Travel Blog

I went to the post office the other day.

"To Poland," the clerk said, taking my envelope.

"Yes, it's my book about Poland."

"Does it have pierogies in it?" the man asked.

"Yes," I said. "It mentions pierogies."

"And kielbasi? Does it have kielbasi too?"

I said there was a word or two about kielbasa.

Then the man told of his neighbor, a "Polish woman," who went out one day with a stick to throw to the dog, forgetting that she had her car keys in the same hand.

After all these years, the jokes continue. After Pope John Paul II and Lech Walesa. After Krzysztof Kieslowski and Ryszard Kapuscinski. Of course, the sort of people who tell Polish jokes have never heard of these last two men.

Mockery is often based on ignorance, even - perhaps especially - when ignorance is its imagined target. And in their cluelessness about Poland, many Americans are unaware that the country is, as the Polish journalist Adam Michnik recently said in a speech in Philadelphia, "the most pro-American in Europe, perhaps the world." They heap abuse on the one country that continues to show us love and respect.

So the joke's on whom?