Mmm, Kasza

It is required that I think about returning home—to the U.S., not just from Lubień to Kraków, or to my mieszkanie from Sunday Mass and long walks along the Wisła. Work and travel arrangements oblige my paying attention to homecoming. Given new media, I haven’t missed the place, America, “home,” or any of the places in it, after such a brief remove, and I’m absolutely sure that my country has not missed me, aside from a loved one or two who claims to, and they probably wouldn’t lie. So, it would seem, no significant love has been lost in the interim, no damage done. A new boat promises to pick me up in Antwerp and haul me back to the States, via Liverpool, come mid-June. Except for the apparent fickleness of freighters and the possibility of unwanted adventure, I otherwise don’t think too much about the prospect of having to go home. I’ll be back—back and forth, actually.

I have in the last couple of weeks eaten my first grilled, followed by my first fire-roasted, kielbasy, boiled kasza, and my first lody na patyku, (“ice cream on a stick”), which comprised such a large part of my diet on my first trip to Poland in 2002. Kasza particularly has a future with me, a kind of Slavic grits or risotto. Only duck, Kraków style, and galonka have yet to be devoured and reviewed in this column before I pass my second judgment on the Polish menu. I have also smoked my first small bowls of Polishly branded tobacco, Poniatowski, in my bent little number of a Polish pipe. Pipe-smoking is not culturally compulsory here, but when your language skills remain undeveloped, you adopt some affectations to screen the gap, in spite of the health risks, including impotencja, according to my package warning. But I have to say that a solitary midsummer night’s smoke (it was in the high 70s this week) on the Planty has its charms, redolence, and a curious little buzz. How come I was never told about the latter? In these days I have also written my first Polish poem, haiku, in praise of szarlotka, and invented my first Polish word in the process, jabłkowść, (“appleness”). I have seen, heard, and positively identified the rook and the magpie (Eurasian), sroka, which are not native to Minnesota or the U.S. And just yesterday I popped a Polish tag at the thrift store, sklep odzieżowy, for inexpensive, new and used clothing, tanie, nowe, używane. The selection for men, męskie, is not wide, faux American-athletic and Euro-nerd, but the prices are reasonable. I found a pair of shorts, the pattern a little busy, but I had neglected to pack much summer apparel. I’d include a picture, but prefer being seen in these only anonymously. My Polishness increases by the hour, but in the tiniest increments.    

Ufaj ale Sprawdzaj

“Trust but verify” was the only mantra coming out of the Reagan era that I had, and continue to have, any particular reverence for. With these words he insisted upon the need for on-site inspections of Soviet missile sites, but I would suggest that they possess a more general wisdom and have an application to, well, everything, including visiting quasi-professorial banter. This nugget, Ufaj, ale sprawdzaj, rendered in flawless Polish, represented the high point of my lecture to Dr. Banaś’s first-year master’s class. They appreciated the translational effort. My critique, though transparently liberal, was not a wholly ungenerous deconstruction of the Reagan myth delivered in contemporary American English. I tried to counter the impression of “economic miracle” with numbers drawn from Krugman and Stieglitz and true confessions by David Stockman. Little ever trickles down; most gets fracked up. (I should find that passage in Eklezjastesa.) But even as I qualified, and rightly so, the homely, heroic image of the Great Communicator, our Ronnie, I could concoct a case in my own mind for his deserving bronze statues in Poland.

You see, these students’ knowledge of English is infinitely better than my knowledge of Polish, and I wondered aloud whether we had Ronald Reagan to thank for that, as they might otherwise have had to learn Russian in school, as Dr. Banaś had. We liberals—this liberal anyway—like to think that the Soviet Union was at the point of collapsing of its own sclerotic ideological and centralized economic weight, which may have been proximately true as well. But what if that collapse had been delayed or deferred ten years, what if the Politburo had clumsily temporized on a bit longer, what if Putin, or a Putin, had been available instead of Gorbachev? Ten years in the larger historical picture doesn’t mean much—except for those actually living under those conditions for ten more years in central and eastern Europe. What if U.S. military overspending, as the argument goes, actually did pressure the Soviet military to keep pace, a pace its rickety economy simply couldn’t match or sustain, hastening the realization that their system was broken and prompting efforts like glasnost and perestroika. Even if the arms race wasn’t cost effective for us, perhaps it actually made a significant difference to Poles, in their lives, proved their lucky break. What if trickledown really does trickle, though it takes forever and trickles out to the strangest places? Otherwise, I might not have had an audience this week.

I also granted that Reagan reversed the political economic discourse in the United States from one of social welfare progressivism to that of a diminished governmental and deregulated capitalism—whatever the realities. Such a shift in social messaging is no mean feat—at least in the sense of “small, negligible.” That Greed might be Good proved a surprisingly good sell by the late 80s, even to those who couldn’t afford it. Such free(r)-market entrepreneurialism has its appeal to intelligent, well-intended Poles who have lived under Communism and live now under a kind of recovering, cronified capitalism. But already, relatively early on, there are signs of an awareness that the benefits of economic growth might be divinely complicated, à la this Cracovian Banksy. A not so sacred heart.

Marność

Spring has arrived finally, bringing the sun, or the sun has arrived, at long last, bringing the spring. In either case, warmth and light have bred the usual perennials: tourists, old men at chess, young lovers, pamiętki vendors, jugglersjoggersbikerspolicje”cops,” swans, boats along the Wisła, children in strollers, and the opening of the crypt at Na Skałce.

I sit on the banks of the river and read my new book, the Bible, or as it is titled here, Pismo Święte, “Holy Writing” or “Holy Scripture.” Reading texts, the gist and the phrasings of which you already know reasonably well, strikes me as a good way to engage a foreign language, about the right mix of the familiar and the novel to make forward progress a little more likely. I have been struggling with Mickiewicz’s Dziady at least in part because of a complete ignorance of the myths and the story line. So I’ve rebegun my studies, flipping between Genesis and Ecclesiastes, my favorites, Rodzaj and Eklezjastesa, the first book remarkably appropriate for the season. “Let light appear,” God said, “Niech się stanie światło.” And day and night, waters and firmament, sun, moon, stars, plants in all their varieties, animals in all their varieties, and eventually people, in their somewhat rudimentary duality. Reading Rodzaj on the banks of the river at the foot of Wawel Castle after such a long winter, I sense, rather obviously, that God created the world in the spring. Such abundance. Such hope. Such letting be.

 

 

As something of a counterpoint to all that epic creation, I turn ahead to the old ecclesiast as well, “There is nothing new under the sun,” Nie ma nic nowego pod słoncem. The world had been around awhile by then, as had the ecclesiast, and the discontent of long winters had no doubt worn him down. (Be that as it may, I look about and see a lot of old things under the sun, many still worthy of attention, and a middle-aged thing or two.) But there are new things under the sun, or at least, newish kinds of things, like sunscreen, which I did not find in the drugstore. For the top of my head. You can find tanning emollients, that is to say, “vanities,” marności, among which the ecclesiast also counts wisdom, study, and books, “For study is a weariness to the flesh, and of the making of books, there is no end.” My very favorite observation on the nature of the professional world I inhabit. In Polish, że pisanie ksiąg to praca, która nie ma końca, a wytężone studia są umęczeniem dla ciała. It’s a profoundly beautiful lament, really.

And not untimely, because I was invited this week to attend a scholarly conference in Kraków on Ethnicity, Culture, and Politics. Scholars, I think, being a universal species, produce a similar kind of event, interesting and illuminating in places, puzzling (in the not good way) and contentious in others, and mostly agreeable in the before, the after and between the sessions, when we meet quite talented new people, not unlike what we think ourselves to be, who know different things and in talking, can save us some weariness of the flesh. But we all, publicly, profess a utility, a desire to be useful, to help, to be relevant, to contribute to the management of the world, or to its creative disruption, to the solution of social problems, to make it a better place, to give back. Forgive me some skepticism. The effort to know that derives from that busy impulse, and not from simple human curiosity, is to me the vanity of vanities, marność nad marnościami. The effort that derives from the simpler desire just to know is a more innocent vanity, a vanity, yes, but only of the first degree. Not that the knowledge and discoveries of interpretive scholarship don’t have their applications and uses, some even good, but they are applied and used by others for their own purposes, when not completely ignored. This desire to be useful I do not mock, but only caution as an invitation to an unnecessary sense of futility. We should study and write books and have conferences and teach not because of the grandiose good we might do—or the importance we might gain because of the grandiose good we might do—but because this is our special vanity, what we do as a created kind. We make meaning. (In fact, we can’t not.) And that is enough.

Earlier in my stay, on a wintry walk to Na Skałce, I discovered that the crypt holding the bones and ashes of some of Poland’s greatest literary figures was closed. On the way back to my mieszkanie I chanced upon these words written in the snow, vanitas ergo sum. In them I may have found my epitaph. For vanitas had replaced cogito with an ungrammatical but Ecclesiastically ironic insight.

This warm and sunny week the crypt was open, and for two and a half złoty and the removal of your czapek, you could pay your respects to Jan Długosz, Stanisław Wyśpianski, and Czesław Miłosz, which I have done. On Miłosz’s tomb are inscribed the words Dbałość o naukę jest miłość, “a solicitude for study is love.”  Which is another way of saying the same thing, isn’t it? Whether written in stone or snow, studies are both love and a weariness to the flesh, a vanity, but they are our vanity, God-given.

 

Queen Jadwiga

I attended church today at Kościół Karmelitów, the Church of the Carmelite Brothers, the neighborhood monastic order. Along with bookstores and bake shops, it would seem almost every block has its own clerical gang. The Bernardines, the Capuchins, the Dominicans, the Felicians, the Franciscans, the reformed Franciscans (what’s the story there?), the Johanines of the Cross, the Norbertines, the Paulines, et al.—all have their own houses of worship. I won’t get to all of them this trip, but it’s nice to know that Kraków is well supplied with the meek. I sympathize and identify with them, however unlikely I am to share in their inheritance—the ultimate territory.

The church was founded by the sweet, young Queen of Poland, Jadwiga, in 1395. Herself a bit of a waif, “intelligent, pretty, an accomplished musician and scholar, and entirely helpless” in the dynastic intrigues of her day, she was wedded to Jagiełło, a Grand Duke from the Lithuanian sticks, a man thrice her age and only recently a pagan. He would do respectably for Poland over his long lifetime, but the young queen died in 1399, “at the age of 24, leaving her entire personal fortune for the refounding of the Cracovian Academy, the Jagiełłonian University.” (117-8) She was a patroness of the poor, the powerless, the pious, and the scholarly, and though slight, left her mark on this country, both figuratively and literally: the impression of her foot in a stone that graces the foundation of the Carmelite church. Don’t ask me how. The historians provide no detail on this. She was a saint as well, so it might have been a miracle. All I know is that there is a depression in the stone with the vague outline of a small, feminine foot. The university is still here, too. Which reminds me that I have notes to revise.

Monument to the Marriage of Jadwiga and Jagiello on the Planty

 

W Połowie Drogi

At the halfway point, or thereabouts, of this experiment I cannot report a single qualm about what I have wanted to do and what I’ve managed to do so far, nor what I intend to do as a result, that is, continue on becoming polakiem indefinitely. How, I do not know. Slowly? Surely? The details, I confess, are hazy. Yes, I will return home as planned and resume the outward life of an American, see my kids, attend to friends, do my work, golf with my sibs, etc., but my inward being looks much farther east now (from Minnesota) and into the past, almost fixedly.

This week, though, my attention has been turned to my Americanness, amerykańskość. Taxes are due, work has gotten busier, and my newly assigned lecture topic for the 25^th is Ronald Reagan. Perhaps no political figure in the 20^th century was more mythically American or more appreciated in Eastern Europe than Ronald Reagan. Poland has erected at least two larger-than-life size bronzes, in Gdansk and Warsaw, in honor of his role in fostering the collapse of the Soviet Union, no one’s favorite regime, especially here. Liberal as I am, I will attempt to qualify his mythic status. He was just a president to me, not a particularly good one, but in his defense, not the worst in my lifetime either.

Meteorological spring has arrived at long last. To the boats.

Hunger

So, it appears that I have eaten headcheese, unwittingly, not entirely unintentionally and not a lot, a slice, but, you know, enough. Seeing that I am a finicky eater, wybredny, though they would be too polite to say so, my Borowicz cousins asked if there were any Polish particular I might like to try. “Kasza,” I said, or thought I said. Kasza I understand to be a dish of boiled cereal grains, buckwheat groats—gryka, which I fancied to be somehow the linguistic root for “grits.” Something like grits. A little butter, a little cheese, maybe even something sweet folded in. (Typical Polish fare, cold egg dishes and cold cuts for breakfast, śniadianie, are not to my liking.) I also remembered reading in Żeromski’s The Faithful River that kasza provided a certain insurgent food for the national soul: “He scowled at the injured man [insurgent] as the latter lifted the scalding kasha to his mouth with trembling hands and swallowed it hurriedly and with indescribable relish, burning his lips as he ate. Soon the bowl was empty, and the delicious kasha was eaten to the last mouthful.” (18-9). So, “kasza,” I thought I said. Then they asked me dark or light, which somehow, eventually, got us on to the topic of kiszka—had I misspoken and said kiszka originally?—which is a dark, blood sausage I was willing to try but much more circumspectly. I can’t recall exactly where the conversation went after that. At any rate, I’ve not yet eaten kasza, but finding myself in the meat market after our trip to Szymbark, I was pointed to dark tubes of meat product expectantly. “Would I like to try?” I gestured non-commitally at a window, and the ekspedientka shaved off some slices from a marbly, violet block of … salceson ozorowy.

It was tongue. It wasn’t bad tongue, even after I found out what it was, a little rubbery, purple, but otherwise non-descriptly mild, a lot better than I imagined tongue would taste. On this trip north, I’ve also sampled śledź, “herring,” which had every appearance of being raw, and smalec, “lard,” seasoned in this case, but still lard.  None of these staples would I have ever otherwise put into my mouth, but I have to say that they have elevated my sense of the Polish palate by not being as bad as I had originally feared. And I’ve had delicious things, too, wyśmienity. The Easter pork loin with prune filling surprised and delighted, and Elżbieta prepares an excellent meatball of ground pork shoulder around a mushroom core and a cutlet of chicken breast, breaded, pan-fried, with a thick coat of podlaski cheese. And then there are the cakes, ciastki—but we will leave those until another time and an entry all their own.

When eating experimentally, I find it helpful to actually be hungry, głodny. How much of “indescribable relish” and deliciousness attribute to genuine biological need. Hunger improves so many foodstuffs.

Kaszëbe

For some years now, I’ve been contemplating a new bad habit, a minor one, something to complement my excessive consumption of white sugar, something savory with a Polish theme, something tobacco related. My grandfather, during his brief stint as a Polish gentleman farmer, had raised a surreptitious row or two in his own garden, either for his own use or as a cash crop. Obviously not enough, as the farm failed. But I appreciate the effort, consciously resistant of authority, but not recklessly subversive or revolutionarily stupid. After all, the state he was resisting was renewly Polish. Now, there is a lot of cigarette smoking going on here, and not merely among the foolish and faddish young, but among bus drivers and the late heroes of modern Polish poetry. And I do remember rather fondly the second-hand smoke of a Marlboro as it wafted into the back seat of a Ford Maverick. But smoking cigarettes has become an outdoor, and therefore an almost exclusively public vice in the United States, and the sophisticated gestural dance of pack-tapping (why exactly?), opening and extraction, lighting, inhaling, and ash-tapping, and butt-stubbing or precision-flicking, would betray me as a novice. Cigarette smoking is an addiction to be acquired in one’s youth, in stupidity and with a sense of immortality and hubris. I’m too old.

However, on my last full day in Sulęczyno, Krzysztof took me to Szymbark, a regional educational center for the promotion of Kaszubian culture. Kaszubia, a heavily forested region in east-central Pomerania, Pomorze (literally, “up to the sea”), partakes of a rustic culture of wood and salt-water, lumber and fish, and offers a language called a “dialect” of Polish, although most Poles find it incomprehensible and many linguists consider it a distinct language. Road signs here in the north/northwest of Poland, as in Quebec, are written in two scripts. Krzysztof, I learn, is half Kaszub, and though sympathetic and of a lively inquisitive mind, shakes his head and furrows his brow at the thought of mastering Kaszubian. At any rate, at the end of the tour, in the Kaszub souvenir shop, I found my new bad habit—well, maybe not a habit yet, maybe only the promise of a bad habit. Habits take time. We’ll have to see.

The tour included the world’s longest board (Guinnessly confirmed), and by “board” they meant “table for eating,” as in “room and board,” a single half-tree slab extending 36+ meters. On the wall hung an even longer plank, 3” x 24” x 46+ meters, the longest I’ve ever seen, though unverified by Guinness. A lumbering tool exhibit, a Siberian Labor Camp House (for wayward Poles), a Siberian transport train, an insurgent’s home, transplanted houses of Polish emigrants to Canada and Turkey, a replica of a World War II Kaszubian/Polish partisan bunker (Gryf Pomorski),a wooden chapel, and an upside-down house with nary a horizontal plane in the entire structure. One walks up and through it as if afflicted by vertigo or Żubrówka.

 

 

All of interest, yet the most curious item to me was my surname, emblazoned on a Kaszubian street sign at the entry to the Siberian exhibit. “There were Kaszubian Borowiczes?” I asked Krzysztof. “Tak.” “How do we know that we’re not Kaszubian?” (This is where I learned that he was half-Kaszubian, but on his mother’s side.) Our family, he explained, are and were to the south and the east of Kaszubia, from Kujawy—which is really not that far away, but in days past, may well have been.

In the souvenir shop I found my bad: Kaszubian snuff. Looking for mementoes I chanced upon a case of snuff horns, which took me back ten years to my first trip to Poland and to Kaszubia, to a skansen, an “open-air museum,” a replica of a Kaszub village, not entirely unlike Szymbark, in which I first snorted the pungent leaf. (All of Europe is a skansen to an American, but this was self-consciously so.) I can remember thinking, “Interesting, not too bad.” And while I wasn’t too keen on the hats, the blue of the Kaszubian kontusz is the color of my soul and Kaszubian blues decorate my brand new vice-box.

 

 

 

Filip

I have a new “niece,” Julia (Yulia). She was born the day after Easter, Easter Monday, a holiday known in Poland as Śmingus Dyngus, (SchMINGoos DINgoos—yes, how unfortunate). Harking back to pagan purification rites at the equinox, it calls for boys and girls to douse, drench, spray, squirt, or sprinkle the boy or girl of their choice with water, or perfect strangers, whoever happens to be handy. Or you can lash them about the calves, more or less lightly, usually in the morning, with a lengthy sprig of juniper. So much for Śming. At any rate, looking down on this rosy new creature and smelling her head (she did not smell like an American baby, that is, one washed in Johnson & Johnson), I wondered if she would overtake me in Polish language fluency. Her cousins, Kalina, Dawid, and Natalia, at almost 8, 8, and half 6, are already well beyond me, and I don’t think I will be able to catch them. But I have a two+ year lead on her. On her brother, Filip, I have only a one year lead. Though I suspect he has “mother” and “father” as well in his vocabulary, I’ve only heard him utter, coo rather, one word, “dziadu,” (“grandpa”). With my current lead, I hope eventually to keep pace. But Filip will be my benchmark.

Back “home” now in Kraków, after a full week in the north country, I’ve had little time to write. Family life, especially happy family life, is time consuming, all that joy to enjoy—cakes and tea in Poland, mniam—and with no need to write anything down because as Tolstoy observed, all happy families are happy in the same way. "Love," you know, "I love you." It’s all been logged already, but if those accounts have gone unread or been forgotten, I’ll attach a few thousand words’ worth of pictures.

 

Wielkanoc

The red-eye from Kraków to Bytów proved a long, dark, cold ride, though hardly epic. The bus was less than adequately heated for its second leg, and this winter has lingered too frostily. We stopped often, in Katowice, Częstochowa, Łódż, Toruń, among half a dozen smaller cities, almost every hour or so to smoke cigarettes and pee. Our entry into Toruń over the Wisła offered the only striking scenery, the city walls and towers, the Stare Miasto, lit up like a stage set or a post-card. Otherwise, we made essentially a night haul through the crumbling and tattooed infrastructure of the as yet unfullyrecovered post-Communist economy. Somewhere about midway, in the scramble to change buses—and my desire not be left in the middle of Poland in the middle of the night—I abandoned my handbook of Polish verbs on the seat, along with a tablet of crib sheets of useful phrases. Kurtka na wacie! Perhaps there are Poles who can make use of them. My cousins here in Sulęczyno confirm that even Poles could use a primer from time to time. As we teach one another our respective languages, they wince and apologize for the challenges of their native tongue, and praise me, unduly, not for achievement, but mostly for trying at all.

It being Holy Week, I’ve spent long hours in church, here in Sulęczyno, Święty Trójca, a church of the “Holy Trinity.” The entire town streams thereunto and packs the place, such that the seating seems profoundly insufficient, and I begin to sense what it means to live in a one church town and a largely one religion country. The “late-comers” arrive and fill the aisles till about mid-church, kind of like during the playoffs, and Agata remarks that attendance seems down this year. While my liturgical Polish is improving, glacially—the glaciers are moving more readily these days—my faith remains about the same, that is to say, appreciative of the myth and the tradition, but not the theology or the institution. If blasphemous, it seems less egregious, at least to me, if you don’t fully understand the surface language, as opposed to understanding completely and not really believing. (Today at table, my cousins related the inverse challenge of living in Polish monotheism. Apparently, on their visit to the United States some years ago—I had not heard this story—missing a particular Mass time and assuming that Masses would be offered more or less on the hour almost every hour, and every church a Catholic church, they walked themselves into a 1:00 p.m. Baptist service, Baptistów. Oh, man.)

Easter dinner, obiad, we spent at the home of one of Krzysztof’s children, u Kasii i Roberta. The meal proceeded perfectly, around a table the entire afternoon and into the evening, except for a brief walk, na spacer. Food, drink, family, talk, non-stop, most of which I did not comprehend, words and phrases, here and there, but the non-comprehension around the table felt profoundly more comfortable than the non-comprehension in church. The vodka and the krupnik, rather a lot really, no doubt had something to do with it, but it was, is, and ever shall be much easier to believe in family than in church. While eating my first dessert, a sweet creation of whipped cream, divinity, and fruit, I happened to turn my spoon in my mouth as I am wont to do, so that it emerged convex up, tongue discreetly sweeping the smooth concavity below. Elżbieta burst into the eurekaeic laughter of theory confirmation. Apparently, this habit is inborn/imprinted among the Borowiczowie. I had thought it was merely a savvy way of keeping one’s moustache clean, which would explain, as well, the phenomenon with regard to Krzysztof. However, Elżbieta reported having observed this gesture on the part of Krzysztof’s sister. I did not ask the obvious, but rather, accepted Elżbieta’s truth, not because it’s been scientifically verified, but because, well, why not? and I love Elżbieta.