Writing the Polish Diaspora

What We Sign Up For: Poems by Lisa Siedlarz

2012-01-03T08:39:00.000-08:00

For years, I've been teaching Lisa Siedlarz' first book of poems (I Dream My Brother Plays Baseball) in my War Stories class. The book deals with her brother's tour of duty in the Afghanistan War and how his time there has shaped her. It's an excellent book and always one of the high-points for me and my students. Lisa's poems touch us all and tell us things about the post 9/11 wars that we all need to know.

Lisa's new book, What We Sign Up For, builds on her previous book in ways that seem natural and necessary--adding more stories about her brother, herself, her family, and her friends and what we all sign up for when a loved one goes to war.

Here's one of the poems from What We Sign Up For, a persona poem about a friend of Lisa's who served in Iraq and has PTSD:

Don't Paint In Camels

Amazing creatures, really. The color of
heaped dunes, scorch just rolls over them.

I’ve marched their waveless beach, mirages
of smiles disarming and deadly. Those camels

marched knock-kneed and steady. Even under ﬁre
they did not ﬂinch. The mind is treacherous.

I see camels in stitches of multi-colored coats and falling foliage.
In burning bushes of autumn, red is an exploding oil well,

black clouds, souls of those who will never come home.
I’m ﬁ ne now. I know I’m home when I hold my paint brush

and canvas, a good bottle of wine. I listen to the ocean’s
music, become grounded. I will not drown in the legs

of this merlot. Will capture spray of ocean on rocks,
paint a picture of a life not mine.

Bury me in the sand and I will envy how clouds move on
like breath. Cold doesn’t faze me, having walked

through dust-deviling hell where thoughts of winter saved
me from suﬀ ocation. Here I sit on this beach, sand

slipping through my open ﬁ ngers to reunite with kin.
Sand is color-blind. Drinks blood as if it were water.

_______________________________

To read more about What We Sign Up For, click here.
To read my blog post about Lisa's I Dream My Brother Plays Baseball, click here.

The Polish Review seeks Editor-in-Chief

2011-12-21T11:15:00.000-08:00

I received the following notice:

The Polish Review: The Polish Review is a peer-reviewed, international, English language, interdisciplinary academic journal published by the Polish Institute of Arts & Sciences in America with the mission of disseminating scholarly materials in the various fields of Polish studies broadly defined to include Poland and the Polish diaspora. To accomplish its mission, The Polish Review publishes original research, review articles, book reviews, translations from significant Polish-language literature and other scholarly materials.

Responsibilities: The Editor is responsible for the content and quality of each issue of The Polish Review and makes the final decisions relating to the production of each issue. The Editor appoints (with the approval of the PIASA Board of Directors) the Editorial Board, Book Review Editor and other staff, and manages the work of the Editorial Board and Book Review Editor. The Editor actively solicits scholarly contributions to the Review; ensures the integrity of the peer review process and editorial standards for English usage, formatting, scholarly citation and civility; serves as liaison with the production staff and printer; and manages the production schedule for each issue of the Review. The Editor collaborates with and directs numerous assistant editors, guest editors, peer reviewers, and authors.

Qualifications: Required: earned doctorate in the humanities or social sciences; demonstrated teaching and research excellence in a field of Polish studies; excellent communication, organizational, and management skills; ability to work well with a variety of people from various disciplines; familiarity with the requisite computer skills to conduct the normal business of the editorial office through e-mail and other electronic media as needed. Preferred: bi-lingual skills in English and Polish; prior editorial experience.

Terms of Appointment: Initial Appointment is for three years with the possibility of renewals.

Application Process: Applications and nominations—as well as any questions about the position—should be directed by e-mail to the committee chair, Dr. James S. Pula, at: jpula@pnc.edu. Applications will be accepted until the position is filled.

Show Up, Look Good: A New Novel by Mark Wisniewski

2011-12-21T08:50:00.000-08:00

Mark Wisniewski, author of Confessionsof a Polish Used Car Salesmen, has recently published his second novel, Show Up, Look Good. The novel relates theadventures of a young Midwestern woman who hopes to get over a failed relationshipby moving to Manhattan.

Here’s what Kelly Cherry, the PoetLaureate of Virginia, says about it:

“This novel about a thirty-somethingwoman who travels from Kankakee, Illinois, to New York to ‘make it’ deepens inunexpected and moving ways. Wisniewski ventriloquizes with perfect pitch hisfemale narrator, who has a real talent for getting into trouble. Show Up, Look Good is funny, dark, poignant, and unsettling.”

Here's an excerpt from the novel:

Theground floor window under my room exploded, glass raining onto the sidewalk.Smoke twisted out and rose.

“Joycebetter leave,” I said.

Ernestwrote:

FIRE ESCAPE

IN BACK.

“Good,”I said, and he nodded, and I did, too, and I was glad Tino was in Etta’ssection of the building’s back yard: with the firemen now inside, I trustedhe’d be safe there. Then I wasn’t so sure. To distract myself from worry, Iasked Ernest, “What was in your duffel bag?”

MEMORABILIA.

I WAS

GOING TO

SELL IT.

Anotherwindow exploded, and then they were exploding from left to right, ax-headspopping through them like iron tongues. This is serious, I almost said, but theescaping smoke tapered off. Then axes shattered two second-floor windows. Iglanced at Ernest, whose eyes were fixed on the window to my room, and his expressionassured me that he, unlike Joyce, knew that heat and smoke ascended, and thathe was picturing Joyce dashing through Etta’s dark hallway while his duffel bagremained beside a bra on my floor.

“Excuseme,” I told him.

Icrossed the street, accelerated toward the building, and a fireman yelled, “Ma’am.Where you going?”

“I’vegot to get something,” I said. “Just a duffel bag. Before it burns.”

“It’sburning.”

“Whatif it’s still there?”

“It’sburning. You might as well phone your insurance.”

“Ican’t run up and check?”

“Wejust got everyone out of there. You run up and I lose my job.” He clutched anindustrial-size crowbar. “So you’re not running up.”

Inodded and walked back to Ernest. We stood beside each other, neither speakingnor writing, just watching more onslaughts of smoke. Then a hand squeezed my shoulderhard enough to portend rudeness. Joyce? I thought, and I turned and saw Ettapulled up as close to my left as Ernest was to my right.

“Etta,”I said, “can you believe this?”

“Unfortunately,”she said.

“Atleast we’re out here,” I said, but my insides churned—because if the thirdfloor caught fire, our living arrangement might end. “Tino’s out back,” I said.“In the yard.”

Ernestthickened a period and handed his notepad to me, and Etta read it as I did:

I HOPE

JOYCE

BRINGS

MY DUFFEL

BAG.

“Sodo I,” I said.

“Whatwas in his duffel bag?” Etta asked me, and before I could answer, another firetruck rounded the corner. Ernest and I exchanged glances. He shrugged. Then thesecond-floor window beneath mine explodedwithout the help of an ax. Inside that room, the tips of flames stretched intoview. Ernest’s breathing grew vexed, then worse. He had only so muchmemorabilia, I was sure, and he was probablypicturing his last aged and genuine baseball singe, and his autograph on thatbaseball could have made someone happy—and helped Ernest afford more of thecity. I felt sorry for the person the memorabilia might have made happy, andfor Ernest himself. I felt ashamed that I’d fantasized about Letterman whileErnest’s future had burned.

“Ifthe whole building goes,” I said to myself out loud, and then I babbled abouthow I’d just begun to get my life together, about how Manhattan was the onlyplace open enough to let me be who I really was, and about who knows what else.As I said these things, I used phrases made common on talk shows and feltdestined to make an awful impression on Ernest, but I babbled on anyway, and thenI tried to explain to Ernest that, for most of my life (which, granted, Iadded, had been less than half of his), all of my trying and talking andlovemaking and understanding had done nothing but separate me from everyoneelse. Then I noticed that his breathing had gone silent, and I turned to seehis pencil finish a message:

I KNOW

WHAT YOU

MEAN.

“Doyou really?”

Henodded, sat on the curb, and watched the flames rise. Then he lay back so thathis legs were splayed on the street, his spine flat against a sidewalk dottedby black, discarded gum. He shut his eyes and placed his palms down, one on topof the other, on his chest.

“Willyou watch it?” I yelled at a woman who nearly stepped on his head, butshe kept on walking, so I hoped for a response from Ernest.

Hiseyes stayed shut. He can’t, I thought, handle the city right now.

“Ernest?”I tried.

Someonetapped my shoulder: Joyce, hugging Tino, then handing him to Etta. “Ernest isnapping,” she said. “He does this wherever he feels.”

Ettaglanced over. “Is he okay?” she asked me.

“I’dsay he’s felt better,” I said.

“Itook CPR at the gym,” a guy on the sidewalk behind us said. “If anyone here canhelp, it’s me.” This guy was huge, maybe three hundred pounds, and he plantedhis feet on either side of Ernest’s chest, then crouched so his ass touchedErnest’s abdomen, then rested on it.

“AndI’m engaged to this man,” Joyce said. “Do you see what I have to put up with?”

“You’resmothering him,” I told the fat guy.

“I’mhelping him,” he said.

“Idon’t think so,” I said. “He doesn’t need CPR. It’s a breathing thing.”

Heplaced a palm on Ernest’s chest and pressed. “It’s his heart,” he said, and Igrabbed his gargantuan arm and tried to shove him off of Ernest, but he didn’tbudge. I pushed again, using strength I hadn’t expected, and he let go of Ernest’sdwindled shoulders and rolled onto the sidewalk. He was lying beside Ernest,straining to sit up, but I didn’t see him rise: I was hovering over Ernest,pinching his nose and grabbing the skin where his jaw was supposed to be, andlowering the flabby remains of his chin. Then I was descending, hoping Ernest’seyes would open before our lips touched. Then we were sharing his silence. Hismouth was warm, and I exhaled into it, and my palm, on his chest, rose slightly.I won’t have to do this more than twice, I thought, and I inhaled, tasting garlic,halitosis, and cinnamon. I heard glass pelt the sidewalk across the street. Itried not to hear the fat guy, who was shouting at me with instructions. Onemore time, I told myself, and I’ll hear that troubled breathing. Everythingwill be exactly the way it was.

_______________________________________________

Mark Wisniewski is theauthor of the novel Confessionsof a Polish Used Car Salesman, the collection of short stories All Weekendwith the Lights On, and the book of narrative poems One of UsOne Night. His fiction has appeared in magazines such as The Southern Review, Antioch Review, Virginia QuarterlyReview, TriQuarterly, New England Review, The Gettysburg Review, The YaleReview, The Sun, andThe Georgia Review, and has been anthologized in Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories. His narrative poems have appeared in such venues as Poetry International, New York Quarterly, and Poetry. He’s been awarded two Regents’ Fellowships in Fiction,an Isherwood Fellowship in Fiction, and first place in competitions for the KayCattarulla Award for Best Short Story, the Gival Press Short Story Award, andthe Tobias Wolff Award.

Show Up, Look Good is available from Amazon and Gival Press, the publisher.

Two Review Poetry Contest Deadline Extended

2011-11-23T03:57:00.000-08:00

I just got this information from Jeremy Edward Shiok that Two Review has extended its deadline for its poetry contest, a contest that I am judging. Here's all the info:

Two Review

A Journal of International Poetry & Creative Nonfiction

2011 Poetry Contest

Judge: John Guzlowski

1st Prize: $100 2nd Prize: $50 3rd Prize: $25

Prizes include publication in the 2012 issue of Two Review. All submissions considered for publication.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Submit up to five (5) unpublished poems, brief bio, and $10.00 contest fee at www.tworeview.weebly.com.

DEADLINE

December 30th, 2011

ABOUT TWO REVIEW

Two Review is an annual independent journal of international poetry and creative nonfiction committed to publishing the best original work available. Two Review seeks writing about the modern world, its inhabitants, and the events that shape them. The editors believe art is not a foreigner on the geopolitical landscape, and for this reason they promote work by poets, writers, and artists who are aware of more than themselves and show us the world as it celebrates and as it struggles. All topics that illuminate the human experience are welcome as long as the writing is grammatically strong and syntactically unique.

Two Review is featured at select independent booksellers across the U.S. Copies are also submitted to non-lending libraries at national poetry centers including The University of Arizona Poetry Center, Richard Hugo House in Seattle, The Poetry Center of Chicago, The Stadler Center for Poetry in Pennsylvania, and Poets House in New York City.

Polish American in the Mohawk Valley

2011-11-18T12:53:00.000-08:00

I received this note from Daniel Weaver of the journal Upstream:

I have founded a cultural and counter-cultural review here in the Mohawk Valley. Our second issue is going to focus on Polish-Americans in the Mohawk Valley. I have already received a great essay on Joseph Vogel and a current Polish-American memoirist is interviewing former Lt. Governor Marianne Krupsak for the second issue.

I would love to receive some more essays and articles about Joseph Vogel plus almost anything relating to Polish-Americans in this part of New York State.

I only can pay $25-$50 per article. For more information about the journal check out www.upstreamjournal.wordpress.com. To read more about what I am looking for in the second issue, check out this post http://upstreamjournal.wordpress.com/2011/04/13/looking-ahead-to-upstream-2-and-upstream-3/.

I do publish a certain amount of material not related to the Mohawk Valley and/or by non-residents of the Mohawk Valley.

The deadline is December 15, 2011

Artists and Writers: Updates November 2011

2011-11-15T08:41:00.000-08:00

"The Best Five Places for Kissing in Warsaw," Karen Kovacik's poem, appears in the latest issue of The Cosmopolitan Review. The issue also contains Ewa Chrusciel's review of Karen's book Metropolis Burning.

I interviewed poet Anne Colwell at the r.kv.r.y. blog, and then she interviewed me. We had fun talking about academic vs creative writing, strong women, and eternal optimism. Check it out by clicking here!

John Minczeski and I are still accepting submissions for our anthology of Polish American Writing. To find out more about the anthology, click here.

Journalist Bozena Zaremba recently interviewed Rita Cosby, TV reporter and author of the memoir about her Polish father who fought in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, Quiet Hero: Secrets from My Father’s Past. Here's the link to her interview.

The deadline for the Two Review poetry contest is November 30, 2011. Complete guidelines are available by clicking here. Two Review is co-edited by Polish American poet Jeremy Shiok.

Leonard Kniffel interviewed Philip Levine for American Libraries Magazine. You can read it by clicking here.

Photographer Bogdan Frymorgen continues to share his gift with the world. Here's one of his photos:

Oriana Ivy blogged recently about love and the poetry of comfort at her Oriana Poetry blog. If you haven't read one of her blog posts, you're in for a treat. Her poem "Mrs. Noah" recently appeared in the Cosmopolitan Review.

Poet Linda Nemec Foster is working on a collaborative project with Hungarian musician, Laszlo Slomovits. A few months ago, Slomovits contacted Foster after reading her chapbook, Ten Songs from Bulgaria (Cervena Barva Press, 2008). He was so moved by the poems that they inspired him to compose music using the poems as lyrics for the songs. Foster has heard five of the pieces and is impressed with Slomovits' talent as a musician; he fully realizes and engages the spirit and tone of the poems. He plans to complete the compositions for the entire chapbook (plus possibly other songs based on Foster's other poems) this winter and record the CD in March. An article about Ten Songs from Bugaria appeared earlier in Writing the Polish Diaspora.

Lisa Siedlarz's What we Sign Up For, a book of poems about those who go to war and those who are left behind, has just been published by Pecan Grove Press. That link will take you to one of the fine poems from the book, "Tea with Elders." The book is also available from Amazon.

A reading by Poet Mark Pawlak is now available on youtube. Click here.

Artist/Poet Grzegorz Wroblewski has two new images works online in the current Otoliths. His painting "I Will Survive" is featured here.

Polish film maker Michael Adamski has recently posted his film Granica Niagara/The Niagara Frontier on youtube.

Christina Pacosz's poem "Blood Moon Kansas City" appears on New Verse News today. And writer/scholar Danusha Goska has written a piece at "Bieganski the Blog" about Ms. Pacosz and my upcoming chapbook "How to Measure the Darkness." The blog includes a youtube of Ms. Pacosz reading her poems.

Andrena Zawinski has placed two poems in the online anthology, AMERICAN SOCIETY - WHAT POETS SEE produced by Future Cycle. The poems are available online and are forthcoming in a print edition of thirty poets. To read her two poems ("Bittersweets for Camellia" and "The Pickers"), follow this link and then click on her name.

Frank Zajaczkowski posted a poem "I Held Perfection" at his blog My So-Called Paradise.

Here's another of Bogdan Frymorgen's photos. To see more of his work, click here.

Poet Sharon Mesmer has moved recently and started a new blog called Dubious Labia where she writes bout her move and her writing and her friend. I especially recommend her blog about her friendship with Allen Ginsberg.

Tourist Season at Auschwitz by Mark Lewandowski

2011-10-20T07:48:00.000-07:00

Polish-American novelist Leslie Pietrzyk has recently started a website called Redux to showcase classic pieces of creative writing that have so far not been published online.

The fifth installment features Mark Lewandowski's essay "Tourist Season at Auschwitz," originally published in The Gettysburg Review (1999).

I first read this essay about 3 years ago, and I thought then that I had never read anything better about what it feels like to visit Auschwitz. I had visited there in 1990 and written about the visit a number of times, about what it was like being a tourist there, but nothing I've written and nothing I've read by other writers compares to what Mark Lewandowski offers in this superb essay.

Here is an excerpt. The entire essay along with a brief piece by Mark about how he came to write the essay is available at the website.

"Tourist Season at Auschwitz"

On the morning of the October day that England qualified for Italia ’90 (the World Cup soccer tournament), a small group of Englishmen were seen by some of the sports press at Auschwitz, laughing and posing as they took pictures of each other—doing the Nazi salute. Pete Davies, “All Played Out”

At Birkenau stands a mound unlike those dotting the countryside that Poles have built in remembrance of past generals and statesmen. You will not see picknickers lay out blankets on it or watch their children roll down the slopes. The Birkenau mound is a mass grave for Soviet soldiers killed by the Nazis. The bodies were packed so tightly together that they are still decomposing, and when it rains now, almost fifty years later, human grease rises to the surface and fans out through the grass in a brilliant rainbow of color.

Not far from the mound lies what looks like an ordinary pond. Bend over and peer into its depths and you might be surprised not to see a minnow or two, at least, in the water. Take a stick. Dip it into the water and movie it in circles. Soon, a whirlpool of gray ash will funnel to the surface. This pond is only one repository for the remains of the Jews.

A Polish actor told me that these were just a couple of the sights in the Auschwitz complex most tourists miss. I was with two American women I had met in a youth hostel in Kraków. This was the summer of 1990. The Berlin Wall had been down for only seven months. American tourists were still a novelty to most Poles. The actor, who spoke English fluently, spied us three on the rickety commuter train from Kraców to Oświęcim, site of Auschwitz and Birkenau. He was going to visit his mother, who was a librarian at the Auschwitz museum.

“By all means,” the actor said, “do not spend the entire afternoon in Auschwitz. After you have watched the movie and seen the major displays, go to Birkenau. The barracks still stand unmolested by museum directors. Wander the buildings and you will read messages written in coal by the inmates. You will find fragments of clothing, steel cans, rotted straw, heating stoves. Leave the barracks and follow the tracks to the gas chambers. They have not been reconstructed. They have been left the way they were found, a much more profound statement to the horrors of the Holocaust than the glitz you will find in Auschwitz. Why would the retreating soldiers bother to destroy the evidence if they were not aware of the incredible crimes they had committed against humanity? Do not believe that they felt justified or that Hitler brainwashed them. They knew their sin. You will not experience their guilt among the glassed-in cases of human hair and suitcases at Auschwitz. Only in Birkenau, the much larger of the camps, will you find what you are seeking.”

And what were we seeking? What do the hundreds of thousands who visit concentration camps every year hope to find amongst the barbed wire, the staggering statistics pasted to barracks walls, the bricks riddled with bullet holes and once saturated with blood? What world are we looking for when we pass under the gateway that tells us, Arbeit Macht Frei, Work Brings Freedom? Do we find the same closeness to history, a sense of our own place in it, that we find wandering the back alleys of Venice, touring the White House, crawling through the ruins of ancient Egypt, or gazing at the art amassed in the Vatican Museums?

________________________________

To read the entire essay, click here: Redux.

Milosz and the Future: A Centenary Festival

2011-10-07T13:20:00.000-07:00

Claremont McKenna College is celebrating the centenary of Milosz on Oct. 19-21, and it will feature a number of prominent writers including former US poet Laureate W. S. Merwin, Robert Pinsky, and Polish-American writers Lillian Vallee and Piotr Florczyk.

If I were living anywhere near Claremont McKenna, I know I would be there for this one of a kind celebration. Absolutely.

To find out more about registering for the conference, please click here.

To see a schedule of readings, click here.

Two Review: Contest

2011-10-03T12:35:00.000-07:00

I'm going to be judging a poetry contest for Two Review A Journal of International Poetry & Creative Nonfiction.

1st Prize: $100 2nd Prize: $50 3rd Prize: $25

Prizes include publication in the 2012 issue of Two Review. All submissions considered for publication.

Here are the submission specifics:

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Submit up to five (5) unpublished poems, brief bio, and $10.00 contest fee at Two Review's website. Click here.

DEADLINE

November 30th, 2011

ABOUT TWO REVIEW

Two Review is an annual independent journal of international poetry and creative nonfiction committed to publishing the best original work available. Two Review seeks writing about the modern world, its inhabitants, and the events that shape them. The editors believe art is not

a foreigner on the geopolitical landscape, and for this reason they promote work by poets, writers, and artists who are aware of more than themselves and show us the world as it celebrates and as it struggles. All topics that illuminate the human experience are welcome as long as the writing is grammatically strong and syntactically unique.

Two Review is featured at select independent booksellers across the U.S. Copies are also submitted to non-lending libraries at national poetry centers including The University of Arizona Poetry Center, Richard Hugo House in Seattle, The Poetry Center of Chicago, The Stadler Center for Poetry in Pennsylvania, and Poets House in New York City.

Krysia Jopek Speaks about Her Novel Maps and Shadows

2011-09-29T10:13:00.000-07:00

Polish-American novelist Krysia Jopek will talk about her novel Maps and Shadows at the Windsor Public Library on Oct. 20, 2011. The novel tells the story of one Polish family's struggle in Siberia during the Second World War. The program runs from 7 pm - 8:30 pm, and will be held at the Windsor Public Library, 323 Broad Street, Windsor, CT 06095, tel: 860-285-1918, www.windsorlibrary.com. The event is free and open to the public.

I posted a blog about this powerful novel earlier this year, and you can read that review by clicking here.

Here's an excerpt from Maps and Shadows:

Chapter I

Our Orchards (Henryk)

Eastern Poland, 1930-1940

Some dates change the world irrevocably. What is done cannot be undone. No matter how well- or ill-conceived. One plane or two or ten piercing invisible lines, seeking enemy flesh.

A page of history that can never be torn out permanently. Things tend to catch up. Even when they are buried or ripped out. And it’s impossible for people to go on the same, though many pretend while sweeping the ashes under the expensive silk carpet. It depends where the lines are drawn. Maps and agreements that may or may not be honored, upheld. Memory, selective. Paper and flesh can be burned.

The history books my sister, Helcia, loved—would become unreal, unwritten. The Helcia that was light, flipped her honey hair and skipped with her books about lost cities, golden ash. Before the stone pages made her heavy. The then-unwritten pages that would unfold us. One group of people fighting another; the variables, teams and players switching, faking the others out.

Update: Polish Diaspora Writing

2011-09-12T11:40:00.000-07:00

The Poetry Foundation published a 9/11 poem by Polish Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska about a photograph people falling from the World Trade Center. The poem is called "Photograph from Sept. 11," and the text and an audio version of the poem are available from the Foundation site.

***

On Oct. 11, 2011, between 4 pm and 6 pm, John Guzlowski will be giving a reading at the Founders Hall Theater/Callahan Center, St. Francis College, 180 Remsen Street, Brooklyn Heights, NY. The reading is called Lightning and Ashes: Two Lives Shaped by World War II and will focus on his parents and their experiences in the concentration and slave labor camps in Nazi Germany. The reading is free and open to the public.

Here's a youtube of one of the poems:

***

Oriana Ivy's new chapbook April Snow won the $1000 Finishing Line Press New Women's Voices Competition. The book will be published this coming April. You can read some of her excellent poems at her blog.

***

Stateside, Jehanne Dubrow's new book of poems about her military husband's deployment, was recently featured on the NPR program Fresh Air.

***

Polish-American journalist Bozena U. Zaremba continues her extraordinary interviews with classical pianists. Here is her recent interview with Jon Nakamatsu, 1997 Gold Medalist at the 10th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Click here.

***

John Minczeski and I are editing a new edition of the classic anthology of Polish American writing, Concert at Chopin's House. The deadline for submissions is Jan. 31, 2012. Click here to read about submission guidelines.

***

Suzanne Strempek Shea, the author of the Hoopi Shoopi Donna and Selling the Lite of Heaven, will be speaking at a symposium "In Praise of the Essay," at Fordham University's Lincoln Center on October 15. Complete information is available at the university's website.

***

A photograph by the photographer Bogdan Frymorgen:

***

Anna Marie Mickiewicz's poetry was recently read by Ott-Siim Toomet at the Art Centre in Vaniistu, Estonia. Ott read the poems in Polish. He is the son of the well-known Estonian writer of Polish origin, Jaan Kaplinski.

***

Grzegorz Wroblewski's one-act play "Turning Point" is now available online. Five of his poems, translated from Polish by Agnieszka Pokojska, appear in the new issue of 3:AM Magazine.

***

Off_Press is devoted to publishing contemporary Polish poetry in English translation. It features the work of such writers as Wioletta Grzegorzewska, Jacek Maczek and Marta Gorska. Here's the link.

***

Jen Michelski has just announced the last issue of her online literary journal, JMWW. This issue focues on non-fiction with pieces by Ron Capps, Curtis Smith, Jane Satterfiled, and others. You can check it all out by clicking here.

***

Anglo-Polish poet Sarah Luczaj's book Urgent Request has been translated into Polish. The Polish title is Pilna Prosba. The English version is currently available at Amazon. Here's one of the poems from the book, first in Polish and then in English:

MOJE ŻYCIE JEST WSPANIAŁE

Nikt, kogo kocham

nie umarł na razie dziś

każda wojna na tym świecie bez wyjątku

mnie omijała

nie głoduję i nie trafiłam

na mapę żadnego terrorysty

ani na niczyją oś zła

nikt mnie dzisiaj nie torturował

żaden policjant nie zastrzelił mnie przypadkiem ani celowo

żadna fala tsunami nie zmyła mojego domu

nie zostałam skazana na karę śmierci za zdradę,

bluźnierstwo, morderstwo

ani za to, że zupa była za słona

MY LIFE IS BRILLIANT

No one I love

has died so far today

every single war in this world

has passed me by

I am not starving and I haven’t stumbled

onto any terrorist’s map

or into anyone’s axis of evil

nobody tortured me today

no policeman shot me by accident or on purpose

no tidal wave swept my house away

I was not sentenced to death for infidelity

blasphemy, murder

or not having put enough salt in the soup

Hollywood's War with Poland: 1939-1945

2011-08-26T18:18:00.000-07:00

The following essay was written for Writing the Polish Diaspora by Dr. Danusha Goska, author of the award-winning Bieganski: The Brute Polak Stereotype in Polish-Jewish Relations and American Popular Culture.

MBB Biskupski's Hollywood's War with Poland: 1939-1945 is a must-buy, must-read and must-keep book for several audiences. Twenty-first century American citizens seeking insight into ethnic jockeying for power will want to read this book. Conspiracy theorists fascinated by the ability of popular culture to twist human minds will find support for their most Orwellian nightmares. Polish Americans who care about the abysmal position of Polonia in the arts, politics, journalism and academia will buy, read, and reread it. Biskupski's style is straightforward, without academic or aesthetic flourishes. The average reader will have no problem.

HWWP is an essential resource that proves, beyond any question, that powerful people, prompted by geopolitical competition and deep hostility worked hard to sully the image of Poles, Polish-Americans, and Poland. They did this during World War II, when Poland was playing a key historical role. World War II began when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Nazis located notorious death camps like Auschwitz in Poland; Poland is an essential site of the Holocaust. As part of its treaty with Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union invaded as well, and Poland would be central to the Cold War. In short, when Poland was being crucified by two of the most murderous regimes in world history, Hollywood, with US government supervision and approval, did everything it could to convince its audiences that Poles were unworthy of support or even concern – in fact, Hollywood told its audiences that the Poles were deeply flawed people who probably deserved everything they got. This is the Big Lie writ with lightning – not by Goebbels, but by Washington and Hollywood.

HWWP provides another important service for anyone who studies ethnicity in America. Powerful forces in academia, politics, journalism and popular culture have insisted that the American ethnic landscape is literally black-and-white: poor and oppressed blacks struggle against privileged and powerful whites for their piece of the American pie. Perhaps the most notorious and resented example of this worldview are those check-off boxes that ask scholarship applicants and academic job candidates to identify as several different varieties of "persons of color" while offering only one choice for "white" people. In fact the black-white myth has never reflected reality, and American whites have come in varieties of rich and poor, powerful and disempowered. HWWP depicts Polish-Americans as the utterly disempowered, fecklessly looking on while their ancestral homeland was ruined and their ethnicity was degraded.

Film fans may scoff at the very title of Hollywood's War with Poland: 1939-1945. Hollywood simply did not make many memorable films that feature Polish or Polish-American characters in leading roles. 1939 is known as Hollywood's annus mirabilis. "Gone with the Wind," "Wizard of Oz," "Stagecoach," "Ninotchka," and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" were all in theaters that year, and a Pole is only mentioned in passing in one of these films: as screen goddess' Greta Garbo's lover in "Ninotchka." Perhaps the most famous Hollywood production that was made, and takes place, during World War II is "Casablanca," and there are no Poles in that. The most celebrated film about post-war America is 1946's "The Best Years of Our Lives." In that film, Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) a veteran suffering from PTSD, has a nightmarish flashback of combat. In a panic, he speaks of trying to save Gadorsky, a fellow soldier. In another scene, a poor and uneducated, but stalwart and worthy, war veteran and Slavic American, Novak, applies for, and receives, a bank loan to make a new start for himself. The film teaches audiences to like inarticulate working men like Novak.

HWWP acknowledges that Hollywood made few memorable films with identifiable Polish characters. The book focuses instead on movies little seen or discussed today. Biskupski argues that moviegoers of sixty years ago attended many films, not just major productions, but B movies, serials, and government propaganda films as well. These include two forgotten romance films: 1935's "The Wedding Night," and 1944's "In Our Time," and two more overtly propagandistic films: 1943's "Mission to Moscow" and "The Nazis Strike." As Biskupski shows, in these films and many others, negative Polish characters abound. These characters are not negative in a random way; rather, their distastefulness fits a pattern, one Biskupski outlines again and again and again. Through reference to changing versions of pre-production scripts and inter-office memos, often between representatives of Washington and Hollywood, Biskupski demonstrates that distasteful Poles are the products of careful planning. Polish aristocrats are ineffectual, selfish, fascists. Polish peasants and working people are thuggish, sexually coarse, stupid. In short, this is the Bieganski stereotype.

This negative stereotype, Biskupski argues, didn't come about purely by chance. Two factors developed and honed it. The United States was at war with Nazi Germany and wanted the Soviets to keep fighting on the Eastern Front lest a separate peace would allow Nazis to devote all their power to fighting Americans on an eventual Western Front. Of all nations, Poland presented the politician, the historian, the filmmaker and the ethicist with a quandary. Poland was invaded by both Nazi Germany and Communist Russia in September 1939. To this day, the debate continues: who was worse, Hitler or Stalin? No one has the definitive answer. To Roosevelt, though, the answer was clear; America needed to ally with Stalin. Problem: Communist Russia was held in low regard by Americans. The Red Scare of 1919-1920, when America expressed hate and fear of communists and communism, had not occurred all that long before 1939, when World War II began. Americans, who had learned to hate and fear Russians and communism during the Red Scare, needed to be manipulated into embracing their new Soviet ally. Washington directed Hollywood to bring about this dramatic transformation of American hearts and minds. Washington demanded, and got, films celebrating the Soviet Union.

Hollywood enthusiastically embraced Washington's commission. A good percentage of Hollywood's screenwriters, actors, and other movers and shakers were leftists, if not card-carrying members of the Communist Party. To convince Americans that defeating Hitler was worth American blood and treasure, and that the Soviets were a worthy ally, Americans needed to be educated about Hitler's evil, and the Soviets' benignity. This narrative would be a tough sell: the Soviets had been the Nazis' ally just a few short years before the US entered the war, and had signed the August, 1939 Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. The Nazis invaded Poland, a bad thing, but the Soviets had invaded as well, and they also had invaded Finland. Nazis mass-murdered and exiled Poles; Soviets mass-murdered and exiled Poles. Nazis demanded other countries' territory; Soviets demanded Polish and Finnish territory. With alacrity, and with adherence to the concept that truth is of value only in so far as it advances the revolution, Hollywood screenwriters did the work of Soviet propagandists. There was no depth to which they would not sink in their insistence on exculpating Mother Russia. Hollywood devised films that depicted the tragic victims of Stalin's purges and show trials as guilty and worthy of the death penalty. Hollywood worked to justify the Hitler-Stalin pact. Hollywood assured its audiences that the Soviet invasion of Poland was a good thing. Are you reaching for your Orwell yet? And your Dramamine?

In the past, Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union fought over territory. Today ethnic groups fight over another commodity: the right to speak of one's own victimization, both in terms of actual body counts and in terms of the cultural victimization that results from negative stereotyping. Poles and Polish Americans are mocked and trivialized when they attempt to speak of their victimization. This happens in staff meetings on university campuses, in the press, and in seminal books. Just one example: James Carroll's very important 2001 book "Constantine's Sword," about Catholic anti-Semitism, describes Poles as being "particularly inclined to define" themselves as victims, in contrast to Jews, who actually do suffer. Art Speigelman justified depicting Poles as pigs in his Pulitzer-Prize-winning comic book "Maus," by saying that "the afflicted" – those who have suffered – understand his work. Poles have not suffered, in this view, and so their opinions don't count. In 2003, Bozenna Urbanowicz Gilbride, who had been in two Nazi camps, and whose mother had also been in two Nazi camps, was told she could no longer refer to herself as a Holocaust survivor because she is not Jewish. These and other dismissals of Polish suffering are strategic. At a meeting at Indiana University, an African American university official told me that he works against public acknowledgement of women's and homosexual's status as victimized groups. Why, I asked, stunned. Because if we acknowledge women and homosexuals as victims, he said, money will flow from programs for African Americans toward programs for women and homosexuals. Status as victim equals justified recipient of commodities, from cash to respect to scholarly attention and placement in curricula. Thus, it is important to belittle any discussion of Poles as victims of stereotyping. Acknowledgement of Polish suffering would require rearrangements of thought patterns, of attention, and of resources. Thus the importance of Biskupski's book.

HWWP is not perfect. Again and again, Biskupski insists that America just did not care about Poland or Poles. As "Bieganski" shows, America was obsessed with Poles and Poland, and America violated its own best traditions in passing the Quota Acts while citing the danger of immigration of people like the Poles. Congressional testimony, articles in the popular press, including the Saturday Evening Post, the New York Times and Atlantic Monthly, and foundational anthropological publications cite the Poles as the very reason America needed to shut its borders. The SAT test, a rite-of-passage for American youth, was first promoted as a test that proved the intellectual inferiority of Poles. This obsession with Poles gave rise to that American cultural icon, the Polak joke. Biskupski never situates his discussion of the brute Polak in American films in relation to America's primary ethnic conflict, that between blacks and whites. Doing so would have offered insight. Poles are the prototypical poor white ethnic. They are the wretched of the earth it is okay for elites to hate, even while embracing African Americans, and using that embrace as a badge of liberalism.

Biskupski insists on the distinction between, for example, a Polish American and a Slovak American in an American movie. Biskupski bristles at the word "Bohunk," suggesting that it arises only from American ignorance about and hostility to Eastern Europeans. In fact, the word "Bohunk," and the concept it describes, makes perfect sense in the American context. Poles, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Hungarians, and Yugoslavs shared similar cultural traits in the old country, and occupied similar socioeconomic niches in this country. Two immigration classics: "The Jungle," about a Lithuanian meat packer in Chicago, and "Out of this Furnace," about a Slovak steel worker near Pittsburgh, could just as easily have been written about Poles. Biskupski argues that Victor Laszlo in "Casablanca" had to have been Czech because Czechoslovakia had no territorial grievances with the Soviet Union, while Poland did. Question: Did American audiences make this distinction? Did they care? As Christopher in the television series "The Sopranos" put it, "Czechoslovakian? That's a type of Polak, right?" Scholar Michael Novak, a Slovak American, complains that people tell him Polak jokes; they see those jokes as being about him. This blurring of boundaries does not occur strictly on this side of the Atlantic; poet Adam Mickiewicz began "Pan Tadeusz," Poland's national epic, with lines praising Lithuania, and the Polish folk hero, Janosik, was actually Slovak; Queen Jadwiga grew up in Hungary. Just so, in American films, characters slide between Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, and other Bohunk identities. This book would be of interest to scholars of a variety of Bohunk ethnicities, not just Poles.

The American concept of the Bohunk is significant to American stereotypes of Poles and other Eastern Europeans and the use of films to disseminate and reinforce these stereotypes. In fact an iconic Hollywood production did introduce American audiences to indelible images of Eastern Europe, and that film, more influential than perhaps any Biskupski discusses save "Casablanca," is the 1931 Bela Lugosi film "Dracula." This film opens to Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake" and peasants repeatedly blessing themselves and invoking the Virgin; there is a roadside cross; a peasant woman gives a British man a crucifix as protection. A British tourist comments that the setting is a relic of "a bygone age." Peasants in authentic costumes, including embroidery, vests, shawls, caps and headscarves are shown in a typical, Eastern European cottage, complete with straw roof. You may as well be in a Skansen. "Dracula," and Maria Ouspenskaya's heavily accented presence in subsequent Wolfman films, communicate loud and clear to American audiences: if you're looking for the scary dark side, the vaguely demonic, the dangerous, the primitive, the irrational, the creepily religious, the superstitious, the sexually perverse, the grotesque, the medieval, Eastern Europe is your go-to location. To this day, every Halloween, Americans wishing to communicate these qualities imitate a vaguely Eastern European accent.

Biskupski devotes no time to an ethnography of audience reception – how did pro-Soviet, anti-Polish films go down with American audiences? With brief references to opinion polls, Biskupski says that these films went down exactly as the filmmakers intended. Todd Bennet, in his article, "Culture, Power, and Mission to Moscow: Film and Soviet American Relations During World War II" argues otherwise. Bennet reports that Americans were often unconvinced, if not outright offended, by pro-Soviet material in American films. There was even a backlash. Significantly, one letter-writer to Warner Brothers studios insulted Harry Warner for being foreign born, and, thus, in league with the Russians. Warner was born in Poland. The American letter-writer apparently could not distinguish between Poles and Russians.

Biskupski's narrow focus on the influence of Hollywood's pro-Soviet Communist Party does not allow for a discussion as to why the Brute Polak image was popular before World War II, after World War II, in print, for example in Nelson Algren's books, or in European films. Andrzej Wajda's "Promised Land" features a Polish aristocrat worse than any to appear in a Hollywood film, and coarse peasants as well. The 1999 Polish film, "With Fire and Sword," features peasants who are drunken, violent torturers and thieves. There are hopelessly stupid and crude peasants in the Czech films "Zelary" and "The Cow," a lengthy scene of cat torture in the critically acclaimed 1994 film "Satantango" set in a Hungarian village, and comically stupid, sexually debased, criminal, violent, and lusty Yugoslav immigrants in the 1981 Swedish film, "Montenegro." In short, Biskupski is correct, and he proves himself correct; communism did inspire Hollywood screenwriters to craft negative Polish characters in World War II era films. But there's more to it than that, and that's why I hope readers will read HWWP and "Bieganski" together. "Bieganski" talks in greater detail about the narratological reasons why storytellers, both on the page and on the screen, often choose to depict Bohunks as brutes.

HWWP's cut-and-dried approach allows little attention to the magic or artistry of film. Biskupski identifies Hedy Lamarr, not Greta Garbo, as the eponymous star of "Ninotchka" (244). No classic film fan would ever make this gaffe; it's like confusing Joe DiMaggio with Vince Lombardi. This is more than a surface complaint. Biskupski rightly argues against a Czech being the leader of the resistance in "Casablanca." At the same time, "Casablanca" is such an overt Hollywood confection that one wonders if anyone has ever viewed it and come away with a sense that the Poles were not doing their part to fight the Nazis, while the Czechs were. Aesthetics affects reception. I've watched "Casablanca" numerous times. I am as much of a nationalist Polish viewer as that film has never had. Yet I've never watched "Casablanca" and had a problem with Laszlo being Czech and not Polish. My attention is focused on the lighting on Ingrid Bergman's lovely face, whether Captain Renault (Claude Rains) is a good guy or a bad guy – or gay or straight – and the film's witty repartee. Biskupski makes clear that filmmakers intended to create ugly Polish characters. Whether or not filmmakers are always successful in their goals is a very different question. Bennett argues that "Mission to Moscow," intended to boost the Soviet Union in the eyes of Americans, actually boosted the US in the eyes of Soviet citizens. When the film was shown there, Russians were given a taste of what life is like in America, and they realized that capitalism was much better than their communist homeland. In any case, as a Polish historian, Biskupski makes up for his lack of film-fan sensitivity with the meticulous attention he pays to pertinent historical facts, attention that probably no film scholar would ever devote to this topic. For example, Biskupski points out the disconnect between the depiction of Polish airmen in American films and the performance of real Polish airmen in the actual Battle of Britain (280).

There is an unavoidable, controversial aspect to HWWP. Jews were overwhelmingly represented among those slandering Poles, Polish Americans, and Poland during Poland's darkest hour. Just one example: Anatole Litvak participated in creating "Why We Fight," which Biskupski excoriates as anti-Polish. Later, Litvak would make a film that helped America re-embrace Germany. It's painful to contemplate a Ukrainian-born Jewish American filmmaker who helped America to see Poland in a negative light, but then helped America to exculpate Germany.

World War II was not the first time American Jews contributed to a negative American assessment of Poland. Andrzej Kapiszewski's "Conflicts Across the Atlantic: Essays on Polish-Jewish Relations in the United States During World War I and in the Interwar Years" reports that American Jews often undermined Polish efforts for its own rebirth in 1918 after over one hundred years of colonial status under Prussia, Russia, and Austria. In a typical incident, in 1914, American Jewish newspapers published an open letter alleging that "barbaric" Poland did not deserve independence. To mention this reality risks opprobrium, and, indeed, stating this risks appearing to offer support for the very sorts of hate-mongers who created World War II. When, in 1989, Cardinal Glemp mentioned that Jews had sullied Poland's reputation in the press, he was sued by Alan Dershowitz and widely denounced as a wild-eyed anti-Semite.

Silence does us no good either, though. Nature abhors a vacuum, and in any silence around Polish-Jewish relations, those with the worst intentions become the most loud. So let us state this plainly: American Jews played a significant role in contributing to highly negative images of Poland at two of Poland's most vulnerable historical moments. Now that we've said that openly, we can say the next necessary thing: it was not an essential Jewish identity that brought this about. Not all those insulting Poland were Jewish. Frank Capra, maker of "Why We Fight," was Sicilian-born and Catholic. Roosevelt was no Jew. Not all Jews were anti-Polish. In 1937, MGM, under Louis B. Mayer, released "Conquest," a film that romanticizes Poland and depicts bestial Russians hoards ravaging an elegant Polish estate; heroic Poles respond in a civilized and courageous manner. Too, Jews played a significant role in creating a positive image of Poland during the face-off between Solidarity and communism. The New York Times, under significantly Jewish leadership, published Pulitzer-prize winning, highly sympathetic coverage by journalist John Darnton. Biskupski emphasizes that filmmakers were influenced by communism, not their Jewish identity.

If Polish chauvinists are gratified by anything I've written above, I hope that this paragraph causes them to wipe the smug look off their faces. Biskupski's conclusion contains two sentences that should give every Polish American pause: By 1939, "the Poles in America had conspicuously abandoned the loyalty to the Polish cause that had distinguished their parents' generation…American Poles deserve considerable blame for their failure to defend their nationality's reputation more devotedly." And defend it they could have – Biskupski repeatedly mentions Irish Americans, who were abundantly successful in bringing about significant changes to American film, including the introduction of the Production Code, the inclusion of numerous positive Irish characters, and the plethora of positive depictions of Irish Catholic priests in American film. Biskupski mentions pressures to assimilate, poverty, and lack of education as reasons for Polish-American failures to affect the negative depictions of Poles in films. In fact, though, poor people lacking formal education have organized to make change; witness Satygraha, the Civil Rights Movement, The United Farm Workers, and, indeed, Polish American strikers who played a significant role in the 1936-37 Flint sit-down strike. Further, as my own book shows, the Bieganski image has not gotten better since World War II, but worse. Today's wealthy and comfortable Polish Americans have yet to take significant cultural, political, and academic action against this image, which, in museums, in peer-reviewed books, and in entertainment and documentary films, is used to rewrite World War II history and place Polish, Catholic peasants in the position rightfully occupied by German Nazis. Polish Americans need to act. Their first act after reading this review can be to purchase Hollywood's War with Poland: 1939-1945 and also Bieganski: The Brute Polak Stereotype in Polish-Jewish Relations and American Popular Culture.

________________________

Danusha V. Goska is the author of Bieganski: The Brute Polak Stereotype in Polish-Jewish Relations and American Popular Culture winner of the 2010 Halecki Award. She is also the author of the novel "Save Send Delete" forthcoming from O Books in 2012. She received her MA from UC Berkely under Alan Dundes, and her PhD at Indiana University. She is currently an adjunct professor.

Dr. Goska blogs about the intersection of Poland and America at Bieganski the Blog.

Ethnic American Literature and Poetry Writing Position

2011-08-24T03:49:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends, I saw the following ad at CWROPPS and thought I should pass it on:

GRINNELL COLLEGE. Tenure-track position in the Department of English (Ethnic American Literature and Poetry Writing), starting Fall 2012. Assistant Professor (Ph.D.) preferred; Instructor (ABD) or Associate Professor possible. Grinnell College is a highly selective undergraduate liberal arts college whose English department offers courses in a broad range of literary traditions spanning the long history and present multiplicity of writing in English. The College's curriculum is founded on a strong advising system and close student-faculty interaction, with few college-wide requirements beyond the completion of a major. The teaching schedule of five courses over two semesters will include Literary Analysis, a survey and an advanced seminar in Ethnic American literature, and eventually introductory and advanced courses in poetry writing. Every few years one course will be Tutorial (a writing/critical thinking course for first-year students, oriented toward a special topic of the instructor's choice).

In letters of application, candidates should discuss their interest in developing as a teacher and scholar in an undergraduate liberal arts college that emphasizes close student-faculty interaction. They also should discuss what they can contribute to efforts to cultivate a wide diversity of people and perspectives, a core value of Grinnell College. To be assured of full consideration, all application materials should be received by November 11, 2011.

Please submit applications online by visiting our application website at https://jobs.grinnell.edu. Candidates will need to upload a letter of application, curriculum vita, transcripts (copies are acceptable), statement of teaching philosophy, a set of recent teaching evaluations, a writing sample, and also provide email addresses for three references. Questions about this search should be directed to the search chair, Professor Astrid Henry, at
(replace (at) with @ in sending e-mail> or 641-269-4655 .

Grinnell College is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer committed to attracting and retaining highly qualified individuals who collectively reflect the diversity of the nation. No applicant shall be discriminated against on the basis of race, national or ethnic origin, age, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, marital status, religion, creed, or disability. For further information about Grinnell College, see our website at http://www.grinnell.edu.

Call For Submissions: Polish-American Writers

2011-08-11T07:25:00.000-07:00

One of the finest anthologies of Polish-American writing is John Minczeski's Concert at Chopin's House. Published by New Rivers Press in 1988, it introduced me to the world of Polish-American writers, a world I never knew existed. For me, it was a life-changing experience. I thought I was the only one, the only Polish-American writer. Minczeski's book taught me otherwise. It showed me that there was a community of writers who shared my background, concerns, and heritage.

I am honored to say that John Minczeski has invited me to help in editing his second collection of Polish-American writing.

Here's our call for submissions:

For an anthology of Polish/American authors, the editors (John Minczeski and John Guzlowski) seek quality poetry, short fiction and creative non-fiction, not necessarily on a Polish theme, from writers with a Polish background. The anthology will update Concert at Chopin’s House, a Collection of Polish/American Writing, published by New Rivers Press in 1988. Payment, 1 copy. Please send 3-5 poems, or up to 10 pages of prose by Word or RTF attachment to: Polish.Anthology[at]gmail.com. Deadline: January 31, 2012.

___________________________

A Loaf of Bread: A Short Story

2011-08-02T12:52:00.001-07:00

For years, my favorite ficiton writer has been Isaac Bashevis Singer, the author of Enemies, A Love Story and a couple hundred of the best short stories written in the 20th Century. What I love most about those stories is the fable-like mix of realism and magic, coal dust and fairy dust.

I've recently started reading Stephen Poleskie, a Polish-American short-story writer who brings some of that same magic to the page.

Stephen is a man with talent to burn. His drawings and paintings are included in the collections of NYC's Metropolitan Museum and Museum of Modern Art, The National Collection in DC, and the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Tate Gallery in London. His fiction, essays, and art criticism have appeared in dozens of journals including Many Mountains Moving and Sulphur River Literary Review.

He's allowed me to post one of his stories, "A Loaf of Bread," about a Polish immigrant, here at Writing the Polish Diaspora. The story comes from Stephen's new collection Acorn's Card:

Here's the story:

A LOAF OF BREAD

A sinking orange sun was slowly giving way to a late-summer full moon, whose magical beams now rummaged about weakly in the courtyard below, drawing long shadows underneath the abandoned bicycles, trash cans and prowling stray cats. A tall, angular woman, wearing droll accessories that he could not make out, a pheasant costume perhaps assembled at a thrift shop, tap-danced down the hall, stomping her feet ecstatically, and twirling a lasso made of light. The sudden and rather discordant beeping of Jan Lesnachevski’s alarm clock pulled him from his sleep. It was nine o’clock—as they say here in America—in the evening not the morning. The sky was beginning to get dark, not bright.

Awake now, Jan dressed quickly and then followed an unctuous smell down the hallway to the kitchen, where his wife, clad only in a brassiere and half-slip due to the heat, was cooking him a breakfast of kielbasa and scrambled eggs. “Ahchoo!” Jan sneezed, announcing both his arrival and the fact that he had a late-summer cold.

This reeking and rat infested tenement flat was not exactly what John and his wife had expected when they emigrated from Poland. They had come secretly, via Vienna and London as asylum seekers, to avoid Jan’s being arrested for his part in organizing the Solidarity shipyard strikes. Jan thought to return now that he heard things were much improved in his homeland. But he had written so many letters back, telling everyone how well he and his family were doing—the townhouse in the city, the cottage on the lake, two cars, one a Cadillac, and his children in the best schools. The reality was that while Jan Lesnachevski did own the cheap camera that had taken the photos, the cars and the house in the background belonged to an anonymous someone else. And the shot of his daughter and son under the ivy-covered arch of a fine prep school had been taken on an open tour of the campus. The Lesnachevskis were truly living an American dream.

At the massive, sprawling shipyards in Gdansk, where Poland had once proudly built ships for the world, Jan had been a hydraulic engineer, who wrote poetry in the evenings. Some of his verses had even been published in Polish literary magazines, and he had a minor reputation there. Now, in America, his heart scraped as bare as the knuckles on his hands, he worked as a plumbing repairman, and wrote nothing.

His beautiful and intelligent wife Magdalena didn’t teach in a university anymore, as she had done in Gdansk, but cleaned houses for the rich who lived on River Walk Drive—people who thought they were being nice to her by giving her their castoff clothes, which she accepted and then gave away herself.

Although Jan and Magdalena had become citizens of their new country they felt that they were, nevertheless, without a place. America was still to them a foreign country, where it was not easy to remain yourself and keep your dignity. Although they were unquestionably friendly with their neighbors, and the members of the church group—Protestants nonetheless—who had sponsored their arrival in the United States, the Lesnachevskis had nobody that they could consider their true friends. And while they worked hard to improve their knowledge of their adopted country, its history and its culture, they were forever circling outside, making the rounds, jostled and shoved, polite novelties, in demand until Poland’s plight had faded from the headlines.

They tried hard to start conversations about things dear to them, like mushroom hunting. However, no one here was quite as interested in mushrooms in their natural habitat as Poles were. When you started a conversation about mushrooms you were immediately put in the same category as hippy stoners or American Indians. Those people who did eat mushrooms would never think of gathering them in the wild, but bought Portobellos in the gourmet deli section at their supermarket. Jan and Magdalena wondered if they needed to learn more than just the words to understand the language. Ripe with a great craving for knowledge they kept telling themselves: Soon we will understand and we will truly be Americans.

Through much diligent study in night classes Jan and Magdalena had both mastered English, and spoke with only a slight Polish accent. They were, however, dismayed by the fact that they could not comprehend most people, especially their children, who went to a public school and talked like rappers on MTV.

“Like it’s just funk, dude, totally. I mean don’t slam me, dude. Like ya gotta drop that old Polack shit right now and get with the program, if ya know what I mean. Like ya gotta chill out if ya wanna be into it nowadays.” Or something like that? Jan had been pleased that his son had gone back to calling him dad, rather than Jan, until Magdalena had explained that the word her son kept repeating wasn’t dad but dude.

“Son . . . I can’t understand you.” Jan would reply. “Isn’t it hard to talk with that little bolt poking through your tongue?”

Jan watched his teenaged children walk out the door, wondering why his boy liked to wear his clothing three sizes too big; pants so low that they dragged on the ground and his underwear showed out the top, his baseball hat on backwards. And his daughter; a skirt so short and tight that she dared not sit down or bend over, and boots that looked as if they were borrowed from a Nazi Storm Trooper. Jan could not recall when he last saw either one of them reading a book. Their cluttered rooms had the ever present rattle and glow of video games.

Whenever Jan talked about the possibility of going back to Poland—he didn’t say going home anymore as both he and Magdalena were no longer sure where home really was—all his children ever said was: “Poland! Like are you totally out of your mind, dude? No way!”

Jan and Magdalena had degrees, certificates, yellowed pieces of paper written in Polish, framed and hanging in their living room; however, these were useless here in America. But they would be valuable back in Poland. Jan felt that he was too young to be shunted into a sidetrack, and that his wife’s pedestrian life was unfair to her. Back there they could get good jobs again, not so much for the money, but jobs that they could take an interest in, jobs they could be proud of. Jan and Magdalena had never intended to do nothing with their lives. But people would wonder why they had returned, when they were doing so well. They were living the American Dream.

Although the sky had not yet fully darkened, the summer stars had already appeared, lurking like celestial muggers in their furtive cloud alleys. Outside Jan’s window the borne-down-by-the-heat wind hung immobile over the ragged tenement rooftops, now inhabited by refugees from the sweaty, jostling apartments below. Some people were sitting, some smoking the tips of their lit cigarettes hovering like urban fireflies. A young couple discreetly made love in a quiet corner behind a chimney. The sound of boom boxes, forever circling, each one competing to provide the unwanted melody of the moment, echoed up from the street below. It was time for Jan to go to work—he was on night call.

“Ahchoo!” Jan spurted out again, covering his mouth with his hand. Unlike their meals in Poland, which were always filled with conversation, Jan and Magdalena no longer talked to each other when they ate. They seemed to have nothing to say. When they first arrived, to help with their learning a new language, they had agreed to have their conversations only in English. Lately, when they had gone back to speaking Polish, it was as if they needed to learn their native tongue all over again.

“Would you pick up a loaf of bread on your way back, Jan?” Magdalena asked. “We are all out and the children will want some for their breakfast tomorrow.”

“Ahchoo! I am going on a repair call now, Magda, not out for shopping,” Jan protested. “I got a message. I must go to fix a hot water heater in a tenement over in the Snake Hill neighborhood. I hate going out there at night, much less stopping in a convenience store. They are always filled with weirdoes, junkies, and drug dealers.”

“That grocery store on Jefferson Street is open. I have shopped there before . . . it’s not too bad. You can get a loaf on your way otherwise they may be already closed when you are coming back.”

“Ahchoo! But they will probably only have loaves of that pasty white bread.”

“It’ll be alright. I will make toast.”

“Okay. Goodbye. Ahchoo!”

“Goodbye, dear . . . and don’t forget to buy a loaf of bread.”

Out on the street Jan discovered that his truck’s license plate had been rolled up again. A crazy kid, strong as a gorilla, high on dope and steroids, went around the neighborhood rolling up license plates like they were toilet paper—apparently just for the fun of it. Jan had followed him home one day and then knocked on the door and told his father what he was doing and that if the kid didn’t stop he would report him to the police. “So tell me already,” the father had said rather sarcastically, pulling out his badge, “I’m a cop.”

The very next day, Jan had come down to find the kid rolling up a license plate on the car parked in front of his truck. The boy turned around and, with a big grin on his face, gave him the finger. If his father could not even keep his own son in line, Jan asked himself, how was he going to prevent other people’s kids from committing crimes? The damn police in this town were worse than the criminals, he though; at least with the secret police in Poland you knew where you stood. Could he do nothing here but give up all his ambitions and longings, and try to manage as well as possible in a world without grace and intellect—just put his head down and try his best to forget?

“Ahchoo! . . .” Jan drove along in his pickup truck, wondering why he hadn’t got one with an air conditioner, especially with his allergies. And you couldn’t ride around in this town with the windows open either for fear of being robbed. Jan was sad. His life had become nothing. He reminded himself that he did not want to go out as someone who had been called in to fix the Lord’s plumbing.

“Ahchoo! Damnit,” Jan swore. He had gotten off the highway at the wrong exit—it should have been the next one. What a maze, Jan thought peering through his windshield at the unfamiliar scene in front of him. The damn streets were a mess, all torn up, and it was rather creepy down here by the river at night. Nobody lived in this area but the homeless. Jan had read that they even had homeless people on the streets of Warsaw now—the price of progress the article’s author seemed to think.

“Damn! It sure is hot.” Jan said out loud to nobody but the loaf of bread
sitting in a bag next to him. He had bought it at the store on Jefferson Street, as his wife told him to, using the last of his money. Jan never brought any cash with him when he came to Snake Hill. Some of the other repairmen told him that this was unwise, that he could get killed if someone tried to rob him and he told them he had no money. You should always have a little something to give them, an amount that you could afford to lose, they said. But at present Jan could not afford to lose anything.

“Ahchoo! Shit! It sure is hot,” Jan complained again. Who would want hot water on a night like this anyway, he wondered. The call could have waited until tomorrow. “Ahchoo! Damnit!” Jan was really uncomfortable now, sweating profusely. He wished that he could open his window a crack—but he couldn’t risk it, especially not down here.

The long, wrinkled river, shallow and muddy, swung along lazily just outside Jan’s headlight beams, its sour smell blocked out now by a passing freight train. Jan Lesnachevski slid his seat forward, all the while talking to himself, bending to the windshield, trying to make some sense of where he was. Then he saw a sign reading: Morgan Street. Good, Jan thought, this would take him all the way to Snake Hill. He turned and started down Morgan with enthusiasm. But after one block it became a one-way street. “What the hell?” Jan cursed, realizing that if he turned here he would be basically heading back in the direction he had just come from.

“Ahchoo!” Jan feared that he had driven into some kind of labyrinth. Things looked different at night. There was a lonely, rather spooky bleakness all around, the skyline revealing nothing but the crouched roofs of abandoned warehouses and the tetched lights of the occasional topless bar. He had to get out of these emergency night calls, Jan told himself, even though the pay was time and a half. He wanted to move out of the city, to find a job in the country, some place where he could breathe fresh air. Jan imagined owning a house in a town where he could leave the door unlocked when he wasn’t home. He had heard about such places. Maybe he should take that job he had been offered at a high school in the suburbs. It would mean less money, but it would also mean tall trees and green lawns. Jan had only three more days left to decide. Perhaps he should take his whole family back to Poland—whether they wanted to go or not. He didn’t want his kids to grow up to be tattooed junkies like everyone else in their neighborhood.

After a quarter hour of driving up and down a series of streets that seemed to lead him nowhere, Jan Lesnachevski accepted the fact that he was lost. Finding himself back on Morgan Street, and not knowing what else to do, he decided, as there were few cars in this neighborhood at night, to just go down this one-way street the wrong way until he came to some place that he recognized. And he hadn’t seen any police cars. He guessed that they were probably too afraid to come down here by the river at this late hour.

“Ahchoo! Shit!” Jan swore out loud again. “Now what?” There was a car following him. It had appeared behind him at the last intersection. He had watched its lights lurking in the rearview mirror. Now it was catching up. There was no telling who it might be, doubtless somebody looking to rob him. Jan decided that he had better get the hell out of there. He pressed his foot down hard on the accelerator pedal.

The car behind was speeding up also, almost on his rear bumper. It began flashing red and blue lights. A siren blared once as the car closed the gap between them. “Police officers!” a voice squealed, and then bellowed through a loudspeaker. “Pull your truck over!”

John guided his pickup to the curb, avoiding as best as he could the intaglio of flattened beer cans and broken bottles that lined the gutter. Shutting off the engine, he rolled down the window. The night air, despite being quenched with a musty dampness and the acrid smell of urine, felt cool on his face. This made him sneeze: “Ahchoo!”

A dark presence unwound itself from the police car and slowly made its way up to Jan Lesnachevski—shinning his super-sized flashlight into his query’s eyes as he came. “Can I see your license and registration, sir?” the officer said. Spoken as a question the tone was clearly that of a command. He followed Jan’s hand with the beam of his light as he fished for his wallet.

“Here are my cards, officer, sir . . . what have I done something that is wrong?”

The policeman gave the cards a cursory look and began his screed. “Do you realize, sir, that we have been following you for the last block, and that you have been going down a one-way street the wrong way?” The police officer’s shoulder radio hissed some static. “And may I ask you, sir, just what are you doing on this street at this late hour? Your truck doesn’t have a name on it. And everything down here is closed.”

“Ahchoo! I am lost. . . .”

“You say that you’re lost,” the officer said with an unbelieving tone, his eyes searching the interior of the cab. The beam of his flashlight circled from Jan’s face to the passenger seat. The circular glow fell on Jan’s toolbox—obviously containing burglar tools. Alarmed, the policeman backed away from the window and stood erect. His free hand moved to the handle of his pistol.

“Sir, I’ll have to ask you to get out of your truck . . . slowly . . . turn around . . . spread your legs . . . and put your hands on the hood.”

Blinded by the lights of the squad car, Jan futilely did as he was told. Jan Lesnachevski had a singular trait that revealed his character, one that placed him under eternal suspicion, perhaps something that had become ingrained in him while growing up under a totalitarian system—strangely enough he took pleasure in obeying orders. He moved slowly, considering any errors or stupidities that might compromise his situation. He wanted very much to sneeze but stifled the urge. Jan could hear the crackling of voices on the police radio, and the idling engine of the squad car. The night seemed hotter now. The air was heavier than it had been just a few moments earlier. The dull, gray sky had become veined with luminous moon-whitened contrails.

“I am a licensed plumber . . . a repairman on a night call,” Jan protested meekly as the policeman, using one arm, the other still on the handle of his gun, patted down Jan’s body searching for a concealed weapon. Jan wanted so badly to sneeze, to cough, to wipe his nose. But he swallowed hard, held his breath and did nothing.

Standing with his legs spread, Jan’s mind recalled a similar steamy night some years ago back in Gdansk. The fear that cloaked his body now was the same fear that he had felt then—a fear that he wasn’t supposed to have here in America.

For no apparent reason the tram had stopped; not at a regular stop, but in the middle of a block. The driver threw the door open and two men got on, apparently the ones who had signaled the operator. They didn’t pay a fare, and the tram did not start up again when the door closed. The two men walked slowly down the aisle, carefully studying the faces of the occupants as they moved between the rows. Jan pretended to be looking out of the window at the dark figurines in niches on the houses: gargoyles, Mary and Jesus, gaudy in painted plaster or enamel. What he really was observing was his own reflection. How much did he look like the photograph on the identification card that he was carrying, a card that had his face, but not his name? In the window’s reflection he saw the two men in leather trench coats, too warm for the season, but a mark of their trade, looming over his shoulder. They had stopped at his seat.

“You! Turn this way . . . and show us your papers.”

Jan pivoted in his seat, smiled, and produced his identity card.

“This is you? The taller of the two men, had asked, holding up the card to John’s face.

“Yes. . . .”

“And where are you going on this tram?” the second man added.

“Home. . . .”

“Home?”

“But this tram does not go in the direction of the address you have on this card. . . .”

John flushed, he needed a good story quickly; he smiled and then leered. “Of course not. I am stopping off at my girlfriend’s apartment first for a little relaxation. And then after home to the wife. . . .”

“And so we have caught you up to some monkey business,” the tall man said. Jan’s heart skipped a beat; sweat began to run down the back of his neck. Were they on to him? “But you are lucky. For tonight we are not looking for cheating husbands, but for strike organizers. We have a list of names of the people we want to bring in . . . and you, Stefan Podlewski, fortunately are not on it.”

“So now you can go ahead and get yourself a good fuck,” the shorter man said smirking at Jan as he handed him back his false identification card.

The two secret policemen turned and continued working their way to the rear of the car. The tram still had not moved, another tram had come up the tracks behind it and also stopped. Two other men in leather coats got out of a parked Lada and boarded the second tram. After a few moments in the back, the two men on Jan’s tram came forward; they had a third man with them. Jan recognized the man from protest meetings that he had attended, but the two were careful not to make any eye contact. At that moment Jan had felt very sorry for the man being taken away. Shortly thereafter he and Magdalena had fled from Poland.

Now, over the policeman’s shoulder, Jan observed a lone figure turn the corner and begin walking toward them. Then the man must have caught sight of the police car parked behind Jan’s truck. He turned his baseball hat around, and pulled his hood up over his head. Although the city was a bonfire the man wore a bulky coat over his black hooded-sweatshirt. Trying to look casual, the unknown man crossed over to the other side of the street. The walker was a black man—the officer checking out Jan was white. There was another officer in the squad car, but he had remained seated inside, only a dark silhouette.

Matching Jan’s Slavic face with the picture on his driver’s license and with the ones on his union card and plumber’s license seemed to satisfy the questioning officer. He returned Jan’s cards and told him he could get back into his truck.

Jan was elated, he had nothing to fear, proud that these really were his cards, relieved. The matter was closed. This was America. There was justice in this country. It was only a mistake, the police couldn’t be too careful. After all, they were here to protect him, looking out for his own good.

“I love America! I love America!” Jan shouted out the truck’s window, startling both the policeman and a very large rat that had just chanced to emerge from the sewer grate across the street.

Ignoring Jan’s enthusiasm the police officer continued: “However, there is still the matter of the traffic violation. . . .” He spoke softly, almost in a whisper, his head leaning into the open window, his words coming slow, groping.

“What infraction?” John asked. He turned his head, “Ahchoo!” but did not cover his mouth, not wanting to make any sudden moves with his hands.

“You were observed by two police officers driving in the wrong direction down a one-way street.”

“But I was lost,” Jan said hoping to explain away his crime. “I was so happy when I saw the flashing lights of your police car. I was quite nervous down here in this dark and unfamiliar area . . . nothing but warehouses and abandoned factories. Ahchoo! I had gotten off at the wrong exit. I was sure that the lights behind me were a car full of thugs planning to rob me.”

Jan thought that he saw a look of pity come over the officer’s face. He felt a slight coolness as a gentle zephyr searched its way down the dark street. With a cautious gesture he wiped the back of his hand across his runny nose, but did not sneeze.

“Well . . . let me go back and talk to my partner about it,” the policeman said, giving Jan a disparaging look. “I’ll tell him that you didn’t know what the law was because you are a foreigner. . . .”

“No! Please. I’m not a foreigner,” Jan yelled after the officer. “I am now a citizen . . . I love America!”

Jan Lesnachevski waited patiently in a clammy silence, not exactly clear just what was going on, his palms and armpits damp. The officer had gone back to the police car and was sitting inside talking to his partner, who apparently was of a higher rank as he had remained in the air-conditioned vehicle while his junior had gotten out and done all the leg work. John watched them in his rear view mirror, wishing for the power of clairaudience so that he might know what they were saying. Nevertheless, his wait was brief. The first policeman returned shortly with a half-smile on his face.

“My partner thinks that we should let you go . . . but first ya gotta give us a Christmas present.”

“A what?” Jan asked incredulously, sneezing again, wondering that either his English, or his hearing, must be failing him. “A Christmas present? But this is the middle of summer. . . .”

“Yeah, a Christmas present . . . you know, a gift. Like how much money have you got on ya?”

“I haven’t got any money,” Jan said displaying his empty wallet. Then he pulled back, suddenly realizing that he could be arrested for vagrancy. He had almost forgotten that in America it was a crime to not have any money. “I mean, yes I do have plenty of money at home . . . but not with me. You see, when I go on calls in these rougher neighborhoods I never bring any money with me for fear I might get robbed.”

“A good idea,” the officer agreed. “We wouldn’t want you getting ripped off down here . . . would we now.”

Jan sniffed. He would have liked to have taken a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his nose clean, but he was wary of making any suspicious moves at the moment. For some reason unknown to him, Jan’s gaze fell on the officer’s chest.

The policeman caught Jan’s eyes trying to read the number on his badge. He shined his flashlight in his suspect’s face. Jan blinked and turned his head. The flashlight’s beam fell on the brown paper bag stuck in the space between the seats.

“So ya got no money . . . but my partner says ya gotta give us a gift if ya don’t wanna get a ticket . . . and he’s my superior. So what ya got in that there bag?”

“It’s only a loaf of bread . . . for my children’s breakfast.” Jan stifled another sneeze.

“Is it fresh?”

“Yes, I just got it back there in a store on Jefferson Street.”

“Let me go talk to my partner. . . .”

The officer turned and slowly walked back to the police car. Jan watched out the half-open window as a low flying airplane passed overhead, its strobe lights appearing like nascent diamonds in the hazy night sky.

“My partner says that we’ll take the bread,” the officer announced on returning.

“What do you mean?”

“Just give us the bread and we’ll let you go. . . .”

“You’ll let me go if I give you this loaf of bread?”

“You heard me. . . . That’s what my boss said.”

Slowly rolling his window down all the way, Jan handed over the brown paper bag.

Holding it rather nervously, the policeman shined his flashlight into the bag, warily verifying its contents. “You can’t be too careful these days, it might of contained a rattlesnake . . . or maybe even a bomb. You never can be too sure of these things. Like why do people hate us policemen so much? They’re always trying to kill cops. I can’t understand why? I mean, we’re only out trying to do our job.”
“I understand,” Jan volunteered cautiously, clearing his throat.

“Thanks,” the officer said smiling. “And if you turn right at the next corner, and then go three more blocks to Truman Avenue . . . that’ll take you back to the expressway. Have a nice night, buddy.”

“And you too, officer. . . .” Jan smiled his best smile.

Gingerly gripping his prize, the policeman raised his free hand to the peak of his cap in a smart salute. The officer looked rather comical standing there rigidly in the darkness, Jan thought, rather like the cutout life-sized man that served as a “welcome” sign at his neighborhood carwash.

“Ahchoo! Thank you, God. . . .” Jan said when, upon turning his key in the ignition switch, his truck, not known for its dependability, sprung back to life. It was apparently as glad to be leaving this dark place as he was. Peering through the windshield, Jan glimpsed a violent flash of energy from a building thundercloud, too far away to be heard. It looked like rain for later tonight.

As Jan pulled his truck from the curb a man, apparently homeless, scruffy but still perky, darted through the yellow circle of the street lamp in front of him. Jan applied his brakes rather firmly, causing his metal tool box to depart the seat for the floor, landing with a crash. As Jan drove away, the anonymous man quickly disappeared into the anxious shadows alongside the building.

Jan Lesnachevski’s family would have no bread tomorrow morning. His children wouldn’t care though—they rarely ate breakfast. And Magdalena didn’t like toast anyway. Jan would lie and tell them that he gave the bread to a homeless man. His wife was very generous and would understand. He didn’t want to reveal the perplexing story about the policemen, and what actually happened to his loaf of bread.

Jan wondered again if perhaps he should take that job at the high school, even if he would be nothing more than a glorified janitor. No one had pointed out any reason why he should or should not make this choice. He could work days, and be home at night. And the school superintendent had said that they would find a job for Magdalena too, if only as a school bus driver. She would earn less than she makes now cleaning houses, but still, with the two salaries they might be able to afford a small house of their own. They could have a yard, with grass and trees, and even a cat. And maybe then he could tell his wife the real story of what happened to the loaf of bread he bought that night—but never brought home.

Freed of the Stygian darkness, Jan urged his pickup truck onto the rushing asphalt beltway, newly paved, whether it needed it or not, by a company owned by a friend of the mayor. Jan’s headlights flashed on the posters lining the concrete abutments; posters for candidates who promised him less taxes, and more of everything, if only he would vote for them—no more lost jobs, no more hunger, no more war, no more graft and corruption.

In the sky above, Jan Lesnachevski saw the fickle moon wink from behind its horehound ring, aspen wisps of cloud hurrying past. He thought he caught the fresh scent of a new wind prowling around the roof tops.
__________________

Visit Stephen Poleskie's website by clicking here.

Cosmopolitan Review--Summer Issue

2011-07-13T09:12:00.000-07:00

The summer issue of Cosmopolitan Review, the transatlantic online journal of Polish culture, history and art is now available.

Here's a note from Irene Tomaszewski, the editor, describing the contents:

We bring you a review of a beautiful new book about Sklodowska-Curie, "Radioactive," and, like radium, it glows in the dark.

Joanna Szupinska reviews the latest book about Miłosz, "An Invisible Rope," while Isabelle Sokolnicka’s exuberant expression of love for the Polish language will no doubt make the great poet nod his head in agreement.

We bring news of three extraordinary books, published in Edinburgh: "Scotland and Poland," "Polish Invasion," and "Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero." If you didn’t know about this Polish-Scottish relationship – and few people do – these books are at once a surprise and a pleasure.

Also reviewed: "A Polish Book of Monsters," eerie tales from Poland, Doug Jacobson’s new novel, "The Katyń Order," and "This Way," a thoughtful and beautifully printed study of art representing Tadeusz Borowski’s powerful book about Auschwitz.

Books need libraries and there is none more beautiful than the library at the University of Warsaw. Justine Jablonska visited it and she brings us a photo essay of this stunning building and its rooftop garden, a collaboration of both architects and landscape designers.

Then, the first two of a series of six discussions about Polish films by art historians, curators and academics from the San Francisco, introduced to Polish cinema by Joanna Szupinska. As one of them put it: “We’ve [ ] been given an opportunity to think about a rich culture outside the usual stops of London or Paris, Rome, or New York.” They share their views, and it’s a wonderful way to look at familiar films through new eyes.

A theatre event in Shamokin, Pennsylvania and poet Kath Abela Wilson on a lesson from Paderewski.

And there you have it. Happy reading!

Ten Essential Polish American Literary Works

2011-07-09T17:35:00.001-07:00

Awhile ago, I posted a list of ten books that I think are essential literary works about the lives of Polish Americans. The list includes fiction and poetry and memoir, and like all such lists, it's highly subjective. It simply includes a list of books that have touched me, spoken to me about my life as a Polish-American.

The complete list with my comments is available at Amazon by clicking here, but I thought I would post an abbreviated version of the list here:

1. Concert at Chopin's House: A Collection of Polish-American Writing, ed.John Minczeski

2. Twelve Below Zero: New and Expanded Edition -- by Anthony Bukoski

3. Zorba's Daughter by Elisabeth Murawski

4. A Letter to Serafin by John Minczeski

5. A Polish Son in the Motherland: An American's Journey Home by Leonard Kniffel

6. Amber Necklace from Gdansk: Poems by Linda Nemec Foster

7. The Orpheus Complex by Leonard Kress

8. Habry by Helen Degen Cohen

9. The Buffalo Sequence. Introduction by Denise Levertov. by Mark Pawlak

10.Lightning and Ashes by John Guzlowski

________________________

Braids & Other Sestinas by Leonard Kress

2011-07-07T06:13:00.000-07:00

A new book of poems by Polish-American poet Leonard Kress is always an event for me, and this time it's even more so.

His latest chapbook Braids & Other Sestinas (winner of the Keystone Chapbook Prize) is a collection of 20 sestinas, my favorite form. I won't get into the dynamics and expectations of the sestina here, but let me just say that like the best forms, the sestina equally challenges and inspires the poet to explore his feelings and thoughts in a profound way. But the sestina doesn't just inspire the poet, the reader following the poet's movement through the sestina experiences in part the joy of discovery that the poet experiences.

For my money, the sestina is a win-win form, and Leonard Kress lets us share in the winning.

Here's what writer Betsy Sholl who judged the 2010 Keystone Chapbook Competition said in part about his book:

“Easy to think a collection of twenty sestinas (minus envoy) would be drear, repetitive, self-indulgent. But read these poems, and something happens. Call it surprise, call it the poet letting the poem loose to fly and going along on the tailwind. The poet pays homage to other artists, explores myth and the great biblical themes, writes of love and grief. At times the form becomes nearly invisible as the voice takes over. There’s a rollicking cleverness that turns away from itself into the deeper/darker heart of its concerns, as in the final poem where a son grieving for his dying mother says ‘Strange for us offspring–parents retracting into kids,/ Meeting ours along the way, flashing signs.’ I find these poems challenging, compelling, and moving in both muscular and emotional ways.”

Leonard has allowed me to post one of the poems from the collection here at Writing the Polish Diaspora. The poem commemorates a poetry reading he and several other Polish-American poets gave at the Polish Embassy in Washington, DC to celebrate the Year of Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert.

The Idiot

I was invited to read some of my poems
At the Polish Embassy in DC,
A celebration, of sorts, of Zbigniew Herbert’s
Life and work, a decade after his death,
His year, the Polish Sejm proclaimed
Of course, I wasn’t the only reader

There—and one distinguished guest, who didn’t read,
Though he’d authored a slew of works about the poetics
Of arms control and whose most dubious claim
To fame— lauded only, I think in DC—
Was helicopters in Vietnam, the death
And destruction they brought. What would Herbert’s

Mr. Cogito, his everyman say, since Herbert
Often spoke through him? I dreaded having to read,
Like some spokesman for so much death
And suffering, so I chose my poems
Carefully, after wandering all day through DC’s
Museums, wary of sounding any sort of proclamation

Or making any great moral claims
For poetry, though I do partly believe. Unlike Herbert,
I didn’t live through war, revolt, or prison. My trip to DC
Was funded, though I have, of course, done the reading.
My long trek made me thirsty, late, and poetry
Was not on my mind. To keep from dying,

I’d just taken my heart meds, and in the dead
Silence of beginnings I reached out to claim
A glass of juice, gulped it down, grabbed my poems,
Formulated some rationale how they related to Herbert,
then recalled with horror what I’d read
On the pills—Avoid grapefruit Juice. Here in DC

It was bound to happen, a foreign embassy in DC,
Convulsions, drool, seizures, trashed decor, I’d die
Spotlighted, pathetic, the kind of scene you’d read
In Dostoyevski’s Idiot. As if a proclamation
Had been issued, this might be the year of Herbert,
But when it’s up, there’s no further need for his poetry
_____________________________________

Braids and Other Sestinas is available in a limited edition from Seven Kitchen Press.

Leonard has another chapbook entitled Living in the Candy Store coming out this fall from Finishing Line Press. You can pre-order the book by clicking on this link

The cover illustration for Braids and Other Sestinas is by the artist Mania Mary Dajnak.

Gagarin Street: Poems by Piotr Gwiazda

2011-06-21T13:01:00.000-07:00

I've been posting about the Polish Diaspora for a while now, and what always brings me pleasure is the realization of how many fine writers and artists there are who share a Polish background.

Recently, I've met one of these writers online. His name is Piotr Gwiazda, and he came to the US from Poland in 1991. He's a reviewer, a translator, a university professor, and a poet.

His recent book Gagarin Street has the creative energy that I've seen in writers like Milosz, Szymborska, and Herbert. Gwiazda's book -- combining nostalgia and apocalyptic visions -- offers us a vision of a disappearing world folding in upon itself. It's like nothing else I've seen since William Burroughs.

You've got to take a look at Gwiazda's poems:

GAGARIN STREET

When I was a child I lived on Gagarin Street.
Today it’s called Pilsudski Street.
Ten years ago the sun rose, a little wind blew, a little bird sang,
a little empire fifty kilometers away
fell, and so did its heroes: Lenin, Dzerzhinsky,
Bierut. This one, though, makes you pause for a moment
after his lonely voyage in spinning Vostok
after his tumble from orbit, his fifty-fifty chance of survival.
After all, he was our hero—this they taught us
in middle school—“our” meaning all of us, all of the world.
Not so. Today his space-suit rots
in a museum basement, his Russian face with Soviet smile
disappears from history textbooks, his round-the-globe celebrity
revoked (unanimously) by a municipal
subcommittee. Well, I suppose that’s how history is made
or unmade. Nothing is certain till it becomes history
and then it is unmade. I’ve been carrying
this city in my pocket for so many years and today—
look: a hole. What’s happened to it?
Streets are renamed, monuments rededicated,
old heroes buried, still older ones brought back from the dead.
In place of the crumbling soccer stadium, I read in the paper yesterday,
they’re building a new church. Or is it a new stadium
that will replace a church? I can’t tell for sure,
but this I can tell: my city doesn’t recognize me, buildings
give me evasive looks, the Old Town district
(did it get a face-lift?) turns its shabby back on me, the parks I loved
either leased or closed, even Gagarin Street,
now Pilsudski Street, pretends it’s never seen me before
as I cross it, then re-cross it, trying to stir its memory
by taking pictures. Nothing helps!
Granted, some things have stayed the same: Fiats,
kiosks, drunks (though now the homeless
seem to outnumber them), the city-hall clock still strikes twice
at one in the afternoon, and better times are as usual late
for people at the bus stop. The place itself, though,
has changed. I don’t mean the surfaces, I mean
this: passing by the dreary, four-story apartment building
where I once lived, I ask myself
what is real and what is past and therefore
imagined? For I can almost imagine
this is not my hometown at all. Suppose I’m just passing through,
another happy tourist with a rented car
and digital camera (these days you see droves of them
in all Central Europe). Nothing connects me to this place,
nothing keeps me here, nobody waits for me.
After all, it’s only another foreign city and I’ve seen so many,
each slightly different from what I expected.

JULY

Days were predictable, times uncertain.
A heat-wave paralyzed the Eastern Seaboard,
the war inched on, Dow Jones kept sliding,
I had just moved to a new city. Every afternoon
I would take walks by myself, learning street names
marking buildings—I read sign boards, posters,
inscriptions under statues, people’s faces
(some would even ask me for directions), strolled
through the cool halls of churches, museums, libraries
with the guilty curiosity of a student
skipping school. So much time,
so little money. I survived on bread and Tolstoy.
In the newspapers, another suicide bombing,
another corporate scandal. Meanwhile,
the sun would rise above the painted harbor,
Tuesday imperceptibly slip into Thursday.
Such bliss. Such misery. I savored my solitude,
I craved company. My pocket notebook
was filled with apocalyptic images. In the West
half of America was on fire.

__________________________________

From Gwiazda's page at the Washington Writers' Publishing House:

Piotr Gwiazda was born in Olsztyn, Poland, in 1973 and came to the United States in 1991. His published works include Gagarin Street (WWPH, 2005) and James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). His poems have appeared in many journals, including Barrow Street, Columbia, Drunken Boat, Hotel Amerika, Margie, Rattle, The Southern Review, Talisman, and Washington Square. He has published book reviews in Chicago Review, PN Review, Postmodern Culture, the Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. He is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, where he teaches courses in modern and contemporary poetry.

Kessler's Coffin Factory by John Bargowski

2011-06-10T11:04:00.000-07:00

Mr. Bargowski's poem recently appeared at Poetry Daily.

Kessler's Coffin Factory
Ogden Avenue, Jersey City

Hot days the workers
threw open the shop doors
and the neighborhood buzzed
with the rip of their saws
through the seasoned planks
of walnut, birch, and maple.
Pine shavings piled inches
deep on the floor oozed sap
over the steel-toes of the aproned man
who stood hours turning scrollwork
while near him another burnished
stacks of brass cornices and grips,
and the friendliest, saddled
with a sagging belt of hammers,
mouth bristling with nails,
tacked nameplates and sterling crucifixes
to each finished box,
some nearly as long as grandfather's rowboat,
others barely big enough
to hold sister's talking doll,
and after our fathers drove off
to the grind of the second shift
leaving their wives leaning out
windows to tend twisted lines of wash,
we kids on the sidewalk
slapped balls and double-dutched
through the vapor-stink of curing varnish
while over our heads the empty sleeves
and pant legs flapped when our mothers
pulley-squealed them closer
through pitched beams of light
already clogged with dust.

_______________________

John Bargowski was born and raised in Jersey City and now lives with his family on a small acreage along the Delaware River in the Skylands of northwestern New Jersey. He is the recipient of a 2009 NEA Fellowship in Poetry, a 2000 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Distinguished Artist Fellowship, The Rose Lefcowitz Prize from Poet Lore, and the Theodore Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest. His work has been published in Poetry, Gettysburg Review, Poet Lore, Southern Poetry Review, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, & Journal of New Jersey Poets, among others.

This above poem originally appeared in Poetry Northwest.

One Life to Give: A Path to Finding Yourself by Helping Others

2011-05-25T12:12:00.000-07:00

I do a lot of presentations and poetry readings about my parents' experiences in the concentration camp system of Nazi Germany, and one question I often get is "What did your parents learn from their experiences?" It's a central question, and a hard one to answer. I think that a lot of my poems and my other writings try to get at an answer (see the note at the end of this entry), but I feel finally that I will never know the answer no matter how much I try.

However, it is important to try to answer such questions, and I was especially interested in One Life to Give: A Path to Finding Yourself by Helping Others by Andrew Bienkowski and Mary Akers (available at Amazon.com). Andrew is a Pole whose family was taken to Siberia by the Soviets during World War II. He survived the war, came to the US, and became a psychotherapist.

His perspective on his experiences, as you can imagine, is unique and worth attention.

In One Life to Give: A Path to Finding Yourself by Helping Others, Andrew describes watching his grandfather starve to death on purpose so that he and his younger brother Yurek would have enough food. But rather than dwelling on the horrors, Andrew's book takes the "long view" and examines such experience for what they have taught him about life.

The first chapter discusses the idea of Radical Gratitude, the notion that we can learn to be grateful even for the difficult experiences of our lives because they make us stronger, wiser, and more responsive to the suffering of others. Following chapters talk about hope, faith, perseverance, laughter, and love as tools we can use to see us through the most difficult times. Each chapter is supported by a specific story from his family's time in Siberia, and the book covers the time from their initial deportation, through their survival and eventual escape.

Here's a video of Andrew Bienkowski talking about his book:

Signed Polish copies of the book are available from Mary Akers, Mr. Bienkowski's co-author at her blog.

_____________________________________

One of my own poems that tries to understand what my mother learned is "What the War Taught Her."

"What My Father Believed" is one of my poems about what my dad learned.

Artists and Writers: Updates

2011-05-17T09:20:00.000-07:00

Sharon Chmielarz's new book of poems, The Sky is Great, The Sky is Blue, is now available from Whistling Shade Press. Here's a poem from this book:

Chopin: Apples

And what country hasn’t he lived in,
his music chilling the listener’s arms?

And when haven’t his glissandos
spilled over history, the colossus

that upsets lives like apple carts?
Apples rolling over cobbles.

God-fall we think,
finding among the bruised,

a handful of sweet apples.
The easy thank you is listening

to someone playing at a window
in Warsaw, turning the rumble

of despair into a mazurka.
“Beloved little corpse,” Sand called Chopin,

sitting beside him at the keyboard.
Her “angel.” His music, his wings.

* * *

Douglas Jacobson's second novel The Katyn Order is now available. The novel deals with the Polish Underground's attempt to locate the Soviet order to kill the 20,000 Polish officers at Katyn.

Here's what Publishers Weekly says about the book: “Jacobson follows his debut, Night of Flames, with another solid WWII thriller. The author makes the bloody fight for Warsaw both exciting and suspenseful.”

You can read my recent blog about Night of Flame by just clicking here.

* * *

Actor/Director/Writer Marek Probosz has recently had his volume of short stories Call Me When They Kill You published in Poland. Also, Director Probosz's recent film Y.M.I., a psychological thriller about teen suicide, is now available from Amazon.

* * *

The latest issue of Poets on Adoption features the work of three Polish American poets: Christina Pacosz, Sharon Mesmer, and Mary Krane Derr. http://poetsonadoption.blogspot.com/

* * *

Peter and Laura Zeranski have just published a new cookbook of traditional Polish recipes. Find out more about the book at their blog.

* * *

Elisabeth Murawski is featured at the Serving House Books website. The page includes a video of Ms. Murawski reading a poem and a link to an interview.

* * *

The book This Way: Covering/Uncovering Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, edited by John Bertram and Marco Sonzogni, was just published. The book focuses on the recently completed competition to design a cover for Tadeusz Borowski's book on Auschwitz, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman. A website devoted to this project and to Borowski's book is online.

I especially recommend the sample pages from the book. They offer some of the recent covers from the competition along with brief essays about the history of Borowski's great work.

* * *

Grzegorz Wróblewski has recently published one of his paintings, entitled "These Extraordinary People," at The Post-Literate (R)Evolution. website.

Three of his new poems, original Polish versions and English translations (by Agnieszka Pokojska), appear in the current issue of the political journal CounterPunch.

His art will be featured in an exhibit focusing on the word as image until July 2 at the Bury Art Museum, Bury, England.

* * *

Mark Pawlak placed a poem, part of his Lubec, Maine, journal, at Wilderness House Literary Review. It appears in the poetry section.

The new issue of Hanging Loose #98, co-edited by Mark Pawlak, features a number of Polish American writers: Karina Borowicz, Stephen Lewandowski, Sharon Mesmer, Elisabeth Murawksi, and Mark himself.

* * *

Martin Stepek is currently building a personal website which includes, among other things, a number of his fine poems about what happened to Poland during World War II. The site is available at www.martinstepek.com.

* * *

Sharon Mesmer's essay on Flarf poetry along with several of her poems appear in the latest issue of the online journal Scream Online. If you haven't read her flarf-ish poems, take a look. They are wild. Here's a piece of one of them:

I Am Now Bringing Everything To The Path

Working class, ethnic, hard-hearted and obscure,
I am the Polish church in anguish.
And that’s why I am now bringing everything to The Path.
Granted, Yale’s musical recruitment you tube video
is ludicrous, but no matter where you are, chances are
you can crack a window and hear a cow moo,
a cow who is bringing everything to The Path, too. . . .

* * *

Mira Rosenthal's translations of Tomasz Rozycki's book Colonies has just been accepted by Zephyr Press. She read some of the poems from this book at a reading with Adam Zagajewski this spring in New York.

Ms. Rosenthal's poems are also something wonderful. Here she is reading two of them at the Cortland Review site.

* * *

Piotr Florczyk's translation of Anna Swir's Building the Barricade and Other Poems of Anna Swir is now available at Amazon. I recentyly posted a blog about the book with several poems from the collection. Click here.

* * *

My poem "What My Father Believed" was re-posted at Tikkun's Network for Spiritual Progressives.

The short personal essay I wrote about the wooden trunk that my parents brought to America from the Displaced Persons Camps in Germany after World War II was the featured essay this last March at Sandra Hurtes' website.

My poems "War Poets" and "My Father Talks about Time and the Camps" appear in the latest issue of the print journal Two Review. You can purchase a copy of the journal by clicking here. (The current issue also contains two fine poems by Oriana Ivy.)

________________

The photo of the Tatra Mountains of Poland is by a photographer who goes by the name Lonelywolf2.

Night of Flames by Douglas Jacobson

2011-05-03T14:12:00.001-07:00

Night of Flames is a novel about Polish lovers separated at the outbreak of World War II and their struggle to reunite. The book, available through Amazon, has been very well received, and Homer Hickam (the author of October Sky) describes Mr. Jacobson's book as "historical fiction at its best."

I asked him to tell me about the inspiration for his novel, and here's what he said:

I have always been interested in World War two history. With my Polish-American background (my mother was Polish), I had a particular interest in Poland's experience in the war. But I never imagined I would write a novel about it.

The beginning of Night of Flames goes back to 1993, when my daughter married a young man from Belgium and moved to Europe, setting our family on a course that has forever changed our lives. Over time, while traveling to Europe two or three times a year, we became very close friends with my son-in-law’s parents. They are wonderful, caring people who are several years older than we are. They were young children during the German occupation. Young, but old enough to remember. They didn’t talk about it at first, in fact they still don’t, its over, it happened a long time ago, and they survived. End of story.

But gradually, as they realized I really wanted to know, they began to tell me the stories. They told me about living in the cellar while their city was being bombed, about not having anything to eat for months on end and German snipers shooting at them while they scavenged in the streets for food, about my son-in-law’s grandfather being dragged away from the family home by the Gestapo in 1941. . . then returning five years later when he walked home from Germany.

The experiences of my Belgian in-laws inspired me. It made it real. It also gave me the historical background for blending the stories of courageous people from two countries, Poland and Belgium, into a unique perspective of the war. I spent the next five years writing Night of Flames: A Novel of World War Two.

_____________

Here's an excerpt from the beginning of the novel.

CHAPTER 1

Anna Kopernik slept on this hot, muggy night but it was a restless sleep troubled by strange dreams. The sheets were clammy and her thin cotton nightgown clung to her back. A paltry breeze drifted in through the open window with little effect. The still, humid air on this September morning hung over Warsaw like a massive wet blanket.

It was five o’clock and Anna drifted back and forth between consciousness and sleep, the dream flitting in and out of her mind like an annoying gnat. The telephone rang. Then it stopped. She wanted to answer it but couldn’t find it. It rang again but it wasn’t a telephone, it was something else . . . a bell, perhaps, or a horn. Anna kicked at the sticky, twisted sheet and rolled onto her back. She was almost awake but still just below the surface. The noise returned, louder now, a harsh clanging boring into her head. She kicked the sheet completely off, struggling to understand. What was it? A horn…or…a siren.

Anna’s eyes snapped open and she sat bolt upright. The shrill sound blasted into her brain, penetrating through the fog of sleep like an icy wind. She blinked and looked around the dark room, trying to focus on shadowy images as the sound wailed on and on.

She ran to the window. It was still dark but the night sky held a hint of gray. An early morning mist shrouded the street lamps casting a gloomy, almost spooky glow along the deserted sidewalk below. The grating noise of the air-raid siren raised the hair on the back of her neck and suddenly she was shivering. Anna crossed her arms over her chest and stared into the dull, charcoal sky. Then she heard another sound.
It came from the west, a deep angry drone like a swarm of giant bees, growing louder by the second. Anna tried to move but her feet didn’t respond. Immobilized, riveted in place, she stared out the open window as the pounding vibration of a hundred propellers enveloped her. The thunderous roar of the bombers drowned out the air raid sirens and the entire building seemed to sway in rhythm with the oscillations.
Anna snapped out of the spell and instinctively reached out to pull the window closed. A flash of light blinded her and an ear-shattering blast threw her backwards amidst a shower of glass and falling plaster. She fell heavily against a small wooden night table and collapsed on the floor.

Another blast rocked the building. Frantic and disoriented, a searing pain in her head and a million lights dancing in her eyes, Anna tried to crawl under the bed, oblivious to the shards of glass that sliced through her hands and knees. Jarring detonations punctuated the deafening thunder of the airplanes.

Then, as abruptly as it started, it was over, the pulsating thump of propellers receding into the distance. Anna lay still, her head under the bed. Seconds passed then a minute and the only sound she heard through the ringing in her ears was the continued wailing of the air raid sirens. She crawled backwards and tried to stand but her legs gave out. She fell against the bed and back onto the floor, this time wincing in pain from the glass and chunks of plaster that littered the floor. Holding the edge of the bed, she struggled to her feet and staggered across the room.
Through the ringing and the sirens Anna heard another sound, someone screaming in the hall. She lurched through the doorway and tripped over Irene, who was crawling on her hands and knees, covered with plaster dust. Anna reached down and helped her friend to her feet.

Irene stared at her with blank eyes then pushed past her. “Justyn!” she screamed. “Oh my God, Justyn!”

They stumbled down the dark hallway to the bedroom at the top of the stairs. The door was split down the middle, hanging from the top hinge. Anna pushed it open and they stepped into the dust-filled room.

Her eyes began to clear and Anna squinted, trying to see through the haze. The small room was completely shattered with a gaping hole in the outside wall. On the left, where the bed had been, she spotted the ten-year-old boy lying still, face down under a pile of wood and plaster.

Irene shrieked and rushed to her son, clawing away at the rubble.
Anna knelt down beside her and they turned the limp boy onto his back. His eyes were closed and his breathing was shallow, blood oozed from a ragged gash on his forehead. Anna spotted a pillow amidst the rubble. She pulled off the pillowcase, shook out the dust and ripped it in half. As Irene held her son’s head, Anna wrapped the makeshift bandage around the wound, tying it tightly to stop the bleeding.

Irene looked up at her and started to say something when Justyn’s voice croaked, “Mama? What . . . ?” The boy flinched in pain, tears welling up in his eyes and Irene cradled him in her arms, rocking him back and forth.

Anna stood up and rubbed her eyes, burning and irritated from the thick dust.

She smelled something.

It was more than dust.

Smoke.

She reached down and grabbed Irene by the arm, yelling over the wailing siren, “We’ve got to get out of here!”

Irene looked up at her, clutching her son, not comprehending.

“The building’s on fire!” Anna screamed, pulling her friend to her feet. She hoisted the boy into Irene’s arms and pushed her out of the room.

The hallway was quickly filling with smoke as they scrambled down the stairs. By the time they reached the ground floor Anna’s eyes were burning and she could barely find her way through the foyer to the front door. She grabbed Irene’s arm, pulled open the heavy wooden door and they burst out, coughing and gagging into the humid pre-dawn air.

___________________

Mr. Jacobson's new novel about Poland and the war is entitled The Katyn Order and is also available from Amazon.

I encourage people to visit his website where he posts about Poland and World War II.

Poems of Beauty and Wisdom

2011-03-31T13:58:00.000-07:00

A Review of Talking Diamonds, Linda Nemec Foster's new collection of poems.

By Oriana Ivy

The typical poem in this beautiful collection by Linda Nemec Foster, her eighth book, is quiet, elegant, and wise. These poems do not shout; they whisper - about aging and dying, a mother's frightful dementia (the mother no longer recognizes her daughter and calls her "Mom"), deformed children who are nevertheless a gift, and dead stars whose light still travels to us. They are filled with small, uncanny observations, for instance the demented mother saying "What a glorious burden" to the living room wall.

It is the poet's gift of compassion that makes such poems not only bearable, but a pleasure to read. For instance, we learn that the mother's own mother died when her daughter was only fifteen.

But me, I heard my mother calling
my name every day long after
we buried her . . . Always
the same voice from that dark place.
`Helen, Helen.' Her voice so clear
as if she was in the basement
calling me down to help her fold
clean, white sheets.

This is heartbreak presented in the most intimate, quiet voice. In a later poem, just as quietly, we are told her mother was conceived to take the place of two daughters who previously died. It's all muted colors and gray sky. A new kind of trinity presides over this volume: Mother, Daughter, and the Spirit "where everything begins and nothing ends."

Linda Nemec Foster's other great gift is her sensitivity to the astonishing in unlikely settings.

. . . nothing prepares you for this vision:
Our Lady of Guadalupe on Waikiki.
A blue ocean away from where she
first appeared to that dirt-poor
Indian peasant on Tepeyac Hill,
you can't miss her shape of glorious
colors coming toward you: deep teal,
bright vermilion, bronzed gold tattooed
on the chest of a huge Mexican from Baja.
Even his back is emblazoned with her back
and you're stunned by the accuracy
of detail; the little angel at her feet
holding a sliver of the crescent moon
as if she were a living, breathing icon.
. . .
This ocean, this beach at your feet
as if she were Boticelli's Venus
washed ashore with the sea foam,
washed ashore for your approval.
And you tell yourself this isn't a miracle,
only a tattoo; this isn't anything
extraordinary, only your life

Here is a poet who is always prepared for miracles, and who recognizes the deep affinity between Venus on her shell and Our Lady on the Crescent, typical of the icons of the Black Madonna. In another unforgettable poem, "The Blind and the Lame Swim at the Y," the transformation is even more startling:

But it's the crippled girl
with a slash for a mouth
that amazes the water. Tiny
deformed feet that curl
like tender shells forgotten
on some deserted beach,
become the shining, sleek fins
of a mermaid's tail.

The poem ends with a stanza of skillfully wrought wisdom: mothers will accept their handicapped children "without regret" -

Because the secret heart of every
fairy tale is locked deep within
these children. Because this heart
beats in goodness which is rarer
than perfection. Because this heart
is like water: uncaring yet
kind, transparent yet full.

Among my favorite poems is "Red Amaryllis, 1937," honoring an art lover, a man who even in a strip joint behaves in a courtly manner:

When a black girl
with erect nipples came to dance inches from your face,
you stood up, took her hand, and began to waltz.
. . . After the waltz, you kissed her hand.
She said her name was Jasmine. Flower of night air
and moonlight, you replied.

Another favorite is "The Nature of the Beast," with these lines about a cat bringing its offering of a nestling it killed:

But remember how it holds the gift
tenderly in its mouth, approaching
you like a child, a lover who wants
to give you the gift of its wildness.

Poetry is not the things themselves, it is in how we respond to them - quietly, lovingly, without judgment or bitterness, only with compassion and understanding, Linda Nemec Foster teaches us. In spite of heartbreak, there is beauty and grace in life. Everything can be transformed, transfigured into brilliance. In the title poem of the collection, she imagines diamonds talking

about their lives underground.
Never are they bitter or angry. Nor do they
even curse those dark
memories of suffocating black. They know
every facet of their brilliance began as mere
coal - a mere dark fist waiting
for a chance to be something
other than ordinary.

But then it turns out that nothing is merely ordinary. Simply to wake up to another day is already extraordinary, if we have the eyes to see. Linda Nemec Foster certainly has the eyes that are always ready for miracles, and the words with which to describe them. Through her, we see that life is indeed a glorious burden - with equal emphasis on "burden" and "glorious."

____________________

The book is available from Amazon and New Issues Press. To see more about Linda Nemec Foster, I encourage readers to checkout her website.

Poet Oriana Ivy blogs about poetry at Oriana-Poetry. Her translations of Zbigniew Herbert are available at Scream Online. Some of her poems are also available. online. A powerful sequence about her Polish grandmother appears here. Her poem "My America" about discovering America for herself is available at her blog.

Poems about the Warsaw Uprising, 1944

2011-03-15T11:37:00.001-07:00

Anna Swir (Świrszczyńska) was a woman who fought with the Polish resistance during World War II. When the Germans decided to destroy Warsaw in 1944, she became a front-line nurse in a battle that saw the city leveled and 250,000 Poles die.

Thirty years after the war, she published a book of poems about her experiences in that slaughter. It was called Building the Barricade. Gifted poet and translator Piotr Florczyk has produced the present volume, Building the Barricade and Other Poems. It combines the best poems from that earlier book along with Anna Swir's later poems, poems which focus on the human body and her experiences of love and family. This bi-lingual collection, starting with her writing about the war and ending with the last poem she wrote, "Tomorrow They'll Cut Me Open," gives the reader an overall sense of her career and her strengths as a poet.

I could quote from what readers like Czeslaw Milosz, Edward Hirsch, Eva Hoffman, and Sandra Alcosser say about these powerful poems, but I won't. The poems don't need it. They speak clearly and powerfully on their own.

I CARRIED BEDPANS

I worked as an orderly at the hospital
without medicine and water.
I carried bedpans
filled with pus, blood and feces.

I loved pus, blood and feces—
they were alive like life,
and there was less and less
life around.

When the world was dying,
I was only two hands, handing
the wounded a bedpan.

THOUGHTS
OF A FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD NURSE

If all the bullets in the world
hit me,
then they couldn’t hit anybody else.

And let me die as many times
as there are people in the world,
so that they wouldn’t have to die,
even the Germans.

And let nobody know
that I died for them,
so that they wouldn’t be sad.

THE RATS REMAIN

In this city
there are no more people. Sometimes a cat
with burnt eyes
crawls out from an alley
to die.

Or a rat
scuttles to the other side of the street.

Or the wind moves
a page in a book on the pavement
and knocks the window
with the glinting shard of glass.

____________________________

Anna Swir's book Building the Barricades and Other Poems can be purchased from Calypso Editions (free shipping included).

Translator Piotr Florczyk previously translated Julian Kornhauser's Been and Gone. I posted a blog about it recently.

"The Rats Remain" and "Thoughts of a Fourteen-Year Old Nurse" were originally published in the online journal Little Star.

Celebrating the Poetry and Life of Czeslaw Milosz

2011-03-10T18:45:00.000-08:00

This is the year of Czeslaw Milosz, and a number of celebrations in his honor are scheduled across the country.

Cecilia Woloch and I will be doing one in Los Angeles for the Modjeska Club on April 16, 2011, 6:30 p.m. The presentation is entitled "Milosz in My Life, conversation with poets John Guzlowski and Cecilia Woloch." It will be given at The Ruskin Art Club, Los Angeles. For further information, please go to Maja Trochimczyk's Modjeska Club blog

Here's one of my favorite poems by the Nobel Laureate:

Encounter

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

__________

I also received a notice about a celebration from the Polish Cultural Institute of New York. Here is their announcement:

The Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y together with the Polish Cultural Institute in New York present

A CELEBRATION OF CZESLAW MILOSZ
WITH CLARE CAVANAGH, ROBERT HASS, AND ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI

Monday, March 21, 2011, 8:00 PM

The Unterberg Poetry Center
1395 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY
Admission: $19//$10 age 35 and under Tel: 212.415.5550

Czeslaw Milosz's "trust in the delicious joy-bringing potential of art and intellect was protected by strong bulwarks built from the knowledge and experience that he had gained at first hand and at great cost."
- Seamus Heaney, 2004

The Polish Cultural Institute in New York is honored to announce the first event in the United States in a year-long international celebration of the centennial of the birth of Nobel Prize winning poet, essayist, translator, and scholar, Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004). The Polish parliament has declared 2011 the Milosz Year in honor of one of Poland's greatest cultural figures.

The Unterberg Poetry Center, which hosted six readings by Czeslaw Milosz during his lifetime, in collaboration with the Polish Cultural Institute in New York have invited Milosz's friend and Berkeley colleague, poet Robert Hass, translator and Milosz biographer Clare Cavanagh, and one of the most important contemporary Polish poets who has also been dividing his time between Poland and the US, Adam Zagajewski, to read and reflect upon the life and work of Czeslaw Milosz at the 92nd Street Y.

One hundred years after his birth, fifty-seven years after the publication of his seminal essay [The Captive Mind], Milosz's indictment of the servile intellectual rings truer than ever: "his chief characteristic is his fear of thinking for himself." - Tony Judt, New York Review of Books, 2010

Branded a "catastrophist" by critics of his early poetry in the 1930s, publishing underground at great risk during the Second World War, challenged by leftist intellectuals in Paris in the 1950s for seeking asylum from the Polish Communist government, criticized by Polish emigres for having served as a diplomat in the same government, joining the anti-war movement at Berkeley in the 1960s, and questioned by conservative Catholics as a heretic at his burial, Czeslaw Milosz lived a full life as an independent thinker and as an inspiration to others struggling against the prevailing forces in their own contexts. Milosz spent over 40 years in the United States, becoming an important figure in the West Coast poetry scene, across the country, and throughout the world, and many of the Milosz Year events in the United States in 2011 will focus on his time in America and his American legacy.

_______________________

One of the best sources for Milosz's poems online is the Poetry Foundation site.

For more information about events in the US celebrating Milosz's writing, please click here.

Jolanta W. Best has written a very good summary of the events scheduled in Poland to celebrate Milosz. Please click here.

Maps and Shadows--A Novel about the Poles Taken to Siberia

2011-02-21T08:14:00.000-08:00

I do a number of presentations each year about what happened to my Polish parents during World War II. I talk about how they and so many other Poles were put on trains and sent to work in the slave labor and concentration camps in Germany. I also talk about the Poles who were left behind, the brutal conditions they lived under during the war. Invariably, during the Q & A sessions after these presentations, someone from the audience will rise and say, "I never knew this happened."

I have been hearing this for years.

Aquila Polonica is a relatively new publishing house that is trying to do something about this problem. This press specializes in books about the Polish experience in World War II. They have published a number of outstanding books in recent years: the award-winning The Mermaid and the Messerschmitt: War Through a Woman’s Eyes, 1939-1940, The Ice Road: An Epic Journey from the Stalinist Labor Camps to Freedom, and 303 Squadron: The Legendary Battle of Britain Fighter Squadron. Each of these books has endeavored to tell a part of the largely unknown story of what it was like for Poles in the Second World War.

To this list, the press now adds its first novel, Maps and Shadows by the poet Krysia Jopek. Ms. Jopek's novel tells the story of what happened to the 1.5 million innocent Poles who were deported to forced labor camps in Siberia after the Soviets occupied eastern Poland at the beginning of the war. were taken over by the Soviets.

Focusing on the real experiences of her own family, she follows a mother, a father, a sister and two brothers from Poland to Siberia and beyond, writing of the brutal transport of the Poles to Siberia, the years at hard labor there, and the hardships they experienced as they were eventually released by the Soviets to find their own way to freedom and security.

Ms. Jopek's narrative combines her own gift for lyricism with a straightforward narrative style that demands you keep reading. Telling her story from the points of view of four of the family members, she is able to give us a deep sense of what the experience was like for men and women, soldiers and poets, the old and the young.

Here are some of the opening passages in the novel. They are in the voice of Helcia, the daughter of the family and a poet:

Everyone has a story.

Some stories are difficult to believe, though true. Other accurate, yet dull. Some difficult to tell--apart from the others. One story often spills into another, echoes, diverges before crossing trajectories again. The skeins once separated, can fray. To isolate the variable can unthread the most composed, even the most vain.

This is my story and my younger brother Henryk's story. My mother Zofia's and my father Andrzej's. My youngest brother Jozef doesn't speak of these places. Somehow his memories were lost.

A story of war, shifting boundaries, alliances and ideologies. A story of mid-twentieth-century ice and burning sun.

________________________________________-

Maps and Shadows is available from Aquila Polonica and Amazon.

To read another response to the novel, I recommend Danusha Goska's Bieganski blog.

WHAT SOME POLISH DIASPORA WRITERS AND ARTISTS ARE UP TO--AND A POLONIA POETRY COMPETITION

2011-02-16T02:40:00.000-08:00

Here's some news about the activities of Polish and Polish-American writers and artists.

I received a note from poet Sarah Luczaj. She writes that her friend recently completed work on a cabin in Poland that's perfect as a writer's retreat or for holidays. The cabin is beautifully restored in a traditional style and set in 20 acres of private woodland and mountain pasture. If you want more information about the cabin, please click here for the webpage. By the way, Sarah's book An Urgent Request is now available from Amazon.

Poet Sharon Chmielarz has a new book out called The Sky is Great The Sky is Blue.

Maja Trochimczyk's anthology of poems in honor of Chopin (Chopin with Cherries) was recently reviewed by Christopher Woods in Contemporary World Literature. She also has been blogging about her experiences with this anthology. You can read about them at her blog.

Poet Leonard Kress, scholar Roman Koropeckyj, and actress Beata Pozniak Daniels will be participating in a celebration of the poetry of the great Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855) at the Modjeska Club in Los Angeles this Saturday, February 19. For more information, please check out the Modjeska Club site. To read Leonard's translation of Mickiewicz'z Pan Tadeusz, click here.

Grzegorz Wroblewski has had a great year so far. His fine poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Shampoo, and Words Without Borders. His recent book of poems, The Marzipan Factory, was reviewed by Gilbert Wesley Purdy in Eclectica.

Thad Rutkowski's recent novel Haywire was reviewed in the National Book Critics Circle blog Critical Mass and in Kirkus. To read a section of the novel posted at Writing the Polish Diaspora, click here.

Andrena Zawinski, the features editor of Poetrymagazine.com, tells me that Karen Kovacik is one of the featured poets in the current issue.

Janusz Zalewski writes that the journal Poets and Writers now provides a list of subscribers who self-identify as Polish Americans. You can check out the list by clicking here.

Christina Pacosz's poem "Another Version of the Goings-on at the Solstice Christmas Village" was published at New Verse News.

I'd like to recommend three blogs that I follow: one is by the poet Oriana Ivy and the other is by fiction writer Danuta Hinc and the third is by essayist Danusha Goska. All are excellent.

The Anglo-Polish poets are planning an event in London. Here's a youtube about it: YouTube - PoEzja Londyn

Finally, here's news about a poetry contest in Poland that encourages submissions from Polonia:

7th Annual Poetry Contest Invites Polonia Participants

Mielec, a town best known in Poland for its aircraft industry, now exports airplanes and aircraft components to customers around the world. It is also home to an international poetry competition, held each year at the Pedagogical Library. There are three categories: Adult, Juvenile, and Polonia.

The top prize for the first two categories is the Silver Quill of the Mayor of Mielec; the grand prize in the Polonia category is the Eagle of the Senate of the Polish Republic. Senator Wladyslaw Ortyl, who represents the region in Parliament, and the Mayor of Mielec are honorary patrons of the event. For runner-ups there are lesser prizes and a number of honorable mention awards. All poems that clear the hurdle into the finals are published in a commemorative chapbook.

Entries are being accepted now for the judging which will take place at the end of May 2011 (deadline for submission is March 25, 2011). Entrants are permitted one poem of up to 30 lines. Submission is anonymous, a code word is used to identify the poem and poet. (Apparently poetry in translation is acceptable if you meet the other criteria.)

Experienced and aspiring poets who would like to submit entries to the 7th Tourney of the All-Poland and Polonia Poetry Competition should check the website of the Pedagogical Library where the official rules are posted.

Ewa Parma's W Strefie Ognia

2011-02-09T07:28:00.000-08:00

I first met Polish poet Ewa Parma on Facebook last year in February and have been reading and enjoying her poems in Polish and English since then. The poems have an emotional drive and intensity that keeps me coming back to her work. Her writing has been published here and in Poland in journals like Slask , Connecticut River Review, Artful Dodge, and Mr. Cogito. Recently, she published a new book of poems in Polish entitled W Strefie Ognia(The Fire Zone). The book is available from the publisher .

Ewa has allowed me to post one of the poems from her new book. The poem is about a wooden statue of Mary Magdalene "with Meryl Streep’s eyes and hair like a coat all over her body" that Ewa found in a museum in Pieskowa Skala, Poland. Her English translation of her poem follows the Polish version.

Maria Magdalena z Pieskowej Skały

Jeżeli opuszczą mnie moje diabły,
obawiam się, że ulecą z nimi moje anioły.
R.M.Rilke

Nie patrz tak na mnie natarczywie
nie oddam ci ani jednego grzechu
i nie chcę by ode mnie odeszło
siedem moich złych duchów –
każdy z nich to bliski przyjaciel
prawdziwy anioł stróż
w rozterkach zawsze przy mnie
w upadkach niezawodny
w rozpaczy niezastąpiony
Gdy wychodzę z mojej jaskini
okrywam się szczelniej włosami
- ich blask oślepia anioły
co przychodzą z wodą i chlebem
i wodzą na pokuszenie swoim
androgynicznym pięknem
Za każdym razem pytają
czy łaska już na mnie spłynęła
lecz ja wciąż nie jestem gotowa
i wybieram pocałunek mężczyzny
przy którym zapiera mi dech
- oddychaj – mówi mój anioł
- oddychaj – powtarza mój demon

Here's Ewa's translation:

Marie Magdalene from Pieskowa Skala

If my devils leave me, I am afraid
my angels will fly away, too.
(R.M.Rilke)

Don’t look at me so insistently
I won’t give you a single sin of mine
and I don’t want my seven evil spirits
to abandon me – each one
is a close friend to me
a real guardian angel
standing by me when I am irresolute
unfailing when I am falling
indispensable to me in despair
Whenever I go out from my cave
I wrap myself tightly with my hair –
its glamour is blinding the angels
bringing me bread and water
and tempting me with their
androgynous beauty
Each time they ask me if
I have already been touched by Grace
but I am still not ready
and choose the kiss of a man
by whom I keep losing my breath
“Breathe”, says my angel
“Breathe”, echoes my demon

__________________________________

Other poems by Ewa Parma are available online at Modowo.PL.

Haywire by Thad Rutkowski

2011-01-21T08:28:00.000-08:00

Thad Rutkowski's new novel Haywire is currently the #1 book on the Small Press Distribution best seller list. The novel is made up of 49 semi-autobiographical flash stories narrated by the son of a Polish-American artist father and a Chinese mother.

Thad's a terrific writer, and I recommend his work. As the novelist John Barth says, Thad Rutkowski is "tough and funny and touching and harrowing."

I heard Thad read a section of Haywire at a Polish American Historical Association meeting in DC a couple of years ago, and I still remember how much the audience enjoyed the story "Pan Tadeusz." In fact, I don't think I've ever heard people at an academic conference having that much fun.

Here's the Pushcart Prize-nominated story he read that day in DC:

PAN TADEUSZ

In the morning, my father drove me to school because I had missed the bus. I’d missed it because my father was talking to me.

“I don’t care if you go to school,” he said as he steered his car. “I don’t want you to associate with American kids. When I was in school, I had no friends. That’s why they called me The Brain.

“I say, to hell with this educational system,” he continued. “You’re going to learn what Polish schoolchildren know. You’re going to read Adam Mickiewicz’s epic poem, Pan Tadeusz. You’ll start by memorizing a hundred lines. Then you’ll recite to me.”

As we rode, cold air blew through the seams of the car’s flimsy convertible roof. Mornings brought a chill in this part of Appalachia.

“Do you know who Mickiewicz was? Mickey was a poet and a hero! There are statues of Mickey all over Poland!”

I looked at the gas gauge. The needle sat almost at Empty. “Is it time to get gas?” I asked.

“Don’t interrupt me!” my father replied. “You’re going to learn about the lost country of Lithuania and the noble families who lived there. If you don’t pick up anything else, you’ll have better manners.”

*

When I told my mother about my father’s assignment, she said, “That’s the Polish way. I know nothing about it. I know my own way, the Chinese way. But if you want to be part of this family, you’ve got to act like a Pole.”

“How about you?” I asked. “Did you convert?”

“I learned to cook like a Pole from my mother-in-law. After I met your father in college here, that was a condition of marrying into his family.”

*

I started to read Pan Tadeusz. The poem was in a small book with a plain-red hard cover.

I couldn’t understand why a traveler named Thaddeus arrived at a farm, caught a glimpse of a swan-necked woman next to a pond, and shared a meal with the people of the estate. These people spent a lot of time hunting hares and loading sheaves of rye.

I put the book down, pulled on my clodhoppers and went to visit an Amish friend. I rode my bike a few miles, then crossed a field on foot. In the open, a bull spotted me and started to charge. The animal bellowed as it came. Its horns had been cut off, but the loss seemed to have aggravated its anger. When it got closer, it began to dig at the ground with a front hoof. Clouds of condensation sprayed from its nostrils.

I hopped a fence and reached the farmhouse. I knocked on a side door while looking into the dark interior. I saw a dog sleeping on an upholstered chair, and a woman with a headscarf sitting next to a cast-iron stove.

My friend came to the door.

“I’d like to walk to your pond,” I said.

“I’ll go with you,” he said.

The two of us hiked across fields until we came to a crater filled with water.

“The pond almost went dry,” my friend said, “but your father brought a drainpipe to fix it.”

I looked into the water and saw a thick iron cylinder standing on end. Water was flowing into the mouth of the pipe and leaving from under the pond’s embankment.

“We jammed the pipe into the ground,” my friend said, “and the water rose, but most of the fish died.

I could see the Amish family’s barn in the distance. It looked sturdy and newly painted. “Your building is in great shape,” I said.

“Someone burned our old barn down,” my friend said.

“Who did it?”

“It happened while we were asleep. We saw a truck driving away, but we couldn’t see its license plate. Ours was the fourth barn burned in this valley.”

“Why did they do it?”

“They like to see things burn.”

On our way back from the pond, my friend brought me to a chicken shed. “Have you ever seen a green egg?” he asked.

He unlatched a rickety door and led me inside. I saw a bird-shaped object on the floor. It was on its back, with its curled wings pointing upward. “Is that a dead chicken?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Why is it on the floor?”

“No one has taken it out yet.”

I looked around the small, hot room for green eggs.

“You know,” my friend said, “sometimes I think about leaving the faith. I’d like to have a truck instead of a horse, and maybe a telephone. I’d like to smoke tobacco.”

*

That night, I noticed that my mother didn’t offer Polish food. Instead, she served a mixture of rice and Chinese cabbage. My brother and sister and I used American utensils. My father wasn’t present; I guessed he was at the local bar.

I picked up a pair of chopsticks; I’d learned from my mother how to hold them. But my brother and sister didn’t follow my lead.

*

The next time my father and I were in his car, he tested my knowledge of Pan Tadeusz.

“What does the title mean?” he asked.

“Sir Thaddeus,” I said.

“That’s right. Now, recite!”

I was silent.

My father pressed the accelerator, and air began to whistle around the edges of the car’s vinyl roof.

“I see you’d rather horse around than listen to the old man.”

“I went to see a friend,” I said.

“I’m the judge,” my father said. “You’re a peasant. In the poem, the judge decides what happens with peasants.”

The car’s engine banged a couple of times, then went dead. “We’re out of gas,” my father said.

I waited while my father walked to a fueling station. His trip took a long time. When he came back, he was carrying a large can with a goose-necked spout.

He removed the gas cap on the rear fender and funneled liquid into the opening. When he turned the key, the engine churned but wouldn’t catch. He repeated the steps without success.

Presently, a passing motorist stopped and said, “You need to prime the carburetor.”

My father lifted the hood, unfastened a metal lid and poured a small amount of gasoline down the engine’s throat. When he turned the key again, we heard a small explosion. Then we heard the cylinders engage. In a moment, the engine was spinning like a top.

On the way home, my father stopped at a roadside bar. I sat at a Formica-topped table with him. He had a bourbon and a beer, while I had a ginger ale. “You will go to your room,” he said, “and you will not come out until you’ve memorized a hundred lines.”

*

In my room, I ignored the Polish epic. I lit a stick of incense and let it smolder. Then I lit a hand-rolled tobacco cigarette and smoked it. I looked out my window and imagined there was another country on the other side of the nearest mountain. I could climb over the ridge to get to the other realm. Boulders strewn along the summit wouldn’t stop me. On top, I would look over and see a city. I’d walk down the other side and come to a street. The street would take me to a customs office. I’d show my identity papers and cross.

I opened Pan Tadeusz. Sir Thaddeus was leaving the farm. He was saying goodbye to the swan-necked woman. His head and the woman’s head touched like the tops of two trees in a storm.

I shut my eyes and mouthed the words. I thought it wouldn’t take long to commit a hundred lines to memory.

Credit: Published in The Westchester Review, 2010, and in Haywire (Starcherone Books), 2011

____________________________________________

You can buy Haywire from his publisher Starcherone Books or Amazon.

If you want to know more about Thad. You can find biographical information, interviews, and more at his website.

There's also a fine interview about how he uses autobiographical details in his writing at Planet Green.

___________________________________________

By the way, if you're interested in reading Pan Tadeusz: or the Last Foray in Lithuania: a History of the Nobility in the Years 1811 and 1812 in Twelve Books of Verse by Adam Mickiewicz and getting really smart, there's a wonderful English translation by the poet Leonard Kress available free as a PDF download at his website by clicking here.

Stephen Lewandowski's O Lucky One

2011-01-13T12:14:00.000-08:00

O Lucky One, Stephen Lewandowski's tenth book of poems, again shows his profound gifts. His poems have the sparseness and clarity that you'd expect from someone who has dedicated his life to preserving the environment. He sees the world in all of its line and color, weight and shape, and he can tell us about natural facts in language that always rings true. But there's more to his writing, of course, than this.

Like Emerson and Thoreau and the other great transcendentalists of the 19th Century, Stephen has the gift of sensing spiritual facts beneath the natural facts he sees so clearly and describes so exactly. In each of his poems, he brings us to a place and somehow finds a way of showing us the mystery there.

In many ways, what he does is harder than what Emerson and Thoreau did. When these writers walked out into the forest or looked up at the stars, people still believed that the woods and the stars were worth looking at and that in their shadows and brightness some kind of truth lay that could touch us.

Stephen, for all his Polish heritage and his "otherness," still has this faith and a way of holding these shadows and lights in his hand so that we can see what he sees, understand what he does.

Here are two poems from O Lucky One:

BARE HILL BY STARLIGHT

To get to Bare Hill
look for that dark spot
on the map.
You may walk up
a rough road
into sunlight
reflected from clouds,
but once the darkness
comes, a fire is set
and roars into the night.
At the call to dance,
there's a ring or two
around the dying fire.
When we stumble down
feeling with our feet
for the dark path we
follow that stream
of stars.

MEETING THE BEAR

At night
bears flow
like some dark
force
through the trees
they turn logs
and stones
to lick up food
their thick fur
absorbs starlight
to become bear-shaped
black holes

One slips down from
a weedy road bank
and without a look
enters the field
illuminated by my car
soaking up
every ounce of light-
for a moment
there is no car
no driver
no time
no road
no bear
now we breathe
deep and travel on

_____________________________

Stephan Lewandowski has been busy working with soil conservation for 24 years, preservation of historic places, and environmental protection. For the past ten years, he has supported himself as a consultant specializing in watershed protection.

His book O Lucky One is available from Foothills Publishing.

His poems also have appeared in Scream Online and Kritya.

His essays about his life and his work are available online at The Crooked Lake Review.

Contest: East-European Roots: New Writing on the Old World

2011-01-13T08:28:00.000-08:00

The people at Summer Literary Seminars are having a non-fiction contest this year with the theme "Eastern European Histories: people's roots and ancestral heritage."

Here is some of the info. More is available (including the complete guidelines at the SLS site by clicking here.

The Summer Literary Seminars SLS Jewish Lithuania/Litvak Experiences Program is pleased to announce a new non-fiction contest: East-European Roots: New Writing on the Old World, held this year in affiliation with Tablet Magazine, an online magazine providing a "new take on Jewish life", and judged by Philip Lopate.

The theme for the contest is Eastern European Histories: people's roots and ancestral heritage. The contest winner will have their work prominently featured online in Tablet Magazine. Additionally, they will receive free airfare, tuition, and housing to our 2011 SLS Jewish Lithuania/Litvak Experiences Program.

Second-place winners will receive a full tuition waiver for the 2011 SLS Jewish Lithuania/Litvak Experiences Program, and third-place winners will receive a 50% tuition discount.

A number of select contest participants, based on the overall strength of their work, will be offered tuition scholarships, as well, applicable to the 2011 SLS Jewish Lithuania/Litvak Experiences Program.

Poland, Love, Communism, and Spring

2010-12-26T07:50:00.000-08:00

I received a poem a couple of days ago from my friend Danusha Goska, and I thought I would share it with you. I've also asked her to send a photo from her time in Poland and a brief piece about the origin of the poem.

I lived in Krakow, 1988-89. Communism's blackened, necrotic carcass was blotting out the sun. Solar scientists can confirm this: there was less available light in Poland, 1939-1989. Daily life was a Kafka text. Riots provided the edgy outlet of a cocaine jag. Against all odds, I fell in love with a Polish man. It wasn't happy. I took a train north. I got off at Gdansk and began to walk. I walked beyond the edge of the city. I walked through ploughed fields. Polish spring smacked me in the face.

It's Hard to Believe

It's hard –
striding full the scratch
of eager underbrush,
pregnant smells: alfalfa, earth fresh cut,
the ting and bang and thump and squeal of fields of lapwings,
bog-bound frogs,
flower bidden-bees,
yellow squares, quilted, tight, of rape,
bruise-blue ripening rye,
and sturdy chestnut colts: shoulders & rumps & thighs
shiny as chrome,
and tattered path-side tapestries
of Queen Anne's lace
and fallow fields scattered
as skies where you don't yet know the constellations
to believe –
to know, yes, I know –
but to really believe
that you won't be coming
back into my life again.

___________________________

The photo of Danusha was taken the roof of Dom Studencki Piast in Krakow, Poland.

She is the author of Bieganski: The Brute Polak Stereotype in Polish-Jewish Relations and American Popular Culture and the novel Love Me More: An Addict's Diary.

She blogs at Bieganski the Blog.

Two Books by Maria Jastrzębska

2010-11-17T10:42:00.000-08:00

In these two books -- Everyday Angels and I'll Be Back Before You Know it -- there are poems for anyone who has ever lived in two countries, two languages, two hearts at once.

Maria Jastrzębska was born in Warsaw in 1953 and came to England as a young child when her parents escaped from Poland. She writes poems that are at the same time here in the new world (England or America, call it what you will) and there in the old world (Poland). Her poems explore the borderland between lives and countries that all exiles, refugees, and immigrants live in, the shadow land of objects, places, and people that sometimes as sure as stone and other times elusive as dreams.

What her poems do in these two books is to make this shadow land, this border between here and there, real to the reader in the way that only poetry can be. She slows down the swirling calls of time and memory and allows us to rest for a moment in that changeless place she has created, regarding the ashes in our hands, the ones that refuse to be ashes.

These are deeply personal poems that speak directly and clearly to the reader. I saw this immediately in "Europa," the first poem in the wonderfully titled I'll Be Back Before You Know It.

EUROPA

There was a smell before I was born.
It came across fields
dotted with sows, above yards

where thin chickens scratched
in the dust, past cordons
of pines, scaring out quails.

It was stronger than the smog
of Nowa Huta, which eats away
stone faces and newborn lungs.

How could you miss it
when it rose from chimney stacks
along that flat skyline

or blew over rivers and broken
telegraph wires to spread
above schools and church spires?

Ladies dabbed Chanel Number 5
on their fox furs to ward it off -
gents lit the fattest cigars.

Gents with made-up eyes, ladies
with shingled hair and monocles
danced rumbas and milongas

but overnight they vanished.
Not even alcohol or opium
could dispel it - the smell

stayed in the air.
Soon everyone coughed.
Some politely, some not.

In Ms. Jastrzębska's more recent book Everyday Angels, she continues to explore this borderland and her exploration, I think, becomes a search for what lasts in this life and the one we left behind. I see this in many of the poems, but perhaps most clearly in the poem that ends this volume.

OLD ROSES

No one
expected them

to live this long.
Their bodies sharp

sticks. Whitened
by mildew. Skin

mottled by every
disease known.

Buds form
almost

in spite of them,
rotting before.

they've had a chance
to open, like words

misshaped by
the lips,

coated in cuckoo
spit, petals

darkening too soon.
One or two

survive, nodding
high, lucidly

sweet, impossible
to reach.

_____________________________________

Everyday Angels is available from the publisher at Waterloopress.co.uk, I'll Be Back Before You Know It from Pighog Press.

Contact information for Ms. Jastrzębska can be found at her webpage.

Poems by Ms. Jastrzębska appeared in the issue of KRITYA devoted to Polish Diaspora writers, edited by Christina Pacosz and me.

To read more about Maria Jastrzębska, please go to the Poetry International website.

Borowski Design Competition Winner

2010-11-03T10:20:00.000-07:00

I was fortunate enough to be asked to serve as one of the judges in the recent competition to find a cover design for Tadeusz Borowski's seminal book about his experiences at Auschwitz, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman. We received hundreds of fine designs from around the world, and the image above by Anna Zyśko of Tarnobrzeg, Poland, was finally--after much discussion--chosen as the winning design.

To read more about this competition and to see five other entries to the contest, please go to John Bertram's site Venus Febriculosa.

The competition was sponsored in part by the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in Los Angeles.

Ewa Lipska's The New Century Poems

2010-11-03T07:19:00.000-07:00

For many readers, Poland is the country of poets. Some of them are internationally known. The recent Polish Nobel Laureates, Czesław Miłosz and Wisława Szymborska, of course, come to mind. But the list of fine contemporary Polish poets is deep, and some of their names are familiar to American readers, names like Zbigniew Herbert, Tadeusz Różewicz, and Adam Zagajewski; others aren't yet.

But they will be.

A new generation of translators are working to make the best contemporary Polish poetry available to American readers. I've written about some of these translators here in the past, scholars and poets like Karen Kovacik, Leonard Kress, Oriana Ivy, Piotr Florczyk, Janusz Zalewski, Danuta Borchardt, Bill Johnston, and Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough.

Robin Davidson and Ewa Elzbieta Nowakowska have joined this list with their powerful and long-overdue translation of the poems of Ewa Lipska. Entitled The New Century: Poems, this volume from Northwestern University Press gathers together many of her finest poems with introductory material by the two translators as well as Ewa Lipska.

Here's a piece from Robin Davidson's informative introduction to Ms. Lipska's work:

"To situate Lipska's verse within twentieth-century Polish lyric poetry, it is important to see the work as arising from Poland's distinct encounters with European totalitarianism. The poems are shaped by the legacy of wars, both by Polish cultural memory of the German occupation and the horror of Holocaust atrocities and by the presence of Soviet communism, in particular the two decades of the 1970s and 1980s, during which Lipska matured as a poet. The intersection of history, politics, and the literary arts has typified East European culture for more than two hundred years.... The role of the Polish poet became one of an 'acknowledged legislator,' to reverse Shelley's depiction of British romantic poetry. In Polish lyric poetry, neither does the speaker stand outside time nor does the poem consist of epiphanic moments where time stops and human experience expands. Rather, the Polish lyric becomes the site of intersection between social forces and the individual, primarily because the genre has repeatedly served national political agendas."

Some of the finest poems by Lipska focus most keenly on this intersection.

Here are a few:

God Asks

That you not invoke him. That you not buy and sell him.
That you not hang his grace from political stalls.
That you not use the alibi Gott mit uns
for a godless crime.
That you not perform rituals of evil
in his name.
That you not take in vain
the adoration of the shepherds.
That you not shove. Not squander.
Not burn anyone at the stake.

From the charred eye
ran a tear.

Perhaps he will come to you
o, wretched humanity,
as you cross over
to the other sin.

The New Century

The new century has come as no surprise.
After midnight we already call it by name.

Your dress lies beside the bed.
My suit a pirate flag.

Reports warn us
about the slippery surface of history.

The question of what comes next
we send back to the gala.

We speak to each other in fireworks.
A drowsy noun in the mouth.

We subject breakfast to laboratory tests.
314 calories on a white plate.

We’re zipped fast
into a lifeproof vest.

Press Enter

Forever and ever Enter
(in the news )

The most state-of-the-art crematorium in Europe.
Berlin Treptow. An Arcadia of mourning.

The holy order of computers with eyes of lusterless crepe.
A web of silence. Only the rustle of artificial leaves.

The afterlife of Pentium.
Immortal memory.

The concurrence of two days in one.

For the deceased a hairdresser. Beauty treatments.
A photographer’s studio. Warm blackness.

Antivirus software on guard at each floor.
(Torrential content outside the window.)

A casket on a hard disk.
We lie there in the index of names.

A droplet in the corner of the mouth.
Moisture of dead love.
We were in love when this happened.

Now there’s only a file connected to the sky.
A closed database.
An orphaned cloud from the chimney.

Are you sure you want
to begin deleting?

Press Enter

Newton’s Orange:
Infinity

They already were.

They fight a losing battle of dates.
Blurred. Against a background of surly clouds.

In the Hollywood movie theater
a train of abandoned seats whistles.

The remains of films
still breathe through the screen’s lips.

“But Venice for me is so much like
the graveyard of happiness that I haven’t
the strength to return”—wrote Marcel Proust.

We are now.

In love’s globalization
we succumb to sensuous market forces.
Speculative fireworks.

The corrupt bed linens of Shakespeare
in the national theater.

A city of muscular stadiums
clings to us.

A pirated copy of prosperity.

The penitence of a wilted rose
tells us nothing yet.

Arrhythmia of infinity.
Gigabytes of memory.

At dawn
a bigoted breeze shivers.

Norton AntiVirus software
scans our lungs.

All around
the broken glass of frost.

You are yet to be.

On a balcony a woman
a cloud resembling a kiss.

New Year’s Eve night is trembling.

The twenty-second century.
The twenty-third century.
The twenty-fourth century.

We are connected
by a dye works of sunrises and sunsets.
A polishing shop of magic, words, and fire.

They divide us forever.

---------------------

The New Century: Poems was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement by Piotr Gwiazda.

ZAGAJEWSKI'S "ANTI-CRAFT LECTURE"

2010-10-11T13:39:00.000-07:00

The following is an article written by the poet and journalist Oriana Ivy regarding a lecture that the Polish poet and Nobel Prize for Literature nominee Adam Zagajewski, author of Without End, Canvas and Tremors, recently delivered at the Vermont Studio Center. If you click on the link, you'll be taken directly to Ms. Ivy's site.

oriana-poetry: ZAGAJEWSKI'S "ANTI-CRAFT LECTURE" AT VSC, SEPTEMBE...: " STEFAN GEORGE ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI’S “AN..."

WHAT SOME POLISH DIASPORA WRITERS AND ARTISTS ARE UP TO

2010-10-06T16:21:00.000-07:00

Here's some news about the activities of Polish and Polish-American writers and artists.

The Fall Edition of PoetryMagazine.com features the poems of prize-winning poet Polish-American poet Elisabeth Murawski (author of Zorba's Daughter), along with Evelyn Posamentier, Lesley Wheeler, and Luisa A Igloria. The features editor is Andrena Zawinski.

Thad Rutkowski's story "Pan Tadeusz" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the Westchester Review.

Grzegorz Wroblewski's series of drawings MY LIFE WITH ANN 2 is now available on the Post-Literate (R)Evolution website. Three of his poems have been translated into English by Agnieszka Pokojska. They appear in the latest issue of Postmodern Culture.

The current issue of Connecticut River Review features poems by Polish and Polish American writers Ewa Parma, Leonard Kress, Cecilia Woloch, Linda Nemec Foster, John Minczeski, Suzanne Niedzielska, and John Guzlowski.

Leonard Kress has a new chapbook (Thirteens)--poems w/prints by Mania Dajnak--due out any day from Aureole Press. He also has poems in the recent Crazy Horse and Harvard Review.

Lisa Siedlarz recently had her book I Dream My Brother Plays Baseball -- about her brother's experiences in the Afghan War -- reviewed by the Yanaguana Literary Review.

Oriana Ivy recently returned from a poetry workshop at the Vermont Studio Center. She will soon be blogging about this experience.

Anna Maria Mickiewicz has recently published a collection of poems in Polish called Proscenium. The poems were written during the period of martial law in Poland during the 1980s.

Leslie Pietryzk's short story "The Chicago Brother" appears in the latest issue of Crab Orchard Review. The story is from her novel in progress about Polish immigrants in Chicago at the turn of the 20th century.

Amy Nawrocki's second collect of poems, Nomad's End, is available from Finishing Line Press.

Jakub Julian Ziolkowski, a young Polish artist (born in Zamosc, Poland, 1980), is having his first solo exhibit in the US. The New York Times wrote an informative piece about him that includes a slide show of his paintings.

My book Lightning and Ashes was recently reviewed by Gently Read Literature. The review was entitled "Children of the World War" and the reviewer Marc Sheehan liked it.

______________

The illustration above is by Polish artist Adam Guzowski.

Metropolis Burning by Karen Kovacik

2010-09-23T10:09:00.000-07:00

I love the poems in this book.

In it, Karen Kovacik does almost the impossible. She writes about the tragic 20th-century history of Poland with a firm awareness of what happened in Warsaw and Auschwitz but she also manages to infuse the Polish landscape of lost lives and lost battles with a love for Poland and an excitement in writing about it that is infectious. And in doing so she gets at -- for me -- the very heart of Poland.

Here's one of my favorite poems.

Versions of Irena

for my aunt who grew up near Oświęcim [Auschwitz]

Chronology

When she was five, her great delight was gooseberry juice.
At seven, she experienced the strangeness of books.
When she was ten, her beloved uncle expired at the table.
At eleven, she refused to leave the coal stove in the corner.
By twelve, she had forgotten her uncle’s bloody cough.
At thirteen, she chewed poppy leaves and hallucinated music.
When she turned fourteen, her dress grew tight in the bodice.
At fifteen, she scrubbed the parlor of a short Nazi sergeant,
and the night smelled of cognac and smoke.
At twenty, her mind declared war on her body.
For years, local doctors have regarded her case with gravity.

1943

She could smell them burning, their forgotten
valises piled in a corner of the yard
along with topcoats and short pants, sheet music,
a book of French pictures. She hid the brittle pages
in her coat and learned what a man’s body
could do to a woman’s. Midnight was the hour
of gravity, when the sergeant swung the bell
on his table. He wanted his heart’s delight:
something milky to help him sleep, warmed cognac
to dull his dreams. Each night, she smelled them burning.

1986

Having lost her uterus at 25, she feels the effects
of gravity, her lumpy body without music or delight.
She walks plates of white bacon from the table
to the sink, and rinses the grease in cool suds.
Behind her sits the American niece with a short book
of Polish phrases. The girl hardly ate her supper
and only sweetened her tea with one sugar.
Time to slide the featherbed into the starched cover
and make up the girl’s couch in the corner.
She wishes her niece untroubled dreams:
“What is forgotten,” she says, “will not harm us,
and only sleep can take the war out of night.”

____________________________________________

Karen Kovacik directs the creative writing program at Indiana Univ. Purdue Univ. Indianapolis. She's currently at work on a new collection with the working title Vérité. Her poems and translations have appeared in APR, Boston Review, Crazyhorse, Massachusetts Review, West Branch, and elsewhere.

She is the recipient of a number of awards, including a guest fellowship at the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Creative Writing and a Fulbright Research Grant to Poland. She is also the author of Beyond the Velvet Curtain, winner of the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize (Kent State University Press, 1999).

Been and Gone: Poems of Julian Kornhauser

2010-09-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

Julian Kornhauser is a Polish poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator who, along with Adam Zagajewski, was one of the major figures of the New Wave poetry movement of the early 1970s. Although Kornhauser's work continues to be read and appreciated overseas (winnning the European Poetry Prize and the City of Krakow Prize), he's not very well known in this country.

This translation of his poems by Piotr Florczyk, therefore, is long overdue. Florczyk, a native of Krakow now teaching in the US, captures the stark clarity and mystery of Julian Kornhauser's Polish originals in this bilingual edition from Marick Press.

As poet Adam Zagajewski says of Kornhauser in his foreword to Been and Gone, "when I read Julian's poems now, I'm amazed by the continuity of his writing, by the honesty of his poetry, by his patient worship of the concreteness of the world. Poetry is for him like the origami he describes in the poem written while traveling from Karkow to Oswiecim, a small city whose German name was Auschwitz--an object both arbitrary and necessary:

We pass hills and forests,
a paper swan
looks sleepily on the burning
grass."

_________________

Here are two poems from Been and Gone I especially liked.

The first is dedicated to Ewa Kuryluk, an artist who left Poland in 1981 when martial law was imposed.

ETERNAL JOURNEY

A search, an escape, death.
The search for languages, the escape
from a school desk, death of dear ones.
Eternal journey over clouds of smoke,
a swirling thin thread of life,
game of lands, gruff farewells, naked bodies
impressed on the cloth. Heart calls out no more
for help, it sinks its claws into a glacier
hung high above the sky. The smell of burning
skin weakens a step from the abyss, the fire
of native captivity, unexpressed happiness.
Ever further, so not to return to the Viennese
apocalypse, young rebels, a departing
mother. Ever closer to a tiny bit of a table
and a narrow window, beyond which one
sees only the happy eyes of a a little Jewess
and two raised wings of an apple pie.

CHILDREN

are smarter than we are
know everything
even n o t h i n g to them has the hue of a chestnut
they see mountains where we don't see them
seas splash when nothing is heard
through their crooked teeth
words known to no one slip out
fear and an inexpressible adventure
lurk under dirty fingernails
when they run
their oversized shoes cackle
and their hair sticks to the wind
when they're silent
their eyes express so much adult longing
they stand on tiptoe
to touch what's forbidden
they try to wrestle with rules
to be able to tell the difference
between a joke and fear
sometimes they lie quietly on the floor
casting strange spells
and the the glass falls from the table
opportunity arises
a crayon moves slowly across the white-papered wall.

___________________________________

Some of Piotr Florczyk's own poem are available online. Here are two published in InPosse Review.

Danuta Borchardt wins the 2010 Found in Translation Award

2010-09-21T16:19:00.000-07:00

The Polish Cultural Institute in New York Press Release:

DANUTA BORCHARDT
WINNER OF
THE 2010 FOUND IN TRANSLATION AWARD

Found in Translation is an annual prize given for the best book-length translation of a work of Polish literature into English. This year's winner is Danuta Borchardt for her translation of Pornografia (Grove/Atlantic, 2009), by Polish literary giant Witold Gombrowicz (1904-69) - an underground classic since it was first published in the Polish émigré press in Paris in 1960 and subsequently rendered into several European languages, including English via the French and German versions. Borchardt provides the first translation of the book into English directly from the Polish original.

Robert Boyers, editor of Salmagundi, writes, ”Borchardt brings Gombrowicz's great novel to us with a force and beauty English-language readers have not felt before. Deception and illusion, savagery and high mindedness, fire and ice, desire and impotence are all captured in the crystalline sentences of a translator who is herself a masterful stylist.”

The award will be presented at the University of Illinois at Chicago during the ceremonial inauguration of The Stefan and Lucy Hejna Chair in Polish Language and Literature, to be assumed by Professor Michal Pawel Markowski. Prof. Markowski is one of Poland's leading public intellectuals with 12 books and over 150 essays to his name and winner of numerous awards. The bequest of Romuald Hejna to the University of Illinois at Chicago is the largest single gift to the university and will fund two chairs in Polish history as well as the chair in Language and Literature, representing a major expansion in the field of Polish studies in the U.S.

The winner of the Found in Translation Award, established in 2007 by the Polish Book Institute in Krakow, the Polish Cultural Institute in London, the Polish Cultural Institute in New York, and W.A.B. Publishers in Warsaw, receives a monetary prize and a three-month residency in Krakow funded by the Book Institute. The first Found in Translation Award, in 2008, was given to Bill Johnston for his translation of New Poems by Tadeusz Rozewicz (Archipelago Books, New York, 2007). In 2009 the award went to Antonia Lloyd-Jones for her translation of Pawel Huelle's The Last Supper. Candidates for the Award may be nominated by private individuals as well as institutions in Poland and abroad. Nominations should be sent with the subject-heading FOUND IN TRANSLATION to: The Polish Book Institute, 31-011 Krakow, ul. Szczepanska 1, Poland, e-mail: biuro@instytutksiazki.pl

------------

To hear a podcast of an interview she gave Bill Marx, click here

THIS IS NOT A PLACE TO SING

2010-09-04T10:25:00.000-07:00

Recently, Polish-American poet Christina Pacosz found a box of copies of her highly acclaimed book This is Not a Place to Sing, a collection of poems about her visit to Poland. She wants to share these books with others and is offering to send them to interested readers for the price of postage: $2 for a copy, $3 for 2 copies.

The books can be purchased by contacting

Christina Pacosz
4238 Charlotte
Kansas City, MO 64110

When it was originally published in 1987, Choice, the official publication of the American Library Association, published a review that said the following:

"The Wind at the Wedding," the first poem in this unusual, moving collection, is intensely powerful and original. Written as a prose poem, it describes a wedding in Poland in which 'The wind lifts the hem of the birde's dress,' revealing her ankles. The scene is sharp and poignant as the poet weaves it, strand by strand, into Poland's terrible history. Pacosz states, 'In this country there is too much to remember,' and with each poem she adds to the picture of the devastation ... of the past that can never be forgoten, and a present in which life is difficult. "Matka Boska, Matka Polska" tells of the women who "are mothers with capable hands and patient feet" and of "an entire country criss-crossed with lines where women wait...." Other practically strong poems are "Auschwitz: Oswiecim" and "On the Propensity of the Human Species to Repeat Error." The poet employs daring technique and style; she does not hesitate to take risks. Highly recommended.

Here are the three poems from Christina's book mentioned in the above review:

The Wind at the Wedding

The wind lifts the hem of the bride's dress. She is wearing white shoes. Her feet look frail surrounded by the hard stones of the street, the raised hoop of her skirt. The bride is a bell for a moment, waiting to be rung.

Unlike the wind, who is a traveler, the bride is stationary and may never leave Lublin. Possibly she will visit the Black Sea on a holiday with her husband, but she will not be wearing her white dress. She will never be a bell again, all the notes wrung out of her, whether she remains in a flat in Lublin, or suns herself on the sand.

The wind is an old wind, full of understanding, but, like the bride's feet, it has no strength against the stones of the street. No strength to lift the people's hearts, even for a moment. The wind has only enough strength to lift the white hem of the dress of the bride who is wearing white shoes with high heels to match her high hopes.

The groom has white gloves on his hands. The stones at his feet are gray. The stones are gray and as old as the wind, maybe older.

In Krakow there are fossils embedded in the paving stones around St. Mary's Church. There, the brides and grooms step on ancient animals without thinking. There, when the trumpeter plays his notes from the steeple, he imagines he is flinging his song to the sky, which is like the sea, blue and roiled, but by swallows, not fish. What does it matter: fist, fowl, human flesh? We all share the same fate.

The bride and groom are waiting for the bells to ring, for permission to become one flesh. The wind lifts her dress and the bride does not blush when the groom stares at her feet. Why should she?

The wind blowing its way through the old city is a kind wind. Wise and kind and old like a grandfather or grandmother. The bride and groom may be thinking that one day this day will lead them to a garden and grandchildren climbing on their laps in the sun. Peace.

The bride and groom are young. They have never known war, but the wind cannot forget how it blows over the eyelids of the dead in all directions. Today the wind wants to play a simple joke and lift a bride's dress, showing her shoes, her ankles to the world.

The wind harbors no illusions. To lift a dress is not to lift a heart, except maybe his, the groom's, who is staring at the bride's ankles, thinking how they will be his soon. He wants to kiss the blue vein under the strap of her shoe. He wants to begin there.

The wind knows the hearts of the people are hungry, but for what? Meat lines, milk lines, bread lines, lines for vodka. Lines on the palms of his hands, the map of his life lost to a grenade in the Warsaw Uprising.

What is the soldier doing here? Isn't this a wedding, not a war?

In this country there is too much to remember. Better to watch the wind lift the hem of the bride's white dress like a cloud moving across the gray stones into the church.

On the Propensity of the Human Species to Repeat Error

And if they kill others for being who they are
or where they are Is this a law of history
or simply, what must change?
Your Native Land, Your Life Adrienne Rich

The world is round
This should tell us
something, this should
have been our first clue.

what goes around
comes around

Scientists are studying
a rent in the roof of sky
over the South Pole
right now, but poets
need not adhere
to the caution
of the scientific method.

The message is simple:

what goes around
comes around

The battery acid of
Plato's Republic
has finally reached
the ozone layer,
a membrane, protective
like skin or an amniotic sac,
permeable and destructible.

what we take
for granted
will get us
in the end

The Sioux woman's breast
severed from her body
dried into a pouch
for tobacco,
what book was that?

Or a chosen people's skin
stretched across the heavens,
shade for us to more easily
read the harsh lesson
of history.

Message from the Past to the Present

A looming mound
of empty zyklon B canisters
behind glass: to open death
like canned peaches

Behind the tins:
corporate profit.

Are there no new tales
we can tell each other?

Artifacts of the age,
the waning twentieth century
on parade, naked
and exhausted.

Each time capusule
should include
one of these.

Such eloquent
refuse.

Auschwitz: Oswiecim

Los Nas Dla Was Prestroga
Let Our Loss Be Your Warning
Majdanek Monument

We are leaving
flowers like messages
in this awful place:

what else to do
except fall down
with weeping
into a grieving
that will never
be done.

And how to live
int the world then?

So it is calendula
for memory, here
with the children's
clothing they never
outgrew.

And here before
hundreds of neatly
lettered suticases
with addresses from
every country in Europe
never claimed
by their owners
we leave
our innocence
in the form
of a single
white daisy.

We should haul
larkspur by
the truckload
and fill every
exhibit room
from floor to ceiling
with levity
with light.

We must airdrop
hyacinth purple
sorrow raining down
until this place
of the awful name
is smothered in
fragrance.

We should be weaving
miles of rosemary garlands
for remembrance
and planting olive
for peace.

The lilac leaves
are waving, try
to imagine
them blooming.

The poplar trees
are voices
in the wind:

We did not
consent
that our bodies
be used
as weapons.

Remember the ash
how it sifts down
to the desks
where the bureaucrats
are stamping papers.

____________________________________________________

The books may be purchased by contacting

Christina Pacosz
4238 Charlotte
Kansas City, MO 64110

“The Wind at the Wedding” appears in St. Andrews Review, Issue No. 37, Laurinburg, North Carolina, 1989.

“On the Propensity of the Human Species to Repeat Error,” “A Message from the Past for the Present,” appeared in Beyond Lament, Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust, edited by Marguerite M. Striar, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois 1998.

“Auschwitz: Oswiecim,” Blood to Remember, American Poets on the Holocaust, revised, second edition, edited by Charles Ades Fishman, Time Being Books, St. Louis Missouri, 2007.

Friends of Poland

2010-08-19T03:41:00.000-07:00

I've been a member of Friends of Poland, an online discussion and information group for people interested in Poland and Polish things for about six years now, and I recommend it as a place where people can talk with others about everything from Polish cuisine to Polish history, from Polish film to Polish politics.

Here's a recent piece by member Robert Strybel describing the group:

Interested in people, places and things Polish history, culture, politics, current events, religion, traditions, food and most anything else? Do you occasionally have a question about your Polish heritage but don't know whom to ask? Are there things about being of Polish background you sometimes would like to discuss with someone? If you have answered affirmatively to any of those questions, Friends of Poland might be worth looking into.

Friends of Poland (FoP for short) is a unique Internet discussion forum devoted to any and all topics relating to things Polish or Polonian. Not knowing Polish is no obstacle, because all discussion is in English. The forum was set up in the 1990s by Polish-born IT expert Marcin Å»mudzki, but most members are US-born Polonians. Other participants hail from Australia, Canada, Poland, Britain, Russia and other countries.

"I joined FoP in 1998, as I was looking for information to assist me in an upcoming trip to Poland," explained Laura Zurowski, a college official from Clintondale, NY, who is now one of the forum's moderators. "This year we have also started a FoP Facebook addressed to a younger audience with moreemphasis on arts and culture. Now that we have two avenues to participate(Facebook and YahooGroups) we have something to offer all those interested in the topic of Poland and Polonia."

Another FoP stalwart is John Radzilowski, a University of Alaska history professor. "I joined because it was and is one of the few places where Poles and Pol-Ams could discuss issues and exchange ideas in areas ranging from politics and religion to cultural matters and even Polish food," he told this reporter. "I've learned a lot from FoP. The great thing about it is that not everyone shares the same point of view. It's a bit like a community center, open to everyone even if some people spend way more time there than others."

FoP participants include Rik Suligowski Fox, one of Polonia's leading historical re-enactors, who regularly promotes the glory of Old Poland's military might on America's Renaissance Faire circuit. One FoP contributor from Michigan is now planning to move to Krakow in a few years, when he and his wife retire.

Another is James Conroyd Martin, the non-Polonian author of Poland-themed historical novels. The forum is an excellent place to announce Polish or Polonian events as well as Polish-related books, projects or services. But aside from people knowledgeable about and/or directly involved in Polish or Polonian affairs, like all such forums the FoP also has its share of lurkers. That is the term applied to participants who prefer to listen to and learn what others are saying rather than to actively contribute. There is no obligation to post messages, but after a time some lurkers decide to join in the discussion.

The only rules are that each post must pertain to some facet of things Polish or Polonian and be in English. If Polish terms or sayings are posted, and English translation must be included. And posters are required to sign each message with their name and location.

Another benefit of FoP is a daily news service dealing with Polish current affairs, compiled by another forum veteran, Professor Roman Solecki. Another of his achievements is his constantly expanding Prominent Poles website. It is a goldmine of information on Poles and Polonians who have made various contributions to the world.

If you feel such a source of information and the lively discussion it often generates may be your cup of tea, contact listowner Marcin Zmudzki for more information and details on how to join: marcin(at)zmudzki.net--substitute @ for (at).

Ostatni Etap--The Last Stage: Auschwitz

2010-08-10T08:15:00.000-07:00

The following article about Ostatni Etap, one of the first films about Auschwitz, was written by John Bertram and first appeared at his blog Venus Febriculosa:

I first learned about the existence of this relatively obscure (in the United States, anyway) film while perusing a gallery of vintage Polish film posters. My eye was immediately caught by one similar to the original cover for We Were in Auschwitz designed by Anatol Girs. Its designer, Tadeusz Trepkowski (1914-1954), a largely self-taught artist from Warsaw, was one of the original graphic designers commissioned after World War II by Film Polski and Central Wynajmu Filmow (state-run film producers and distributors) to design film posters. The film Ostatni Etap was a semi-autobiographical story about prison life in the women’s barracks at Auschwitz.

A member of the Polish resistance during the war, director and co-writer Wanda Jakubowska (1907-1998) was arrested in 1942 and spent six months in Warsaw’s Pawiak prison before being sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau where, she says, “the decision to make a film…originated when I crossed the camp’s gate.” A member of the camp resistance, she was moved to the Rajsko, an experimental agricultural station and one of more than 40 sub-camps, and in early 1945 was transferred to Ravensbruck where she was liberated by the Soviet Army. Once free, Jakubowska immediately began work on the script with another survivor Gerda Schneider, a German Communist, based exclusively on events witnessed by them and their fellow prisoners. By the end of the year they had produced a first draft and, returning to Auschwitz in the spring of 1946 where she had decided to film, she was shocked to find “daisies of monstrous proportions and exuberant, indescribable vegetation on the soil that was fertilized by blood and sweat.”

Filming at Auschwitz-Birkenau began in the spring of the following year. Actors, many of whom were originally interned at Auschwitz, lived in the former barracks and instead of costumes wore authentic striped prison uniforms. One actor noted that “the air was filled with a characteristic unpleasant smell that had a depressing effect on us.” As harrowing as the movie is, Jakubowska notes that “the camp’s reality was human skeletons, piles of dead bodies, lice, rats, and various disgusting diseases. On the screen this reality would certainly cause dread and repulsion. It was necessary to eliminate those elements which, although authentic and typical, were unbearable for the post-war viewer.”

Released in Poland in March 1948 barely three years after Auschwitz was liberated, Ostatni etap was the second film produced by Film Polski and the first Polish film to get international distribution. Writing in The New York Times upon the occasion of the film’s U.S. release in March 1949, Bosley Crowther points out:

“ …the story itself is secondary…to the staggering accumulation of daily atrocities, seen in the pattern of the story through a pitilessly factual camera’s eye. From the opening shot in the death camp, showing the brutality of a guard to a pregnant girl, standing among a group of women in a dreary sea of mud, the film is a continuation of horrifying episodes which make up a modest realization of the inhumanity of the Nazi camps.

There is the episode, for instance, of the murder of the baby born to the suffering girl. There is the arrival of a trainload of Jewish prisoners who are brutally separated, some to be gassed. There are terrifying scenes of the inmates being driven and beaten in the prison yard while a band plays serenely cheerful music under the baton of an agonized girl. And there is one simply overwhelming sequence of little children being marched off to be killed, with a cut of their discarded toys piled up among the relics of all the dead. There are also recognitions of the frailties of the inmates themselves, revealed in vicious and deceitful stratagems and deeds.”

Interestingly, Wanda Jakubowska’s creative arc parallels that of Tadeusz Borowski’s: imprisoned at Pawiak, then Auschwitz, shortly thereafter producing an authentic, unflinching landmark work based upon harrowing experiences. However, whereas Borowski’s stories remain completely free of any trace of ideology, in Ostatni etap, Jakubowska’s Communist leanings are clear to the point that to some the propagandist nature of the film (at one point, for instance, Stalin’s name is reverently invoked) leave it irrevocably compromised. Still, it remains a valuable document for its powerful imagery that has served as template for numerous subsequent films on Auschwitz.

Special thanks to Polish film historian Professor J. Marek Haltof of Northern Michigan University whose book Polish National Cinema (New York/Oxford, 2002) and essay “The Monstrosity of Auschwitz in Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stage (1948)” provided indispensable background material for this post.

For more information, see Women in Polish Cinema, Chapter 8, Wanda Jakubowska: The Communist Fighter, by Ewa Mazierska.

____________

To read more about women and what happens to them in war, please click to my post Women in War.

Borowski Design Competition Update

2010-07-22T08:32:00.001-07:00

The deadline for the competition to design a possible cover for Tadeusz Borowski's Auschwitz memoir This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen has been extended.

In addition, the amount of the prize has been increased to $1000.

Here are the full details from the sponsors:

BOOK COVER DESIGN CONTEST No.4

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

PURPOSE

The purpose of the contest is to foster interest in the relationship of literature to the visual arts through the design of a hypothetical book cover for Tadeusz Borowski’s remarkable collection of concentration camp stories This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. This is an ideas competition only: as of this writing there are no plans for the winner’s work to be featured on a forthcoming edition of Borowski’s work.

ELIGIBILITY

This international competition is open to anyone 18 years or older. Graphic design students and professionals are especially encouraged to enter. ONLY ONE ENTRY PER PERSON IS ALLOWED.

DEADLINE

Entries must be received by Monday, August 30, 2010.

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS

There is no fee to enter. All design entries must be an original artwork of the entrant's own creation. Use of copyrighted materials not owned by the entrant will result in disqualification from the contest. Submissions must include Name, Address, E-Mail Address, Country, and School Attending (if Student).

MEDIA FORMAT

Submissions must be in digital JPEG format only and must be sent to both of the following addresses: admin@venusfebriculosa.com and marco.sonzogni@vuw.ac.nz.

IMAGE REQUIREMENTS

5” x 8” Vertical Orientation Only
300 dpi preferred. 2MB Maximum file size.
Image file name should include the entrant’s name only (e.g.: Rudolph Nureyev.jpg; rudolph_nureyev.jpg; rudolphnureyev.jpg).

REQUIRED CONTENT

Artwork must contain the words “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” and “Tadeusz Borowski.” No other words or phrases shall be used unless they are used in a purely graphical manner.
Only submissions of the front cover will be accepted.

EVALUATION CRITERIA

Submissions will be evaluated on how creatively they address the collection’s themes. Entrants are encouraged to visit the Wikipedia entry for Tadeusz Borowski and, of course, to read the book (click here for excerpts .)

AWARD

There will be one winner. The designer of the winning submission will receive a cash award of $1000 US and will be featured on the Venus febriculosa website . The award will be announced on Friday, October 1, 2010 on venusfebriculosa.com.

COPYRIGHT AND USAGE

Copyrights of all entries shall remain the property of the artists. The contests sponsors retain the right to reproduce any of the designs on Venus febriculosa’s website (venusfebriculosa.com), as well as in any publications resulting from this contest.

QUESTIONS

All questions should be directed to admin@venusfebriculosa.com.

Official Press Release

Venus febriculosa

Press Release – For Immediate Release

TADEUSZ BOROWSKI BOOK COVER DESIGN CONTEST - JURY ANNOUNCED

Contact:
John Bertram, Administrator
Venus febriculosa
admin@venusfebriculosa.com
323.854.5728

LOS ANGELES, CA June 17, 2010 Venus febriculosa, a website devoted to contemporary literature and the art and design of books, announced today the jurors for its Book Cover Design Contest No. 4 – This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, a collection of short stories by Polish journalist and poet Tadeusz Borowski (1922-1951) based upon his experiences in the Auschwitz and Dachau death camps during WWII. His short story The Battle of Grunwald about his time spent in a displaced persons camp after the war was made into the film Landscape after Battle in 1970 by acclaimed Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda.

Previous Venus febriculosa book cover contests have included Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, and The Eel by Eugenio Montale.
The submission deadline for this contest is Monday, August 30, 2010. The winner will be announced on Friday, October 1, 2010. Complete details are available at www.venusfebriculosa.com.

JURY:

Alicia Nitecki, Ph.D, Adjunct Professor of English, Bentley University
Translator of We Were in Auschwitz (Welcome Rain) and Postal Indiscretions: The Correspondence of Tadeusz Borowski (Northwestern University Press).

John Guzlowski, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Contemporary American Literature, Eastern Illinois University, Author of Lightning and Ashes (Steel Toe Books) a collection of poems dealing with his parents’ experiences in German slave labor camps during WWII.

Jae Jennifer Rossmann, M.L.S., Assistant Director for Special Collections, Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library, Yale University, Curator of 2002 Yale University Exhibit on Polish designer and publisher Anatol Girs, who published We Were in Auschwitz by Janusz Nel Siedlecki, Krystyn Olszewski and Tadeusz Borowski.

Barbara Girs, Daughter of Anatol Girs, who designed and published We Were in Auschwitz and was himself a survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau.

Marco Sonzogni, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer in Italian, School of Languages and Cultures, Victoria University of Wellington, Widely published academic and an award-winning editor, poet and literary translator currently working on a new and experimental area of research: the study of the book cover as a form of inter-semiotic translation.

venusfebriculosa.com

Lawrence Ferlinghetti in Polish

2010-07-19T10:20:00.000-07:00

Janusz Zalewski has long been interested in the beats and especially in Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Zalewski has edited a special issue of Nowa Okolica Poetow devoted to the Beat writers and one devoted specifically to Ferlinghetti. The Ferlinghetti issue contains a number of Zalewski's translations of Ferlinghetti's poems into Polish.

Recently, I asked Janusz to tell me something about his interest in the Beats and Ferlinghetti, and he sent me the following note:

I am interested in the Beats because they were all against the traditional culture, in multiple ways, like Burroughs, whom you know well. He was against traditional cultural values, in a way that created new values opposed to those not accepted before: explicit writing, use of drugs, gender issues, etc., etc.

Ferlinghetti, although he does not admit being a Beat in a strict sense, actually helped in creating the movement by publishing "Howl" and defending its publication by winning a law suit against it in court, and thus became a part of the culture himself, and continues to be a part of this culture.

It is interesting how I found out about the Beats. When I was in a high school (lyceum), there was a magazine published in Poland named Forum, which included translations of articles from other languages. Of course, it
was mainly created to publish Polish translations of articles published in western magazines (Le Monde, Figaro, Financial Times, Stern, Newsweek, etc.), and to keep the authorities happy, it also included translations from Russian, East Germany, and other magazines. From Forum I have learned, as a very young man, about all the literary and revolutionary movements in the West. It was interesting, how the booksellers laughed at me, when I was asking them about poetry books by writers like Ginsberg, Kerouac, and also Gombrowicz, Henry Miller, etc., who were either unpublished or banned in Poland.

________________________________

Three Ferlinghetti Translations by Janusz Zalewski

Pound in Spoleto

Pound w Spoleto
(latem 1965 r.)

W południe wszedłem do Teatro Melisso, wspaniałej renesansowej sali, gdzie codziennie odbywały się odczyty poezji i koncerty kameralne Festiwalu w Spoleto, i nagle zobaczyłem go pierwszy raz w życiu, Ezra Pound, siedział sztywno jak statua mandaryna, w loży z tyłu teatru, na pierwszym balkonie. Doznałem szoku. W pierszej chwili nie rozpoznałem go, dostrzegając tylko uderzająco starego, ale to starego człowieka w dziwnej pozie, chudego i długowłosego, o orlim wyglądzie, około osiemdziesiątki, z głową dziwnie przechyloną na jedną strone, pogrążonego w permanentnej medytacji. W ten sposób przesiedział południowy koncert, nigdy nie zmianiając pozycji, ani nie poruszając wzroku.

O piątej po południu przeszedłem się w kierunku loży, gdzie mogłem zobaczyć Pounda ponownie, naprzeciwko siebie. Po trzech młodszych poetach recytujących na scenie, przychodziła na niego kolej, aby czytać wprost z kabiny, gdzie siedział w towarzystwie starej przyjaciółki (która trzymała jego papiery), oczekując w tej samej pozie co przedtem, jakby tak spędził całe popołudnie. Głowę miał teraz opuszczoną, oglądał knykcie swoich palców, ruszając nimi nieco, bez wyrazu. Poza tym, pozostawał nieruchomy. Tylko raz, gdy wszyscy widzowie w wypełnionym teatrze zaczęli oklaskiwać kogoś na scenie, on też ożywił się, aby złożyć ręce, nawet nie przyglądając się, mechanicznie, jakby reagował na dźwięk w pustce. Pawłow. Jego kolej nadeszła po prawie godzinie. Albo po wieczności.

Wszyscy na sali podnieśli się, odwrócili i patrzyli w górę na Pounda w swojej kabinie, klaskając. Oklaski trwały nadal i Pound starał podnieść się ze swego fotela. Mikrofon był w drodze. On ujął poręcze fotela swymi kościstymi dłońmi i spróbował wstać. Nie udało mu się, ale spróbował ponownie, bez skutku. Jego stara przyjaciółka nie starała się mu pomóc. Wreszcie, podała mu wiersz do ręki i conajmniej po minucie dało się słyszeć jego głos. Najpierw poruszył szczęką, po czym wydawał głos, niesłyszalny. Młody Włoch przysunął mu stojący mikrofon trochę bliżej twarzy i głos zaczął docierać, wątły ale stanowczy, wyższy niż się spodziewałem, cienki, cichy i monotonny. Sala zamilkła jak porażona. Ten głos zwalił mnie z nóg, taki cichy, taki cienki, taki wątły, a przy tym taki stanowczy. Oparłem głowę o ramiona na welwetowym parapecie loży. Ze zdziwieniem spostrzegłem jak łza kapnęła mi na kolano. Cienki, nieposkromiony głos brzmiał dalej. Oprzytomnieć! Wyszedłem z loży oślepiony, przez tylne wyjście, na pusty korytarz na piętrze teatru, gdzie oni wciąż siedzieli wpatrzeni w niego, zszedłem na dół i wytoczyłem na światło dzienne, łzawiąc... W górze, ponad miastem, przy starożytnym akwedukcie, nadal kwitły kasztany. Bezgłośne ptaki fruwały poniżej w dolinie, dużo dalej, słońce padało na kasztany i liście mieniły się w promieniach, i mieniły się, i mieniły się, mieniły, i wciąż się mieniły. Jego głos brzmiał dalej, i dalej, przez liście...

(to read the English version, please click here.)

The Old Italians Dying

Starzy Włosi umierają

Przez lata starzy Włosi umierali
w całej Ameryce
Przez lata starzy Włosi w wypłowiałych filcowych kapeluszach
wystawiali się na słońce i umierali
Widzieliście ich na ławkach
w parku na placu Waszyngtona
starzy Włosi w swoich czarnych butach na zatrzaski
starzy mężczyźni w swoich starych filcowych kapeluszach fedora
z poplamionymi wstążkami
umierali i umierali
dzień po dniu
Widzieliście ich
co dzień na placu Waszyngtona w San Francisco
gdzie powolny dzwon
bije rankiem
w kościele Piotra i Pawła
w marcepanowym kościele na placu
o dziesiątej rano powolny dzwon bije
z wieży u Piotra i Pawła
a starzy mężczyźni, którzy jeszcze żyją
siedzą rzędem opalając się
na drewnianych ławkach w parku
i obserwują pochody w tę i z powrotem
pogrzeby rankiem
śluby po południu
powolny dzwono rano Szybki dzwon w południe
Wejście jednymi drzwiami, wyjście drugimi
starzy mężczyźni siedzą tam w swoich kapeluszach
i obserwuja wchodzących i wychodzących
Widzieliście ich
tych, którzy karmia gołębie
łamiąc twardy chleb
swymi kciukami i składanymi nożykami
tych ze starymi zegarkami kieszonkowymi
tych z sękatymi dłońmi
i dzikimi brwiami
tych z powypychanymi spodniami
zarówno na paskach jak i na szelkach
pijących grappa z zębami w kolorze kukurydzy
Piemontczyków, Genueńczyków, Sycylijczyków
których czuć czosnkiem i pepperoni
tych którzy kochali Mussoliniego
starych faszystów
tych którzy kochali Garibaldiego
starych anarchistów czytających L’Umanita Nuova
tych którzy kochali Sacco i Vanzettiego
Oni prawie wszyscy już odeszli
Siedzą i czekają na swoja kolej
i opalają się przed kościołem
nad wrotami którego znajduje się inskrypcja
wyglądająca jak niedokończone zdanie
z Raju Dantego
o wielkości Jedynego
który utrzymuje wszystko w ruchu
Starzy mężczyźni oczekują
aż to się skończy
aż ich chwalebny wyrok na ziemi
dobiegnie końca
powolny dzwon bije i bije
gołębie paradują wokoło
nawet nie myśląc o lataniu
powietrze jest za ciężkie przy takim biciu dzwonów
Czarne wynajęte karawany zajeżdżają
czarne limuzyny z zaciemionymi na czarno oknami
chroniącymi wdowy
wdowy w długich czarnych welonach
które przeżyją ich wszystkich
Widzieliście je
madre di terra, nadre di mare...
Wdowy wyłaniają sie z limuzyn
Krewni wychodzą w sztywnych garniturach
Wdowy idą wolniusieńko
po schodach katedry
z opuszczonymi siatkami welonów
opierając się ciężko na ramionach w ciemnej odzieży
Ich twarze nie są rozbite
Są zaledwie roztrzęsione
One są wciąż matriarchami
które przeżywają wszystkich
starych italiańców umierających
w Małych Italiach po całej Ameryce
starych martwych italiańców
odholowywanych w porannym słońcu
które nie opłakuje nikogo
Jeden za drugim, rok za rokiem
zostają wynoszeni
Dzwon
nigdy nie przestaje bić
Starzy Włosi o pomarszczonych twarzach
są odholowywani w karawanch
przez opłaconych grabarzy
w płaszczach jak mafioso i w ciemnych okularach
Starzy martwi mężczyźni są odholowywani
w swoich ciemnych trumnach jak małe łódki
Wchodzą do prawdziwego kościoła
po raz pierwszy od wielu lat
w tych ociosanych czarnych łodziach
gotowi do przeprawy
Księża drepczą wokół
jakby mieli odrzucić linki holownicze
Inni starzy mężczyźni
wciąż żywi na ławkach
obserwują to spod swoich kapeluszy
Widzieliście ich siedzących tu
czekających aż koło fortuny przestanie sie toczyć
czekających aż dzwon
przestanie bić i bić
aż powolny dzwon
zakończy bicie
opowiadając niedokończoną historię z Raju
odzwierciedloną w niedokończonym zdaniu
u wrót kościoła
odzwierciedloną na twarzy rybaka
w czarnej łodzi bez żagli
odbywającego swój ostatni połów

(to read the English version of The Old Italians Dying, click here.)

Come Lie with Me and Be My Love

Chodź połóż się i kochaj mnie

Chodź połóż się i kochaj mnie
Chodź ze mną śpij
Złóż siebie mi
U cyprysowych pni
Na słodkich trawach
Tu gdzie wiatr dmie
Tu gdzie wiatr łże
Gdy noc przemija
Chodź połóż się
W tę noc przy mnie
I nasyć się całując mnie
I nasyć się kochając grzech
I niech mój jaszczur zagra ci
I niech nam jedno serce brzmi
Przez noc u cyprysowych pni
Bez krzty miłości

________________________________

A special issue of Nowa Okolica Poetow, on Ferlinghetti, was published as No. 13 in 2003, with lots of my translations and brief conversations with him. Link to the Table of Contents by clicking here.

Nowy Dziennik's cultural weekly, Przeglad Polski, has just published Zalewski's review of Janusz Szuber's They Carry a Promise. The Polish title is Janusz Szuber: Laboratorium Slowa - Janusz Szuber: A Word Laboratory.

The photography above is of Ferlinghetti and Janusz Zalewski taken this summer, in Caffe Trieste, on North Beach, in S.F.

Milosz and Captive Minds: Now and Then

2010-07-15T11:23:00.000-07:00

Tony Judt's article originally appeared in the New York Review Blog:

Some years ago I visited Krasnogruda, the restored manor house of Czeslaw Milosz, close by the Polish–Lithuanian frontier. I was the guest of Krzysztof Czyzewski, director of the Borderland Foundation, dedicated to acknowledging the conflicted memory of this region and reconciling the local populations. It was deep midwinter and there were snow-covered fields as far as the eye could see, with just the occasional clump of ice-bound trees and posts marking the national frontiers.

My host waxed lyrical over the cultural exchanges planned for Milosz’s ancestral home. I was absorbed in my own thoughts: some seventy miles north, in Pilviskiai (Lithuania), the Avigail side of my father’s family had lived and died (some at the hands of the Nazis). Our cousin Meyer London had emigrated in 1891 to New York from a nearby village; there he was elected in 1914 as the second Socialist congressman before being ousted by an ignominious alliance of wealthy New York Jews disturbed by his socialism and American Zionists aghast at his well-publicized suspicion of their project.

For Milosz, Krasnogruda—”red soil”—was his “native realm” (Rodzinna Europa in the original Polish, better translated as European Fatherland or European Family). But for me, staring over this stark white landscape, it stood for Jedwabne, Katyn, and Babi Yar—all within easy reach—not to mention dark memories closer to home. My host certainly knew all this: indeed, he was personally responsible for the controversial Polish publication of Jan Gross’s account of the massacre at Jedwabne. But the presence of Poland’s greatest twentieth-century poet transcended the tragedy that stalks the region.

Milosz was born in 1911 in what was then Russian Lithuania. Indeed, like many great Polish literary figures, he was not strictly “Polish” by geographical measure. Adam Zagajewski, one of the country’s most important living poets, was born in Ukraine; Jerzy Giedroyc—a major figure in the twentieth-century literary exile—was born in Belarus, like Adam Mickiewicz, the nineteenth-century icon of the Polish literary revival. Lithuanian Vilna in particular was a cosmopolitan blend of Poles, Lithuanians, Germans, Russians, and Jews, among others (Isaiah Berlin, like the Harvard political philosopher Judith Shklar, was born in nearby Riga).

Raised in the interwar Polish republic, Milosz survived the occupation and was already a poet of some standing when he was sent to Paris as the cultural attaché of the new People’s Republic. But in 1951 he defected to the West and two years later he published his most influential work, The Captive Mind. Never out of print, it is by far the most insightful and enduring account of the attraction of intellectuals to Stalinism and, more generally, of the appeal of authority and authoritarianism to the intelligentsia.
Milosz studies four of his contemporaries and the self-delusions to which they fell prey on their journey from autonomy to obedience, emphasizing what he calls the intellectuals’ need for “a feeling of belonging.” Two of his subjects—Jerzy Andrzejewski and Tadeusz Borowski—may be familiar to English readers, Andrzejewski as the author of Ashes and Diamonds (adapted for the cinema by Andrzej Wajda) and Borowski as the author of a searing memoir of Auschwitz, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.

But the book is most memorable for two images. One is the “Pill of Murti-Bing.” Milosz came across this in an obscure novel by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, Insatiability (1927). In this story, Central Europeans facing the prospect of being overrun by unidentified Asiatic hordes pop a little pill, which relieves them of fear and anxiety; buoyed by its effects, they not only accept their new rulers but are positively happy to receive them.

The second image is that of “Ketman,” borrowed from Arthur de Gobineau’s Religions and Philosophies of Central Asia, in which the French traveler reports the Persian phenomenon of elective identities. Those who have internalized the way of being called “Ketman” can live with the contradictions of saying one thing and believing another, adapting freely to each new requirement of their rulers while believing that they have preserved somewhere within themselves the autonomy of a free thinker—or at any rate a thinker who has freely chosen to subordinate himself to the ideas and dictates of others.

Ketman, in Milosz’s words, “brings comfort, fostering dreams of what might be, and even the enclosing fence affords the solace of reverie.” Writing for the desk drawer becomes a sign of inner liberty. At least his audience would take him seriously if only they could read him:

Fear of the indifference with which the economic system of the West treats its artists and scholars is widespread among Eastern intellectuals. They say it is better to deal with an intelligent devil than with a good-natured idiot.

Between Ketman and the Pill of Murti-Bing, Milosz brilliantly dissects the state of mind of the fellow traveler, the deluded idealist, and the cynical time server. His essay is more subtle than Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and less relentlessly logical than Raymond Aron’s Opium of the Intellectuals. I used to teach it in what was for many years my favorite course, a survey of essays and novels from Central and Eastern Europe that included the writings of Milan Kundera, Vaclav Havel, Ivo Andric’, Heda Kovaly, Paul Goma, and others.

But I began to notice that whereas the novels of Kundera and Andric’, or the memoirs of Kovaly or Yevgenia Ginsburg, remain accessible to American students notwithstanding the alien material, The Captive Mind often encountered incomprehension. Milosz takes for granted his readers’ intuitive grasp of the believer’s state of mind: the man or woman who has identified with History and enthusiastically aligned themselves with a system that denies them freedom of expression. In 1951 he could reasonably assume that this phenomenon—whether associated with communism, fascism, or indeed any other form of political repression—would be familiar.

And indeed, when I first taught the book in the 1970s, I spent most of my time explaining to would-be radical students just why a “captive mind” was not a good thing. Thirty years on, my young audience is simply mystified: why would someone sell his soul to any idea, much less a repressive one? By the turn of the twenty-first century, few of my North American students had ever met a Marxist. A self-abnegating commitment to a secular faith was beyond their imaginative reach. When I started out my challenge was to explain why people became disillusioned with Marxism; today, the insuperable hurdle one faces is explaining the illusion itself.

Contemporary students do not see the point of the book: the whole exercise seems futile. Repression, suffering, irony, and even religious belief: these they can grasp. But ideological self-delusion? Milosz’s posthumous readers thus resemble the Westerners and emigres whose incomprehension he describes so well: “They do not know how one pays—those abroad do not know. They do not know what one buys, and at what price.”

Perhaps so. But there is more than one kind of captivity. Recall the Ketman-like trance of those intellectuals swept up in George W. Bush’s hysterical drive to war just a few years ago. Few of them would have admitted to admiring the President, much less sharing his worldview. So they typically aligned themselves behind him while doubtless maintaining private reservations. Later, when it was clear they had made a mistake, they blamed it upon the administration’s incompetence. With Ketman-like qualifications they proudly assert, in effect, “we were right to be wrong”—a revealing if unconscious echo of the plaidoyer of the French fellow travelers, “better to have been wrong with Sartre than right with Aron.”

Today, we can still hear sputtering echoes of the attempt to reignite the cold war around a crusade against “Islamo-fascism.” But the true mental captivity of our time lies elsewhere. Our contemporary faith in “the market” rigorously tracks its radical nineteenth-century doppelgaenger—the unquestioning belief in necessity, progress, and History. Just as the hapless British Labour chancellor in 1929–1931, Philip Snowden, threw up his hands in the face of the Depression and declared that there was no point opposing the ineluctable laws of capitalism, so Europe’s leaders today scuttle into budgetary austerity to appease “the markets.”

But “the market”—like “dialectical materialism”—is just an abstraction: at once ultra-rational (its argument trumps all) and the acme of unreason (it is not open to question). It has its true believers—mediocre thinkers by contrast with the founding fathers, but influential withal; its fellow travelers—who may privately doubt the claims of the dogma but see no alternative to preaching it; and its victims, many of whom in the US especially have dutifully swallowed their pill and proudly proclaim the virtues of a doctrine whose benefits they will never see.

Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives. We know perfectly well that untrammeled faith in unregulated markets kills: the rigid application of what was until recently the “Washington consensus” in vulnerable developing countries—with its emphasis on tight fiscal policy, privatization, low tariffs, and deregulation—has destroyed millions of livelihoods. Meanwhile, the stringent “commercial terms” on which vital pharmaceuticals are made available has drastically reduced life expectancy in many places. But in Margaret Thatcher’s deathless phrase, “there is no alternative.”

It was in just such terms that communism was presented to its beneficiaries following World War II; and it was because History afforded no apparent alternative to a Communist future that so many of Stalin’s foreign admirers were swept into intellectual captivity. But when Milosz published The Captive Mind, Western intellectuals were still debating among genuinely competitive social models—whether social democratic, social market, or regulated market variants of liberal capitalism. Today, despite the odd Keynesian protest from below the salt, a consensus reigns.
For Milosz, “the man of the East cannot take Americans seriously because they have never undergone the experiences that teach men how relative their judgments and thinking habits are.” This is doubtless so and explains the continuing skepticism of the East European in the face of Western innocence. But there is nothing innocent about Western (and Eastern) commentators’ voluntary servitude before the new pan-orthodoxy. Many of them, Ketman-like, know better but prefer not to raise their heads above the parapet. In this sense at least, they have something truly in common with the intellectuals of the Communist age. One hundred years after his birth, fifty-seven years after the publication of his seminal essay, Milosz’s indictment of the servile intellectual rings truer than ever: “his chief characteristic is his fear of thinking for himself.”

Lullaby of the Trains

2010-07-05T12:15:00.000-07:00

One of the outstanding poems in Elisabeth Murawski's recent book Zorba's Daughter is "Lullaby of the Train," about the transport of Gypsy children to the Nazi death camps. Ms. Murawski has allowed me to post the poem here.

Lullaby of the Train

With eyes like empty
begging bowls
the orphan gypsy girls

have stopped complaining
of shoes that pinch
their toes, of dresses

with holes. The town
clock releases
a knight on horseback,

announces the hour.
The children can’t tell
time yet. Numbers

on paper, they shuffle
forward, too weary
and hungry to cry

or look back.
The German nun waves
to her charges, obedient

as shadows. Click clack
go the wheels
kissing the railroad track,

lullaby of the train.
Click clack, click clack
to the smoky town in Poland.

___________

To read more about the fate of the gypsies during the Holocaust, please visit the Jewish Virtual Library.

___________
Ms. Murawski's book, winner of the 2010 May Swenson Prize, is available at Amazon.

Bieganski: The Brute Polak Stereotype in Polish-Jewish Relations and American Popular Culture

2010-07-04T07:10:00.000-07:00

If you are a Pole or Polish-American living in this country, you have probably been called a dumb Polak. You have also probably been told that Poles are stupid, lazy, anti-semitic, and brutal.

You have heard this from your friends and the people around you. When I was a four-year old refugee from Germany, I heard it from a boy my own age who lived next door to me. Later, I heard it where I worked and lived. And always, of course, I heard it from the media, from TV shows, movies, books, and music.

I never understood it. I saw Poles who were smart, caring, helpful, and idealistic, and I wondered where the stereotype of the brute Polak came from.

Danusha Goska's new book answers this question.

Bieganski: The Brute Polak Stereotype in Polish-Jewish Relations and American Popular Culture is a daring and far-reaching study that examines the sources and prevalence of stereotyped images of Poles as brutal, subhuman creatures. Drawing on her extensive research in history, popular culture, and folklore, and also on interviews of Poles and Jews in America today, interviews of both stereotypers and victims of stereotyping, she teaches us all something profound about how the image of the Polak originated and why it continues to flourish.

Two decades in the works, and written and researched without institutional support, her study has been called "groundbreaking" and "brilliant."

Here are two more recent responses to this "groundbreaking" and "brilliant" book:

From John J. Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago

"Bieganski is a truly important book because it challenges and demolishes the widely held belief that Poles are nothing more than ignorant and brutish anti-Semites who played a central role in causing the Holocaust. Goska does a first-rate job of describing how Jews and Poles really interacted with each other over their rich history together. Let's hope that this book is widely read and helps change the conventional wisdom about Polish-Jewish relations."

From John T. Pawlikowski, OSM, Ph.D., professor of Social Ethics, Director, Catholic-Jewish Studies Program Catholic Theological Union, Chicago

"Stereotypes of Poles have been commonplace in Western society. Danusha V. Goska presents a comprehensive overview of such images in a balanced fashion. She offers no apologetic for genuine instance of Polish anti-Semitism. But she also exposes those rooted in outright prejudice with no foundation in fact. An important contribution to improved Polish-Jewish understanding."

From Dr. Michael Herzbrun, Rabbi Temple Emanu-El, Rochester, NY:

"In this most important work, Dr. Goska's style incorporates those necessary ingredients that justify writing as an art form: her grammar is impeccable, even while the pathways of her sentences can be unpredictable. Her imagery is robust, but yet it never gets in the way of the underlying premises of her arguments. Moreover, her thinking is crisp, and her knowledge of this very sensitive topic is thoroughly evident. Indeed, the reader cannot help but be persuaded by the logical unfolding of the positions she brings to this necessary work. Above all, she establishes that all-important trust in her readers: that while she may jostle their previously-held constructs, she will also protect them on a literary journey that could be harrowing and dangerous in lesser hands."

_______________

Dr. Goska has started a blog devoted to her work on Bieganski and other issues. You can see her blog by clicking here.

Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration

2010-06-25T13:30:00.000-07:00

If you're reading this, you probably came to America as an immigrant or your parents did or your grandparents did. You or your people came with little or very little, and the world they found was always strange and often hard and sometimes threatening.

Immigrants, for the most part, don't like to talk about those days. I know my parents didn't. When I would ask my mother as a child what it was like when we came, she would wave me away. Like so many other immigrants, she wanted that past forgotten. Remembering that past was somehow a betrayal of what she wanted to be, an American. She wanted to be an American sharing the real American dream, the one that promises you never have to remember where you came from and how hard the passage here was.

But we can't forget those stories, shouldn't forget them, because some time we'll need them. They are part of our essential legacy, and they tell us that we can survive no matter how hard times are; they tell us we can keep going even when it seems like we'll never succeed, never crawl out of the mess we're in.

Gregory Tague understands how important these stories are. In Common Boundaries: Stories of Immigration, he has gathered together a collection of twenty true stories by twenty immigrants from Poland and Hungary and Mexico and Iran and Morocco and Cuba. (The two essays about Polish immigrants were written by Dagamara J. Kurcz and me.)

These stories are sad and funny and heartbreaking, and they need to be read and passed down because someday we'll need to remember what courage and hope and strength and love can really accomplish when faced with the impossible.

__________________

Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration is available from Amazon and Editions Bibliotekos.

To find out more about Common Boundary, please read the recent article in the Brooklyn Eagle.

Further information is also available at the Editions Bibliotekos website.

Barney and Gienka by John Surowiecki

2010-06-17T15:51:00.001-07:00

Part Dante’s Virgil and part Groucho Marx, John Surowiecki writes about his Polish-American parents, aunts, and uncles with seriousness and humor, elegance and wit. The narrative of his peoms begins as his father wakes after a stroke and weaves back and forth across the years, taking the reader to pre-war movie theaters, army staging areas in England, a ball-bearing factory in the States, and the small-town Connecticut world his parents lived in after the war.

Where other writers would treat the lives of such working-class people with pointless nostalgia or sentimentality, Mr. Surowiecki reveals real lives in all their cluttered and touching complexity.

This book adds to Mr. Surowiecki considerable achievements which include winning the Poetry Foundation's first Pegasus Award for Verse Drama, the 2006 Washington Prize for Poetry, and the 2007 Pablo Neruda Prize, also for poetry.

Originally, I was going to post "Barney and Gienka," the title poem, but I think "Mr. Szmykleszczwladeczeryniecki’s Funeral [June 13, 1965]" offers a sense of the Polish-American community that is very powerful. There's death and rebirth and joy and suffering in the poem that speaks of the continuity of that community even as the old members pass on.

Mr. Szmykleszczwladeczeryniecki’s Funeral [June 13, 1965]

The foundry workers, who were so loud
and tearful at his wake, sit quietly
in back of the church, stepping
outside now and then to smoke cigarettes
and to hear the shouts and cries
of children playing in the street.

A few people from the St. Casimir Society
remember the time he played Santa Claus,
handing out bright fragrant oranges to children
who handed them back saying they wanted PEZ
dispensers and comic books, not something their
parents brought home every week from the store.

The stained-glass windows of the church
feature portraits of the Holy Family:
Lazarus the uncle, cousins James and Jude,
Martha the worrying aunt, grandmother Ann,
Joseph teaching carpentry to toddler Jesus
and Mary, pained, thinking of what’s to come.

And the glass is so thin it admits the shouts
of the children outside and it shudders and rattles
with the organ’s every throb. It groans as the priest
explains that death ought to be an occasion for joy
and celebration, then sighs, finally, at the squeak
of Mrs. Jablonski’s thin soprano voice.

______

Barney and Gienka is available at Amazon.

To read more about Mr. Surowiecki please click here.

You can also visit his website.

News from Polish Diaspora Writers

2010-06-07T10:45:00.000-07:00

I've had a heart attack recently (you can read about it here) and open heart surgery, and I've fallen behind on my blogging.

There's been a lot of news about the activities of Polish American writers and artists these past few months, and I know that if I don't get it out quickly I'll just get buried under the news that I'll be hearing in the next few months.

So, in no particular order:

Christina Pacosz's recent reading at the Montserrat Poetry Festival, sponsored by KMOS-TV in Warrensburg, Missouri, has been released as an audio file. You can hear 17 minutes of Christina's poetry by clicking here.

Jeremy Edward Shiok will be tracing the journey of his grandfather across the Pacific during World War II. Jeremy will be writing about his experiences and his grandfather's experiences with the US Marine Corps. The website devoted to this project is at Atoll: A Historical Journey to the Central Pacific.

Linda Nemec Foster's Talking Diamonds and Jehanne Dubrow's From the Fever World were finalists for the Book of the Year Awards.

Cherries with Chopin: A Tribute in Verse: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry edited by Maja Trochimczyk was reviewed recently by Alison Ross in The Clockwise Cat.

Mark Pawlak's latest collection of poems was published this spring. Jefferson’s New Image Salon: Matchups & Mashups is a surreal meditation on the American landscape.

Adam Lizakowski's "A Poem about the Rooster" won the $1,000 first place prize in this year’s Elma Stuckey Poetry Contest.

Mark Lewandowski has just published a collection of stories called Halibut Rodeo (All Things That Matter Press). He's also started a blog about the book and other things (mostly about Alaska at this point) at http://halibutrodeo.com.

Grzegorz Wroblewski edited the Polish section of the Cleaves Journal. It's available online. His MEMORY IS THE SAME AS IMAGINATION (I-IV)is available at the New Post Literate: A Gallery of New Asemic Writing.

John Surowiecki's play "My Nose and Me: A TragedyLite or TragiDelight in 33 Scenes," winner of the Poetry Foundation's first Pegasus Award for verse drama, will be published in the Midway Journal this June.

Phil Boiarski is the featured poet in the recent OFF_Anthologie, a new publication from OFF_Press, an organization founded by Polish expats and Englishmen.

John Guzlowski recently published two poems, "A Dog Will" and "What the Tower of Babel Looks Like," in a special issue of Convergence Review devoted to race. His book Lightning and Ashes has also recently been reviewed on the blog Venus Febriculosa. The review also includes his poem "Here's What My Mother Won't Talk About."

_______

The picture above is of a tree and a field in Poland.

Two New Polish American Bloggers

2010-06-05T16:33:00.001-07:00

Essayist Danusha Goska and poet Oriana Ivy have recently started blogging, and their blogs make extremely interesting reading. While Dr. Goska writes thoughtful and entertaining essays on Polish-American culture and the depiction of Poles and Polish Americans, Ms. Ivy posts her own fine poems and her reflections on other poets.

Danusha Goska's blog is called "Bieganski the Blog," and you can get there by clicking here. The current post deals with correspondent Helen Thomas's recent controversial statement regarding Jews returning to Poland.

Oriana Ivy's blog is named "Oriana-Poetry," and you can get there by clicking here. The latest post discusses the term "extreme effort" and features a poem by Ivy called "Ghost Ranch."

Tadeusz Borowski Cover Design Competition

2010-05-28T07:10:00.001-07:00

John Bertram sent me a note yesterday about a design competition that his company, Venus febriculosa, is conducting.

They are looking for a cover design for Tadeusz Borowski's classic memoir of his life in Auschwitz and Dachau, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.

This is a no-fee competition with a $500 prize.

Entrants are encouraged to visit the Wikipedia entry for Tadeusz Borowski and, of course, to read the book. Excerpts from This Way for the Gas can be found by clicking here.

You can find all the details of the competition at Venus Febriculosa's website and at the PDF file for the rules.

------------

Recently, I published a poem based on an incident Tadeusz Borowski describes in his memoirs. The poem is called "Fear."

FEAR

During the war, there was only work and death.
The work broke you down, filled your stomach
with rocks and threw you in the river to drown.
The work shoved a bayonet up your ass
and twisted the blade till you were dead.

In the camps, there was only what we ate
and those we worked with—sometimes women.
But we never made love. I’ll tell you why.
Fear. I remember once a thousand men
were working a field with sticks, and trucks came
and dumped naked women in front of us.
Guards were whipping them to the ovens,
and the women screamed and cried to us, pleaded
with their arms stretched out—naked mothers,
daughters, and sisters, but not one man moved.

Not one. Fear will blind you, and tie you up
like nothing else. It’ll whisper, “Just stand still,
soon it will be over. Don’t worry, there’s nothing
you can do.” You will take this fear to the grave
with you. I can promise. And after the war,
it was the same. I saw things that were as bad
as what happened in the camps. I wish
I had had a gun there. I would have
pressed it here to my forehead, right here.
Better that than what I feel now. This fear.

—originally appeared in Hanging Loose, 92, 2008

Murawski Wins May Swenson Prize

2010-04-03T08:14:00.000-07:00

Polish American poet Elisabeth Murawski has just received the prestigious May Swenson Poetry Award for her forthcoming poetry collection Zorba's Daughter.

Her manuscript was selected by distinguished poet Grace Schulman, long-time poetry editor of The Nation.

Here's part of the press release:

The 2010 Swenson Award will go to Elisabeth Murawski, of Alexandria, Virginia for her collection of poems entitled Zorba's Daughter.

Ms. Murawski will receive a cash award of $1000, and Zorba's Daughter will be published by USU Press in the summer of 2010.

Murawski holds an MFA from George Mason University and is a well-published poet. She has been awarded a Hawthornden fellowship (2008), as well as residencies at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Achill Heinrich Boll Association. She is author of the collection Moon and Mercury (Washington Writers' Publishing House) and two chapbooks--Troubled by an Angel (Cleveland State Poetry Center) and Out-Patients (forthcoming from Servinghouse Books).

Over 200 of her poems have appeared in journals that include Yale Review, New Republic, Virginia Quarterly Review, Field, Ontario Review, Antioch Review, Southern Review, Dubliner, Poetry Northwest, and others. The present volume has been a finalist for the Field Poetry Prize, the Brittingham and Pollak Poetry Prize, the Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry, and The Journal/OSU Poetry Prize.

To read more about Elisabeth's book, please go to her book's website by clicking here.

Elisabeth has allowed me to publish the title poem from the collection.

Zorba's Daughter

Night boasted it was eternity.
But here now
through the brown links of trees
the sun spills dawn.

Light's turn (dice on a table)
to be eternal, a current
to feed her house, abruptly
wake her like a thief. Who

will teach her divine
collaboration? Who will love
her dirty hands enough
to leave her head unshaved?

She goes barefoot as the sky,
nectarine slice on a spoon,
sweet coral carnation,
little fish

with wings in her heart,
tempted to fly
from the spear
she cannot escape, resolved

to die like Samson
braced against the pillars
of the temple,
roaring for his eyes.

____________________

Other poems by Elisabeth Murawski at Writing the Polish Diaspora include Alias Irene and How We Learned about the War.

Clicking on the above titles will take you to the poems.