, visit a

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few bars, including my favorite one in the basement of the Adam Mićkiewicz Museum. I would invariably complain about the length of the walk, and Tony would say that even his young American students call his Warsaw tours “Martinico’s Death Marches.” But they weren’t really that bad. I must have made that tour, or some variation of it, with half a dozen of my friends, and it’s one of the things I missed most after my return. Once I had seen Kraków and Gdańsk, Warsaw was not my favorite Polish city. However, so many “insider” visits coupled with seeing it anew through the eyes of so many of my friends gave me a love for the defiant and vital place. Its skyline changes every time I visit, but its soul remains the same. Slowly new glass and steel skyscrapers surround Stalin’s gift of the ghastly neo-gothic Palace of Culture and Science, yet the benches at the end of Kościelna St. in the New Town still provide a quiet place to look over the Wisła. History—often tragic history—is everywhere, marked with plaques and candles, but the future is right around the corner too. After Marco and Heather’s visit, my friend Steve, who has probably endured more of my proselytizing than anyone else, arrived in Poland about the same time as another friend of mine. Steve’s been a real sport about it because he is 100 percent Polish American and does in fact enjoy Polish food, music and drink. He’s at best undecided about Polish cinema, especially the Dekalog, but he’ll endure the occasional late-night viewing of that grim set of films. We met up in Kraków rather than Warsaw because I was staying there for an academic conference the weekend he was able to visit. I’d had the organizers book an extra room for him in the conference hotel. He flew into the Kraków airport and was just settling into his room in the early evening when I arrived back from the conference. “Dzień freakin’ dobry,” he said as he opened the door. “Dzień dobry, brother,” I replied, and we shook hands, “welcome to the Mother Land. We’re meeting everyone for drinks in fifteen minutes.” He’d arrived without his checked baggage so he had no opportunity for a change of clothes after his overnight flight. He splashed a little water on his face and we headed off to a classic Kraków cellar bar where most of the conference participants had gathered for a beer before dinner. It was smoky, crowded and loud. It was the perfect place to ward off the ill effects of jetlag through the awesome power of Polish beer. After a few pints of delicious, cold Żywiec—how many times have we drank this together back in the States, and why did it never taste this good we asked each other—we moved with the rest of the group to a wonderful Italian restaurant for dinner. Red and white wine were the order of the day there, and Steve bought several extra decanters for the table. We both flirted

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with a pretty teacher who was participating in the conference. Her English was terrific—in fact, her main role at the conference seemed to be to translate for her school’s head teacher. Steve’s main line of flirtation was to defend his mother’s use of a pinch of brown sugar on her goląbki. “I have never heard of such a thing,” the pretty teacher said. “Are you doubting my mother?” Steve teased. “No, no,” she demurred, “It is just so new to me.” After dinner a few of us went to yet another of Kraków’s cellar bars. I love those places. “I hate these places. Can’t we ever drink above ground?” asked Ewa, a beautiful young civic education activist. “C’mon,” I protested, “we have to show Steve the real Kraków.” “Most of that is above ground,” she protested. After a round or two just the three of us remained in the bar. The pretty teacher had to return with her boss to their room at a reasonable hour. A middle-aged Polish professor left at the same time as the secretary of the academic program at Jagellonian University that was sponsoring the conference. He failed to make it back for day two of the conference. Steve, Ewa, and I drank and talked the night away. A little of The Proselytizer came out during the conversation. “On the bus from Warsaw to our orientation in Wrocław, the Fulbright Commission showed us Wajda’s Man of Marble” I said. “That’s the one about the bricklayer, isn’t it?” Steve offered. “Yeah, the bricklayer the communists love and then hate,” I said, “and Krystyna Janda’s performance as the young filmmaker is just great, too,” I said. “Krystyna Janda is my aunt,” Ewa said. I couldn’t believe it! There I sat, just one degree of separation from one of Poland’s great actresses. She even plays a role in the Dekalog! We talked a little bit about her decline into relative obscurity, some poor choices of roles, and her recent activism on behalf of the rights of a transgendered Pole. As conversations must, this one moved on, mercifully before I could gush too effusively. Then Ewa said her goodbyes and Steve and I stumbled back to our hotel. The next morning I made it back to the conference a little green around the gills, but nothing that bitter Polish instant coffee and a lot of bottled water couldn’t cure. That afternoon my friend Marty arrived. He was staying in the same room as Steve, and I think he awakened him with his late afternoon arrival. A much reduced group from the conference hit the bars that night. We started out with visits to a couple of jazz clubs; one featured fusion jazz which I don’t much like, while the other was soon overrun with obnoxious drunk businessmen. We walked back toward out hotel around midnight, still thirsty for more. So we stopped at a steamy bar crowded with karaoke singers.

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Often Poles sing western pop music at karaoke, but I like it more when they sing disco polo, which are folk songs played on cheap sounding synthesizers and drum machines. It’s not considered serious music, but Poles seem to love it, especially when they’re drinking. So it’s popular for wedding receptions and karaoke. I like the songs because many of the polka bands in America play them and so I know some of the lyrics and melodies. Disco polo dominated this bar. Just after the three of us sat down at the bar, a beautiful young blonde approached us. Upon discovering we spoke only English, she informed us in our native language that she might have lost her job that night for calling her boss something terribly offensive. But she was so drunk she didn’t care anymore. Steve flirted with her for a while, but she was too far gone. So we drank a couple of beers and listened to the terrible singing. I sang along with a few songs from my barstool, but even after all the beer I’d consumed I wasn’t foolish enough to get up and sing one from the stage. On our way back to the hotel, we stopped for a kebab sandwich at a stand we had been informed was the best in Kraków. Because I know enough Polish to do so, I ordered for the three of us. This also meant I had to fend off the diminutive drunk who begged us for money. After I paid for our sandwiches, I gave the drunk a few złoty while the men working the kebab stand yelled at him to go away. One bar between the kebab vendors and our hotel was still open at that late hour, but they had a “no kebabs” sign in the front window, so we went back to our rooms to eat. It was a wise choice. We had to catch an early train to Warsaw the next morning.

Chapter Eleven

A Great Day of Teaching

Part way through the semester I’d made a sort of resolution to try to get more discussion going in my classes. I’d become more comfortable with my students, and I think they had become accustomed to my informal style. I’d delivered many of what I thought to be pretty good lectures, but I hadn’t managed to draw them out very often. I’d been warned, even by those professors who enjoyed their teaching experiences in Poland, that the students are unduly deferential to their professors, and are just not that accustomed to being asked their opinions. But I value intelligent in-class discussions, and thought I should try it in Poland. I chose a pretty auspicious time in American political history to try to get my American Politics class talking, given that the topic of the day was the presidency, and Barack Obama was shaking things up back home. Also, experiences outside the classroom had convinced me that the Poles were pretty interested in American Presidents and in race relations. I started the class period off by asking the students to name the greatest presidents. “Lincoln,” came the first reply. I wrote his name and 1861-1865 on the chalkboard. “What did he achieve?” I asked. “He won the Civil War,” came the almost immediate answer. “Who else?” I asked. “F.D.R!” “Excellent,” I said and wrote down 1933-1945. “His accomplishments?” “He won the war—for you,” a young man said, making sure I knew he didn’t consider all of Roosevelt’s war policies to be beneficial for Poland. “Okay, there is another president I always hear Poles say they love,” I hinted. 56

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“Reagan,” said one of the three smart young women who sat side by side by side in the front row and took the most copious notes of any of the students in the room. I wrote 1981-1989 on the board and asked, “and what did Reagan do?” “He fought the communists,” someone said. “And how did he do that?” I asked. There was a long pause. There’s always a long pause at this point in the discussion, even in the States. They know we didn’t go to war with the Soviet Union during Reagan’s term. They usually don’t immediately think of the proxy wars in Afghanistan and Central America. They almost never think in terms of the trillion dollar military build-up. “How do you say it?” one of the smart young women asked, “Star Wars?” “Well, yes, that symbolizes how he did it,” I said. “We could afford to spend a trillion dollars on the military, and if the Russians tried to keep up it would bankrupt them because their economic system was so bad.” “He helped Solidarity, right?” someone asked. “Yes, he did,” I said, “but there are debates about how much. Why didn’t the U.S. warn activists before martial law was declared, if in fact we knew it was coming?” I asked. “Maybe you didn’t know.” “Maybe so,” I said, “but there is no doubt he hated communism.” “And that was a good thing to hate,” someone said. “It was,” I replied, “and what about his domestic policies?” This question elicits silence in the United States as well. The events we were speaking of happened before they were born, so to them it is ancient history. “Tax cuts,” I said. “Trying to cut social programs?” None of it rang a bell with them. But I listed on the board the three classic Reagan planks: cut taxes, reduce social spending, increase defense spending. Most of the students dutifully wrote them down, but I also noted that one of the only two male students was actually copying a stack of notes loaned to him by another student. I couldn’t tell from the front of the classroom if they were just the notes he never took during my class, or if they were the notes he never took from all of his classes. He also flirted occasionally with the pretty student seated next to him, but it was never loud or sustained enough to justify a shushing. Clearly this guy is a “professional” bad student, I thought. Then I explained the President’s formal powers as granted by the Constitution and modified over time. As always, the lecturing tends to take a bit of the wind out of the discussion, but there is no way to explain the president’s executive, legislative, judicial, diplomatic and military powers without naming them,

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describing them, and offering examples. The examples usually elicit some response from the students. I tried some different examples than I normally use in the U.S. in an effort to connect with the Polish students. When discussing the president’s diplomatic powers I used the example of the Baltic states that were once part of the Soviet Union, and why it mattered that the United States never recognized the legitimacy of Soviet control over them. I would never have used this example in the United States, but I thought it would resonate with the Poles, and it did. But I also used some of the same examples I use back home. For example, I love discussing the 1967 Detroit riots as an example of the president’s power to use the military in domestic situations. My Bowling Green students are usually pretty interested in the death and destruction in Detroit in 1967, and it sometimes leads to a discussion of why the National Guard failed to put down the riots, which in turn leads to a discussion of what kind of people were in the Guard in 1967, what they were avoiding, and what kind of people served in Vietnam instead. But my Polish students weren’t very interested. They did, however, seem to find any topic that involved the place of race in contemporary American politics very interesting. During a discussion with the American Studies Student Association, race came up in the form of a question about the electability of a black presidential candidate. From there the conversation turned to conflicts between African Americans and some recent immigrants; for example, between blacks and Koreans in Los Angeles and blacks and Chaldeans in Detroit. “Why do blacks fail to get ahead?” a student asked. I gave a politically correct, and accurate, answer that suggested a combination of factors including both racism and some social pathologies in many black communities as the causes. But the student wanted more. “Are they lazy?” I was taken aback by the directness of the questioning, but I tried to explain the fallacy of ascribing individual characteristics to an entire group of people. In that day’s class discussion of the American Presidency we were destined to discuss race again, given Barack Obama rise to top-tier presidential candidate status. But before settling into that, I wanted to describe how political parties select presidential candidates and how the electoral college works. This is a difficult task even among American students who’ve supposedly learned all this in high school. I expected it to be nearly impossible with Polish students, who likely had heard little about our little 18th century anachronism. I wrote the following words in big block letters on the board:

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Nominee Conventions Delegates Primaries Caucuses People Then I explained that major party presidential candidates in the U.S. are chosen by delegates to national conventions, who in turn have been chosen in primaries and caucuses. I even explained the differences between caucuses and primaries. When I cited the prominence of Iowa and New Hampshire in the process and noted their unrepresentative demographics, the students were every bit as appalled as my American students normally are. Then in another column next to the words above, I wrote the following list: Electoral College 538 House Plus Senate 50 State Elections Winner Take All Majority House of Representatives As I was explaining that each state gets a number of electoral votes equal to its number of senators and representatives, and that the plurality popular vote getter in a state wins all of the electoral votes in 48 of the states (Nebraska and Maine being the exceptions), and that to win the presidency a candidate must get a majority of the electoral votes or, failing that, the House of Representatives chooses the president, the background chatter in the room began to grow. Of course I couldn’t hear the specifics of most of it and it was all in Polish so even if I had been able to hear it, I would have been hard-pressed to understand it all, but I sensed it was expressions of confusion, about what I was trying to explain. And I loved it. I was excited because the vast majority of the minds in the room were intellectually engaged with the subject! I usually sum up my discussion of complicated matters like this with an intentionally long, confusing and (I hope) funny sentence. That day’s efforts went: “So, small numbers of Americans from demographically unrepresentative states start a selection process through primaries and caucuses that cost tens of millions of dollars to nominate both parties’ presidential candidates

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who then compete in a series of winner take all elections in the states, but most states are not very competitive so they concentrate all their efforts in a handful of competitive states like Michigan, Ohio, and Florida, and even though they have only three electoral votes, states like Wyoming are actually OVER-represented in the process (do the math), which some say helps Republicans, and if no candidate gets a majority of votes in the electoral college, then the House chooses the president, but they don’t vote as individuals, but as state delegations.” They laughed. It worked. I am absolutely certain that not all of them understood everything about the selection process of the President of the United States (because I know my U.S. students don’t either), but for close to an hour and a half their minds were engaged in the process of critical thinking about presidential greatness and the complexity and expense of choosing the most powerful person in the world. It was exhilarating. “And after all this a black man will emerge as president?” a student asked. “Hmmmmmmm. . . . Maybe?” I said, and they laughed a little again. “Well, that’s enough for today, if you have any questions, come and see me,” I said, and most of the students noisily filed out of the room. A few stayed behind. Some of them were catching up with notes from missed classes, but a few were going over what we had just covered. The “professional” bad student returned the notes he’d borrowed from the girl who sat next to him. He smiled at me politely and nodded as he left the classroom. I was sure he’d missed out on most of the discussion, and it didn’t bother me at all, because it reminded me of what a professor I respect a great deal had once told me about teaching: “Do it for the good ones.” For at least one class session during my lectureship in Poland, “the good ones” meant almost all of them.

Chapter Twelve

Warsaw, London, and Oxfordshire

As I mentioned earlier, teaching is not a professor’s only responsibility. We are obligated to produce original research and to share that research with our scholarly community in the form of conference presentations, journal articles and books. During my Fulbright lectureship I attended two conferences in Europe: one in Kraków and the other in England, at the Ditchley Foundation. I’d been invited to the Ditchley gathering before I left for Poland in September. I received an e-mail invitation to the conference entitled “How Young People Form Political Opinions” from Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the Ditchley Foundation’s Director and Britain’s ambassador to the United Nations at the time of the invasion of Iraq. Even though the topic was spot- on with what I research (the first book I published was entitled Entertainment and Politics: the Influence of Pop Culture on Young Adult Political Socialization), I was initially skeptical of the invitation. Most professors receive quite a few invitations to conferences that are more interested in making a financial profit by luring professors to a warm locale than they are about serious research. Plus, the “Sir” appended to Greenstock’s name, rather than reassuring me, actually made me more skeptical. I smelled a rat—some new twist on the old Nigerian lottery scam. So I called the Ditchley Foundation, and without exactly intending to do so, asked if they were a scam. A proper Englishwoman on the other end of the line said to me, “Professor Jackson, we are most assuredly legitimate.” She let me know that I had been invited because they had read a journal article I’d written. Of course I agreed to attend. I decided to spend a few days in London before going out to Ditchley, which is about an hour train ride away. En route I planned to spend a day and night in Warsaw. Around that time Fulbrighters were asked to attend a half-day mid-semester meeting, and I believed a bit of a vacation from Lódź 61

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was in order. It would mean missing a full slate of Wednesday classes, but the students assured me they wouldn’t mind having a day off. Not all of the Fulbrighters I’d previously met at the Embassy made it to the meeting in Warsaw, but most did. The first order of business was to discuss any problems we were facing, and many of my colleagues offered what sounded to me like very legitimate complaints about housing, compensation and working conditions. I kept my mouth shut, because I didn’t believe I’d been abused at all compared with people who’d had real difficulties getting paid, or having necessary renovations done on their apartments. Of course I never found out how much money my apartment cost or even if I was paying for it, nor how much (if anything) my internet connection cost. I think I paid Polish taxes, which amounted to 20 percent of my university-paid salary, but understood that I might get some of that back. I did end up getting assigned Saturday classes, which I did not expect, but that hardly seemed worth complaining about, when other people (especially students) were being completely ignored by their host universities. One student, whom I had not particularly liked at the orientation because he usually ignored the lectures and wrote in his journal or folded origami (yes, folded origami), presented himself much better at the mid-semester meeting. He sounded more intelligent and confident, and he was teaching about five sections of basic English composition, something he had never done before. He said he was loving it and his classes were going great. Someone asked him if he’d been provided curriculum materials, and he just laughed and said of course not. I thought that made his achievement all the more impressive. Another very intelligent young woman who’d recently graduated from college was assigned to the English department at the University of Poznań. Her superiors all but ignored her for the first few weeks, and would only meet with her very briefly after that. It turned out they had only requested a Fulbright teaching assistant because they thought it was prestigious and they knew how to fill out the forms. They really didn’t know what to do with her—they did not want to give her courses to teach, and none of the professors had much for her to do, although they were very friendly to her and seemed to like having her around. So she set up her own tutoring operation and recruited students outside of classes. All she wanted from the university was a little office space, which at the time of the meeting had not been forthcoming -- again not because they didn’t like her, but because space is at such a premium at Polish universities (three of us shared my office in Lódź, which was just a little bigger than my private office in Bowling Green). We all complained about the declining value of the dollar, but the Fulbright staff assured us there was nothing they could do about that. After the meeting we ate dinner at a Bavarian themed restaurant, but everyone was disappointed

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with their food. Many of us had heard good things about the place, but they weren’t on their game that day. Many of us were staying in Warsaw for the night (or were living there), so we planned to go out for the evening. But we had a bit of business to attend to before the fun. First was the book exchange. Some of us had been reading quite a bit since arriving in Poland, especially those of us who do not speak the language very well. So we agreed to exchange books. I traded some Hemingway, John Irving and Nick Hornby for some different John Irving. Our next project was a little stranger. A Polish graduate student friend of the resourceful woman in Poznań was writing a dissertation on changes in the American pronunciation of the letters “y” and “i.” She wondered if we each would be willing to read a list of words into a recorder for him. Most of us agreed, and met up after dinner at a Warsaw Fulbrighter’s apartment for the recording sessions. It was a long, strange list, because we had to follow each word with the same phrase: “one more time”: Ice, one more time Bike, one more time Thick, one more time Pyre, one more time It proved to be only moderately annoying, and the graduate student gave each of the participants a chocolate candy after his or her reading. Our third project before going out for the evening was to help our friend Trevor with the Polaroid photo and name project. Each of the readers of “i’s” and “y’s” dutifully lined up to be photographed and to talk about their names. Tony’s description was the best I ever heard because he channeled Groucho Marx with jokes such as, “I was named after my father who was named after his father who was named after his father . . .” It was quite hilarious. Then we all went out in search of a good bar. The first place we visited was right next to the Novotel Hotel at the corner of Marszalkowska and Jerozolimskie Streets in the center of Warsaw. We sat upstairs and made multiple beer-runs to the bar downstairs. The first round of four beers cost 36 złoty—nine each, which is close to four bucks. By the second round our four beers cost 37 złoty. Ridiculous Warsaw prices, so we moved on to the un-named bars in the old Pewex store off Nowy Świat. The eight of us had the basement to ourselves, and we drank and talked about our experiences. These were the people who loved, or at least really liked, Poland -- even some of the strange and difficult stuff. It felt very reassuring to talk with them, and I began to feel even better about how I was handling the experience, especially my classes. When the evening was over I really wanted a kebab or a falafel

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but no place that served them was open, so I settled for zapiekanka, which is stale baguette with a thin layer of cheese baked on top and ketchup and mayonnaise squirted on for good measure. Polish street pizza. It’s much more appealing on the way home from the bar than on the way to it. The next day I flew to London a bit hung over and a little queasy in the stomach. My flight was stupidly arranged: on the way there I had to connect through Frankfurt, and on the way back through Munich—but to arrange it any other way would have made it cost much more. However, I was pleased with the efficiency of German airports, and I made both connections with plenty of time to spare. My hotel in London was near Paddington Station, on an express train-line from Heathrow. It cost 17 pounds—about 35 dollars. Damn the dropping dollar, I thought. When I arrived at Paddington I was unsure where my hotel was, so I approached a couple of businessmen in the taxicab line and asked if they were from London. They told me they were from Liverpool. The heavier set and more friendly of the two looked over my map with me, but we couldn’t make heads or tails of it, so he offered to let me share their taxi. The ride was quick, and he refused to let me pay for even a penny of it. In the brief ride he asked me what I missed about being away from home. One of the things I mentioned was football, and we joked about our countries’ using the same name for such different games. The heretofore silent businessman then said he’d played two years on offense for the London Monarchs of N.F.L. Europe. His colleague joked about his presence being the reason the team was so terrible—and it was clear they’d had this conversation before. I checked into my hotel, and made my way to my room. The first thing I noticed was that it was the size of a small prison cell—barely big enough for the bed, and so narrow that I could touch both walls with my outstretched arms. What I noticed next about the room was much more disturbing. It seemed that someone was living in it already. There were two pairs of women’s sandals on the floor, a pile of clothes on the bed, a used toothbrush and comb in the bathroom, and a stack of magazines on the floor. I went back to the desk and told the clerk why I wanted a different room. He checked the situation and promptly gave me another room, but he didn’t really apologize or seem surprised by the mix-up. I wasn’t surprised either: I’d been warned the hotel situation in London could be pretty tough. I took a walk around the Paddington area, and while I did not love it at first, it certainly grew on me, especially the ethnic and racial diversity. Poland is 97 percent Polish. You don’t see many blacks, Asians, or for that matter anyone but Poles. Paddington is different, and I admit it took some getting

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used to being around people who looked very different than me, even after only a few months in Poland. I bought a pint at a pub called “Pride of Paddington,” but I was later informed by a Londoner who lives in the area that the pub is anything but the pride of the neighborhood. On the plus side, when I entered the place the video juke box was playing a song by The Jam, which made the place feel especially English to me. On the downside, on the TV sets that showed the videos there was a constant scroll about thieves working the area, the need for vigilance, and the pub’s refusal to take responsibility for any lost or stolen articles. Pride of Paddington indeed, I thought. I did eat their fish and chips for dinner, however, and I thought it was delicious. Then I walked the neighborhood for a bit, but returned to my hotel quite early because I had some annoying business to attend to the next morning. When I’d agreed to participate in the Ditchley conference, they had informed me the conference details would arrive about a month before the start of the event. With about three weeks to go, nothing had arrived via e-mail, which I’d assumed was how they would communicate with me. Well, they had sent the information by regular mail. When they finally re-sent it again via e-mail, I was initially distressed to learn that dress at Ditchley was “smart casual.” A quick internet search for the meaning of that concept reassured me that black jeans with a jacket would be acceptable. But for the closing dinner, “black tie is our preference, otherwise a dark business suit.” I don’t own a business suit, dark or otherwise. I couldn’t buy a suit in Poland because I was certain no store would carry my size. I’d never seen a big and tall store in Poland (they would go out of business). I was screwed. But I quickly went online and ordered a suit from J.C. Penney’s. I wasn’t confident the right-sized suit would arrive in time for my trip, and of course it didn’t. So I did a Google search on “big and tall London” and wrote down the location of a store called Rochester Big and Tall. I figured I could buy a black sport coat and wear it with black jeans and pass it off as an actual suit in the (hopefully) dim light of Ditchley Manor. It looked to be about a mile or two walk from my hotel. It was raining that morning, and it very windy, but not too cold. I set out on the walk down Sussex Garden Drive to Hyde Park and all the way across the park to Knightsbridge. From Knightsbridge I would have to go down Brompton Road, but I knew not how far. But on arriving in the area where I thought the store should be, I saw Harrod’s department store right in front of me, and Rochester across the street. I felt unbelievably lucky. A thin black man helped me try on jackets. I noted that all the attendants in the store were as thin as he was, and I didn’t like it one bit. Couldn’t they reserve the jobs at a big and tall store for big and tall people? The first jacket

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I tried on fit perfectly, but it cost 650 pounds, about $1,300. We worked down to a significantly less expensive jacket, but still more than I had ever paid for a piece of clothing in my life. The woman who cashed me out asked if I was a permanent resident of the U.K.—something about a V.A.T. rebate if I were. I told her I was an American living in Poland. She said that she too was from Poland—Kraków to be specific—but I’d already detected that from her accent. I told her I was teaching at Lódź. “Not very beautiful, is it?” she asked. I said I liked it anyway. I told her that a friend of mine taught at Jagellonian University in Kraków, so I was able to visit there occasionally. She said she’d graduated from Jagellonian, and I suspected she did not attend the best university in Poland to learn how to sell big and tall clothing in London, but I did not ask her about her major. I spent the rest of the day doing London tourist things: Buckingham Palace, Big Ben and Parliament. I drank a pint in a pub on Parliament St. called the Red Lion. It was decorated for Christmas and full of well-dressed businessmen and women chatting away. And Bruce Springsteen’s “The River” played in the background. America is everywhere, I thought. During the conference at Ditchley I talked about political socialization with some of the most intelligent and best-informed people I have ever met. I met the youngest member of the British Parliament and an American who’d moved to Great Britain in the 1970s and become the chief pollster for the Labor Party. The attendees included a professor from Maryland I should have met a long time earlier, because we do very similar research on young people’s participation in politics. He ended up recommending me to a blogger at Arianna Huffington’s Post, who then cited some of my research as the Iowa caucuses approached. I met Robin Lustig of the B.B.C. and Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who served at Great Britain’s ambassador to the United Nations during the lead-up to the Iraq War. Because the Ditchley Foundation operates on the Chatham House rules, I may not cite anyone’s specific comments. Yes, I felt a little out of my league. But only a little, and that felt pretty good. As I boarded the plane at Heathrow to return to Poland, I felt a little like I was going home, and that felt even better.

Chapter Thirteen

Another Bar

One late-December Saturday, after my 12:00 to 1:30 class (which actually lasted for only an hour because I didn’t want to try to teach the Presidency and Congress in the same session), I walked around Łódź a bit. Specifically, I was looking for a bar called the Baghdad Café, which is popular among students, located at 45 Jaracza Street. But I couldn’t find it. Instead I found a bar with the names of the proprietors printed on the sign, which always makes a bar seem like a good prospect to me. I decided to go there later in the evening. When I returned to the place around 8:00 after a meal at Ramzes, the restaurant where the drunk lads had cornered me some weeks before, my immediate impression of the place was not a good one. Whereas during the day the bar was dimly lit by strings of white Christmas lights, at night it was bright and fluorescent and full of hard, ceramic surfaces, with no wood, and lots of cigarette smoke. On the plus side, beers were only three złoty sixty groszy, not much more than you’d pay at a convenience store. The clientele was a little rougher around the edges than the crowd at Kresowa. Nobody seemed to be the talking kind; instead they drank their cheap beers and smoked with their heads down, alone. I stayed for just one, inhaled enough second hand smoke for the week, then left. And that’s how this becomes another story about Kresowa. Because it was Friday, the place was crowded. Zbyszek poured me a beer and I had to take a spot toward the back, near where the owner normally sat with his cronies, and close to the incredibly cluttered and curtained off area that serves as his office. Zbyszek was busy pouring drinks, and we had only occasional moments of conversation. I noticed a middle-aged man with long stringy grey hair, silver wire rimmed glasses and several days of grey stubble working his way around 67

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the place, talking to the people he knew. Once he was out of earshot, Zbyszek said, “He is a bass player.” “In your band?” “No, no. He is terrible. He gets a lot of money from the juke boxes he owns—he owns the juke box here—so he has the best bass guitar available. But he doesn’t play it well. He will not practice.” “I see,” I said, “my musician friends often speak of guys who buy the best equipment, but cannot really play.” Then the bass player returned to the bar and commenced to trade piles of Polish change for paper money (Polish paper currency starts at the ten złoty bill). Zbyszek needed the change for what was becoming a busy evening. After the bass player walked away, Zbyszek showed me a twenty and a ten and said, “my lovely tips. I have been working since eleven this morning.” “Why are you working so much?” “The third bartender was fired. He was drinking on the job and stealing. Now it is just me and my woman every day,” he said, and went to pour another beer. In my earlier visits to Kresowa, the same small, older man had been there working on a lap top. This time I had to push past him to get to my spot around the bar, and I noticed he was playing solitaire on the laptop. He’s about a foot shorter than I am, about five one or five two, and once he was wearing a red sport coat, which I thought looked quite sharp. He had thinning hair and a medium thick pair of what seemed to be communist era eyeglasses—almost circular lenses, with light brown frames—Jaruzelski glasses. He’s no looker, but a few times I’d seen him sitting with a very beautiful woman who looked to be ten or twenty years his junior. I certainly respected that. This particular night, though, his mission in the bar was to help hang the Christmas lights. I have no idea how or why he was assigned the task, but the owner gave him the tangled lights as he was leaving with six big cans of dog-food and a Tupperware tub of red bigos. The little man couldn’t untangle the lights on his own, so the grey-haired bass player helped him. They would argue, pull a section apart, then wrap the whole long string between two chairs like people sometimes do with yarn on a pair of hands. The progress was slow, the arguments intense. It was, I believe, a very Polish moment: two Poles with tangled Christmas lights, and three opinions about how best to untangle them. Then Zbyszek said, “I want to give you my Christmas recording.” “I love Polish Christmas songs,” I said, and sang a few lines of “Dzisiaj w Betlejem (To Bethlehem Today).” Dzisiaj w Betlejem, dzisiaj w Betlejem Wesoła nowina

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Że Panna Czysta, że Panna Czysta Porodziła syna!

In response he said, and this is a literal quote, “It makes a Polish man happy to hear an American sing that!” I have never been prouder of my love for Poland and my Polish pronunciation skills. Then we both turned our attention to the two stooges working on untangling the Christmas lights. They had them all strung between the chairs, and now it was time to hang them from the top of the tree (yes there was a small Christmas tree in Kresowa) and on the rafters extending in a semicircle from the bar. This required the little man to stand on a barstool, which, of course was a hilarious sight. Every time I needed a chuckle I just looked to my left and there was the little man wearing Jaruzelski glasses stringing Christmas lights as they were handed to him by the greasy-haired bass player. How they argued! And what a mess they made of the job! Finally the little man carefully worked his way off the barstool, packed his laptop, and announced he was leaving. The bass player said something to him in Polish that I imagine had something to do with the job being only half done. I did hear the word “jutro” which meant, I think, they would finish the job the next day. Soon after that I left Kresowa too. After all, I had to teach the next day. I decided to buy a few beers to drink while writing emails back to the States. The largest chain of convenience stores in Poland is called Żabka. They’re everywhere. On the way back home from Kresowa I stopped at one near the tram stop for beers and a cigar. I bought a four-pack of Warka—5.7 percent alcohol, for a little better than nine złoty. I asked the clerk, in perfect Polish I must say, if she had any of the delightful Żabka coffee mugs that I’d been given by clerks at other locations. The mugs are among my favorite Polish possessions: they are yellow, with a cartoon of a small green frog looking mischievously up and to the left. She said they were all out, but gave me a yellow balloon instead.

Chapter Fourteen

A Day on Piotrkowska Street

During December in Lódź I experienced some of the shortest days I have ever seen. It would get light around 7:30, and be completely dark by around 4:00. It was cloudy nearly every day, so even when it was supposed to be light, it was still pretty dark. When my friend Marty visited he told me scientists believe a person needs only fifteen minutes a week of sunshine in order to stay sane and healthy. I’m not sure I always got that much in the winter in Lódź. But I never felt particularly depressed, and I didn’t suffer the symptoms of vitamin D deficiency. I think it helped that it rarely became brutally cold. On a typical non-teaching Saturday, I would ride the tram from my dormitory to Piotrkowska Street. On my way out of the apartment I would stop to pet one of the three cats that belonged to an old woman who also had an apartment in the dorms. Only the black one was fearless enough always to let me pet her, while the grey tiger-striped kitties usually skittered away from my outstretched hand. On arriving at Piotrkowska Street one Saturday afternoon, I withdrew 500 złoty from the bank machine. One of the happiest surprises of my time in Poland was that I was paid a decent salary from the University on top of my Fulbright grant money. Rent and internet charges were supposed to come out of the university salary, but nobody could tell me how much any of that cost. The receptionist at the front desk of the dorm where I collected my mail speculated that the apartment was free, because I was a guest of the university, but her guess was no better than anyone else’s. My first stop was the Totolotek betting shop. I always chuckled at the name because it sounded a little like, “Total Low Tech,” which it most certainly was. There were no self-betting machines like there are in the racetracks I gamble at in the States, and instead of bubble sheets that must be filled out 70

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with a number two pencil, you wrote out your choices on whatever paper you could find and handed them to the clerk. I like to gamble. I visit the standard-bred horse racetrack in Toledo nearly every week, and I’ve been going there long enough to have developed friendships with the other horseplayers, who threw a very warm going away party for me before I left for Poland. Because I’m not much of a handicapper of the harness races, I purchase picks from a handicapping service, which once produced my greatest gambling victory ever (so far): a $12.00 investment paid about $750.00. But in Poland I didn’t bet on the ponies. Instead I wagered on Futbol Amerykański—American football—and only on the NFL, because college games were unavailable. I put 100 złoty on the NFL games on Sunday, December 23, 2007: • 50 złoty on the Detroit Lions minus 5.5 points. My theory was if Coach Rod Marinelli couldn’t get guys who have no chance at the playoffs motivated to play for their jobs and for pride, then nobody could. • 30 złoty on Cleveland minus 3.5 at Cincinnati. Cleveland should easily win a rivalry game for a playoff berth, I thought. • 20 złoty at 9 for 1 on Miami against New England. New England’s perfect season getting ruined by the lousy contemporary version of the last perfect team? I figured that was the kind of weird thing that sometimes happens in the NFL. I went 0-3. I stayed at the betting shop for several minutes after I’d placed my football bets to watch a harness race on TV. I looked over the program, and because I know the terms and their usual location on the page so well, the translation from Polish was no problem. I thought about making a wager, but I didn’t. In harness racing, they say you bet the drivers, and of course I didn’t know who any of these guys were. Also, I preferred to keep alive the streak of more than 90 days without having made a horse wager. They ran 1,620 meters—almost exactly a mile. It looked to be a half-mile track, so they’d run two laps. No one made a move in the first lap, just like they often do in the States. Coming down to the final quarter, the six horse was still saving ground along the rail, and the nine was first over beside him. It looked to me like the six was running out of gas, and sure enough the nine ran past him down the stretch and won by two lengths. I should have bet it, I thought. I left the betting shop before the next race sucked me in. My next stop was the English-language bookstore right across Piotrkowska from the gambling shop. I read much, much more fiction in Poland than I normally do back in the States, mainly because I watched almost no television,

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except for a Polish version of Family Feud, and a wonderful Name that Tune type of show called Jaka to Melodia. English-language pickings were pretty slim. When I entered I forgot to say Dzień Dobry to the clerk, which is a real no-no in Poland. It made each new customer’s greeting of her that much more pronounced, and me all the more uncomfortable. I grabbed some Steinbeck (East of Eden) and checked out. The transaction was smooth, and I made a big point of saying “Do Widzenia” when I left. I walked south down Piotrkowska toward an Indian restaurant I liked. On the way I stopped at another English language bookstore and bought some John Irving (Until I find You). This time I greeted the clerk on my way in, even though he was checking another customer out. He made a point to greet me, however. I’d eaten at the Indian restaurant more than half a dozen times. I’d sat at the same table, and ordered the same items from the same waitress every time. But this time the place was crowded and my table wasn’t available. A different waitress waited on me too. I tried to order the same things I always had, but my routine got derailed. After she determined I didn’t speak Polish, we switched to English. I said “Vegetable Pakora,” and just as I said, “and paneer makhani,” she was distracted by something out the window. She kept writing, so I figured she’d understood it. But she did ask in a curious way if that was all I wanted, and she asked me that in Polish. If I were in the States, I could have corrected any confusion, but I couldn’t do so in Poland with my weak language skills. I decided to wait and see what would happen, and take what I got as just desserts (well, appetizers, more likely). About ten minutes later she set down in front of me two orders of vegetable pakora. I ate them and waited for my entrée, but I knew it wouldn’t be coming. I decided that when I’d said “makhani” and she was distracted she must have heard “dwa razy,” which means “two times.” The first ten Indian onion rings and fried cauliflower were delicious, the next ten pretty good, but the final ten inedible. I forced most of it down, paid up and left. I hadn’t gotten what I’d wanted, but I’d gotten exactly what I deserved. I rode the tram back to my apartment, did some laundry, read a bit of a John Irving short story collection, and napped. As I was drifting off to sleep I heard the old woman calling for one of her cats from the porch near my bedroom window. “Piwka,” she would call into the night, stretching out the first vowel out so it sounded like, “Peeeeeeeeevka.” “Piwka” means “little beer,” which I thought was an adorable name for a cat. It might also refer to a derogatory term for Prussians, which would be a less adorable name for a cat. After my nap, I created a CD of some songs by the Canadian band Blue Rodeo that I thought Zbyszek might like and took the tram back to Pi-

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otrkowska and made the short walk down to Narutowicza toward Kresowa. I noticed a sign on the door, in Polish of course, but I didn’t bother to try to read it except for the number 18, which I figured meant they were trying to keep out the under-aged. The place was brightly lit, and almost festive. Places were set on all the tables. Huge platters of pierogi, carp, and bigos were being served by a waiter. Zbyszek told me it was the boss’s Christmas party. Zbyszek and his woman were not guests; they were working the party. “I can leave . . .” I said “No, no. Stay for a beer. It’s okay,” he said and poured me a Warka. A bug-eyed man who looked to be in his late fifties or early sixties with longish black and grey hair was noodling around on a keyboard. The keyboard maintained an easy listening shuffle beat while he played “Jingle Bells” in an organ sound tuned like the one in Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale.” Then he played a jazzy rendition of the normally plaintive Polish Christmas carol “Lulajże Jezuniu.” It wasn’t very good or even accurate, but I liked it nonetheless. I gave Zbyszek the CD and said, “I thought you might like this band.” He read the card I’d placed inside the CD case. “Blue Rodeo . . .” “Some people compare them to the Eagles,” I said, knowing Zbyszek is a big fan. The keyboard player had put on headphones, which actually worsened his playing, as did the shots of vodka people were pouring for him. After a run of particularly clunky wrong notes, Zbyszek couldn’t help himself anymore and burst out laughing. “He’s terrible, isn’t he?” he said to me, a little more subtly. “He has his moments,” I said, “He seems to play better when he’s not wearing the headphones.” “Would you like a cigar?” Zbyszek asked. “Shouldn’t I be going? I don’t want to crash the party.” “It’s okay. The boss likes you. Another beer?” “Sure,” I said. I ended up drinking three beers and smoking the cigar. Nobody strange tried speaking to me in terrible English. No Leonard Cohen or Supertramp played on the jukebox. No stories of sadness and misfortune were shared. All in all it was a disappointing Kresowa experience.

Chapter Fifteen

Wigilia

My student Agnieszka invited me to her parents’ wigilia, which is traditional Polish Christmas Eve. Normally a twelve course meatless meal is served (with various forms of carp, including carp in aspic, as central dishes). Straw is used in the place settings to symbolize the manger, and a place is set but not used, in case a stranger comes. It is said that at midnight barnyard animals are able to speak human language (my Polish friend Anna swears her cats are able to speak Polish at midnight on Christmas Eve too, but, being cats, they choose not to do so). Agnieszka is an interesting student who was very helpful to me while I was in Lódź. She has studied in the United States, but returned to Lódź to finish her Ph.D. She audited my American Government and Media and Politics classes, because as a graduate student she couldn’t use the credits toward her degree. I think she might have also attended the classes early in the semester to keep an eye on the undergraduate students, but I never confirmed that suspicion. We talked about the wigilia plans on my last day of classes before the winter break, although she had invited me weeks before. “You will still come to our wigilia?” she asked. “Of course,” I said, “I’m looking forward to it.” “My mother and grandmother are very nervous,” she said. “No need,” I said, “I’m an easy guest.” “They’re always nervous for the holiday,” she said, “and that in turn makes me nervous.” Well, all that had me feeling a bit nervous! “Is there something I should bring?” “No, no. But maybe don’t eat before. They will make sure you are stuffed.” 74

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“Cool,” I said, although the meatless, fish-centered nature of the meal had my stomach a little on edge. “Do you sing?” she asked. “I do, but not well,” I said. “I always want to sing during wigilia, but often we don’t” she said, “maybe we could play some American carols so you could sing too.” “I know some of the words to a few kolędy too,” I said. “Well, then maybe we will sing this year!” she said happily. “I also wonder, if it’s not too much trouble, if we could agree to meet you near Galeria Łódźka. We will be coming from my husband’s family in the countryside and it would be easier not to have to pick you up at the dormitory.” “Of course,” I said. “I know just which tram to take,” I added proudly. “Okay then, 6:30 on Monday,” she said. “6:30 or so,” I said, “I know all about “Polish Time.” She laughed. “6:30 or so . . .” A few days later I received an e-mail asking if we could change the meeting time to 6:45. Of course I agreed, and planned not to get there before 7:00. A little after 7:00 on the big day they pulled up to me in their little Citroen and skidded a bit on the ice the freezing mist had made on the road. Agnieszka was seated in back with her little daughter, whom I believe was a big part of the decision to give up her studies in the States. The front passenger seat was empty. I knew where I was supposed to sit, but Agnieszka jumped out of the back seat, apologized for being late, and invited me into the front seat. Her husband Mariusz introduced himself to me in smooth English, and I liked him instantly. I could tell he was a very serious young man, and I already knew he worked for the Polish Ministry of Finance. Then they introduced me to their daughter Jagoda. “Jagoda,” I said, “that means ‘berry,’ right?” “Yes, it does,” Agnieszka said, “but it is also an old Polish name for a little girl.” “It’s an adorable name,” I said. “Cześć,” I said to the two and a half year old. “Cześć,” she answered quietly, but evidently not too afraid of the giant stranger. We drove a little south to a massive communist era apartment block. “It is called Manhattan,” Agnieszka explained, “because when it was built it was the tallest building in Lódź. Well, the tallest building where people lived.” It was an imposing sight in the dark and the mist. Many of the windows were adorned with various sorts of Christmas lights: flashing multicolored

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strings in some; dignified candelabras in others; some with a single light: a fourteen story wall of imposing concrete conformity decorated as individually as possible. The apartment was warm with hospitality and the smells of cooking. Andrzej, Agnieska’s father, offered me a drink of “kompot,” a smoky juice drink. As soon as I finished it he offered me some red wine, which I gladly accepted. While Agnieszka worked in the kitchen with her mother and grandmother, Mariusz translated for his father in law and me. “He wants to know where you are from.” “I live in Ohio, in Toledo, but I am from Michigan,” I said. “He says there are many Poles in Detroit.” I loved his pronunciation of the city, with the “De” pronounced like the “Dea” in “Dead,” and the stress on the first syllable. I’ve always thought of that as the Polish pronunciation, because my Polish grandfather said it that way. “Yes,” I said, “in fact my mother’s family moved from Poland to Detroit around 1910, but as soon as they could afford it they bought a farm outstate.” I played the “I’m a Polish-American” card sparingly while in was in Lódź, for a number of reasons. First, in my skepticism about the conniving ways of the students brought on by some of my conversations with former Fulbrighters, I didn’t want to give them the impression I would be a pushover because I felt some misguided special kinship with them. Second, many Poles have a deep resentment for the Poles who left before the World Wars and communism, and thereby escaped so much suffering. But telling Agnieszka’s father seemed like a good idea, and I think it was, because he became even more friendly toward me after I’d told him. Before dinner Andrzej brought out pieces of opłatek. Agnieszka started to explain the tradition, but I assured her I already understood it. “We still do some things the same way in America,” I said. We broke off pieces of ours and took pieces of everyone else’s, and wished each other, “Wszystkiego Najlepszego,” or “All the Best” for the coming year. Then out came the first course: sauteed mushrooms, which were Agnieszka’s favorite because she had picked them herself the previous autumn. I made the standard American joke about not trusting mushrooms from anywhere but the grocery store, and she assured me these were safe. “Mushroom hunting is the national sport here,” Mariusz said, “like N.F.L. in America,” and the English speakers laughed. Once he explained it to the Polish speakers, they laughed too. Then came the fish. I didn’t much care for the herring in cream sauce, but I liked the herring in onions: powerfully fishy and pungent from the onions. I managed to avoid the carp in aspic. I just don’t like savory Jello. There were a couple of creamy salads with salty bits of fish in them as well.

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A strong mushroom and fish soup was the next course. “Only for Wigilia,” Agnieszka explained. The soup was accompanied by small mushroom filled pastries, which were delicious. They were filled with the same mushrooms we had eaten fried earlier. These were my favorite food of the night, which pleased Agnieszka’s grandmother, because they were of her doing. Mariusz told a funny story about how when he and Agnieszka had worked at a summer camp in New York, the other counselors were shocked that the Poles would eat mushrooms they had picked for themselves in the forest. One counselor told them, “all we know about mushrooms you find on the ground is that you do not eat them.” “I think Poles are closer to nature in some ways than Americans are,” Mariusz said, and I agreed. While the women returned to the kitchen to work on the next course, Andrzej took down from his bookshelf the “Małe Atlas Grzybami,” “Small Atlas of Mushrooms,” and explained it to me, through Mariusz. “He says there are 94 varieties of Polish mushrooms which are eat . . . how do you say, eatable?” “Edible,” I offered. “Yes, yes. Edible” He explained which ones were most rare and difficult to find and what kind we were eating. Then he showed me a small pamphlet with drawings of mushrooms. “He says these are the only poison ones,” Mariusz said, as if that should have cleared up any possible confusion, even to a novice hunter. They didn’t look any different to me than the edible ones pictured in the book. “Rozumiem,” I said. (“I understand.”) Fried carp steaks were the next course. They were at least an inch thick, lightly breaded, and not de-boned. “Mother says they’re too salty,” Agnieszka said, but I dug right in. They were full of bones, but delicious. “Because there are so many Poles in Great Britain,” Mariusz began, “this year they put up signs in Polish near many lakes to keep Poles from fishing for carp.” “Do you think that was really necessary?” I asked. “Oh yes,” he said, and the English speakers had a chuckle. “It is considered good luck to keep a few of the carp’s scales,” Agnieszka said, “I have them here in my pocket.” She pulled out a small pile of the dried scales and I put one in my jacket pocket. After the carp steaks, the meal was finally over, and the family exchanged gifts. “This is usually when the arguments start,” Agnieszka said. “You know how it is: if you have two Poles, you have three opinions.” I knew.

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Most of the gifts were for Jagoda, and most of the others were practical things: it worked out that every member of the family received a pair of pyjamas from someone else. Mariusz gave Agnieszka a Velvet Revolver CD because she’s always been a big fan of Guns ‘N’ Roses. They put it on the CD player immediately. “I can’t wait to tell my family about this traditional Polish Christmas music,” I said, and Mariusz and Agnieszka laughed. Agnieszka gave me a gift with a card that said, “Dla Dawida do Sw. Mikołaj,” (“For David from St. Mikolaj,”) which is the Polish equivalent of Santa Claus. It’s a book of photos of Lódź, which I explained was an awesome gift because in three months I hadn’t taken a single photograph. Then Andrzej gave me a bottle of Sobieski vodka. Then it was time for dessert: poppyseed cake and tea. Andrzej asked me if I preferred wine or beer, and I admitted I wasn’t much of a wine drinker. He offered me a bottle of his favorite beer: Warka Strong. It contains seven percent alcohol, but tastes remarkably smooth for such a strong brew. After he poured me a glass, he pointed to the image of Casimir Pułaski on the label. “He fought for America,” he said through Mariusz. “Yes, and Kośćuśko too,” I said. “But why is he not on a beer too?” “He is too important,” was Andrzej’s reply. I took his point. Pułaski died at the Battle of Savannah during the American Revolution, but Kośćuśko returned to Poland to fight for independence. Then it was time to leave, because Agnieszka, Mariusz and Jagoda were leaving early Christmas morning to drive to Zakopane for a week of skiing (Jagoda had received a little pair of skis from Sw. Mikołaj.). As I was leaving, Andrzej handed me a bag that contained the vodka, photo book, several slices of poppyseed cake, and a small bucket of homemade bigos. “He says for tomorrow, when you may eat meat.” I thanked them all as best I could: much shaking of hands and hugging and “Wesołych Swiat” and “Dzię Kuje Bardzo” and “Dobranoc,” and we were out the door and back in the little car. I pointed out to Agnieszka that we had forgotten to sing, and she reminded me that it happens every year. At my apartment, I thanked the little Polish family again for their incredible hospitality. As I walked up the exterior steps to the main door of the apartment section of the dormitory, I noticed the light in the hallway was on. Then I noticed the old woman who lives a few apartments down from me—the keeper of the cats—was out in the hallway with her latest feline acquisition: a nosy black and white kitten that chirps instead of meows and was often found waiting outside my door in the morning. I knew she didn’t let it outside the building,

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so I waited for her to pick it up before I unlocked and opened the door. It squirmed around in her hands, and I rubbed its soft little belly while it took little swipes at me. I wondered what it might have to say to her at midnight for having let the big foreigner pet it. Then I said “dobranoc” to her and unlocked my apartment and walked on in. I read a few pages of East of Eden, then fell asleep in Poland.

Chapter Sixteen

My Grandfather’s People

While I was in Poland I read much more than I normally do in the States. An essay by John Irving about Charles Dickens, an author I never much liked, affected me pretty deeply. What was most interesting about the essay was its defense of sentimentality, of letting emotions pour through in writing. He contrasts this with a detached modern or post-modern approach to writing. As an example, he offers a short-story about a four course meal as told from the perspective of a fork. It would never be accused of being overly sentimental, but it would not mean much to anyone either. Irving’s essay prompted me to think of two very different episodes of the television program M*A*S*H, which has frequently been accused of oversentimentality. In one memorable Christmas episode, wealthy Winchester is thought to be a scrooge because he donates little to the Christmas potluck dinner. But secretly he has carried out an old family tradition of delivering expensive chocolates to the local orphanage, with the explanation of the essential need to keep the identity of gift-givers a secret. The rule is an old Winchester family tradition. Upon learning that the master of the orphanage sold the chocolates on the black market, Winchester confronts him and is humbled by the explanation that the money fetched by the candy on the black market will feed the kids for months. Chastened, Winchester retires to his tent, but crazy cross-dressing Corporal Klinger has overheard the conversation, and delivers a plate of food from the party. When he informs Winchester that he must keep the identity of the gift-giver a secret because it’s part of an old family tradition, Winchester understands what has happened, and they each wish the other a merry Christmas, very pointedly using each other’s first names. 80

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The other episode is called “Point of View” and follows a patient through the entire field hospital. The perspective of the camera never changes. The viewer sees everything through the eyes of a wounded Korean War soldier. It is inventive and bold—and I never elect to watch it if I can choose the Christmas episode instead. People have feelings, and interesting books and television programs should explore those feelings. Sometimes they’ll go too far and become too sweet. But the solution to over-sentimentality should not be to eliminate all sentimentality. Whenever I’m in Poland I think about my Polish grandparents—what I’d like to say to them about being there, eating and drinking there, trying to speak Polish. Explaining these feelings might be a risk, but I think it’s worth taking. I’m only half-Polish; more accurately half Polish-American, from my mother’s side of the family. Her great-grandparents moved to the U.S. from the small southern Polish village of Stary Wiśnicz around 1910. They never returned, and none of their children ever visited Poland. But when I’m in Poland I feel my family around me all the time, and sometimes I even talk to my grandparents about what I’m doing. Our family is at that stage of Polish-American-ness where no one under 80 speaks much Polish. We know the village where my Grandfather’s people came from, and we have purchased and framed the Ellis Island documents that confirm the family’s recollection of its origins. A few of us have even visited Poland, and the village of our ancestors. In 2001 I visited Stary Wiśnicz, which is about thirty miles east and south of Kraków. I was staying in Kraków for a few days after a conference in Lódź, and I arranged with the Orbis tourist office for a car and driver for four hours, which cost about $50.00. The driver didn’t speak much English, and I didn’t speak much Polish. We drove to the larger city of Nowy Wiśnicz, which I think is where the driver thought we were supposed to go. This didn’t surprise me, since it’s a slightly larger town near the village I was looking for. We parked near the small central business district, and I noticed there was a large map of the region mounted on a wall, surrounded by a park. I motioned the driver over, and showed him the little dot of the place I wanted to visit. We returned to the cab and drove to the village. It’s hardly even a village at all, just a church, school, and cemetery—no pub, inn or restaurant. The driver walked around the church grounds with me and pointed out the old bell with the year 1569 stamped on it. He disappeared for a while and I walked up the hill to the cemetery. It was filled with familiar names from my youth. Many of the Polish people in the area of central Michigan where I grew up originally came from this place and other nearby

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villages nearby, and their names were all there in marble and metal: Bachuła, Wiśniewski, Łazowski, Krzywda. Then I discovered where the driver had gone. He returned with a priest, who opened the church for me. It was cool and dark inside, and a little bit run-down. It looked like a place that had been used for hundreds of years, without a fancy renovation to wreck its character. Then it hit me like a wave how many hundreds of my ancestors had been baptized, taken first communion, married in and been buried from this place. My mother’s grandparents were married there. I said hello to my grandparents and thanked them for the great gift of being a Polish-American, and they thanked me for working hard to keep our traditions alive. My mother and I returned to this church in 2004, escorted this time by distant cousins who lived in the nearby city of Bochnia. After taking us to the church, they walked us up and down a set of snow-covered hills to the exact spot where my great-grandparents had lived. Our cousin Stan even drew the perimeter of the house with a stick in the snow. My mother and I were photographed near it. The picture hangs in the dining room of her home in mid-Michigan, the home I grew up in and the home my grandfather grew up in; the first and only home my great grandparents ever owned in the United States. Lunch with our cousins was difficult that day. Before we arrived, I’d had a Polish friend translate a letter to them, so I’m pretty sure they thought I spoke Polish. Our driver tried to translate a little, but it was no use. They served chicken and potatoes, and back then I was still a vegetarian. Of course I ate the cutlet appreciatively. Anything else would have been unbelievably rude. Cousin Stan showed us on a 1974 map where his brother lived in west-side Chicago, and said he’d been there to visit him back then. I did not know how to tell him his brother had probably moved since then, or at least wished he had. Meeting these cousins was a strangely un-emotional experience for me, and I wondered why I didn’t feel more when I was with them. Our cousin Mary certainly looked like my grandfather’s people, which she is. But these Poles were strangers to us, and because of the language barrier it was impossible for us to become acquaintances, much less friends. In the end our only connection was genetic, which meant something, but not a whole lot. My mother even gave them some money when we left, for their granddaughter’s education she said, but even that didn’t feel right. But she had to do it. She had to express our affection and appreciation for them somehow. During my time in Lódź on my Fulbright, I wrote a few e-mails to my mother when I felt the presence of her parents particularly strongly. Sometimes I would drink a few beers and play the polka music they loved so much

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and think of them. I’m happy my Grandmother lived long enough to listen to one of my polka radio broadcasts. After I’d talked about American politics with a particularly fired-up Pole, I would think of the passion for politics my grandfather possessed. His speech might have been slurred after his first stroke in 1979, but he was always able to clearly form the words, “Goddamned Republicans!” One of Warsaw’s finest attractions is the recently built “Powstanie Warszawskie” museum, which tells the story of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, which was doomed by the Germans’ superior military strength, Stalin’s shrewdness and the Allies’ indifference. My mother and I visited the museum on a cold, grey day in November 2007. Behind the museum is a garden surrounding a display of dozens of bigger than life colorized photographs from the Uprising. As cat lovers, my mother and I were struck by a photo of a young Polish soldier holding a cat and talking to a pretty girl on the front steps of a tenement in soon-to-be-ruined Warsaw. We stood transfixed in front of the photo while the sounds of the wind, automobile traffic, and groups of other visitors swirled around us “Did you hear something?” my mother asked. “No,” I said. “It sounded like somebody said my name,” she said. “It sounded like your grandpa.” We were quiet for a few minutes, but then we let it go. We had a whole day to spend together and too much sentimentality early in the day can drag you to a standstill in a city like Warsaw. But I’d understood what she’d said. I hear them too.

Chapter Seventeen

Comments

“You can’t really get to know a place if you live there less than a year.” “You haven’t really experienced a place until you’ve had something go really wrong.” A fellow Fulbrighter made both of these comments to me at our mid-semester meeting in December in Warsaw. Maybe he’s right, I thought at the time. As my time in Poland seemed to be moving faster than it should have, I did begin to feel like I was planning to leave too soon. I mean, I had very good reasons for returning to the U.S.; lots of time off to write and think, and not teaching being chief among them. Since even before I received my Master’s degree in 1993, I’ve taught every semester. While I was earning my Ph.D., I regularly taught any class at any community college or university that would hire me. One semester I even taught seven classes, which is two more than I teach in a year now as a full-time professor. I felt like I deserved some time off. But, still his comments affected me. Put simply, I liked it in Poland. I liked my students and the other Fulbrighters. I liked my colleagues. I liked the people I met in bars, restaurants and at the movies. What’s the hurry to go home, I asked. Well, seven months off teaching for one thing. I’ve taught a lot more than the average second or third year associate professor. The first time I taught American government, Bill Clinton was running for President the first time. I’ve taught thousands of students since. I taught statistics during a summer semester once on Friday nights. Once I taught it back to back from 5:00 to 7:30 and again from 7:30 to 10:00. I believed I deserved some time off. But what about the argument that you can’t really get to know a place in less than a year? On the surface it has some merit. I am certain that had I stayed for a full year or longer, I would have taken language classes, and that of course would have allowed me to understand much more of the Polish 84

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world around me. On the other hand, I’ve visited Poland many times, studied the culture, and had many aspects of its American variant burned into my soul since birth, so how much would have been different had I stayed nine months rather than five? The idea of needing something bad to happen to really understand a place is even more intriguing. After I returned, I talked over lunch with one of my colleagues about the experience, and she asked me if anything really bad had happened. I told her the winning of a Fulbright had indeed produced some strange experiences. In order to qualify for the Fulbright fellowship I was awarded, I was required to pass a physical exam. Regrettably, this was no simple physical. It required a full anal exam! What? Yes, an anal exam. Not a prostate exam, but a good old-fashioned, serious analysis of the well-being of my asshole. My doctor was unavailable for the physical, so a nurse practitioner performed the task. Just before she probed me she held out her long, mercifully thin finger and said, “Just so you know, this is narrower than poop.” Small comfort. I told my classes in both the States and Poland that the only reason the Fulbright commission should care about that region of my anatomy would be if my head were up there, which it most assuredly is not. My American students laughed more than my Poles did, but once the explanation of the joke made its way around the room, the Poles seemed to find it quite funny too. The really bad part came when I thought I was going to have to take the exam a second time, this time in Poland. It was in fulfillment of a new edict from the Kaczyński twins—the identical, former child TV and film stars who were President and Prime Minister of Poland when I arrived. I knew it was more than just their reactionary ideology that made me dislike these little creeps. To try to prevent a probing in Poland, I e-mailed our secretary back at B.G.S.U. and had her fax over the results of my U.S. physical. My shepherd Paulina and I visited the physician, who took my blood pressure, weighed me (and chided me for being overweight), but ultimately signed the forms without sticking her finger up my ass. It was win-win for everyone. Did anything else truly bad happen? I was disappointed to find out I had to teach on Saturdays, but besides the extra load it represented, aren’t weekends just an artificial construct? I mean, if I had Monday and Tuesday off that’s the same as a weekend, right? Besides, finding out I had to teach on weekends was accompanied by the pleasant surprise of learning that I was to be paid by the university, beyond the pay Fulbright provided me. So on balance that wasn’t so bad. I’m sure some things have happened I’d rather not have had happen. Some people were rude to me once they discovered I was an American. I think an old man might have spat in my general direction once in Warsaw, but I’m

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not really sure. It could just have been a bad cough. An old man getting on a bus behind me was peeved I didn’t understand what he was saying when he shoved some heavy baggage toward me, but a kind young woman grabbed his bag once she saw I didn’t understand what the old coot wanted me to do. The internet connection in my apartment performed inconsistently. “That’s really it?” my colleague asked. “Yeah, I guess that’s it.” Would anything interesting that happened to me have been any better had I stayed longer? I certainly would have had more experiences had I stayed another semester, but would I have had more interesting experiences? Would I have had that elusive unpleasant experience that would have offered the essential insight into the real Poland? I don’t know, but I don’t think so. Maybe it’s a cop out, but it seems to me an outsider can never penetrate the “real” anywhere, if he stays five months or five years. That’s just the nature of being an outsider. There was another comment that took me by surprise: “The times of Gierek were different. Women could leave their children in prams outside the store while they queued, and they knew they would be taken care of.” My friend Zbyszek said it, and for me it is one of the most fascinating comments I have ever heard about Polish politics. The life and times of Edward Gierek, the First Secretary of the Polish communist party from 1970 to 1980, are fairly well-known. He took over from Gomulka in 1970 and borrowed huge sums from western governments. This created the illusion of prosperity, as Poles experienced the availability of consumer goods as never before. But eventually the price had to be paid, and Poland could not pay it. So by 1980 the country was tens of billions of dollars in debt. Price increases led to strikes which resulted in Gierek’s recognizing Solidarity, which led to his removal and the eventual imposition of martial law under General Jaruzelski. The 1970s were different times indeed. Did people trust each other more then? Evidently that was the case in Poland, at least according to Zbyszek. I have heard comments like these before. For example, a Fulbrighter who taught in Lodz when I did, but also from 1984 to 1986, said, “Times were hard, but people trusted each other more because we felt like we were all in it together. That feeling is gone now.” He also believed it was easier to make friends with Poles then, because people needed each other more. That is most certainly a sad commentary if it is accurate. We get along better when we are all suffering together? Although I don’t believe this is true of Zbyszek, maybe that’s why some people actually miss the communist times. Poles have become more individualistic and materialistic since 1989, and not everyone likes it. Consumer

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products are readily available—no more waiting in monstrously long lines with a piece of string to hang toilet paper rolls on if you’re lucky enough to find them. One of my Polish colleagues said some older Poles miss the old days because life was simpler then: go to work, then wait in line. I could have stayed in Poland for a hundred years and never understood that.

Chapter Eighteen

Fitting In

In early January, walking up Piotrkowska Street after a few beers at Kresowa, I felt a little like a Pole. I didn’t hesitate a bit before saying “przepraszam” if I bumped into someone, or, more likely, if someone bumped into me. Just south of Plac Wolności I stopped to pet a small black cat who had wandered out from one of the many alleys along the long commercial street. A Polish couple with a small, stupid dog criticized my affection for a cat (at least that’s what I think they said) as they walked past me, and I defiantly replied, “lubie kotki. Lubie czarne kotki” (“ I like cats. I like black cats.”) They just kept walking, and the little black cat took a swing at me, the ungrateful little Polish bastard. But this story is about what happened before the walk and ride home. It was my big teaching day: three 1.5 hour lectures. I woke late because a friend in Texas had called me late the night before. When we hung up, for him it was only 7:00PM, but for me it was two in the morning. I never stay up that late on a night before I have to teach. But I woke up feeling good about teaching. That’s a feeling I had more often in Poland than back home. Part of it came from not really caring if my students attended class or completely understood my sense of humor, as long as those who were there understood the content I was trying to deliver. Part of it came from the feeling of having been decently successful in a foreign environment. It’s a great feeling when you discover that you actually can do something a little different than what you’re used to doing. The first class of my day was Canadian Government and Politics. I was surprised to find that about half of the 25 or so students registered for the class were actually there. I began the lecture with a discussion of the differences between the U.S. and Canadian Senates, the increased role of the Supreme Court of Canada after the addition of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and 88

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the notion of a “confidence house.” Of the 13 students in attendance, only two were male. They didn’t take any notes, but instead just looked straight at me with their arms folded. I decided that one of them might be somewhat intelligent because his in-class comments were pretty smart, although he wasn’t keen on raising his hand before speaking. As with most of the male students, however, these two reeked of non-seriousness. So after about 45 minutes of lecture I tired of them whispering to each other and called them out on it. I hate calling out students in class—in America or anywhere else. But I did it, and kept on with the lecture for another half hour. When I was finished I asked if there were any questions. As usual, there were not. But a couple of women stayed after class to negotiate about the final exam, the only graded work for the entire course. Poles are great negotiators. Some might call it scheming. “Will it be essay, or will there be some terms to identify too?” the brunette named Malgosia asked. “Probably both,” I said. “How much of each?” she persisted. “Maybe 25 percent identification, 75 percent essay,” I said. “That is fair,” the blonde named Barbara said, but Malgosia would have none of it. “Is it fair to make so much of it essay when students who do not come to class very much could pass an essay?” “I take your point,” I said, “anyone can bullshit their way through an essay, but I think I can tell the good ones from the bad ones.” The little obscenity made them blush and chuckle. “We may laugh, but it is true,” she said. “But of course you can do what you want,” and then she started babbling because I think she felt like she had crossed a line of respect with me (I didn’t feel that way at all. I found the entire exchange quite charming). She said it was okay with her if I did what I wanted, but then she felt like she should clarify that because she didn’t want me to think she thought I needed her permission to do what I wanted. Blonde Barbara started pushing her out the door, fearful she was offending me. As they were walking away down the hall Barbara was laughing loudly and speaking very fast Polish to her friend, who was really blushing when she left the classroom. When I relayed this story to a Polish friend and former student, he said the problem with most Polish professor’s essay questions is that they are incredibly broad: “analyze the most important events in 20th century Polish history” type questions. Therefore, as he put it, the students with the “lightest pens” do the best, not necessarily the students who actually know more of the material covered in the course.

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In terms of the potential lack of respect their comments might have shown me, he agreed that it would be highly unlikely they would dare try to influence the content of the examination from an older, Polish professor. “But they were trying to make it more difficult,” I said, with a laugh. “No matter what they said, the older professors would find it offensive.” My next class, Politics and Mass Media, was a great success. I lectured for one hour non-stop about US national media coverage of the President, Congress, and the Courts. When I stopped and asked for questions, they actually had some. They were interested in how it could possibly be fair for the accused that CourtTV showed criminal trials in progress in the U.S. They assured me this would never happen in Poland. I assured them it was a difficult balance to strike between a “public” and a “fair” trial. I also told them about my favorite part of the BG News, the student paper at B.G.S.U. It is called “The Blotter” and it is a list of everyone arrested in the city of Bowling Green the night before. I said a typical entry read like this: “John Smith of Perrysburg was cited for public urination behind The Corner Grill at 2:39 A.M.” They laughed, but said such a thing would never happen in Poland. Even famous people would be referred to by just their first name and last initial. They asked if the paper printed stories about people who were acquitted of the crimes they were accused of in the blotter, and I told them no. Of course they asked me if I’d ever been mentioned. I pleaded the fifth. In my final course of the day—Introduction to American Government—I was at my worst. “Interest Groups” were the only topic to be covered in the 90 minute lecture, and even in the U.S. I’d have a hard time filling more than an hour with that topic. It’s not that I don’t know a lot about the topic or that I think it’s not important. It’s just not that interesting. So I offered them the “pluralist” and “elitist” interpretations of James Madison’s Federalist Number Ten and sent them home after 40 minutes. It was the right thing to do, but it felt like cheating at the time. They didn’t seem to mind getting out of class early. Students almost never do. I resolved to do better next time. I ate dinner at Chłopska Izba, an old fashioned Polish karczma on Piotrkowska Street. The food was beyond delicious, especially the fried sheep’s cheese. The music was terrible, not because I didn’t like it, but because they played the same seven English and Polish Christmas carols in a boring loop. After dinner, I made my way up to Kresowa. The place was nearly empty. Kresowa does not look good when it is empty. It looks downright seedy, in fact. The beautiful brown haired woman was sitting with a new guy. A man named Adam, whom I’d met the night I talked with wild Darek, sidled up to me immediately. “Dzień Dobry,” he slurred. “Dzień Dobry, I replied.

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Zbyszek immediately brought me a beer. The drunk begged me to buy him a beer, and I complied. It cost only two dollars, and he really seemed to need it. Zbyszek laughed, because we both knew Adam and I would not be trading rounds for each other. “Hej,” I said to Zbyszek, “your music is all over the United States now.” “What?” he asked. “Sure,” I said, “I’ve sent your kolędy to people in Michigan, Ohio, Georgia . . .” “That is great,” he said. “Here,” I said and handed him a cigar I’d bought next door, “for you.” “Thanks,” he said, and we both lit up off drunk Adam’s lighter. “Do you know what those songs are about?” Zbyszek asked. “Seven of them, yes,” I said, “but the first two I have never heard before.” “Because we wrote them!” he said. “What do you mean?” I asked. “The second song, ‘kolęda odrzuconych,’ means ‘carol of the abandoned.’ The words are about the sad old men in the soup line on Piotkowska, men who fought for Poland’s freedom during the war but who are homeless now. I wrote the music, and Andrzej wrote the words.” “I had no idea,” I said, “I had a bit of a sense of the meaning, but I didn’t know all this.” “Make sure your American friends understand what the songs are about,” Zbyszek said. “I will,” I said. “I am a Polish patriot,” he said. “I am not afraid to say it.” “Why would you be afraid?” I asked. “Because of how it used to be,” he said. “Rozumiem,” I said. (“I understand”). “You really pronounce our words well,” he said. “Dzię Kuje,” I said. “You know, I try to be a Polish patriot too, even though I am not a Pole. When my mom was here we visited the “powstanie” museum in Warsaw.” The Powstania of 1944, the Warsaw Uprising, saw tens of thousands of Poles killed in their failed attempt to liberate their city from the Nazis. Controversy remains about the role of the Red Army in the affair, because it did not move from the east side of the Wisła River while the uprising was being crushed on the west side. “It failed because the Russians sat on the east side of the river and let the Germans kill the Poles,” he said, more angry than I’d ever seen him before. “That is how my grandfather told me the story,” I said.

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“Your grandfather was right,” Zbyszek said, “I am a patriot. That is how it is.” Then Adam asked me for two zloty for some ryż. Not just any rice mind you, but “poor man drinking in a poor man’s bar” rice, which means white rice with some smalec (old lard with bits of pork in it) melted on top of it. Nobody asks for this unless they really need a meal, so I gave Adam five złoty—three more than he needed for the rice, but still short of another beer. Then the beautiful brown-eyed woman threw the cell phone belonging to her boyfriend of the moment against the wall. He crawled around the floor to pick it up, but showed no signs of hostility toward her for what she’d done. “She owns him,” Zbyszek said. He also gave her a stern warning about her behavior. He said there had to be limits. I asked him for more details about her. “Her name is Kinga,” he said. “She is the fiancé of any man who buys her drinks.” “But why?” I asked. “Her father was murdered when she was just 12, and her mother became a total alcoholic,” he said, “She has been on her own for 12 years. When I call for a cab, they know who they are coming to get.” “Murdered?” I asked. It’s not a word you hear very often here. “By a gypsy gang,” he said. “Gypsy gang,” I repeated, a little incredulously. But then I let it go, because I didn’t really want to know the details. I decided to believe he had been involved in something bad and had gotten what was coming to him. “Do you think she is beautiful?” he asked. “Yes, yes I do,” I said. “And her shape?” “I love her shape.” “Pocahontas!” Adam yelled. “Jescze Raz?” I said. “Pocahontas!” he repeated. “They call her Pocahontas, for how she looks” Zbyszek explained. “From the Disney film?” I asked. She did have more than a passing resemblance to the Disney character: long brown hair, big brown eyes, dark complexion. “Yes, and they call him ‘Gypsy,’” he said and pointed to Adam, who was snarfing down his bowl of greasy rice. “Because he steals?” I asked. “He doesn’t steal. He begs. He’s drunk. He does not want to get better. He is called ‘Gypsy’ because he has it in his blood.” “Does he understand any of what you say to me about him?” I asked, because Adam had used a few words of English earlier in the course of his begging.

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“He understands nothing.” “Ale fajnie,” I said, which means something like “but great” or “lovely.” I said it for a reason. It is the chorus of the song “Cyganeczka,” which is a popular polka performed Polish-American bands. It is a song about a gypsy girl who is drowning, and a man who doesn’t have a boat to save her. Here is an English translation of the chorus: Oh Oh Oh, ale fajnie, ale fajnie, ale fajnie Oh Oh Oh, ale fajnie, ale fajnie, ale fajnie tutaj jest Oh Oh Oh, it’s so lovely, it’s so lovely it’s so lovely Oh Oh Oh, it’s so lovely, it’s so lovely it’s so lovely here with you

The English is not a literal translation, which is more like “But great it is here,” but it makes the point. I’ve always taken it to mean that it’s lovely that the gypsy is drowning, which seemed kind of mean and racist. Anyway, I don’t know if that chorus is part of the Polish version of the song, because it’s not shown in the lyrics at www.chords.pl. But when I said “ale fajnie” everyone laughed. I know they didn’t laugh because of bad pronunciation. I know they didn’t laugh because the phrase made no sense in the context of the conversation: it did. I wondered if they laughed because it was a quote from a song about a gypsy drowning, but I didn’t have the skills to explain my interpretation to them. I decided to leave Kresowa early. A few more people had shown up, including two pretty young girls who ordered grape juice and called Zbyszek “Zbyszku,” but the place was a little too dreary for me. As I left I said goodbye to Zbyszek and said “do jutro,” which basically means I’ll see you tomorrow.

Chapter Nineteen

Christmas and Boxing Day

Christmas 2007 was the first time in my 38 years that I did not spend any of the holidays with my family. Being practical people, my brother, sister and I had decided that, since I wasn’t going to be home for Christmas, we wouldn’t buy each other gifts. I didn’t expect missing Christmas to be too difficult emotionally, because my mother had already visited me in Poland and I’d be returning to the States in early February. I didn’t really do much on Christmas Day, except trade a few emails with my extended family back home as they were eating dinner and exchanging gifts. I walked to a BP gas station about a mile from my apartment, because it was the only place that was open. I bought a can of peanuts, a sack of potato chips, and two four-packs of Tyskie beer. Standing in that line felt more familiar (i.e., more American) than any experience since my arrival in Poland. I think a line of people paying for gas, snack foods and beer on Christmas day feels just about the same everywhere. The married couple who run the American Studies program had invited me to their apartment for lunch the day after Christmas—the second day of Christmas Elżbieta called it. I eagerly accepted. Their apartment has been beautifully renovated, with light hardwood floors, cream colored walls, and new windows. It’s spacious, if not huge. Wiesek picked me up at my little apartment and told me that he and his wife had lived in it for a few months during the renovations. I couldn’t imagine two fully grown people sharing the small space. The Oleksies are very successful entrepreneurial academics, running the American Studies program and the Women’s Studies center at the University of Łódź. They seem to choose young faculty well, because my colleagues are brilliant, hard-working and serious. These young professors are also chang94

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ing the traditional adversarial relationship with the students, expecting a lot of work from them, and not tolerating cheating. The Oleksies have brought in many Fulbright fellows over the years, and they’ve been Fulbrighters themselves in the States. I was pleased to find that I was not the only guest invited for lunch. Their friend and colleague from the philosophy department, Barbara (Basia), was there too. The meal started with herring. It was layered with cooked potatoes, beets and onions in a cream sauce, and even though I don’t much like herring I thought this was a pretty good way to eat it. “Our son made this,” Elżbieta said, “do you like it?” “It would be better without the herring,” Basia said. I agreed, but I didn’t say so. Unlike on Christmas Eve, this time I wasn’t going to be able to get out of eating carp in aspic. I cut out a small piece, squeezed a lemon over it, and put some horseradish on it—anything to drown the flavor and alter the slippery texture. “Do you like it?” Wiesiek asked. “Well, honestly, it’s not my favorite,” I said “Perhaps we should drink some vodka. It goes well with herring,” he said and went to the kitchen. He came back with two shots. “The Polish way is to drink it all down at once,” he said, “Cheers!” “Na Zdrowie” I said, and we drank them down. “What is this awful music?” Basia asked. “They are medieval English Christmas carols,” he explained. “Don’t you have anything with a little more pep?” “Of course,” he said and began messing with the remote control. He succeeded only in restarting the English medieval disc. “Our son gave us this for Christmas. I have no idea how to control it,” he said and pointed the remote at the machine. Eventually he made it play a Louis Armstrong disc. “Won’t you have some carp, Basia,” Elzbieta said. “You know I don’t like it very much,” she answered. “You do not like herring, carp, or vodka!” Wiesiek said, “we should take away your Polish citizenship,” and we all had a good laugh. The main course consisted of quiche and a variety of meats, which went well with the red wine we were drinking. “What is this dark one?” Basia asked. “Ostrich,” Wiesek said proudly. The smoked kielbasa was more like our family’s recipe than any other I ate in Poland, and I commented upon its familiarity. “It is very special,” Wiesiek said, “it has veal in it.”

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Well, there it is: I guess I’m totally off the vegetarian wagon, I thought. Eighteen years down the drain. Herring, carp, veal and ostrich in one meal. The thought of it made me a little queasy. We finished the meal with a dessert of cheesecake and a plum flavored liqueur, which was very sweet. Soon I said I had to leave because I was scheduled to get together with my Fulbright friends, Alex from Warsaw, and Trevor, Ashley and their daughter Anna. Holidays are like that everywhere. Not many restaurants on Piotrkowska Street were open, but we managed to find a “Sphinx” that had room, although the waiter who greeted us at the door was quite surly. Alex and Trevor speak wonderful Polish, but when we ordered our waiter insisted on speaking English, which was just fine with me. I made funny faces with Anna, ate only a plate of French fries, and drank three beers. Alex asked what I planned to do with all my free time during the winter break. “Well, I’m writing about my experiences in Poland,” I said, “and you’re all in there.” “I hope you’re able to present a richer picture than most of that kind of writing does,” Alex said. “I’m relying mainly on cliché and stereotypes,” I said, and we all had a good laugh. “Trevor is always called Trevor the Mormon, T.T.M. for short. Ashley, you’re A.T.M., Ashley the Mormon, and Anna is A.T.M. Junior.” “And Alex is?” Trevor asked. “A.T.F.G.S., of course: Alex the feminist grad student,” I said. “Everybody gets exactly one dimension,” I added. We ate, drank and laughed, but soon it was time to go, because later that evening, Alex and I were attending a party at our friend, and my colleague, Ola’s place, and we needed to bring some beer. Trevor asked the waiter in Polish where an open beer store might be. “Trevor the Mormon helps the heathens find booze,” I said. On our short walk off Piotrkowska to find beer, young Anna was practically bursting at the seams with excitement. She waved her arms around in the stroller and shouted out little happy nonsense sounds. “Anna the Mormon is having a really big night!” I said to her excitedly. “It’s not every night you get to help your friends buy beer, is it?” and she laughed and laughed. I bought six Warka Strong beers, the beers with Pułaski on the label, and then we said our goodbyes. The little family took a cab home, while Alex and I walked fast, too fast, down Piotrkowska to Ola’s apartment. She lives near

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Lódź’s cathedral, which was quite a popular destination for families that night because of its nativity scene that featured real, live animals. At the party, the talk quickly turned to American politics, of course. A young man best described as a close-talker told me it would be wrong to vote for Obama because he has no experience. “But a candidate with too much experience usually loses,” I said, “look at how they savaged John Kerry’s record. Better not to have too much experience.” “That is a fair point,” he said. “So, what do you do?” I asked to change the subject. “I work in government. With the European union,” he said. Then he added this non sequitur, “have you ever been to Key West?” “No, I have been to Florida, but never to the Keys,” I said. “I love it there. My parents live there.” “Are they retired?” “No, they are illegal immigrants. They work in hotels.” Before long I became “The Proselytizer” in a way I never had before. I’d burned a CD of what I think are some of the best Polish-American polka songs, especially in terms of the quality of their Polish (many of the younger bands sing the songs phonetically now, and really can’t speak Polish at all). I had given it to Ola when I arrived in the hopes of hearing it played during the party. With each additional Warka Strong I became more insistent about hearing the CD. To her credit, Ola never gave in. Before I knew it I’d drunk all six of the Warka Strongs, a poor decision. They contain seven percent alcohol. I made a quick mental list of what food and booze I’d consumed that day, and began to feel a little sick. I asked Ola to call a cab for me, and made to leave. I made it home before I blew, for which I am grateful to God or fate or whatever kept the contents of my stomach inside me while I was in my friend’s apartment, the cab, and the hallway of my building. My friend Alex sent me a sarcastic e-mail the next day, suggesting that since she hadn’t found me in the alley she assumed I’d made it safely home. When I apologized to Ola for my behavior, she assured me everyone at the party had been pretty drunk and I hadn’t really stood out at all. I thought again about what Czesław Miłosz had written about the effect of alcohol on Polish men’s feelings about themselves and thought that it might apply to PolishAmericans as well. But I really didn’t hate myself in my heart of hearts. I just felt like a fool.

Chapter Twenty

Poland, Slovenia, and Austria

The bus from Lódź to Warsaw pulled into aisle six of the Fabryczna station and I pushed for the door just like a Pole. During the communist times, Poles may have been great at respecting the queue, but no more. At airports and bus stations, especially, it’s everyone for himself. As we were jostling our way on board, I noticed just behind me a small woman with jet black hair, a very high forehead and big brown, almost black eyes behind fashionable glasses. “Hello Professor,” she said. “Hello,” I answered. “going to Warsaw?” “No, I need to go to Płock.” This is one of my favorite Polish place names—the kind of place I’ll say over and over in my mind for a while after the first time I hear it during the day. It’s pronounced “Pwohtsk.” Say it fifteen times in your head and you’ll see what I mean. “I don’t think this bus goes there,” I said, disappointed I would not be able to ride to Warsaw with one of my students. The crowd continued stuffing itself into the bus, and she disappeared behind me. She knew I didn’t speak Polish so she asked the leggy blonde in front of me who was already buying a ticket from the driver to find out if the bus went to Płock. I understood from their conversation (and previous experience with this bus line) that it did not, but when the blonde turned back to tell my student, it was clear she did not hear her. I told her the bad news, and she said goodbye. The ride to Warsaw was the first stage of a journey to Linz, Austria. Friends there had invited me for New Year’s, and I welcomed the opportunity to visit another country. During the trip, sections of the bus would erupt in different ways and at various intervals. First a bald man in his fifties got into an argument with the driver after he had been made to move back a few 98

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rows from the seat nearest the exit—a kind of extra seat situated almost in the doorway and meant for tour guides. Then came the first pop! of a beer can from the young hooligan behind me. Covered in tattoos, listening to screaming-loud hip-hop on his ipod, and occasionally hollering into his cell phone he epitomized much of what I hate about the modern world. But I chose not to hate him on this ride to Warsaw—why bother? Just another annoyance in a world full of them, I thought. Two girls in front of me giggled together at each display of his crassness, which I thought encouraged him. As the trip wore on, however, I reconsidered and decided these girls really weren’t encouraging his behavior. Then, when I sneezed and they said, in harmony, “sto lat,” which wished me a hundred years of health, I knew they were okay. The bus rolled into the station at Jana Pawła Street just as it was getting dark, and I walked the short distance to the Marriott Hotel, which is quite a bargain on weekends in January. I ate dinner at Pub 7 on Plac Konstytucji, drank a few beers at a student bar near the Politeknik, and decided to see what a bar near the Marriott called “Champ’s” was all about. Well, it was all about what it sounds like it would be all about; it was a U.S. style sports bar. I sat down next to a beer-gutted, dark-haired man who was talking to the young Pole working behind the bar. The kid had the haircut and sideburns of the younger guys who play in nouveau rockabilly bands in the States. I ordered a beer and was pleased to find it cost only seven złoty—among the highest one should ever pay in Warsaw, but I expected this place to cost 9, 10 or 11. “You are from Germany?” the fat man asked. “No, no,” I said, “U.S.A.” “When you speak Polish, you sound German,” he said. “Cool,” I said and felt like a stupid American for having said it. He laughed a little. “I do not want to sound German,” I said, “Are you from here?” I asked. “No, I’m from Slovenia,” he said, “but I have been in Warsaw for twenty years. I am Gaspar.” “My name is David,” I said. “Is it okay if we speak English?” he asked, “I get no practice anymore.” “Of course,” I said as casually as I could. “What do you do here?” he asked. “I am a professor in Łódź,” I answered. He laughed the laugh of all Eastern Europeans who have ever visited Łódź: sarcastic, disdainful, understanding. “I am now unemployed,” he said, “you know of the famous market here?”

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I knew exactly what he was talking about. After the war the Polish government built a stadium to hold over 70,000 people for sporting events and big communist party gatherings. It is said they literally built it from the rubble left over from the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Well, it couldn’t have been built very well, and by 1983 the government abandoned it, and after the collapse of communism in 1989, the area around it grew into what many said was the largest open-air market in all of Europe. People from places other than Russia sold there, but it came to be known as the Russian market, and everything from AK-47 rifles to pirated music was available there. “Yes, I know of it,” I said, “I hear the days are numbered.” “Numbered? Ha! They are finished,” he said. “They have already closed it! To make way for the big future.” The stadium site is to be cleared, and a new 70,000 seat national stadium is to be built for Poland’s hosting of the Euro 2012 soccer tournament. “I had read of that,” I said, “but I did not know it happened already.” “They wanted us out, so we are out,” he said. “Progress . . .” I said. “They say so,” he said, “I don’t know. Do you like it here?” “I think I do,” I said, “the prices are good, the women are beautiful.” “Polish women . . . no way!,” he said. “You want a good wife? Go to Odessa.” “You went there?” I asked. “Damn right,” he said. “We are happy for 15 years. But I cannot get her a visa.” “Visas are easy now,” said a young man in a business suit sitting a few stools down from me. They argued in Polish for a bit, and Gaspar assumed I understood what they’d said when he looked back to me. I’d understood some of it. “Easy for him, maybe,” I said, playing off his obvious businessman looks. “Yes, easy for him. With his relationships,” he said. He said the last word like an obscenity. “Why don’t you move to Ukraine with her?” I asked. “I cannot go there now, with nothing. I need to make money again. Maybe I will go to Germany or Austria. I am part German, you know: Schmitt is my father’s name. Maybe I can make money there.” “I hear there is money to be made in England and Ireland.” “I am too old for that. I tried it for two weeks. Work like dog, live like pig, you understand?” “I do,” I said. “Now I live here, and there, and everywhere. Sometimes I sleep in the train station,” he said.

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“That’s terrible,” I said. “None of my old associates help me. I am on my own. But I will survive.” I bought us a round of beers. We said “na zdrowie” and clinked our glasses. I left him there around 11:00 because I wanted a good night’s sleep before my flight to Vienna. Of course, before leaving the Marriott I ate breakfast there, which is the most comprehensive breakfast buffet I have ever experienced: Polish, English and American tastes are each satisfied. You can get British beans, Polish ham, and American bacon. The flight to Vienna was uneventful, as was the bus ride from the airport to the Westbanhof train station, where I had to catch a train to Linz, where my friends live. I bought a second class ticket and made my way down the cars, looking at the tags in the windows that indicated seat reservations. I finally found a car of six seats which was completely empty and had only one window seat reserved. I sat in the other window seat. As our departure time approached, I was happy no one had come to claim any of the other seats, even the reserved one across from me. Minutes before we were to leave, an older man, with thin grey hair and a pale face marked with glowing red splotches appeared at the door to the compartment with a young woman, most likely his daughter, I thought. He opened the door and yelled something in German. Yes, he yelled. I had no idea what he had said, so I motioned them into the seating area. He had a tremendous belly, which he could hardly conceal under an expensive looking wool coat. He walked into the cabin and stood in front of me. His presence caused the cabin to reek of alcohol—liquor, not beer. He yelled at me again, in German, as if speaking louder would help me to understand. His daughter said something in English, but I didn’t make it out over the din of the drunken tyrant. “Stand up!” he finally yelled. “I’m sorry. I have a window seat reserved,” his daughter interjected. “He thinks you are in my seat.” I stood up and faced him. “Sit in the hall!” he yelled. I did not move. Here is how I feel when I am challenged in a foreign language environment: first I feel bad, wrong, certain I am at fault. I apologize. Then, if conditions indicate I am not wrong, I feel incensed if the native speaker is trying to push me around. Clearly that is what this Austrian was trying to do. I stood my ground to him, but offered my seat to his daughter, and moved over one. She took the seat, put her belongings on the overhead shelf, and spoke a stream of angry German at her drunken, out of line father.

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Then he left the train without speaking another word—of German or English. The confrontation with the angry Austrian was by far the most unpleasant experience I had during my entire stay in Europe, and even that wasn’t a very big deal. A drunk turned a small misunderstanding into an embarrassing event for his daughter, and I suspect her apology to me was not the first time he’d put her in a spot where she’d had to do that. I spent a few days in Austria with good friends, but I can’t imagine any of what we did would be of interest to anyone but us. But when I returned to Poland, even more strongly than during my return from England, I felt like I was going home.

Chapter Twenty-One

Fighting Poland

How much can you learn about Poland in two hours in a bar? I walked into Kresowa around 8:00, and Zbyszek greeted me on his way out to buy lottery tickets. His numbers hadn’t come in for a while, so he felt like they were due. Ania poured me a Warka and gave me a pack of zapałki—matches—to light my cheap cigar. I sat at the bar two seats over from two slightly suspect looking characters. The one closer to me was young and muscular and constantly in motion. He shrugged his shoulders, he turned to look at the door behind him, and he tapped a pen on his half-filled half-litre glass of Warka beer. The older man to his left was bald and sullen, and he occasionally muttered something aimed more at the pack of cigarettes and the two one hundred złoty bills on the bar in front of him than at anyone sitting nearby. Soon Zbyszek returned and took over behind the bar. As always he translated for me when the locals wanted to talk. It seemed the locals always wanted to talk. “He wants to know if you are ‘the professor,’” Zbyszek said, referring to the question from the bald and sullen Pole. “Why does he think he knows me?” “Come on! You have been coming here long enough to be a little famous,” Zbyszek teased. “Tak, tak. Jestem profesorem,” I said (“Yes, yes. I am a professor”). “He wants you to drink with them,” Zbyszek said, and so I moved over two seats. We introduced ourselves. The man in motion was named David, just like me, and the sullen one was named Vincent. These, of course, are anglicizations of their names. They are actually Dawid and Wincenty. Each of them spoke a little English; certainly more than I spoke Polish. So simple 103

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things they could tell me themselves, but more complicated ideas required Zbyszek’s translation. “You like Wiśniówka?” Vincent asked. I told him I did, and he told Zbyszek to pour us three shots of the eighty-proof cherry-flavored vodka. “To America,” Vincent said, and we drank them down. “My brother is in America, in Nowy Jork” Vincent said, “I hate him.” “That’s rather harsh,” I said, a bit taken aback. Then he explained everything to Zbyszek, who in turn explained to me that Vincent hated his brother because he’d abandoned him to move to New York, and he has never so much as called or written in ten years. And even with a brother in America, Vincent cannot get a visa. “I am all alone,” Vincent said, and David laughed, which seemed cruel. Then I noticed a rough, poorly healing cut on David’s nose. “What happened?” I asked, and pointed. “I was bitten,” he said, “by a man.” He told me he works in a kitchen, but that he is also a “fighter.” I asked if he meant karate or something like that, and he said yes, but the kind of fighting he does is different. “It was invented by the Jews,” he said. I had no idea what he was talking about, and I’m always a little suspicious when Poles in bars talk about Jews. But in later research I learned there is a rich tradition of Jewish martial arts, and that new masters have begun teaching it the world over. Who knew? At the time I tried to make a joke. “Jew Jitsu?” I asked, but nobody seemed to get it, and it didn’t matter, because Vincent wanted to talk about the history of Lódź. He also wanted to buy another round of vodka. Of course I agreed, but I asked Zbyszek if I should pay for a round. “He says tonight you are his guest.” We drank them down, and Vincent ordered up another round. I’ve learned that you can slow down the drinking in some Polish bars, but you can never stop it, except by leaving. I knew that if I kept my third shot on the bar for a few moments, they would too, and so I did. “Americans wrong,” Vincent said, “Much wrong. Nazi kill Jews. Not Pole.” Then he said a lot to Zbyszek, who in turn relayed it to me. Vincent wanted me to understand that the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe is in Lódź. He said it is in Lódź because the city had “allowed” the Jews to live here. Allowed was his word. He said Americans come to Poland to find the “Polish” concentration camps, but they aren’t Polish: they are German, Nazi German. He seemed to want me to believe there were no Polish collaborators in the Holocaust, no Polish anti-Semitism then or now, no blame for Poland for anything, ever.

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“We don’t do it!” Vincent yelled, “We fight!” His face turned red and his hand shook a little as we drank up our shots with a toast to Poland. When I first met these guys I was afraid that if there were to be trouble, it would come from the young fighter. But as the evening had progressed, it began to seem I had more to fear from Vincent. More evidence for the unreliability of first impressions, I thought. “Don’t be afraid,” David said, sensing my fear. Then he slapped my upper arm, hard. Possibly friendly, too. “Should I be afraid?” I asked Zbyszek. “No way,” he said, “you can trust them.” I said, “You trust them, but I trust you.” Vincent instructed Zbyszek to pour another round of cherry vodka. “You want big beer too?” Vincent asked me. I had been drinking a halflitre of Warka when he called me over. “Big beer for big man,” he said. David feigned a punch at my beer gut, and we all had a good laugh. The vodka seemed only to make me more thirsty, so I drank the beer quickly, and another one arrived. I asked Zbyszek if I should pay for anything, and he said it would be rude to try to do so. “Next time,” Vincent said. “You have four weeks,” I said, reminding them, and myself, that my Fulbright semester was over in just 28 more days. “Big beer for, big man,” Vincent repeated, “I am tiny man.” Of course David laughed at that, but added, “I am tiny man too. But not forever. Him, tiny man forever.” “You have a plan?” I asked, “Maybe go to England for a while?” This offended him, but he didn’t beat me up. He said he would never go to England, as hundreds of thousands of other young Poles have recently done. He told Zbyszek to tell me of his plans. “For now he makes dumplings, pierogi, you know, in a restaurant,” Zbyszek said, “but he does favors for a big man, so things may change.” I left it at that. I didn’t want to know what kind of favors they were talking about. “Rozumiem,” I said. I understand. Then Vincent started up again. He wanted to know if I had heard of the Warsaw Uprising, the Powstanie Warszawskie. I told him that of course I had. Then I thought: why should it be “of course?” All they know about me is that I’m a large American professor, not that I’m Polish-American and have been steeped in things Polish since birth. That my grandfather was the first to tell me of the Allies’ betrayals of Poland at the end of World War Two. “My Grandfather dead in Powstanie,” Vincent said.

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“He said he keeps a tie with a bullet-hole in it that his grandfather was wearing when he was killed by the Nazis,” Zbyszek said. I had no reply for that. I would like to say we raised our glasses in honor of Vincent’s grandfather, but we didn’t. Vincent’s monologue soon degenerated into gibberish, and he asked Zbyszek for a pen so he could write a note to me. The note read: “Silly boy. Robert DeNiro protect you.” Then a boisterous crowd of young people arrived, and David went off to drink with them. As Vincent drifted in out of consciousness I asked Zbyszek to order me a cab, and I was back in my apartment by a little after 10:00.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Three Good Classes

On a warm night in January, I ended up back at Raz Na Wozie, the place where Trevor and I had dined some weeks before. The name means something about “time on the wagon,” and the logo includes a wooden cart with some hay on it. They serve standard Polish food in a large dining room decorated with wagon wheels and other rural Polish kitsch like antique farm implements and dried flowers and vegetables. For a time early in my stay in Lódź, Raz Na Wozie had been a regular hangout for me. A few weeks into my time in Poland I started going there around 6:00, after my three Wednesday classes, but before the karaoke and dance- music started around 8:00. They were good times. I would sit at the bar and watch sports on TV with the wait staff as they got ready for the big night ahead. We couldn’t speak each other’s languages well, but we tried to be nice to each other: the bartender who could juggle would juggle; the pretty waitresses wore cat ears on Halloween; I ate good soup and potato pancakes covered in meat sauce. It was good to be back. I sat down on a faux rural bench, and ordered up a Tyskie duże, żurek soup, and a big potato pancake with meat sauce on top. The first Tyskie tasted as good as beer has ever tasted, mainly because I was parched after a long day of teaching. The day had begun well enough, but had briefly gone downhill, before I executed a nice recovery. When I left my apartment around 10:00 in the morning it was sunny and forty degrees, which is quite warm for Poland in early January. In quick succession the three trams that go close to where I teach rolled through the stop near my building. I didn’t feel like running to catch one (Trevor had broken his ankle once doing just that!), and I knew that when they stack up like that it’s going to be a long wait for the next one, so I decided to walk to a stop closer to campus. 107

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That worked out just fine, because as I arrived at the stop, the good old number 15 tram rolled up. The stop is one of the scary ones, with a lane of traffic between the sidewalk and the tram line, and it’s in front of an elementary school so sometimes there are crowds of kids among the cars and trams. And Poles are terrible drivers. They take unnecessary risks, and drive far too fast on all qualities of road surface and in all kinds of weather. They take off with a squeal of spinning tires and they never coast to a stop, choosing instead to slam on the brakes a few feet before the sign or signal—as if it was the first time they’d ever seen it there. So I stepped off the curb with great caution. In fact, I waited until a few people to my left stepped into the car lane so that any wayward vehicle would get them before it got me. But the traffic stopped in time, although a few cars skidded noisily on the wet road. The same cannot be said for the little green car that ran the red light as our tram was entering the Rondo Solidarności. I was sitting near the front when I saw the car through the windows of the front door of the tram. I knew right away we were going to crash. The tram driver rang his warning bells and I braced my hands on the seat in front of me. I didn’t expect too jarring an impact, and the dull thud and hard stop barely moved any of us from our seats. The tram driver got out to inspect the damage, as did the driver of the car. He was unhurt. The tram had crushed his back driver-side door—had the impact occurred a second or two sooner, I think he would have been seriously injured. The fiberglass bumper of the tram had popped off at one corner, but otherwise the multi-ton monster was undamaged and could have just been driven off from the scene. Of course, that’s not how it works anywhere. And how it worked in Poland was very entertaining. After some angry convincing from the passengers, the tram driver opened the doors to let us out, even though the two-car tram was stopped over several lanes of traffic. But those cars weren’t going anywhere, so letting us out in the street didn’t put us in any danger. Most of the passengers scattered from the accident scene to catch other trams or to walk to their destinations, but because I had a little extra time before my first class at 11:20 I stuck around to watch the events unfold. An old man stayed behind too, not just to watch the investigation but to participate. In a loud voice accompanied by grand, sweeping hand gestures, he criticized the driver of the green car for causing the accident. The tram driver wanted nothing to do with the old man; he looked sad and defeated by the fact that the rest of his day probably would be spent dealing with the heavily bureaucratic and inefficient investigation of a small accident that clearly was not his fault.

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I watched the old man argue with the car and tram driver, even seeking to engage passersby who had not been riding on the tram or anywhere near the scene at the time of the accident. It was clear he was planning on sticking around so he could make a richly detailed report to the police. I wished I could have stayed longer, but because I had a bit of a walk in front of me, and a little less than an hour before my first class, I went on my way. About a hundred meters from the accident scene, I slipped and nearly fell on some ice hiding in the midmorning shade produced by an apartment building. Although these were minor incidents in the grand scheme of things, I reminded myself that misfortunes come in threes. I feared my first class could finish the trifecta. My first class, Canadian Government, went well because I brought a printout for each student of the central ideas of the three topics we were examining: language and politics, diversity and politics, and Canadian foreign policy. We followed the outline, and I didn’t have to write anything on the chalkboard. Students asked questions where appropriate, and as I looked down on the desks I could tell most of the students were filling in crucial ideas on the handout, just as I had intended for them to do. I delivered a lot of serious academic content, they asked great questions and laughed when they should have. It was a good class: I would grade it a B+. In the next course, Media and Politics, I started with a discussion of the Iowa and New Hampshire Democratic primary elections. “Who won Iowa?” I asked. “Obama,” they answered. “Right. What percent?” They weren’t sure, so I told them 38. “And what did Hillary get?” I asked. Again they weren’t sure, so I told them 29. “Quite a defeat?” I asked. They didn’t seem sure what to make of why I thought that was funny. So I explained that a common assessment by pundits of Hillary’s defeat in Iowa included the observation that a full 71% of Democrats voting in Iowa had voted against Hillary. Then I said, “But, didn’t 62% vote against Obama?” They nodded their heads in agreement. They understood. Throughout the semester we’d discussed the idea that the news media set the expectations for candidates, and that campaigns contribute to the expectations game by raising or lowering them based on where they think their candidate will finish. But now we had actual examples, hot off the presses as it were, which always helps to illuminate concepts. “And what about the Republicans? How did they finish?”

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They knew Huckabee beat Romney in Iowa and McCain beat him in New Hampshire. “So Romney is . . . toast?” a student asked, appearing quite pleased with his use of American slang. “Quite possibly. But what about Giuliani?” I asked, “He has finished far behind in New Hampshire and Iowa too. Is he . . . toast?” I deliberately paused the same way my student had, not to mock but to bond through a little humor. I would like to say they responded in unison that Giuliani was, in fact, not toast, because his campaign had succeeded in setting media expectations low enough in New Hampshire and Iowa that poor showings there wouldn’t really hurt his campaign. Instead he was focusing on the delegate rich states that vote on February 5th. But that didn’t happen. I let them think about it for a while: applying theory to events to produce knowledge, as a B.G.S.U. “learning outcome” puts it. When it became clear that the observation I hoped for wouldn’t be forthcoming, we worked through it together. So at least they now had two real world examples. Then we talked about “momentum.” Candidates coming out of Iowa with a victory are supposed to do better in the states that follow. Again this is a media-constructed expectation. Why should a candidate who does well among a handful of Democrats in one un-representative state necessarily do well among a differently un-representative sample of Democrats in another state? But that’s how the game is played. Naturally we then discussed the fact that Hillary Clinton had won in New Hampshire. I had to admit that political scientists were somewhat baffled by the outcome, and we tried to discuss some of the questions raised by the inaccuracy of the pre-election polls. Why were the polls wrong? Where were Obama’s young voters in New Hampshire? Did voters change their minds? Did voters abandon Obama because he is black? I didn’t have any easy answers for the students, and it felt great admitting it. Why should I have all the answers? This is political science I told them, not rocket science. We are examining the fluid motions of an open system, so any predictions are by nature very risky. Sure, I’d told them earlier in the semester that what differentiates political science from other “lesser” attempts to analyze the world (e.g., the efforts of journalists, pundits) is that we make predictions, just like the big boys in the natural sciences. I didn’t tell them that the problem with the “scientific” study of politics is that we are so often wrong in our predictions. But I think they already knew that, and the New Hampshire results made it even more clear.

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One point I really wanted them to understand is the unreliability of polls concerning African American candidates, sometimes called the “Bradley Effect” for how the overestimation of the prospects of Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley when he ran for governor of California in 1982. In general, surveys overestimate the support for black candidates. It’s part of a larger point about how difficult it is for pollsters to gauge accurately public opinion about controversial topics. I told it to them exactly as I tell it to my American students: “If you ask someone a question that has a socially acceptable answer, you’re more likely to get that answer than you are to get the truth.” Then we switched gears to talk about the subject scheduled for the day: U.S. media coverage of foreign affairs. That really took the wind out of the sails of the class, but I felt it essential that we work on some of the assigned material. This is a tension every professor and most teachers I’ve talked with feel: the seeming zero-sum trade-off between the exhilarating experience of having a really good discussion about a topic, and the sometimes deadening process of transferring information, usually through a lecture. The best teachers I know use both strategies during each class period. I try to emulate them, but it isn’t easy. I also wanted to discuss foreign affairs coverage because I think it’s really important, and I thought the students would appreciate the example from our textbook of how 24-hour cable news channels have radically sped up the news-cycle in the U.S. When the Berlin Wall went up in 1961 J.F.K. waited eight days to make a public statement about it; as it came down in 1989, George H. W. Bush had to comment as it happened, and act as if everything was going as planned, or at least anticipated. No wonder modern presidents look less well-prepared when it comes to events in other countries! I think they understood and appreciated the example, but not as strongly as I had hoped. Then again, many of my students were born around 1989, and anything that happens before a 19 year old is born is ancient history to them. It’s true of my American students, and it seemed to apply to my Polish ones as well. By the time for my American Government class 4:30, I was as tired as usual. Normally I can wing this class on just adrenalin and excitement for the night ahead. This night was no exception, and it didn’t hurt my cause that the topic was elections. It turned out to be a great class. I explained the seeming contradiction that while survey evidence indicates Americans want third and fourth political parties to play a significant role, we do not have them. I assured the students that political scientists know the reason why; and it’s one of the few features of political life we describe as a “law.”

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Duverger’s Law, named for the scholar who introduced it, is elegantly simple: if your legislature consists of districts which each elect one member, and if you choose that member through a plurality electoral system (where the winner need not get a majority of the votes, just at least one vote more than anyone else in the race), then you will have a two party system. Because all the winning candidate needs is one more vote than his nearest opponent, supporters of minor parties have a massive incentive to throw their support to the major party they find least offensive: exercising the “lesser of two evils” option. We also discussed what some political scientists call Duverger’s Hypothesis, which suggests, again elegantly and simply, that if your electoral system is a proportional one in which political parties win seats in a legislature roughly in proportion to the percentage of the popular vote they received, you will end up with a multiple party system. The “lesser of two evils” option need not be exercised when almost every party has a decent chance to win seats. We talked about hypothetical and real examples of the phenomena; I encouraged them to think about the psychological factors surrounding the idea of “wasting your vote” on a third party; we talked about the idea of a “spoiler effect,” and it surprised me that most of them were quite familiar with the role of Ralph Nader’s 98,000 votes in Florida in producing George W. Bush’s 537 vote margin in that state. It was exhilarating. It felt like education! Then two guys sitting in the front row started whispering about something other than the class content. Yes, it was in Polish, so I can’t be sure. But I’m sure. Professors know. I shushed them, and while it was not a big event, the great good feelings were gone in an instant. Maybe I was “crashing,” because during my walk to campus after the tram accident I had forgotten to purchase my usual snacks, and had eaten nothing all day. I know I’m getting too old to teach all day on an empty stomach, but I continue to do it anyway. I plodded through the remainder of my notes. I wasn’t so much angry with the students, as I was just drained. Even the chatters really weren’t bad students. In fact, one of them runs the American Studies Student Association, and in our discussions there he has demonstrated a better grasp of some of the technical details of American politics than I have. It’s just a lot to expect a group of twenty year olds to pay attention to one non-electronic source of information and entertainment for 75 minutes in a row. I know I’m interesting, but not as interesting as television or the internet. After class I headed to Raz Na Wozie, about a 25 minute walk. As I neared the busy intersection of Narutowicza and the southbound street that leads to the train station, I heard a fast- moving set of footsteps come up behind me. “Hello professor!”

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It was Piotr, the smart chatter. We walked together for a while and he told me about his love for Chicago, where he’d spent the summer of 2007. Previously, he had lived and worked in Delaware , and had hated it. “No Polish food!” he said, “but Chicago, ‘ooo la la.’” I asked if he’d ever eaten at my favorite Polish restaurant in Chicago, an all you can eat place called the Red Apple. “I lived no more than fifty meters from there!” he said. When we split up he said enthusiastically, “Now I am off to drink with my friends!” “Ask them about the impact of electoral systems,” I joked. “No way!” he said. Neither the juggling bartender nor the pretty waitresses who wore cat-ears on Halloween were working at Raz Na Wozie that night, but the soup was good, the potato pancakes hit the spot, and the beer was cheap, cold and delicious. I left before the music began. I walked carefully to avoid hidden ice, dislodged sidewalk blocks, and the many holes and obstacles on Lódź sidewalks. I didn’t want number three to happen after what had been a pretty good day.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Zbyszkuuuu . . .

I sat down at the bar, and Zbyszek said, “Warka?” I answered in the affirmative and had a beer in front of me in less than a minute. At that moment, I believe I became a regular. I sat next to an attractive woman about my age. She was drinking beer with juice—a typical Polish woman’s drink. She and Zbyszek seemed to be old friends and they would talk quietly when he wasn’t busy serving customers. Within minutes of my arrival a small, almost tiny, bald man sat down next to me and started trying to speak to me in the most halting English I have ever heard. “I . . . you . . . very . . . here?” “Nie rozumiem.” (“I don’t understand”) “Speak Polish?” “Przepraszam, nie.” (“I’m sorry, no”) “Aha . . . I . . . you . . . go . . . England?” I decided that meant he thought I was from England. “No, no. U.S.A.,” I said. “Aha, U.S.A . . . very . . . very good . . . understand?” “Yes,” I said. Zbyszek and the woman were obviously enjoying my introduction to one of the stranger regulars at Kresowa. I learned his name is Ryszard. He wore thick wire-rimmed glasses, had a few days of scruffy stubble, and terrible breath. He curled his little fingers backwards when he spoke, sometimes pressing the index and second finger together, or overlapping them as in the good luck sign. Sometimes he would push both his hands forward, like someone releasing a bird, when he made what he thought was a particularly important point. Some younger guys next to him ribbed him a bit, but it 114

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seemed to be more or less good-natured. I could see them over Ryszard’s head, and during a particular long speech which I could not understand one of them rolled his eyes, and I made my best “it’s okay, he seems harmless” face in response. “What’s with him?” I asked Zbyszek after Ryszard had made his way to the W.C. “He’s just Ryszard,” Zbyszek said, “strange, but harmless.” “I see,” I said, and got up to throw some coins in the jukebox. Andrzej the owner noticed me from his seat across the bar and nodded a greeting. I nodded back. He was eating liver smothered in onions and reading Polityka Magazine. Reading up on the collapse of the Polish right, I thought. Then a group of three men in their twenties burst noisily through the door. Two of them sat down at one of the tables, and the third came to the bar to order beers. He shook every man’s hand and said, “dobry wieczor,”—good evening -- and he kissed the hand of the attractive woman. It was clear nobody at the bar knew the man, but it was not the first time I’d been formally greeted in this way when sitting at a bar. Then I noticed a chubby young girl standing behind the boys at the bar. She looked to be underage (the legal drinking age in Poland is 18). She had short, dyed-black hair, and wore lots of black eye make-up, and garish red lipstick. She pleaded with Zbyszek for something to drink. “Zbyskuuuuuu . . .” she nearly sang as she was asking. When Zbyszek returned to our corner after serving up several rounds, I asked him about her. “A prostitute,” he said, “she is only 16.” “Oh my god,” I said, “that’s terrible.” “I know, I know. She wants drinks, but I never give them to her.” “I . . . you . . . very . . . recording . . . Abba,” Ryszard said. “He’s trying to tell you he likes Abba,” Zbyszek said. “Tijuana Brass!” “And the Tijuana Brass,” Zbyszek said, then said a few sentences in Polish to Ryszard about being a pest. “Zbyszkuuuuu,” Ryszard sang. “How many ways are there to say your name?” I asked. “Probably a thousand,” he sighed. He knew for the rest of the night he was going to be called Zbyszkuuuuu: pleadingly by the teenaged whore, pathetically by Ryszard, and mockingly by the young men at the bar. I asked Zbyszek for another beer and tried to buy one for the attractive woman to my left, but she turned it down. After Zbyszek poured my beer he explained her situation to me in English, certain she would not understand a word of it.

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“Her story is very sad. Her husband died in a crash on the way home from a business trip to Germany. She has two daughters. One is 21, the other 13. She lives with her mother and the 13 year old.” Neither of us looked at her when he spoke, which maybe made it seem we were not talking about her. “How very sad,” I said lamely. But what else could I say? “Zbyszkuuuuu” she said, and he laughed. Then I noticed that two old men sitting next to Andrzej the owner were eating giant red Gołąki and bright yellow potatoes. I knew there was a kitchen (remember Adam’s pathetic rice?), and I knew some decent food occasionally emerged from it (remember the liver and bigos eaten by the big owner?), but I hadn’t known real food might be available for sale. “You serve food here?” I asked Zbyszek. “Yes, and it is very good,” he said, “but Polish food only.” “I love Polish food,” I said, and nodded toward the two gentlemen’s plates, “those look delicious.” “Pigeons,” he said. “Yes, yes, gołąki,” I replied. “Ohhh, so you know . . .” he said, “here they are delicious, with raisins.” That didn’t sound too good to me, but I didn’t say so. And so the evening went. Ryszard insisted on talking to me, even though in general I had no idea what he was talking about. The teenaged whore came and went, and finally convinced Zbyszek to give her something: the darts for the electronic board. I made a mental note to keep an eye on where she threw them. The young men messed with Ryszard, and Zbyszek made quiet conversation with the attractive widow whenever drink orders slowed down. After a couple of hours, she accepted a beer from me. I pumped occasional money into the jukebox, and Zbyszek cranked up the volume whenever a song he liked played. In my way of thinking, here is all you have to know about how cool Zbyszek is. I played Janis Joplin’s version of “Me and Bobby McGee,” and before he cranked it up, he said, “Kris Kristofferson.” “He is one of my heroes,” I replied. “Fantastic songwriter,” he said. Then he sang, “help me make it through the night . . .” He turned down the juke box a little when the next song played. I think it was something by Leonard Cohen. I just loved hearing Leonard drone over the noise of Kresowa. “Somewhere near Salinas,” Zbyszek said, “in California, right? Steinbeck wrote about it.”

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“He did,” I said, “and with great sympathy.” I stayed past the time when the trams stopped running, and Zbyszek called a cab for me. I’d already finished reading East of Eden, but when I returned to my apartment, I made a point to add it to a pile of books I planned to donate to the American Studies program’s library.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Breaking Glass

Since my time in Poland was growing short, I began to visit Kresowa more frequently. Early one evening, while I was drinking my usual half-litre of Warka, a man and woman sat down next to me. He was about 60, bald and rail-thin. He was a serious and somber looking fellow. She looked to be a bit younger and was as wide as she was tall. She was jovial and loud. He ordered a big beer and she ordered a small one. She asked Ania, Zbyszek’s ladyfriend who was tending bar that night, to heat up the beer for her. Ania must have kept the beer in the microwave too long, because the rotund woman complained to her partner about it. So he drank down about a third of his beer and then poured some of hers into his. Then he refilled her glass. This seemed to produce the right temperature and she began drinking her beer. The sad thin man offered me a cigarette, but I politely refused. Then he asked me a question I did not understand, and I told him I didn’t speak Polish. He apologized with one word in English which he repeated a few times: “sorry . . .” I wanted to tell him he had nothing to be sorry about, but all I could say back was “sorry” in Polish: przepraszam. Then they began to argue. Well, more accurately, she began to holler at him, and he hung his head and listened, interjecting an occasional syllable, not even a full word. They smoked cigarette after cigarette right down to the filter. She was definitely loud and a little annoying, but it was far from the worst behavior I’d seen in a bar in Poland. The one time he managed to get out a whole sentence, I think it was about me and went something like, “I think the American understands a little Polish,” which is true. But I understood only that comment, not any of the substance of their argument. During this one-sided argument, Andrzej, the owner of Kresowa, drove up onto the sidewalk in front of the bar. He and a couple of regulars got out and started unloading the trunk. They brought in several bags of flour and some 118

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medium sized white boxes. I never did find out what was in the boxes, but the flour was put to immediate use in the kitchen. The two women who work back there began methodically and carefully producing pierogi and arranging them in neat rows on plastic trays. These were beautiful pierogi. No two of them were the exact same size or shape, although there was nothing sloppy about them either. They were just handmade, home-made pierogi and I knew they would be delicious. So there I sat drinking tasty Polish beer, listening to the one-sided Polish argument, and just really enjoying being in Poland. Evidently the kitchen ladies were not as pleased with the situation, because after finishing three or four trays of pierogi, one of them came out from the kitchen and yelled at the fat woman with the warm beer. I didn’t understand all the details of her short tirade, but I got the major point: take your argument out onto Piotrkowska Street! Humbled and silent the woman put on her scarf (she hadn’t taken off her jacket because it was quite cold in the bar), smoked her last cigarette down to the filter, and walked with her silent man out onto the street. I felt bad for them because they really weren’t that annoying—certainly I didn’t think they were annoying enough to deserve to be kicked out of Kresowa. In fact I enjoyed the classic spectacle of the fat jolly woman berating her skinny whipped-dog husband. It was reassuring to see that tradition in Poland, having seen it often back in the States. I also hoped they hadn’t put them out because they thought they were annoying me. But, I decided that was pretty unlikely and ordered another Warka. Then Pocahontas walked in. She hadn’t been around the bar for a while. I’d asked Zbyszek about her absence and he’d said she was in trouble. “She stabbed him,” he’d said. I didn’t want to know who, so I didn’t ask. But there she was, back in the bar, smiling and seemingly happy. She sat down right next to me. “Hi,” she said, and I returned the greeting. She speaks no English so I knew we weren’t going to have much of a conversation. A few minutes later one of her friends arrived and I switched stools so they could sit side by side. Pocahontas and her friend drank a few big beers, then Pocahontas left the bar without her jacket. I guessed she was going next door to buy cigarettes, but she was away too long for that simple transaction. When she returned, she had with her a small bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey, which she poured into her beer. She drank that down pretty quickly and continued chatting with her friend in a friendly way. But I noticed Ania nervously keeping an eye on her. After pouring Pocahontas a shot of vodka, Ania made a phone call. Zbyszek arrived just after Pocahontas had thrown a heavy glass ashtray into the liquor bottles behind the bar. Without any warning or obvious provocation, she’d just stood up and whipped the ashtray across the bar and into

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the bottles. Quickly Andrzej was in her face, yelling at her, while Ania was sweeping up the pieces. A young giant of a man, bald and brutal looking, tried to intervene between Pocahontas and Andrzej. He seemed to be taking her side. Ania called the police. “This happens when she drinks more than beer,” Zbyszek said. “She didn’t have very much,” I said. “She doesn’t need very much,” he replied. Things settled down for a bit while everyone waited for the cops to arrive. Then Pocahontas screamed, and went to throw her beer glass across the bar, into the bottles she’d hit with the ashtray. But Andrzej grabbed her arm, and the glass fell to the floor behind the bar and shattered. She broke free from Andrzej’s hold and climbed onto a table. She didn’t seem to know what she was going to do once she was up there, and after a few seconds she accepted the brute’s assistance and climbed down. I’d seen enough action for one evening and decided to leave. “Is it okay if I leave?” I asked Zbyszek. “Of course,” he said, “the police will want witnesses who speak Polish.” I put a ten złoty bill on the bar as a tip for Ania, and Zbyszek translated her reaction. “She says we should pay you for seeing all of this,” he said. I smiled, shrugged my shoulders and said, “jest jak jest,” which means “it is what it is.” I stopped off at the Ramzes restaurant for some dinner to take home, and at the Żabka across from the downtown tram stop for a four-pack of Warka. It was about ten o’clock and half a dozen people were waiting for the tram. Then a figure emerged from the alley next to the tram stop. He was yelling primitive nonsense and staggering pretty badly. Another lovely Polish drunk, I thought. As he walked toward me I noticed that he’d been pretty badly beaten, and recently. His face was covered in blood, and only the thinnest spots had begun to dry. “Graaaaa, graaaa. . . .” he said and put out his hand, which contained a few coins. I gladly gave him a handful of change and he staggered toward the others waiting for the tram. They gave him wide berth. “Graaaaa . . .” he said and collected a few more coins before staggering off into the night.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Firsts and Lasts

As my departure approached, the food tasted better, people seemed nicer, even the weather warmed. I had recently discovered a restaurant about a block from my office called Bar Sznycelek. Technically I didn’t “discover” it—my student Piotr recommended it. It’s a real no-frills operation: you read the menu off a big sign on the wall and give your order to a middle-aged woman behind a counter. You sit at tables with people you don’t know, and when your food comes out of the kitchen it’s placed on the counter under the big menu sign. The cook or order-taker hollers out what it is so the right person can come and get it. After you finish eating, you take your dishes and silverware to a little window, where an old lady who peels potatoes when she’s not washing dishes, takes them away to clean them. The food is incredible -- by far the best Polish food I’ve ever eaten in a restaurant in Poland, or anywhere else for that matter. The first day I went in, I expected to order a chicken cutlet, but I saw an order of meatballs in mushroom sauce come out of the kitchen and ordered that instead, with dill pickle soup. The soup is what really makes the place special. Huge bowls of very flavorful Polish soups such as kapusniak and żurek for under two dollars. In fact, a meal consisting of soup, entrée, potatoes, cabbage salad, and a bottle of Coke cost just over five dollars. I ate at Bar Sznycelek every day for my final two weeks in Łódź. My colleagues were saying their goodbyes as well. Some of that was formal stuff in the department, but the better kind were dinners and drinks with colleagues who had almost become friends. One night my American colleague David LaFrance and I went out for a beer. He drank only one because he had a 3:20 A.M. bus to the Warsaw airport the next day. I had more than one. We drank at the Baghdad Café. It’s about a five minute walk from my office, and this was my first visit. I’d tried to find it before and failed because 121

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I’d assumed it was located in one of the commercial buildings along Jaracza Street, but it’s actually in the basement of a mansion that used to belong to one of the industrialists of old Lódź. After LaFrance and I said our goodbyes, I walked to the new tramstop that had just re-opened in front of our office building. I got on the number 13 tram, thinking its new route took it to the stop right in front of my home building. When it reached an intersection not very far from where I lived, instead of going straight toward my home, it turned right. Oops. So I got out at the next stop, which was high atop a busy elevated roadway, and walked under the tracks on a walkway that connects the two tram lines, and waited for one to take me back to the intersection. It arrived pretty quickly, and as I got off I decided to walk the remainder of the way home. Successfully making the adjustment after riding on the wrong tram felt like one of those little achievements that mean you’ve really settled into a place. During the walk home, I decided to visit a pub I’d walked past a few times which looked interesting. It’s called Pub Buła (pronounced Boo-Wah) and its symbol is an ancient Egyptian Pharoah head. The word Buła means a kind of bread roll in Polish, but that’s not what the bar is named for. The Polish name for the University of Lódź Library is Biblioteka Uniwersytet Lódźki, so the name is a play on the acronym: B.U.Ł. However, what had really caught my attention about the place was the big sign out front, whose English translation read, “bottomless pit of cold beer.” How could I resist such a challenge? The crowd was of mixed age—young and middle. A long bar (with no stools) ran almost the entire length of the place, with tables along the floorto-ceiling windows that formed the front wall of the pub. Just as I walked in the cook emerged from the kitchen to place a pizza on the bar, and I recognized him. It was Dawid, the Jewish martial arts expert I’d met a few weeks before at Kresowa. I noticed that his nose had almost completely healed. We said our hellos and he told the bartender something that must have included “speak English to this guy,” because that’s what he did. I ordered a half-litre of Żywiec, but the keg blew just as he began to pour it, so I said I’d take a Warka instead. It cost 4 złoty, 50 groszy, which made it the second cheapest pint I’d found in Lódź (the cheapest being one for 3.50 at a bar I wouldn’t return to on a bet). I sat at a table behind three Polish guys who looked to be students. I quickly inferred that they must have had something to do with the demise of the Żywiec keg because in front of them was a long, narrow wooden board with the Żywiec logo printed on it and seven beers on it too. The bits of their conversation I could hear indicated they were pouring down the beers and eating pizza to celebrate the end of the semester studying law.

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I drank just two pints and walked home past the library, the “American Corner,” and the new business administration building. It’s the collection of university buildings that looks most like an American campus, and I liked walking through there. I wanted to make it an early night because the next day at noon there would be a little send-off in the office, and a dinner and drinks that night with some of the younger faculty members. I thought it might become a late one. The next night five of my young, beautiful, and smart colleagues and I ate dinner at Anatewka, a Jewish restaurant. A small musical group consisting of violin, accordion and clarinet played long sets of songs in the minor key, and in between a woman violinist perched on a chair halfway up a wall played for the crowd. She climbed a ladder to get up there. It was very strange. She played “hava nagila” three times during dinner. Afterwards, three of us went to Kresowa. The place was nearly empty, and Zbyszek was in a foul mood. We drank one beer, listened to the snoring drunk passed out on the bench behind us, and left for Lódź Kaliska, one of Lódź’s best-known night clubs. My colleagues still had stacks of exams to grade, so we decided to make it an early night, and left after just one beer. Grading exams in Poland and assigning grades turned out to be one of the most hilariously complicated processes I’d ever experienced. Normally bureaucratic bullshit makes me angry, but I realized there was no point in that this time. And it wouldn’t have made any difference. During exams, only a handful of students cheated—by attempting to copy from one another. I stared them down, and most of them ceased. Two young men in my Saturday class were not deterred by this, since Polish students get a second chance to pass any exam they fail. As punishment for their cheating I lowered their grades to just above the point of failing. If they complained, I would say I had punished them for “insufficient citation” of each other’s work. But they didn’t complain. Polish students carry with them for their entire academic careers what are called “Indekses.” This is their personal record of each class they took, the grade they received, and the number of times they’d had to take the exam in order to pass. Professors must write in a grade and sign each of their students’ indekses. At first it was a little intimidating to have to look the students in the eye as I gave them their grades—especially poor grades—but only one student out of 132 complained about the grade I gave him. There is a lot more to giving grades than just signing the indekses, including filling out forms and entering them into a computer. I spent most of an eight hour work day signing indekses, filling out forms, and signing my name.

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After a full day of bureaucratic nonsense, I walked over to Kresowa for my final visit. The place was packed with young revelers, many of whom looked to be university students celebrating the end of the semester. I sat on the side of the bar where Andrzej and his cronies normally sit and waited for Zbyszek to get a free moment to pour me a Warka. Andrzej and I exchanged “dobry wieczors” (“good evening”). Zbyszek brought me a beer, and I said, “This is my last night here until September,” when I planned to return for an academic conference. Zbyszek immediately told Andrzej in Polish that I was soon to leave. He appeared characteristically unmoved by the news of my impending departure. Then Dawid, drunk as can be, stumbled over. As I have mentioned before, when he talks to you he invades your personal space, and this time was no exception. He put his arm over my shoulder and patted my back when he wanted to make a point. He speaks very broken English. “Come to Buła. I cook special for you.” “In September,” I said. He didn’t understand. “My English terrible,” he said, “but I study.” Andrzej told him I was leaving. Then he and Dawid engaged in a conversation I didn’t understand. Zbyszek poured me another Warka. “May I ask you a question?” he said. “Of course.” “What is a ferris wheel?” I didn’t expect that, and it’s not as easy as you might think to describe a ferris wheel to someone who speaks English well, but with a somewhat limited vocabulary. “It is a kind of ride,” I said. His confused look indicated that explanation hadn’t worked. “It is a wheel,” I said, conscious of the fact I was using part of the term to define it, “that is thirty or forty meters high, that has seats hanging on it that you ride . . . for pleasure.” The word “pleasure” seemed to be the key. I thought about asking for a pen and paper to draw it, but he was summoned away to pour more beer. After he finished talking with Andrzej, Dawid turned to me and said, “Sorry. I must sit with my girl,” and pointed behind me to where she stood. It was Ewa, the beautiful redhead from Raz Na Wozie. I know this seems really unlikely, but it’s true. John Irving is right when he responds to his critics who complain that there are too many coincidences in his novels: but they happen! This happened. There she stood, and she looked

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even better than I remembered. Her hair was cut shorter, which accentuated her pretty face. We shook hands and I said “hi” in Polish: cześć. After they had gone to sit down at a table with their friends I wondered if she would tell him I’d tried (lamely) to pick her up at Raz Na Wozie, and if that would make him want to kick my ass. I decided it was unlikely, then Zbyszek returned. “Another question,” he said. “what is a county fair?” Again, think about explaining this to a non-native English speaker. I’m most certainly not disparaging Zbyszek’s English or intelligence. It turns out that I’m not great at explaining things, which given my profession, reflects poorly on me. But this time I knew of a Polish term that would help: dożynki, which means harvest festival. So that’s what I told him it was which, while not entirely accurate, did the job well enough. “And it is a place where you will find a ferris wheel,” I said. “These words are in the lyrics of a song on the new Eagles album,” he explained. Then an older man with a small grey pony-tail sat down next to me. He took some time ordering his drink, and I understood almost all of the conversation, which made me very proud. He wanted a bottle of Leżajsk beer, and Zbyszek informed him that he had only one left. Then he took out a complicated and expensive looking camera and took some photos of people as they were giving Zbyszek their drink orders. In broken Polish and English he managed to tell me he was a professional photographer, and I told him I was a professor. Zbyszek told me many of the photos on the walls are his work, and the photographer wanted to take my picture. I happily agreed. He snapped a couple of me from the side, just talking to Zbyszek. I was smoking a cheap cigar, and he asked me to take a couple of puffs. I obliged. He showed me the photos on the little screen on the back of the camera, and never have I seen myself look more like Charles Bukowski. I absolutely loved the picture, and he told me, through Zbyszek, he would leave prints in a few days. Zbyszek promised to mail them to me. By then I’d been in the bar for about two hours, and the last trams of the night were rumbling past. I asked Zbyszek for some pierogi and goląbki to go, and somehow managed to drink down three more beers in the fifteen or so minutes it took for the food to come out of the kitchen. Zbyszek called a cab, and it seemed to arrive almost immediately. All too soon I was saying my goodbyes. I shook Andrzej’s hand, then Zbyszek’s. “I am very glad we met,” he said. “Me too,” I answered. “See you in September,” he said. I walked out of Kresowa, got in the taxi, and told the driver where to go.

Conclusion: Warsaw One More Time

I spent the night before my departure from Poland in Warsaw, because even though my flight out didn’t depart until noon, I always like to be no more than a cab ride away from the airport the day I have to take a flight. I met up with my friend Tony for a beer before dinner. He asked me how I was feeling about leaving. “I feel like I’m abandoning something,” I said. “You’re not,” he said, “but if you want to stay you should ask the Fulbright office now, to find out if it’s possible.” “I don’t want to stay, and I don’t want to leave,” I said. I’d already thought over the possibility of asking for an extension, but had decided against it. By returning the States I would have six months off from teaching, which would allow me a lot of time to write. I knew I was leaving a substantial amount of money on the table by not asking for an extension, but I’d thought of something my friend Kevin had told me: if the choice is between time and money, always choose time. Intellectually, I was very comfortable with my decision, but emotionally, in Warsaw on the night before I was scheduled to leave, I felt pretty bad about my choice. “You’ll feel different once you’re on the plane,” Tony said. He was right. But I still felt pretty ambivalent about leaving. Once again, lyrics from Chicago polka king Eddie Blazonczyk summarized my feelings: Back across the ocean to my home away from home I’m glad to be returning, but sad to have to go I’d like to find a way to be two places at one time It’s easy going back again, it’s hard to say goodbye

Knowing that I was coming back in a few months for a conference made me feel better. Professor Wiesiek Oleksy, who helps to run the American Studies 127

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program, had reminded me about a Fulbright program to fund shorter guest lectures by U.S. faculty. I’d told him I’d be happy to come back to Łódź every year to do that, if it were possible. In Polish, the word for “good bye” is “do widzenia.” That’s the formal, and therefore always the correct, way of saying good bye. On the other hand, the less formal “do zobaczenia” means something like “see you later,” and that’s what I felt like I was saying as I left Poland in 2008. I had wanted to achieve a number of objectives on my Fulbright, and I think I did pretty well. First, and most importantly, I wanted to teach my classes effectively. By and large, I think I did that, although had I taught for an additional semester I am certain I would have challenged the students more. For example, instead of a final exam based mostly on objective questions as the only graded work for the courses, I would have required some in-class writing assignments as a means of rewarding the students who were actually keeping up with the readings, and punishing those who were not. Throughout the semester I had talked with Tony about the challenges of teaching in Poland. We faced many of the same dilemmas, including large numbers of students who rarely or never attended classes. Tony used a short quiz at the beginning of each class session to encourage attendance, while I decided it was up to the students to decide if coming to class was worth their time. We discussed how difficult it can be to get students to express themselves in class, and I told him how I’d gotten lucky on that front. About three or four weeks into the semester a very bright and talkative young woman began attending my classes, and whenever she would speak up in class (which was often), other students (especially the women), would feel emboldened to speak up as well. My second goal as a Fulbrighter was to maintain and build relationships with Polish colleagues. I was less successful with that than I was with my teaching. I don’t mean to suggest that I offended anyone I worked with or that relations were not always cordial and professional. That most certainly wasn’t the case. I still have a good relationship with Elżbieta and Wiesek Oleksy, who run the American Studies program. I liked my colleagues and got along well with them, but the academic environment at Łódź is a little different from the one I am used to at B.G.S.U. I consider myself to be pretty good friends with all of my American colleagues who are around my age. We frequently eat lunch together, gather for happy hour at a local pub, and go to parties at each other’s homes. Little of that happened while I was in Poland. Naturally, had I stayed longer than just one semester, there would have been more informal contact. But, I think other factors were at work as well. First, Polish colleagues spend less time in their offices than my American colleagues. It seems that when they are

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not teaching or holding office hours, most Polish professors would rather be somewhere else. Since we all shared office space, perhaps it’s easier for them to get work done at home. Also, I got the feeling that Poles in general do not become friends quickly. An American colleague said this is especially true in their relationships with foreign professors. Why invest much emotion in a relationship with someone who won’t be there very long? But I think it goes even deeper than that though. Americans become friends very quickly, and the Poles see the relationship as superficial. Poles take longer to become friends, but the relationship that develops is more meaningful. Or perhaps Poles are just a little cranky by nature . . . I had also wanted to learn more about Poland, the Polish language and culture, and Poles as people, and I think I did. I still can’t speak Polish very well, but I can speak it better than I could before I spent five months in Łódź. Almost every day I refer to facts I learned during the crash courses in Polish history, politics and culture we attended at the orientation. I know a lot more about the Polish academic culture and the stifling effects of bureaucracy in higher education. But most importantly, now I know more Poles. Any time I feel like it, I can write an e-mail to one of my Polish colleagues, and I’ll see them at conferences in the future. And there’s a pub on Narutowicza Street, just off Piotrkowska, where I know I can go for a half-liter of Warka and a good conversation with my friend Zbyszek, and whomever else wants to talk politics with me. I know I’ll hear good music there and opinions passionately defended. I’ll see beautiful women I can barely communicate with (even though I’ll try), and I might see breaking glass or a broken nose. The trams will rumble past, and I’ll wonder if I should try to catch the last one, or wait until later and take a taxi. Maybe I’ll buy some pierogi or gołąbki for a late night snack. In other words, I’ll be in Poland.

References

Blazonczyk, Eddie. 1995. “Polish and Proud of It.” Polkatime: 20 of the Best. BelAire Records. ———. 2000. “Home Away from Home Polka.” Smokin’ Polkas. Bel-Aire Records. In Your Pocket Guide to Łódz´, http://www.inyourpocket.com/poland/city/lodz.html. Irving, John. 1996. The Imaginary Girlfriend: A Memoir. New York: Ballantine Books. Lightfoot, Gordon. 1976. “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” Summertime Dream. Reprise Records. Miłosz, Czesław. 2001. Miłosz’s ABC’s. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. Phelps, Christopher. 2004-2005. “Fulbright on the Mind.” “Teaching: the View from Poland.” “Being There.” “Polish Autumn.” “Prepare for Departure.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, retrieved 19 May 2008 from http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/ archives/fp/authors/christopher_phelps/fp_articles.html. Steinbeck, John and Robert Capa. 1948 (1999). A Russian Journal. New York: Penguin Classics. Supertramp. 1979. “The Logical Song.” Breakfast in America. A & M Records.

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