Yesterday in Warsaw, Poles marked the 70th anniversary of the Palace of Culture and Science, an unwanted gift from the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, the building “towered over the city in brute, dulled, gloating majesty” (from Falling into Place: A Story of Love, Poland, and the Making of a Travel Writer). Today, backdropped by taller towers of glass, it has an almost endearing homeliness.
Sunday’s New York Times Book Review carried a review of a new book, The CIA Book Club, that tells the story of the agency’s efforts during the Cold War to smuggle books and magazines into Eastern Europe in hopes of promoting not just the Western ideology but also its way of life. Among the magazines was Cosmopolitan.
The review, like the project, focused on Poland, which I found interesting but also a little puzzling. In Warsaw, where I lived in the early ’80s, Poles had free access to the British Council and the library in the American embassy, where there was no security check or request for ID; you simply walked in the side entrance, past the marine, and entered the brightly-lit room filled with books, periodicals, and days-old copies of the New York Times, Washington Post, and International Herald-Tribune. I don’t recall that Cosmopolitan was available, but Time, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic Monthly all were.
The British Council was more popular with Varsovians because it was located far from the British embassy and so carried no obvious governmental association. I assume the political classics mentioned in the review were available – 1984, Brave New World – but, because I had read them in college, I was drawn to other works: V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas and Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts (which remain, 45 years later, two of my favorite books). I also read, as every Anglophone Pole could, Timothy Garton Ash’s stylishly insightful reports from Poland in The Spectator.
I will read The CIA Book Club to see if any mention is given of the valuable role these libraries played in the Cold War.
A Polish friend messaged me this morning with the news that she’s presenting a paper at an academic conference and one of her co-panelists will be discussing my book. Looking at the program listing that she attached, I saw that a professor at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin will be talking about Unquiet Days: At Home in Poland, as well as another book about Poland by another American. I googled this author and learned, with dismay, that she is an esteemed anthropologist, the recipient of numerous academic awards. Surely, she wrote a deep, well-researched, important study of Poland. My book, by contrast, is a mix of descriptions and anecdotes from the two and a half years I lived in Warsaw. I hope the professor is not too hard on me.
We gave up on The Four Seasons (the series, not the concerto) after two episodes, finding it silly and glib. Though I did enjoy the dinner scene when the three couples are discussing vacation ideas and someone suggests Warsaw. "The New York Times says Poland is the new Portugal."
I was delighted by this evidence that my favorite country is finally getting its due. (Even though a google search turned up no such quote from the Times.) And, naturally, I thought: the more interest in Poland, the better for my memoir. But I would not like Warsaw to be overrun with tourists the way that Lisbon now is. As a flat, often overcast city far from the sea - and close to Russia - it probably doesn't have to worry too much about massive popularity.
Today is Polonia Day, honoring the approximately 20 million Poles who live outside Poland. It is such a large and historic diaspora that it has not only its own name, but its own day.
from Falling into Place: A Story of Love, Poland, and the Making of a Travel Writer:
"The morning of May 1st, as I dressed to go out, Hania once again urged me to be careful. A service was going to held in the cathedral, after which a protest march was planned, as a counter-May Day parade.
"On the street I passed a worker, a tragic figure in a comic book outfit: a soiled cloth cap; an ill-fitting grey suitcoat, shiny with age; purple bell-bottom trousers. He was walking away from the buses that would have transported him to the parade in his honor."
Later, after the service, marching through the city:
"We soon made a right turn, to avoid a paramilitary unit holding carbines. "ZOMO do domu!" (ZOMO go home!) people chanted. Also, "Who are you serving?" A young mother watched from a balcony with a baby in her arms; another woman leaned out of her window and clapped rhythmically as we passed. I took in my fellow marchers, the trees green with buds, a world awakened, and thought: Prague. Warsaw. The Eastern European spring."