Category: poland
Thirty years ago today I walked with hundreds of Poles through Warsaw's Old Town in a demonstration against General Jaruzelski. Our own little May Day parade. Special ZOMO forces blocked main streets and - before the afternoon was out - they gave me my first taste of tear gas.
In the evening I joined Hania at a party, and I remember feeling invigorated, and very happy. Yes, we were living under martial law, but it was spring and we were young.
Tuesday I was browsing in a bookstore - the Travel section, if you can believe it - and came across Nancy Pearl's Book Lust: To Go. Pearl is the Seattle librarian who rose to fame with Book Lust (the original) and then had the great distinction - unprecedented for someone in her profession - of inspiring an action figure.
I immediately checked the index for my name. It wasn't there, even though - I soon discovered with increasing dismay - there was a section devoted to Poland. Among the books listed to give Americans a feel for the country was Alan Furst's The Spies of Warsaw. This is another in Furst's series of World War II novels and conveys little of the atmosphere of Warsaw back then, partly because few of the characters are Polish, and partly because the author (as he told me when I interviewed him in Miami a few years ago) spent less than a month in the city. It became clear after a few minutes of talking to him that he had little interest in the place; it had simply provided an exotic backdrop for his - at least in this case - rather workmanlike thriller.
I e-mailed Nancy - we met years ago in Portland when my second book came out - and told her about my first book, the result of living for two and half years in Warsaw, marrying a Pole, learning the language, becoming so attached to Poland that I now regard it as something of a second homeland. I said that I hoped she didn't think my e-mail impertinent, but that when one invests so much time and emotion in a subject, one wants to receive some recognition for it. And, I added, unless I write e-mails, I don't. As the Poles say: Always speak well of yourself; others will speak badly.
She e-mailed me back within an hour, saying she'd look for a copy of Unquiet Days and perhaps tweet about it. It's still true - as the Russians say - that what is in print cannot be removed with an axe. But what is not in print can now, swiftly and sometimes effectively, be acknowledged.
Thirty years ago this month Czeslaw Milosz won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the two-month-old Solidarity movement was gaining strength at home and support abroad, and - on Oct. 11 - I was married to Hanna Matras in the Palace of Weddings in Warsaw's Old Town. It was an overcast day (Polish golden autumn). The gathering was small and the ceremony brief; it ended with me wearing my new wedding ring on my right hand and then getting kissed three times on both cheeks by the few people in attendance, including my best man. At home, Hania's aunt greeted us at the door holding a loaf of bread with salt atop it, a traditional symbol of good luck. It has lasted for three joyous decades.
Over the weekend we went to visit Magda and Ryszard, who had recently returned from Poland. I asked how the mood was after the plane crash in Russia that killed 97 people, most of them top men in government, including President Lech Kaczynski, who subsequently was buried - amid much controversy - in Wawel Castle.
"The first thing I heard," said Ryszard, "were jokes."
It was just like the old days (1980s) when Poles dealt with hardship by laughing in its face. After 20 years of democratic capitalism the survival mechanism has not changed. You may question the taste of some of the jokes - one was morbidly anti-Russian, one unfavorably compared the recently deceased president with Pilsudski's horse - but not their importance.
Niech zyja zarty. (Long live jokes.)
"Is it really cursed, our Poland?" These words, spoken by a Pole the first week of martial law, in December 1981, came back to me on Saturday.
I heard about Katyn shortly after I arrived in Poland in 1978. The memory of the massacre of 20,000 Polish officers - the new generation's best and brightest - was especially strong because the Soviets continued to deny any responsibility. (Also, as Lawrence Weschler pointed out in one of his New Yorker pieces, when Americans say "it's history," they mean "it's over, it's finished"; when a Pole says "it's history," you see the veins in his neck pop out.)
The crash this weekend of the plane carrying Poland's leaders - political, military, economic - to the site of the massacre made one think of curses (though not, thankfully, conspiracies). This was supposed to be a happy year for Poles as they celebrate the 30th anniversary of the birth of Solidarity - the movement that marked the beginning of the end of communism in Eastern Europe - and the 200th anniversary of the birth of Frederic Chopin, the beloved composer whose most oft-played piece is a funeral march.
I don't know if it says more about this year's kick-off party for the Sony Ericsson - or more about me - but the only players I recognized were Slavic women.
Jelena Jankovic sat with friends, frequently flashing her winning smile, while the Poles - Agnieszka and Urszula Radwanska, and Caroline Wozniacki (a Polish-Dane) - took to the dance floor. It was rather sweet to see Agnieszka dancing next to Caroline, who beat her at Indian Wells less than a week ago. Polish sisterhood.
I was tempted to go up to them and say something stupid. "Dobry wieczor" (Good evening) or "Co slychac?" (What's new?). Poles usually melt whenever a foreigner says something in Polish, but I had an inkling that wouldn't be the case this time. And besides, the music was so loud they wouldn't have had the slightest idea what language I was speaking.
Szkoda.