Embers in the Steppe

Finished Sienkiewicz’s Fire in the Steppe Wednesday and feel only slightly more Polish—a little tired, a little defeated, a little melancholy—as if one had actually campaigned against the Turks but seen little action: it’s a long, fairly flat read of the epic sort. One book jacket reviewer claims that “If you are going to read only one literary work in your life about Poland, read Sienkiewicz’s Trilogy.” Perhaps, but if you are that reader, I recommend you read it when you are a boy. Parts of this third volume would make a reasonably salable video game, that is to say, a ripping good bloodbath, but the book as a whole and the love story dominating it are less satisfactory.


One unforgettable scene, though, tests this Polish proselyte as it punishes the traitor. Azia Tuhaybeyovitch, an orphaned Tartar prince unwittingly raised in the Commonwealth as a servant in a noble Polish household, escapes that house and rises by merit through the ranks of the Light Horse with excellent prospects of eventually achieving noble status through his exploits in war. Ultimately the villain, he’s initially the most handsome and interesting of characters. But he betrays Poland, of course, and suffers the fullest of humiliations in battle and the most brutal of indignities at his summary execution—by impalement.

But it was too late for realizations and regrets. Lusnia stooped down, grasped Azia by the hips so that he’d be able to move them back and forth, in much the way that a seamstress moved the eye of a needle she is about to thread, and barked an order at the men who held the waiting horses.

“Move out! Slowly and together!”

The horses started forward. The ropes tightened and pulled on Azia’s legs. His body slid along the ground for barely a moment before it struck the crudely sharpened point of the young, felled tree. [It gets rather graphic here, page 602-3 for the less squeamish among you.]

“Slowly!” the sergeant growled.

[The stake is raised and imbedded in the ground.]

Azia looked down upon all this from his dreadful height. He was fully conscious. This form of execution, which came to the Commonwealth from Valachia a long time before, was all the more dreadful because an impaled victim sometimes lived as long as three days.

[Then it gets worse before Sienkiewicz finally ignites him.]

Sparing further, grisly details, I wonder at the sufficiency of my hard-heartedness. Am I tough enough to soldier for the Commonwealth? And if I prove so, such passages remind one of the dangers of backsliding.

Fire in the Steppe

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.

Beginning Polish

This afternoon I enrolled in Beginning Polish at the university. While not usually the first step to becoming Polish, learning the language is without doubt the longest, hardest, and most important of slogs. Language bears and impresses more culture per unit effort than any other ethnomorphic activity. At the very least, if you can talk the talk, you’ve walked a good deal of the walk.


Taking up a third language—having never really mastered the second, German—sobers me more than a little, especially when the third language is reputed to be considerably more difficult than the second. I studied German for three years in high school, two and a half more in college, and spent a term abroad in Koln, achieving nothing at all resembling competency or comfort. A colleague observes that you begin to understand a language when you dream in it, and that usually happens around third semester. Never happened to me with German, and not only because I don’t dream. I’m overly punctilious about error, thus, a hesitant practitioner. It doesn’t even matter that my auditors might be generous, encouraging, even giddy to help. A high regard for correctness and nuanced usage may serve me badly here, along with another character trait, a tendency to finish what I start. A dangerous combination. We begin in a month.

Becoming Polakiem

You will no doubt have noticed the eight day delay between when I first decided to blog—unfortunate word, really, “blog”: from “blahblahblah” + “fog”—and my first post. A number of reasons account for the delay. First, having overcome a shyness to publication of any kind, I had to learn the basics of the contemporary push-button vanity press. Amazingly simple as it has turned out to be, still, cognitive and psychological hurdles had to be overcome in the process. Though by no means a Luddite, nor am I an early adopter of any technology. I seem to have proven, however, sufficiently techno-savvy and surprisingly vain.



The most important factor delaying my initial post, though, was that my original title, “Becoming Polish,” was already taken, and relatively recently. “Becoming Polish” chronicles the “life and times of a Scottish girl in love with a Polish boy.” Very nice. As big a fan of love as anybody—well, maybe not—I wish her a long career in blogging and love and thus can’t really wait for her to relinquish the title. So I had to come up with another on the fly.



After some unsatisfactory and unsuccessful wordplay in English, I struck upon a linguistic fusion of English and Polish (Engolish): “Becoming Polski.” The movement from left to right, from English to Polish would capture something of the movement of consciousness I was aiming at, and polski was, as far as I knew, the Polish word for “Polish.” But I do know, and did know, enough about the intricacies of the Polish language to suspect that “Becoming Polski” would be far too easy a solution to my problem, as well as being less than euphonious. And so I contacted my Polish language authorities, whom you will likely meet in later entries, and they confirmed that in addition to being a little hard on the ear, polski would be quite a ways from correct. In truth, the concept of becoming Polish is expressed so differently in both languages that no combination of English and Polish words seems grammatically satisfactory. The least wrong is my current title, “Becoming Polakiem.” Perhaps, like the title, the goal itself will prove incongruous. But so many things seem that way at the outset.



Finally, between the time I learned that my first title wouldn’t work and that my last title might, life intervened. Work. Laundry. Email. Personal relationships. Naps. Until this afternoon, when I finally got around to making the template selections for this site and posting my first thoughts. You will note, if you visit “Becoming Polish,” that that author and I have the same taste in templates. Strange. I may have to meet her sometime.

Becoming Polish

Just when in the last couple of years I decided to become Polish, I cannot say precisely, though with a little digging, I could probably narrow it down to the month or the week. The idea first inkled into my mind in 2001 after a trip to the north of Poland, an international family reunion, if reunion is the appropriate term for a gathering of families of virtually complete strangers who have never known union in the first place. Gathering then. I’ve accounted for that gathering elsewhere and won’t dally here, but suffice it to say, my decision to become Polish has been a rather long and deliberate one since then. Recently I have found myself actually talking about becoming Polish to non-family members, strong evidence to me that I have actually decided to do so. We like to think that decision-making is a conscious, rational, left-hemisphere activity providing inexorable, logical outcomes based on the weighing of inputs according to regular sequential patterns. I suspect otherwise. Not that conscious reason doesn’t have its place, but decision and motivation are whole brain processes whose complexities we will never untangle. The mind announces and explains as rationally as possible for social purposes, but never really provides more than an executive summary. So, my dear reader, though I cannot say precisely when—and certainly not quite how—I decided to become Polish, I can say with absolute precision when I decided to inform you about it: today, Friday, July 23, 2010.