Sunday, June 26, 2011

Peasant

When my Uncle Edzio asked his Uncle Franek why my grandfather, Aleksander, Franek’s brother, came to the United States in 1902, Franek answered, “for bread,” na chleb. (Borowicz, 21) This was the obvious and classic response to this question, usually accompanied by a shrug of the shoulders. This past year though, in class, I learned that my grandfather might have been motivated as well by the reasonable desire to avoid conscription in Czar Nicholas II’s army.

In his four-volume novel, The Peasants, or in Polish, Chlopi, Ladislas Reymont, setting a tavern scene, remarked upon “the lads who were to be taken into the army towards the end of autumn: those drank deep for very grief. And no wonder, having so soon to go amongst strangers, and into a foreign land.” (80) The translator noted that at about 20 years old, young Polish men were subject to “[f]our years in the Russian army, often in the very depths of Russia,” where they might very well lose their own language and culture. (127) So that immigration to America, hard as that seems to us and indeed was, might actually have presented to Aleksander, eighteen going on twenty, the less perilous of his immediate travel options. “Next Sunday the Russians will take them away to somewhere at the back of the world.” (182) The back of the world, or the back of Russia at right about that time, was Port Arthur, Manchuria, the key site of Russia’s disastrous war with the Japanese in 1904-5. A good move for Aleksander, but interestingly, forty years later his son, Norbert, drafted into the U.S. Army and stationed on Amchitka Island at the end of the Aleutians, faced the Japanese from the other direction. He saw no action, and the U.S. won. Traveling the world and approaching things from the complete other side makes a good deal of difference.

I have been making no progress in Polish language this summer, but some in the literature. The ironic coincidences delight a fellow, a chlop, given to ironic coincidence. Ladislas Reymont won a Nobel Prize in 1924, in large part for Chlopi and the “so-called chlopomania ('peasant mania')” of the early century (Milosz, 370), thus, in the very year my peasant grandfather returned to Poland to essay the life of a country gentleman.

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Ojciec

My father, moj ojciec, the youngest of four brothers, alone survives them into his 87th year. Gone are Hank, Dick (Kashek), and Ed (Edzio). Three of seven sisters, JoAnn, Lu, and Theresa, likewise the younger ones, carry on to the present—and “carry on” is the operative verb—though now on stainless steel knees and with the aid of pharmaceuticals. The original tongues and wits remain essentially intact, the tongues especially. Dear people on the whole, and from this pool my Polish blood flows to the Baltic.

Moj ojciec, Norbert, has written extensively of his early life; and revisiting his Reminiscences this Father’s Day, I nod in recognition and in memory and smile. Though not self-consciously Polish, which probably makes him forever more Polish than I, he exhibits the many signs, like Catholicism and a special attention and devotion to Aunts, cioci. I had thought that my own high regard for my father’s seven sisters owed completely to their incredibly agreeable singularity and collectivity and my own good sense and sensitivity. And now, in First Reminiscence, 5:1, I read again, “Aunt Sophie! Dear, sweet, gentle Aunt Sophie,” as she soothed his troubled First Communion conscience—had he actually received the host in a state of sin? damn you, Norbert!—in the ample pillow of her breast. On the next page appear these very cioci, the “Fun Aunts,” the four Betlejewski sisters (and my grandmother), a gorgeous progression from pleasing plumpitude to cheerfully morbid obesity, a perfect diet of amitular dumplings. Happy, so happy!

This aunt theme read familiarly, resonated, and I traced the original note in the echo chamber of my mind to the contemporary Polish poet Adam Zagajewski’s Two Cities, page 11, “My aunts . . . More important than my uncles.” [his ellipsis] Though his aunts in Communist Poland were characterized less by good nature than maternal ruthlessness, I consider the difference purely circumstantial. What matters here is the importance of those women—as well as the relevance and sagacity of Zagajewski, a Polish Pole. The hint here of a national character trait, blood-borne.

This past May, the New York Review of Books carried two poems by Zagajewski, the second dedicated to his father, “Now That You’ve Lost Your Memory.” It fondly remembers a moment they shared in the lantern of a lighthouse high “above the Baltic.” The son wants “to help,” but laments in the last line, “I can’t help you, I have only one memory.” (I heard him read with resigned longing this poem in October, 2009, in both English and Polish, that is, before I knew a word of Polish.) While I don’t think I have ever shared with my old man, stary ojciec, quite such a transcendent moment, despite that, I will be able to help if he ever loses his memory. I have his Reminiscences. Dziekuje, Pop.

Friday, June 10, 2011

Polish Moustache

Little accompolished these days—on vacation. Except that I have been monitoring the growth of my Polish moustache, polskie wasy, and a bit of beard, broda. Inspired by the whiskrage of Jerzy Hoffman’s movie trilogy, and some highly impressionistic, rigorously unscientific surveys of Polish social portraiture, I’m convinced that facial hair matters in Polish cultural semiotics. Now, no doubt, facial hair matters in the semiotics of all national cultures, but I’ll speculate that it matters just a little bit more in the Polish experience. Moustache and beard seem more visible in Polish imagery generally, and more positive emblems overall, even as, in contemporary times, they may be vanishing from the public face.

The most important moustache of the post-Communist era, and one of the hirsute reasons we have a post-Communist era at all, belongs, of course, to Lech Walesa—a Solidarnosc founder, a Nobel Peace Laureate, and the eventual president of Poland in its first genuine, democratically-elected government, post-WW II. A formidable horse shoe of a moustache, it spanned his mandible like a brass knuckle for his face, for the pounding of some sense into the clean-shaven, chinless cranium of Wojciech Jaruzelski. Note that all of Jaruzelski’s immediate forebears—Gomulka, Gierek, and Kania—sported not a hair on their dour and jowly visages. No semblance of a Party here. Walesa’s hyperbolic hyperbola proved a glorious band, a signature arc, a great triumphal arch, both stubborn and roguish. And further note that Poland’s previous political resurrection in 1919-20, proceeded under the muzzle hair of Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, whose thick, drooping shaving brush rivaled the 19th-century stylings of Friedrich Nietszche—a fancier of Polish political heritage. In fact, reviewing the portrait imagery of all of Poland’s most successful practitioners of rule—Mieszko I, Boleslaw Chrobry, Kazimierz the Great, Stefan Batory, and Jan Sobieski III—one finds the wings of an impressive moustache, noses with dual horse-tail standards.

For most of my adult life, I have grown and worn facial hair, at least a moustache, on occasion, a fuller beard, and most recently, a salt and peppery short cropped scruff. Except for an early college beard, which occasioned my first published prose—though anonymous—these growths were cosmetic, aesthetic attempts to mitigate or distract from the flaws of an imperfect face: receding hairline, too-full lips, narrow jaw. My early college beard quite self-consciously declared a principled non-conformity, but in truth this late adolescent declaration of non-conformity came rather quickly to seem a stereotype, an age-appropriate non-conformity, that is to say, conformity. So, my intermittent moustaches, beards, goatees, sideburns have never amounted to more than accents, diacritical marks on a blank but increasingly creased and spotty parchment.

But for Poles, a moustache is a statement, a declaration, a manifesto even, one tending toward the extravagant, the determined, the romantic. As Davies has noted, “Male hair-styles tended to be exotic.” (I, 248) The fabulous eastern (Sarmatian) origins of the Polish nobility, the szlachta, account for much of this exoticism, along with the nation’s long contact with Cossacks, Crimean Tartars, Ottoman Turks, and even the Mongol hordes of the then recently departed Ghengis. I’m partial, myself, to the Cossack influence, the moustache with drooping wing feathers, tendrils that curl with the slightest hint of dangle. A true Cossack, provided he survived long enough, might sport a growth that could be worn over the ear on a windy day, but I’m not a Cossack, only respectful of them. They had some style. And so my most recent homage to the facial traditions of my ancestors. To date, my efforts have been both complimented and twitted as Don Quixote and Burl Ives: fair enough, but a Cossack Don Quixote, a free-booting and blood-thirsty Burl Ives, perhaps an Ataman Sanders of a Ukrainian Fried Chicken franchise. Have your fun.