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.
