Looking for a beach read in a second-hand bookstore, I found instead Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Fire in the Steppe, the third fat volume (700 pages) in his heavy trilogy of the Polish national experience in the mid 1600s. While never actually cracking it on the beach (too much sand, too much sun, too much wind, too much surf—how do people actually manage to read on the beach?) I did make it through the first 200 pages in the air-conditioned beach house. On page 199 you can read, “A foreigner is always just a stepson in any other country, but our good Motherland [Poland] will stretch her arms to him and hug him to her breast from the start.”
These words reassure me in my efforts to acculturate even as they issue from the liquor-intake cavity of Pan Zagloba, an irrepressible old knight who figures as something of a mouthpiece of Polish national culture. But I worry that the Motherland has aged in the intervening centuries since the Commonwealth, and her experiences with the foreigner—invasion, slaughter, imperial domination, diplomatic betrayal, genocidal occupation—have certainly given her cause for withdrawing her embrace, even to well-intended strangers. Writing in the 1880s, Sienkiewicz ventriloquized this noble sentiment when Poland had ceased to exist for almost a century, owing to foreigners, Russians, Prussians, Austro-Hungarians. And Soviet Communists, putatively well-intended Slavic brothers, have hardly endeared themselves to the Motherland for the previous half-century. So it would be perfectly understandable if Poland wanted nothing to do with me.
But the new Poland, the post-Communist Poland, in a unifying Europe, in a globalizing world, would appear to be more diverse, more international than the most recent Poland—more like the Commonwealth. Or need to be. In which case, she might revert to her previous indulgence of foreigners, of me. The new, the impending, but not-yet Poland. Perhaps in time, perhaps I’ll have to wait. But there’s much to do in the meantime.
