Henry Gonshak

Final Thoughts

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:15:34 GMT

Well, gentle readers, this will be--ta da!--my final blog entry. This coming Sunday, five days from now, we fly back to the states. We're spending a week with my mom in New York City, visiting my sister and old friends with whom I've stayed in touch. Then I fly back to Butte the following Sunday, while Nancy and Becky hang around the Big Apple for a couple more days, and then head down to Baltimore for the annual convention of the National Puzzler's League, a group of savants whose idea of fun is to do incredibly complex word puzzles, an organization that has provided a kind of second family to Nancy for decades. Now Nancy is initiating Becky into the strange rites of the tribe.

I want to cover two topics in this final entry. First, I want to discuss a Holocaust conference I attended about a month ago in Krakow, which included a visit to Auschwitz. Second, I want to share some concluding thoughts on leaving Poland.

The Holocaust conference was co-sponsored by Jagiellonian University in Krakow, one of the oldest universities in Europe, dating back to the Middle Ages, and a much newer institution, the University of Northern Iowa. One reason it was such a worthwhile affair is that it included a lot more than just academic sessions filled with profs reading papers (although there was plenty of that). But there was also a talk given by the head rabbi of Krakow, a performance of Yiddish songs at the Krakow Jewish Center, Friday night Sabbath services at one of the few operational synagogues in Krakow, a multimedia presentation by two American academics who had designed a Holocaust Center in Maine, and, as I've said, the highlight of the conference, the visit to Auschwitz. I returned from the conference (riding the Polish rail system all by myself in a heroic move) totally exhausted, but also having had a rich and memorable experience.

The bus ride from our hotel in downtown Krakow to Auschwitz took about an hour and a half. We left bright and early at, if I recall correctly, 8:30 in the morning. Auschwitz was thronged with tourists. We first entered the large Visitor's Center, which, one of my fellow conferees who'd been to Auschwitz before informed me, had not existed when she'd visited the concentration camp just a few years earlier. Generally, I had a sense of a place that is still under development, even so many years after the war, not surprisingly, since I doubt much was done with Auschwitz under the communist regime. Because the place was so packed, we were all given headsets so that we could always clearly hear our guide, despite the throngs of other tourists. Frankly, I wish the camp wasn't quite so crowded. Often, inside the various buildings, I would have liked to pause and look at something more closely, but with hundreds of people pressing at my back, and the other members of my party rapidly disappearing into the mob, that wasn't really possible. So I hurried along like everyone else.

I left the tour with a much better sense than I'd had before of the logistics of the camp. Auschwitz was divided into two camps--Auschwitz proper, and Birkenau, a few miles away, which was much larger. It is over the entry gates to Auschwitz that the cruelly deceptive slogan is spelled out in metal script, the words which greeted prisoners upon their arrival at the camp (in German): "Work Shall Set You Free". In Auschwitz, we visited the camp prison, where misbehaving prisoners were housed in tiny cells, often in solitary confinement, before usually being taken out and shot against the wall that divided the prison from the adjoining building.

At Birkenau, unlike Auschwitz, the buildings were constructed of wood rather than stone, so only a few of them remain standing, but you can see the lots where the other buildings once stood. We toured the train stop, where, when the boxcars containing the prisoners arrived, the Nazi doctors made their infamous "selections"--designating those who had some job skill and were fit enough to work to become slave laborers, while the rest, including almost all the children, were herded off to the gas chambers. We also toured the communal toilets, where the prisoners were given only a few minutes a day under unbelievably crowded conditions to wash and go to the bathroom. And we toured the dank, claustrophobic barracks, where the prisoners slept on wooden bunks pressed against their fellows.

And, perhaps most importantly, we toured the gas chambers and crematoria. In Auschwitz, some relatively small gas chambers and crematoria remain, but in Birkenau the Nazis dynamited these facilities before evacuating the camp just before it was reached by the oncoming Allied troops in an ultimately fruitless attempt to conceal their monstrous crimes. As a result, the large gas chamber and crematoria at Birkenau has been reduced to rubble. But, if you look closely, you can still make out a few details that survived the destruction--e.g., the hooks upon which the prisoners hung their clothes before being ushered into the gas chambers, having been deceived into believing they were going to be taking disinfecting showers, the stone steps leading from the gas chambers to the crematoria, upon which the bodies were carried by the Sonderkommando units (groups of prisoners assigned these horrific tasks) to be cremated. I stood within a few yards of the remains of the gas chambers, and considered the fact that when these facilitites were fully operational, 5,000 innocent people were murdered here on a daily basis.

Of course, that was a fairly mind-blowing reflection. But, to be honest, I can't say that the full horror of the Holocaust hit me upon visiting Auschwitz. For one thing, we visited the camp on a sunny Spring day, and, with its green lawns and budding trees and fields of wild flowers, I'm sure it looked very different from how it looked in the 1940s when it was a center of genocide. On the contrary, the camp had an almost bucolic, pastoral atmosphere. It was almost impossible to make that leap into how the camp must have looked during the war. Perhaps it would have been better to have gone there in the dead of winter, when the sky was grey and the fields were snow-covered and frozen.

Earlier in the year, my daughter visited Auschwitz on a school trip with her history class, and wrote a wonderful essay about her experience (reprinted in the school's newsletter and yearbook) in which she concluded with bracing honesty that, given the passage of time and the comfortable security of our own lives, it is almost impossible for us today to truly imagine what the prisoners at Auschwitz experienced. I think that's right. Of course, this doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make this leap of imagination. It's just that we should take that leap while simultaneously aware that we simply can't go all the way, that there will always be a level of horror to Auschwitz which will elude our emotional and intellectual grasp. In other words, I think we should approach our visit with a certain sense of humility and awareness of our own limitations.

On a completely different topic, how do I feel about leaving Poland? Frankly, my experience here has been mixed. I met some wonderful people, both colleagues and students and others. The public sphere in Poland is not a particularly friendly place, perhaps because of the lingering legacy of communism, but individual Poles, when they welcome you into their homes or come to visit yours, are incredibly friendly and giving. It seems just about impossible in Poland to ever have a quick visit. On the contrary, you settle in, and are fed and fed till you're ready to burst, and stay for hours on end. If you attempt to leave, your host will invariably press you to stay longer, and to eat some more. Of course, this can become burdensome, but it reflects a code of hospitality that is really heartwarming.

Not surprisingly, I was homesick for much of my stay. I never realized how American I am, how rooted I am in American culture and society, until I left the country for a year. To be honest, I can't imagine ever settling anywhere else. Hopefully, when I return to the states, I will stop taking America for granted (as I've always done, never having lived anywhere else that I could use as a means of comparison) and really appreciate what a wonderful country we are lucky enough to live in. (I know that must sound incredibly sappy, but I'm being sincere.)

Moreover, if I ever do live in a foreign country for an extended period again, I will make a better effort than I did this year to learn the local language. Not that my failure to learn Polish was entirely my fault. As I've written before, the language is fiendishly difficult. And enough people around here speak English (especially my colleagues and students in the English Studies Dept., whose English is flawless) that I was able to cope, relying on my pidgin Polish and a lot of hand gestures when I had to deal with service people. But you just miss so much of what's going on in a country when you don't speak the language. I feel there was a whole level of experience here I was deprived of due to my lack of Polish.

Still, I don't want to end my blog on such a downer note. I certainly have grown as a result of my year abroad, and I know myself better than I did before, both my strengths and my flaws. And self-knowlege, I believe, is an absolute good. As Socrates said (if I can be permitted one pretentious quote in closing), "Only the examined life is worth living." I hope I have accurately and even perhaps somewhat entertainingly shared my examinations with my readers.

Professorial Melancholia

Mon, 11 May 2009 15:39:33 GMT

Let me admit from the outset; this is going to be another bummer of an entry. When I first introducted my blog almost a year ago, I promised to avoid the temptation to present my time abroad in purely idyllic terms, and instead to admit honestly to problems and complaints. But I also think that whining and complaining in a blog should be kept to a minimum, since most readers have limited patience for that sort of thing. But I will point out that I haven't posted a truly negative entry since the saturninely titled, "The Horrors of Polish Bureaucracy." and before that you have to go all the way back to one of my first entries, tersely called, "Griping," about my struggles with the language barrier in Poland. So, I think I've earned a modicum of whining.

Not to beat around the bush, my classes haven't been going very well. Bluntly put, I'm having a hell of a time getting classroom discussion going. Some of the reasons are probably my fault. I lack the complete grasp of the subject matter I'm teaching this semester, the Literature of the American West, compared to the subjects I taught last semester, Jewish-American Literature and the Holocaust in American Film--subjects I knew inside and out. But, without letting myself off the hook, I think some of the reasons for my classroom failures are not entirely my fault. Just like in America, springtime is also the hardest season in which to teach, since the students (not to mention the teachers) have been going full-steam since the Fall, and, particularly as the weather warms up, which is happening here, there is an understandable temptation to wish to chuck the damn textbooks in the garbage and frolic in the sunshine. At Montana Tech, this problem is somewhat modified by the administration's sage decision to end Spring semester in the first week of May. But at the University of Wroclaw, by contrast, the semester rusn all the way to mid-June, a cruelly extended period.

Another problem with the Polish university system, not found in America, is that students don't buy their books. I assume the reason is to save students' money, but the result is that the professors purchase a handful of texts for the library, and the students then photocopy the material. This, of course, costs the students some money, and it also greatly increases the chances that students won't do the reading, since a lot of students can't be bothered doing all that damn photocopying. Indeed, I strongly suspect that a lot of students aren't doing the reading, and that this is a simple explanation for why I have had such trouble getting students to talk, since it's rather difficult, to put it mildly, to discuss what you haven't read. Given that students have to pay money to photocopy anyway, I think it would make a lot of sense to have Polish students purchase their textbooks, just like we do in America.

The class I'm having the most problems getting students to talk in, my Masters Level Literature of the American West course, is also the largest of my classes, containing over 40 students, and I strongly suspect the two facts are related. Small classes are always easier to get talking than large ones, since a lot of students are intimidated by the thought of speaking in front of such a large group. In the same class, my students have been writing pretty good papers, so I suspect that, in general, the intimidation factor is the problem, not that the students don't grasp the material. With a class of this size, most professors simply lecture, but over the many years I've been teaching I've never become comfortable with lecturing as a pedagogical method. For me, it's the back and forth between me and my students that make classes come alive, and that forces students to think on their feet and really become engaged in the learning process. In my experience, when teachers lecture, students have a tendency to lean back in their seats and lapse into coma, because it's simply dull to listen to someone drone on ad nasueum in the front of the room. So, I've devised an approach which will hopefully get students involved while absolving me of the necessity of lecturing. Instead, I plan to break my students into groups, give each group a discussion question to brainstorm together, and then have each group share their answers with the class, which hopefully will elicit further discussion. Of course, some students dislike working in groups, because they feel that one or two students invariably do all the work, but, hell, you can't please everyone. I promise to report back to my faithful readers on the success or failture of my pedagogical experiment.

My final explanation for the problems with my classes stems back, I think, to those ever-present and accursed language and culture barriers. Don't get me wrong. My students all speak fluent English--remarkably fluent, considering it's a second language, and considering how different English is from that fiendishly idiosyncratic language, Polish. But you can speak English very well and still miss all sorts of idioms and subtle connotations and that kind of thing. Back in America, my philosophy as a teacher is based on that great song, "Make `em Laugh," from that marvelous movie musical, "Singing in the Rain". That is, I fill my classroom utterances with one-liners and jokey asides and little quips. Anything to keep the students awake and reasonably entertained. But, as I believe I stated in an earlier entry, comedy translates remarkably badly from one language to the next. As proof, consider the fact that American comedies and adventure flicks are so much more popular in Poland than are comedies. When we saw "The Dark Knight" in Poland, the theater was packed; when, in contrast, we saw the very witty, "Forgetting Sarah Marshall," we virtually saw the film by ourselves. So, there's a whole resource, comedy, which I turn to regularly as a teacher in America, which I can't rely on in Poland. Of course, this problem, as far as I can see, is unsolveable.

I don't know how many other Fulbright professors teaching abroad have faced the same problems I have. But I suspect I'm not entirely alone.

Loving London

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 08:48:05 GMT

Well, faithful readers, Nancy, Becky and I have just returned on Friday from the last big trip we plan to have during our stay in Poland (which is rapidly drawing to a close)--six days in London. It was another great vacation. Our activities included visiting Westminster Abbey, the National Gallery, the reconstructed Globe Theatre, the Tower of London, the used bookstores on Charing Cross Road, while also taking in two plays--the long-running mystery/thriller "The Woman in Black," and the smash musical, "Billy Elliott".

It's hard to find words for the delight we experienced at finally being back in an English-speaking country. Knowing the language provides you with a whole different level of engagement with a country you're visiting. In London, I was able to read the local papers and watch the local news on television, and, as a result, I learned a lot about the current political scene in England, which seems to be in a perpetual state of furor. Not long before we arrived, a close advisor to the prime minister, Gordon Brown, had been caught leaking scandalous, false stories to the press about the private lives of opponents of Brown's Labour Party in the Conservative Party, and even though the advisor was quickly released, the Tories in the Conservative Party have been screaming for the PM's head.

An even bigger story concerned the demonstrations in London to protest the meeting of the G-20 countries there. I'm not sure exactly what the demonstrators were protesting, although I know the Iraq War had inspired their ire. When we were taking a bus from the airport to the tube, where we could catch a subway to the apartment we were renting, the driver had to drop us off early, because the demonstrations had totally shut down midtown London and no traffic was getting through.

There were also allegations of police brutality from the demonstrators. A news-seller named Ian Tomlinson was pushed to the ground by the police, whereupon he had a heart attack and died, which led to charges that the police had murdered Tomlinson. The outrage over Tomlinson's death inspired yet more demonstrations. There was a second case where a female demonstrator was yelling at a policeman, and he slapped her in the face. When she then screamed, "But I'm a woman," he rapped her behind the legs with his baton. The whole scene was caught on a home video, which led to another outcry. The police officer has been suspended pending an investigation, and the woman is vowing to sue.

I may offend some readers by saying so, but, personally, I have some sympathy for the police in these situations. When you're facing an angry mob, it's hard to walk that fine line between keeping the peace without slipping over into police brutality. And I'm not sure why the demonstrators were so furious with the G-20 countries. In the case of the Iraq War, President Obama has already pledged to bring the troops home. He can't just bring back every soldier immediately for fear that Iraq will then slip into chaos. The insurgency has already been emboldened by news that the Americans will soon be gone, after they'd been subdued fairly successfully by a combination of American and Iraqi forces. In short, what's required is a carefully phased withdrawal. But try making that kind of nuanced argument to a mob of fanatical demonstrators.

I was surprised by how active radical politics appear to be in England, while in America the far-left has been largely silenced. The subject even arose in the musical "Billy Elliott". I'd known the play was about a poor boy from a lower class neighborhood who dreams of becoming a ballet dancer, but what I hadn't anticipated was how central the theme of working-class, socialist-inspired labor agitation is to the play. Both Billy's father and older brother are miners, and in the background of the whole ballet story is a brutal miners' strike that sweeps up Billy's family, and which the miners explicitly regard as an act of class warfare. In one scene, at a Christmas Day celebration, the miners and their families launch into a satirical song lampooning the then British prime minister, the staunchly rightwing Margaret Thatcher, and, at the song's end, a huge, cartoonish puppet of Thatcher, with the word "hate" spelled out on her knuckles, looms over the stage. During the same scene, a character inspired cheers from the audience by deriding Tony Blair for stripping the Labour Party of its radical roots. And a key scene in the play is when Billy's father decides to become a "scab" by crossing the picket line in order to get money so Billy can audition for admission to an exclusive dance school.

I don't want to overstate the play's political themes. "Billy Elliott" was basically a feel-good musical filled with lively song and dance. But I can't imagine a Broadway musical in which radical politics played such a large and primarily laudatory role. Based on my stay in London, I'd say that radical politics are alive and well in England, for better or worse, in a way they certainly aren't in the states. In America, socialism is a dirty word. Look at how Obama was tarred with the term by the rightwing media and politicians when he decided to institute some long overdue taxes on the wealthiest Americans, who'd been given a free ride under the Bush administration. But in England (and elsewhere in Europe) democratic socialism is a long and venerated tradition, even if the Labour Party has moved away from its socialist roots under Blair and Brown.

But enough about politics. What else did we do? I greatly enjoyed our visit to the reconstructed Globe Theatre, located just 200 yards from the original Globe Theatre, which burned down centuries ago. We had a fine (though too short) tour and spent hours in the theatre's extensive exhibitions. I picked up lots of good talking points for the Shakespearean Drama course I'll be teaching at Tech when I return in the Fall. For example, the tour guide stressed that in the Globe the plays were pitched to the ear rather than the eye. It was more important to hear a play than to see it. That was why the royal boxes were located in a section of the theatre which had an obstructed view of the stage, but which offered the best acoustics in the house. In short, in Shakespeare and his fellow Elizabethan playwrights, language is everything. There was almost no scenery, and the costumes, though lavish, were contemporary dress. As a result, actors had to reveal where a scene was set through the dialogue. And because the audiences were so rowdy, Shakespeare's characters will often repeat something several times to make sure the audience catches it. It's because language is so central to Shakespeare that it can be as profitable to read his plays as to see them performed, unlike almost any other dramatist.

I can't close this entry on our trip to London without mentioning our lunch at a traditional English pub called The Prince of Wales, located in the Kennington district in southern London a short walk from the apartment we rented. The pub was recommended to us by the owner of the apartment. During the lunch, I spouted on to Nancy and Becky about the venerable tradition of the English pub, which I know about primarily from having read dozens (possibly hundreds) of classic British murder mysteries, which invariably contain countless scenes set in English pubs. In the Inspector Morse mysteries, e.g., Morse finds that he can solve crimes best by puzzling over them while guzzling beer in a pub, so he's constantly dropping into pubs at all hours of the day and night, and dragging his poor assistant (who's no drinker) along with him to pick up the tab. Because it was located in a residential neighborhood, the Prince of Wales had a chummy, homey atmosphere you probably wouldn't find in a pub in downtown London. I suspect if we didn't have a plane to catch on the day we had lunch there, we'd have spent hours, and by the end of our stay would be buying drinks for the house, joining in on traditional English folk songs, and improving international relations between England and America.

Well, I think I'll close the entry on that note. Perhaps it's time to revive my blog motto: Stay tuned!

Teaching Western American Lit. to Poles

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:28:40 GMT

As I wrote about in an entry a very long time ago, last semester here at the University of Wroclaw I taught courses in Jewish-American Literature and the Holocaust in American Film. This semester, drawing on my experience of having lived in Montana for almost 20 years, I am teaching two classes in Western American Literature. I'm also teaching a course devoted exclusively to the novels of the great Western American writer from the early 20th century, Willa Cather.

We've only had one discussion so far in each of these classes, so it's a bit early to say how my Polish students are responding to the material. I did ask if any of the students had traveled in the American West, and other than one student who'd said she spent a few hours in the Dallas Airport (after studying in Louisiana), no one had. As for the writers on the syllabus (I picked a great anthology, The Literary West: An Anthology of Western American Literature), a fair number of students had heard of John Steinbeck (most had read "Of Mice and Men"), a few knew Jack London (having read "Call of the Wild" and "White Fang" as kids), and several were familiar with Willa Cather (mostly through "My Antonia"). And that's about it. No one knew the more contemporary Western writers in our text, like Gary Snyder, Sam Shepard, Rick Bass, William Kittridge, Terry Tempest Williams, etc. And no one had heard of major Montana authors like A.B. Guthrie, or popular Western writers like Zane Grey and Owen Wister. So, I think it's fair to say that both the geography and the literature of the American West is relatively unexplored terrain for my Polish students.

It's also somewhat new territory for me, too. Jewish-American Literature and the Holocaust in American Film are subjects I know in the marrow of my bones. I don't have that same kind of expertise with Western American Literature. In the book reviews I used to write for "The Montana Standard," I reviewed a lot of books by Western writers and on Western subjects, since I assumed those were the topics the newspaper's readers were interested in. And when I served in the late 90s on The Montana Committee for the Humanities, we received a lot of grant proposals that were related in some way to Western (usually specifically Montanan) literature. And, finally, I've tried to weave Montana writers into my Introduction to Literature course, which has led me to include books like Guthrie's "The Big Sky" and Ivan Doig's "This House of Sky" (not surprisingly, a lot of Montana books have the word "sky" in the title) and James Welch's "Fool's Crow," about the Marias River Massacre. So, all that ad hoc work has provided me with something of an informal education on Western literature.

How do you describe Western literature? As the introduction to our anthology notes, there are really two "Wests". One is the mythic West. That is the West popularized by Hollywood Westerns and by those "dime novels" which were so rabidly devoured by readers all over America (and the world) in the 19th and early to mid-20th centuries. This West is almost entirely masculine (women are left back at the homestead while the men ride the range), features heroic cowboys and villainous Indians, includes clear-cut divisions of good and evil devoid of moral ambiguity, apppears as a place where a man can live any way he chooses without being restricted by society's laws and regulations, provides an opportunity to start over, to remake oneself anew, is a place where problems can be neatly solved by violence, and displays a sentimental attachment to the natural terrain of the West and to the animals that populate this rugged landscape. As I said, it's a West popularized in the best-selling novels of Zane Grey, Owen Wister and Louis L'Amour, among many others. I'm extremely interested in the mythic West, because this myth has exerted such an enormous influence on American culture and the American imagination. So I'm glad that selections from those "dime novels" are included in our anthology, even though their literary merit is questionable. It's intriguing that many of these writers weren't born in the West. Wister, e.g., who wrote the enormously popular 1902 novel, "The Virginian," was, as a young man, sunk in serious clinical depression as a bank clerk in Boston, until he went on a "rest cure" to a Wyoming ranch and emerged a transformed man. For these writers, the West was a place to escape to, and they captured that sense of metamorphosis in their writing.

According to the anthology introduction, running alongside and often counter to this mythic West is the real West. This is a place that's considerably less glamourous than the myth, where ugly realities appear that get airbrushed out of the pristine picture of the mythic West. For one thing, the real West tells the story of the white man's destruction of the Indians and of traditional Indian culture, a shameful story of massacres, broken treaties, reservations, conversions to Christianity, etc. While the mythic West is almost entirely a creation of white men, the real West features Indian writers like N. Scott Momaday and Sherman Alexie telling the Indian side of the story from an exclusively Indian perspective. Female voices also appear in the real West, telling the tales of women on the frontier, women often dragged out West more or less against their will by their husbands and fathers, struggling to survive in a unforgiving and patriarchal world. Finally, the real West includes the tale of the destruction of the environment by mining and logging and oil drilling, and often displays a "green" environmental consciousness. This narrative features a Western Nature which isn't something to be conquered by rugged men, but instead a Nature which is an ecosystem with which human beings need to learn to live in harmony, lest we lose the world that sustains us. It's also a story that recognizes that just as Man has exploited the environment in the West, so small family farmers and other members of the working class in the West have been exploited by big business interests like the railroad barons and the oil tycoons and the copper kings and the land speculators and others of their odious ilk.

I hope, though, that my approach to Western literature doesn't come off as excessively politicized. Western literature also just tells great stories, of courage and cowardice, fear and exultation, determination and exhaustion, love and hate. What will my Polish students make of it? Are there any comparable traditions in Polish literature? Nature writing? Work which pits bosses against employees? Work that features stirring myths which are comparable to the myth of the West? These are questions whose answers I look forward to learning from my students over the course of the semester.

Parisian Reflections

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:21:57 GMT

Well, dear readers, I am sitting in the apartment in Paris we rented during our eleven day vacation in this lovely city. It's a very nice place, better than the apartment we rented in Florence, quite comfortable, white walls, bright, a large reproduction of a beautiful Renoir painting in the living room. We are just wrapping up our stay; tomorrow we fly back to Wroclaw. I am alone; Nancy and Becky have gone to visit the catacombs, but I was feeling rather tired of sightseeing, and looked forward to a quiet afternoon by myself.

We have had a full slate of events. As best I can remember, we have taken a boat ride down the Seine, visited both the Louvre and the Impressionist museums, went to the palace at Versailles, took a trip to the famous cemetary where Jim Morrison of the rock group The Doors is buried (along witih many other lumaniries), went to Sunday Mass at the cathedral of Notre Dame, browsed in the Shakespeare and Company bookstore where Joyce and Henry Miller hung out, attended a jazz club on the Left Bank, and probably engaged in a few other activities which I am spacing at the moment.

As I said, Paris is a beautiful city. Of course, the common wisdom is that the Parisians are snobbish and hate Americans, but I must say I saw absolutely no evidence of that whatsoever. On the contrary, people on the street, when we asked directions, as we did repeatedly, were not only civil but often went out of their way to be friendly and helpful. Considering what a big, crowded city Paris is, it truly was remarkable. Maybe Parisians are feeling friendlier toward Americans now that Obama has been elected president. Or maybe that stereotype is more a product of American insecurity than any realistic perception. Or maybe we seemed especially amiable and unthreatening, Nancy especially, who invariably tried first to communicate in pidgin French, before the Parisians switched over to English, which almost everyone here seems to speak at least a little bit. Or maybe we just lucked out.

What was my favorite activity? There are many to choose from. I still think the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is the best museum I've ever visited, but the Louvre is definitely a close second. It's even bigger than the huge Metropolitan. As you probably know, the Japanese architect IM Pei designed a gigantic, glassed-in pyramid (very controversial at the time), which is where you buy tickets, and this pyramid then connects to the four main wings of the museum, which are housed in the old, original building, which stretches on forever. Nancy, Becky and I split up, and spent about five hours in the museum, and I passed almost that entire time looking at French painting. I have a fondness for monumental painting, gigantic canvasses that depict a historical scene, or something out of the Bible or Greco-Roman mythology, and the French painting wing of the Louvre provided that kind of thing in spades. Shockingly enough, we all managed to find each other afterward, though I wandered for some time lost through the Ancient Egyptian and Etruscan wings before stumbling on the cafe in the pyramid where Nancy awaited me and Becky.

The Impressionist Museum is also a marvel. It's not strictly filled with Impressionist paintings; what it contains are modern paintings, modernism being broadly defined as stretching from the 19th century to the present, with the Impressionists being the most famous among the many schools of painting on display. Unlike the Louvre, for the Impressionist Museum I purchased an audio-guide, which was a great addition. Thus guided, I treked through paintings by the Realists, the Symbolists, and the Neo-Classicists, not to mention viewing a hefty number of sculptures and ornate furniture, before, with just half an hour to go before I was due to meet Becky and Nancy, I stumbled on the top floor wing which housed the Impressionists, most notably van Gogh, Monet, Renoir, Pissaro, and Cezanne, which meant I had to whirl through some of the most beautiful pictures ever painted at breakneck speed. Still, the result was that I got to see a lot of paintings with which I was much less familiar than I am with the Impressionists. By the way, the Impressionist Museum is housed in an old, enormous train station with a huge glass roof.

Versailles is equally impressive. This is the gigantic palace about a half-hour train trip from Paris where the French kings and their royal retinue lived for centuries before the revolution came along, the peasants stormed the gates, and the aristocrats all got their heads chopped off in the guillotine. Based on the tour we took, aided by another audio-guide, the life at Versailles lived by the royals was one determined by endless rituals all followed with exacting severity and to the most minute detail. To tell the truth, though it was undoubtedly resplendent, all that endless pomp seemed a bit dull. I can't help thinking that now and then the aristocrats must have had a sneaking urge to kick off their embroidered shoes, pull off their ornate wigs, and just let loose a bit. And I can certainly understand how the peasantry eventually got fed up with all this costly elegance while they were starving in the streets. Liberty, fraternity and equality indeed.

If I have any criticism to make of France, it's that the French clearly have a very high opinion of themselves, which isn't the same thing as rudeness, but is a somewhat off-putting trait nonetheless. After we traipsed through all the palatial rooms at Versailles, we visited an adjoining museum founded by one of the emperors in the 19th century that features a huge hall adorned with monumental paintings celebrating all the battles the French armies have won over the centuries, from the dark ages up to Napolean defeating the English. You'd never know from that museum that the French ever lost a battle. Of course, this same celebration of French military prowess is exemplified by the Arc de Truimph in downtown Paris. Clearly, no country ever deals well with military defeats, but the German occupation of France during World War II, when the French succumbed to Hitler with barely a fight, must have been almost unimaginably galling to French pride. Hence the longterm myth that the French all joined the Resistance, rather than allied themselves with the collaborationist Vichy government, as so many Frenchmen did in reality.

On a somewhat lighter note, I had a surprisingly fun time at that famous cemetary whose name I am currently blanking on. The grave of Jim Morrison's is actually quite small and modest, although covered in flowers, a poem, coins, even a handful of cigarettes. The stone reveals that Morrison was only 28 when he died from alcohol and drugs, another casualty of the culture of 60s rock 'n roll. We also visited the tombs of Heloise and Abellard, Chopin, Getrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Marceau, Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, Appolanaire, and perhaps a few other of the distinguished dead I'm forgetting at the moment. This cemetary truly is the best real estate in the world for the deceased. At most of the graves, visitors have left often quite touching personal notes for the dead. Stein and Toklas, e.g., were hailed by someone as "our brave lesbian foremothers." At Proust's grave, someone vowed in Spanish to read all his books, while confessing he hadn't done so yet. Wilde's grave was the most decorated after Morrison's. Of course, Wilde died in Paris in obscurity, after being forced to flee England after he was convicted and sentenced to hard labor for homosexual "indecency". But after he died an admirer erected a large tomb of a rather Egyptian looking angel or seraph of some kind, replete with a penis and testicles which someone had broken off for a souvineer. Wilde's tomb was also covered in graffiti, even though a sign in both French and English implored visitors not to do exactly that. What most struck me about the graffiti was that the tomb was covered in lipstick kisses. That seems a touch Wilde himself would have appreciated.

I could go on, of course, with all the many other things we did in Paris, but I'm running out of steam. So, au revoir, and I'll see all my readers back in Poland!

MacBeth in Poland: A Tale Told by an Idiot?

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 10:49:22 GMT

Last night, my wife, Nancy, daughter, Becky, and I went to see an experimental version of Shakespeare's "MacBeth" in Wroclaw. The city is famous for its experimental theater. During the communist era, there was a well-known local theater company that was seen as a dissident force against the communist rulers, not because the plays it produced were overtly politically subversive, but simply because the absurdist, experimental nature of the theater dissented from the tenents of social realism that were supposed to dictate communist art--that is, realistic stories dramatizing such central Marxist tenents as class struggle, the dictatorship of the proliteriat, etc. (You can imagine the kind of propagandistic garbage social reaslism produced.) The theater was especially known for the gnomes which appeared in its productions, and today there are small metal statues of gnomes (as I may've mentioned in an earlier entry) found all over the city in squares and in front of restaurants and shops.

The Gonshak/Coughlin family had wildly differing views about "MacBeth". In sum, I hated it; my wife loved it, and my daughter was somewhere in between. In the interest of balance, I'll present everyone's views, and readers can decide for themselves which they find most persuasive. (This blog is nothing if not fair-minded.) Honestly, one reason I was so turned off by the production, which had nothing to do with the play itself, was that I was in tremendous physical discomfort throughout the entire performance. It was a very small theater in a Wroclaw church, and there were very few seats, which were all crammed together on one side of an open space. The chairs were small, wooden and hard. I found that I was too large to have any room to move my legs more than a few inches up or down or from one side to the next. As the play proceeded, I developed a dreadful cramp in my right buttock and the back side of my right thigh which I was unable to alleviate, since I couldn't move. Perhaps it seems unfair to judge a production by the comfort of the seats for the audience, but, in my view, theater producers must consider every aspect of a production, including the comfort of the seating area. No one can enjoy a play if they are in physical pain.

That said, I was also turned against the production by the opening lines, spoken by one of the witches, when she prophesizes to MacBeth that he will become king. Rather than speaking these lines clearly, the witch half-mumbled, half-chanted and half-sang them, accompanied by some kind of musical instrument that may have been a zither and produced a rather Oriental sound. As a result, the words were completely unintelligible. To varying degrees, this approach characterized the way the dialogue was spoken for the entire play. In a handout distributed to the audience, the play's producers wrote: "This performance explores the musicality of Shakespeare's poetry." Indeed it did, but the meaning of the words was sacrificed for the sake of the music. It was as if the producers had concluded either: a) everyone already knows the play, so there's no need to make the words coherent, or b) most of the audience is Polish, and barely speaks English, so what difference does it make if the words are intelligible? Bad news for those of us in the audience who were English speakers, and wanted to know what Shakespeare said, not just how he said it. In the play's defence, MacBeth's famous speech going, "Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," delivered after he learns of his wife's suicide, was delivered straight, without any singing or chanting, although that annoying zither was being plucked in the background.

Just as the play sacrificed the meaning of the words for their musicality, so it sacrificed the logic of the plot for the sake of spectacle. Periodically through the play, the actors stopped reciting their lines, and began hurling themselves about the stage, singing wordlessly, and swinging about wooden sticks that vaguely resembled pool cues. Admittedly, it was a powerful spectacle, but I couldn't see how it furthered the plot. In my opinion, theatrical spectacle shouldn't be included for its own sake, but rather because it provides some kind of insight into the story. By the same token, when MacBeth is killed in battle at the play's climax, his body is dragged off the stage by a wailing Lady MacBeth, even though she had committed suicide a scene earlier. Was she resurrected from the grave? Apparently, the audience wasn't supposed to consider these kinds of practical questions, because just as the meaning of the dialogue didn't matter, so the coherence of the plot didn't matter either. All that mattered was the power of the spectacle, and, yes, a woman on her knees keening over her slain husband is a powerful (if rather stereotypical) spectacle.

Why did my wife love this play? Basically, she was bowled over by the power and virtuosity of the spectacle. She was amazed by what the actors were able to do with their bodies--contorting them grotesquely when they were killed or beaten, racing about the stage like ballet dancers, even, at one point, literally climbing the back wall of the stage like spiders, clutching small hooks nailed into the brick. Nancy was dazzled by the choreography of the fight scenes, timed so that the actors ducked the blows rained by the swinging sticks by inches. She left the theater powerfully emotionally shaken. And both of us were impressed by how the play ended, with the actors blowing out a series of candles, echoing MacBeth's famous line, "Out, out brief candle," and leaving the audience for a moment in complete darkness. Here, for a change, spectacle was at the service of story, since the literal darkness symbolized the dark nihilism at the heart of MacBeth's concluding vision.

So, who was right? Nancy and I differed, it seems to me, because we came to the play with completely different expectations. I expected a reasonably traditional performance of Shakespeare's great play. Nancy arrived anticipating the radical experimentalism for which Wroclaw theater is so well-known.

Oh, and what about Becky? True to her sweetly balanced, reasonable self, she liked the play more than I did but less than Nancy. She would have preferred a slightly more traditional performance, but still appreciated the daring risks the play took in its experimentalism. Perhaps that was the truest judgment of all.

Florence Festivities

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 16:46:50 GMT

My wife, Nancy, daughter, Becky, and I had a wonderful holiday spending both Christmas and New Year's in Florence, Italy. We rented an apartment for eleven days that overlooked the square housing Santa Croce church. Like the rest of Florence, this setting was incredibly old. The Piazza de Santa Croce dates back to the Middle Ages, and during the Renaissance this large square was regularly used to host tournaments and jousts. As for the basilica, construction began in 1294 and, according to our guidebook, "is one of the finest examples of Florentine Gothic architecture." On Christmas Eve, we went to Midnight Mass in the basilica, and it was like attending Church in a museum.

Our apartment seemed pretty old, too, and, according to Nancy, was a good example of Tuscan architecture, which leans toward the rustic; the apartment had wooden floors and bare wooden beams on the ceiling. Even the shower was wooden! Frankly, I initially found the apartment a bit grubby, but by the end of our stay it had transformed for me into picturesque. Actually, that's how I found Florence in general. It's not a particularly clean, neat city--unlike, say, hygienic, ultra-modern Berlin. I wasn't thrilled, e.g, when, climbing up to the gardens in Michelangelo Square that overlook the city, we spotted an alarmingly large and very relaxed looking rat. Florence is also crowded with tourists, and I'm sure that during the summer it's even more thronged. But, over time, the city's Old World charm kind of snuck up on me. If I lived there for an extended period of time, I strongly suspect I'd come to love the city.

Like most tourists, we spent a lot of time in art galleries ogling the extensive and resplendent examples of Italian Renaissance art on display. First, we went to the Pitti Palace, built in the 15th century for the Medici royal family. Of course, the Medicis are both famous and infamous--famous for being perhaps the greatest art patrons of all time, and infamous for running Florence like a clan of Mafia bosses. In the noir movie, "The Third Man," the villain Harry Lime memorably cited the Medicis as proof that evil people are especially likely to do great things. (In contrast, Lime adds, the perennially neutral and well-mannered Swiss have created the Cuckoo Clock!) The palace was suitably imposing and impressive and filled with monumental art of religious scenes and famous battles and mythological images and portraits of the dour and haughty Medicis.

The next day we attended Florence's most famous art gallery, the Uffizi Palace, which ranks along with the Louvre in Paris and the Metropolitan in New York as one of the world's most famous museums. This houses, among many other things, two justly celebrated paintings by the Renaissance artist, Botticelli: "The Birth of Venus" and "The Allegory of Spring." Both paintings are based on subjects from Ancient Roman myth, and both feature beautiful, scantily clad women looking utterly serene in pastoral, supernatural settings. Nancy and Becky came to know these paintings especially well, since they bought jigsaw puzzles based on both of them. I'm sure I must sound like a total Philistine, but you really get to know a painting when you're scrutinizing a puzzle based on it in order to fit one microscopic piece into another!

Unfortunately, Nancy caught a cold, so she stayed home on the day Becky and I visited the Academy of Fine Arts, which houses the most famous of all Florentine art--Michelangelo's massive sculpture of the Biblical David. We had to wait on line almost two hours to get in, but we passed the time looking at the two hundred odd photos of Florence that Becky had already taken on her digital camera. By the time I got to view Michelangelo's David, I had become convinced that I couldn't possibly be impressed by the sculpture, because I'd already seen dozens of cheesy reproductions of the work featured in every tourist-trapping souvenir shop in town. David is naked, of course, and you even see postcards featuring circled blow-ups of his penis and testicles, with the English slogan, "Wow, David!" It's a testament to how impressive the real sculpture actually is that, despite all this nonsense, viewing the actual Michelangelo's David is an overwhelming experience. I doubt I can do justice to it in words, but it's huge, at least a dozen feet high, and atop a monumental foundation. The placard beside the statue quotes some famous Renaissance art critic saying that after you see this David, you never need to see another sculpture ever again, and, looking up, I could tell what he meant. Of course, the physical proportions of David's body are perfect, his marbled, white skin totally smooth, his facial expression, beneath his crown of curly hair, noble and serene. But, really, you've just got to see it for yourself. On David's shoulder rests the slingshot he's just used to slay Goliath, but there's no blood-lust in his expression. Just, as I said, complete serenity.

I want to say something about the nudity, not only of Michelangelo's David, but of so many of these figures in sculptures and paintings, even those depicting Christian scenes. (I saw, e.g., a beautiful Medieval painting of the Madonna and child in which Mary is breast-feeding the infant Jesus!) All this nudity might be upsetting to more prudish viewers. And, realistically speaking, it's hard to imagine that the figures in these works spent so much time in their everyday lives not wearing any clothes. But if Italian Renaissance art represents anything, it represents a celebration of an idealized version of the human form. Clearly, these artists were dying to use every chance they could find to depict perfect male and female bodies. And even though, as I said, the bodies are idealized, they are much more realistic than the stylized, one-dimensional figures who dominate the art of the Middle Ages.

As I viewed these paintings, I thought about the poem by the 19th century British poet, Robert Browning, "Fra Lippo Lippi." It's a poetic monologue by one of these Italian Renaissance master artists. Even though Lippi is a monk (a safe career choice at the time), the truth is he doesn't give a damn about Christianity. (In the poem, he's just been visiting a brothel!) He just wants to paint the human form. Since the morals and credos of the time demanded that sanctioned art be religious, he paints Christian scenes, but really that's just a pretext to depict the physical world in all its thrilling detail and variety. Like a lot of Renaissance artists of the time, Lippi was criticized by the Church for paintings that were so realistic the Church fathers feared viewers would focus on this world, not the next. And, really, the criticisms had a certain point, because it was this world that Lippi cared about. Based on my experiences in Florence, that seems to me true of so much Italian Renaissance art. Whatever its ostensible subject, it's really a celebration of human beings and the material world.

Let me end by mentioning one of Lippi's own paintings that I saw. It's a depiction of Christ being taken down from the cross. But what struck me so forcefully is that one of the figures is atop a ladder, and he's clearly just hanging on by his fingernails. It's obvious that one of Lippi's chief aims in the painting, which has nothing to do with Christ on the cross, was to depict a body just on the verge of falling. I loved the painting.

Adventures in Germany

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 13:13:43 GMT

Well, loyal readers, I apologize for not having "blogged" in some time, but I wanted to actually do something worth writing about before I posted another entry. And, lo and behold, I have! Last week, I attended a Fulbright conference at Potsdam University in east Germany, and then, after the conference wrapped up on Friday, my family and I spent the weekend in nearby Berlin. Based on our regrettably brief stay, I'd say that Germany is certainly worth visiting for anyone looking for culture and entertainment.

Potsdam University is located in a huge park which includes a series of 18th century palaces, one of which we toured. The conference was excellent. On the first day, we listened to presentations by the head of the German Fulbright Commission, a high-ranking German politician, a cultural attache from the American embassy in Berlin, the American Fulbrighter spending the year at Postdam University, the director of Potsdam University's graduate program, and a German MA student who'd spent a semester at the University of Kentucky. Needless to say, the proceedings were in English, which all the Germans spoke fluently. I continue to be amazed by the multilingual facility of Europeans.

Of all these talks, the most interesting was by the German politician, who spoke on German/American relations in light of the recent presidential election. While admitting that relations had been strained under the aggressively unilateral policies of George W. Bush, he remained optimistic that things would improve under an Obama presidency. Germany and America had shared interests and values, he said, and that would keep the two nations close regardless of who happened to be in office. It's not an overstatement, I think, to say that the Germans are wild about Obama. During the campaign, he spoke to cheering throngs of thousands in Berlin. At the conference, I spoke with a German doctoral student teaching a course in autobiography at Potsdam, and she related that her students had avidly read both of Obama's books--his memoir, "Dreaming About My Father" (I may have the title slightly wrong), and his campaign tome, "The Audacity of Hope". The entire class was impressed by Obama's intelligence and honesty and writing ability, especially in the memoir; the books are clearly Obama's own work, not ghost-written by anonymous hacks, as campaign tracts so often are. Frankly, I can't say what a relief it is to be an American in Europe at a time when my country's president-elect isn't someone I feel the need to apologize for. As Jon Stewart said on "The Daily Show," why can't Obama take office already?!

The second day of the Potsdam conference was even better. Several senior professors, including myself, met with a fairly large group of doctoral students from programs in American and Cultural Studies, each of whom spent a few minutes explaining the topics of their dissertations. I'd already met several of these students personally, and while some seemed to be writing dissertations which were flat and jargon-ridden, others were clearly doing exciting, original work.

In the latter category, there was a young man studying aging among Holocaust survivors, who are not merely facing the frightening prospect of death we all must confront eventually, but are also saddled with the added fear that the Holocaust may be distorted or simply denied once more successfully those who have first-hand knowledge of the genocide are gone. I also chatted with a young woman who was writing about what are called "Bintel Briefs"--an advice column from earlier in the 20th century presided over by Abraham Cahan, which appeared regularly in the Yiddish newspaper, "The Forward," which Cahan edited, and which was the primary newspaper read by the Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who congregated mostly in the Jewish ghetto on the lower east side of Manhattan in New York. In these "Bintel Briefs," immigrants wrote in sharing their problems and dreams, and in response Cahan didn't merely dispense practical advice, but also wove in his intriguing ideological blend of socialism and traditional Judaism. For her project, the student has been reading hundreds of "briefs" in the original Yiddish, which she has mastered quite easily because the language is very similar to German.

Given my own interest in Holocaust and Jewish Studies, I benefited greatly from meeting these two students. At the conference, I talked with professors and students about hosting another conference at my host institution, the University of Wroclaw, about fresh perspectives and new fields of study on the Holocaust, and, if we're able to pull this off and get some funding, I plan to draw on the contacts I've already made when drawing up the speakers' list.

After the students were done discussing their projects, I gave a brief presentation of my own on intercultural teaching. I read a quote by the Anglo-Indian novelist, Salman Rushdie, who'd been given a death sentence by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini for his allegedly anti-Islamic novel, "The Satanic Verses," in which he defended the book by claiming that it was a celebration of "hybridity," the mingling of cultures, which Rushdie defined as the modern condition, due to mass migration and the rise of technology, but a condition Rushdie recognized would always alarm those who, like the Ayatollah, dwell in the "realm of the Pure," who, that is, want to return their cultures to some mythic state in which they are untainted by outside influences. The quote concluded, "'The Satanic Verses' is a love song to our mongrel selves."

I supported Rushdie's views, and noted my own "mongrel" status, since three of my four grandparents are immigrants--my paternal grandparents Polish Jews, my maternal grandmother Cuban, and since I'm the product of a mixed Jewish/Christian marriage. I encouraged instructors to teach contemporary literature which explores hybridity--the blending and, at times, clashing of different cultures--as a way of helping students transcend their own provincialism, insularity. My talk rousingly concluded, "Three cheers for hybridity!" I'm confident that, after a year in Poland, my own teaching will move considerably further in this intercultural, multicultural direction--especially since I'm sure that cultural hybridity will only increase in the future. With all due respect to the Ayatollah and his fellow "purists," there's no turning back.

The Potsdam conference wrapped up after lunch on Friday, whereupon Nancy, Becky and I took the short train trip to Berlin. We checked into our ultra-modern hotel, then spent Friday night at the huge Christmas fair held in downtown Berlin, picking up presents for the holidays. On Saturday, we spent almost the entire day at Berlin's enormous Jewish Museum. The museum spans 2,000 years of Jewish history in Germany, and, as far as I could tell, almost every year is covered! My wife moved through more quickly, but my daughter and I made a quixotic attempt to look at everything, with the result that we had already been in the museum over 6 hours when we reached the Wiemar Era and the start of the Nazi period. At that point, I was haunted by a fear that we'd never get out, and that Nancy would be cooling her heels for hours at the museum cafeteria, so I hustled Becky through the remaining section of the exhibit. The museum is truly a remarkable place. Despite its exhaustiveness, it's never boring. On the contrary, considerable ingenuity has been expended making the exhibit diverse and interactive. So, you watch movies, listen to recordings on telephones, pull out drawers containing information, type material into computers, etc., etc. Of course, the museum is also great because of WHERE it's located, right in the former heart of the Nazi empire. It's the kind of place that must have Hitler spinning in his grave.

Because we spent so much time in the Jewish Museum, we didn't have a chance to see much else in Berlin, because our train for Wroclaw left early Sunday morning. But that was okay, since I'm sure we'll be back. Indeed, I can't imagine a European vacation that didn't include a stay in Berlin. Rebuilt almost entirely after the devastation of World War II, reconnected after the fall of the Berlin Wall with the end of the Cold War, the city is ultra-modern and really hopping. Moreover, Berliners are quite friendly, and almost all speak good English, as we discovered as we perpetually asked directions while trying to find our way around the German rail system. Germany is also considerably more Westernized and advanced than Poland--which is not intended as a knock against Poland, since the Poles have had much more to overcome in recent years.

Now we just have one more week of school, Becky and I, and then the Gonshak/Coughlin clan is off to spend Christmas in Florence. Doesn't that sound exotic?! To use what I think I'll adopt as my blog motto: Stay tuned!

A Lovely Dinner

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 11:11:49 GMT

A couple of Saturdays ago, my wife, Nancy, and I went to dinner at the home of a colleague of mine from the university, Patricia. My daughter, Becky, was a bit worn out, and also eager for an evening alone in our apartment, so she stayed home. Also attending were two other colleagues, Dominika and Justyana (the latter serves as my "shepherd" while I'm here), and Justyana's daughter, Maricia.

Dominika picked us up in her typically compact European car and drove us to Patricia's apartment, which was located amidst a group of older, grey, imposing brick buildings in the heart of Wroclaw. Even on the drive over the conversation was interesting. Dominika happened to mention that she'd taught a "Gender and Queer Studies" course at the university, which had inspired protests from a local neo-Nazi group. The protest had been carefully controlled by the police, but the chair of the English Studies program, worried that the course might incite violence, had refused to give the class a room in the building in which to hold the course. There the matter stood, although Dominika was currently searching for a classroom in which they could meet. I told her about the comparably incendiary experience I'd had the first time I'd tried to teach my "Gay Studies" course at Montana Tech, when a fundamentalist minister in Butte had attempted to have the class cancelled on the grounds that I was preaching a "radical homosexual agenda" and trying to "turn" students gay. That led to a discussion of the situation for gay people in Poland, who have a rough time of it, to put it mildly, given the dominance of the Catholic Church in the country, but who are beginning to organize politically and come out of the closet.

Patricia, a thin, pretty woman in her late 30s, cooked us a lavish dinner, replete with a roast turkey and numerous vegetarian side dishes. She's in the process of having her apartment refurbished, working with a friend who is an interior designer. The design for Patricia's living room was unlike any I have seen before, featuring hugely magnified color photographs of dew-covered leaves and branches decorating the walls. The effect was quite soothing and aesthetically pleasing. Only 11, Maricia is rather shy and her English isn't nearly as good as her mother's, and, perhaps for that reason, Justyana and her daughter left shortly after the dessert course, a jam-filled cake baked by Justyana. Beforehand, we agreed to swap our CD collections of television series; we'd give Justyana and Maricia the complete line-up of "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer" in exchange for their giving us the line-up for "Deadwood".

Before they went, we all talked at some length about the situation of Polish academics. The demands for professors to be promoted at the University of Wroclaw are much more stringent than those in place at Montana Tech. To attain the rank of what in the states is called a tenured professor an instructor must publish two books. Because Patricia, Dominika and Justyana are all working in the field of American literature, and writing in English, the opportunities for publishing their books in Poland are slim, and they must normally turn to American university presses for chances for publication. But because they don't have the same access to books and other research materials in Poland compared to what's available in America, they are at a disadvantage when competing with American academics for coveted publication slots. (They might also seem to be at a disadvantage because they are writing in a second language, except that the English of all three women is absolutely flawless.) In short, "publish or perish" prevails in Polish universities with a vengeance, and no doubt a fair number of Polish academics, unable to publish a second book, perish in the process. As for teaching, that seems to play no role whatsoever in determining promotion.

After Justyana and Maricia left, the night was just beginning for the four of us who remained. Although we hadn't planned to stay so late, we ended up drinking white wine and talking till past midnight. (Well, Dominika, as our driver, didn't drink. Polish drunk driving laws are much stricter than in America, and, based on my experience, whomever is behind the wheel remains totally sober at Polish festivities.) We stayed so long that Becky eventually phoned, fearing that we had headed for home hours earlier and gotten hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of Wroclaw.

Our conversation was primarily about Poland, past and present. Patricia and Dominika talked at great length about their country, and, to the best of my recollection, they didn't have a single positive thing to say! However, their discussion didn't come off as mindless whining. Like any country emerging from a repressive past, Poland has a lot of problems. In an earlier entry, I mentioned that during the Fulbright orientation, a Polish professor had estimated to our group that roughly 60% of the Polish people during the communist era had informed on their friends and neighbors to the secret police. Patricia and Dominika updated that subject by complaining angrily that the last two Polish governments in power had formed commissions to investigate Poles who'd purportedly collaborated with the communist regime, whose real aim, the women alleged, was to destroy their political opponents. The women pointed out that under communism some collaboration with the government was virtually inevitable. For example, anyone wishing to obtain a visa in order to travel outside the country had to sign an official document proferred by the secret police. Since these documents still survive in government archives, any of these people can be brought up today on charges of collaboration. Often it was people who had bravely protested the regime who were dragged in by the secret police and forced to sign confessions, which has created the ironic situation that dissidents against the regime are often the very people today accused of collaboration. In contrast, those who worked for the police were granted sizeable pensions by the communist government, and now live in relative comfort and security.

Hearing these horror stories, I suggested that perhaps what's required if Poland is to divest itself of its dark past is a generational shift, with young Poles born after the end of the communist era, and hence untainted by its legacy, coming to power. But Patricia wasn't that optimistic. She accused younger Poles (the generation of our students) of lacking a historical sense, a knowledge of the past which is necessary in order to forge a brighter future. It was a reiteration of Santayana's famous remark that those who are ignorant of the past are doomed to repeat it. Patricia even worried that many younger Poles were attracted to a government which could impose "order," which she felt had certain fascistic undertones.

Discussions of Poland led naturally to discussions of America, and to comparisons between the two countries. We talked about a small but telling example of a sharp contrast between the two nations--namely, when in America someone asks, "How are you?", the accepted etiquette is simply to reply, "Fine." In Poland, in contrast, when someone asks you this question, you are expected to give a detailed answer, including a long list of all your troubles. When Dominika was traveling in America, she was constantly running into the problem of trying to answer honestly when asked how she was, which inevitably flustered her American interlocutors. The difference suggests a fundamental contrast in the temperment of the two nations. Americans are relentlessly optimistic, always putting the best possible face on things, and this has the advantage of leading to achievement, the overcoming of problems, but also the disadvantage of causing repression and denial. Poles, in contrast, are entirely unrepressed about all their woes, but this incurs a tendency to wallow in problems.

I suggested that Poles' gloomier outlook might be a product of the country's tragic past, so different from America, which (with the notable exception of the Civil War) has had a relatively unblemished, sunny history. But Patricia took exception to my comment. Polish history was no more tragic than that of many other countries, she insisted; in fact, it was considerably less tragic than the histories of, say, many Third World nations, which had had to deal with hunger, malnutrition, poverty, AIDS, droughts, despotic regimes, rebellions, etc., etc. On the contrary, Patricia accused Poland of harboring a martyr complex, constantly bemoaning its tragic past as an excuse for failing to address its current problems, which she linked to the overbearing influence of Catholicism on the country. Poland, she insisted, sees itself as the Jesus among nations, which she considered profoundly unhealthy.

We talked about many other things during this long evening, but hopefully I have given at least some sense of the intensity and liveliness and diversity of our discussion. As I've suggested, some of these subjects were certainly grim, but rather than finding the experience depressing, I found it intoxicating because the talk was so insightful and informative. All in all, I'd call it the best night I've had so far in Poland.

Becky's School

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 15:46:19 GMT

A while back, a former student and faithful reader emailed me, shared some kind words about this blog, and made the excellent suggestion that I post an entry describing my 15-year-old daughter Becky's school here in Wroclaw. So, here goes.

Becky attends a branch of the British International School in Poland, which teaches all its classes in English. The main school is in Krakow. Although the school is small, it is undergoing a period of rapid growth. A couple of years ago, there were only 25 students, but now attendance has ballooned to 125. In order to accomodate the bigger size, the school is in the process of moving from the rather provisional quarters where it's been housed till now, in one half of a Polish sports academy, to a larger, old, beautiful building about a 15 minute drive away, which it will occupy exclusively. So far, the primary school has moved into the new building, and the secondary school, which Becky attends, is slated to move in December, at the end of this semester.

Based on the British model, the curriculum is heavily weighted toward standardized exams which all British students take at the end of the school year in all basic subjects when they're attending our equivalent of high school. This poses some problems for Becky, since she'll be returning to Butte High next year, and therefore there's no practical reason for her to take these exams. We've decided to let her take the tests anyway, since perhaps she'll gain some practical knowledge about test-taking which will be helpful when she takes the PSAT and SAT exams her junior and senior year of high school. But we've stressed to her that since her scores on the exams are essentially meaningless, there's no pressure. I've often criticized American pre-college education which, ever since the passage of President Bush's ill-advised "No Child Left Behind" bill, has focused monomaniacally on test-taking, with funding for schools being based on student scores, an emphasis which forces instructors to "teach for the test," rather than presenting their subjects in the most intrinsically meaningful, worthwhile way. But, if anything, the British system seems even more inclined in this direction.

Nonetheless, I'm pleased with Becky's school. The curriculum seems more academically rigorous than Butte High. For example, she's taking three science classes--biology, chemistry and physics. She's also studying two foreign languages--Polish (which is valuable for practical reasons during our stay in the country), and Spanish (a beautiful, international language everyone should know). Many of her teachers are Polish, and though they're all entirely bilingual, they do speak heavily accented English, but Becky seems to have adjusted to their speaking styles with little problem. Perhaps I'm deluded, but her teachers strike me as more intellectual, more like college professors, than do her teachers back home.

As for the composition of the student body, it's overwhelmingly populated by Koreans, since there is a Korean auto plant in Wroclaw which employs many of the fathers of these students. Korean students tend to have a difficult time with English, since it's so different from the Korean tongue, not to mention having a different alphabet. But, to my knowledge, Korean homes tend to put a heavy emphasis on educating their children, and, as a result, the students generally are very dedicated to their studies. The other students mostly come from countries in Europe--e.g., England, Belgium, Holland, etc.--although one of Becky's best friends at school comes from India. There are no other students in the upper grades from America other than Becky. Needless to say, I am thrilled that Becky is having an opportunity to be exposed to her peers from so many different countries, especially since in Butte one tends to be so regrettably insulated from folks from foreign countries, or even people from other parts of America. I'm sure this exposure will leave Becky with a more international, cosmopolitan outlook, something even more valuable to her generation than mine, since globalization is increasingly shrinking our planet, forcing us to interact with peoples from all parts of the earth if we are to share in a productive future. As the columnist Thomas Friedman has put it, today's world is "flat," and we all must engage with that reality or suffer the consequences.

I couldn't end this entry on Becky's school without mentioning her wonderful English teacher, Mr. Holliday. As an English teacher myself, I feel I'm a pretty good judge of the breed, and Mr. Holliday is by far the best English teacher Becky has ever had. He's a classic British eccentric right out of the pages of P. G. Wodehouse or Evelyn Waugh. I've no idea what his background is, but he has the plummy accent and all the sophisticated mannerisms of the British aristocracy. He's also a world traveler, having previously taught at British schools in Switzerland and Sudan. In Sudan, as he informed us at the start of the school year, he was teaching at the same school where a fellow instructor was arrested because she'd asked her students what they wanted to name their class teddy bear, and the consensus choice was "Mohammed"!

But what is wonderful about Mr. Holliday is that, unlike so many high school English teachers in the states, he assigns students A LOT of writing, and then critiques their writing with care and precision, with a careful attention to detail, maintaining high standards, not fearing to point out student errors when they arise, while still being supportive. The result is that Becky is spending much more time on her writing than she ever did before, following Mr. Holliday's instructions about the value of "pre-writing" (note-taking and outlining), choosing her words with care, putting her essays through several drafts before submitting them. All that hard work is paying off. Not to sound like a boastful parent, but Mr. Hollliday said that Becky's essay psychoanalyzing Lady MacBeth was, quite simply, the best student essay he'd read on "MacBeth" in 45 years of teaching! Based on the glowing report we received at our parent/teacher conference, it seems safe to say that Becky gives Mr. Holliday a reason to get up in the morning and go to work, a reason to persevere through all those ESL errors in the essays by non-native speakers.

At our parent/teacher conference, Mr. Holliday also regaled us with a rather bizarre story about visiting Lake Placid with a friend, being assigned the hotel's only available room, which happened to be the Bridal Suite, having the friend wander off after their first drink at the bar, and then, as a result, being stuck in the Bridal Suite all by himself! Perhaps not the ideal story to be sharing with a student's parents, but, as I said, he's a classic British eccentric!

Viewing the Election from Afar

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 13:37:07 GMT

I have had the experience of watching one of the most important events in my country's history, the 2008 presidential election, from the perspective of distant Poland. It's been curious. My entire family has been closely monitoring the race, but completely via the Internet, by reading newspapers and magazines on-line, and by, I confess, nightly viewings of the hilarious "Daily Show" and "Colbert Report". Let me reveal from the start that we are all committed Obama supporters. This is the first election my 15-year-old daughter Becky has paid attention to. If anything, Becky is a more diehard Obama fan than Nancy or I. Because Poland is six hours ahead of the East Coast in time, we didn't learn the results of the election till Wednesday morning, at which time we discovered the news when Becky ecstatically woke us up to tell us. She was wearing a homemade Obama button and American flag which she'd pinned to her blouse. She'd gotten up early to get the results before she had to leave for school. Her enthusiasm reminded me of the special appeal Obama, our first post-Boomer president, has to young people, for whom he represents a new direction for the country, new "hope" (to use the favorite word of his campaign).

Becky's happiness was wonderful to behold, but the Polish nation, as far as I could tell, greeted the election results with considerable apathy. I suppose the nation's leader released some sort of statement of pro forma congratulations, but in Poland as a whole Wednesday was just another day. There were no jubilant crowds the way there were, according to the news, in some European capitals, and in places like, say, Kenya, where Obama's father was born, which declared the day a national holiday. A Polish colleague at my university told me that, in her opinion, most Poles were indifferent to the outcome of the election, concluding (incorrectly, she felt) that its outcome would not affect them personally, although she said some attention had been paid to the fight between Obama and Hillary for the Democratic nomination, because it was such a juicy human interest story. Just before I left for Poland, my friend at Western, Bill Janus, who has family here, told me a lot of Poles considered Obama "soft," and preferred McCain's "tougher" stance on foreign policy. My guess is that a lot of Poles appreciated McCain's staunch support of Georgia when that country was invaded by the Poles' hated enemy, Russia. Obama supported Georgia, too, but not with the same vehemence, and McCain has had more direct dealings with that little country.

I wish I could say that my distanced perspective on the election has given me some special insight into it, and earned me some prophetic powers concerning the future of the Obama presidency, but I'm afraid it hasn't. Like so many Americans, I do see this election as a potential turning point in our nation's history. The election of an African-American after our country's legacy of racism is, of course, momentous. After the dismal years of the Bush presidency, it's remarkable to have a president whom I admire and respect. Without doubt, Obama has the intelligence and vision to help restore America's wounded image abroad, to end our nation's catastrophic entanglement in Iraq, to start to solve our profound domestic problems. Nonetheless, I would caution against harboring too many utopian hopes (that word again) for an Obama presidency. Our nation's biggest problems are endemic, and not amenable to quick solutions, to put it mildly. I'm no economist, but my guess is that America's economy will get worse before it gets better, that if we're not in a recession yet, we will be in one before long. And I may have spoken too soon in saying Obama will get us swiftly out of Iraq, since I doubt anyone has the answer of how to extract us from that chaotic nation without leaving it in a state of civil war. Even though I believe we never should have gone into Iraq in the first place, I think we must remain at least in some capacity until the country is relatively stable.

There, have I succeeded in suicidally depressing all you jubilant Obama fans? Happy to oblige. Oh, Nancy and Becky just returned from church, and I told them the topic of my blog entry, and Nancy said I should mention how the day after the election we went to dinner with a retired American professor with whom I share an office here, who eight years ago relocated to Poland. Unfortunately, the professor is a rabid rightwinger; after dinner at a restaurant, we went to his apartment for tea and pie, and discovered that he has several tomes by the deranged Ann Coulter on his bookshelf. As a result, we spent the whole evening without being able to even mention the election results. Bummer, man!

Viva Barcelona!

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 11:26:42 GMT

Well, dear readers, your Intrepid Blogger and World Traveler has just returned from a four-day vacation with his wife and daughter in Barcelona, Spain. Barcelona is a port city on the Mediterranean Sea in the north of Spain in the Catalan region. The Catalonians speak their own dialect of Spanish and are fiercely devoted to their region; there was long a push for Catalonian independence, and even terrorist activity on behalf of that cause, but that seems to have ebbed somewhat in recent years. Barcelona is a hip, bustling, youthful, culture-filled city. If you like night-life and museums and cathedrals and castles and good restaurants, it's the place to go.

We flew on Ryan Air, an Irish airline which offers discount fares in exchange for the removal of anything which could be remotely construed as a frill. In fact, our fare was originally (get this!) $0, although then they tacked on all these additional charges. Still, the total fare came to the bargain basement price of $90 round-trip per person. The catch (and there always is one) is that the airline doesn't offer assigned seats. We paid extra for priority boarding, but that advantage was nullified when all the passengers were packed onto a bus and driven to the airplane. The minute the bus doors opened, everyone made a mad dash for the plane. Nonetheless, people were generally more civil than passangers would probably be on an American airline (should an American airline be brazen enough to adopt this policy), and we were able to get seats all together.

In order to get this discount fare we also had to catch a very late flight, which meant our taxi didn't drop us off at our hotel till about 2:00 in the morning. The hotel (really more a hostel) was also extremely cheap, but we discovered after we booked the room that it was located in one of the two neighborhoods our guide book recommended that crime-fearing tourists avoid. Indeed, when we exited the cab we found that the narrow, cobblestoned streets (the hostel was located in the old part of the city), despite the late hours, were filled with groups of scruffy-looking young men hanging around for what purpose we couldn't fathom. Maybe they were conducting drug deals. Nonetheless, perhaps I'm naive, but they didn't strike me as particularly threatening, and we were unmolested as we made our way to the hostel, even though we must have looked like ideal targets for anyone with nefarious intentions. As for our room, it was as large as a decent-sized closet, but it was clean. There was, though, a lot of street noise, since Barcelona is a partying town and we were staying in a partying district, which made sleep difficult for my light-sleeping wife, though Becky and I snoozed right through the night.

The next day we slept late, breakfasted at a local restuarant filled with gregarious Spaniards which was recommended to us by the owner of the hostel, then made our way by an unfortunately circuitous route (we still hadn't quite mastered our map) to the Picasso Museum. Frankly, the museum was a disappointment. Picasso lived in Barcelona from the age of 14 to 23, then returned periodically over the course of his long life, and the city has claimed him as one of their own. The artist was remarkably prolific, painting thousands of paintings (along with creating sculptures and even ceramics), but much of his best work is housed in major museums in cities like New York and Paris and London. As a result, the Barcelona museum is composed for the most part of distinctly second-rate Picassos. There are, though, some amazingly mature and proficient paintings that Picasso created while still an early adolescent, including a gorgeous depiction of a young girl receiving her First Communion.

After the museum, we strolled down what's called La Rambla, a broad avenue for pedestrians that extends for about a mile through the heart of the city and is filled with vendors selling everything from fruit to candy to ham hocks to tourist junk to caged pigeons, ferrets and chickens. La Rambla is also packed with street performers who are clad as, say, a winged devil or Mother Theresa or a spirit of Nature or an invisible man, and who, for a Euro or two, are happy to pose with you for a photograph. Eventually, we made our way down to the harbor, past the towering monument to Columbus, who departed from Barcelona with the blessings of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to discover the New World. There, we had dinner at a sea-side cafe, where I sampled the paella, a local favorite containing every kind of seafood imaginable (much of it unshelled, alas) tossed into a pan with rice and spices.

The following day we toured the much-touted Gaudi Cathedral. Gaudi was a Barcelona architect and devout Catholic who lived in the latter half of the 19th century and designed a vast and truly bizarre cathedral which not only was unfinished at the time of his death, but is still being constructed, and probably won't be completed till around 2080! I'm not quite sure why the thing is taking so damn long to get done, but it truly is a Herculean labor. The outer facade of the cathedral is stone but looks kind of like melted wax, with dozens of diverse, sort of droopy, rather sinister Christian statues jutting out of the edifice. The cathedral is the opposite of beautiful; it's grotesque, really, but it's also unlike any other building on earth. Definitely an acquired taste.

In the afternoon, we took what's called a "funicular" (a kind of cable car) up the side of one of the mountains overlooking Barcelona, where we were dropped off at the top. There, we found a closed amusement park, which led Nancy to comment, "There's nothing quite so sad as an abandoned amusement park." Wise words. There was also another, more conventionally constructed cathedral, whose narrow, towering spires poked up into the clouds which fringed the mountain top on this rainy afternoon. For the return trip, we caught the tourist bus that traverses the city, sitting up on the top level desperately clinging to our umbrellas in the wind and rain, until one of the tour guides informed us that umbrellas were forbidden here, I suppose because they could fly out of our hands and cause a major car accident, whereupon we gloomily returned to the bus' lower level, where we crammed in with our fellow tourists, listening to the babble of foreign languages encircling us.

On our final full day in Barcelona we visited a second art museum, this one devoted to the work of the 20th century Barcelona artist, Joan Miro. This was much superior to the Picasso Museum, packed with hundreds of Miro paintings, including his best work, filled with ample documentation of the paintings and sculptures, and also containing, as a temporary exhibit, a fine sampling of 20th century American art on loan from the Corcoran Gallery in Washington. Still, I'm not a huge fan of Miro's work. Over the decades, he developed a kind of artistic shorthand, with stylized representations of moons and stars and women appearing in painting after painting, and after a while it gets a bit monotonous. Honestly, though I'm sure this view would appall Miro fans, it doesn't look that HARD to draw a Miro painting. Anyway, that same day we also toured a science museum, which since, as an arty-farty type, I have no interest in the sciences (unforgivable, but there you have it) I will pass over quickly. Then we took a suspended cable car to another mountain top containing an enormous, heavily armed castle.

The last day, we heard a classical band performing in a town square until the rain began again and everyone scattered, then caught a taxi to the bus terminal, from which a bus took us to the small town of Girona, which was where our plane flew from, another small inconvenience we had to tolerate in order to get that discount fare from good old RyanAir. We played cards in the Food Court at the airport, followed by another mad rush onto the plane, and then we winged back to Wroclaw. All in all, a good trip. Unlike some families, my wife, daughter and I travel well together. We are solicitious of each other's needs, don't complain too much, are willing to compromise. My daughter, in particular, is remarkably even-tempered and sweet-natured. God knows some teenage girls would be a trial to travel through Europe with. But not Becky.

Things I Truly Like About Poland

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 16:15:25 GMT

I'm getting worried that in some of my entries I've come off a bit too negative in my views about Poles and Poland. This is particularly worrisome because now that my face is plastered for the moment on the Home Page of the Tech Website, it seems, based on the correspondence I'm receiving, that people are actually READING what I'm writing.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not totally repentent. As I wrote in my introductory entry, I really wanted my blog to NOT become what I think travelogues of this kind so often are--subtle acts of self-aggrandizement on the part of the author in which everything is portrayed as perfect so that readers will just drool with envy. On the contrary, it was important to me to be honest, to acknowledge that living in a foreign country can sometimes be difficult. That way, when I did offer praise and happy thoughts the reader would know what I'm saying is heartfelt.

On the other hand, there is something distasteful, even offensive, in someone who's only spent a short time in a new country drawing all sorts of sweeping conclusions about that country, some damning, all based on very little evidence. Again, it's normal to have first impressions. Everyone does in these circumstances, and they're not always positive. You should read, e.g., what Dickens had to say about America--a country he spent very little time in but wrote a book about dripping with bile, all couched in the language of classic British snobbery. Still, just because Dickens did it doesn't make it right. As I said, it's distasteful. So, if I've ever been guilty of that sort of thing in these entries, I apologize. The thing to remember, I think, as I also said in another entry, is that these ARE very much first impressions, and I reserve the right to change my mind, perhaps dramatically, as I get to know Poles and Poland better. Blogs are off-the-cuff by definition. They shouldn't be taken as set in stone.

That said, I want to try to right my course a bit in this entry by talking about things I truly LIKE about Poland. So, here goes:

1) No, as I've said, Poles in public are not very friendly. To some extent, that's true of any big city like Wroclaw, but that's not the whole story. When my wife and daughter attended here a Polish version of the musical "A Chorus Line," the audience didn't clap at the end when the cast took individual bows. That would never happen on Broadway in my hometown of New York--not exactly the friendliest city on earth. On the other hand, Poles' public chilliness is often counterbalanced by tremendous kindness in private relations--where, after all, it really matters. Just today, e.g., our landlord, Marian, went with us to a government office building to sign some forms related to our receiving our temporary residency permits, and even though it took a good hour-and-a-half of dealing with taciturn bureaucrats who raked over every inch of our applications with eagle eyes, he never expressed the slightest trace of exasperation or impatience. (After all that, we still have to go back with Marian a second day, and he was good about THAT, too.) I've already written about Dorota, a colleague of mine at the university, who spent weeks finding us an apartment, even though she has an autistic child who demands so much of her time and energy, and who, since we've arrived, has continued to be a faithful, devoted friend. Even Polish chilliness may have its silver lining. In America, where everyone is perpetually demanding that you "have a nice day" (or else!), you never know if anyone is sincere. In Poland, in contrast, all that phony hyper-civility doesn't exist, so people respond to one another honestly.

2) The greatest thing about Poland--and it really IS great--is the way the country has thrown off the shackles of communism and transformed itself into a democratic nation. With our own history of uninterrupted democracy, Americans may not realize just what a difficult process that is. During the Fulbright orientation, one of our lecturers, a U. of Wroclaw history prof, mentioned in passing during the discussion period that, by her estimation, during the communist era 50-60% of ordinary Poles informed on their friends and neighbors to the secret police. Let that statistic settle slowly into your mind. 50-60%! Often their loved ones were threatened if they didn't talk--circumstances that would probably drive most of us to talk. How does a society recover from that kind of wounding? After all, Poland has been democratic less than 20 years--a blink of an eye in the great scheme of things. Anyone in even early middle age lived a large chunk of their lives under the communist regime. I read in the NY Times that the great dissident Czech writer, Milan Kundera, as a young man, based on the recent unearthing of some government records, informed on a friend to the police. Even dissident writers were sometimes informers in the Communist Bloc! And yet, despite that awful legacy, Poland (and the Czech Republic too, based on our stay in Prague) is filled with energy and optimism. Some of that energy is expressed in the burgeoning of a robust consumer society (Wroclaw shopping malls rival anything in America), which may not seem like the greatest thing, but, on the other hand, when you consider how empty the shelves were under communism, maybe it IS kind of great. But the best indication of the promise I see in Poland is expressed to me in the intelligence and enthusiasm of my students, who talk with me about American literature just as insightfully and eloquently as any American students, even though they're speaking in a second language about the writing of a culture not their own. In my Holocaust in American Film class, I showed my students Charlie Chaplin's masterpiece, "The Great Dictator." At the end, Chaplin steps out of character and speaks directly to the audience, at a time when dictators like Hitler literally threatened the survival of civilization, about the need for the people to reject tyrants and follow instead their own innate sense of right and wrong, their inner goodness. During our post-film discussion, I mentioned that Chaplin's speech seemed perfectly applicable to Poland, which had thrown off the yoke of Communist dictatorship, and the students agreed.

There, that was a POSITIVE entry, wasn't it? It's important for me, too, to think about all the things I truly like about this country, the honest affection I feel for Poles and Poland. Still, I can't promise I'll never gripe again. After all, some of that Polish tragic sense has to rub off on me, doesn't it?

The Horror of Polish Bureaucracy

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 10:51:03 GMT

As readers may surmise from its title, this isn't going to be a cheery entry.

As part of our Fulbright orientation, we were all given copies of a book called "Short-Cuts to Poland," a work written by a former American Fulbrighter, Laura Klos Sokol, aiming to help Americans in particular fathom the often subtle intricacies of Polish life and culture. Here's what Sokol says in a chapter on Polish bureaucracy: "Documents, stamps and notaries. Long waits, grumpy clerks, and frustration. Poland has bureaucracy down to an art form; Franz Kafka must be cuddling up in his grave....Maybe Polish bureaucracy isn't much worse than in other European countries but it demoralizes Poles and foreigners alike--something Poland can't afford to do."

Sokol's remarks are particularly notable because "Short-Cuts to Poland" is a book which is generally kind to Poles and Poland to a fault, bending over backwards to find the silver lining in all things Polish. And, true to form, the passage above, while generally on the mark, doesn't, based on our experiences, go far enough in exposing...the horror of Polish bureaucracy.

For reasons of space, let me just focus on the maddening attempts of my wife and daughter to procure temporary residency permits, required for anyone living in Poland beyond three months. This is the most extreme example of the kind of bureaucratic nightmares we've faced here, but readers should keep in mind that this particular instance could be mutiplied many times over with other slightly less heinous but still infuriating examples.

Anyway, following instructions provided by the Fulbright Handbook, my wife and daughter went down to the huge, ugly grey office building in downtown Wroclaw from which temporary residency permits are dispensed (at least in theory). Told, for some reason, to enter through a side door, they slipped down a garbage strewn alley--an apt harbinger of what awaited them inside. There they found a tiny, cramped office of surpassing grimness containing a chain-smoking, telephone-conversing woman, dwarfed by the giant piles of papers stacked on her desk, who, immediately upon their arrival, began frenetically stamping their forms, leaving Nancy with the wildly erroneous impression that the matter was being handled. However, once the stamping was done, the woman summoned a colleague, who related that a whole series of further documents were required, including:

1) A signed letter from me, written in Polish, relating that I have agreed to financially support Nancy and Becky with my Fulbright money, even though the likelihood that I would be unwilling to support my own wife and daughter, who have accompanied me to Poland, is remote, to put it mildly.

2) Nancy and Becky had brought in photos to be affixed to their permits, but these were deemed insufficient. They were also required to provide photos of their profiles, in which, it was specified, their left ears were visible.

3) In order to prove that we have a residence in Poland, the rental agreement for our apartment, which Nancy has brought with her, was, once again, not enough. As well, our landlord, Marian, must provide what's called a 'zameldowanie tymczasowe' --a form he obtains from another government office documenting that he has, indeed, rented us an apartment. Marian must obtain this form in person at the office; we can't just get it for him.

4) Because these offices apparently don't have computers with all this information on file, we must provide numerous copies of the application, my visa, Nancy's and Becky's passports, my Fulbright contract, our lease, and all forms which are stamped--totalling, in full, about 90 pages of material!

I hardly know where to begin explaining how ridiculous and unfair I find all this. All else aside, it encourages criminality, since the poor applier, faced with all this bureaucracy, is tempted to just chuck the whole thing and remain in the country illegally. Probably the system is a legacy of Poland's communist era, when citizens were faced with the demands of a byzantine bureaucracy--which covered up its injustices with gallons of red ink--every time they wanted to tie their shoe laces. And Sokol's reference to Kafka implies there may be something deeply imbedded in the culture of Eastern Europe, predating communism, which manufactures these kind of insane systems. Hearing from Nancy about the requirements for the permit, I thought of the scene in "The Trial," where the protagonist, K, is waiting outside an office door to which he is repeatedly refused admittance. He waits for ages, and is never let in, only to be ultimately informed by the doorkeeper that this particular door had been meant for him and him alone.

On the other hand, one of our Polish friends, Dorota, who spend two years teaching at the University of Buffalo, told us she experienced during her stay the same kind of bureaucratic nightmare with the American government. So, perhaps what we have here is something inherent to the nature of bureaucracy (as I suspect Kafka would be the first to agree), rather than a problem besetting Poland alone. But whatever the causes, it's deeply frustrating, and risks inducing foreigners to not want to come to the country in the first place--which, as Sokol suggests, can't be good for Poland's future.

Teaching, cont.,

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 08:27:17 GMT

This entry may be a tad shorter than my previous ones, since I seem to be reaching a point that must checker every blogger's existence now and then where I feel compelled to post an entry (since I haven't posted one in over a week) but aren't exactly sure what I want to say. We'll see how it goes.

I've now taught my second set of classes (as noted in a previous entry, I have this delightful schedule where I only teach one day a week). I'd continue to call the teaching a qualified success. Honestly, teaching may be the one area of my life where I feel totally confident, where I think I can do this about as well as anyone can. But in truth I've felt rather nervous teaching Polish students, at least at this early point of the semester. Although, as far as I can tell, their English tends to be excellent, I'm never quite sure how much is getting through when I launch into some long pontification, so I try to keep my language simple and avoid idioms, which are usually killers for non-native speakers. (You'd be surprised, though, how often we use idioms when we speak.) Our discussions have generally been lively, and what the students have to say isn't wildly different from how American students would probably respond to the same material--with the exception (shockingly enough) that these students tend to throw in a lot more off-handed remarks about Poland.

The two stories we discussed both dealt with the immigrant experience for Jews in America, who mostly congregated on the lower east side of Manhattan in the Jewish ghetto in New York City. I felt the students needed some historical background to fully appreciate these stories, so we talked about Jewish life in Eastern Europe living in the Pale of Settlement (the area in the Russian empire where Jews were permitted to live). That meant we had to address the delicate subject in this context of why the Jews were so hated and persecuted by Christians in Europe, and, a related topic, why they left places like Poland by the thousands in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (even though they usually barely had enough money to pay for the passage) in order to come to the US. I'm always amazed how few students, whether they're Poles or Americans, are aware that the Jews were demonized in Christian Europe as "Christ-killers"--the accursed race who first denied that Jesus was the Messiah and then demanded from Pilate his crucifixion--surely a crucial reason for Christian persecution. On the one hand, I suppose that's good, since clearly this particular slander against the Jews is no longer generally hurled from Catholic and Protestant pulpits. But, on the other hand, it's bad, since it's equally clear that Christians today are not being taught by their religion about one of the darkest and most shameful chapters of that religion's history, a lesson they must learn if we are truly to have meaningful interfaith dialogue and understanding between Christians and Jews. Just as American students should learn in schools about the disgraceful episodes in our nation's history of slavery and the massacre of the Indians, even if that education makes us uncomfortable, so Christian children should be learning in their churches about this equally woeful history. But, as far as I can tell, it's not happening.

Anyway, in my Holocaust in American Film class, I showed the students a relatively short HBO movie called "Conspiracy" about the Wansee Conference--a meeting of top Nazis who met in the pastoral town of Wansee, Germany, to work out the details of the implementation of "The Final Solution". It's not a bad film, but I'm afraid it wasn't a good way to kick off the semester. For one thing, the movie is extremely talky and static; it depicts a conference, after all, where characters just tend to sit around and speak, and that tends to be boring, even if what they're discussing is the murder of millions of innocent people. In short, it wasn't a good English language film to be showing on a humid late afternoon in a stuffy attic classroom to an audience of Polish students. Still, we all survived, and the subsequent discussion, which lasted about half-an-hour, was fairly energetic and insightful. Unlike the subject of Christian persecution of Jews, I doubt the topic of how nasty the Nazis were will pose many problems for my Polish students, since the Poles, unlike the Americans, suffered first-hand under the German occupation, and suffered horribly, and, as a result, a certain Polish animus toward Germany continues to this day (although, not surprisingly, the Poles hate the Russians even more).

Well, once again, starting an entry feeling totally blank, I have nonetheless managed to dredge up some hopefully at least relatively interesting things to say. As my late father, whose whole career was spent in educational radio, loved to say, "Stay tuned!"

Reflections on My First Day of Teaching

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 08:59:12 GMT

Yesterday was my first day of teaching at the University of Wroclaw, and in this entry I'd like to look back on that experience. It wasn't a perfect day, certainly; there were some problems, but other things went well. All in all, I'd call it a qualified success.

First, the problems. When I walked in for the first time to my afternoon Jewish-American Literature class, I was greeted by a chorus of concerned students, whose problems I still don't completely understand, but who seemed to be under the impression that my first afternoon class (on literature) was actually my second (on film), and vice-versa, and also were unclear on exactly which class covered which requirements in the curriculum. Since I know absolutely nothing about how the Polish higher education system works, I wasn't the best person to address their questions, so I scurried off to find a Polish colleague who might provide some answers. Eventually, we got things straightened out, but the concerned students continued to look vaguely disgruntled, and I suspect I won't be seeing them in future classes, which is probably just as well. Of course, this is every teacher's nightmare--a class that increasingly begins to spiral out of control as the poor teacher is beset by questions he is unprepared to answer and doesn't even entirely understand. I mean nightmare literally; according to English professor and literary critic, Elaine Showalter, this is a recurrent "anxiety dream" many professors suffer from.

The second unexpected moment from my day of teaching wasn't really a problem, but it was a surprise. Polish classes normally meet for an hour and a half a week. However, for my Holocaust in American Film course, I'd arranged with the department chair to have the class meet every OTHER week for three hours, so that I could show a film and then have time left over for discussion. In order to take full advantage of every moment we had (since this arrangement made for a rather short semester), I'd decided to show a movie on the first day of class--"Conspiracy," an HBO film about the Wansee Conference, the first and only high-level conference of top Nazis where the details of the Holocaust were officially worked out. However, when I returned from our break all ready to show the movie, my students related that they'd conferred among themselves, and, as a result of their deliberations, had two "proposals" to make to me. First, since they hadn't expected to be kept three hours on this first day of class, they wanted to postpone the showing of "Conspiracy" 'till next week. Second, and more sweepingly, they wanted to reorganize the entire schedule so that we meet EVERY week for three hours, rather than every other, and, as a consequence, finish our course work a month before the end of the semester, leaving the whole month of January free, which, the students explained, is by far their busiest month. I thought about the proposal, initially wary after all the problems I'd had in the other class, but I couldn't see any drawbacks for me, so I agreed. In restrospect, it strikes me that it took considerable chutzpah, quick thinking, and self-initiative for the students to have rapidly devised this plan as a group on the first day of class during our five minute break. Having taught in American colleges for almost thirty years, I doubt American students would have done the same. This speaks well for Polish students.

Indeed, the students seem to be a pretty bright bunch. Most of them had read at least some of the authors on the syllabus or seen some of the films. They also all speak English very well, though with thick accents, which makes it a bit hard for me to follow them. And, for the love of God, I'm having a helluva time pronouncing their Polish names, thanks to the godawfulness of the accursed Polish tongue. They tell me their names; I repeat what sounds to me like a perfect echo of what they've just said; they shake their heads and correct, insisting that I'm missing some hissing or gurgling noise that has to be slipped into the pronunication; I try again, and the process continues ad nauseum, until they finally shrug and say, "That's close enough."

As well, I (and my cherished wife, too) have been suffering from viral infections, so I didn't feel even close to 100% while teaching, and found myself covered with a thin sheen of feverish sweat by the end of the day. But I hope to be fully recovered and ready to go by next Monday. Oh, yes, perhaps the greatest delight of my teaching schedule is that I only have to teach one day a week! This schedule is a piece of cake compared to what I'm used to at Montana Tech. Of course, it begs the question of exactly how I'm going to fill up the rest of the week (other than by posting copious blog entries). I'll have to get back to my dear readers on that one.

Orientation, Part II

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 13:15:44 GMT

Well, loyal readers, I have now completed, as of yesterday, the Fulbright orientation. I have spent the whole week at the University of Wroclaw (where, as it happens, I'll also be teaching this year), for the most part studying the Polish language in the morning, and attending lectures on various aspects of Polish history and culture in the afternoon. In retrospect, the whole experience was mixed--often exhausting, at times dull and incomprehensible, at other moments highly stimulating and informative. All in all, I certainly have a deeper sense of the Polish tongue and Polish life than I did before. Obviously, I can't cover in one entry everything we touched on this week during our jam-packed schedule, but let me at least mention some of the highlights, and provide an over-view.

Our daily morning lessons in speaking Polish were the most valuable aspect of the orientation. Our teacher, Brygida Gwiazda-Rzepeicka, a doctoral student who also teaches classes in both Polish and English, was a pure delight--effusive, sweet-natured, supportive, as well as being a very talented and well-organized instructor. She took what in the hands of a less gifted teacher could have been an agonizing experience and made it fun. She was a good example of the way an exceptional teacher can make ANY subject entertaining and enlightening. I stress how potentially horrific learning Polish can be because, as I have suggested in previous entries, the language is fiendishly difficult to learn. Just try pronouncing Brygida's last name noted above and you'll get a hint of what I'm talking about. I was told that Harvard conducted a study which determined that Polish is the second hardest language in the world to learn after Mandarin (which, if the Chinese empire continues to expand, we may all be struggling over soon). I definitely have a better grasp of Polish now than I did before spending a week of study with Brygida, and I have arranged to continue my lessons in a class at the university, but I must confess that sometimes I despair of ever acquiring real fluency, of ever being able to simply sit down and conduct a normal conversation in Polish. Often I feel too old, with too little general fluency in foreign languages (thanks to growing up in one of the few mono-lingual countries on earth), to ever successfully master a tongue that seems to have been invented by some kind of linguistic sadist or maniac. But we'll see. As I say, I haven't given up yet.

The afternoon lectures were far more hit or miss than the Polish lessons. Because of my own background as an American Jew and Holocaust educator and author, the most interesting topic for me was the vexing and explosive one of the relationship between Poland and the Jews, which was featured prominently in several different lectures. Not every lecturer presented this subject in the same light. For example, Professor Piotr Lewinski, in the course of a presentation which sought to debunk what Lewinski considered several "myths" about Poland, tackled as one of those alleged myths the widely held perception that the Poles are anti-Semitic. Admittedly, the professor made his case fairly well. He pointed out, for instance, that in 1264 the Polish prince Boleslaus the Pious issued a General Charter of Jewish Liberties in Poland, which specifically guaranteed that Polish Jews would be exempt from the kinds of persecutions they then faced elsewhere in Europe. As a result of this charter, Jews flocked to Poland by the thousands, which is why when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, the country had the largest Jewish population on the continent. Attempting to rebut the common charge that during the Holocaust Poles often betrayed their Jewish neighbors to the Germans (for personal gain or due to anti-Semitism), Lewinski noted that, unlike in other countries occupied by the Third Reich, in Poland any Poles who helped Jews in any way were not only subject to death, but their entire familites were executed as well. Yet, despite this edict, many Poles risked their lives to save Jews, according to Lewinski, who pointed out that Yad Vashem, Israel's national Holocaust museum, in its listing of "Righteous Gentiles" who rescued Jews, cites more Poles than members of any other nationality.

All this is true up to a point. Still, the professor's arguments were not beyond challenge (though, because he left no time for discussion, none arose). One might have pointed out, for example, that the reason there were more Poles than members of any other nationality among Yad Vashem's Righteous Gentiles was probably less because Poles were uniquely heroic in saving Jews, than simply because Poland had a larger Jewish population than any other nation, and therefore there were more Polish Jews around to be saved. Morever, two other lectures presented a very different picture of Polish attitudes and actions toward the Jews. For instance, Professor Marcin Wodzinski, a professor in the University of Wroclaw's Jewish Studies Program, while offering a survey of Polish/Jewish relations from ancient times to the present, described the notorious Kielce pogrom in 1946. There, a couple of years AFTER the Holocaust in Poland, Polish civilians in the town of Kielce killed 46 Jews and wounded countless others in the course of a large-scale riot which arose after Polish civilians, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, accused the Jewish community (already battered by the Holocaust) of kidnapping Christian children and ritually baking their blood in Passover matzas--a charge that echoed the so-called "blood libel" which had been leveled against Jews in Christian Europe for centuries. Morever, in 1968, Wodzinski reported, the Communist government launched an alleged "anti-Zionist" campaign in Poland which more or less forced the remaining Polish Jews to emigrate or face the consequences. Studying this history, it seemed questionable, to say the least, to claim that Polish anti-Semitism was a "myth".

That anti-Semitism remains a serious problem in Poland, despite the virtual absence of Jews, was suggested by another presentation, titled "Is Poland Mono-Cultural?," offered by sociology professor, Marcelina Zuber. Drawing on current studies and polls, Zuber noted that 12% of Poles would be bothered by having a Jewish colleague at work, 12% by having a Jew as a close neighbor, 19% by having a Jew as a boss, and 39% by having a Jew as a son- or daughter-in-law. The only Polish minority with higher negatives in these areas, according to the study, were Muslims. Zuber cited another study which revealed that Poles assume Jews occupy a much larger percentage of the general population than they actually do (with the same misperception being held about another despised minority, the Roma, or gypsies, also a target of Hitler's Final Solution).

How does one explain these discrepancies among the lectures? When I told Jewish friends that I was going to live and teach in Poland, a common response was, "Why do you want to live in a country that's filled with anti-Semites?" I think it's fair to say that this is a commonly held attitude among Jews world-wide. What goes along with this attitude is the concurrent belief that during the Holocaust Poles by the score betrayed their Jewish neighbors to the Germans, because, in truth, no matter how much the Poles may have hated the Nazis for occupying their country, they were really glad Hitler was killing off the Jews. For all the reasons cited by Professor Lewinski (and others), this is a one-sided perception. The Poles are well aware of this perception (which is also often held by non-Jews) and it upsets them, with good reason. But it seems that the Polish response has been to defensively swing the pendulum to the other extreme by making the equally one-sided claim that no Poles are or ever have been anti-Semites, that, on the contrary, the Polish attitude toward the Jews has been one of undying love.

Again, I am not entirely unsympathetic to the Polish view. The Poles suffered horribly under Hitler. As many Poles, 3 million, were killed by the Nazis as were Jews. So, it's no wonder the Poles resent the potrayal of them as victimizers, rather than victims, during the Holocaust. But the reality, as Professor Wodzinski said to me when we spoke privately after his lecture, is that the Poles were BOTH victims and persecutors during the Holocaust, and this is a reality, Wodzinski added, which few Poles want to face. Indeed, the general picture of Polish/Jewish relations is similarly complex, nuanced, multi-faceted. That's something, it seems, which neither Poles nor Jews want to face.

Orientation

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 14:56:52 GMT

Well, devoted readers, my Fulbright orientation is now in full swing. Last Wednesday, I threw caution to the wind, made my way to the Wroclaw train station (a Victorian relic built in the 1850s that looks unchanged from the Communist era), and took the express all the way to Warsaw--about a five and a half hour trip. There, I managed in the rain to locate a cab, which drove me to the drab, bare-boned hotel where we Fulbrighters not from Warsaw were put up by the Polish Fulbright Commission. All in all, an uneventful trip, though naturally I worried about it beforehand, unnerved by the thought of crossing the country armed only with my dreadful Polish and cock-eyed sense of direction.

The next morning, we gathered in the hotel lobby and were ferried by bus over to the American Embassy, where we were "briefed" by the embassy staff. I'd been told by a friend and fellow Fulbrighter that American diplomats and lower-level bureaucrats were all "assholes," but, in contrast, I found these American politicos to be a surprisingly intelligent and amiable bunch. Most of them spoke several languages fluently, were extremely knowledgeable about Polish culture even though they'd generally only been in the country a short time, and, despite their positions, seemed to feel under no obligation to tout the Bush party line on various political matters that arose. All this served to confirm my suspicion that in government the really smart, talented and principled people tend to occupy the lower rungs of the employment ladder, while the people at the top are grossly inferior in every respect. I'm not sure why this is--perhaps due to the electorate's moronic fear and loathing of voting "experts" into positions of power. Whatever the explanation, it's a damn shame, most recently exemplified by the choice of a consummate mediocrity like Sarah Palin as McCain's VP choice, placing Palin (should the American people be stupid enough to vote Republican) a terrifying heartbeat away from the presidency.

But I'll climb down off my soapbox and continue my story. The briefing was informative and practical and non-ideological, though we all had to suffer during it from the evil-eyed gaze of Dick Cheney staring down at us from a large photo on the embassy wall. (I'm not sure whether this had political implications, but the photos of Bush and Rice were both covered up by large stacks of boxes!) That evening, we were all invited to a reception at the palatial home of the American Ambassador to Poland--a former mayor of Nashville and a classmate of Bush's from Yale who pledged to his same "Skull and Bones" society. Even though the man's appointment smacked of croneyism, I must say that he seemed like an extremely pleasant fellow. Standing at the reception with my glass of red wine in one hand and my barbecued shrimp speared on a toothpick in the other, I decided that in my next life I want to bid a none-too-fond farewell to academia and come back as a career diplomat. The ambassador's house was backed by an enormous, well-tended lawn that I was told hosted over 2,000 guests at his July 4 picnic this summer, and was fronted by tall, wrought iron gates guarded by Secret Service men who were surprisingly nonchalant as they waved us through. (I squelched a desire to shriek, "Allah Akbah!," as I waved a bomb-laden Koran above my turbanned head.)

Anyway, after the reception I hooked up with three fellow Fulbrighters and we had the bus deposit us in downtown Warsaw, from whence we walked through the heart of what seemed a lovely city (contradicting claims I'd heard that Warsaw was drab and ugly) to a smoky, basement-level jazz club, where we were treated to a truly virtuoso performance by a be-bop trio led by a scintillating guitarist. I perched on a ledge at the side of the stage with my excellent Polish beer, surrounded by enthusiastically jazz-loving Poles, and contemplated how far I'd come from Butte, Montana.

The next morning, we assembled back in the hotel lobby at the god-awful hour of 6:45 AM and boarded the bus to take us from Warsaw (for me, back) to Wroclaw, another over 5 hour schlep. (Polish travel is especially protracted because there are very few major highways in the country, so if your vehicle gets stuck behind, say, some farmer's tractor inching along at a glacial pace, you're screwed.) Once we arrived in Wroclaw, the other Fulbrighters (only one other was scheduled to reside in the city permanently) deposited their luggage in their rooms at the student dorms, and then we caught taxis to transport us to a hearty Polish lunch at the university's Fine Arts Institute, where we've had almost all our meals. After lunch, we walked over to the truly gorgeous Baroque chapel in the university's main (and oldest) building--like the Catholic cathedrals I've already viewed in Prague and elsewhere in Wroclaw, stuffed to the gills with an amazing assortment of statues and murals and paintings and inscriptions that encircle you on all sides with evidence of a time when the Church completely, utterly ran the show. There, however, we were forced, I'm afraid to say, to suffer through an excruciatingly dull and borderline incomprehensible lecture by the school's vice-rector, who doubled as a chemistry prof, on rocks and alchemy and snowflakes and myriad other seemingly randomly chosen topics. Not every moment of a Fulbright orientation is thrilling, to say the least.

Yesterday, which was Saturday, included an oddly incongruous assortment of events. I was accompanied by my lovely wife, whom I hope to convince to join me in as many orientation activities as possible. First, we regrouped in that stunning chapel, where we listened to a far superior lecture by the school's outgoing rector about the history of the university, which included some admirably honest words about endemic problems in Polish higher education. One such problem is the long-standing epidemic of cheating among Polish students. Apparently, in Polish schools cheating on exams and homework is a widely accepted practice, winked at by the authorities, and not carrying any particular social stigma. In fact, students who refuse to allow their classmates to cheat off them are generally looked down upon. One reason, the rector explained, is that much Polish education proceeds by a process of mindless but often minutely detailed memorization, so students are bored out of their minds, and feel compelled to cheat just to get by. Of course, this poses some real, very practical issues for me as a visiting professor. One response I plan to take is to not allow my students to retake their final exams if they flunk--a common practice, but one that obviously encourages cheating. Hopefully, I won't be considered by my students a tyrant for doing so.

In any event, afterward we boarded yet another bus and traveled about 40 kilometers out of Wroclaw to a smaller town that featured a predictably beautiful 300 year old Lutheran church known as the "Church of Peace," because it was built following the Peace of Westphalia in the early 17th century, which ended the vicious 30 Years War between Protestants and Catholics. (This ends any scintilla of information I possess about the Peace of Westphalia.) Any spiritual feelings the church might have inspired, however, were quickly dispelled when next we traveled to a museum housing old trains and Harley Davidson motorcycles, privately owned and run by a pair of aged enthusiasts who gave us a tour of the premises filled with a barrage of details narrated in surprisingly good English. After the tour, we feasted on Polish sausage and raspberry-flavored beer while enjoying a stage show that consisted of more demonstrations of the wonders of the bikes, interspersed with interludes in which a trio of barely pubescent Polish girls sashayed across the stage to blaring rock music, swinging their bony hips like Las Vegas showgirls, while striking shamelessly erotic poses atop and across the metallic chaises of the motorcycles. We'd come a long way from the Peace of Westphalia!

As for my fellow Fulbrighters, they seem like a nice bunch, smart and good-natured, and remarkably cosmopolitan, most having traveled all over the world and speaking fluently several different languages. This upcoming week, our activities will turn more academic, as we'll spend the mornings studying the Polish language, and afternoons hearing lectures on Polish history and culture.

Well, my aforementioned lovely wife and equally delightful daughter have just returned to our apartment from Sunday shopping, so I'll wrap this entry up, with promises of many more exciting orientation events to relate later.

Jewish-American Lit.

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 10:29:40 GMT

I am now perched right on the cusp of plunging into this whole Fulbright deal. On Wednesday, Sept. 17, I'm taking a train to Warsaw. (It's about a 5 hour trip.) On Thursday, we Fulbrighters will spend the whole day being "briefed" (whatever that means, exactly) at the US Consulate, and then that night there is a reception at the home of the American ambassador to Poland. (Thank God I splurged and bought a suit in Butte!) And then, on Friday, we all troop onto a bus and ride back to Wroclaw for a week-long continuation of the orientation, which will include lectures on Polish history and culture, as well as field trips. And then, at the beginning of October, I start teaching.

So, I have a lot of exciting activities coming up. But my life this past week or so has been relatively quiet. Last night, my wife and I tracked down that restaurant whose owner I met at a coffee klatch sponsored by "The International Friends of Wroclaw" (whom I described in my last entry). The restaurant is called "Abrams' Tower," and according to the owner it's housed in the oldest building in Wroclaw. The building, which is tucked away in an alley (we had to schlep around with our trusty map for a good half-hour before we found it), certainly looks ancient. It earns its name because it is indeed a rather narrow stone tower, and the restaurant is housed on three floors, with the first containing the kitchen, the second the bar, and the third the restaurant itself. In other words, you get a lot of exercise before you sit down at your table! True to what the owner had told me, they were broadcasting Sunday football games in a big screen format on one stone wall of the restaurant. Based on what I saw last night, however, I doubt this novelty is going to draw many customers to this fledgling restaurant, because the only diners watching the game, other than my wife and me, were two young Poles who purchased some wine and chips, and who, to their credit, seemed quite well informed about American football, based on their exuberant howls anytime there was a good play. But it seems these Poles were a notable exception to a general lack of interest in Wroclaw in football, at least the kind where you throw rather than kick the ball. For me, though, getting to see a football game was a real treat, a respite for a few hours from the homesickness I suffer from occasionally.

But mostly how I've been spending my time this past week hasn't been by guzzling beer and watching televised football, but rather by reading Jewish-American literature in preparation for the two sections of the course I'm scheduled to teach at the university here come October. First, I read through the anthology I picked, "American Jewish Fiction: A Century of Stories," edited by Gerald Shapiro, which collects short stories by famous and lesser-known Jewish-American fiction writers which span the entire century. And, once I finished that book (skipping the three stories included which I'd already read), I turned to Philip Roth's masterful little novel, published in the 1970s, called "The Ghost Writer," which I'm going to also be teaching, along with Cynthia Ozick's "The Shawl," to the upper-division section of the course.

So, I've been thinking a lot about Jewish-American literature this past week. It's a great sub-genre of American literature, which includes two Nobel Prize winners, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Saul Bellow (both of whom have fine stories included in the anthology). It's a literature which records the entire span of the Jewish experience in America, from the struggling days at the dawn of the 20th century striving to "make it" in America as impoverished immigrants crammed mostly in the Jewish ghetto on the lower east side of Manhattan in New York City, to the more prosperous experiences of thriving in lucrative white collar professions and moving out to the suburbs, to the mixed blessings of assimilation--intermarriage and a loss of those religious and cultural traditions which their ancestors brought with them on those cramped ships crossing the Atlantic from Europe. It's a very American story, while also being uniquely Jewish. And it's a story shadowed, haunted by the Holocaust, which happened on another continent, but claimed the lives of many of the relatives of American Jews, and also brought Holocaust survivors with their shattered psyches and horrific stories to these shores after World War II. In one form or another, directly or indirectly, as a major or minor theme, the Holocaust turns up in story after story in the Shapiro anthology, and also in "The Ghost Writer" and "The Shawl," especially the latter work, which is about a Holocaust survivor.

What will my Polish students make of this literature? That is a question I am eager to discover the answer to. Of course, Poland, which before the war had the largest Jewish community in Europe, is precisely the country so many of the Jewish immigrants fled FROM to get to America (though during the late 19th and early 20th century immigrations that brought a huge flood of such immigrants, including my paternal grandparents, Poland was occupied by Tsarist Russia). I think it's a safe bet to say that no Jewish immigrant who came to America from Poland before WW II ever regretted his or her decision, no matter how hard life was in the ghettos of the lower east side. That certainly included my grandparents, who started out penniless in New York and managed to haul themselves into the middle-class by dint of their own Herculean efforts. Will Polish students be grieved by the fact that anti-Semitism made so many Polish Jews forced to leave their homeland? Or fascinated by the transformation these same Jews underwent in a new land? Or resentful that these formerly Polish Jews regarded their previous country with such abhorrence, however understandable those feelings might be?

Of course, right now I have no answers to these questions. But I will be exploring them over the course of the semester, and I promise to share the conclusions I reach with my faithful readers.

Poles on Poland

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 10:25:24 GMT

For this entry, I'd like to share random observations about various aspects of Polish life and culture and character that have been shared with me by native Poles, and by a few Americans who've lived for extended periods in the country. I don't know whether these reflections will add up to a general picture of life in Poland, or not. We'll see.

A Polish colleague of mine in the university here, Patricja, a voluble and intelligent academic in her early 40s, told me over coffee and cake in the Old Square (or "Rynek") in downtown Wroclaw, that the Poles are known for loving to complain. This would confirm my earlier conclusion in a past entry that the Polish national character is of a rather somber, morose cast. On the other hand, as that entry also documented, the Poles, historically, have certainly had plenty to complain about, primarily endless occupations by imperialistically minded neighboring empires. But Patricja added that polls show that, relatively speaking, the Polish people are happier now than they've ever been. That's the result, I suppose, of replacing totalitarianism with democracy.

From what I can gather, however, few Poles seem satisfied with the present state of the government. My colleague and friend at the University of Montana--Western, Bill Janus, whose parents were Polish immigrants and who's been to Poland many times (including once as a Fulbright scholar), told me that the federal government here has changed hands from a center-right party to a far-right party. A leftwinger himself, Bill added that the government is engaged in what he called a "witch-hunt" to rout out and prosecute former communists from the old regime. Based on what I've learned about the nature of that regime, though, I'm not sure this is an entirely bad idea. Another Polish colleague in Wroclaw, Justyna, confirmed Bill's view when she remarked to me during a hike up a mountain outside of town that the Polish government is dominated by conservative parties, because the Polish left is entirely discredited because of the taint of Poland's communist past. Whatever the evils of that past, it's certainly true that a country that doesn't offer political representation from across the ideological spectrum tends to be in bad shape, as Americans know all too well from eight years of Republican domination in Washington. Patricja confirmed Justyna's sour view of Polish politics when she complained that the parties fight so much among themselves that they tend to get little done. I'd add, though, that I think this negative view of the national political scene should be taken by outsiders with a grain of salt. How many people, after all, are ever SATISFIED with their nation's politics?

At a coffee klatch sponsored by "The International Friends of Wroclaw" (a group described in an earlier entry), I met an American who has lived in Poland ever since the fall of communism, and who has recently opened a restaurant in Wroclaw. Pitching his new eatery to me, he insisted that his place was the only restaurant in Wroclaw that served "real" Mexican food (since the kitchen sported a genuine Mexican chef), and also that every Sunday night they planned to broadcast American football games, which certainly piqued my interest as an inveterate football fan pining for the game in distant Poland. Anyway, this restauranteur complained to me that the bureaucratic hoops which had to be jumped through by anyone trying to establish a business in Poland were absolutely horrendous.

A glimpse into why this might be the case was provided to me by another colleague at the university, an American from Colorado, Jason, who has lived in Wroclaw since 1996 and is married to a Polish woman who works as a pianist at the local conservatory. Jason told me that Poland is still scarred from its Communist past, and that one form this historical wounding takes is that Poles in positions of authority are very reticent about providing helpful information to would-be information seekers. The reason is that the communist system created a Darwinian world where everyone had to be out for themselves just to survive. As a result, everyone was reluctant to give anyone else any potentially valuable information that might provide the other person with an advantage. The thinking was, "I didn't get any help to get where I am; why should I give any help to you?" According to Jason, this thinking has survived the collapse of Communism, and it would help explain the frustrations encountered by the lamenting restauranteur. It would also help explain some frustrations I've personally encountered trying to get information related to my Fulbright, although I might add that these problems concern the American Fulbright people in Washington as well as their counterparts in Poland.

In short, Poland, it seems, is a mixed bag, struggling to overcome its tragic past and emerge into a brighter future. In that noble endeavor, I certainly wish the country the best of luck.

The Dogs of Poland

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 09:49:52 GMT

My entries up to now have tended to be on rather somber, weighty subjects--e.g., the Polish national character, or the Americanization of Polish culture. For this installment, I wish to change pace a bit, and write on a somewhat lighter, more whimsical topic--Polish dogs.

For, you see, based on my time in Wroclaw, it appears that Poland is full of dogs. However, there seems to be a subtle yet distinct difference between Polish and American dogs. At least in Butte, there are tons of dogs, but they tend to be unleashed, and to wander about the city in surprisingly amiable packs. Moreover, the vast majority of them are mixed breeds--or, to use the more homely expression, mutts. In Wroclaw, in contrast, almost all the dogs are on leashes, with attentive, conscientious owners attached to the other end, and, based on my considerable expertise in canine matters, they seem to be pure breeds, and a wide variety of them. Sheepdogs, bassett hounds, German shepherds, Dalmatians, Rotweillers, schnauzers, Irish setters, etc. In accordance with their impeccable breeding, they appear well-groomed, and fairly sleek, looking like they get plenty of exercise, though, truth be told, they trot along and race about and sniff and bark with the same goofy, mindless concentration found in dogs everywhere.

Does this contrast between Polish and American dogs suggest any larger differences between the two cultures? Of course, there is always the remote possiblity that the answer is "No, this, in fact, suggests nothing at all." But such possibilities are always banished instantly by your intrepid blogger, who is nothing if not in search of meanings--even if that requires going where no Man has gone before. (Was that from some TV show?) Let me propose, therefore, that the dissimilarity between American and Polish dogs results from canines occupying a different status in the respective cultures. In America, everyone has a dog, and dogs are no big deal. They are part of the furniture, part of the scenery. They are as common in our culture as flags and hot dogs and political rhetoric. No one is, or ever will be, impressed when they see me trudging along on the dirt paths behind Montana Tech faithfully followed by my aged, over-weight mutt, Katie (part Lab, part God knows what).

In contrast, in Poland I suspect that dogs are status symbols. That's why they're pure breeds and well-groomed and svelte and walked regularly. Perhaps this is a consequence of the fact that Poland, still emerging from the dark days of communism, has not really shed its image as a Third World nation. Under these circumstances, you need to find your objects of prestige where you can. Perhaps, then, once Poland is fully democratized and Westernized and modernized, the status of dogs will drop, and unkempt, chubby mutts will be as omnipresent as they are in the USA. That will be a grand day for the historically much-abused and struggling Polish nation.

One final note. I have not the faintest idea whether anyone in the world is actually reading my blog. But, on the odd chance that some erudite soul somewhere is checking in, let me encourage readers to email me with responses. Savage disagreement is encouraged. My address is:

HGonshak@mtech.edu

Then I, in turn, can respond to your responses in future entries. God knows, as this entry makes eloquently clear, I need more topics to write on.

Meeting Americans Abroad

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 10:51:05 GMT

My family and I have joined a club called "The International Friends of Wroclaw". It's composed of "expats" (to use the fashionable lingo), people from all over the world who, for one reason or other, have landed in Wroclaw, and who have banded together to befriend one another and provide moral support and practical help as we all try to navigate the sometimes baffling and perilous shoals of living in a foreign country. The club meets once a week for a coffee klatch, and the members also organize classes, trips, and other social events.

The club contains its share of Americans (though we're by no means in the majority), and whenever we from the US find one another, there tends to be a shared gleam in our eye, a quiet yelp of mutual appreciation. My wife, Nancy, has told me she's a bit bemused by how happy Americans tend to be when they meet fellow Americans abroad. "Why would I want to travel all the way to another country just to see other Americans?," she asked me, grinning wryly. "If I wanted to find other Americans, after all, all I'd have to do is stay home."

A fair point, and one I've heard expressed by others. Unlike Nancy, sometimes these others infuse their arguments with a certain American self-hatred. You know what I mean--Americans who buy into the stereotype that Americans abroad tend to be "Ugly Americans," conforming perfectly to every prejudice harbored against us by the rest of the world. And no doubt the Ugly American does exist. Many years ago, when my wife and I went on our honeymoon to a resort hotel in Puerta Vallarta, Mexico, we found ourselves, to our dismay, surrounded by Ugly Americans, who spent all their time in the hotel pool, clad in bathing suits much to small and tight for their middle-aged bodies, bellowing to the harassed, overworked waiters, "Hey, dos cervezas!" (As a promotional deal, the hotel offered guests all the drinks they could consume, and these Americans took advantage of that offer with a vengeance.) When this crowd tried to include us in their bacchanalia, we politely explained that we were on our honeymoon, assuming they'd take the hint and recognize we wanted privacy, but several couples just replied, still maintaining their standard bellow, "So are we!"

But few of the Americans we've met in Wroclaw conform to the Ugly American stereotype. If you're in search of a drunken orgy, you're much more likely to go to Mexico than Poland, after all. And yet my wife still has a point that there's something odd about traveling to a foreign country and then being dying to meet people from the country you just left. And yet I confess, somewhat shame-facedly, to expressing that shared gleam in the eye, etc., whenever, at a "International Friends of Wroclaw" meeting, or elsewhere, I discover an American compatriot. Why? On a simple level, conversations with fellow Americans usually have an ease conspicuously lacking in other dialogues abroad. Even English conversations in foreign countries can by trying because much of the time you're simply trying to decipher the other person's accent. This isn't only true with people for whom English is a second language. I'm sure they say the same thing about Americans, but I've met Brits here who speak a rather peculiar version of English, at least to my ear. It's not just the accent; it's also that many Brits have a manner of speaking that entails talking very fast in a barely discernable mumble punctuated with odd squeaks and squawks. As a professor who teaches courses in British literature, I think I can state with some authority that this style of speaking is something of a national trait.

But, of course, the pleasure of discovering a fellow American abroad goes beyond just the comfort of being able to understand what the hell he's saying. The truth is that most of us are homebodies at heart, and that reality may even extend to those of us with the guts to go journeying abroad. We treasure the known, the familiar, the secure, the predictable. We're wary of extending ourselves too far out of our comfort zone. And, of course, the reality of being in a foreign country is that you're perpetually out of your comfort zone. So, when a taste of home appears, is it such a suprise that we so often respond with a grateful sigh of relief?

Are Americans Fatter than Europeans?

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 09:16:59 GMT

Having now spent about a month in Europe (four days in Prague as a tourist, and the rest of the time living in my new home for this year--Wroclaw, Poland), I am prepared to make a sweeping, categorical cultural generalization: Americans are fatter than Europeans. In Prague, I saw tourists from all over Europe, and in Wroclaw I've seen lots of Poles, naturally, and there's no question about it--they're a lot skinnier than we are. Granted, some of the older people tend to be a bit stocky and bulky, especially the women, but among the pre-elderly set, you rarely see anyone who's overweight. That contrast is particularly noticeable among Polish children, almost all of whom are thin, whereas in America childhood obesity is a serious problem.

What explains the difference? One non-explanation, certainly, is diet. The traditional Polish diet is an incipient heart attack on a platter--fried, starchy, heavy, packed with cholesterol. The Poles seem engaged in some kind of contest to see how many dishes you can prepare with a potato; it even appears in liquid form, via the national drink--vodka. The Polish diet is also incredibly meat-centered; there must be at least a zillion types of sausage alone. Admittedly, as Poland in its post-Communist incarnation has become more Westernized, the national diet has improved, with more fruits and fresh vegetables added to the menu. (The Poles have always eaten vegetables, especially cabbage, but they've tended to be heavily pickled.) Still, it's remarkable that people who eat this way can remain so svelte.

A more persuasive explanation, which casts Polish trimness in a less positive light, is that Poles (and Europeans generally) smoke a lot more than Americans do. There are many reasons I'm proud to be an American, but one important one is due to how well Americans have handled the issue of smoking, banning cigarette smoking in almost all public places, which has reduced the risk of second-hand smoke for us non-smokers, and also induced a lot of smokers to quit, since finding a place outside the home to smoke has become such a pain in the neck. In contrast, Europeans smoke profusely in public places, especially restaurants and bars. And cigarette advertising in Poland is omnipresent. So, maybe there's at least one reason Americans are fatter than Europeans which shouldn't worry us unduly. We may all die young from clogged arteries, but they're going to be kicking the bucket from lung cancer.

However, a more benign explanation for Europeans' comparative thinness is that they walk a lot more than we do. If Americans had to pay the gas prices that Europeans do, which can run as high as $12 a gallon, there'd be a second revolution. The Poles' sensible response to these astronomical gas prices has been, especially in cities like Wroclaw, to either leave their cars at home or never purchase automobiles at all, and elected officials have made this choice manageable by erecting excellent systems of mass transportation. We haven't bought a car in Wroclaw, and so far that's not been a problem, because trams criss-cross the entire city, and there's a stop just a short walk from our apartment. And the entire continent of Europe is traversed by a superb railroad system that puts Amtrak to shame. Of course, the more you use public transport, the more you have to walk, and hence the skinnier you remain. It's a heretical thought in America, but maybe if gas prices continue to rise in the US, we'll get decent local and national mass transportation systems, which may help alleviate the national obesity problem.

This whole issue has a personal dimension for me, because, in the great American tradition, I've gotten a tad softer in the middle as I've sunk deeper into middle age. So, maybe I can take off a few pounds in Poland, while still indulging occasionally in the national dish--fried pork chops and cabbage!

Lost in Translation

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 10:39:10 GMT

I've been reading an interesting book these days. Titled "Lost in Translation," it's a memoir by Eva Hoffman, a Polish Jew born in Krakow (one of Poland's most beautiful cities, in the eastern part of the country), whose parents were Holocaust suvivors, and who, in 1959, emigrated with her family to America, when the Polish Communist government told all Polish Jews that they were allowed to leave the country--and, it was clearly implied, they'd BETTER leave or else. (As another book I've read, Jan Gross' "Fear: Anti-Semitism after Auschwitz," underscores, anti-Semitism in Poland, at the highest levels, by no means vanished after the defeat of the Nazis.)

But what I wish to focus on in this entry is the meaning of Hoffman's title. What she discovers after arriving in America is that important, deeply-rooted aspects of herself, created and nurtured by her Polish upbringing, simply don't "translate" now that she's been relocated on American soil. With American friends, neighbors, classmates, etc., she finds she can't be "herself" because who she is is inextricable from the Polish context in which that self was born. As a result, she discovers herself forced to adopt a new persona which is stiff and shallow and bears little resemblance to the rich, complex person she really is, but which is translatable to the Americans she encounters.

Inverting the journey depicted in "Lost in Translation" (not from Poland to America but vice-versa), I've had a somewhat similar experience here in Poland--a much milder version, of course, because I'm only here for a year, whereas Hoffman had to move to America permanently and could never return home (at least as long as the communists were in power), but still at least remotely comparable. We Americans tend to cherish this myth that we are pure individuals, in no way shaped by circumstances outside our control like culture and history, but instead emerging into life full-formed and independent like Athena from the head of Zeus. But that IS a myth. The truth is we are profoundly shaped by those external forces, much more that we are aware, and the best way to discover this reality is simply to move somewhere else. I never knew how American I was until I left America. And I never knew how much my interactions with others were conditioned by the unwritten norms and codes and taboos of American culture until I found myself among foreigners and discovered how hard it was to present myself authentically.

I don't want to overstate my case. In a significant way, we can never entirely reveal our inner selves to any other people, even those closest to us. As the narrator, Marlowe, says in Conrad's novel, "Heart of Darkness," "We live as we dream, alone." And there are also many traits that bind us to some people and estrange us from others beyond just nationality and culture. For example, most of the Poles I've met so far (as I described in my last entry) are academics from the university where I'll be teaching, and our shared careers in academe and all that goes with that--e.g., a love of literature, our natures as intellectuals, etc.--has definitely established a connection between us that transcends culture, at least to a degree. Nonetheless, that sense of being "lost in translation" remains.

One small example is how no one is laughing at my jokes over here. Not that back in the states I'm considered the reincarnation of Henny Youngman, but at least I've always been able to generate a few yucks now and then among my fellow Americans. But here I'm like a stand-up comic performing before the Amish. For instance, when I was walking down the street approaching some Polish colleagues awaiting me in front of the English Dept. building (one of whom I'd never met before), I tripped on the curb and almost landed flat on my face. When I arrived, breathless, before the pair of Polish academics, I quipped, "Well, I always make a dramatic entrance." Not a side-splitter, admittedly, but you'd think they'd have at least cracked a smile. But no. Nothing. Bubkas. Robert Frost once said, "Poetry is what gets lost in translation." But perhaps he should have added, "Humor gets lost, too." What's funny about a joke, after all, is so dependent on such an elaborate and often quite subtle code of cultural signifiers. What one culture finds hilarious may leave those from another culture scratching their heads in perplexity. How else to explain why the French are so in love with Jerry Lewis?

These reflections have led me to feel increased sympathy and empathy for immigrants to America. Americans tends to be so belligerently intolerant of immigrants, demanding that they learn English immediately, that they give up at once their alien ways and assimilate into the "melting pot" of American culture. But the truth is that transitioning from one culture to the next is a complex, difficult, often scary process, and also one permeated with a sense of loss, as the immigrant is forced to relinquish his native ways forever. No wonder it takes time, or that it should induce mixed feelings, or that there should be a temptation to wish to cling to old ways, old habits, old perspectives. Three of my four grandparents were immigrants--my paternal grandparents Polish Jews, my maternal grandmother from Cuba--and though none of them certainly regretted coming to America (consider what would have happened to all three had they remained behind), all of them, I suspect, though they didn't talk about, it, felt a certain perhaps inchoate sense of loss and regret.

So, if there's a moral to this entry, it's that we Americans must have more compassion for immigrants, must understand that their difficult journey is psychological and spiritual as well as literal, and must realize that to the extent that they preserve their native customs (those aspects of their backgrounds which ARE translatable) they enrich, rather than threaten, the rich tapestry of American culture.

Hope that didn't sound too preachy!

Some Poles I've Met

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 12:07:00 GMT

I haven't had a chance to meet many Poles yet, because most of my contact with Poles will be through the university in Wroclaw where I'll be teaching, and August is the one month when the university is closed, with almost all of the faculty, staff and students out of town on vacation. However, I have met two Polish women who will be my colleagues in the English Studies Dept., both of whom are smart, opinionated and dynamic, and who collectively have provided me with an introduction to a group that has always exercised more influence in Poland than America: the native intelligentsia.

One is named Dorota (which may be a common Polish name, since it's also the first name of the woman in charge of the Polish Fulbright program in Warsaw). My wife, Nancy, and I first met Dorota via email. Although she's only an adjunct professor in the department, she was the faculty member who worked hardest to find us an apartment in Wroclaw while we were still back in the states, exchanging countless emails with my wife about our various options. For that alone, we owe Dorota a lot, because we've ended up with a lovely apartment--quite spacious (at least by Polish standards), with a dishwasher and a washing machine (by no means fixtures in all Polish homes), located next door to a food market and only a short walk to the tram stop that will take me to the university and my daughter, Becky, to her international school.

When we took that rather grueling bus trip from Prague to Wroclaw which I described in an earlier entry, Dorota and her husband Greg met us at the bus stop. She's a small, thin woman in her 30s with short, dark hair and glasses who's a bundle of energy, talking vociferously and almost always in motion. She had already bought us some groceries so we didn't "starve" our first few days in town, and the next day she took us out, showing us how to ride the tram, and, serving as translator, helping us buy some cell phones. That evening, we had dinner at her apartment, and the day after that Greg helped us get set up with Internet access (which, of course, is allowing me to write this blog). Quite a bit of aid from someone who wasn't even "officially" designated by the university to help us (in contrast to several other professors who were so designated but who've so far been far less accommodating). Dorota's fulsome assistance is all the more remarkable when you consider that she has two small children, the youngest of whom, Witek, is severely autistic.

Actually, the fact that Dorota has an autistic child, which Nancy discovered during their email correspondence before we even arrived in Poland, was an immediate bond between us, because, as I alluded to in my introductory entry, we also had a severely autistic child, Hannah, whose care pretty much dominated our lives for 17 years, and who died in her sleep of an epileptic seizure in the summer of 2005. Not surprisingly, parents of autistic children almost always feel an immediate connection, because they have undergone experiences which most of the rest of the world, frankly, can't begin to understand. When we met Witek, who's now four, at Dorota's apartment, he reminded me a lot of Hannah at that age: constantly on the move, picking up and then discarding one object after the next, sometimes after destroying them, largely indifferent to the people around him (though he is clearly bonded with his parents), not speaking clear words but communicating with his own form of sing-song babble. Like most parents of autistic children (especially mothers), Dorota is, to be honest, obsessed with Witek: monitoring his every move when they're together, endlessly researching autism to find out about the latest possible treatments, then trying them all out and scrutinizing Witek to see if any of them work even slightly. (Because scientists don't know what causes autism and so don't know how to cure it, there is a blizzard of "anecdotal" evidence that one thing or another--e.g., vitamins, diet, sound therapy, etc.--might help, most of these dismissed by the mainstream medical community, but what parent won't try something that might, maybe, possibly, do some good?) Watching Dorota and Witek brought back for both Nancy and me a flood of largely painful memories of Hannah and the lives we led when she was the center of our world just as Witek is now the center of Dorota's. Nancy plans to spend our year in Poland writing a memoir about Hannah's life and death, in which she will, I'm sure, tell this whole tragic story far more eloquently than I can, since, close as I was to Hannah, her maternal bond was, honestly, far stronger.

Dorota and Greg were also the first Poles so far with whom we've discussed what life was like under Communism--the system under which they grew up and spent their teen years. Greg, who's tall and handsome with close-cropped, thinning hair and Slavic features, related that when he was in high school the police started making inquiries because he, along with three other students, had organized an informal group that met to discuss philosophy. Four students! Philosophy! It was a small but instructive story about what life is like in a police state. Not surprisingly, the gregarious Dorota's stories were more expansive. She related how her primary school class was taken on a field trip to see a movie, a lengthy epic relating some dramatic, heroic event in Polish history from the distant past. What Dorota recalls, however, is less the noble characters or the stirring plot than a scene depicting a feast among the knights where a giant ham was carved up for the delectation of the warriors, which led Dorota and her classmates to drool over the ham and gape enviously at the well-fed knights. In short, ordinary people didn't eat too well in the socialist "utopia" that was Communist Poland.

Dorota's second story concerned a nationwide government-run contest to send a small, elite group of students who were especially proficient in English to study abroad. Because Dorota herself excelled in English (today, she is completely bilingual), her mother met with the local communist education official to see if her daughter could be picked for the prize. The official informed Dorota's mom that all the positions were already filled, and her mother (in Dorota's description, a meek, docile woman) dutifully returned home with the bad news. However, the next day the father of one of her classmates, a professor at the local university, went to see the same official, and because this man enjoyed far more social status than Dorota's mom, his daughter was chosen as a winner. The girl went abroad to study (at a time when gaining permission to travel outside the country was very difficult for most Poles), and ended up studying at prestigious BrownUniversity in the US and becoming a hotshot academic. However, Dorota related that she'd seen a photo of the girl several years after she'd left Poland, and rather gleefully reported that she'd gained a lot of weight. But she also noted that the girl was posed holding a banana--a virtually unattainable luxury in Poland at the time. Both Nancy and I agreed that this story is central to Dorota's self-understanding, to her conception of her own life. How far might Dorota have gone had she won that English contest? Might she be that hotshot academic rather than just an adjunct professor in Poland? (I don't mean to leave the impression that Dorota's academic career is a disaster. On the contrary, she was funded to teach Polish Studies for two years at the University of Buffalo.) The story also exemplified the profound unfairness of the Polish Communist system. In a society in which, according to the official propaganda, everyone was supposed to be treated equally, in reality there was an elaborate status system, in which people were rewarded based on how highly placed they were within that system (much of that determined by your rank within the Communist party), not, by any means, according to merit. My impression is that this hypocrisy induced an enormous cynicism among the populace, and led to endless corruption. Of course, America isn't a totally egalitarian society either. The rich and powerful enjoy far more perks than the poor and helpless. But some distinctions are in order here. The Polish communist system was much, much worse.

I was planning to describe the second Polish friend we've met here, Patricia, but I suspect I've droned on long enough, so I'll end here and talk about Patricia in a future entry.

The Americanization of Polish Culture

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 09:09:43 GMT

Yesterday, my wife, daughter and I went to the movies in Wroclaw. We saw "Forgetting Sarah Marshall," an American film with Polish subtitles (quite funny, by the way). The film was shown in a multiplex housed in an enormous, ultra-modern mall not far from our apartment. Also playing were American films such as "Hancock," "The Black Knight" and Kung Fu Panda" (the last dubbed, since it's a kid's movie). Afterwards, we got ice cream and ate it in the mall's food court, which sports a "Subway" sandwich shop and a "Burger King". Sitting there, you'd have no idea (except for the signs in Polish above the stores) that you weren't in Middle America. Oh, and the way we know what tram stop to get off coming home is that there's a McDonald's at the stop.

Probably you see where I'm heading. Since the fall of communism in 1989, Poland has become permeated with what Poland's communist leaders decried as an arch-evil: American popular culture. Of course, in this respect, Poland is no different from almost all the rest of the world. Is this Americanization of Poland a good or bad thing? That's a complex question, and I don't claim to have a definitive answer. Probably the most extreme negative analysis I've come across is proclaimed in a book by two British left-wingers I wrote about a few years ago in a journal called "The Montana Professor". The book is titled "Why Do People Hate America?", and the resounding answer the authors provide to their own question is: "Because they SHOULD!" And one of the most hated aspects of the US, according to the authors, is the way the country has spread its pop culture across the globe in a move the writers refer to as the "McDonaldization" of the planet. Not mincing words, the authors call this phenomenon "cultural terrorism," the destruction of native cultures (cuisine, film, fashion, etc.) by the American juggernaut. They see it as a form of imperialism, comparable to the imperialism wreaked on the Third World by the European powers in an earlier era.

But that's a false analogy, I think. There's a big difference between something that's imposed by FORCE, and something where the natives retain free will. Under colonial rule, the colonized had no choice but to to put up with a foreign government, legal system, educational system, etc. But today if a Pole doesn't feel like eating a greasy Big Mac, he can always walk down the block and snarf down some pierogi (Polish dumplings, delicious) and a bowl of borscht. In other words, American pop culture has thrived in Poland not because mighty, imperialistic America has forceably imposed it on the Polish people, but rather because the Poles LIKE it. They have clearly expressed their favorable view of American pop culture with their wallets and pocketbooks. If the Poles viewed this Americanization as a repugnant, alien invader, they obviously would refuse to buy the products, and the global scourge of the Golden Arches would disappear.

Of course, it's not quite that simple. Big business doesn't just respond to consumer needs; it also helps create those needs. Advertising makes a product desirable when had that advertising not existed the locals probably would have gotten along just fine without the product. There is something sad about going to a Polish movie theater and not seeing any Polish films to view, just as, generally, there is something sad about seeing a culture so permeated with the trappings of a foreign culture. I wonder if some Poles have developed an inferiority complex, a kind of self-loathing, seeing their own culture so dominated by an alien one.

On the other hand, one could argue that this globalization (for this is the phenomenon I've been describing) is bringing the world closer together. If everyone across the globe is eating Quarter Pounders and watching "The Black Knight," is it possible we'll all get along better? I know that, as an American, I find Polish culture less alien, more accessible, because it's so Americanized. On the other hand, the fact remains that the world today is as riven with violent conflicts as ever. I recall watching the BBC World News, and seeing that some rioters in Pakistan (I forget what they were rioting about, exactly), in the course of their carnage, had burned to ashes a statue of Ronald McDonald, which suggests that this Americanization of the Third World can inspire antagonism toward the US as easily as it can inspire love and connection. Indeed, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism during the era of globalization signals the rise of a culture that deliberately pits itself in opposition to the West. But consider why, exactly, fundamentalism has risen. What the jihadists most fear is less that American will impose itself on their native cultures, as they do that their fellow Muslims will respond receptively to this imposition. In other words, the threat comes from within more than from without. It's because so many in the Muslim world LIKE American culture that Osama bin Laden is on the warpath. What's happening is a kind of cultural civil war within the Muslim community. And, whether they ultimately win or not, the group on the side of Madonna videos and curly fries may well be in the majority--especially among the young, the next generation, always the biggest fans of American pop culture (in Poland, too).

Well, I said the question was complicated, didn't it?

The Polish National Character

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:20:56 GMT

First a correction. At the end of my last entry, I claimed that the Polish word for "goodbye" is "Dosvadana". Actually, that's Russian. In fact, the Polish word for "goodbye" is "dovidzana" (spelling mine). I claimed to have a wretched grasp of the Polish language, and I've proven my point far more eloquently than I could have if I'd tried to do so deliberately. But I have publicly sworn to improve my Polish, and I mean to keep my word. At present, I am aware of three different opportunities to learn Polish from three different sources. I will choose one. Unfortunately, none of the classes begin before September, so for the next couple weeks I will have to continue with my present, hardly ideal form of communication: pidgin Polish, hand gestures, and, when the situation demands it, more or less elaborate theatrics. Wish me luck. I'll need it.

As the title of this entry states, my aim here is to analyze the Polish national character. But I plunge in, a few caveats. I realize some readers may find it rather presumptous of me to be analyzing the Poles after having only been in the country about two weeks. I could retort that I did some reading before arriving here (which I did), but mostly what I want to stress is that what I'm sharing today are purely FIRST impressions. I reserve the right to clarify or simply change entirely my opinions as I spend more time here, meet more Poles, and learn more about Polish culture. As I said in my introductory entry, I see this blog as tracing the evolution of my thinking over time. I hope I'm not horribly embarassed by this entry several months from now, but you never know.

Second, generalizations about something as amorphous as a national character are always just that--generalizations, hopefully not sweeping or stereotyped, but still there will inevitably be thousands (millions?) of Poles who don't remotely conform to the traits I've outlined. Nonetheless, I do think an entity exists called a "national character," shaped in subtle and obvious ways by history and culture, and so I find value in exploring this subject.

Whew! Now that I've hopefully covered my ass, here goes. There's a famous history of Poland by a historian named Norman Davies called, "God's Playground". (In unabridged form, it covers two volumes of close to 1,000 pages. I've started it, though I confess I'm not remotely close to finishing it.) As I understand the title, Davies is suggesting that a possibly sadistic God has been "playing" with Poland for centuries. I'm reminded of Glouchester's famous line in Shakespeare's "King Lear": "Like flies to wanton boys, the gods play with us for their sport". What that means in more empirical terms is that, dating all the way back to the Middle Ages, one large empire after another has been invading and occupying Poland, denying the citizenry national sovreignty. First, back in the 14th century, it was the barbaric Tatars from Mongolia. Then, soon after, it was the Teutonic Knights from Germany, who were convinced that, even if the Poles insisted they were Christian, they weren't Christian ENOUGH for the Knights, and so had to be converted at the point of a sword. When my grandparents left Poland at the start of the 20th century and immigrated to America, different parts of the country were split up among several different foreign powers, with eastern Poland where my grandparents were born being controlled by Czarist Russia. Then, after a brief, fledgling attempt at self-government, the Poles were occupied by the Nazis; then after the Stalin/Hitler pact they were reoccupied by the Russians; then when Hitler broke the Pact and invaded the Soviet Union, the country was once more under German control, and then when the Third Reich lost WW II, Poland become a sattelite of the USSR all the way until 1989, when communism finally fell and a democratic, independent Poland at last came to power.

What does it do to a nation and its people to have this kind of almost continuously tragic history? Even from the relatively limited sight-seeing we've done so far in Wroclaw, I can tell that this issue is very much on the minds of the Poles. For example, one Sunday afternoon we visited probably the most famous tourist attraction in all of Wroclaw: the Panorama. This is an enormous painting, which extends entirely around the circular wall of a sizeable building, painted by two Polish painters in the late 19th century, which depicts a famous battle which occured at the end of the 18th century, in which the Poles rose up in a well-orchestrated attack against their Russian overlords, and won the battle, though they lost the war. In minute detail, you see Polish soldiers thwarting Russian troops (many of them Cossacks in furry, rounded Russian hats) in every possible way: shooting them off their horses, besting them in hand-to-hand combat on the ground, overturning their cannons, etc. Elsewhere, other Poles pray before an enormous cross for victory, or tend to their dead or wounded, or the officers discuss battle strategy. Not surprisingly, when Poland was a de facto colony of the Soviet Union, Moscow prevented the painting from being publicly exhibited, as our English-translated audio guide noted (I imagined) through clenched teeth.

Just outside the building, there is a memorial commerating the Katyn Forest massacre. This was a mass killing toward the end of WW II (when German defeat was already a foregone conclusion) by the Russians of (if I'm recalling correctly) 22,000 Polish officers. Stalin's motives in ordering the killings was to facilitate post-war Soviet control of Poland by murdering almost the country's entire officer class, making an armed rebellion against Russian hegemony extremely unlikely. For the same reason, when the Polish underground rose up against the Nazi occupation in Warsaw, even though Russian troops were positioned just across the Vistula River, and could have easily come to the aid of their supposed Polish allies, the Russians elected to do nothing, and allow the Germans to slaughter the Poles, since the Nazis larger defeat was assured, and a decimated Poland was, again, quitely likely to passively accept the Soviet yoke. The Katyn massacre memorial shows a dying Polish soldier was his head in the lap of an anguished Polish peasant woman, while above an angel kneels holding a sword. On the day we visited, fresh flowers had been placed on the memorial, which I assume is a regular practice.

One unsurprising consequence of the history I've briefly outlined is that, not to mince words, the Poles HATE the Russians. (They're not too crazy about the Germans either, but they occupy a distant second on the enemies' list.) During my stay here, Russia has invaded the neigboring country (a former Soviet republic) of Georgia, alleging that the ethnic group living in one section of Georgia wishes to ally itself with Russia, an invasion that has definitely alarmed the Poles. Due to increasing tension between the two countries, a Russian ambassador just cancelled a planned diplomatic trip to Poland. I can fully understand why the Poles might fear that Russia is back to those old imperialistic ways it displayed so flamboyantly during the days of the Soviet empire. When we visited the school my daughter will be attending in September, the secretary who gave us a tour mentioned that she'd recently visited Russia on vacation, where her belongings were minutely searched by the Russian customs officials as if (her words) "I was a terrorist," and where, she insisted, whenever any shopkeeper discovered she was Polish, he or she immediately inflated their prices. Recently, America has moved some anti-missile installations into Poland, and while one of my knee-jerk leftist friends back in the states emailed, decrying this as yet another example of American imperialism, the truth is that the Poles are eager to have these weapons in place on their soil as a defense against potential Russian aggression.

But I've written an awful lot, and I've yet to say anything about the Polish national character. Well then, my first impression is that this tragic history (most recently, of course, the depredations wrought by the totalitarianism practiced for half-a-century by the communist government) have left the Polish people a somewhat somber, morose lot. In Wroclaw, no one smiles or nods to one another on the streets (in dramatic contrast to hyper-friendly Butte). When people in public discover we are Americans, few so far has been lavishly accomodating--not, I think, because the Poles are anti-American (on the contrary, I think the Poles LIKE Americans because we were the enemies of the Soviet Union during the Cold War; there is even a square in downtown Wroclaw named for Ronald Reagan!), but because the Poles are simply treating us with the same chilly aloofness they display to their fellow Poles. You might argue that people in public in a fairly large city are always distant with one another, and it's true that so far the Poles we've met privately have mostly been extremely nice. However, my wife and daughter have reported that when they've attended Sunday mass here, during the part where the priest urges the congregation to give signs of peace and friendship to one another, while in Butte people go haywire lovingly greeting each other, even walking to other pews to shake someone's hand, in Wroclaw the congregants merely give one another a perfunctory nod! And my wife also noted that when women go toward the altar to take the Eucherist, they take with them their purses, so that they're not robbed while they're ingesting the body and blood of Christ!

I point out this Polish moroseness more in sorrow than anger, since I think I understand the sad history that's behind it. And, as Poland becomes increasingly Westernized and Europeanized and modernized, this national moroseness may dissipate or even disappear. I do know that young people here, who seems to love American pop music and t-shirts and movies and fast food, seem a lot more cheerful than their elders, who still seem to be carrying the weight of that blighted communist era.

Griping

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 09:24:28 GMT

I've been promising for several entries now to discuss the hardships of living abroad, so this entry will be devoted to...griping. If you're a have-a-nice day, the-glass-is-half-full, if-you-have-lemons-make-lemonade kind of person, please skip this entry, and read the others instead, which try much harder to maintain a positive attitude. Okay, don't say I didn't warn you.

1) Language. By far, the most difficult aspect of living in Poland is not speaking the language. My wife, daughter and I did purchase some CD's which provided an introductory course in conversational Polish, which we studied before our trip. But learning any language is hard, and Polish is especially so. The pronounciation alone is maddening. To give a simple example, take the name of the town we're living in: Wroclaw. It's not pronounced remotely the way it's spelled, partly because the "l" has a line through it, which means it's pronounced as a "w," and partly because...Well, God knows why. A phonetic spelling would read something like: "Vrat-swaf". Anyway, living in America, where everyone speaks English and only English, we entirely take for granted how language is required endlessly to facilitate the simplest daily transactions. Not speaking the language makes all those transactions a challenge, to put it mildly. We try to get by with hand gestures and our pidgin Polish and anything else we can devise. It's exhausting, but maybe the worst part, at least for me, is having to look foolish on a regular basis. Because while some Poles are good-natured about our linguistic incompetence, others are merely frigidly civil, and still others are downright hostile.

Let me give a simple example. The first time we went food-shopping at the market next door to our apartment building, we were unaware that you are supposed to bring your own bags to carry off your groceries. So, when I put our purchases on the counter next to the cashier, she began chattering at me in Polish, and of course I hadn't the faintest idea what she was talking about. That's a scary moment, when someone is forcefully giving you instructions, and you don't know what they're saying. When I didn't immediately respond, I could tell from the tone of her voice that the cashier was becoming increasingly annoyed with me. Eventually, after a few seconds had passed, I realized that she was telling me to pick up an empty basket from the floor and place it on the counter to be filled with groceries, and I complied with the request. But then she wanted me to put the filled basket on the floor and hand her another empty one for the rest of the groceries, another request I didn't immediately understand, so we went through the whole unpleasant process a second time. I'm not trying to paint this as an earth-shaking experience. But it's significant nonetheless, but it's an example of how the simple transactions we must go through every day to function in society, which we carry out effortlessly, almost mindlessly, when we speak the language, become demanding chores when we don't. And one reaction, at least for me, is to turn hermitic, reclusive. You just don't feel like going out and resuming the struggle. You'd rather hole up in your cosy, friendly apartment. Of course, you have to fight that impulse. Because the more often you face these challenges, the easier it gets. But it's not easy, especially at first.

Here's a more comic example. A few nights ago, the three of us walked to a pizza place not far from our apartment for dinner. We'd been there once before, and had a good experience. Unfortunately, the girl at the counter spoke no English (although she did speak German, a more common second language for Poles in Worclaw, because, as I mentioned, this used to be a German city, and is now near the border with east Germany). So, I resorted to hand signals. All the different kinds of pizza were numbered, so I held up three fingers, meaning that I wanted Pizza Number 3, a vegetarian pie. Later, as we sat at an outdoor table drinking beer and awaiting our pizza, it struck me that it was taking an awful long time for the pizza to be delivered to our table. The reason for the delay was clarified when all three workers in the restaurant showed up at our table holding aloft...three pizzas! A mix-up, in short. So, we each sat there with a large-sized pizza in front of us, and wondered if our fellow Polish diners thought that our apparent gluttony was an explanation for the obesity problem in America! We ended up taking the uneaten pizza home, and living off it for the next couple of days. Of course, one solution to this particular kind of screw-up is to see the humor in the situation, which we managed to do, since there was really no great loss. But with other kinds of screw-ups, that's harder to do.

Naturally, another solution is to try really hard to learn Polish, which I also plan to do, intending to take more lessons while I'm here. But since Americans are uni-lingual for the most part, that's harder for us than for Europeans, who are forced by circumstances to learn a variety of languages, and so naturally develop more linguistic competence. I think learning languages also gets harder as you get older, perhaps because the brain is less flexible, less adapted to the massive memorization that learning a language entails. As I've noted in another entry, of the three of us my 15-year-old daughter is by far the best Polish speaker, which might support my theory.

I was planning to include in this entry other gripes I have about living in Poland: e.g, no dryers, no screen windows, difficulties purchasing tram passes, having to pay to use public toilets, etc. But all of these problems are so dwarfed by the language problem that it seems anti-climactic to belabor them now. So, I'll wrap up. As the Poles say, "Dosvedania!" (That means "goodbye," spelling entirely original.)

First Impressions of Wroclaw

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 10:02:21 GMT

Before turning to my arrival in Wroclaw (where I'll be living this year) and first impressions of the city, I want to mention one last thought I had touring the Museum of Communism in Prague. I hope I'm not belaboring the subject, but, as I've said, the museum made a profound impression on me. As I've also written, a main goal of my coming to Poland as a Fulbright scholar was to study the history of the Holocaust in this country. But increasingly during my stay in first the Czech Republic and then Poland I've come to feel that the topic of the impact of communism in these countries, and how these nations are doing in their post-communist, democratic incarnations, is incredibly important, and should be of great interest to Americans, so this, too, is a subject I want to explore during my stay in some depth.

Anyway, one point that struck me forcefully during my tour of the museum is the absolute centrality of the Soviet premier at the time, Mikhail Gorbachev, in ending the Cold War peacefully. Gorbachev is not popular in Russia today, where he is blamed for losing the Soviet empire (understandably enough). And he seems to be a largely forgotten figure in the West. But what was crystal clear from the Museum of Communism is that if, during the so-called "Velvet Revolution" (the 10 day peaceful protests which led to the collapse of communism in Czechoslovakia) a hard-line premier like those who preceded Gorbachev had been in power in Russia, the Soviets simply would have sent in troops the way they did in response to "The Prague Spring" in 1968, and the Velvet Revolution would have been wiped out in a heartbeat. The same goes for all the other anti-communist revolutions that spread throughout the Eastern Bloc in 1989. It was Gorbachev's decision not to fight these revolutions, to let the Soviet empire peacefully disintegrate, and, in so doing, thousands of lives were spared, and the Cold War was brought to a tranquil end. For his conscious inaction, Gorbachev must surely stand as one of the great heroes of the 20th century. When will he get the credit he deserves?

Okay, enough about communism (at least for the moment). My wife, daughter and I took a bus from Prague to our new home in Wroclaw. The bus ride took almost 6 hours, not because the distance between Prague and Wroclaw is all that great, but because the vehicle moved at an absolutely glacial pace, rarely exceeding 50 mph. That's because we traveled by minor roads, often only going one way, either because major highways don't exist between the two cities, or in order to make local stops. In any event, the trip was fairly exhausting. The bus looked like a hangover from the communist era, with patched, faded seats, and no air conditioner, with the only air circulating via a sun roof, which our fellow passengers insisted on closing since it was raining. What with the heat, and the bone-jarring jostling of the bus over the rutted roads, it was hard to read, or do much of anything save lie back in one's seat in a dazed semi-stupor. The aggravation of the trip was increased by the fact that midway through, over the loudspeaker located directly above my head, the driver decided to pipe in the most hideous Eastern European (not sure if it was Czech or Polish) pop music, which blared in our ears for the remainder of the journey.

On a more postive note, Wroclaw seems like a lovely city, a fine place to be spending a year. It was almost completely destroyed during WW II, but has been extensively rebuilt, with the builders taking pains to retain the city's original look. Like Prague, there is a beautiful town square and gorgeous Cathedrals. There's also a wonderful, tranquil botanical gardens located right in the heart of the city. We were less impressed by the zoo (much heralded by our guide book), which can't hold a candle to the best American zoos, and where some of the animals are kept in cramped quarters which don't remotely resemble their native habitats (which greatly upset my animal-loving daughter).

The Odra River passes right through town and as a result Wroclaw is filled with bridges, some old and beautiful, which have earned it the somewhat dubious designation: "the Venice of Poland". It's also far less thronged with tourists than Prague. In fact, it seems to be rather off the beaten track, so, if you want to beat the crowds, it's an excellent place to visit.

Before I start lapsing into the prose of the local tourist board, I want to bring this entry to an end. In upcoming installments, I'd like to share my first impressions of Polish life and culture, and also, since in my opening entry I expressed my commitment to honesty in this blog, discuss some of the difficulties of living abroad, especially for a rather shy, timid fellow like myself. Stay tuned!

Our Trip to Prague, Part II

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:29:54 GMT

For this entry, I want to continue discussing the four day visit to Prague, capitol of the Czech Republic, where my wife, daughter and I spent time before taking a bus to our new home in Wroclaw, in the neighboring country of Poland. Specifically, I want to talk about two excellent museums that we toured: the Franz Kafka Museum, and the Museum of Communism, the latter the highpoint of my stay.

Franz Kafka was a great 20th century Czech (though he wrote in German) Jewish fiction writer, who lived his entire short life in Prague (he died of TB at the age of 39) at the start of the century. Kafka was not a realistic but a surrrealistic writer. Perhaps his most famous novel (novella, really) and one of the few published in his lifetime, is "The Metamorphosis," about a rather ordinary young man, Gregor Samsa, who wakes up one morning to discover that overnight he's been transformed into a giant beetle. Another masterpiece, "The Trial," concerns another individual, referred to only as "K," who is indicted and brought to trial for a crime which the ministers of justice leave unspecified. Many critics have seen Kafka as a prophetic writer, predicting the rise of the totalitarian regimes which would cast a long, tragic shadow across the 20th century. Indeed, he died not long before the Nazis came to power and (soon after) occupied Czechoslovakia, and most of his relatives were murdered in the Holocaust because they were Jews. Kafka himself had a fascinatingly ambigious relationship to his own Jewishness. He grew up in a secular home, but many have compared his stories and novels to traditional Jewish folk tales, and Kafka himself became increasingly interested in Judaism as he grew older, studying Hebrew and contemplating a trip to Palestine toward the end of his life.

The Kafka Museum focuses, appropriately enough, on Kafka's relationship with the city in which he lived all his life. Like his relationship to Judaism (indeed, like ALL Kafka's relationships, it seems), his relationship to Prague was highly ambiguous and ambivalent. In fact, that Kafka's identity is now so entwined with Prague, and that he's become a major attraction drawing tourists to the city, is rather ironic, since, based on the information in the museum, he doesn't seem to have liked Prague very much. No doubt, the city's endemic anti-Semitism was a big part of the problem. For centuries, the Jews of Prague were forced to live in a cramped, squalid ghetto, today preserved as the Jewish Quarter (another tourist attraction). Christian attacks against Jews for a variety of imagined offenses were common. But Kafka (who, not to mince words, was a clinical neurotic) seems to have found the very look and feel of Prague oppressive. Although it's a gorgeous city, I can sort of understand how he felt. As I wrote in an earlier entry in reference to Prague ancient churches, but which applies to the city as a whole, the general aesthetic here is excess. For example, I have never seen a city filled with so many statues. They loom over you everywhere you go; e.g., they dot at regular intervals the famous old Charles Bridge (named for a king of the Austro-Hungarian empire) which crosses the river that bisects the city. You don't have to be as paranoid as Kafka to feel like you're being watched by these stone sentinels, like K in "The Trial". According to the musem exhibit, as a child Kafka used to be traumatized just by walking to school every morning, accompanied by the family cook.

One of the best things about the Kafka Museum, which adjoins this river not far from the Charles Bridge, is that rather than merely compiling artifacts from Kafka's life, the whole design of the building and the exhibit attempts to recreate the twisted, clautrophobic quality of Kafka's mind. So, for much of the exhibit you are in semi-darkness, and you're constantly walking up or down cramped, twisting staircases, or wending your way through narrow, low-ceilinged passages. Even leaving the exhibit is a challenge. You have to stand before an opaque screen, which then automatically parts, allowing you to slip into the foyer of the building. Not realizing that the screen parted, my first impression was that there was no damn way out, that I was going to be trapped in this musem forever--like (yes, again) K in "The Trial". There are also surreal movies screened, in which wide-eyed, desperate looking people rush frantically down deserted urban streets, recreating the mood of Kafka's fiction. I especially liked the exhibit placed in the section which discusses Kafka's famous story, "In the Penal Colony". This is a bizarre tale about a despotic government where political prisoners are tortured by having texs and symbols inscribed upon their bodies like tattoos. The prophetic allusion to the numbers tattoed upon prisoners in the concentration camps during the Holocaust has been noted by many critics. In any event, here in the exhibit stands a model of the instrument of torture described in the story, made out of metal and paper-mache, and including a blank-faced prisoner trapped in the machinery of the device.

The Museum of Communism was an entirely different exhibit from the Kafka Museum, although it also was one that was extremely revealing about the city of Prague. After the Nazis were defeated in World War II, Czechoslovakia soon became a communist country subjugated by the Soviet Union along with the other Eastern European countries (including Poland) that comprised the Soviet Bloc--mortal enemies of the US during the Cold War. This was the political system that dominated the country for almost half-a-century, until that amazing year, 1989, when the entire Soviet empire, including its Eastern European de facto colonies, peacefully imploded, and the West won the Cold War. But earlier, in 1968, a moderate, reformist leader came to power in Czechoslovakia, Alexander Dubychuk, who tried to make the communist system more humane and less oppressive, instituting what Dubychuk called "socialism with a human face," which inspired what's known as the "Prague Spring," which brutally came to an end when the Soviets under Leonoid Brezhnev sent troops into the country, killing demonstrators, removing Dubychuk from power, and replacing him with a hard-line leader who brought back old style socialism with no humanity whatsoever.

The most immediately shocking aspect of the Museum of Communism (which,with delicious irony, is literally located above a McDonald's!) is that the exhibit makes absolutely no pretense that it is historically objective. In fact, the street poster directing you to the museum shows one of those cute Russian traditonal wooden dolls (the kind that contain increasingly smaller figures within figures, etc.) with, however, her lips parted into a vicious snarl, revealingly huge, jagged teeth! And, when you enter the foyer of the exhibit, you see an equally cute Russian bear, a baby, suitable to serve as a stuffed teddy bear for a child, except that this bear is toting a submachine gun! In other words, the museum is not exactly a love song to the former Soviet Union! Of course, this tone of the exhibit leaves it open to charges of bias. After touring the museum, I checked out the book at the exit for visitors to leave comments, and one Danish visitor complained about this very thing, lamenting that the exhibit's subjectivity made it untrustworthy, and insisting that "communism had some good points".

This may sound like a valid complaint, but in this case it's not, because, rather than just being an emotional, anti-communist screed, the exhibit documents in chilling detail just what an evil (I use this loaded word deliberately) system communism actually was. In other words, the emotions are backed up with lots and lots of irrefutable facts. Perhaps the most awful aspect of communism was the way (as Orwell depicted so well in "1984") the system was designed to control not just the external but also the internal aspects of the individual. That is, the aim of communism was to create what its leaders called the "Socialist Man": concerned not about his individual well-being but rather about the good of the state. In short, the system tried to infect your very soul. This goal was communicated through many sources, but most importantly through education, and one exhibit in the museum recreates a communist classroom, complete with textbooks with brightly colored covers sporting illustrations showing beaming factory workers and farmers gazing happily into the golden dawn of the socialist utopia.

Of course, the reality of communism differed slightly from the government's puplic relations image. In practice, as the museum documents, communism was a disaster. The shelves in markets were devoid of food and prices were exorbitant. People had to wait endlessly on huge lines to buy anything. It could take decades before one was given one's own apartment. And all the perks were reserved for the elite. Rather than sharing the wealth equally, as communist ideology promised, in reality all the good stuff was handed over to the corrupt party leaders who ran the show. It's a fascinating question whether communism toppled because the system denied people personal freedoms, or because it denied them material goods. The case of China, where the government denies its citizens political liberties but offers them the wealth available in a free market system, an arrangement that has turned the country into a major world power, might seem to suggest that people care more about wealth than freedom. In any case, under the Czechoslovak communist system, the ordinary citizen had neither.

What most haunts me about the Museum of Communism are the faces of the mostly young Czech demonstrators who took to the streets to protest the government, both during the Soviet invasion that followed the Prague Spring, and during the so-called "Velvet Revolution," that peaceful demonstration which brought down the communist government in only ten days in 1989. These were the faces of principled, idealistic Czechs yearning to be free, and, when I saw them in the film of the events screened at the museum, I was moved to tears. Some of them died for their beliefs. Perhaps the most wrenching individual story is of Jan Palach, a 21-year-old Czech student who, on Jan. 19, 1969, immolated himself on the front steps of the City Hall in Prague to protest the return of a hard-line communist government imposed by the Russians. Palach was to be only one of a group of young Czechs who all planned to set themselves on fire in protest, but while he was dying an agonizing, lingering death after the immolation, Palach told his friends from his hospital bed not to kill themselves as he'd done, but instead to live and fight for a free Czechoslovakia. On those city hall steps, there is a twisted metal cross imbedded in the concrete to mark the spot where Palach died, which we visited and photographed. But there is no text describing the event other than a barely legible script scrawled into the cross simply listing Palach's name and his birth and death dates. Eyeing that obscure memorial, I wondered how Czechs feel today about their communist past, and how happy they are with the democratic system that's replaced it. (Not long after communism fell, the country, artificially held together by the power of totalitarianism, split into two nations: Slovakia and the Czech Republic.) But these aren't questions answered by the Museum of Communism. One partial answer was implied by the desk clerk at our hotel when we checked in. Noting that we were Americans when we handed over our credit card, which displays a red, white and blue tophat, she said in excellent English, "Americans are very patriotic, no?" When we answered affirmatively, she replied, "I think that the Czech don't love their country in that way." I regret that I was too surprised to pursue the conversation. But I will have many opportunities in the coming months to discover how the Poles feel about their communist past and democratic present--a subject I promise to return to in future entries.

our trip to Prague

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 09:27:40 GMT

Our transatlantic flight was uneventful. One pleasant surprise was that if you fly long enough on an American airline (or at least on Continental) they break down and actually give you a meal. Not only that, but I was so tired that I even was able to sleep on the plane during the over-night flight. We landed first at some godawful early hour in Dublin, where we had a long lay-over. Sometime during this trip, I hope to see Ireland, but this time we just got to see the Dublin airport, which looked a bit shabbier than American airports, but otherwise not much different. I splurged and at an airport cafeteria ordered what was proudly billed as a “Real Irish Breakfast,” which basically consisted of lots of different meats cooked a variety of ways and a soggy fried egg dropped atop a watery pile of baked beans. I’m sure Irish food improves when you leave the airport, but it may not improve all that much, since the Irish are not known for the felicities of their native cuisine, as those of us from Irish Catholic Butte know all too well. I should say that while generally speaking, as I confessed in my first entry, I am not particularly adventurous, the one notable exception to my over-all timidity concerns food; I enjoy sampling exotic cuisines, and fearlessly plunge in with all sorts of bizarre dishes.

After that long lay-over in Dublin, we boarded a Czech airline for the four-hour flight to Prague. Almost from the moment we boarded the plane I sensed that European airlines treat you much better than American ones do. We were given a tasty lunch of a sort of meat pie along with an apple pastry, and, not only that, but the drinks tray included wine (red and white) gratis, rather than for the exorbitant fees charged on American airlines, which so pleased me that I decided to sample the vintage despite the early hour. Speaking of wine, here’s newsflash that probably won’t shock my readers: Europeans aren’t tea-totalers, to put it mildly. Both in the Czech Repulic and in Poland, the beer (many brewed locally) flows freely at all hours of the day and night, often consumed in outdoor cafes. In Poland, beer is literally cheaper than water (which, yes, must be paid for and arrives in bottles, with or without, in the local lingo, “gas”).

Prague is a beautiful city. We stayed at a hotel called the “Fenix” (“phoenix” in English, for the bird) which was clean and modern and included a free breakfast that was quite tasty. (More proof of the non-tea-totalling nature of Europeans: the breakfast included champagne.) The hotel was conveniently located near the OldTown, which is the place to see in Prague; indeed, the only drawback to the location of the hotel was that it was right next to the city’s “Red Light” district. Only a few doors down was a seedy establishment stridently dubbed “Sexy Land” (maybe it sounds less ridiculous in Czech) and groups of rather thuggish-looking young men milled around outside the strip club at all hours engaging in hushed, urgent conversations in their mobile phones. Still, perhaps it was my American naivitee, but they seemed to me harmless enough, and utterly uninterested in us, not surprisingly, since I assume families aren’t their usual clientele. I never felt nervous passing them on the street, even at late hours.

At least the OldTown in Prague is like a giant museum. As many before me have remarked, so much in Europe is incredibly old, and the buildings in the OldTown often date back to the Middle Ages, or even earlier. Moreover, most of the historic buildings in Prague were left miraculously unharmed during World War II, even though the country was occupied by the Germans. One spot, though, that all the guide books insist you check out was rather a bust: the Astronomical Clock. This is located in the Old Town Square in, if I recall correctly, the TownHallBuilding. Large crowds gather in the square to watch this celebrated clock toll the hour. But all that actually happens is that, to one side of the clock, a statue of a skeleton (a symbol of the death that awaits all mortals, as Medieval Christianity was forever reminding its flock?) strikes a gong, and then, behind two small windows inset above the clock, a series of robed figures parade past. The whole show lasts maybe two minutes. Frankly, this would scarcely warrant a glance if it was transplanted to, say, Disney World. (Yes, I know I sound like a Philistine!)

Many of the other buildings in Old Town Prague are a lot more impressive. There are some stunning cathedrals (as, I’d soon discover, there also are in Wroclaw). Based on what I’ve seen so far, the aesthetic that guided the medieval architecture of Eastern European Catholic Churches was: the more the better. In these churches, which invariably have towering Gothic arched ceilings, every inch is stuffed with paintings and statues and frescoes, etc. And, as we learned when we decided to take audio tours, none of these innumerable artifacts is included thoughtlessly. On the contrary, everything refers to a specific story from the Bible, or a particular saint, or the founder of a certain religious order, or a reference to some aspect of Catholic theology. Cumulatively, the effect is absolutely overwhelming, which I’m sure is the point; these churches are meant to awe you with the sheer might of the Catholic Church. It’s in-your-face architecture.

That’s probably enough for now. For my next entry, also on Prague, I plan to discuss my memorable visits to two of the city’s best museums: The Kafka Museum (focused on the life and writing of the great Czech Jewish fiction writer, Franz Kafka), and the Museum of Communism, which tells the story of five decades of communist rule in Czechoslovakia, and which provided the most unforgettable portion of my trip to Prague.

how and why I applied for a Fulbright

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:14:34 GMT

In this entry, I plan to discuss why I applied for a Fulbright, and how I went about the application process. Frankly, I’m not much of a tourist. When my wife and I have planned vacations in the past, we usually either visit family (hers in Colorado, mine in New York), or else we head off to some sun-drenched tropical paradise in Florida or Mexico, where we loll on the beach drinking margaritas and reading trashy novels. I’m extremely interested in foreign cultures, but, nonetheless, there are only so many awesome cathedrals or historical sites I can troop through with my guidebook in hand before I glaze over and start thinking longingly about getting back to the hotel and hitting the mini-bar. However, I have always been drawn to the idea of living for an extended period in a foreign country, where you actually get to know some of the locals, where you become rooted in the place in a way a tourist never does, where you see the culture from the inside rather than the out. But, since I’ve done relatively little travel in my life, especially outside the country, this idea has tended to remain on the level of fantasy.

Moreover, I’ve long liked the notion of associating with foreign fellow academics—my kind of folks, as it were. Believe me, having spent almost my entire adulthood in academia, I don’t idealize academics, to put it mildly. On the contrary, some of the most horrid people I’ve ever met have been academics. On the other hand, even if we come from foreign countries, my fellow academics and I have a lot in common, which segregates us fairly sharply from the rest of our countrymen: an interest in ideas, an attraction to the life of the mind, a love of books, a wealth of often arcane knowledge, a somewhat alienated perspective on our own culture that tends to be common among all intellectuals. In many ways, academics from different countries, especially if they’re in the same fields, have more in common with one another than they do with their own fellow citizens. So, applying for a Fulbright seemed a way to connect with my own kind who live elsewhere.

But why Poland, you might reasonably ask? On a strictly practical level, I applied for a Fulbright to an Eastern European country because I thought (accurately, I’m sure) that I had a better chance of being accepted to teach and study there than I would if I applied to someplace in Western Europe, which are surely more popular among potential Fulbrighters. But that wasn’t the only reason. I’m an English professor, but over the course of my career I’ve become increasingly involved, both as a teacher and scholar, in the study of the Holocaust. I was drawn to the subject in good part because I’m Jewish (something I plan to talk a lot about in this blog), though that wasn’t the only reason. Perhaps it’s proof of my innate morbidity, but subjects like genocide and totalitarian regimes have always fascinated me. And the Holocaust is kind of the ultimate example of these sorts of things.

If you want to learn more about the Holocaust, Poland (after Germany, I suppose) is definitely the place to go. Before World War II, Poland had the largest Jewish population in Europe. That was in large part because throughout Polish history enlightened Polish rulers welcomed Jews fleeing persecution in other countries to come and play important roles in their societies (although there was also plenty of anti-Semitism in Poland, in high and low social spheres alike). Polish Jewry was absolutely annihilated by the Holocaust. About 90% of the Jews of Poland were exterminated, about 3 million people (out of a total of 6 million Jews killed all-together). One reason Hitler was so effective in wiping out Polish Jewry is that the Nazis established most of the major concentration camps in Poland—e.g., Auschwitz, Treblinka, Chelmno, etc. In part, Hitler did this in order to place the major camps near the major Jewish population centers, and in part because the Fuhrer wanted to try to hide The Final Solution from his own people by removing the killing centers by and large from German soil. It’s something of a generalization to say that Hitler succeeded in wiping out all the Jews of Poland, since a few Jews did survive, but it’s fair to say that Jewish life in Poland, which had played such a central role in the culture for so many centuries, was annihilated by the Holocaust. This isn’t the place to explore this subject in detail, but let me just add briefly that Polish Christians were also horribly persecuted by the Nazis. In the elaborate hierarchy based on Nazi racial ideology, Jews were at the lowest rung of the ladder, but Slavs of the kind that lived throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union weren’t much higher. In fact, the master plan for Poland concocted by Heinrich Himmler (Hitler’s right-hand man, and the one officially in charge of the Final Solution) was to turn Poland into a giant colony for German colonists, with Polish Jews exterminated and Polish Gentiles reduced to the status of slaves serving their German masters.

In short, Poland was a logical place to go to pursue my life-long study of the Holocaust. Moreover, my paternal grandparents were Polish Jews who immigrated to America at the start of the 20th century (a time where the eastern part of Poland where they lived, in the province of Bialystok near the border with Ukraine, was occupied by Tsarist Russia). One goal I have in visiting Poland is to try to track down what happened to my ancestors who had the misfortune to remain behind in Poland when my grandparents left.

That said, I only listed study of the Holocaust in Poland as a secondary goal of my Fulbright, because the actual teaching lectureship I applied for is in American Studies. As you might imagine, the Poles are extremely interested in America (as a means, no doubt, of improving relations with the world’s sole remaining superpower), so American Studies Fulbrights are the most widely available in Poland. To be honest, recasting myself as an Americanist in my application was a bit of a stretch, because I haven’t actually taught American literature for over 20 years. Not that I have no background in the subject. On the contrary, pre-20th century American literature was the focus area for my doctoral oral exams, and when I taught at Virginia Tech (which I did before coming to Montana), I offered survey classes in American lit. But, at Montana Tech, these courses were the province of one my department colleagues, still working at the school, so I was given classes instead first in World and then (when another colleague retired) in British literature. Actually, when I spoke with the woman, based in Washington, in charge of Fulbrights to Eastern Europe, Muriel Joffe, she left me with the impression that my lack of recent experience in American Studies would doom me from receiving the award. But, though I’m not privy to the deliberations about my application that went on at either the American or the Polish sides, I assume that my background in the Holocaust, my Polish Jewish ancestry, and my graduate school training in American literature all succeeded in overcoming these obstacles and qualifying me for the award. As for the courses I’ll be teaching at the University of Wroclaw, I was given complete freedom in choosing them, and I picked classes which combine my various interests: Jewish-American literature and the Holocaust in American Film in the Fall, and Literature of the American West in the Spring (a subject I’ve garnered a fair amount of knowledge about after living almost 20 years in Montana).

Just one more issue concerning my Fulbright application and then I’ll wrap up this entry. I’m convinced that what clinched my acceptance for the Fulbright was the fact that I was able to round up invitations to teach from two Polish universities: MarieCurieUniversity (yes, she was Polish) in Lublin, and the University of Wroclaw. When I attended a seminar at Tech on applying for a Fulbright, and was told by a Fulbright rep from Washington that in order to be accepted potential Fulbrighters need invitations from host universities in the countries they’re applying to, the prospect of securing such invitations seemed daunting if not impossible. But it actually turned out to be much easier than I’d expected. I just phoned Dr. Joffe, who emailed me the listings posted by all the Polish universities seeking Fulbright scholars to teach at their schools, and then I, in turn, sent application letters, with my vita attached, to all these institutions. And, as I’ve said, two of them extended me invitations. I listed Lublin as my first choice on my application, because I had a very warm correspondence with the chair of the American Studies program there, and because there’s a major concentration camp site, Majdanek, located just outside Lublin, but said I’d be happy to teach instead in Wroclaw. I have no idea why I was awarded my second choice, though I assume the people making these decisions make an effort to disperse the Fulbrighters evenly across Poland.

I guess the lesson of my experience is that anyone considering applying for a Fulbright should be aware that people do actually get them, even people like me who may not seem to fit perfectly into the slot that’s open, and not be discouraged from applying by the somewhat forbidding aura that surrounds the award. Granted, it’s a lengthy application process. You need to fill out an extensive form (now being done exclusively on-line), write an essay, get three recommendation letters, and, as I’ve said, secure invitations from host schools. With the tireless aid of my wife, I scoured my application to ensure that I’d followed to the letter every little requirement. But it worked. So, if you’re toying with the idea of applying for a Fulbright, my advice is: go for it! We’ll see whether or not I’ve changed my mind several months from now.

For my next entry, I’ll write about the four-day visit my wife, daughter and I spent in Prague, capitol of the CzechRepublic, before coming to Wroclaw. Oh, my daughter! I haven’t mentioned her yet, have I?! She’s 15, attends Butte High, by far is best at learning Polish among the three of us, and will be attending an international school (taught in English) starting in September. I’m sure I’ll have lots to say about her in the entries ahead.

introduction

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 10:53:14 GMT

Blog entry 1

      Welcome to my blog, which will record my year-long adventures in Poland as a Fulbright scholar, teaching in the English Studies Department at the University of Wroclaw, which is the fourth largest city in the country, and is located in the west near the border with Germany and the Czech Republic. (In fact, before World War II Wroclaw was a German city, called Breslau.)
      Let me start with a few general thoughts about this blog. I want to try to avoid a few pitfalls which I think a document of this kind could succumb to. One refers to a tendency people often display when they discuss their travels—not just in blogs but in any format. That is to depict their experiences as the most exciting, exotic, unforgettable adventure known to man. I suspect you know what I mean. Every place they visit is breathtaking, every anecdote they relate is stunningly memorable. Nothing bad or simply boring ever occurs. The motive behind this sort of stuff is self-agrandizing. That is, the writer or talker wants you to envy and admire him or her for having been to such wonderful places and done such wonderful things. The writer wants to present him or herself as an expert on the place visited, and as possessing the kind of knowledge and inside connections enabling him or her to dig infinitely deeper into the foreign culture than does the average braindead tourist. Of course, one obvious problem with this kind of discussion is that the reader never knows if he or she can trust the author, or if it’s all just hype.
      In short, I intend in this blog to try to be scrupulously honest. I want to include the bad along with the good. The truth is that living in a foreign country is in many ways a very difficult experience, for reasons I plan to discuss in considerable detail. Not only that, but in quite a few respects I personally am tempermentally extremely unsuited to living abroad. My eldest daughter (who passed away from an epileptic seizure when she was 17 in 2005) was severely autistic, and (not surprisingly, since there is increasing medical evidence that autism is genetic in origin) I have many characteristics myself common to high-functioning autistic people. That is, I tend to be somewhat introverted, reclusive, shy with new people, disconcerted by new, unknown places and experiences, in need of the calm and security provided by comforting ritual and routine—on the most basic level, I have a somewhat dysfunctional relationship with everyday reality; in other words, I find simply daily life hard, and I tend to brood over minor unpleasantries which another, more balanced person might barely notice. All this, it should go without saying, are hardly ideal qualities to possess if you’re planning to live for an extended period in a foreign country. At this point, you might be wondering why the hell, given my personality, I applied for a Fulbright scholarship in the first place. That’s a good question, and I plan to address it later.
      So, this blog will include the sorrows as well as the joys of living aboard—which I strongly suspect every foreigner experiences to some degree, but which may be exacerbated in my case, given who I am. As well, as I hope this first entry already makes clear, this blog will be more than merely a record of what I see and do, and of my reflections on Polish life and culture. Don’t get me wrong; there’s going to be a lot on these subjects. But I also want to use this blog to try to psychologically explore my mental state as I go through experiences which I’m pretty sure will be profound for me. I hope the reader agrees this approach should make for a deeper, more original piece of writing than what’s found in a mere travelogue. And it’s also what I’m more interested in writing. Because, truth be told, this blog is being written as much for me as it is for you. I’ve always found autobiographical writing a means to understand myself, a process of self-discovery. It’s also a way of coming to grips with difficult experiences. So, that’s another function of this blog.
      We’ll see how it goes.