Of Course there are Still Jews in Cracow

Sighting: Radisson SAS Hotel lobby gift shop.

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No Joke: More on Polish Cooking

More evidence that Polish food is not a Polish joke: Raraka. Cut potato thin on your mandolin. Salt it down to leach out the moisture. Skillet-fry it into a pizza-style pancake (maybe add some ground pepper). Top it with lumps of (a) salmon roe (or, hey, beluga); (b) sour cream; and ( c) chopped onion. Wrap little bits of the goodies into slices of pancake. Again, yum.

Inspiration: the Restauracja Szara on the Old Town Square in Cracow. Mushroom soup was good, too, if a bit salty. But then, the mushroom soup is good almost every place here, and they say it isn't even the season.

Cooking fact: they say that the Poles got cabbage from the Italians in the 16th Century (same time they go Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine), and that the cabbage improved the quality of Polish cuisine,. Query, what must Polish cuisine been like before cabbage? Is this a rework of the old joke about the politician who went from Palookaville to Washington and raised the intelligence level of both places?

Plinglish

Polish is not an easy language for an English speaker to guess at, but there sre ways of getting a toehold. You start with the international brand names—Toyota, Tesco, KFC. You move on to the stuff that is part of the universal language of tourism—kebab, pizza, sport. But then you continue to what look like foreign borrowings bust with a Polish twist: antyki, apteka—here's a sign that says “cygara, cawa, alkohole” (I don't know how to categorize “motory skutery”). Not all are English borrowings: we see restaurajca and delikatesy, also bizuteria, kuchina and fryzjerskiy (hairdresser) not to mention “kosmetyci naturalni.”

But there are more general cases where western culture seems to have carried its language with it. Academic life is clearly one (and come to think of it, I recall reading somewhere that “academy” is one word that is the same in all European languages)--consider also “muzeum archaeologiczne,” and “ogrod professorsky” (professor's garden).

And here in this heavily Catholic country, it is perhaps not surprising that some of the heaviest borrowings are in the realm of religion. Cracow is the city where Karol Józef Wojtyła was archbishop, so it doesn't take much to guess your way through “Universytet Papieski Jana Pawla II”--but then you also see “katolicka basilice” and “zakrystia.”

Aside from the Western Europeanisms, I suspect you could do a lot better with Russian but you'd have to (a) transliterate from the Russian alphabet to the fussy Polish script and (b) know Russian. I do like it that you see “ochrana,” which echoes Russian “okhrana,” the old tsarist secret police: these days in Poland it seems to mean “security guard.”

None of this gets you very far, of course, expect perhaps to put paid to the idea that we are all homogenizing into English. Rather the point is that we are not homogenizing into English at all but developing a linguistic soup in which all languages participate.

Łódź

Łódź, on the road from Cracow to Warsaw, is hardly a tourist destination. But I've wanted to read it since I read I.J. Singers family saga, The Brothers Ashkenazi. And I can testify: a visit to Łódź is a fascinating insight into what Poland must have looked like under the communists and even further back under the tsars.

Apparently at best, Łódź was no more than a big, hard-working industrial city.--”the Manchester of Poland,” I heard someone say. I assume they were talking about 19th-Century Manchester, England, but it also reminded me of Manchester, New Hampshire, where I went to high school 60 years ago. Łódź, is (and apparently then was) bigger, but they are both defined by the old textile mills—massive, gaunt red-brick buildings with lots of windows, side by side with blocks of charmless worker housing. Both in Łódź and in Manchester this stuff evidently stood vacant for a long time, but in both cases it has now been aat least partly revived with restaurants, computer stores and who knows what else. Łódź also has something my high school town does not—ungainly and portentous faux baroque monuments to the industrialist's power.

Łódź today appears to be a functioning city, but by any superficial measure, it looks a lot worse off than either Warsaw or Cracow. Warsaw is charmless but appears to be busy enough and somewhat on the make. Cracow –even after the floods—appears to thrive. But in Łódź, you see bad teeth, crummy haircuts, cheap clothes. I hear tell that some Poles are moving back home from the west. Under the right circumstances I can see how that would make sense. For their sakes, I hope it won't be here.

Update: I am reliably informed that the correct pronunciation is "wudge," as in "there once was a lady from wudge..."

Just a Word About Cracow

Now that I'm here, I can spoil the fun: Cracow is what I suspect maybe Prague was 20 years ago. Lots of well-preserved medieval architecture, pleasant walking spaces, plenty of beer and ice cream (90 cents a scoop) but not nearly as many tourists as the hordes on the Charles Bridge. Quaint at the center; big, public square although it lacks definition--they could use a Bernini. But this is no hole in the wall: the book says 800,000 people and they have traffic jams. There seems to be a bit of music around, but our timing was off.

Why did this jewel survive World War II, while Warsaw was reduced to rubble? I haven't really researched but my impression is that (a) the Nazis wanted to preserve it as a headquarters; and (b) at the end, they decided they needed the army worse elsewhere.

Also, lots of hilly/mountainous woodland in the outer environs. They say that westerners come over here for the hunting, but I have to wonder: if, say, a Dane comes over here and brings down, say, a woolly mammoth, how does he get it back to Copenhagen? Maybe he says it is the heart of his dear brother.

Polish Culinary Advice

You can eat any mushroom in Poland, but some only once in your life.

Polish Piano Music: The Secret

We got to attend a concert of Chopin piano music last night in Warsaw, the Chopin-mad city. It was an almost private affair in a refurbished palace with a baby grand piano, and for a strong bass , and assuming they couldn't afford a full grand, wouldn't they have been better off with an upright?

The walls were decorated with massive paintings in a mode of sedate elegance, one showing some American Indians bearing gifts to a European. But funny thing: the Indians had six toes on each foot.

What's going on here? I don't know but it occurs to me that maybe this explains the dazzling complexity of Chopin piano music. Maybe the great man himself had six fingers; maybe also his expositors. Maybe this means that the painting was done from life, and maybe it explains why only Poles can play it.

Polish Joke

--"This is our Parliament House. Sometimes we have demonstrations. The farmers come and throw potatoes. The miners come and throw coal. So far we do not have the bankers come and throw money."

A Lovely Spring Morning in Warsaw

I went this morning to visit the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Monument. The Nazis reduced everything around here to rubble so there is not a lot left to monumentalize, but there is a bit of open park space and one modest proletarian-style statue. They say Hitler himself picked out the stone, envisioning a monument of a rather different sort. At the souvenir stand, you can buy Polish cookbooks in six different languages, and biographies of Chopin, along with severe accounts of the ghetto story. The guide, to her credit, did not spare the details: how the Nazis rounded all the Jews up into a ghetto (there was none before), and then undertook systematically to transfer them to Treblkina and their certain extinction--and how s saving remnant rose up and lost their lives in a final act of suicidal defiance. There is small bulletin-board-like display of archival photos, including one of the ghetto's Nazi commandant. "He was hanged," the guide said. A voice muttered, "too bad they could only do it once."

"You are smiling," the guide said to me as I left. "You must be in a good mood." Sure I was in a good mood. The sun was shining in a cloudless sky; the temperature was around 70F and there was just a touch of a breeze. And every day above ground is a good day.

Warsaw Restaurant Note

Smaki Warszawy (does this mean "Warsaw Snacks?")--47/49 Zurawia, just out of sight of the world's ugliest cultural center. Local food: great for sour rye soup and borscht, and at least six different settings for asparagus. Dumplings not as deeply bathed in pig fat a you might expect. Okocim beer on tap. Block-long dessert showcase.

"Someone Put Pineapple Juice in my Pineapple Juice!"

They say that just before Chopin died in Majorca Paris, he asked that his heart be taken back to Warsaw. His sister undertook to carry out his death-bed request, but she feared the hostility of the Polish customs guard. When the guard asked her what was in the package, she airly replied:

Oh, it is the heart of my dear brother.

Believing this to be the silliest story he ever heard, he cheerily waved her through.

I'm sending my liver to Liverpool,
My pancreas off to Peru;
My stomach and kidney
For the summer to Sidney,
But my heart I'm still savin' for you.

Oh My Stars...

Hegel says that history is a butcher block. I've developed a soft spot for Poland lately. The Poles may have plenty to apologize for but who doesn't? And meanwhile, they certainly seem to have suffered their full share of misfortune. And now this.

Fn.: I'm booked to fly Air Poland Warsaw-St. Petersburg in June. One may prayerfully hope that this is a wake-up call for safety maintenance.

Fn. 2: Scanning other blogs and comments, I see an emerging riot of assertion and speculation: it was the pilot, it was the Prime Minister, it was the KGB (or whatever they call them now). Looks like we may be in for a long slog.

Appreciation: Kate Brown's Report from Nowhere

Kate Brown has written a wonderful book* on the shadowy roots of statehood in the void between Poland, Russia, the Ukraine and heaven knows what else, fit to stand on the shelf with Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities and John Scott's Seeing Like a State, but she seems to have paid the price for it by spending a lot of her youth in disagreeable, not to say muddy, places. Her focus is the kresy which, as she says, "has no definite polity becaue it was never the seat of power but always the peripherey, whether rulers arrived from the north, west, or east. ... Never the center of things, the kresy has played the role in east-central Europe of an arena in which warring parties have time and again fallen into the exhausted embrace of worn-out prize fighters."

Setting aside a tangled prehistory, Brown asserts that it was the Soviets who did most to imposes nationalist/ethnic identities in Eastern Europe--ironic, for an ideology so committed to internationalism--and then turned on its progeny when they began to stand on their own feet. Her particular focus is Dovbysh, once Marchlevsk, once burned (i.e., from above, from Moscow) with the peculiar destiny of becoming a center of Polish culture and society. "Dovbysh," she says

is classified as 'a rural settlement of the urban type,' a Soviet euphemism which translates as a village with a population and industrial base nearing that of a town. It means Dovbysh lacks both the conveniences of the city and the charm, the space, and greenery of a village. The result is a sludge, lots of it, washing the overtaxed infrastructure in human and animal excrement.

"In order to reform" she continues, "modernizing societies first take stock. ... Jews were relatively easy to count. .... Germans too were distinguished by religion and tradition. ...

The Polish population, however, was more ambiguous. Although the official statistics listed the population of Poles in the Marchlevsk territory as 70 percent of the total population, less than half of tht number actually spoke Polish; fewer than half of those spoke it well and used it daily ... When asked to stste their nationality, many peasants replied simply "Catholic." One peasant said he spoke quite well the "Catholic language." Other peasants said they spoke po-chlopski, "in the peasant way," or "in the simple way" (pro-prostomu) or "the languge of here" (tutai'shi). Investigastors went form location to location reporting that no two villages were alike, each place contained a different blend of language, ethnicity and social composition.

This sometimes-comical chasm of bewilderment and incomprehension certainly doesn't excuse, but it may help to explain, the epidemic of paranoia, emanating first from Stalin himself, that turned the Bolshevik regime into an enemy of the people. Brown's account reminds one of nothing so much of Mark Twain's story of his uncle who "went to bring the good news to the savages, and they et him." Only here as so often, it may have been the "savages" who got the worst of it.

*A Biogrphy of No Place: From Ethnic Boderland to Soviet Heartland.

Georgraphy is Destiny: The Polish Election

Here's one I stumbled on by accident:
...but it's pretty good proof that old habits are slow to change. The black line is the 19th Century Bismarkian (Wilhemian) Germany Empire. The colored splotches are modern Poland. The brown splotches are the "Civic Platform," roughly the successor to the Christian Democrats, "market conservatives," favoring privatization and the flat tax, opposing gay marriage and abortion . The blues are the populist-conservative "Law and Justice" party, descendant, in part of the Solidarity movement, also conservative on social issues but without the free-market heresy. Be interesting, if you could do it, to try to chart out the parallel split in the United States, where free-market and populist conservatives for many years have shared the same (Republican) party political space--although this year, quite a good many of the natual "market liberal" voters voted for Obama.

Source:Wikia, via Strange Maps and Andrew Cusack.