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.

From Rope Gives Carmelites

"From Rope Gives Carmelites." The speaker is a guide at the shrine of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa. My Polish-English dictionary translates: "look at this lovely braided cord, designed to go around the head of the portrait of the Madonna. It was a gift of the Carmelites." And I genuinely admire, not to say envy, the improvisational skill and raw nerve of a man who can just barrel his way through in a strange language, even more when (as this guy did) he actually makes himself understood. He was a priest; I think Pauline, I think he said his name is Carl. He was late because he had to catch the TV showing of the great beatification ceremony in Warsaw. He is a man of strong opinions:

Please (or "Pliz"). Is not black, madonna. Is a lie from Nazis. Look at this picture. Is from eastermediterranean, olive in color, is natural. Nazis call her schwartzemadonna to make her little, but is not black. Is like some people say "you look Russiasn, but no I am not Russisan, I am Pole. Black madonna in Germany, in Croatia, not here. *

Also a bit of a joker:

Why you wear sunglassses? In Poland we worship the sun. I get good weather from you. I call Jerusalem, from here is local call.

Also a man of faith:

You are Mormon? I go to Salt Lake City, they don't let me go to temple, I say why not, you come to my place I let you stand near Madonna, not afraid. The Mormons, they find your ancestors, on Sunday morning they baptize 20 times. But they not believing in Godinthreepersons, 20 times not valid, what a waste.

And efficient:

This is end of five star tour. Now I have mass, we have joke, priest never late for mass. Priest not there, you can read the lesson but not mass.

But in the end, a man of faith who blesses the souvenirs:

In the name of thefathertheson and holyspiritaman. Canon law, cannot sell, only give away, canon law.

But a man of compassion:

Holy water, don't need very much, we boil the hell out of it. Is a joke.

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*For an unexpectedly good discussion, go here.

Addendum: I should have offered a thought about the experience as a whole. Suffice to say this was the most Catholic crowd I've seen since Claremont New Hampshire in 1955. Not all Polish either; in a queue I chatted with a lady here on pilgrimage from England. One woman holding on her lap an obviously impaired child almost as big as she was. Humble folks, but not nearly as shabby as Wal-Mart: no exposed butts and nowhere near as much flab. Lots more tobacco, though. Is no joke.

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.