CLASSROOMS AND

BARROOMS

DAVID J. JACKSON

CLASSROOMS AND BARROOMS

JACKSON

HAMILTON BOOKS

In Classrooms and Barrooms, David J. Jackson recounts his experiences during a

semester-long Fulbright Fellowship in Poland where he taught classes at the

university level and learned more about Poland and himself than he expected.

From the trepidation associated with learning he was assigned to teach in a city

considered by most to be an unpleasant wasteland to meeting American and

Polish colleagues for the first time, Jackson’s worries vanished as he quickly

learned to accept the challenges Poland presented. Halfway through his time

in Poland he stumbled into a bar populated with an ever-changing cast of

eccentric locals who welcomed him into their world. Each visit led him to

another revelation about Polish history and culture.Alternating among hilarious,

somber, and uplifting, Jackson’s experiences in the classrooms and barrooms of

Poland aim both to inform and entertain.

David J. Jackson

is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political

Science at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. From October 2007 to

February 2008, he was a Fulbright Fellow in the Department of American

Studies and Mass Media at the University of Lódz in Poland. Jackson is also

the author of Entertainment and Politics: The Influence of Pop Culture on Young

Adult Political Socialization and numerous articles in scholarly journals.

For orders and information please contact the publisher
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An American in Poland

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Classrooms and Barrooms

An American in Poland

David J. Jackson

H A M I L T O N B O O K S

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To My Family

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: City of Colors

1 Kresowa 1

2 Choosing

Łódź, Heading for Wrocław 7

3 Return to Kresowa

4 (Dis)Orientation 20

5 Friendly Fulbrighters

6 To Work in

Łódź 31

7 Meanwhile, Back at Kresowa

8 Poland for the First Time

9 Names and Pictures

10 Polka, Polka, Polka

11 A Great Day of Teaching

12 Warsaw, London, and Oxfordshire

13 Another Bar

14 A Day on Piotrkowska Street

15 Wigilia 74

16 My Grandfather’s People

Contents

Comments 84

Fitting In

Christmas and Boxing Day

Poland, Slovenia, and Austria

Fighting Poland

103

Three Good Classes

107

Zbyskuuuu . . .

114

Breaking Glass

118

Firsts and Lasts

121

Conclusion: Warsaw One More Time

127

References 131

Contents

vii

There are many individuals and organizations I must thank for their positive
contributions to this work.

First, of course, I could not have had the experiences I write about in this

book without the Fulbright Grant, so I thank the Polish-U.S. Fulbright Com-
mission and the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars. I also
thank the Department of American Studies and Mass Media at the University
of

Łódź for inviting me to teach in their fine program. I especially thank

żbieta H. Oleksy and Wiesław Oleksy for helping to make my Fulbright

semester happen. I wouldn’t have thrived without the friendship and help
of colleagues in

Łódź as well, including Paulina Matera, Aleksandra M.

Ró

żalska, Dorota Golańska, Magdalena Marczuk-Karbownik, Beata Duchno-

wicz, and David LaFrance. Of course, there is no teaching without students,
so I thank the 132 students I had the pleasure to teach American politics to
for their curiosity and intelligence.

Many of my family and friends in the U.S. read chapters of the book in vari-

ous stages of completeness and offered helpful comments. These include my
parents Jim and Barb Jackson, as well as my brother and sister Jim and Jean
Jackson. My sister in law Kendra Jackson read them as well. Others who offered
insights include Candace Archer, Stefan Fritsch, Becky Mancuso, Jim Fracassa,
Moira Fracassa, Julie Jozwiak, Steve Florek, Elena Fracassa, Kathy Bruce,
Glen Biglaiser, John Fischer, Marc Simon, Maria Simon, Becky Lentz-Paskvan,
Mark Jakubowski, Fred Sampson, Randy Krajewski, Margaret Dramczyk, Su-
sana Peña, Tony Martinico, Steve Engel, Eleanor Lazowski, and Sherri Cherry.

David Wilson deserves special thanks for reading the completed manu-

script and making hundreds of helpful suggestions. He is a great editor and
friend. Becky Lentz-Paskvan read it all too, and made many helpful correc-
tions. Any errors are the fault of the author.

Acknowledgments

From September, 2007 to February, 2008, I taught political science courses
in the Department of American Studies and Mass Media at the University
of

Łódź in Poland as a Fulbright Fellow. I found the experience incredibly

rewarding in terms of my teaching, my interactions with Polish colleagues
and other American Fulbrighters, and most importantly, the relationships I
developed with the Poles I met outside the classroom.

Fulbright awards are often misunderstood. I certainly misunderstood the

program before I applied for one. The majority of Fulbrights are given to
professors for the purpose of teaching. I had always thought that most of
them were research-oriented grants to go to another country and study it, but
I was wrong. I also didn’t know how difficult it is to win a Fulbright because
the commission is pretty secretive about the acceptance rates. But I do know
that the goals of the program are very noble. According to the Council for the
International Exchange of Scholars, which administers the program, Senator
Fulbright proposed the exchanges in order to promote “mutual understanding
between the people of the United States and the people of other countries of
the world.” I certainly tried to acquire and promote that understanding while
I was in Poland.

Eastern Europe is considered by some people to be something of a “conso-

lation prize” in the Fulbright sweepstakes, in that awards in Western Europe
are much more difficult to win. In other words, the Commission might say:
well, you wanted to go to Germany, England or France, but they couldn’t fit
you in, so how about Slovakia? I know something like that happened when
a professor from Ohio applied to teach in Finland, but was offered Estonia
instead. What the heck, the Fulbright Commission seems to have thought, the
Baltic is the Baltic.

Introduction: City of Colors

Introduction: City of Colors

On the other hand, none of the Fulbrighters I met in Poland had been sent

there as their second choice. In fact, each had specific reasons for wanting to
teach, do research, or make films in Poland. So, who knows?

I do know that the Polish city I was offered a Fulbright is considered by

many to be the “booby prize” of that country because a former Fulbrighter
who taught there told me so. I know this also because I know something about
Poland’s cities. Kraków in the south is a charming, medieval university town
with Europe’s second oldest university; Warsaw is a bustling world capital;
Gda

ńsk in the north is a city rich in history, famously as the center of the

Solidarity movement that helped to topple communism; Pozna

ń in the west

is a thriving, business-driven city with more than a little German influence.
On the other hand,

Łódź is…well, none of the above.

The facts of

Łódź are pretty simple: Poland’s second largest city is the

down-on-its-luck former textile capital of the country. Over 800,000 people
live in this relatively young city that grew up with the industrial age. It is
not a medieval city; there is no central square. At one time it was known as
the city of the “four cultures”—Polish, German, Jewish and Russian. But no
more. Almost all of the city’s inhabitants are now ethnic Poles. Among the
last vestiges of its cosmopolitan past are a very large Jewish cemetery and
a few Russian Orthodox churches. Its architecture ranges from ghastly com-
munist-era apartment blocks to the charming Art Nouveau of the main street,
Piotrkowska.

Some less objective descriptions tell a bit more of the real story.
One of

Łódź’s most famous nicknames is the Manchester of Poland. Some

Americans have called it the Cleveland or Pittsburgh of Poland.

One guide book calls

Łódź gritty, sprawling and unpleasant.

A former Fulbrighter who actually liked the place said, “

Łódź is a city of

colors: grey, grayish, dark grey, light grey . . .”

A student I know who studied Polish there said, “It doesn’t give you much

to like, but I love it.”

For five months I lived and taught in this unique place called

Łódź, Poland.

While I was there I took notes about my experiences: from the sometimes
disorienting orientation in September, to the sad flight back to the States in
February; from the challenges presented by insane Polish bureaucracies, to
occasional triumphs in the classroom; from chance encounters with Poles and
Americans on the streets and in lines at kiosks, to the development of a real
friendship with the bartender at the most political pub I have ever frequented.
Those experiences and many more are recounted in these pages.

But first things first. The stories I present here are not at all literal transcrip-

tions of exactly what happened. While I made every attempt to accurately
write about my experiences in Poland, I did not record conversations or take

Introduction: City of Colors xi

notes as things happened. Often I recalled them days or weeks later. Some-
times I combined in one story events that in fact occurred over two or three
nights. Sometimes I changed names and minor details to protect people’s
identities. But these stories do accurately reflect the spirit if always the letter
of my time in Poland. So, while not a work of journalism, I believe this is a
work of truth nonetheless.

Also, I make no claims that these experiences are somehow reflective or

representative of the “real” Poland, whatever that might mean. Somebody
else going to the same places I visited in Poland will likely have very dif-
ferent experiences. These are just some very interesting things that I did,
and that I wanted to write down. In his excellent, and controversial, work A
Russian Journal, John Steinbeck cautions his readers that he has not written
“the” Russian story, but merely “a” Russian story. I believe that is true of my
stories of Poland.

Steinbeck also had to admit that his Russian Journal was a somewhat

superficial work, and I must confess the same thing. My time in Poland was
relatively short, and my lack of language skills limited me to certain kinds of
experiences. I believe many of them are very interesting and even insightful,
but I know they would have been very different had I stayed longer and been
able to speak the language. But Steinbeck was also limited by the communist
government in terms of who and where he was allowed to visit. I faced no
such limitations, and I made a real effort during my time in Poland to go to
places where I would find interesting people who might tell me the truth.

I should also note that while the stories presented here form a more or less

linear tale of what happened during my time in Poland as a Fulbright Lec-
turer, I have also included some material about my previous visits to Poland,
my ancestral connections with the place, as well as some thoughts concerning
sentimentality and coincidences that came up when I was just starting to write
about my time in

Łódź. If the book sometimes has more of an episodic rather

than thematic feel, it is because just about every chapter was written in such
a way that it could also stand alone as a vignette about some matter involving
my interpretation of things Polish.

It will be evident that I loved my time in Poland, so it is important to point

out that I am very far from an objective observer of things Polish and Pol-
ish-American (a distinction whose significance to me has grown greatly due
to my time in the Motherland). My mother’s ancestry is one hundred percent
Polish-American and I was raised in a family steeped in Polish-American
traditions: Sunday morning polka radio; home-made kie

łbasa at Christmas

and Easter; close attention to Poland’s struggle for independence, and much,
much more. So I went to Poland as a sympathetic friend, and I returned as
one as well.

xii

Introduction: City of Colors

This is not to suggest that everything that I did in Poland was an unadul-

terated joy or that I do not have some complaints. Of course not. But I was
perhaps fated to enjoy things in Poland more than an American without Pol-
ish connections might have been. Of course, it might be that my expectations
and hopes were higher because of my Polish connections. So disappointment
might have been a greater possibility for me than for other American Ful-
brighters going to Poland. This possibility of being disappointed may keep
many Polish-Americans from visiting Poland: I hope the stories presented
here will help convince more people, including Polish-Americans, to visit.

And, I was not disappointed; not in the least. In fact, I kept waiting for

something truly bad to happen to me, and it never did. After I returned to the
U.S., I ate lunch with a colleague and she asked me which aspects I didn’t like
very much. I had no ready answer. The internet connection in my apartment
was unreliable sometimes? The students who lived above me occasionally
threw loud parties and played god-awful pop music? A few of the students
cheated on the final exam? Night fell at 4:00 P.M. in December? These are
irritations, not problems. Sometimes I think I should have stayed longer than
for just one semester.

Regret, now that’s a problem. I doubt that it would have been very difficult

to get an extension of my time in Poland, but I elected not to apply for one,
and sometimes I regret it. I came back home when I did because by doing so
I would have seven months where I did not have to teach a single class. There
were also a lot of good reasons to stay, but I eventually rejected them all.

When I first returned I felt pretty bad about the decision. I really felt like

I should have asked to stay, to teach for another semester. While I did ev-
erything I said I would do, and even a bit more, I still felt like I was leaving
something important behind, and unfinished. But during the conversation
with my colleague about what I didn’t like, I came up with a simile for how
I felt about my return, which helped me process my mixture of feelings into
something useful: it felt like breaking up.

But it felt like breaking up with a great woman without falling out of love.

In fact, we still have a great deal of affection for each other and plan to see
one another again in the very near future. Once I had a simile, I felt better,
and I felt like I wanted to re-live, or at least preserve the memory of the ex-
periences, and that’s why I wrote down all of this. Of course, I also thought
other people might find these experiences at least a little bit enlightening and
entertaining. But that is for the reader to decide.

“Do you like Litzmannstadt?” the old man asked.

I couldn’t believe he’d said it. Nobody calls “Łódź” that. That’s the name

the Nazis gave it after the conquest in 1939, after the German general who
tried (and failed) to take the city during the First World War.

“Jeszcze raz?” I said (“One more time?”)
“Do you like it here in Litzmannstadt?” he repeated.
“I like Łódź,” I said.
And so went one of my first conversations in a bar that would become my

home away from home during my Fulbright Lectureship at the University of
Łódź.

The day had begun auspiciously enough, given that it was my busy teaching
day: three hour-and-a-half lectures between 11:20 and 6:00. For some reason
I felt really happy on my way to classes. I’d bought some tram tickets at the
green “Ruch” kiosk and felt my usual pleasure at getting the right kind and
proper number (I’m not blaming the clerks for the occasional failure. The
villain is my very faulty Polish). The tram ride was uneventful, and after I’d
disembarked I’d stopped at a little store that seemed more down-and-out than
those around it, especially the clean and shining Żabka-chain convenience
store across the street. The little store was cold and dark and far from well-
stocked, but I decided to buy some grapes for lunch.

I didn’t want a full kilogram of grapes and I’d forgotten how to say “half”

and had left my pocket dictionary back in my apartment. I asked for grapes
and after the very old woman behind the counter said “how much?” in Polish
I placed my hands about two feet apart and said, “kilo.” Then I moved them to
about a foot apart, and waited. She said, “poł kilo” (“half a kilo”). I repeated
it and resolved to remember it. She smiled and packed up my grapes.

Chapter One

Kresowa

Chapter One

As I crossed the park in front of my office it seemed like there was less

dog poop than usual on the sidewalks. The sun wasn’t shining, but everything
felt bright anyway. Normally I do not feel this good on my way to classes,
in Poland or the U.S.A. My neurotic personality, even after fifteen years of
teaching, causes me to repeat in my head, “I hate teaching. Why do I do this?”
It’s an unproductive response to nerves, I suppose, but it’s gotten me through
so far. Then I always feel great after classes are finished. Whether they went
well or not I feel an incredible sense of relief, and if they went well (which
is often), I feel triumphant. Feeling good and happy before classes is not a
normal feeling for me.

Classes went well in an unspectacular kind of way. No obvious light bulbs

going off over students’ heads or incredibly clever metaphors from me; just
three solid, content-rich lectures. After my final class of the day, one of my
students invited me to Wigilia, Polish Christmas Eve, at her parents’ home. I
thought that was very cool of her and I looked forward to experiencing a truly
special Christmas with a Polish family.

I made my way to what at the time was my favorite Polish restaurant in

Łódź, and it was busy with people attending the international film festival
there, a great event for the city. But what was especially gratifying to me that
night was that the wait staff I’d dealt with before appeared to be happy to see
me, because I actually tried to speak some Polish with them. And, during less
busy times in the restaurant, I paid close attention to their instructions and
incorporated some of what they taught me into subsequent “conversations.”

After dinner, I decided to visit a bar called Kresowa, located on Narutow-

icza Street, just off Piotrkowska, which is the main drag in Łódź. Estimates
vary about how many bars, pubs and clubs are located on or near the three
kilometer pedestrian section of Piotrkowska, but a number I’ve heard more
than once is 165, and it seems plausible. I wanted to visit this particular bar
for two reasons.

First, my friend and fellow Fulbrighter Tony had recently asked me a

rather pointed question about whether I was meeting any Poles. I offered my
students and colleagues as evidence that I was, but I knew that wasn’t what
he had meant. He’s been coming to Poland for close to thirty years, and he
counts the friends he’s made outside of the professional setting as one of the
great joys of having spent so much time in the country. Where better to meet
real Poles than in real local a bar, I thought?

The second reason I chose this particular bar was because it came highly

recommended by the usually reliable and always sarcastic In Your Pocket
guide. Here is what they wrote about the place:

A locals bar with a mixed clientele from the lower rung of the social ladder.
Stained and stinking from years of beer and cigarettes this is the drinking expe-

Kresowa

rience Polski style; watch barflies playing chess while telling the story behind
their latest street-battle injury. Trams roar by outside the glass windows and
framed pictures of Poland’s ceded Eastern territories hang from scabby wallpa-
per. A great place to prop up the bar and listen to local drunks rant and ramble
about all that is wrong with the world. We love it.

How could I resist such a recommendation?

I almost didn’t make it inside the bar. The heavy glass and steel door was

very difficult to open, and I was so embarrassed by my hard push, its refusal
to budge, and the heads of the few men at the bar turning to watch me fail
that I almost walked away. I pushed harder and propelled myself, stumbling a
little, into a very dark and cold bar. Again, I almost turned around and walked
out. But I summoned the courage and sat down on one of the rickety wooden
barstools.

I sat next to an older man, maybe 65 or 70, who had his cell phone out

and was playing a tinny version of “The Logical Song” by Supertramp, and
talking with the bartender.

When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful,
A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical.
And all the birds in the trees, well they’d be singing so happily,
Joyfully, playfully watching me.
But then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible,
Logical, responsible, practical.

I don’t speak much Polish, but the combination of content clues and what I
do know made it obvious the old guy really loved his Supertramp, especially
this particular song.

The bartender looked to be in his mid forties, with thinning salt and pepper

hair and a tough scowl that seemed to say, “I dare you to try to order a beer.”
I instantly thought he looked like a journeyman bass player who’s always
available for one more small arena tour with the remnants of some 1970s rock
band. His strikingly beautiful black-haired lady-friend sat at the corner of the
bar smoking cigarettes and agreeing with the Supertramp fan.

The barkeep’s girlfriend tried to pacify the old man when a group of young

men sitting at the heavy wooden picnic-style tables began to play some truly
awful music on the jukebox. The young men wanted the bartender to turn
up the jukebox, but the sound remained about the same after he visited the
volume switch behind the bar.

I sat there for quite a few minutes just taking it all in and waiting for the

bartender to ask me what I wanted to drink. When he finally did ask me, he
met my request with scowls and grunts as if he didn’t understand my Polish. I
know my Polish is terrible, but I also know that I know how to order my first

Chapter One

beer, how to properly ask for another beer, how to say, “I feel like a beer”
and “gimme a beer,” and so on. In other words, I know how to ask for a beer
in Polish. Finally he pointed to a tap, I nodded, and he poured me a half-liter
of Warka, which cost five złoty, or about two dollars.

Everyone in the bar kept their coats on because the place was so cold. The

young men who played the jukebox talked pretty loudly and drank a few
shots of wódka, but they didn’t seem like they were interested in making any
trouble.

Finally, the old Supertramp fan said something to me in rapid Polish. I

replied with, “Przepraszam, nie rozumiem” (“I’m sorry, I don’t understand”).
This phrase became my constant refrain in Poland.

He responded in broken English (much less broken than my Polish) that he

thought it was okay I didn’t understand. He asked me where I was from, and
after I replied that I was an American, he said, “America bad.”

“Good and bad,” I answered.
Then he asked me to name my favorite American President.
“Franklin Roosevelt,” I said.
I was being deliberately provocative. I was warned by a former Fublrighter

that I could expect to get in many arguments with Polish professors if I
brought up F.D.R. They would argue that the Allies had sold out Poland to
the Soviets at Potsdam and Yalta, while most Americans would respond that
Stalin had committed to free elections for Eastern Europe (whether or not he
ever intended actually to deliver them), and that the deals were the best we
could have expected. As a Polish-American my sympathies are almost always
with the Poles on these questions, even if logic suggests that the Allies’ mili-
tarily taking on the Soviets in 1945 might not have been the best idea. But I
felt like provoking the Supertramp fan.

“F.D.R. good for America,” he replied, “much bad for Poland.”
At that the bartender became as friendly as he had previously been surly.

He began translating for me and the Supertramp fan. His attitude flipped like
a switch, and I didn’t (and still don’t) know why.

“Who do you think will be the next president?” he asked on behalf of the

old man.

I told him Barack Obama, but I really hadn’t formed an opinion. In fact,

avoiding part of the longest presidential election in U.S. history had become
one of my favorite parts of my time in Poland.

“No way,” he said through the bartender. Then, literally, “Sir wants you to

know America won’t elect a black man.”

“Please tell him I disagree,” I said, and the bartender complied. The drunk

dismissed me with a wave of his hand and a roll of his eyes.

Kresowa

“He says history will not change overnight,” the bartender said.
Then the bartender asked me why I was in Łódź. I answered that I was

a visiting professor at the University of Łódź. He wanted to know what
I teach and in what language: Political science and English, of course, I
answered.

Then a very fat man with a grey beard and blue suspenders walked in. The

barkeep told me he’s the boss man, the owner of the bar. The owner disap-
peared into the darker back section of the place, and a few minutes later some
lights came on and I could see the whole thing. The In Your Pocket guide
hadn’t been entirely correct. The pictures on the wall were not maps of lands
Poland had ceded after World War Two. They were pictures of Marshall
Józef Piłsudski, numerous prints of Piłsudski’s portrait, and one of the Mar-
shall on horseback. There was also a bronze relief of the great leader, a few
drawings and even a black and white photograph.

“Lewo or prawo?” the old man asked me, in reference to my politics—left

or right?

“Lewo,” I said.
“Don’t tell him,” he said and nodded across the bar to where the owner had

sat down to a cup of hot tea and a plate of steaming pierogi. He drank his tea
from a mug with the letters “PiS” printed on it—“Prawo i Sprawiedliwość” or
“Law and Justice,” the right-of-center political party defeated in the October
parliamentary elections.

“I won’t,” I said.
“It’s okay. You can,” the bartender assured me.
Then he wanted me to know that there was much more to him than just

tending bar in this Polish nationalist tavern: he is a musician, and he writes
and sings in English.

“I want to sing songs even better than Bob Dylan,” he said.
He even sang a couple of his songs for me. He just belted them out from

behind the bar. I thought he was pretty good, in a rough and bluesy way.
Sometimes it was hard to understand all of the lyrics, but his passion for his
songs was infectious, and so I liked them very much.

He asked me if I wanted a copy of his CD. I answered that of course I did.

He ran out to his car and got me the recording. His name was written on the
disc: Zbyszek Nowacki. I said his name out loud. He seemed very pleased
with my pronunciation, which is actually quite good, and often gets me in
trouble. Poles sometimes quite reasonably expect that I can speak more Pol-
ish than I can. His attitude was a 180 degree turnaround from less than an
hour before. Maybe this is why they say if you have two Poles, then you will
have at least three opinions. Each has so many of his own.

Chapter One

While Zbyszek was out at his car, I’d put seven złoty in the jukebox—this

bought ten songs. I chose Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love,”
a Polish sea shanty, Led Zeppelin’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Cohen’s “Everybody
Knows,” and some Supertramp, of course.

When I sat back down at the bar, the old man asked me, “Do you like

Litzmannstadt?”

When I applied for the Fulbright Lectureship during the Fall of 2006 I was
required to answer a question about which university I preferred. Specifically,
I could rank up to three. Since I had a previously existing relationship with
the American Studies and Mass Media program at Łódź, having attended
conferences there in 2001 and 2006 and having stayed in e-mail contact with
the leaders of the program, including it in my choices should not have been a
difficult decision. But it was.

Before the closing party of the 2006 conference, I had dinner with the

chair of American Studies at Warsaw University. He’d made it clear to me
that I should consider applying there, and he described what sounded like
a dynamic program, with productive colleagues and excellent students. His
description of the apartment I could use as just a tram ride, then a bus ride,
and finally a short walk from the program office was a little unnerving, but
at the time the excitement of Warsaw had the grimness of Łódź beaten hands
down in my mind.

But I put neither Łódź nor Warsaw as my first choice of destinations.

Instead, even though I knew no one there, I listed Jagellonian University in
Kraków as my first preference, for what seemed like several good reasons.
First, Jagellonian is the second oldest university in Europe, with a great repu-
tation in Poland and elsewhere. Also, and most importantly, it’s located in
Kraków, my favorite city in Poland. I ranked Warsaw second and Łódź third.
I felt a little guilty about this ranking, given that the University of Łódź had
provided the reason for two of my visits to Poland, but I really love Kraków
and Warsaw.

When I received notification that I was assigned to Łódź for a year I was

only a little disappointed because, deep down, I had known it was coming.
My mother thought it made good sense to return to Łódź because from my

Chapter Two

Choosing Łódz´,

Heading for Wrocław

Chapter Two

description she said it sounded a lot like Detroit, where I’d done my B.A. and
Ph.D. I knew that was true, and that I really didn’t belong at the Harvard of
Poland, but still . . .

Before formally accepting my assignment, I decided to do a little further re-

search on the American Studies program at Łódź. Their website proved quite
handy for this because it lists the names and American university affiliations
of the past half-dozen or so Fulbrighters who taught there. I “cold-emailed” a
few of them, and was scared to death by what some of them had to say.

The first former Fulbrighter to return my e-mail was far from satisfied with

his time in Łódź. He informed me that the classes are too large (over 80 stu-
dents in each); the students talk or do pretty much anything else they feel like
throughout lectures; they cheat brazenly, and justify it because they take too
many classes. In fact, he said, cheating is ingrained in the academic culture,
and there is an adversarial relationship between students and professors. He
complained that the Polish university bureaucracy is a tremendous burden,
and giving out grades will take away days of your life. He also claimed that
Poles are thieves, racists, and prone to violence—any polite outward appear-
ances to the contrary. Anyone who initiates contact with you is not to be
trusted because he is doing so just to get something from the rich American.
Naturally these comments substantially dampened my enthusiasm for spend-
ing a year in Łódź.

He also suggested that I read a series of articles that were published in the

Chronicle of Higher Education

, written by a Fulbrighter who’d spent a year

teaching in the American Studies program at Łódź. These thoughtful and
well-written pieces confirmed much of what the first former Fulbrighter had
said about the academic culture and class sizes. On the plus side, he didn’t
mention thievery and violence, and indicated that his wife and children
seemed to get along well in Poland. In our e-mail exchanges he suggested
that I sign up for the year—he certainly didn’t want his comments to stop me
from having what could be a very different experience—and if I didn’t like
it just to leave after a semester. That seemed to me like a shifty thing to do,
but he assured me that such selfish behavior was very much in keeping with
the Polish way.

These communications left me devastated. Something I thought I’d wanted

suddenly seemed like the worst idea in the world. Luckily, two more former
Łódź Fulbrighters painted a slightly better picture. An historian informed me
that, in his opinion, too many Fulbrighters view the award as an “academic
vacation.” He said he viewed it as an opportunity to work, which he said he
most assuredly had done while he taught at Łódź. He said curtailing poor
classroom behavior, which he didn’t believe was much more rampant in Łódź
than at most U.S. universities, was as simple as briefly stopping class and

Choosing Łódz´, Heading for Wrocław

reminding the offenders that attending class was a voluntary activity. I took
his point. I hate these classroom confrontations, but in my experiences they
are almost always successful.

Finally I talked with a fairly prominent American scholar, who also hap-

pens to be the editor of a political science journal to which some colleagues
and I had recently submitted a paper. When she returned my phone call,
she thought I’d called to discuss the submission, and seemed pretty relieved
when I said I’d called to talk about Łódź. She told me that she’d loved it. She
found the students intelligent and engaged, enjoyed the apartment she’d been
provided, and was pleased with the social interactions she’d had with her col-
leagues in the semester she’d spent there.

Well, that settled it for me: I’d spend only a semester instead of a year, but

I’d ask officially for the reduction in time, and not just leave my hosts hang-
ing. It was readily granted.

With profound ambivalence I departed for Poland. In retrospect, it’s a little

embarrassing how much stock I put in other people’s opinions of Poland. But
by committing myself for only one semester I believed I’d done something
smart. I’d reduced the probability of the worst possible outcome: being stuck
for a whole year in a place and situation I hated. Of course I also reduced the
probability of the best possible outcome: spending a year in a place I loved.
Such is the nature of compromise.

Having been to Poland several times, I know my preferred flight: KLM from
Detroit to Amsterdam, then Amsterdam to Warsaw. As a Fulbrighter this op-
tion was not available to me.

Fulbrighters are subject to a law called the Fly America Act. It means we

must use U.S. carriers to and from our host countries. The law was written
in 1974, and it might need a little updating. It is perfectly within the law for
me to pay an American airline to put me on a Lot Polish Airlines flight, but
I may not pay the Polish airline directly. So that’s what I did: I paid $1,300
to United to put me on their partner’s plane when I could have paid $800 to
fly KLM.

My flights over were easy ones: Detroit to Chicago, then Chicago to War-

saw. The hours on the planes were even relatively pleasant, except that during
the Detroit to Chicago run I sat next to a toddler who cried all the way. I tried
to sympathize with the little girl, imagining how baffling and unpleasant a
flight must be for a young child. I also knew that I was about to experience
five months of new and sometimes unpleasant experiences, so not letting the
first small irritation get to me seemed like a good idea.

Surprisingly, the Chicago to Warsaw flight even took off on time. It was

a very full flight, and we were jammed in tight. I had requested an aisle seat,

Chapter Two

but even that was of little benefit. I pitied the poor folks in the center and
middle seats, including the Polish woman seated to my right. She was small
in stature, so that helped. She was also very kind to the big American seated
next to her. For example, she told the flight attendant before I could that I did
not speak Polish when the attendant asked me what kind of wine I wanted
with my dinner. But how had she known?

The most interesting experience on the flight probably shouldn’t have hap-

pened, and wouldn’t have happened if I’d have minded my own business.
Two young Polish women were seated in front of me (I guessed they were
returning home after summer jobs in the States), and between the gap in the
seats I could see what the girl to my right was doing with her cell phone. She
was clearing out her text messages, which appeared to be of two varieties.
One set was from someone named James, while the other group came from
“Mazurkas,” clearly a screen name. James wrote his messages in English,
and they were all about how he’s still in love with her, how he’s “sorry for
everything,” wishes she’d forgive him, and just wants to see her just one more
time. She glanced at each, and then coolly deleted them one after another. The
messages from “Mazurkas” were in Polish, and she appeared to save them
all. It seemed the summer fling was being deleted in favor of the boyfriend
back in Poland. I felt sorry for James, for what he thought he’d lost, and for
“Mazurkas,” for what it appeared he was getting back.

The other interesting feature of the flight didn’t require any surreptitious

peering. Everyone on the airplane, except maybe those sitting in first class,
could hear the drinking Poles seated a few rows in front of me. The airline
brought the trouble on themselves when the flight attendants rolled the little
cart of duty-free items down the aisle. What looked to be a father and son pur-
chased a big bottle of vodka after dinner and decided to finish it on the flight.
As the other passengers slowly drifted off to sleep, and the lights over the
other seats went out one by one, the light over the vodka drinkers’ seat stayed
on. Of course their conversation became louder as they drank more, and the
flight attendants came around once in a while to ask them to be quiet. There
had been complaints, they said. The drinkers were polite and full of smiles
when being chastised, but they went right back to their bottle and their loud
conversation when the flight attendants left. I fell asleep before they did, but
when the cabin lights went on for breakfast, I noticed the bottle was empty.
The drinkers woke up and ate their breakfast, apparently none the worse for
wear. I remembered some advice from the first guidebook to Poland I’d ever
read: never, under any circumstances, try to out drink a Pole!

September 18, 2007 was my first day in Poland as a Fulbrighter. I arrived

in Warsaw mid-morning and took a taxi to my hotel. I was pleased with my-
self for being savvy enough to reject the offers of the corrupt cabbies who

Choosing Łódz´, Heading for Wrocław

snare unsuspecting tourist into paying five times the normal rate for a ride
downtown. Of course, I’d become savvy only through experience, but more
on that later.

Normally I stay at the MDM Hotel in Warsaw, which is located on Plac

Konstytucji and is surrounded by some of the best social realist architecture
in Poland. The housing “estate” was one of the first big new economic de-
velopments built by the Polish communist government after the war, and it
opened in 1952. Of course, every inch of the ground floors of the communist
era buildings is now filled with commercial capitalism at its neon finest, but it
makes an interesting mix. The staid stone and imposing facades of the 1950s
buildings, replete with much larger than life reliefs of workers, teachers and
peasants, mix surprisingly well with the bright lights of KFC and Samsung.

Before leaving for Poland this time, though, a great thing had happened,

which caused me to switch hotels. Most of the friends I’d harangued over the
years with arguments about why they just had to visit Poland, and do so soon,
were actually planning to come this time, especially those with any Polish
roots at all. So I decided to stay in a different hotel in a different section of the
city as a sort of scouting mission. It seemed to me that the MDM had gotten
a little big for its britches lately, often asking just a little less for a night than
the posh Marriott hotel just a few blocks north.

The cab ride felt a suspiciously long, but I couldn’t be sure because I

wasn’t exactly clear about where the hotel I’d chosen, the Ibis Stare Miasto
(Old Town), was located. I knew it was near the Old Town, but I wasn’t sure
just how close. The route we took felt a little circuitous, but it cost only 30
złoty (the ride to the MDM usually costs about 25), so I decided I probably
hadn’t been ripped off. And, in retrospect, I suppose the suspicion that I might
be being ripped off was probably a product of the high level of doubt about
Poles that I’d acquired from the paranoid writings and conversations I’d had
with former Fulbrighters about Łódź. I decided it would be crucial to over-
come that if I were to enjoy my time in Poland.

As it turns out, the Ibis Stare Miasto is actually closer to Warsaw’s New

Town, but it was an easy walk to both. I had a night to myself, before a day
of meetings and receptions at the U.S. Embassy. I checked into my room, laid
down on the bed and went to sleep. I know this is the worst thing to do for
jet lag, but I did it anyway. I woke up several hours later, and knew I would
have a hard time getting to sleep that night. I decided to walk through the
New and Old Towns, find some dinner, and visit a bar in the basement of
the Adam Mićkiewicz museum that I like. I figured a few beers would help
chase away the jet lag.

I ate at a restaurant called “Boruta,” which is Polish slang for the devil (and

which was the surname of one of our parish priests when I was growing up!).

Chapter Two

The middle-aged woman who usually works behind the bar in the basement
of the museum was there when I came in, and she corrected my Polish pro-
nunciation, just as she’d done on a few previous occasions. Then she played
comedian. I asked for a “duże” (“large”) beer. First she held up a very small
glass and I said no. Then she held up a half-liter glass, and I said no again.
Then she held up a liter glass, and I said yes. But then she pointed at the entire
keg and laughed, and I said, “nie dzię kuje!” (“no thanks!”).

Back in my hotel room after dinner and drinks I wrote the following in my

journal: “Well, even if nothing else good happens, at least I had a good meal
in the New Town area of Warsaw: delicious bowl of żurek and green-colored
pierogi with cabbage and mushrooms. Best pierogi ever. They played odd,
moody, echo-filled Polish rock, including a shuffling sixties-rock version of
‘Głęboka Studzienka’ that had great vocal harmonies.”

A few things came to mind after reading that entry written nearly at the

time the events happened. The pierogi and soup were, in fact, great. The ver-
sion of Głęboka Studzienka’, which is usually performed as a waltz by polka
bands in the United States, was indeed terrific. More importantly, the nega-
tive tone of my comments was pretty shocking to me in retrospect. I guess I
really feared the possibility of an unrelentingly negative semester in Poland
and had decided to accept whatever few good things happened as surprising
gifts. I knew part of the pessimism came from some of the bad things I’d been
told about Łódź, but I knew there was a deeper source of it as well, which
made it a little less embarrassing.

In 1984, when I was 15 years old, I’d volunteered to work on my first presi-

dential campaign—for Walter Mondale. Well, we all know what a failure that
campaign turned out to be: a 49 state loss! However, I remember reading in
one of the news magazines how Mondale had steeled himself for defeat. They
said he imagined the worst possible outcome, and this made anything short of
pure tragedy feel more like success. I’ve thought about a lot of other things
in my life that way too. It gives a sense of control—a sense that I can handle
anything but the absolute worst, which, mercifully, life rarely provides. So
Walter Mondale’s realism influenced my approach to Poland as well.

The first day of the orientation was interesting and fun. It took place at the
U.S. Embassy, located on Ujazdowskie Street. I had brief chats with most of
the other Fulbrighters and found out they were in Poland for myriad reasons:
some filmmakers were going to Łódź; some graduate students were staying
in Warsaw, while others were spreading out around the country. One was
writing her dissertation about oscypek—smoked sheep’s cheese from the
Tatra Mountain Poles, called Górale—and one of my favorite Polish foods.
A few were recently-minted B.A.s there to be teaching assistants in English

Choosing Łódz´, Heading for Wrocław

programs, while a few were, like me, professors there just to teach. The ori-
entation consisted mostly of a series of “do’s and don’t’s” related to different
aspects of Polish life as seen by the American Embassy.

Health

: drink the water, but at the very least let the taps run for a while

before filling your glass, and consider boiling it. Bottled water is cheap and
good, so it might be a good idea to buy that. Food from street vendors is
dangerous (e-coli), but most restaurants and supermarkets can be trusted. I
thought of Anthony Bourdain’s comment that you’re more likely to be poi-
soned by the hotel breakfast buffet than the street food, but I let it pass.

We were given health insurance cards and telephone numbers to call if we

needed assistance. We were told Polish dentistry is quite good and inexpen-
sive. Someone asked why he’d seen so many people with terrible teeth, and
another Fulbrighter commented, with some contempt, that even if it’s cheap
not everybody can afford it. I offered that even if it’s cheap some people are
still afraid of the dentist. That got a little laugh.

Politics

: There’s an election in October. Stay out of it. All current Polish

political parties have roots in Solidarity or in the old Communist Party. The
governing right-leaning party, Law and Justice, called early elections to so-
lidify their power. Their social democratic opposition, Left and Democratic,
has image problems because of all the former communists in their midst.
Civic Platform is right of center and very neo-liberal in its economic leanings.
There are others, such as the nationalist and sometimes anti-Semitic League
of Polish families, but these three are expected to be the top vote getters.
Poles will ask us about why the U.S. requires them to get visas in order to
visit. It is because of the high rejection rate: about 26 percent of applicants
are turned down. Until the rejection rate comes down, an expedited process
cannot be implemented, even if Poland was part of the “coalition of the will-
ing” in Iraq and might have expected some favorable treatment in return. No
one from the Embassy actually said that last part.

Safety

: Crime rates in Poland and the U.S. are about the same. If you get

drunk in a bar and get a chair broken over your head, the Embassy can only
do so much to help you out. Stay out of the bars.

The security chief admitted he’d only been on the job for a few months.

It was a mistake for him to admit that. Some of the Fulbrighters have been
coming to Poland for extended stays for more than 20 years. His claim about
the crime rates elicited howls of disapproval and clarification. Property
crime might be as high, but violent crime is much lower, they argued, and
he agreed.

After the orientation, a few of us went to a bar located in the former Pewex

store complex that one of the more Polish-seasoned Fulbrighters knew about.
During the course of our conversations, I admitted that I’d put together a

Chapter Two

fairly poor paper on Canadian women’s attitudes toward the U.S. just so I
could attend a gender studies conference in Poland in 2006. While my com-
panion was a serious feminist scholar, my intrusion into her area of expertise
didn’t offend her all that much, and as a future professor she liked seeing how
we could use the resources at our disposal to travel where we wanted. We
made it an early night because we had to get on the bus early the next morning
for the long ride to Wrocław.

The next day I rolled out of bed at 5:45 to catch a cab to the Etap Hotel

where we were to meet the bus for the trip to the southwestern Polish city
of Wrocław (formerly the German city of Breslau), where the major orienta-
tion was to take place. We departed at 7:00, and it took until 1:30 to get to
Wrocław, with only one stop. Polish roads and Polish traffic!

On the way to Wrocław Andrzej Dakowski, the director of the Polish-

American Fulbright Commission, showed us a movie: Andrzej Wajda’s
“Man of Marble.” It is a fascinating movie about a young film-maker played
by the beautiful Krystyna Janda, who is trying to make her student film in
the 1970s about a bricklayer who once was lauded by the communist govern-
ment, but eventually was removed from history. After his downfall they put
his statue in storage, thus the title. Showing the film was a smart move on
Dakowski’s part: it made the trip go more quickly and it put some of us in a
more sympathetic frame of mind.

At our one stop, I talked with two of the Fulbrighters, each with more than

20 years of experience with Poland. They discussed the fact they were both
in Poland when Chernobyl happened and how difficult it had been to get any
good information from the government about what they should do, and then
they’d learned that the government was recommending against taking the
form of treatment that they were secretly taking themselves, and administer-
ing to their families. How much better things are now, I thought.

We arrived in Wrocław and discovered pretty quickly that we were staying

in dorms. They were pretty spartan accommodations: bedroom, half-kitchen
(sink, no stove), and toilet with shower. I feared this might be what I was go-
ing to get in Łódź, but decided it would be adequate for 15 weeks.

During the first day of meetings in Wrocław, we heard a lecture by the

Rektor of University of Wrocław on the current condition of Polish universi-
ties. In Poland the Rektor is elected by the faculty. I could only imagine how
destructive a fight that could produce among our faculty. He told us there are
just too many students and not enough faculty and physical space. Where
have I heard that before, I thought. Students who pass the entry exam pay
no fees, while students who do not may attend the university if they pay. I’d
never before heard of doing things that way.

Choosing Łódz´, Heading for Wrocław

Then the Rektor mentioned the articles from the Chronicle of Higher Edu-

cation

that had been very critical of the students and of the American Studies

program at the University of Łódź. He said he was happy the columns had
been written, and that they had served as a wake-up call for Łódź and should
serve as a wake-up call for the rest of Polish higher education. It was disheart-
ening to hear confirmation of the criticism, but good to hear that Łódź might
have changed some of its ways because of it.

After the discussions, a few of us walked to a very nice hotel bar for a drink

before dinner. I brought up the critical columns, and Dakowski said the worst
of what I’d heard about Łódź was untrue. He said I would have to see for
myself. He seemed a little surprised that I had contacted former Fulbrighters
at the department in Łódź, and he said that a particularly disgruntled former
Fulbrighter was actually unhappy because he’d racked up a $10,000 phone
bill that he hadn’t wanted to pay. That was news to me. I began to realize that
was how my five months in Poland was going to be: a slow revelation.

Kresowa had caught my imagination, and I so liked the bartender Zbyszek
and the odd cast of characters that I decided to return for another visit a few
days after my first.

When Zbyszek had told me during my first visit that he wanted to write and

record songs better than Bob Dylan’s I’d told him that somebody already had:
Phil Ochs. There was something about Kresowa that seemed to encourage the
passionate expression of opinions, and I clearly wasn’t immune to it. I’m not
even sure I believe the claim, but I would have been willing to defend it to
the end at Kresowa. Zbyszek had said he’d never even heard of Phil Ochs,
and I’d promised to return with a disc.

So when I returned to Kresowa, I brought with me a compilation of Phil’s

music I’d burned from my collection. I own nearly every recording Ochs ever
produced. I walked in around 8:00, and Zbyszek was behind the bar and he
greeted me with a sort of “touchdown” hello: both hands up, but palms out.
A little odd, I thought, but I greeted him with enthusiasm too. The place was
packed, warm and bright, which was quite a contrast from my first visit. I sat
down at the bar, and after a few minutes he poured me a beer and I gave him
the disc.

At first he looked baffled by the spelling of the name, “Phil Ochs,” but

then after a few seconds he understood it and said it like this: “Feel Oaks.”
He wanted me to tell him about Phil, so I did, sparing no happy or grim detail.
I told him all about how Ochs had been the king of the 1960s politically-
oriented folk underground in Greenwich Village and that he’d killed himself
in 1976, with a few highlights in between: the 1968 Chicago Democratic
Convention, after which Ochs had had his tombstone carved; his 1973 con-
cert for Salvador Allende—a concert that Dylan saved from ruin just by
agreeing to perform at it. I told him how Dylan had once admitted that neither

Chapter Three

Return to Kresowa

Chapter Three

he nor anybody else could match Ochs’s topical song output, and also about
the famous incident where Phil criticized Dylan’s music while they were rid-
ing in a taxicab and Dylan threw him out of the car and said, “you’re not a
folksinger, you’re a journalist.” I told him about Ochs’s descent into alcohol-
ism and madness. Zbyszek listened—really listened—to it all, between his
duties pouring drinks for the rowdy crowd.

“Wow,” he said after each twist and turn of the Ochs story, which in some

ways is the American story of the 1960s and 70s.

“It was a real life,” he said.
“Yes, it was,” I replied.
“I am looking forward to hearing this,” he said and put the disc in a duffle

bag he kept behind the bar.

Then I told him that I had really enjoyed listening to his music, and that

I’d sent some songs to my friends in the U.S. and they had all reacted favor-
ably too. He made two fists, pounded one lightly on the bar and said, “yes!” I
quoted some of his lyrics that I liked, and pointed out which songs my friends
in the U.S. had liked the most. He seemed very pleased, which was cool be-
cause I wasn’t sure he’d have wanted me to disseminate his recording. Then
he disappeared through the kitchen behind the bar for about twenty minutes
and his girlfriend Ania took over. I drank two beers while he was gone.

When he returned he gave me a cigar. He said it cost one złoty, 30 groszy

— about 50 U.S. cents, but he wasn’t asking me to pay for it. It tasted better
than it should have, but I’m pretty sure I was smoking shredded communist-
era newspapers.

Then a small object hit me on the shoulder. It bounced off me and landed

on the bar and I picked it up: it was a broken cigarette lighter decorated with
a cartoon of a very erect penis wearing a condom. The woman who threw it
looked like quite a wreck, with greasy blonde hair and several broken teeth.
Her tight blue top revealed too much of her sagging breasts. I put two and two
together and told her “nie dzię kuje” (“no thank you”), and her smile disap-
peared as she angrily retrieved the lighter.

“Never mind her,” said Zbyszek, “only trouble.”
Then one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen in Łodź walked into

the bar and sat down next to a strong-looking bald guy who looked like he
wanted to kick someone’s ass—anyone would do. She was young, maybe
twenty five, and she had long brown hair and big brown eyes. Her eyes had a
twinkle that I instantly recognized as both playfulness and trouble. Her thick
sweater couldn’t completely conceal the fact that she had enormous breasts.
She spoke flirtatiously with the bald man and he bought her a half-litre of
Warka and a shot of vodka. I thought this girl likes to drink, as she threw back
the shot and made pretty short work of the beer.

Return to Kresowa

After a few minutes the big man walked over and sat down next to me.
“I hear you speak English,” he said.
I told him I did.
He told me he worked in Warsaw in public relations for Media Markt, an

electronics store. He said he really wanted to be a journalist. Even though he
was big and brutal looking and he gestured pretty wildly when he talked, he
also seemed really sincere, and almost kind. He apologized frequently for his
English, but I assured him I understood everything he was saying.

He told me he commuted two hours each way from Łodź to Warsaw every

day, but he did it so he could spend more time with his sons, who were six and
twelve years old. He said he very much loved his sons, but he very much did
not love his wife. They stay together for the children. He admitted to a very
strong attraction to the beautiful brown-haired woman, and I agreed with him
that she was well worth a try. I was pretty sure he’d take one before I did.

We chatted for a while and it became clear that this fellow had been in

trouble with the law for “anger management” issues. He said he gets in fights
at football and rugby matches, but he teaches his sons to be both thinkers
and fighters (“Platonic guardians?” I offered. He wisely let it pass). He said
he had served six months in the French Foreign Legion but chose not to sign
up for the standard five year commitment. I believed him. He got really mad
when some men he did not like started talking to the beautiful young woman.
He said, “We call them ‘lefties’ because they shake your hand with the right
hand, but steal from you with the left.” He demonstrated the move by shaking
my hand and pulling my hat out of my coat pocket.

I told him I understood. We drank a few beers that I bought, and then he

said, “Poles disgust me.” I asked him what he meant.

“Everyone now is anti-communist. No way it is possible,” he said.
“I’m not sure I understand,” I said.
“Now people remember they were anti-communist,” he said, “even party

members.”

“Aha,” I said, “People want to remember themselves as they wish they had

been.”

“Yes! Yes! That is it,” he said excitedly.
I wished we could have talked some more, but it was approaching 10:30,

and I didn’t want to miss the last tram. I said my goodbyes to Zbyszek and my
new friend. I left a five złoty tip as I was leaving, and my new friend picked
it up and gave it back to me as if I’d dropped it accidentally. I told him it
was a tip for good service, and he seemed to understand. Zbyszek seemed to
understand too, even though good tips are uncommon in Poland.

Then another prostitute threw an empty Marlboro box at us. The big man

yelled at her in Polish, but she just laughed.

Chapter Three

“She is nothing,” he said.
His name is Dariusz, but he goes by Darek. He followed me out of the bar

onto the street, and walked with me as far west as Piotrkowska. As he was
putting my Polish phone number into his cell-phone, a car ran the red light
on Narutowicza and smashed into another. He laughed and yelled, “Polish
drivers!”

He was really insistent that we should drink together again. I told him I

would like that very much. But we never did. In fact, no one I met in Poland
when he was drunk in a bar who said we should get together again ever
called, or came back to Kresowa. I was not offended by this at all. The great
Polish poet Czesław Miłosz explains it best:

Perhaps . . . Polish men dislike themselves so intensely, in their heart of hearts,
because they remember themselves in their drunken states?

If Miłosz is right, why would a Polish man want to phone up and drink again
with a stranger? Poland was beginning to make perfect sense to me, on its
own terms.

At the orientation in Wrocław our rooms were located in identical fifteen-
story cement dormitory towers built in the 1980s. They are named “kredka”
and “ołówek,” “chalk” and “pencil,” and, not surprisingly, they are not beau-
tiful buildings. But we each had our own little suite, with two bedrooms, a
small kitchen, and a bathroom. They appeared to be built for four inhabitants
during the school year. The rooms were spartan and utilitarian, but they soon
felt like home sweet home, especially after the Herculean efforts of our stu-
dent guides from the University of Wrocław achieved internet connections
for each of us.

The trams that run in the center of the major street next to the dorms pro-

duced a good deal of racket as they banged over some imperfection in the
track. Because it was still warm, the rooms felt much more comfortable with
the windows open, which, of course, didn’t make it any quieter. Dogs barked
nearly constantly too, and students living on the higher floors threw a few
loud parties. I decided these were the kinds of small annoyances, like the cry-
ing child on the flight over, that I couldn’t allow to get to me if my time in
Poland was to be successful, so I tried to ignore them.

The street on which the trams run was built over an airfield the Nazis

constructed with slave labor near the end of World War II. Breslau, as the
Germans knew Wrocław, was supposed to be a final holdout against the Red
Army’s approach from the east. Tens of thousands of slave laborers died
from exhaustion, Nazi bullets and Allied bombing during construction of the
airfield, and one of the only uses to which it was ever put was for the flight
out for the Nazi general who was supposed to lead the defense of the city. So,
in Wrocław, as in so many places in Poland, history often lives right under
your feet.

Chapter Four

(Dis)Orientation

(Dis)Orientation

In Wrocław we mostly attended lectures and language classes. But we did

have a day set aside for tourism, and in typical Polish fashion we got much
more than our money’s worth: the day was long and filled with detailed expla-
nations of every site we visited. Wrocław is located in Lower Silesia, Śląsk in
Polish. The area became part of the modern Polish state only after World War
II, when eight million Germans were moved out, and six million Poles, many
from what is now part of Ukraine, were moved in. Many of the Poles came
from the city of Lwów (in Ukrainian, Lviv), and they brought their cultural
treasures with them, including a panoramic painting of the Polish defeat of
the Russians at the Battle of Raclawica in the Kościuśko Uprising of 1794.
The Panorama is one of the most popular cultural tourist attractions for Poles,
behind only Częstochowa we were told. We did not visit the Panorama on our
day of tourism, however. That was saved for later.

First we visited a huge wooden Evangelical church in Świdnica. It is called

The Peace Church because it was built in honor of the peace of Westphalia of
1648, which had permitted Lutherans to build a small number of churches in
the Catholic portions of the Holy Roman Empire, although the church itself
is only about 300 years old. Not surprisingly, in a country where less than
one percent of the population is Protestant, there are not many members of
the congregation, and now the church is used mainly for special events and
as a tourist attraction.

The best part of the visit was learning from my new friend Tony, a profes-

sor of architecture, some of the details of how such a massive wooden struc-
ture could have been built three hundred years ago, and built very quickly
with the use of almost no nails. It seems some of the techniques are not that
different from those used by post and beam barn builders in the 19

century

in the U.S., who also used no metal in the framing of their buildings.

We were served a sack lunch on the bus on our way to our next destina-

tion: Włodarz. The night before our day of tourism we were warned by our
student guides to bring a jacket, because we would be spending some time in
a cool place. Rumors circulated among the Fulbrighters, and we concluded
we would be visiting either a shady place in higher elevation, or going down
into caves. Worrisome to me, given my mild-to-medium claustrophobia (I
can ride in elevators easily, but I don’t like small airplanes, and I hate caves),
the consensus was that we would be going underground. And the consensus
turned out to be correct.

The group had begun to bond sufficiently that gentle fun could be made

of my fear of caves and their impending presence in my life. Some of the
women sympathized with my condition and assured me it would be perfectly
acceptable if I chose to stay outside while everybody else went in. I told them
I appreciated their sympathy, but I wanted to test myself. What a fool I was.

Chapter Four

The caves at Włodarz were built by the Nazis in the Sudeten Mountains,

and it turns out that nobody is quite certain why they did it. Well, more ac-
curately, nobody is quite certain why the Nazis forced slave laborers to dig
these caves. Somewhere on Earth somebody might know the answer, because
the Red Army confiscated the contents of the cave and shipped them back to
the Soviet Union at the end of the war. Modern day visitors who do not know
anything about the caves are not told before they enter that nobody knows
what they were used for.

We were given hard hats at the creaking steel door that covers the entrance.

Once the door is closed, the only light comes from incandescent light bulbs
strung from the ceiling every twenty feet or so. The walls are rough and
damp, and you can hear the sound of dripping water coming from many dif-
ferent directions where secondary and tertiary pathways break off from the
central tunnel. It was quickly apparent that it would be very easy to get very
lost in this complex.

Our English-speaking tour guide began with a joke.
“Are any of you afraid of ghosts?” he asked us.
We murmured a bit, and a few of us said we weren’t.
“Good,” he said, “because my name is Casper.”
During the tour of the caves, we went from one unfinished or semi-fin-

ished room to another, while Casper asked us why we thought it might have
been built. The shape of the first of these rooms reminded me of the first
gas chamber at Auschwitz, and I feared the worst about why they were not
telling us what the caves were used for. I surmised they wanted to wait until
we were back outside to tell us we had visited an underground death camp.
Deep within the complex, there is a small monument to the thousands who
died building it, but there is no mention of its being used as a death factory,
so about halfway through our visit I rejected my theory about how the Nazis
had used the caves. I also quickly gave up caring very much.

As we moved more deeply within the facility, the passage narrowed and

the ceilings got lower. I was forced to duck at a number of junctures, as were
people much shorter than my six feet one. The tour had become monotonous
and annoying. Each new room with its accompanying question about its use
irritated me more than the previous one. Clearly my claustrophobia was mani-
festing itself as anger. I tried to keep my breathing deep and even; I didn’t
want to hyperventilate.

Then we reached a dock, with several aluminum rowboats moored to it.

Yes, a dock.

Part of the complex has flooded, and evidently the climax of the tour in-

volves cramming too many people into each boat and paddling down a very
narrow tunnel. I don’t know why I agreed to get into the boat. Smarter people

(Dis)Orientation

than I stayed at the dock saying, “No thanks. We’ll just wait for you here.”
How wise they were.

The first several hundred feet of the boat ride were the worst. One passen-

ger seated at the rear of the boat was given a small paddle to control direction.
This seemed unnecessary since the narrowness of the tunnel barely allowed
the boats room to move more than a few inches from side to side. Forward
progress was made by pulling on ropes which were hung next to the electric
lines that fed the bulbs. To prevent electrocution, we were warned not to pull
on the electric line, only the rope. At several points in the tunnel the clearance
was so low that nearly everyone had to lean as far back as they could, or put
their heads between their legs.

Then after a few hundred feet of the most miserably claustrophobic ex-

perience of my life, our little over-full boats popped out of the tunnel into a
flooded room with forty or fifty feet of clearance to the ceiling, and enough
surface space for our boats to float and not come within ten or twenty feet
of each other. To say I found this room a welcome respite is a serious un-
derstatement, but then I remembered we had to go out the same way we had
come in. As we recovered from the journey, Casper asked us what we thought
the big flooded room could possibly have been used for, but by this point I
don’t think any of us was very much interested.

“Nazi swimmin’ hole?” I muttered.
As we made our way back through the narrows, I was euphoric because I

knew that the cave visit was nearly over, save for the retracing of our steps
out. I was so relieved, I felt like singing. I possess a deep, if flat, baritone, and
it rang off the walls of our narrow tunnel as I sang out:

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they called ‘Gitche Gumee’
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy

With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more
Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty.
That good ship and true was a bone to be chewed
When the gales of November came early.

The reaction of the other Fulbrighters was just what I’d expected: much

laughter and a little singing along. It was also generational. The more sea-
soned among us knew the song well. They were the ones who sang along, and
encouraged me to sing more verses.

“We should sing to where the boat sinks,” said one.
“We have to at least meet the old cook,” said another.

Chapter Four

I think the younger ones might have thought we were singing a sea shanty

from the 18

century, and later that night I thought about my choice of songs,

wishing I’d chosen the “Gilligan’s Island” theme instead. Even though it
predates the “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” it would have had more uni-
versal appeal. “Next time,” I thought, and laughed about the unlikelihood of
repeating the singular experience of forty Fulbrighters in a flooded cave.

We ate our second lunch at a massive German house in Morawa. We were

the guests of a very gracious 80 year-old German woman. She was born in
the house when the land it sits on was still part of Germany, but she fled as
the Red Army approached in 1945, and she was able to return only in 1989,
after the fall of communism. The communists had used the house for, among
other things, military purposes, and there’s a stone carving of a Polish eagle
in the back yard. Because the communists carved the eagle, it lacks the royal
crown, but when the system fell, someone painted the crown back on. A bit
of the red paint is still visible.

The house is now used for many purposes, primarily in service to the local

community. In order to regain limited possession of the house, the old Ger-
man had to negotiate a deal with the new Polish government. She’s allowed
to live there now—I don’t think she owns the place -- and she runs a kinder-
garten in it. When communism ended so did free kindergarten, so she and her
staff provide a vital service for the local community.

Our final destination was a railroad and Harley Davidson Motorcycle mu-

seum in Jaworzyna Śląska. The man who owns it is really passionate about
his bikes and trains, but his operation is severely underfunded. He owns doz-
ens of train engines and other rolling stock. The buildings he stores them in
are beautiful old brick behemoths, and his prized possession is a massive 19th
century steam locomotive that actually operated on the Polish rails until the
1970s. He bought the building and much of the stock from the government,
which was keen to unload it all because they had no idea what to do with it.

With enough money and marketing, I thought this place could attract tens

of thousands of tourists, like the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.
The owner is trying many clever ideas to attract people, especially people
with some money. He rents out space in old sleeper cars by the night. Most
interestingly, he is planning to put on an exhibition of the conditions the local
Germans endured in the trains leaving Silesia after the war, as well as what
the Poles endured in coming to Śląsk. They all traveled in boxcars, and he
plans to display one of each kind.

We ate our third meal at the museum: grilled sausages, salads and .67-liter

bottles of Polish beer. I was already stuffed from the two previous meals, but
the smoked sausages were especially delicious, and nothing tastes better after
smoked Polish sausage than a couple of cold beers.

(Dis)Orientation

It was well after dark by the time we returned to Chalk and Pencil. Some

of us wanted to drink a few beers and talk over what we had experienced. We
asked our student guides where we should go, and they pointed out a student-
oriented place across the street from the dorms as the nearest bar likely to be
open on a Sunday night. We invited them to join us, and a few did.

The students were at first reluctant to let us purchase drinks for them, but

eventually they relented. After I’d had a few beers and a shot of Żubrówka
vodka I asked one of the guides just what in the Hell they were thinking about
in taking us to the caves.

“I have been there before,” he said very earnestly, “it is quite interesting.”
“And you went back down today?” I asked, incredulously.
“Of course,” he said.
Absolutely mind-boggling, I thought, but I let it drop. We drank for a bit,

but the long day had tired us out, and we had breakfast and classes the next
morning starting at 8:00. We ended up calling it a pretty early evening. I went
to my little room and went right to sleep, and I’m happy to say I didn’t dream
at all, not even about being trapped underground.

The orientation in Wrocław finished with a charming closing ceremony.
Previous experiences in Poland had taught me that the Poles believe in cer-
emonies of all kinds, and sometimes you have to be ready to say a few words
or sing a song. Mercifully, none of that happened this time.

During the orientation there had been two language classes: beginner and

advanced. Of course, I took the beginner’s class and learned much from a
very good teacher named Krzystof Wróblewski, who used humor and group
activities very effectively. By the end of the class he even had us playing
Scrabble with the 32-letter Polish alphabet! It’s not overstating the case to
say the language class was inspirational, after what I’d heard about Polish
professors and the hostile relationship between professors and students. I
decided that if my students had experienced professors like Wróblewski, then
the main thing I would have to worry about would be trying to live up to very
high standards.

During the closing ceremony, the two teachers of Polish distributed certifi-

cates of completion to each of their students. Wróblewski shook each of our
hands as he presented us with our “diplomas.” The diminutive and beautiful
female teacher of the advanced class hugged each of her students after the
presentation, and I felt a little jealous. After the ceremony I learned from
some of the advanced students that their teacher would soon join the two mil-
lion Poles living abroad, so her goodbyes might have been about more than
the end of her short summer course in Polish for Americans.

In total there had been 20 hours of language training and 25 hours of his-

tory and culture lectures. My new friend Tony and I noted that we were the
only two Fulbrighters who did not skip a single session, and we were justifi-
ably proud of ourselves, because, unfortunately not every one of them had
been enlightening or interesting.

Chapter Five

Friendly Fulbrighters

Friendly Fulbrighters

Besides the languages classes, the best thing about the orientation was meet-

ing and finding out about the projects of some of the other Fulbrighters.

Trevor and Ashley Banks, with their 16 month old daughter Anna, were

spending the year in Łodź too. He is a filmmaker, and he really wants to at-
tend film school at New York University. After we had been in Łodź for a
while I sent him a clip from the old Jon Lovits animated series The Critic,
where there is an image of the N.Y.U. film school’s alleged motto: Lights,
Camera, Unemployment. I think he thought it was funny. Later the director
Ang Lee told him essentially the same thing about job prospects during the
Cameraimage Cinematography Festival in Łodź in November.

They were living in Łodź so he could finish work on a couple of his films

having to do with Poland, and, he hopes, to start and finish another. Interest-
ingly, he is not directly connected to the film school, which is one of the good
things for which Łodź is known. Sometimes its nickname is “Holly- Łodź,”
even though I can’t imagine two more different places than Tinseltown and
the Manchester of Poland. Another Fulbrighter won the coveted position at
the Film School, which given Trevor’s incredible Polish language skills and
work ethic seemed like a mighty injustice to me.

The Banks are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day

Saints—Mormons. But I don’t think Trevor really likes being called a Mor-
mon because he uses “L.D.S.” as the abbreviation. He speaks excellent Polish
because he spent two years in Poland as a missionary. The funniest story he
told me about his missionary experiences involves a play on the Polish word
for Mormons: Mormony. Trevor said that he had asked an old man in Polish
if he knew about the Mormony. Switching to English, the old man replied
enthusiastically, “Mormony, more trouble!”

Trevor and I think about many of the same topics, but in very different

ways. It’s not that we disagree, but as a film-maker he thinks visually, while
as a political scientist, I think in linear terms, with one sentence following the
other. An idea he had for a film about Poland’s adjustment to E.U. member-
ship demonstrates his way of thinking. He wanted to tell the story through
doors: he wanted a door installed in his communist-era apartment building,
but the workers had none that would fit because no two doorways in the
entire building are exactly the same size. So he planned to film the workers
as they measured the doorway, planed the door, and made the installation. I
thought it sounded like a brilliant idea. Were I to investigate the difficulties
of Poland’s transition to E.U. membership, I would write a thirty page paper
with a hundred footnotes.

Trevor, Anna and I traveled together on the train from Wrocław to Łodź.

Trevor was extremely helpful in buying my train ticket. My limited Pol-
ish skills combined with a clerk’s residual communist notion of customer

Chapter Five

(non)service often leaves me with the wrong kind of ticket, if not to the wrong
destination. But Trevor took care of everything, and I was very grateful. He
also struck up a conversation with some Poles in our compartment about the
Polish identity, and translated their responses for me.

A young woman studying to become a dentist was the most willing to talk

with him. At first she seemed to define the Polish identity in a completely
negative way: she made a list of everything she identified with the United
States and said Poland was most definitely not all of those things. In more
positive terms she defined Polish-ness as speaking the Polish language. I
wondered if that meant she would consider Trevor a Pole, but Trevor. and
many other American Polish speakers I discussed it with subsequently, as-
sured me that it is nearly impossible for a non-native speaker ever to sound
truly and completely fluent in the language.

Along with the Banks’s, I met an architecture professor from the Uni-

versity of Detroit Mercy named Tony Martinico during the orientation. The
funny thing is I attended U.D.M. from 1987 to 1991 and never once met him
then, even though he is a protégé of the father of one of my best friends. Our
academic experiences have some odd parallels, separated by about twenty
years. He also attended the University of Detroit, as it was known before it
merged with Mercy College in 1990. He majored in political science back
then, and it turned out we had shared a professor or two, twenty years apart.
Then he went on to graduate study in political science at Wayne State Univer-
sity in Detroit, which is where I took my Ph.D. As it turned out, we’d shared
some professors there too. Architecture is his “second” career, which he says
is quite common. Even though it required traveling 5,000 miles, I’m really
glad we met, and I’m certain we will remain friends.

After I moved to Łodź, we remained in e-mail contact and it seemed not

much was going right for him in Warsaw, where he was spending two se-
mesters teaching at the Politeknik University. The apartment he was provided
turned out to be unacceptable, and he had to move out of it anyway so that
some Syrian exchange students could use it. Three prospective apartments
had already fallen through, including one where Tony thought the rent quoted
to him was in złotys, but the landlord wanted dollars. This is a difference by a
factor of only about 2.5! He took it all in stride. He’s been leading student ex-
changes to Poland for nearly 30 years, so he knows how things sometimes can
go, and because he is good friends with the people in charge of his program,
he did not believe they were trying to screw him. He stayed for a while in a
hotel owned by the university, and once told me, “My room is on the sixth
floor, but the elevator only goes to the third and a half floor. Don’t ask . . .”

Fulbright awards attract professors with a wonderfully diverse set of inter-

ests. Kevin Christianson teaches English Literature at Tennessee Tech, and

Friendly Fulbrighters

we bonded over sausages and beers in the dorm at Wrocław. We also listened
to some Polish-American polka music I had on my laptop. Anyone who likes
polka is all right with me, and Kevin seemed to really like polka. He had
taught in Poland before, and he seemed to know a lot about how the higher
education system works. I learned from him, although it might not have
been the lesson he intended to teach, that everything is negotiable in Poland.
Course load, teaching schedule, topics—everything is up for grabs.

I also learned from Kevin a completely different perspective on Polish

students than I had received from the former Fulbrighters I’d contacted back
home. “What a lot of people think of as cheating is just collaborative learn-
ing,” he said. It sounded a little naïve to me at the time, but he followed it up
by telling me that he found the students to be mostly well-behaved and hon-
est, and that a quick public reprimand in front of their peers usually straight-
ened out the others. In other words, despite decades of teaching it seemed
Kevin still possessed the proper mixture of optimism and realism.

Penn State English Professor Matthew Wilson and his wife and daughter

were sent to Łodź too. He came to teach African American literature. That
can’t be an easy subject to teach to Poles, who, unless they have visited the
U.K. or U.S.A., have likely had almost no experiences with blacks of any
kind, including African Americans. It seemed to me you might as well try to
teach Martian literature, given how little Poles would understand. But Mat-
thew had taught in Poland before, from 1984 to 1987, so he knew what he
was in for. His wife Marian was teaching English at the University too, and
once I ran into her on Piotrkowska. Our conversation almost immediately
turned to how Poles deal with race, and she said something pretty insightful.
“Some Poles think they aren’t racist because they have never done anything
terrible to black people, even though they’re pretty sure they don’t like them.
But there’s a difference between never having dealt with diversity, and not
being racist.”

Finally I was pleased to meet Alex Gerber, a graduate student in sociology

at the University of Michigan. She’s writing about women’s rights issues in
Poland as they relate to the country’s accession to the European Union. She
let me read one of her articles and I learned how loaded a word “equality”
is in Polish political discourse because of its association with the communist
times. I learned from her that you can’t take anything for granted in Poland,
even (maybe especially?) the meaning of words.

Alex is really smart and sarcastic and we had a very funny moment just

looking at each other incredulously during an orientation lecture about con-
temporary Polish government policy toward ethnic minorities. If there was a
lecture worthy of skipping, this would have been it. The young professor read
the lecture in a monotone, from the seated position. My first thought was if

Chapter Five

this is what Polish students are used to, then they’re going to love my teach-
ing style, which is much more extemporaneous and interactive. But then I
remembered the wonderful teaching style of Krzystof Wróblewski.

The young professor began with a table showing the number of various

ethnic minorities in Poland. More accurately, his tables showed the almost
complete absence of ethnic minorities in Poland. But after that revelation
there were still 75 minutes remaining in the lecture. Alex and I unintention-
ally looked at each other, and I nearly burst out laughing about the upcoming
discussion of policies toward a non-existent issue.

When I accepted the Fulbright, I thought about what I really hoped to

achieve from the experience. It’s all about people: students; other Fulbright-
ers; and, of course, Polish colleagues and others. So I was gratified that from
the Wrocław orientation it appeared I had at least laid the groundwork for
good relationships with some interesting Americans. Successfully teaching
and establishing strong relationships with Poles still looked very daunting,
however. But I was starting to feel better about the Polish experience because
it was becoming my Polish experience, and it wasn’t at all like the horror
stories I’d heard.

My first day of duty in 2007 at the University of Łódź was both baffling
and enlightening. There was so much confusion, related to both my teach-
ing schedule and the requirements to become a recognized professor at the
university. Paulina Matera, my “opiekun,” (“shepherd”) proved amazingly
adept at navigating the university bureaucracy, and I cannot imagine getting
through everything without her assistance.

During the summer, Paulina had asked me if I could teach four classes:

Canadian Government; American Government; Media and Politics; and,
Gender and Politics. My first reaction was that four classes in one semester
seemed like a pretty heavy load, given that I teach only five courses over two
semesters at my home university, Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
Second, and more importantly, I informed her that I’m in no way qualified
to teach Gender and Politics! But I understood why they thought I could
teach it. In the summer of 2006 I’d attended the European Gender Research
Conference held at the University of Łódź. I presented a paper on differences
between Canadian men and women’s attitudes toward the United States
(women like us a lot less). Did I deceive them into thinking I was a bona fide
gender researcher with this presentation? Perhaps. But I proposed, wrote and
presented the paper in large part because I wanted to attend another confer-
ence in Poland, even if it meant straying a bit from my realm of “expertise.”
But my bluff had been called. Fortunately I managed to get out of teaching
Gender, and thought I was down for teaching just three classes.

At the orientation in Wrocław, Paulina sent me an email informing me

that my teaching schedule would include three classes, each to be taught on
Wednesday in the form of an hour and a half lecture. She did not write that
these would be my only classes, but she didn’t mention any others either. At
the University of Łódź there are 15 weeks of instruction, so my total number

Chapter Six

To Work in Łódz´

Chapter Six

of hours in the classroom would be 67.5. This didn’t bother me at all, be-
cause in a semester in which I teach three classes at B.G.S.U. I’m actually in
the classroom for 112.5 hours, as our courses require 2.5 contact hours per
week.

But when I arrived at the University of Łódź and began talking with vari-

ous Polish and American colleagues, I learned that I would be required to
teach on several Saturdays too, at least one class and probably two. At most
that would mean 24 additional hours of instruction, for a total of 91.5, which
would still involve fewer hours in the classroom than I was used to back
home. But I was unenthused about the prospect of weekend teaching. First,
what I’d heard about the Saturday students enrolled in the so-called “extra-
mural” classes did not sound very promising. In the main, these classes are
offered for those who did not pass the normal university admissions exam,
but were willing to pay for the opportunity to attend. So I believed I would
be dealing with a much less gifted group of students.

However, I’d also heard that many of the extramural students are part-time,

working students—what we’d call non-traditional students in the U.S. Many
of them live and work in Łódź, but others travel from long distances, take
multiple classes on the weekend, then return to their hometowns on Sunday
afternoons. Because I’ve taught at various community colleges and extension
campuses of universities, I’ve taught many non-traditional students in my
career. Often they are my best students—perhaps not as intellectually pre-
pared as regular students, but able to make up this deficiency with hard work
and actual “real world” experiences. Because of this I wasn’t overly worried
about the quality of students in weekend classes, but I just didn’t want to
teach on Saturdays or Sundays. Not working on weekends is so ingrained
in me as an American, that I really, really didn’t want to do any teaching on
Saturdays and Sundays, let alone do a lot of it.

I know that any normal working person who hears a professor complain

about his teaching schedule, even the somewhat more onerous Polish teach-
ing schedule, is probably unimpressed and not particularly sympathetic. I
mean, 91.5 hours is just over two full forty-hour work weeks, right? Well,
not quite. Of course, we must schedule office hours too: time for individual
consultations with students. Universities vary, but a typical rule is to have the
same number of office hours as you have classroom hours. Then, too, there is
the time needed to prepare lectures and other course materials, but honestly
you can do that during the office hours, because until the end of the semester
brings on fear of the final exam, students almost never come to office hours.

Also, if I were back at my home university, I would be on the hook for

several hours a week for doing what we call “service.” That means attending
meetings. Department meetings, committee meetings. We have committees

To Work in Łódz´

for everything: to distribute merit pay; to buy books for the library; to keep
the undergraduate and graduate curricula up to date; to hear student appeals
of grades, and on and on. Most of this committee work is the thankless but
essential activity that keeps a department, a college and a university function-
ing. I was pretty sure I’d have to do none of that in Poland. What value would
a non-Polish speaker add to a curriculum committee in Poland?

Then there is the question of research. The old cliché “publish or perish”

is still largely true, especially to earn tenure and promotion from the lowest
rank of assistant professor to the mid-level (and job security) of associate
professor (full professor is the highest rank). For a political scientist this
process involves the collecting and analyzing of data (in my case, usually
survey data), and the writing and revising of papers and books. The revising
part is the worst, because revisions are prompted by the double-blind peer
review process employed at most professional journals: the evaluators of your
submission do not know who wrote it, and you are not informed of the names
of reviewers. Naturally this allows for a level of directness (some would say
cruelty) in the reviews that would be absent had reviewer and writer known
each others’ identities. In theory it also leads to more fair and objective re-
views. The point is, the process can sting. I would have to continue working
on my research while in Poland.

So, in the end, my point is simple: professors do more than teach. Do we

work 85 hours a week like a corporate attorney or chief financial officer? Of
course not, but we are not compensated like them either. In fact, teaching is
one of the few jobs about which I hear people consistently say that a great part
of our compensation should be the satisfaction we derive from the success
of our students. I certainly understand why people think that way, especially
given how many teachers (myself included) can wax starry-eyed about the
pure joy of watching the proverbial light bulb go on over the head of a strug-
gling student, or the joy a better student brings to your office along with his
or her law or graduate school acceptance letters. Student success feels great,
but money and free time are pretty desirable too.

So my expectations of how much teaching I was going to have to do in

Poland were confused from the beginning. How much deception, or maybe
just negotiation, was involved on the Polish side has remained a mystery to
me. Deception and negotiation require a lot of organization, and that’s some-
thing that seemed to be in short supply at Polish universities. Things get done,
but they seem to get done at the last minute. And things change, sometimes
in a big way, with little explanation or warning. For example, between 2007
and 2008 the amount of time off between winter and spring semesters at the
University of Łódź was reduced from the entire month of February, to about
two weeks. This wrought havoc with one of my office mate’s plans to return

Chapter Six

to the States. Nobody told him the change was coming; it just came and he
had to deal with it.

As I was being assigned classes and learning something about how the sys-

tem functions, I was most concerned about how many weekend extramural
classes I would be assigned. In the end I was assigned three weekend classes,
but it turned out not to be as bad as that. I was to teach American Government
to both first year and advanced students. But rather than require two separate
lectures to 25 students each, the course was combined into a large lecture of
50 students, which made it by far my largest class.

I was also assigned a “monographic lecture” on the topic of the relationship

between politics and mass media in the U.S. Of course I had no idea what
that meant, so my Polish colleagues explained it to me. It’s a special course
for advanced students where the professor provides a reading list and a final
exam: no class meetings between the first and last day of the semester. So I
just chopped in half the content of my regular Media and Politics class, and
packaged it as a monographic lecture.

As it worked out, I would actually be responsible for teaching three hour-

and-a-half classes for fifteen weeks, and one hour-and-a-half class for eight
weeks (but on weekends, precious weekends . . .). In total I would administer
and grade five sets of final exams, because of the “monographic lecture.” By
some measures (number of discrete courses), that’s a lot more than I would
teach back home, but in terms of actual time in the classroom it turned out to
be about the same. While it was hardly a vacation, it wasn’t excessive.

Thinking of the advice from fellow Fulbrighter Kevin Christianson, after it

was all over I wondered how much of my schedule I could have negotiated.
I’ve decided my opiekun knew all along I would have significant weekend
teaching responsibilities, but her reasons for not telling me had less to do
with deception than something I think I’ve detected in the Polish character.
Rather than disappoint or anger me by telling me all of the facts, she just
left out some crucial information. Did it protect her? I suppose so. But this
happens in lots of situations. I would see a student in the hallway and say to
her, “see you this afternoon, right?” and she would answer in the affirmative.
It turned out that affirmation didn’t necessarily indicate she was coming to
class. Was it a lie? Not really, at least not a big one. But it made the interac-
tion as smooth as possible for the moment, even if it might have damaged the
long-term relationship.

During lunch in Warsaw with my friend Tony I came up with what I

thought was a pretty accurate description of one of the difference between
Polish and American cultures. I said American culture is based on “telling.”
We seem to feel the need or obligation to tell everyone everything they need
(or sometimes don’t need) to know about a situation. “Hi, I’m Sherry and I’ll

To Work in Łódz´

be your server today. Our specials today include . . .” In Poland the culture is
based on “asking.” If you need to know something, you better ask someone
because no one is going to volunteer it. It sometimes seemed people thought
it might be insulting to tell you something without your having asked because
to do so assumes your ignorance. I also think Poles take more than a little
pleasure in watching Americans struggle.

But Paulina Matera helped me with so many other tasks, it’s difficult to

thank her enough. She set me up with the payroll office so my salary could be
directly deposited to my bank account (I’ve heard some Fulbrighters end up
getting paid in big stacks of cash). She saw me through the process of setting
up my bank account, and she chose a bank with branches and ATMs located
near my apartment. She registered me with the city authorities—a strange
process required of everyone living in Poland. She signed me up for internet
service in my apartment. She helped me avoid a second physical examina-
tion, and she served me dinner on my second night in town. She spent two
full working days helping me, and she tolerated my sense of humor along
the way.

Before our visit to the city offices for registration, Paulina warned me re-

peatedly that I had to bring my passport with me. But about 25 minutes into
our thirty minute walk between the university and the city offices, I said, “I
don’t need to bring any paperwork for this process, do I?”

She took me completely seriously and said, “I told you to bring your pass-

port!”

“Oh, I did,” I said, “I was just kidding.”
“Perhaps we should just drop you off with the police,” she said with a

slight smile.

“But then who would teach all these weekend classes?” I replied.

After a discussion with some of my students, I returned for my third visit to
Kresowa. They had invited me to attend the American Studies Student As-
sociation meeting on a Thursday night, and I’d happily accepted. The topic
was an overall assessment of the Bush administration. They meet every other
week, and it’s supposed to be an opportunity to speak to each other in English
about an important American topic. My students told me that too often they
lapse into Polish, so having me there would force them to speak English.
They also thought I might know something about the topic.

I encouraged the students to think positively about the Bush administra-

tion—especially their success in getting their legislation passed (tax cuts, No
Child Left Behind, the Iraq War resolution). My goal was to encourage them
to think about the relative success or failure of any U.S. administration based
on objective criteria, not on whether they agreed with the policies.

After meeting with the students, I walked the ten minutes west on Naru-

towicza St. to Kresowa. The crowd was small, and I noticed the beautiful
brown-haired woman. Zbyszek the musician was not working behind the bar,
but his lady-friend Ania was. I ordered a beer, she poured it, and collected
the five złoty coin.

A bald man was sitting between me and the beautiful woman. He spoke to

me in English.

“Are you from America?”
I frequently wondered how Poles always seemed to know where I was

from, even before I’d said anything. While I was in Poland I dressed in black
and didn’t wear tennis shoes. Sneakers and bright colors usually give Ameri-
cans away. I tried not to smile, and I always hung my coat up on a rack where
one was available. Grinning people in seats with their coats draped over them
are almost always Americans.

Chapter Seven

Meanwhile, Back at Kresowa

Meanwhile, Back at Kresowa

“Yes, I’m an American,” I told him.
“I love America. I lived there for two years. In Orange County. I love it!

Lots of money!”

“Indeed,” I said, “what do you do now?”
“I became doctor,” he said, as if it were something that had happened to

him, rather than something he’d sought. I wasn’t sure I believed him. It might
well have been something he’d just told the beautiful brown-eyed girl.

“Doctors are useful,” I said, “Unlike professors.”
We talked a bit about why I was in Poland and whether Barack Obama

would win the American Presidency. Poles seem fascinated with the prospect
of an African American president. In fact, a student once said to me, “Four
hundred years of racism just evaporates like that?” I’d told him it was a bit
more complicated.

Then Zbyszek the bartender/musician arrived. He greeted me in his usually

enthusiastic way.

“But I’m sick,” he said, “the flu.”
I said, “you probably shouldn’t be in here then.”
He said the boss insisted, and anyway it was safer for Ania if he were

around. He said he would try to stay for only a short while because he had
go to the apteka to get some pills. He had many private Christmas parties to
play. I asked him if he had any public performances coming up, but he said
no. Then he turned a little bit serious.

“I listened to the CD you gave me.”
“Yes..?” I said.
“I listened to it many times . . .”
“Yes . . .”
“I liked many of the songs. The structure. The lyrics. Many of them were

beautiful. And some were so much about politics.”

I nodded—I’d included only a handful of political songs on the Phil Ochs

disc I’d given him because I wasn’t sure he’d understand all the American
1960s references, and besides I think Phil’s personal stuff is more enduring.

“But the other songs . . .”
“The other songs . . .” I repeated.
“They were very painful,” he said, “Feel Oaks was hurt . . .” he said.
“He was,” I said.
“I could hear his end coming,” he said, “He sounded like he knew the end

was coming for him.”

I told him I regretted having told him the whole story of how Phil Ochs

lived and died -- that it might have biased his judgment. He assured me that it
had helped him to understand the songs, that he really liked many of them, but
he was struck with how sad and desperate Ochs sounded in the personal songs

Chapter Seven

near the end of his recording career. He said he could have figured out just
from the songs that things did not end well for Phil Ochs. Then Zbyszek was
called away by the boss man. He wanted another bowl of bigos, it appeared,
and to have a quiet word with Zbyszek about something important.

So I went to the jukebox and played some Leonard Cohen, Led Zeppelin

and Joe Dassin.

Then the bald man talking to the prettiest woman in Łódź spoke to me

again in English.

“You are from where?” he asked.
“Ohio,” I said.
“Never been there,” he said.
“Of course not,” I said, “why would you?”
“Not what I mean. All of America is great. Do you live in a city?”
I told him I lived close to Detroit, assuming he might not know about To-

ledo, the city in which I actually reside.

“I have been to Detroit,” He said, “much like Łódź.”
I agreed with his assessment, but added, “Less crime in Łódź.”
Then the beautiful brown-haired woman spoke a lot of bitchy-sounding

Polish to him. Chastened, he told me he had better pay more attention to his
girlfriend, otherwise she would get mad. I told him I understood. I said talking
to me or talking to her should be an easy choice. He laughed in agreement.

Then one of the songs by Joe Dassin I had played on the jukebox came up.
A man to my left said, “French music?”
“Yes,” I said, “I love Joe Dassin.”
“He died very young.”
“He did,” I agreed, “I think he was only 40 or so when he died in 1980.”
“It reminds me of my university days here,” he said. “They were not al-

ways very good times. You know, today is a very special day for Poles of my
generation,” he said. He had thinning grey hair and was a little bit heavyset.
He also spoke the best English I’d heard in Poland outside of a university.

“Why is today special?” I asked.
“Today in 1981 Jaruzelski gave his speech,” he said.
“Today is the anniversary of martial law?” I asked.
“A very bad day for us,” he said, “I was studying law at University of Łódź

when it happened . . .”

“Were professors targeted?” I asked.
“They were,” he replied. “It was terrible. I lost many professors, so I left

my studies.”

“Where did you go?”
“Many places, but eventually to Belfast.”

Meanwhile, Back at Kresowa

“Do you still live there?”
“I do.”
“Are you a lawyer?”
“No, no, no . . .” he said with a rueful smile, “I work in a factory. It is really

nothing.” It was very sad how he dismissed the value of his job because even
though it paid well, he didn’t consider it to be important at all.

“All work is worthy,” I said.
“It is nice of you to say that, but it is not true,” he said.
“Excuse me,” I said and went to the jukebox to play some more tunes.
“Please play some Supertramp,” he said.
I asked him to repeat himself. I explained how on my first night at Kresowa

an older man had explained his love for Supretramp. He assured me he was
no relation and had never met the man. I told him the man had called Łódź
“Litzmannstadt” and he assured me the man was just being provocative, not
a Nazi. “Poles love to argue,” he said.

The coincidence was pretty remarkable, but I let it pass as four drunk

members of the same family crowded around me at the jukebox wanting to
select their own songs off my złoty. Evidently they weren’t big fans of my
choices, but they were very entertaining with their criticism. Entertaining in a
very assertive, very Polish way, that is. When they were sitting at their table
they would sing along with the Leonard Cohen a little, and the Zeppelin a lot.
They yammered at me in very fast Polish at the jukebox, and I had absolutely
no idea what they were saying. Then they pointed at the number pad on the
machine to indicate they wanted to choose some songs. I pushed in a quick
few numbers, then left them two of my credits. I sat back down at the bar
and chuckled about the whole thing. The Northern Irish Pole—his name was
Sławomir, rolled his eyes about his countrymen.

“Do you know why this pub is called ‘Kresowa?’” he asked.
“I really don’t,” I admitted.
“I will try to explain,” he said. “You know at one time Poland had a much

different shape on the map?”

“Yes,” I said.
“Well, we had lands in the east—in Ukraine, Belarus,” he said. “Those

lands were called the Kresy. This bar—the Kresowa—is named for those
lands.”

Poland, of course, had lost those lands after World War II. In exchange

they’d received lands to the west, from Germany. For example, all of the
Poles were moved out of Lwow in Ukraine, and all the Germans were moved
out of Breslau. The cities were then renamed Lviv and Wrocław, respec-
tively.

Chapter Seven

“Polish history is very fascinating,” I said.
“It really is,” he agreed, before a recently arrived patron who had been lis-

tening to us interrupted. They spoke much Polish, and then Sławomir said to
me, “He said I should tell you Lithuania and Ukraine are very free, and so are
we.” I didn’t really understand that, but I said “rozumiem” (”I understand”)
anyway. It was near the time of the final trams, and I didn’t want to miss
my ride home, so I made to leave. Sławomir said he would like to talk to me
again the next night, and I promised I’d be back, even though I had to teach
the following day, on Saturday. As I left Kresowa, “Rock ‘n Roll” was play-
ing, and the drunk family was seeming to enjoy it. The beautiful brown-eyed
woman was singing along phonetically, and bouncing around on her barstool.
I waved goodbye to her and her boyfriend.

On the way to the tram stop I stopped at a middle eastern restaurant for

some takeaway food—“na wynos” in Polish. A waitress who had served me
before brought me an English-language menu, which I thought was very kind
of her. I ordered my food, and sat at the bar with my beer and waited.

Then two Polish lads showed up and ordered shots of śliwowitz—Serbian

plum brandy with 70 percent alcohol. Of course one of them started talking to
me. He said he’d just returned to Łódź from England, and would I drink a shot
with them? He said today was a great day in Polish history. To him martial
law represented the beginning of the end of communism.

They were just about the same age as my students, so they hadn’t had to

live through it, which I thought made it easier for them to look back on it in
a more detached way, but I didn’t want to fight with them about it. I agreed
to drink a shot with them. We drank shots of śliwowitz, then my food ar-
rived. I tried to leave, but they wanted to drink another shot. This time Polish
vodka. It tasted better than the śliwowitz, but it was still pretty sharp. They
were completely wasted—they were following the shots with big Polish
beers—and wanted to keep on talking, even though their part of the conversa-
tion was descending into pure gibberish. The waitress finally convinced them
to let me go in peace. More accurately, she distracted them for a few minutes
so I could sneak out.

By then it was too late for the trams. I walked to Plac Wolności (Freedom

Place), which is a small circular park at the top of Piotrkowska Street, with
a tall statue of Tadeusz Kościuśko in its center. I thought about Poland in
1981, when Jaruzelski announced martial law, and how awful Łódź must
have been then. Evidently the winter was brutally cold that year, and I doubt
anyone thought of Łódź as a city of colors. Twenty six years ago I was just
12 years old, and Poland was eight years away from freedom. I remembered
President Reagan telling us to put a light in the window for Poland, and how

Meanwhile, Back at Kresowa

even though my family consisted entirely of committed New Deal Demo-
crats, we’d done so.

I took a cab back to my apartment. It cost 13 złoty and 50 groszy. I gave

the driver 20 złoty and told him to keep the change. He looked to be about
50. I wondered what he’d been doing 26 years before, but I didn’t ask. I just
wanted to go inside and eat my dinner.

When I hear my friends speak of what Poland was like during the communist
times, and immediately after the fall of the system, I regret that I didn’t get
to see the place first-hand during those periods. My first visit to Łódź, and
Poland for that matter, didn’t come until October, 2001. The chairman of my
Department had forwarded to me an announcement for an American Studies
Conference at the University of Łódź. It expressed a particular interest in
Canadian topics, which appealed to me because I am interested in Canadian
government and politics, particularly cultural protection policy.

I prepared a proposal for the 2001 conference, received my acceptance,

bought the tickets and looked forward to visiting this mythical place called
Poland. After the terrorist attacks of 9-11, my mother tried to convince me
not to fly across the Atlantic in early October. I had my own fears and doubts,
but I went anyway.

We departed from the old international terminal at Detroit Metropolitan

airport. Of course, security-screening was heightened, and I arrived for the
flight many hours before the scheduled departure. Too many hours, as it
turned out, because I was forced to wait in the dingy lounge area for more
than three hours before my flight even boarded. I looked over the few other
passengers waiting for the flight to London Heathrow, and one compact, ner-
vous middle-aged man caught my attention. With his short, salt and pepper
hair and olive skin, I profiled him quickly as an Arab. He paced nervously
near the big windows where you could see the flights take off and land. I
wondered what evil plan he might be hatching, but I also tried to convince
myself that the security-screening would have detected anything suspicious
about the nervous little man. I even went and stood near him at the window
for a few moments, hoping he would say something so I could detect his
ethnic origins through his accent, but he didn’t speak.

Chapter Eight

Poland for the First Time

Poland for the First Time

The flight over was great because it was nearly empty. I had a row of three

seats to myself, and they served me two vegetarian curry dinners. It was one
of those planes where each passenger had his own TV screen built into the
back of the seat in front of him, so I was able to watch movies during most
of the flight. It was most comforting to laugh away with Blazing Saddles for
what must have been the twentieth time. I did think it was a strange choice to
show on a flight, but I was pleased that British Airways hadn’t censored any
of the movie’s incredibly offensive language.

Heathrow, of course, was a complicated and miserable experience that in-

cluded a bus ride to change terminals and additional security-screening. Our
flight to Warsaw was operated by the Polish national carrier Lot, and it was
definitely no frills. We packed onto the smaller plane, and as the flight at-
tendants began serving snacks, I noticed the nervous man from Detroit Metro
sitting a few aisles in front of me. I could hear him speaking in Polish with
the flight attendants, and I felt pretty ashamed for my attempt at profiling him
back in the States. I wasn’t ashamed just because I’d profiled the wrong guy,
but that I’d thought that way at all.

When I arrived in Warsaw I made most of the mistakes an American can

upon visiting Poland for the first time. A middle-aged man in a black leather
jacket approached me and asked me in English if I needed a taxi. I told him
I did, but I had to change money first. He waited patiently while I did so.
Then he drove me in his unmarked Mercedes to the Bristol Meridien Hotel
on Nowy Świat St. The ride was disillusioning, mainly because I’d never seen
so much graffiti anywhere, and I’m no stranger to big cities. The ride cost
around 100 złoty. At the time I thought it was a decent price, because with
the exchange rate at 4.25 złoty to the dollar, the ride cost less than $25.00. It
was only later that I read in a guidebook (I hadn’t brought one with me, and
actually bought my first guidebook to Poland in Warsaw) that I had made a
series of rookie mistakes.

First, the cabbies who approach you at the airport are part of a criminal

syndicate and charge many times the fair rate for a cab ride from Okęcie to
the city center. Second, the exchange rate at the airport is much lower than
at kantors in other parts of the city. Third, the Bristol Meridien, even with a
decent exchange rate pushing the nightly rate under $150 is not the sort of
place to stay if you actually want to meet anyone other than foreign business-
men or visiting government officials. Finally, get used to graffiti when you
visit Poland: it’s everywhere.

I’ve often wondered if the potentially disappointing contrast between the

imagined Poland and the real one is part of the reason why more Polish-
Americans don’t visit the mother land. Getting ripped off in the airport by
someone you’ve imagined somehow to be your “brother” in a place you’ve

Chapter Eight

romanticized as a land of happy and hardworking peasants is a real downer.
Viewing grey city walls covered in graffiti that, in the main, you don’t un-
derstand (and what you do understand are the occasional swastikas and stars
of David) is a hard welcome to the place of your ancestors. I’ve had to learn
to take Poland as it is.

During my first night in Warsaw it was still warm enough for some of the

pubs and restaurants in the Old Town to keep open their outdoor sections.
Polish Golden Autumn it is called. I stopped for a beer at the first place I saw,
just past Zygmunt’s Column at the entrance to the Old Town off Nowy Świat.
Inevitably I thought about my Polish grandparents and how much I’d like to
tell them about my visit to the motherland, but they were long gone. After a
few beers, I walked around the Old Town and stood mesmerized for a few
moments in front of two pictures posted near the central square. One is an
aerial shot of the Old Town after the 1944 Uprising, and there is not one un-
damaged building to be seen for miles. The second is of General Eisenhower
walking in the demolished square. Eisenhower once said he thought post-war
Warsaw was one of the saddest things he’d ever seen, and that he didn’t see
how it could ever possibly be rebuilt. But the Poles did rebuild it, in the most
ambitious post-war reconstruction project in all of Europe.

The next day, Sunday, I took a Polski Express bus to Łódź. We were let

out at Plac Dąbrowskiego and I hailed a taxi. The driver didn’t speak much
English, but I had written down the address of the American Studies program
at the University and he took me there, somewhat skeptically. He was right
to be skeptical, because the place was deserted. Naturally the conference was
being held somewhere else, but I hadn’t bothered to write down where, and
the driver certainly didn’t know. He said, “idea,” and drove me to a pool hall,
upstairs from which there was an internet cafe. I sent a quick e-mail to the
conference organizer, hoping he would respond with directions within the
five minutes I would be at the computer. Of course he did not, and none of the
few English-speakers in the place knew anything about the conference.

We drove around Łódź for a while thinking about what to do next. I was

just about to suggest he take me to a hotel, when he said, “idea,” again, and
drove to a rather brightly colored (by Łódź standards, anyway) ten or fifteen
story tower on Kopcinskiego Street. The sign on the awning said the Polish
for University of Łódź Conference Center and Hotel. It just had to be the right
place, I thought, and it was. I tipped the cabbie generously, and even with that
the fair was less than a third of what I’d paid for much less time and mileage
in Warsaw. The young conference manager told me I’d tipped way too much
by Polish standards, but after I explained all the circumstances of my journey,
he agreed the tip was fair. But he warned me to watch out for Polish cabbies.
Where were you in Warsaw? I thought.

Poland for the First Time

Most of the conference participants came from Europe, with a few Ameri-

cans and Canadians thrown in for good measure. The opening night dinner
consisted of roast pork, kasza and beets. I ate the roast even though I was a
vegetarian, because I didn’t want to have a fuss made over my food prefer-
ences. I told Wiesiek Oleksy, the professor in charge of the proceedings, that
normally I was a vegetarian, and he replied, “but not an extremist, I see.”

Two Brits, a Canadian, a Finn and I talked over dinner about wanting to

find the nearest bar as soon as we were finished eating. A student told us the
closest place was just a block away, but that we wouldn’t like it. He described
it as seedy. We decided to try our luck.

It was, without a doubt, the seediest bar I’d ever been in, with a cement

floor, wobbly wooden chairs, and unmatched formica tables. It was unheated,
and a grumpy old Pole sat behind the beaten wooden counter filling drink
orders and serving allegedly Chinese food from big filthy pots on the stove in
the kitchen. On the plus side, the price was right: 3.5 złoty for a half liter of
beer—less than ninety cents. The Brits, Finn, Canadian and I were delighted
when some other conference participants made their way to the dirty place.
Soon the international academics outnumbered the local drunks. They stared
at us a little, but if they were inclined to threaten us in any way I’m sure the
owner would have made them back down because of how much we were
contributing to his bottom line on a Sunday night.

We shared our adventure with the student managers of the conference the

next morning, and they said we really should try Piotrkowska Street. This is
the pedestrian heart of Łódź, with hundreds of “nice” bars. They said it was a
ten minute walk, but when we tried it later in the evening I was introduced to
another Polish phenomenon: dramatically underestimating the time it takes to
walk between two points. It took us half an hour walking at a brisk pace.

We sat in the outdoor section of a bar/restaurant called Quo Vadis. We

were seated near two women in Polish Army uniforms. The Canadian in our
group—a hearty old Nova Scotian with a red face and more of a brogue than
one would expect from someone from New Scotland—walked right up to the
women and asked playfully, “make love not war?” Of course they had no idea
what he was talking about, but they smiled. He chided us single guys in the
group about our reticence in not talking with these decidedly non English-
speaking girls, but after about half an hour, they left, and he let it drop. Later
in the evening, he ran off a pimp who offered us “many women” with a blunt,
“NOT interested!”

During the three nights we were in Łódź the little group of us drank to-

gether every night and bonded the way foreign travelers often do. Our last
night in Łódź we drank shots and beers at the seedy bar until closing. Our
train to the Warsaw airport left the next morning at 6:00, but that didn’t slow

Chapter Eight

us down. The student organizers had called for taxis the night before, and
they were waiting for us at 5:15 when we poured our hungover (or were we
still drunk?) bodies downstairs. There were two taxis. The first one, with two
Brits as passengers, took off into the darkness as the Old Nova Scotian and I
were still getting into the second one. No one had told the driver where to take
us, and he was exasperated when the first cab drove off. I think he’d intended
to follow him to our destination.

“Where!? Where!?” he asked.
I searched my mind for the right words for train station.
“Stacja pociągu?” I ventured.
“O.K.!” he said, and we drove off.
What an introduction to Poland, I thought. Three days in a city no tourist

buses ever visit. Even as the upset taxi driver was taking us away, I felt like
my life with Łódź was just beginning.

My friend Trevor visited my classes one Wednesday to recruit subjects for an
art project with which he was involved. He had to get 200 Polaroid photos of
English speakers and a brief audio recording of each person saying their name
and anything they might want to say about their name.

He chose a poor day to recruit, because attendance was terrible. Fewer

than half the students in the first two classes showed up, while the third—
American Government—had its usually good attendance. I left the room
while he did the photographing and recording because I wanted the students
to know it was voluntary, and that non-participation would not affect their
grade in any way. That’s such an American “ethics in research and education”
thing to do. I don’t think it even crossed the minds of the students to care if
their final grade—based as it is on one exam—would go up or down whether
or not they let Trevor photograph and record them.

After the American Government class, a German exchange student invited

Trevor and me to her dorm because she was sure she could recruit many of
the foreign students living on her floor. She was so enthusiastic and interested
in the project, and Trevor was so far from his 200 photo quota, there was no
way we could turn down her offer, even though she lived on the third floor of
the dorm (in the U.S. it would be the fourth), and there was no elevator.

She walked up and down the hall knocking on doors and explaining the

project. Trevor set up shop in the hallway, and the students came to him.
A Turkish girl said her mom just made up her name. A Frenchman said he
looked up his name once and found that only 35 people in all of France had
the same one. Yet, it still disappointed him there were so many. A Spaniard
complained that his parents had given him the third most common name in
Spain. Between my classes and the dorm, Trevor bagged over thirty subjects,
leaving him only about a hundred short of his quota.

Chapter Nine

Names and Pictures

Chapter Nine

“I owe you dinner at the Vietnamese place for this,” Trevor said.
“Not tonight,” I said, “let’s go to Raz Na Wozie.”
“What’s that?” he asked, “I mean, I know what the name means, but . . .”
“It’s a restaurant and bar I used to go to every week. They’ve got a bar-

tender who juggles, and after nine there’s dancing and karaoke.”

“Polish food, I assume?”
“Yes. Almost nothing over ten złoty.”
We rode the Pomorska tram to Plac Wolności for the short walk down to

Ulica Rewolution 1905, the street on which Raz Na Wozie is located.

“That student of yours is really something,” Trevor said.
“Yeah. Smart, beautiful, energetic . . . How old do you think she is?”
“She told me,” he said, “she’s 23. Of course I’m not looking, but she’s by far

the prettiest German woman I’ve ever seen.” We both had a good laugh at that.

We arrived at Raz Na Wozie around 9:00 and sat on a rough hewn wooden

bench beside an equally rustic looking table. Polish countryside is the theme of
Raz Na Wozie’s decoration, with a real fireplace and a blazing fire adding much
to the charm. We were seated next to two drunk middle-aged Polish women,
obviously on the prowl: overweight and showing too much skin, wearing too
much make-up, seductively smoking (or so they probably thought). They said
something in Polish to both of us, but only Trevor understood.

“What did they say?” I asked.
He pointed to something behind us and whispered that we should both look

at it so they wouldn’t think we were talking about them. So we both turned
our heads toward the wall behind us, and he pointed as he talked.

“They said ‘you can only get one drink here tonight. One beer,’” he said.
“What the Hell does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” he all but whispered.
Then the waiter came over. He was a nice English speaking kid who’d

served me before. I ordered a beer and potato pancakes with gulasz. Trevor
ordered the same, but discussed with the waiter, in Polish, which salads were
available. He settled on red cabbage and beets.

I was knocking back beers at a pretty decent pace, as the food took an

uncharacteristically long time to arrive, and the room filled with beautiful
women and enthusiastic men. The music had started almost immediately
after we arrived. The Wednesday music at Raz Na Wozie is usually decent:
no thumping Euro dance music, but instead mainly Polish pop and the oc-
casional ballad for slow dancing.

“There sure are a lot of beautiful women in here,” Trevor commented.
“Sure are,” I said, “but I don’t expect I could find a wife here.” That was a

reference to an ongoing line of semi-serious conversation between Trevor and
me about how young he is to be married (26) and how old I am not to be (38),

Names and Pictures

and how the difference is partly religion-based. He took my kidding about his
religion very well, and once in a while threw in a barb about Catholicism, or
the morals of a lapsed Catholic.

“You never know,” he said.
I cited the hackneyed “Miss Right versus Miss Right Now” joke, and we

both had a good laugh. I liked to test Trevor with crudity and drinking, and
he never judged me too harshly. He once told me he had been the designated
driver throughout high school, so he was probably used to it. I believe he
must have privately prayed for my soul, and just as is the case with my feel-
ings toward my mother’s efforts in that area, I appreciated it.

The unattractive women at the table next to us went to sit by the fire while

we were eating our dinners. They were replaced by a diminutive and stunning
redhead and her slightly larger brunette friend. I guessed them to be in their
late twenties, maybe early thirties. I leaned toward Trevor, nodded my head
slightly in their direction, and quietly said, “wow . . . ,” mainly in reference
to the redhead.

“The redhead is staring at you and smiling,” he said.
“I think she’s looking at you.”
“No, it’s definitely you,” he said, “I think she likes your beard.”
I decided there was a possibility that could be true. Red and red. Czerwony

i czerwony. I sneaked a glance at her. She most definitely was looking at me
and smiling. I managed a feeble smile back. Why does this stuff make me so
nervous, I wondered.

Then they played “the song.” The song is “It Is Already Evening” by a

relatively new Polish group called Feel. It’s a power pop song in the style of
Creed, with Eddie Vedder-style vocals that I almost certainly would not like
if performed in English by an American band. But I loved it while I was in
Poland. I heard the song everywhere while I was there: in cabs to and from
the airport, on TV at the pool hall, on jukeboxes, even coming out of a lower
floor in the dorm while we were walking up the stairs for the photos and re-
cording. I’d pointed it out to Trevor at the time, but he couldn’t really hear it.
I was glad they were playing it during dinner.

“That’s the song,” I said.
“Oh sure, I know it,” he said, “it’s playing everywhere now isn’t it?”
“I really like it,” I said.
“You should ask her to dance,” he said.
I considered doing the unthinkable and actually asking her to dance, but be-

fore I even had to make up my mind, an older man had her out on the floor.

“You are such a wimp,” Trevor said, “If you don’t ask her to dance I can’t

be your friend anymore.” I knew he was kidding.

“I’m just kidding,” he said, “but you really should ask her.”

Chapter Nine

She sat back down, and the older guy and his older friend joined them at

their table.

“Now I’m screwed,” I said.
“That means nothing. You don’t even know if she likes them.”
“I suppose,” I said, and sneaked another glance at the redhead. God, she

was beautiful, I thought: reddish blonde hair, blue eyes, an off both shoulders
blue knit top, with blue jeans and brown boots. Then I thought she may have
patted the bench next to her in a “why don’t you sit here?” kind of way.

“Did you see that?” Trevor asked. “Go sit down with her.”
I started to get up, but the older man was taking her back out on the dance

floor. She looked back at me with a “you had a chance, sucker” look.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said as I finished off my fifth half liter of Tyskie.
“If you leave here without at least talking to her, we can’t be friends any-

more.” I appreciated his support.

“Okay, when she comes back,” I said.
“I’m going to go outside and call Ashley,” Trevor said. “Do it!”
I did it. Of course she didn’t speak a word of English. The older man she’d

been dancing with actually translated for us. That was awkward. I told her
I thought she was beautiful, and she blushed. That just made her seem even
cuter. I told her I wasn’t a very good dancer. She told me her name was Ewa.
I told her my name, and gave her my business card. My business card! I felt
like such a dummy!

Then the DJ played Ryszard Rynkowski’s “Jedzie Pociąg z Daleka,” which

is a song about riding on a train. Polka bands in the U.S. play it, but their title
is “Anywhere but Warsaw,” because that is where the singer asks the train
to take him in the chorus. Almost everybody in the room got up to dance to
this one, and we snaked around the room as a great train. At least I got to put
my hands on Ewa’s hips and watch her beautiful little behind wiggle as we
moved around the room.

When the song ended, a younger guy grabbed Ewa’s arm for the next

dance. I gave up. I met Trevor at the door as he was coming back in after his
call to his wife.

“We should go,” I said, “we don’t want to miss the last tram.”
“Did you even talk to her?” he asked.
“I did,” I said.
“What’s her name?” he asked skeptically.
“Ewa,” I said, “but tonight’s not going to be my night. Too much competi-

tion.”

“We’ll never get you married this way,” he said. We both had a good

laugh.

“Sure we will,” I said, “just not tonight.”

Because my mother liked polka music, I grew up listening to all the greats:
Li’l Wally, Happy Louie, Marion Lush, Eddie Blazonczyk, The Dynatones.
It should be pointed out that these are Polish-style polka musicians, not Ger-
man, Slovenian or Czech. These distinctions are often lost on non-ethnic ears,
but they are very real and significant in terms of everything that matters about
music: instrumentation, tempo, and, of course, the language of the lyrics. I
have rarely been more offended than when a public TV station in Detroit tried
to woo Polish-American contributors by showing a fine documentary about
the history of Poles in America, then offering Frank Yankovic recordings
as premiums for contributions. “Yankovic is Slovenian,” I yelled at the TV,
and even called the station to complain. I suggested they wouldn’t dare offer
Mexican Mariachi music after a documentary on Cuban Americans.

Of course, when I was in my teen years I rejected polka music with a pas-

sion. The great Chicago polka musician Eddie Blazonczyk sings of doing the
same thing when he was young:

Later on while in high school
I rock and rolled and I was cool
Mom and dad said, “Edziu, co to jest?” (“Eddie, what is that?”)

My mom doesn’t speak Polish and she is of a generation to appreciate some
rock and roll, so she was not as upset by my rejection of polka, but I believe
the idea was the same. Everyone flees from cultural products their parents
like, while their parents just have to hope for their kids to return. Just as Ed-
die B. did in the song and in real life, I too returned to polka music. In fact,
by the time I was in my early thirties I was the host of my own polka radio
broadcast in Detroit.

Chapter Ten

Polka, Polka, Polka

Chapter Ten

A part-time polka DJ is one of the things I am meant to be, even though

I’ve only ever done it for a year total; two different six month stints to be
exact. But they were great times, and the perfect excuse to expand my polka
collection to over a thousand recordings. Even though I tried not to, I became,
especially around my Polish-American friends who do not like polka music,
the kind of Polish-American no one particularly likes. I mean The Prosely-
tizer.

The Proselytizer just can’t understand how any Polish-American doesn’t

love polka music. He plays music for them every time he gets the chance,
claiming polka isn’t just stupid dance music. “Listen to these lyrics!” he says.
He talks them into going to dances, with the belief that they’ll convert after
hearing just a few good songs.

Once he’s been to Poland, the Proselytizer gets even worse. Now he wants

his friends not just to hear polka bands play at the Knights of Columbus
Hall down the street, but he wants them to visit the Mother Land too. At the
very least he insists that they watch Wajda and Kieślowski films (especially
the Dekalog) to get a sense of the Polish soul. In retrospect I marvel at my
friends’ tolerance of my preaching.

The preaching must have had some positive effects because many of my

friends planned to visit me during my time in Poland as a Fulbright lecturer,
and most of them actually showed up. Heather and Marco were the first to
arrive, in mid-October.

Mid-October was a great choice of times to visit. The weather was still

reasonably warm, and their host was in good spirits because he’d already met
all of his students and found them to be not all that different from students
back in the States. In fact, I was starting to doubt the critiques some of the
former Łódź Fulbrighters had offered, and wondering why I had taken them
so seriously.

My friends Alex and Tony met up with us, which initiated a pattern for

these visits in Warsaw. We’d start out for dinner and drinks at Pub 7, a nauti-
cal themed bar off Plac Konstytucji, near the MDM Hotel. True to their char-
acters Tony would be gracious and interested, and Alex would be inquisitive
and friendly with my friends. Then we’d walk up Marszalkowska Street and
Tony would explain the architecture and Alex would take care of the politics.
Next, we’d cross the Saski Gardens and stop for a moment at the Tomb of
the Unknown. Then we’d cross the square in front of the Tomb, and Tony
would suggest a short-cut to the Old Town that by-passed the construction on
Krakowskie Przedmieście Street. Sometimes we elected to stumble through
the construction in order to see the churches and commercial buildings of that
impressive street. Often Alex would leave us there and head home, saying
she’s not a late night kind of person. We’d make it to the Old Town, visit a

Polka, Polka, Polka

few bars, including my favorite one in the basement of the Adam Mićkiewicz
Museum. I would invariably complain about the length of the walk, and Tony
would say that even his young American students call his Warsaw tours
“Martinico’s Death Marches.” But they weren’t really that bad.

I must have made that tour, or some variation of it, with half a dozen of my

friends, and it’s one of the things I missed most after my return. Once I had
seen Kraków and Gdańsk, Warsaw was not my favorite Polish city. However,
so many “insider” visits coupled with seeing it anew through the eyes of so
many of my friends gave me a love for the defiant and vital place. Its skyline
changes every time I visit, but its soul remains the same. Slowly new glass
and steel skyscrapers surround Stalin’s gift of the ghastly neo-gothic Palace
of Culture and Science, yet the benches at the end of Kościelna St. in the New
Town still provide a quiet place to look over the Wisła. History—often tragic
history—is everywhere, marked with plaques and candles, but the future is
right around the corner too.

After Marco and Heather’s visit, my friend Steve, who has probably en-

dured more of my proselytizing than anyone else, arrived in Poland about
the same time as another friend of mine. Steve’s been a real sport about it
because he is 100 percent Polish American and does in fact enjoy Polish food,
music and drink. He’s at best undecided about Polish cinema, especially the
Dekalog

, but he’ll endure the occasional late-night viewing of that grim set

of films.

We met up in Kraków rather than Warsaw because I was staying there for

an academic conference the weekend he was able to visit. I’d had the orga-
nizers book an extra room for him in the conference hotel. He flew into the
Kraków airport and was just settling into his room in the early evening when
I arrived back from the conference.

“Dzień freakin’ dobry,” he said as he opened the door.
“Dzień dobry, brother,” I replied, and we shook hands, “welcome to the

Mother Land. We’re meeting everyone for drinks in fifteen minutes.”

He’d arrived without his checked baggage so he had no opportunity for

a change of clothes after his overnight flight. He splashed a little water on
his face and we headed off to a classic Kraków cellar bar where most of the
conference participants had gathered for a beer before dinner. It was smoky,
crowded and loud. It was the perfect place to ward off the ill effects of jetlag
through the awesome power of Polish beer.

After a few pints of delicious, cold Żywiec—how many times have we

drank this together back in the States, and why did it never taste this good
we asked each other—we moved with the rest of the group to a wonderful
Italian restaurant for dinner. Red and white wine were the order of the day
there, and Steve bought several extra decanters for the table. We both flirted

Chapter Ten

with a pretty teacher who was participating in the conference. Her English
was terrific—in fact, her main role at the conference seemed to be to translate
for her school’s head teacher. Steve’s main line of flirtation was to defend his
mother’s use of a pinch of brown sugar on her goląbki.

“I have never heard of such a thing,” the pretty teacher said.
“Are you doubting my mother?” Steve teased.
“No, no,” she demurred, “It is just so new to me.”
After dinner a few of us went to yet another of Kraków’s cellar bars. I love

those places.

“I hate these places. Can’t we ever drink above ground?” asked Ewa, a

beautiful young civic education activist.

“C’mon,” I protested, “we have to show Steve the real Kraków.”
“Most of that is above ground,” she protested. After a round or two just the

three of us remained in the bar. The pretty teacher had to return with her boss
to their room at a reasonable hour. A middle-aged Polish professor left at the
same time as the secretary of the academic program at Jagellonian University
that was sponsoring the conference. He failed to make it back for day two of
the conference. Steve, Ewa, and I drank and talked the night away. A little of
The Proselytizer came out during the conversation.

“On the bus from Warsaw to our orientation in Wrocław, the Fulbright

Commission showed us Wajda’s Man of Marble” I said.

“That’s the one about the bricklayer, isn’t it?” Steve offered.
“Yeah, the bricklayer the communists love and then hate,” I said, “and

Krystyna Janda’s performance as the young filmmaker is just great, too,” I
said.

“Krystyna Janda is my aunt,” Ewa said.
I couldn’t believe it! There I sat, just one degree of separation from one of

Poland’s great actresses. She even plays a role in the Dekalog! We talked a little
bit about her decline into relative obscurity, some poor choices of roles, and her
recent activism on behalf of the rights of a transgendered Pole. As conversa-
tions must, this one moved on, mercifully before I could gush too effusively.
Then Ewa said her goodbyes and Steve and I stumbled back to our hotel.

The next morning I made it back to the conference a little green around the

gills, but nothing that bitter Polish instant coffee and a lot of bottled water
couldn’t cure. That afternoon my friend Marty arrived. He was staying in the
same room as Steve, and I think he awakened him with his late afternoon ar-
rival. A much reduced group from the conference hit the bars that night. We
started out with visits to a couple of jazz clubs; one featured fusion jazz which
I don’t much like, while the other was soon overrun with obnoxious drunk
businessmen. We walked back toward out hotel around midnight, still thirsty
for more. So we stopped at a steamy bar crowded with karaoke singers.

Polka, Polka, Polka

Often Poles sing western pop music at karaoke, but I like it more when they

sing disco polo, which are folk songs played on cheap sounding synthesizers
and drum machines. It’s not considered serious music, but Poles seem to love
it, especially when they’re drinking. So it’s popular for wedding receptions
and karaoke. I like the songs because many of the polka bands in America
play them and so I know some of the lyrics and melodies. Disco polo domi-
nated this bar.

Just after the three of us sat down at the bar, a beautiful young blonde ap-

proached us. Upon discovering we spoke only English, she informed us in our
native language that she might have lost her job that night for calling her boss
something terribly offensive. But she was so drunk she didn’t care anymore.

Steve flirted with her for a while, but she was too far gone. So we drank a

couple of beers and listened to the terrible singing. I sang along with a few
songs from my barstool, but even after all the beer I’d consumed I wasn’t
foolish enough to get up and sing one from the stage.

On our way back to the hotel, we stopped for a kebab sandwich at a stand

we had been informed was the best in Kraków. Because I know enough Pol-
ish to do so, I ordered for the three of us. This also meant I had to fend off the
diminutive drunk who begged us for money. After I paid for our sandwiches,
I gave the drunk a few złoty while the men working the kebab stand yelled at
him to go away. One bar between the kebab vendors and our hotel was still
open at that late hour, but they had a “no kebabs” sign in the front window,
so we went back to our rooms to eat. It was a wise choice. We had to catch
an early train to Warsaw the next morning.

Part way through the semester I’d made a sort of resolution to try to get
more discussion going in my classes. I’d become more comfortable with my
students, and I think they had become accustomed to my informal style. I’d
delivered many of what I thought to be pretty good lectures, but I hadn’t man-
aged to draw them out very often. I’d been warned, even by those professors
who enjoyed their teaching experiences in Poland, that the students are un-
duly deferential to their professors, and are just not that accustomed to being
asked their opinions. But I value intelligent in-class discussions, and thought
I should try it in Poland.

I chose a pretty auspicious time in American political history to try to get

my American Politics class talking, given that the topic of the day was the
presidency, and Barack Obama was shaking things up back home. Also, ex-
periences outside the classroom had convinced me that the Poles were pretty
interested in American Presidents and in race relations.

I started the class period off by asking the students to name the greatest

presidents.

“Lincoln,” came the first reply.
I wrote his name and 1861-1865 on the chalkboard.
“What did he achieve?” I asked.
“He won the Civil War,” came the almost immediate answer.
“Who else?” I asked.
“F.D.R!”
“Excellent,” I said and wrote down 1933-1945. “His accomplishments?”
“He won the war—for you,” a young man said, making sure I knew he

didn’t consider all of Roosevelt’s war policies to be beneficial for Poland.

“Okay, there is another president I always hear Poles say they love,” I

hinted.

Chapter Eleven

A Great Day of Teaching

A Great Day of Teaching

“Reagan,” said one of the three smart young women who sat side by side

by side in the front row and took the most copious notes of any of the students
in the room.

I wrote 1981-1989 on the board and asked, “and what did Reagan do?”
“He fought the communists,” someone said.
“And how did he do that?” I asked.
There was a long pause. There’s always a long pause at this point in the

discussion, even in the States. They know we didn’t go to war with the Soviet
Union during Reagan’s term. They usually don’t immediately think of the
proxy wars in Afghanistan and Central America. They almost never think in
terms of the trillion dollar military build-up.

“How do you say it?” one of the smart young women asked, “Star Wars?”
“Well, yes, that symbolizes how he did it,” I said. “We could afford to

spend a trillion dollars on the military, and if the Russians tried to keep up it
would bankrupt them because their economic system was so bad.”

“He helped Solidarity, right?” someone asked.
“Yes, he did,” I said, “but there are debates about how much. Why didn’t

the U.S. warn activists before martial law was declared, if in fact we knew it
was coming?” I asked.

“Maybe you didn’t know.”
“Maybe so,” I said, “but there is no doubt he hated communism.”
“And that was a good thing to hate,” someone said.
“It was,” I replied, “and what about his domestic policies?”
This question elicits silence in the United States as well. The events we

were speaking of happened before they were born, so to them it is ancient
history.

“Tax cuts,” I said.
“Trying to cut social programs?”
None of it rang a bell with them. But I listed on the board the three classic

Reagan planks: cut taxes, reduce social spending, increase defense spending.
Most of the students dutifully wrote them down, but I also noted that one of
the only two male students was actually copying a stack of notes loaned to
him by another student. I couldn’t tell from the front of the classroom if they
were just the notes he never took during my class, or if they were the notes he
never took from all of his classes. He also flirted occasionally with the pretty
student seated next to him, but it was never loud or sustained enough to jus-
tify a shushing. Clearly this guy is a “professional” bad student, I thought.

Then I explained the President’s formal powers as granted by the Constitu-

tion and modified over time. As always, the lecturing tends to take a bit of the
wind out of the discussion, but there is no way to explain the president’s execu-
tive, legislative, judicial, diplomatic and military powers without naming them,

Chapter Eleven

describing them, and offering examples. The examples usually elicit some
response from the students. I tried some different examples than I normally use
in the U.S. in an effort to connect with the Polish students.

When discussing the president’s diplomatic powers I used the example

of the Baltic states that were once part of the Soviet Union, and why it mat-
tered that the United States never recognized the legitimacy of Soviet control
over them. I would never have used this example in the United States, but I
thought it would resonate with the Poles, and it did. But I also used some of
the same examples I use back home. For example, I love discussing the 1967
Detroit riots as an example of the president’s power to use the military in
domestic situations. My Bowling Green students are usually pretty interested
in the death and destruction in Detroit in 1967, and it sometimes leads to a
discussion of why the National Guard failed to put down the riots, which in
turn leads to a discussion of what kind of people were in the Guard in 1967,
what they were avoiding, and what kind of people served in Vietnam instead.
But my Polish students weren’t very interested.

They did, however, seem to find any topic that involved the place of race

in contemporary American politics very interesting. During a discussion with
the American Studies Student Association, race came up in the form of a
question about the electability of a black presidential candidate. From there
the conversation turned to conflicts between African Americans and some
recent immigrants; for example, between blacks and Koreans in Los Angeles
and blacks and Chaldeans in Detroit.

“Why do blacks fail to get ahead?” a student asked.
I gave a politically correct, and accurate, answer that suggested a combi-

nation of factors including both racism and some social pathologies in many
black communities as the causes. But the student wanted more.

“Are they lazy?”
I was taken aback by the directness of the questioning, but I tried to ex-

plain the fallacy of ascribing individual characteristics to an entire group of
people.

In that day’s class discussion of the American Presidency we were des-

tined to discuss race again, given Barack Obama rise to top-tier presidential
candidate status. But before settling into that, I wanted to describe how
political parties select presidential candidates and how the electoral college
works. This is a difficult task even among American students who’ve sup-
posedly learned all this in high school. I expected it to be nearly impossible
with Polish students, who likely had heard little about our little 18th century
anachronism.

I wrote the following words in big block letters on the board:

A Great Day of Teaching

Nominee
Conventions
Delegates
Primaries
Caucuses
People

Then I explained that major party presidential candidates in the U.S. are

chosen by delegates to national conventions, who in turn have been chosen
in primaries and caucuses. I even explained the differences between caucuses
and primaries. When I cited the prominence of Iowa and New Hampshire in
the process and noted their unrepresentative demographics, the students were
every bit as appalled as my American students normally are.

Then in another column next to the words above, I wrote the following

list:

Electoral College
538
House Plus Senate
50 State Elections
Winner Take All
Majority
House of Representatives

As I was explaining that each state gets a number of electoral votes equal to

its number of senators and representatives, and that the plurality popular vote
getter in a state wins all of the electoral votes in 48 of the states (Nebraska
and Maine being the exceptions), and that to win the presidency a candidate
must get a majority of the electoral votes or, failing that, the House of Rep-
resentatives chooses the president, the background chatter in the room began
to grow. Of course I couldn’t hear the specifics of most of it and it was all in
Polish so even if I had been able to hear it, I would have been hard-pressed to
understand it all, but I sensed it was expressions of confusion, about what I
was trying to explain. And I loved it. I was excited because the vast majority
of the minds in the room were intellectually engaged with the subject!

I usually sum up my discussion of complicated matters like this with an

intentionally long, confusing and (I hope) funny sentence. That day’s efforts
went: “So, small numbers of Americans from demographically unrepresenta-
tive states start a selection process through primaries and caucuses that cost
tens of millions of dollars to nominate both parties’ presidential candidates

Chapter Eleven

who then compete in a series of winner take all elections in the states, but
most states are not very competitive so they concentrate all their efforts in
a handful of competitive states like Michigan, Ohio, and Florida, and even
though they have only three electoral votes, states like Wyoming are actually
OVER-represented in the process (do the math), which some say helps Re-
publicans, and if no candidate gets a majority of votes in the electoral college,
then the House chooses the president, but they don’t vote as individuals, but
as state delegations.”

They laughed. It worked. I am absolutely certain that not all of them un-

derstood everything about the selection process of the President of the United
States (because I know my U.S. students don’t either), but for close to an hour
and a half their minds were engaged in the process of critical thinking about
presidential greatness and the complexity and expense of choosing the most
powerful person in the world. It was exhilarating.

“And after all this a black man will emerge as president?” a student

asked.

“Hmmmmmmm. . . . Maybe?” I said, and they laughed a little again.
“Well, that’s enough for today, if you have any questions, come and see

me,” I said, and most of the students noisily filed out of the room. A few
stayed behind. Some of them were catching up with notes from missed
classes, but a few were going over what we had just covered.

The “professional” bad student returned the notes he’d borrowed from the

girl who sat next to him. He smiled at me politely and nodded as he left the
classroom. I was sure he’d missed out on most of the discussion, and it didn’t
bother me at all, because it reminded me of what a professor I respect a great
deal had once told me about teaching: “Do it for the good ones.” For at least
one class session during my lectureship in Poland, “the good ones” meant
almost all of them.

As I mentioned earlier, teaching is not a professor’s only responsibility. We
are obligated to produce original research and to share that research with our
scholarly community in the form of conference presentations, journal articles
and books. During my Fulbright lectureship I attended two conferences in Eu-
rope: one in Kraków and the other in England, at the Ditchley Foundation.

I’d been invited to the Ditchley gathering before I left for Poland in Sep-

tember. I received an e-mail invitation to the conference entitled “How Young
People Form Political Opinions” from Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the Ditchley
Foundation’s Director and Britain’s ambassador to the United Nations at the
time of the invasion of Iraq. Even though the topic was spot- on with what I
research (the first book I published was entitled Entertainment and Politics:
the Influence of Pop Culture on Young Adult Political Socialization

), I was

initially skeptical of the invitation. Most professors receive quite a few invita-
tions to conferences that are more interested in making a financial profit by
luring professors to a warm locale than they are about serious research. Plus,
the “Sir” appended to Greenstock’s name, rather than reassuring me, actually
made me more skeptical. I smelled a rat—some new twist on the old Nige-
rian lottery scam. So I called the Ditchley Foundation, and without exactly
intending to do so, asked if they were a scam. A proper Englishwoman on the
other end of the line said to me, “Professor Jackson, we are most assuredly
legitimate.” She let me know that I had been invited because they had read a
journal article I’d written. Of course I agreed to attend.

I decided to spend a few days in London before going out to Ditchley,

which is about an hour train ride away. En route I planned to spend a day
and night in Warsaw. Around that time Fulbrighters were asked to attend a
half-day mid-semester meeting, and I believed a bit of a vacation from Lódź

Chapter Twelve

Warsaw, London, and Oxfordshire

Chapter Twelve

was in order. It would mean missing a full slate of Wednesday classes, but the
students assured me they wouldn’t mind having a day off.

Not all of the Fulbrighters I’d previously met at the Embassy made it to

the meeting in Warsaw, but most did. The first order of business was to dis-
cuss any problems we were facing, and many of my colleagues offered what
sounded to me like very legitimate complaints about housing, compensation
and working conditions. I kept my mouth shut, because I didn’t believe I’d
been abused at all compared with people who’d had real difficulties getting
paid, or having necessary renovations done on their apartments. Of course I
never found out how much money my apartment cost or even if I was pay-
ing for it, nor how much (if anything) my internet connection cost. I think I
paid Polish taxes, which amounted to 20 percent of my university-paid sal-
ary, but understood that I might get some of that back. I did end up getting
assigned Saturday classes, which I did not expect, but that hardly seemed
worth complaining about, when other people (especially students) were being
completely ignored by their host universities.

One student, whom I had not particularly liked at the orientation because he

usually ignored the lectures and wrote in his journal or folded origami (yes,
folded origami), presented himself much better at the mid-semester meeting.
He sounded more intelligent and confident, and he was teaching about five
sections of basic English composition, something he had never done before.
He said he was loving it and his classes were going great. Someone asked him
if he’d been provided curriculum materials, and he just laughed and said of
course not. I thought that made his achievement all the more impressive.

Another very intelligent young woman who’d recently graduated from

college was assigned to the English department at the University of Poznań.
Her superiors all but ignored her for the first few weeks, and would only
meet with her very briefly after that. It turned out they had only requested a
Fulbright teaching assistant because they thought it was prestigious and they
knew how to fill out the forms. They really didn’t know what to do with
her—they did not want to give her courses to teach, and none of the profes-
sors had much for her to do, although they were very friendly to her and
seemed to like having her around. So she set up her own tutoring operation
and recruited students outside of classes. All she wanted from the university
was a little office space, which at the time of the meeting had not been forth-
coming -- again not because they didn’t like her, but because space is at such
a premium at Polish universities (three of us shared my office in Lódź, which
was just a little bigger than my private office in Bowling Green).

We all complained about the declining value of the dollar, but the Fulbright

staff assured us there was nothing they could do about that. After the meeting
we ate dinner at a Bavarian themed restaurant, but everyone was disappointed

Warsaw, London, and Oxfordshire

with their food. Many of us had heard good things about the place, but they
weren’t on their game that day. Many of us were staying in Warsaw for the
night (or were living there), so we planned to go out for the evening. But we
had a bit of business to attend to before the fun.

First was the book exchange. Some of us had been reading quite a bit since

arriving in Poland, especially those of us who do not speak the language very
well. So we agreed to exchange books. I traded some Hemingway, John Ir-
ving and Nick Hornby for some different John Irving.

Our next project was a little stranger. A Polish graduate student friend of

the resourceful woman in Poznań was writing a dissertation on changes in the
American pronunciation of the letters “y” and “i.” She wondered if we each
would be willing to read a list of words into a recorder for him. Most of us
agreed, and met up after dinner at a Warsaw Fulbrighter’s apartment for the
recording sessions. It was a long, strange list, because we had to follow each
word with the same phrase: “one more time”:

Ice, one more time
Bike, one more time
Thick, one more time
Pyre, one more time

It proved to be only moderately annoying, and the graduate student gave each
of the participants a chocolate candy after his or her reading.

Our third project before going out for the evening was to help our friend

Trevor with the Polaroid photo and name project. Each of the readers of “i’s”
and “y’s” dutifully lined up to be photographed and to talk about their names.
Tony’s description was the best I ever heard because he channeled Groucho
Marx with jokes such as, “I was named after my father who was named after
his father who was named after his father . . .” It was quite hilarious.

Then we all went out in search of a good bar. The first place we visited

was right next to the Novotel Hotel at the corner of Marszalkowska and
Jerozolimskie Streets in the center of Warsaw. We sat upstairs and made
multiple beer-runs to the bar downstairs. The first round of four beers cost
36 złoty—nine each, which is close to four bucks. By the second round our
four beers cost 37 złoty. Ridiculous Warsaw prices, so we moved on to the
un-named bars in the old Pewex store off Nowy Świat. The eight of us had the
basement to ourselves, and we drank and talked about our experiences. These
were the people who loved, or at least really liked, Poland -- even some of
the strange and difficult stuff. It felt very reassuring to talk with them, and I
began to feel even better about how I was handling the experience, especially
my classes. When the evening was over I really wanted a kebab or a falafel

Chapter Twelve

but no place that served them was open, so I settled for zapiekanka, which
is stale baguette with a thin layer of cheese baked on top and ketchup and
mayonnaise squirted on for good measure. Polish street pizza. It’s much more
appealing on the way home from the bar than on the way to it.

The next day I flew to London a bit hung over and a little queasy in the

stomach. My flight was stupidly arranged: on the way there I had to connect
through Frankfurt, and on the way back through Munich—but to arrange it
any other way would have made it cost much more. However, I was pleased
with the efficiency of German airports, and I made both connections with
plenty of time to spare.

My hotel in London was near Paddington Station, on an express train-line

from Heathrow. It cost 17 pounds—about 35 dollars. Damn the dropping
dollar, I thought.

When I arrived at Paddington I was unsure where my hotel was, so I ap-

proached a couple of businessmen in the taxicab line and asked if they were
from London. They told me they were from Liverpool. The heavier set and
more friendly of the two looked over my map with me, but we couldn’t make
heads or tails of it, so he offered to let me share their taxi. The ride was quick,
and he refused to let me pay for even a penny of it.

In the brief ride he asked me what I missed about being away from home.

One of the things I mentioned was football, and we joked about our coun-
tries’ using the same name for such different games. The heretofore silent
businessman then said he’d played two years on offense for the London
Monarchs of N.F.L. Europe. His colleague joked about his presence being
the reason the team was so terrible—and it was clear they’d had this con-
versation before.

I checked into my hotel, and made my way to my room. The first thing I

noticed was that it was the size of a small prison cell—barely big enough for
the bed, and so narrow that I could touch both walls with my outstretched
arms. What I noticed next about the room was much more disturbing. It
seemed that someone was living in it already. There were two pairs of wom-
en’s sandals on the floor, a pile of clothes on the bed, a used toothbrush and
comb in the bathroom, and a stack of magazines on the floor. I went back to
the desk and told the clerk why I wanted a different room. He checked the
situation and promptly gave me another room, but he didn’t really apologize
or seem surprised by the mix-up. I wasn’t surprised either: I’d been warned
the hotel situation in London could be pretty tough.

I took a walk around the Paddington area, and while I did not love it at

first, it certainly grew on me, especially the ethnic and racial diversity. Poland
is 97 percent Polish. You don’t see many blacks, Asians, or for that matter
anyone but Poles. Paddington is different, and I admit it took some getting

Warsaw, London, and Oxfordshire

used to being around people who looked very different than me, even after
only a few months in Poland.

I bought a pint at a pub called “Pride of Paddington,” but I was later in-

formed by a Londoner who lives in the area that the pub is anything but the
pride of the neighborhood. On the plus side, when I entered the place the
video juke box was playing a song by The Jam, which made the place feel
especially English to me. On the downside, on the TV sets that showed the
videos there was a constant scroll about thieves working the area, the need
for vigilance, and the pub’s refusal to take responsibility for any lost or stolen
articles. Pride of Paddington indeed, I thought. I did eat their fish and chips
for dinner, however, and I thought it was delicious.

Then I walked the neighborhood for a bit, but returned to my hotel quite

early because I had some annoying business to attend to the next morning.

When I’d agreed to participate in the Ditchley conference, they had in-

formed me the conference details would arrive about a month before the start
of the event. With about three weeks to go, nothing had arrived via e-mail,
which I’d assumed was how they would communicate with me. Well, they
had sent the information by regular mail. When they finally re-sent it again
via e-mail, I was initially distressed to learn that dress at Ditchley was “smart
casual.” A quick internet search for the meaning of that concept reassured me
that black jeans with a jacket would be acceptable. But for the closing dinner,
“black tie is our preference, otherwise a dark business suit.”

I don’t own a business suit, dark or otherwise. I couldn’t buy a suit in

Poland because I was certain no store would carry my size. I’d never seen a
big and tall store in Poland (they would go out of business). I was screwed.
But I quickly went online and ordered a suit from J.C. Penney’s. I wasn’t
confident the right-sized suit would arrive in time for my trip, and of course
it didn’t. So I did a Google search on “big and tall London” and wrote down
the location of a store called Rochester Big and Tall. I figured I could buy a
black sport coat and wear it with black jeans and pass it off as an actual suit
in the (hopefully) dim light of Ditchley Manor.

It looked to be about a mile or two walk from my hotel. It was raining that

morning, and it very windy, but not too cold. I set out on the walk down Sus-
sex Garden Drive to Hyde Park and all the way across the park to Knights-
bridge. From Knightsbridge I would have to go down Brompton Road, but I
knew not how far. But on arriving in the area where I thought the store should
be, I saw Harrod’s department store right in front of me, and Rochester across
the street. I felt unbelievably lucky.

A thin black man helped me try on jackets. I noted that all the attendants

in the store were as thin as he was, and I didn’t like it one bit. Couldn’t they
reserve the jobs at a big and tall store for big and tall people? The first jacket

Chapter Twelve

I tried on fit perfectly, but it cost 650 pounds, about $1,300. We worked down
to a significantly less expensive jacket, but still more than I had ever paid
for a piece of clothing in my life. The woman who cashed me out asked if I
was a permanent resident of the U.K.—something about a V.A.T. rebate if
I were. I told her I was an American living in Poland. She said that she too
was from Poland—Kraków to be specific—but I’d already detected that from
her accent. I told her I was teaching at Lódź. “Not very beautiful, is it?” she
asked. I said I liked it anyway. I told her that a friend of mine taught at Jagel-
lonian University in Kraków, so I was able to visit there occasionally. She
said she’d graduated from Jagellonian, and I suspected she did not attend the
best university in Poland to learn how to sell big and tall clothing in London,
but I did not ask her about her major.

I spent the rest of the day doing London tourist things: Buckingham Palace,

Big Ben and Parliament. I drank a pint in a pub on Parliament St. called the
Red Lion. It was decorated for Christmas and full of well-dressed business-
men and women chatting away. And Bruce Springsteen’s “The River” played
in the background. America is everywhere, I thought.

During the conference at Ditchley I talked about political socialization

with some of the most intelligent and best-informed people I have ever met.
I met the youngest member of the British Parliament and an American who’d
moved to Great Britain in the 1970s and become the chief pollster for the
Labor Party. The attendees included a professor from Maryland I should
have met a long time earlier, because we do very similar research on young
people’s participation in politics. He ended up recommending me to a blog-
ger at Arianna Huffington’s Post, who then cited some of my research as the
Iowa caucuses approached. I met Robin Lustig of the B.B.C. and Sir Jeremy
Greenstock, who served at Great Britain’s ambassador to the United Nations
during the lead-up to the Iraq War.

Because the Ditchley Foundation operates on the Chatham House rules, I

may not cite anyone’s specific comments. Yes, I felt a little out of my league.
But only a little, and that felt pretty good. As I boarded the plane at Heathrow
to return to Poland, I felt a little like I was going home, and that felt even
better.

One late-December Saturday, after my 12:00 to 1:30 class (which actually
lasted for only an hour because I didn’t want to try to teach the Presidency
and Congress in the same session), I walked around Łódź a bit. Specifically,
I was looking for a bar called the Baghdad Café, which is popular among
students, located at 45 Jaracza Street. But I couldn’t find it. Instead I found
a bar with the names of the proprietors printed on the sign, which always
makes a bar seem like a good prospect to me. I decided to go there later in
the evening.

When I returned to the place around 8:00 after a meal at Ramzes, the res-

taurant where the drunk lads had cornered me some weeks before, my imme-
diate impression of the place was not a good one. Whereas during the day the
bar was dimly lit by strings of white Christmas lights, at night it was bright
and fluorescent and full of hard, ceramic surfaces, with no wood, and lots of
cigarette smoke. On the plus side, beers were only three złoty sixty groszy,
not much more than you’d pay at a convenience store. The clientele was a
little rougher around the edges than the crowd at Kresowa. Nobody seemed
to be the talking kind; instead they drank their cheap beers and smoked with
their heads down, alone. I stayed for just one, inhaled enough second hand
smoke for the week, then left.

And that’s how this becomes another story about Kresowa. Because it was

Friday, the place was crowded. Zbyszek poured me a beer and I had to take
a spot toward the back, near where the owner normally sat with his cronies,
and close to the incredibly cluttered and curtained off area that serves as his
office.

Zbyszek was busy pouring drinks, and we had only occasional moments of

conversation. I noticed a middle-aged man with long stringy grey hair, silver
wire rimmed glasses and several days of grey stubble working his way around

Chapter Thirteen

Another Bar

Chapter Thirteen

the place, talking to the people he knew. Once he was out of earshot, Zbyszek
said, “He is a bass player.”

“In your band?”
“No, no. He is terrible. He gets a lot of money from the juke boxes he

owns—he owns the juke box here—so he has the best bass guitar available.
But he doesn’t play it well. He will not practice.”

“I see,” I said, “my musician friends often speak of guys who buy the best

equipment, but cannot really play.”

Then the bass player returned to the bar and commenced to trade piles of

Polish change for paper money (Polish paper currency starts at the ten złoty
bill). Zbyszek needed the change for what was becoming a busy evening.

After the bass player walked away, Zbyszek showed me a twenty and a ten

and said, “my lovely tips. I have been working since eleven this morning.”

“Why are you working so much?”
“The third bartender was fired. He was drinking on the job and stealing.

Now it is just me and my woman every day,” he said, and went to pour an-
other beer.

In my earlier visits to Kresowa, the same small, older man had been there

working on a lap top. This time I had to push past him to get to my spot around
the bar, and I noticed he was playing solitaire on the laptop. He’s about a foot
shorter than I am, about five one or five two, and once he was wearing a red
sport coat, which I thought looked quite sharp. He had thinning hair and a
medium thick pair of what seemed to be communist era eyeglasses—almost
circular lenses, with light brown frames—Jaruzelski glasses. He’s no looker,
but a few times I’d seen him sitting with a very beautiful woman who looked
to be ten or twenty years his junior. I certainly respected that.

This particular night, though, his mission in the bar was to help hang the

Christmas lights. I have no idea how or why he was assigned the task, but
the owner gave him the tangled lights as he was leaving with six big cans of
dog-food and a Tupperware tub of red bigos. The little man couldn’t untangle
the lights on his own, so the grey-haired bass player helped him. They would
argue, pull a section apart, then wrap the whole long string between two
chairs like people sometimes do with yarn on a pair of hands. The progress
was slow, the arguments intense. It was, I believe, a very Polish moment:
two Poles with tangled Christmas lights, and three opinions about how best
to untangle them.

Then Zbyszek said, “I want to give you my Christmas recording.”
“I love Polish Christmas songs,” I said, and sang a few lines of “Dzisiaj w

Betlejem (To Bethlehem Today).”

Dzisiaj w Betlejem, dzisiaj w Betlejem
Wesoła nowina

Another Bar

Że Panna Czysta, że Panna Czysta
Porodziła syna!

In response he said, and this is a literal quote, “It makes a Polish man happy
to hear an American sing that!”

I have never been prouder of my love for Poland and my Polish pronun-

ciation skills. Then we both turned our attention to the two stooges working
on untangling the Christmas lights. They had them all strung between the
chairs, and now it was time to hang them from the top of the tree (yes there
was a small Christmas tree in Kresowa) and on the rafters extending in a
semicircle from the bar. This required the little man to stand on a barstool,
which, of course was a hilarious sight. Every time I needed a chuckle I just
looked to my left and there was the little man wearing Jaruzelski glasses
stringing Christmas lights as they were handed to him by the greasy-haired
bass player.

How they argued! And what a mess they made of the job! Finally the little

man carefully worked his way off the barstool, packed his laptop, and an-
nounced he was leaving. The bass player said something to him in Polish that
I imagine had something to do with the job being only half done. I did hear
the word “jutro” which meant, I think, they would finish the job the next day.
Soon after that I left Kresowa too. After all, I had to teach the next day.

I decided to buy a few beers to drink while writing emails back to the

States. The largest chain of convenience stores in Poland is called Żabka.
They’re everywhere. On the way back home from Kresowa I stopped at one
near the tram stop for beers and a cigar. I bought a four-pack of Warka—5.7
percent alcohol, for a little better than nine złoty. I asked the clerk, in perfect
Polish I must say, if she had any of the delightful Żabka coffee mugs that I’d
been given by clerks at other locations. The mugs are among my favorite Pol-
ish possessions: they are yellow, with a cartoon of a small green frog looking
mischievously up and to the left. She said they were all out, but gave me a
yellow balloon instead.

During December in Lódź I experienced some of the shortest days I have ever
seen. It would get light around 7:30, and be completely dark by around 4:00.
It was cloudy nearly every day, so even when it was supposed to be light, it
was still pretty dark. When my friend Marty visited he told me scientists be-
lieve a person needs only fifteen minutes a week of sunshine in order to stay
sane and healthy. I’m not sure I always got that much in the winter in Lódź.
But I never felt particularly depressed, and I didn’t suffer the symptoms of
vitamin D deficiency. I think it helped that it rarely became brutally cold.

On a typical non-teaching Saturday, I would ride the tram from my dor-

mitory to Piotrkowska Street. On my way out of the apartment I would stop
to pet one of the three cats that belonged to an old woman who also had an
apartment in the dorms. Only the black one was fearless enough always to
let me pet her, while the grey tiger-striped kitties usually skittered away from
my outstretched hand.

On arriving at Piotrkowska Street one Saturday afternoon, I withdrew 500

złoty from the bank machine. One of the happiest surprises of my time in
Poland was that I was paid a decent salary from the University on top of my
Fulbright grant money. Rent and internet charges were supposed to come
out of the university salary, but nobody could tell me how much any of that
cost. The receptionist at the front desk of the dorm where I collected my mail
speculated that the apartment was free, because I was a guest of the univer-
sity, but her guess was no better than anyone else’s.

My first stop was the Totolotek betting shop. I always chuckled at the name

because it sounded a little like, “Total Low Tech,” which it most certainly
was. There were no self-betting machines like there are in the racetracks I
gamble at in the States, and instead of bubble sheets that must be filled out

Chapter Fourteen

A Day on Piotrkowska Street

A Day on Piotrkowska Street

with a number two pencil, you wrote out your choices on whatever paper you
could find and handed them to the clerk.

I like to gamble. I visit the standard-bred horse racetrack in Toledo nearly

every week, and I’ve been going there long enough to have developed friend-
ships with the other horseplayers, who threw a very warm going away party
for me before I left for Poland. Because I’m not much of a handicapper of the
harness races, I purchase picks from a handicapping service, which once pro-
duced my greatest gambling victory ever (so far): a $12.00 investment paid
about $750.00. But in Poland I didn’t bet on the ponies. Instead I wagered
on Futbol Amerykański—American football—and only on the NFL, because
college games were unavailable.

I put 100 złoty on the NFL games on Sunday, December 23, 2007:

•

50 złoty on the Detroit Lions minus 5.5 points. My theory was if Coach
Rod Marinelli couldn’t get guys who have no chance at the playoffs moti-
vated to play for their jobs and for pride, then nobody could.

•

30 złoty on Cleveland minus 3.5 at Cincinnati. Cleveland should easily win
a rivalry game for a playoff berth, I thought.

•

20 złoty at 9 for 1 on Miami against New England. New England’s perfect
season getting ruined by the lousy contemporary version of the last perfect
team? I figured that was the kind of weird thing that sometimes happens
in the NFL.

I went 0-3.

I stayed at the betting shop for several minutes after I’d placed my football

bets to watch a harness race on TV. I looked over the program, and because
I know the terms and their usual location on the page so well, the translation
from Polish was no problem. I thought about making a wager, but I didn’t. In
harness racing, they say you bet the drivers, and of course I didn’t know who
any of these guys were. Also, I preferred to keep alive the streak of more than
90 days without having made a horse wager.

They ran 1,620 meters—almost exactly a mile. It looked to be a half-mile

track, so they’d run two laps. No one made a move in the first lap, just like
they often do in the States. Coming down to the final quarter, the six horse
was still saving ground along the rail, and the nine was first over beside him.
It looked to me like the six was running out of gas, and sure enough the nine
ran past him down the stretch and won by two lengths. I should have bet it, I
thought. I left the betting shop before the next race sucked me in.

My next stop was the English-language bookstore right across Piotrkowska

from the gambling shop. I read much, much more fiction in Poland than I nor-
mally do back in the States, mainly because I watched almost no television,

Chapter Fourteen

except for a Polish version of Family Feud, and a wonderful Name that Tune
type of show called Jaka to Melodia.

English-language pickings were pretty slim. When I entered I forgot to say

Dzień Dobry to the clerk, which is a real no-no in Poland. It made each new
customer’s greeting of her that much more pronounced, and me all the more
uncomfortable. I grabbed some Steinbeck (East of Eden) and checked out.
The transaction was smooth, and I made a big point of saying “Do Widzenia”
when I left.

I walked south down Piotrkowska toward an Indian restaurant I liked. On

the way I stopped at another English language bookstore and bought some
John Irving (Until I find You). This time I greeted the clerk on my way in,
even though he was checking another customer out. He made a point to greet
me, however.

I’d eaten at the Indian restaurant more than half a dozen times. I’d sat at

the same table, and ordered the same items from the same waitress every
time. But this time the place was crowded and my table wasn’t available. A
different waitress waited on me too. I tried to order the same things I always
had, but my routine got derailed. After she determined I didn’t speak Polish,
we switched to English. I said “Vegetable Pakora,” and just as I said, “and
paneer makhani,” she was distracted by something out the window. She kept
writing, so I figured she’d understood it. But she did ask in a curious way if
that was all I wanted, and she asked me that in Polish. If I were in the States,
I could have corrected any confusion, but I couldn’t do so in Poland with my
weak language skills. I decided to wait and see what would happen, and take
what I got as just desserts (well, appetizers, more likely).

About ten minutes later she set down in front of me two orders of vegetable

pakora. I ate them and waited for my entrée, but I knew it wouldn’t be com-
ing. I decided that when I’d said “makhani” and she was distracted she must
have heard “dwa razy,” which means “two times.” The first ten Indian onion
rings and fried cauliflower were delicious, the next ten pretty good, but the
final ten inedible. I forced most of it down, paid up and left. I hadn’t gotten
what I’d wanted, but I’d gotten exactly what I deserved.

I rode the tram back to my apartment, did some laundry, read a bit of a John

Irving short story collection, and napped. As I was drifting off to sleep I heard
the old woman calling for one of her cats from the porch near my bedroom
window. “Piwka,” she would call into the night, stretching out the first vowel
out so it sounded like, “Peeeeeeeeevka.” “Piwka” means “little beer,” which
I thought was an adorable name for a cat. It might also refer to a derogatory
term for Prussians, which would be a less adorable name for a cat.

After my nap, I created a CD of some songs by the Canadian band Blue

Rodeo that I thought Zbyszek might like and took the tram back to Pi-

A Day on Piotrkowska Street

otrkowska and made the short walk down to Narutowicza toward Kresowa.
I noticed a sign on the door, in Polish of course, but I didn’t bother to try to
read it except for the number 18, which I figured meant they were trying to
keep out the under-aged.

The place was brightly lit, and almost festive. Places were set on all the ta-

bles. Huge platters of pierogi, carp, and bigos were being served by a waiter.
Zbyszek told me it was the boss’s Christmas party. Zbyszek and his woman
were not guests; they were working the party.

“I can leave . . .” I said
“No, no. Stay for a beer. It’s okay,” he said and poured me a Warka.
A bug-eyed man who looked to be in his late fifties or early sixties with

longish black and grey hair was noodling around on a keyboard. The key-
board maintained an easy listening shuffle beat while he played “Jingle
Bells” in an organ sound tuned like the one in Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade
of Pale.” Then he played a jazzy rendition of the normally plaintive Polish
Christmas carol “Lulajże Jezuniu.” It wasn’t very good or even accurate, but
I liked it nonetheless.

I gave Zbyszek the CD and said, “I thought you might like this band.” He

read the card I’d placed inside the CD case. “Blue Rodeo . . .”

“Some people compare them to the Eagles,” I said, knowing Zbyszek is a

big fan.

The keyboard player had put on headphones, which actually worsened his

playing, as did the shots of vodka people were pouring for him. After a run
of particularly clunky wrong notes, Zbyszek couldn’t help himself anymore
and burst out laughing.

“He’s terrible, isn’t he?” he said to me, a little more subtly.
“He has his moments,” I said, “He seems to play better when he’s not wear-

ing the headphones.”

“Would you like a cigar?” Zbyszek asked.
“Shouldn’t I be going? I don’t want to crash the party.”
“It’s okay. The boss likes you. Another beer?”
“Sure,” I said. I ended up drinking three beers and smoking the cigar. No-

body strange tried speaking to me in terrible English. No Leonard Cohen or
Supertramp played on the jukebox. No stories of sadness and misfortune were
shared. All in all it was a disappointing Kresowa experience.

My student Agnieszka invited me to her parents’ wigilia, which is traditional
Polish Christmas Eve. Normally a twelve course meatless meal is served
(with various forms of carp, including carp in aspic, as central dishes). Straw
is used in the place settings to symbolize the manger, and a place is set but
not used, in case a stranger comes. It is said that at midnight barnyard animals
are able to speak human language (my Polish friend Anna swears her cats are
able to speak Polish at midnight on Christmas Eve too, but, being cats, they
choose not to do so).

Agnieszka is an interesting student who was very helpful to me while I was

in Lódź. She has studied in the United States, but returned to Lódź to finish
her Ph.D. She audited my American Government and Media and Politics
classes, because as a graduate student she couldn’t use the credits toward her
degree. I think she might have also attended the classes early in the semester
to keep an eye on the undergraduate students, but I never confirmed that
suspicion.

We talked about the wigilia plans on my last day of classes before the

winter break, although she had invited me weeks before.

“You will still come to our wigilia?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said, “I’m looking forward to it.”
“My mother and grandmother are very nervous,” she said.
“No need,” I said, “I’m an easy guest.”
“They’re always nervous for the holiday,” she said, “and that in turn makes

me nervous.”

Well, all that had me feeling a bit nervous!
“Is there something I should bring?”
“No, no. But maybe don’t eat before. They will make sure you are

stuffed.”

Chapter Fifteen

Wigilia

Wigilia

“Cool,” I said, although the meatless, fish-centered nature of the meal had

my stomach a little on edge.

“Do you sing?” she asked.
“I do, but not well,” I said.
“I always want to sing during wigilia, but often we don’t” she said, “maybe

we could play some American carols so you could sing too.”

“I know some of the words to a few kolędy too,” I said.
“Well, then maybe we will sing this year!” she said happily.
“I also wonder, if it’s not too much trouble, if we could agree to meet you

near Galeria Łódźka. We will be coming from my husband’s family in the
countryside and it would be easier not to have to pick you up at the dormi-
tory.”

“Of course,” I said. “I know just which tram to take,” I added proudly.
“Okay then, 6:30 on Monday,” she said.
“6:30 or so,” I said, “I know all about “Polish Time.”
She laughed. “6:30 or so . . .” A few days later I received an e-mail asking

if we could change the meeting time to 6:45. Of course I agreed, and planned
not to get there before 7:00.

A little after 7:00 on the big day they pulled up to me in their little Citroen

and skidded a bit on the ice the freezing mist had made on the road. Ag-
nieszka was seated in back with her little daughter, whom I believe was a big
part of the decision to give up her studies in the States. The front passenger
seat was empty. I knew where I was supposed to sit, but Agnieszka jumped
out of the back seat, apologized for being late, and invited me into the front
seat. Her husband Mariusz introduced himself to me in smooth English, and
I liked him instantly. I could tell he was a very serious young man, and I
already knew he worked for the Polish Ministry of Finance.

Then they introduced me to their daughter Jagoda.
“Jagoda,” I said, “that means ‘berry,’ right?”
“Yes, it does,” Agnieszka said, “but it is also an old Polish name for a little

girl.”

“It’s an adorable name,” I said.
“Cześć,” I said to the two and a half year old.
“Cześć,” she answered quietly, but evidently not too afraid of the giant

stranger.

We drove a little south to a massive communist era apartment block.
“It is called Manhattan,” Agnieszka explained, “because when it was built

it was the tallest building in Lódź. Well, the tallest building where people
lived.”

It was an imposing sight in the dark and the mist. Many of the windows

were adorned with various sorts of Christmas lights: flashing multicolored

Chapter Fifteen

strings in some; dignified candelabras in others; some with a single light: a
fourteen story wall of imposing concrete conformity decorated as individu-
ally as possible.

The apartment was warm with hospitality and the smells of cooking.

Andrzej, Agnieska’s father, offered me a drink of “kompot,” a smoky juice
drink. As soon as I finished it he offered me some red wine, which I gladly
accepted. While Agnieszka worked in the kitchen with her mother and grand-
mother, Mariusz translated for his father in law and me.

“He wants to know where you are from.”
“I live in Ohio, in Toledo, but I am from Michigan,” I said.
“He says there are many Poles in Detroit.” I loved his pronunciation of the

city, with the “De” pronounced like the “Dea” in “Dead,” and the stress on the
first syllable. I’ve always thought of that as the Polish pronunciation, because
my Polish grandfather said it that way.

“Yes,” I said, “in fact my mother’s family moved from Poland to Detroit

around 1910, but as soon as they could afford it they bought a farm outstate.”

I played the “I’m a Polish-American” card sparingly while in was in Lódź,

for a number of reasons. First, in my skepticism about the conniving ways of
the students brought on by some of my conversations with former Fulbright-
ers, I didn’t want to give them the impression I would be a pushover because
I felt some misguided special kinship with them. Second, many Poles have a
deep resentment for the Poles who left before the World Wars and commu-
nism, and thereby escaped so much suffering. But telling Agnieszka’s father
seemed like a good idea, and I think it was, because he became even more
friendly toward me after I’d told him.

Before dinner Andrzej brought out pieces of opłatek. Agnieszka started to

explain the tradition, but I assured her I already understood it. “We still do
some things the same way in America,” I said. We broke off pieces of ours
and took pieces of everyone else’s, and wished each other, “Wszystkiego
Najlepszego,” or “All the Best” for the coming year.

Then out came the first course: sauteed mushrooms, which were Agniesz-

ka’s favorite because she had picked them herself the previous autumn. I
made the standard American joke about not trusting mushrooms from any-
where but the grocery store, and she assured me these were safe.

“Mushroom hunting is the national sport here,” Mariusz said, “like N.F.L.

in America,” and the English speakers laughed. Once he explained it to the
Polish speakers, they laughed too.

Then came the fish. I didn’t much care for the herring in cream sauce, but

I liked the herring in onions: powerfully fishy and pungent from the onions. I
managed to avoid the carp in aspic. I just don’t like savory Jello. There were
a couple of creamy salads with salty bits of fish in them as well.

Wigilia

A strong mushroom and fish soup was the next course. “Only for Wigilia,”

Agnieszka explained. The soup was accompanied by small mushroom filled
pastries, which were delicious. They were filled with the same mushrooms
we had eaten fried earlier. These were my favorite food of the night, which
pleased Agnieszka’s grandmother, because they were of her doing.

Mariusz told a funny story about how when he and Agnieszka had worked

at a summer camp in New York, the other counselors were shocked that the
Poles would eat mushrooms they had picked for themselves in the forest. One
counselor told them, “all we know about mushrooms you find on the ground
is that you do not eat them.”

“I think Poles are closer to nature in some ways than Americans are,”

Mariusz said, and I agreed.

While the women returned to the kitchen to work on the next course, An-

drzej took down from his bookshelf the “Małe Atlas Grzybami,” “Small Atlas
of Mushrooms,” and explained it to me, through Mariusz.

“He says there are 94 varieties of Polish mushrooms which are eat . . . how

do you say, eatable?”

“Edible,” I offered.
“Yes, yes. Edible”
He explained which ones were most rare and difficult to find and what

kind we were eating. Then he showed me a small pamphlet with drawings of
mushrooms.

“He says these are the only poison ones,” Mariusz said, as if that should

have cleared up any possible confusion, even to a novice hunter. They didn’t
look any different to me than the edible ones pictured in the book.

“Rozumiem,” I said. (“I understand.”)
Fried carp steaks were the next course. They were at least an inch thick,

lightly breaded, and not de-boned.

“Mother says they’re too salty,” Agnieszka said, but I dug right in. They

were full of bones, but delicious.

“Because there are so many Poles in Great Britain,” Mariusz began, “this

year they put up signs in Polish near many lakes to keep Poles from fishing
for carp.”

“Do you think that was really necessary?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” he said, and the English speakers had a chuckle.
“It is considered good luck to keep a few of the carp’s scales,” Agnieszka

said, “I have them here in my pocket.” She pulled out a small pile of the dried
scales and I put one in my jacket pocket.

After the carp steaks, the meal was finally over, and the family exchanged

gifts. “This is usually when the arguments start,” Agnieszka said. “You know
how it is: if you have two Poles, you have three opinions.” I knew.

Chapter Fifteen

Most of the gifts were for Jagoda, and most of the others were practical

things: it worked out that every member of the family received a pair of py-
jamas from someone else. Mariusz gave Agnieszka a Velvet Revolver CD
because she’s always been a big fan of Guns ‘N’ Roses. They put it on the
CD player immediately.

“I can’t wait to tell my family about this traditional Polish Christmas mu-

sic,” I said, and Mariusz and Agnieszka laughed.

Agnieszka gave me a gift with a card that said, “Dla Dawida do Sw.

Mikołaj,” (“For David from St. Mikolaj,”) which is the Polish equivalent of
Santa Claus. It’s a book of photos of Lódź, which I explained was an awe-
some gift because in three months I hadn’t taken a single photograph. Then
Andrzej gave me a bottle of Sobieski vodka.

Then it was time for dessert: poppyseed cake and tea.
Andrzej asked me if I preferred wine or beer, and I admitted I wasn’t much

of a wine drinker. He offered me a bottle of his favorite beer: Warka Strong.
It contains seven percent alcohol, but tastes remarkably smooth for such a
strong brew. After he poured me a glass, he pointed to the image of Casimir
Pułaski on the label.

“He fought for America,” he said through Mariusz.
“Yes, and Kośćuśko too,” I said. “But why is he not on a beer too?”
“He is too important,” was Andrzej’s reply.
I took his point. Pułaski died at the Battle of Savannah during the American

Revolution, but Kośćuśko returned to Poland to fight for independence.

Then it was time to leave, because Agnieszka, Mariusz and Jagoda were

leaving early Christmas morning to drive to Zakopane for a week of skiing
(Jagoda had received a little pair of skis from Sw. Mikołaj.). As I was leaving,
Andrzej handed me a bag that contained the vodka, photo book, several slices
of poppyseed cake, and a small bucket of homemade bigos.

“He says for tomorrow, when you may eat meat.”
I thanked them all as best I could: much shaking of hands and hugging

and “Wesołych Swiat” and “Dzię Kuje Bardzo” and “Dobranoc,” and we
were out the door and back in the little car. I pointed out to Agnieszka that
we had forgotten to sing, and she reminded me that it happens every year.
At my apartment, I thanked the little Polish family again for their incredible
hospitality.

As I walked up the exterior steps to the main door of the apartment section

of the dormitory, I noticed the light in the hallway was on. Then I noticed
the old woman who lives a few apartments down from me—the keeper of the
cats—was out in the hallway with her latest feline acquisition: a nosy black
and white kitten that chirps instead of meows and was often found waiting
outside my door in the morning. I knew she didn’t let it outside the building,

Wigilia

so I waited for her to pick it up before I unlocked and opened the door. It
squirmed around in her hands, and I rubbed its soft little belly while it took
little swipes at me. I wondered what it might have to say to her at midnight for
having let the big foreigner pet it. Then I said “dobranoc” to her and unlocked
my apartment and walked on in.

I read a few pages of East of Eden, then fell asleep in Poland.

While I was in Poland I read much more than I normally do in the States. An
essay by John Irving about Charles Dickens, an author I never much liked,
affected me pretty deeply.

What was most interesting about the essay was its defense of sentimental-

ity, of letting emotions pour through in writing. He contrasts this with a de-
tached modern or post-modern approach to writing. As an example, he offers
a short-story about a four course meal as told from the perspective of a fork.
It would never be accused of being overly sentimental, but it would not mean
much to anyone either.

Irving’s essay prompted me to think of two very different episodes of the

television program M*A*S*H, which has frequently been accused of over-
sentimentality. In one memorable Christmas episode, wealthy Winchester
is thought to be a scrooge because he donates little to the Christmas potluck
dinner. But secretly he has carried out an old family tradition of delivering
expensive chocolates to the local orphanage, with the explanation of the es-
sential need to keep the identity of gift-givers a secret. The rule is an old
Winchester family tradition.

Upon learning that the master of the orphanage sold the chocolates on the

black market, Winchester confronts him and is humbled by the explanation
that the money fetched by the candy on the black market will feed the kids
for months. Chastened, Winchester retires to his tent, but crazy cross-dressing
Corporal Klinger has overheard the conversation, and delivers a plate of food
from the party. When he informs Winchester that he must keep the identity of
the gift-giver a secret because it’s part of an old family tradition, Winchester
understands what has happened, and they each wish the other a merry Christ-
mas, very pointedly using each other’s first names.

Chapter Sixteen

My Grandfather’s People

My Grandfather’s People

The other episode is called “Point of View” and follows a patient through

the entire field hospital. The perspective of the camera never changes. The
viewer sees everything through the eyes of a wounded Korean War soldier.
It is inventive and bold—and I never elect to watch it if I can choose the
Christmas episode instead.

People have feelings, and interesting books and television programs should

explore those feelings. Sometimes they’ll go too far and become too sweet.
But the solution to over-sentimentality should not be to eliminate all sentimen-
tality. Whenever I’m in Poland I think about my Polish grandparents—what
I’d like to say to them about being there, eating and drinking there, trying to
speak Polish. Explaining these feelings might be a risk, but I think it’s worth
taking.

I’m only half-Polish; more accurately half Polish-American, from my

mother’s side of the family. Her great-grandparents moved to the U.S. from
the small southern Polish village of Stary Wiśnicz around 1910. They never
returned, and none of their children ever visited Poland. But when I’m in
Poland I feel my family around me all the time, and sometimes I even talk to
my grandparents about what I’m doing.

Our family is at that stage of Polish-American-ness where no one under

80 speaks much Polish. We know the village where my Grandfather’s people
came from, and we have purchased and framed the Ellis Island documents
that confirm the family’s recollection of its origins. A few of us have even
visited Poland, and the village of our ancestors.

In 2001 I visited Stary Wiśnicz, which is about thirty miles east and south

of Kraków. I was staying in Kraków for a few days after a conference in
Lódź, and I arranged with the Orbis tourist office for a car and driver for four
hours, which cost about $50.00. The driver didn’t speak much English, and
I didn’t speak much Polish. We drove to the larger city of Nowy Wiśnicz,
which I think is where the driver thought we were supposed to go. This didn’t
surprise me, since it’s a slightly larger town near the village I was looking for.
We parked near the small central business district, and I noticed there was a
large map of the region mounted on a wall, surrounded by a park. I motioned
the driver over, and showed him the little dot of the place I wanted to visit.
We returned to the cab and drove to the village.

It’s hardly even a village at all, just a church, school, and cemetery—no

pub, inn or restaurant. The driver walked around the church grounds with me
and pointed out the old bell with the year 1569 stamped on it. He disappeared
for a while and I walked up the hill to the cemetery. It was filled with famil-
iar names from my youth. Many of the Polish people in the area of central
Michigan where I grew up originally came from this place and other nearby

Chapter Sixteen

villages nearby, and their names were all there in marble and metal: Bachuła,
Wiśniewski, Łazowski, Krzywda.

Then I discovered where the driver had gone. He returned with a priest,

who opened the church for me. It was cool and dark inside, and a little bit
run-down. It looked like a place that had been used for hundreds of years,
without a fancy renovation to wreck its character. Then it hit me like a wave
how many hundreds of my ancestors had been baptized, taken first commu-
nion, married in and been buried from this place. My mother’s grandparents
were married there. I said hello to my grandparents and thanked them for the
great gift of being a Polish-American, and they thanked me for working hard
to keep our traditions alive.

My mother and I returned to this church in 2004, escorted this time by

distant cousins who lived in the nearby city of Bochnia. After taking us to
the church, they walked us up and down a set of snow-covered hills to the
exact spot where my great-grandparents had lived. Our cousin Stan even drew
the perimeter of the house with a stick in the snow. My mother and I were
photographed near it. The picture hangs in the dining room of her home in
mid-Michigan, the home I grew up in and the home my grandfather grew up
in; the first and only home my great grandparents ever owned in the United
States.

Lunch with our cousins was difficult that day. Before we arrived, I’d had

a Polish friend translate a letter to them, so I’m pretty sure they thought I
spoke Polish. Our driver tried to translate a little, but it was no use. They
served chicken and potatoes, and back then I was still a vegetarian. Of course
I ate the cutlet appreciatively. Anything else would have been unbelievably
rude. Cousin Stan showed us on a 1974 map where his brother lived in
west-side Chicago, and said he’d been there to visit him back then. I did not
know how to tell him his brother had probably moved since then, or at least
wished he had.

Meeting these cousins was a strangely un-emotional experience for me,

and I wondered why I didn’t feel more when I was with them. Our cousin
Mary certainly looked like my grandfather’s people, which she is. But these
Poles were strangers to us, and because of the language barrier it was impos-
sible for us to become acquaintances, much less friends. In the end our only
connection was genetic, which meant something, but not a whole lot. My
mother even gave them some money when we left, for their granddaughter’s
education she said, but even that didn’t feel right. But she had to do it. She
had to express our affection and appreciation for them somehow.

During my time in Lódź on my Fulbright, I wrote a few e-mails to my

mother when I felt the presence of her parents particularly strongly. Some-
times I would drink a few beers and play the polka music they loved so much

My Grandfather’s People

and think of them. I’m happy my Grandmother lived long enough to listen to
one of my polka radio broadcasts.

After I’d talked about American politics with a particularly fired-up Pole, I

would think of the passion for politics my grandfather possessed. His speech
might have been slurred after his first stroke in 1979, but he was always able
to clearly form the words, “Goddamned Republicans!”

One of Warsaw’s finest attractions is the recently built “Powstanie Warsza-

wskie” museum, which tells the story of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, which
was doomed by the Germans’ superior military strength, Stalin’s shrewdness
and the Allies’ indifference. My mother and I visited the museum on a cold,
grey day in November 2007. Behind the museum is a garden surrounding a
display of dozens of bigger than life colorized photographs from the Upris-
ing. As cat lovers, my mother and I were struck by a photo of a young Polish
soldier holding a cat and talking to a pretty girl on the front steps of a tene-
ment in soon-to-be-ruined Warsaw. We stood transfixed in front of the photo
while the sounds of the wind, automobile traffic, and groups of other visitors
swirled around us

“Did you hear something?” my mother asked.
“No,” I said.
“It sounded like somebody said my name,” she said. “It sounded like your

grandpa.”

We were quiet for a few minutes, but then we let it go. We had a whole

day to spend together and too much sentimentality early in the day can drag
you to a standstill in a city like Warsaw. But I’d understood what she’d said.
I hear them too.

“You can’t really get to know a place if you live there less than a year.”

“You haven’t really experienced a place until you’ve had something go

really wrong.”

A fellow Fulbrighter made both of these comments to me at our mid-se-

mester meeting in December in Warsaw. Maybe he’s right, I thought at the
time. As my time in Poland seemed to be moving faster than it should have,
I did begin to feel like I was planning to leave too soon. I mean, I had very
good reasons for returning to the U.S.; lots of time off to write and think,
and not teaching being chief among them. Since even before I received my
Master’s degree in 1993, I’ve taught every semester. While I was earning my
Ph.D., I regularly taught any class at any community college or university that
would hire me. One semester I even taught seven classes, which is two more
than I teach in a year now as a full-time professor. I felt like I deserved some
time off. But, still his comments affected me.

Put simply, I liked it in Poland. I liked my students and the other Fulbright-

ers. I liked my colleagues. I liked the people I met in bars, restaurants and
at the movies. What’s the hurry to go home, I asked. Well, seven months
off teaching for one thing. I’ve taught a lot more than the average second or
third year associate professor. The first time I taught American government,
Bill Clinton was running for President the first time. I’ve taught thousands of
students since. I taught statistics during a summer semester once on Friday
nights. Once I taught it back to back from 5:00 to 7:30 and again from 7:30
to 10:00. I believed I deserved some time off.

But what about the argument that you can’t really get to know a place

in less than a year? On the surface it has some merit. I am certain that had
I stayed for a full year or longer, I would have taken language classes, and
that of course would have allowed me to understand much more of the Polish

Chapter Seventeen

Comments

Comments

world around me. On the other hand, I’ve visited Poland many times, studied
the culture, and had many aspects of its American variant burned into my soul
since birth, so how much would have been different had I stayed nine months
rather than five?

The idea of needing something bad to happen to really understand a place

is even more intriguing. After I returned, I talked over lunch with one of my
colleagues about the experience, and she asked me if anything really bad had
happened. I told her the winning of a Fulbright had indeed produced some
strange experiences.

In order to qualify for the Fulbright fellowship I was awarded, I was re-

quired to pass a physical exam. Regrettably, this was no simple physical. It
required a full anal exam! What? Yes, an anal exam. Not a prostate exam, but
a good old-fashioned, serious analysis of the well-being of my asshole. My
doctor was unavailable for the physical, so a nurse practitioner performed the
task. Just before she probed me she held out her long, mercifully thin finger
and said, “Just so you know, this is narrower than poop.” Small comfort. I
told my classes in both the States and Poland that the only reason the Ful-
bright commission should care about that region of my anatomy would be if
my head were up there, which it most assuredly is not. My American students
laughed more than my Poles did, but once the explanation of the joke made its
way around the room, the Poles seemed to find it quite funny too.

The really bad part came when I thought I was going to have to take the

exam a second time, this time in Poland. It was in fulfillment of a new edict
from the Kaczyński twins—the identical, former child TV and film stars who
were President and Prime Minister of Poland when I arrived. I knew it was
more than just their reactionary ideology that made me dislike these little
creeps. To try to prevent a probing in Poland, I e-mailed our secretary back at
B.G.S.U. and had her fax over the results of my U.S. physical. My shepherd
Paulina and I visited the physician, who took my blood pressure, weighed me
(and chided me for being overweight), but ultimately signed the forms with-
out sticking her finger up my ass. It was win-win for everyone.

Did anything else truly bad happen? I was disappointed to find out I had to

teach on Saturdays, but besides the extra load it represented, aren’t weekends
just an artificial construct? I mean, if I had Monday and Tuesday off that’s
the same as a weekend, right? Besides, finding out I had to teach on weekends
was accompanied by the pleasant surprise of learning that I was to be paid
by the university, beyond the pay Fulbright provided me. So on balance that
wasn’t so bad.

I’m sure some things have happened I’d rather not have had happen. Some

people were rude to me once they discovered I was an American. I think an
old man might have spat in my general direction once in Warsaw, but I’m

Chapter Seventeen

not really sure. It could just have been a bad cough. An old man getting on a
bus behind me was peeved I didn’t understand what he was saying when he
shoved some heavy baggage toward me, but a kind young woman grabbed his
bag once she saw I didn’t understand what the old coot wanted me to do. The
internet connection in my apartment performed inconsistently.

“That’s really it?” my colleague asked.
“Yeah, I guess that’s it.”
Would anything interesting that happened to me have been any better had

I stayed longer? I certainly would have had more experiences had I stayed
another semester, but would I have had more interesting experiences? Would
I have had that elusive unpleasant experience that would have offered the es-
sential insight into the real Poland? I don’t know, but I don’t think so. Maybe
it’s a cop out, but it seems to me an outsider can never penetrate the “real”
anywhere, if he stays five months or five years. That’s just the nature of be-
ing an outsider.

There was another comment that took me by surprise: “The times of Gierek

were different. Women could leave their children in prams outside the store
while they queued, and they knew they would be taken care of.”

My friend Zbyszek said it, and for me it is one of the most fascinating

comments I have ever heard about Polish politics. The life and times of Ed-
ward Gierek, the First Secretary of the Polish communist party from 1970
to 1980, are fairly well-known. He took over from Gomulka in 1970 and
borrowed huge sums from western governments. This created the illusion
of prosperity, as Poles experienced the availability of consumer goods as
never before. But eventually the price had to be paid, and Poland could not
pay it. So by 1980 the country was tens of billions of dollars in debt. Price
increases led to strikes which resulted in Gierek’s recognizing Solidarity,
which led to his removal and the eventual imposition of martial law under
General Jaruzelski.

The 1970s were different times indeed. Did people trust each other more

then? Evidently that was the case in Poland, at least according to Zbyszek.
I have heard comments like these before. For example, a Fulbrighter who
taught in Lodz when I did, but also from 1984 to 1986, said, “Times were
hard, but people trusted each other more because we felt like we were all in
it together. That feeling is gone now.” He also believed it was easier to make
friends with Poles then, because people needed each other more. That is most
certainly a sad commentary if it is accurate. We get along better when we are
all suffering together?

Although I don’t believe this is true of Zbyszek, maybe that’s why some

people actually miss the communist times. Poles have become more indi-
vidualistic and materialistic since 1989, and not everyone likes it. Consumer

Comments

products are readily available—no more waiting in monstrously long lines
with a piece of string to hang toilet paper rolls on if you’re lucky enough to
find them. One of my Polish colleagues said some older Poles miss the old
days because life was simpler then: go to work, then wait in line. I could have
stayed in Poland for a hundred years and never understood that.

In early January, walking up Piotrkowska Street after a few beers at Kresowa,
I felt a little like a Pole. I didn’t hesitate a bit before saying “przepraszam”
if I bumped into someone, or, more likely, if someone bumped into me. Just
south of Plac Wolności I stopped to pet a small black cat who had wandered
out from one of the many alleys along the long commercial street. A Pol-
ish couple with a small, stupid dog criticized my affection for a cat (at least
that’s what I think they said) as they walked past me, and I defiantly replied,
“lubie kotki. Lubie czarne kotki” (“ I like cats. I like black cats.”) They just
kept walking, and the little black cat took a swing at me, the ungrateful little
Polish bastard.

But this story is about what happened before the walk and ride home.
It was my big teaching day: three 1.5 hour lectures. I woke late because

a friend in Texas had called me late the night before. When we hung up, for
him it was only 7:00PM, but for me it was two in the morning. I never stay
up that late on a night before I have to teach.

But I woke up feeling good about teaching. That’s a feeling I had more

often in Poland than back home. Part of it came from not really caring if my
students attended class or completely understood my sense of humor, as long
as those who were there understood the content I was trying to deliver. Part
of it came from the feeling of having been decently successful in a foreign
environment. It’s a great feeling when you discover that you actually can do
something a little different than what you’re used to doing.

The first class of my day was Canadian Government and Politics. I was

surprised to find that about half of the 25 or so students registered for the class
were actually there. I began the lecture with a discussion of the differences
between the U.S. and Canadian Senates, the increased role of the Supreme
Court of Canada after the addition of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and

Chapter Eighteen

Fitting In

Fitting In

the notion of a “confidence house.” Of the 13 students in attendance, only two
were male. They didn’t take any notes, but instead just looked straight at me
with their arms folded. I decided that one of them might be somewhat intel-
ligent because his in-class comments were pretty smart, although he wasn’t
keen on raising his hand before speaking. As with most of the male students,
however, these two reeked of non-seriousness. So after about 45 minutes of
lecture I tired of them whispering to each other and called them out on it.

I hate calling out students in class—in America or anywhere else. But I did

it, and kept on with the lecture for another half hour. When I was finished I
asked if there were any questions. As usual, there were not. But a couple of
women stayed after class to negotiate about the final exam, the only graded
work for the entire course. Poles are great negotiators. Some might call it
scheming.

“Will it be essay, or will there be some terms to identify too?” the brunette

named Malgosia asked.

“Probably both,” I said.
“How much of each?” she persisted.
“Maybe 25 percent identification, 75 percent essay,” I said.
“That is fair,” the blonde named Barbara said, but Malgosia would have

none of it.

“Is it fair to make so much of it essay when students who do not come to

class very much could pass an essay?”

“I take your point,” I said, “anyone can bullshit their way through an essay,

but I think I can tell the good ones from the bad ones.” The little obscenity
made them blush and chuckle.

“We may laugh, but it is true,” she said. “But of course you can do what

you want,” and then she started babbling because I think she felt like she had
crossed a line of respect with me (I didn’t feel that way at all. I found the
entire exchange quite charming). She said it was okay with her if I did what I
wanted, but then she felt like she should clarify that because she didn’t want
me to think she thought I needed her permission to do what I wanted.

Blonde Barbara started pushing her out the door, fearful she was offending

me. As they were walking away down the hall Barbara was laughing loudly
and speaking very fast Polish to her friend, who was really blushing when
she left the classroom.

When I relayed this story to a Polish friend and former student, he said the

problem with most Polish professor’s essay questions is that they are incred-
ibly broad: “analyze the most important events in 20th century Polish history”
type questions. Therefore, as he put it, the students with the “lightest pens” do
the best, not necessarily the students who actually know more of the material
covered in the course.

Chapter Eighteen

In terms of the potential lack of respect their comments might have shown

me, he agreed that it would be highly unlikely they would dare try to influ-
ence the content of the examination from an older, Polish professor.

“But they were trying to make it more difficult,” I said, with a laugh.
“No matter what they said, the older professors would find it offensive.”
My next class, Politics and Mass Media, was a great success. I lectured

for one hour non-stop about US national media coverage of the President,
Congress, and the Courts. When I stopped and asked for questions, they actu-
ally had some. They were interested in how it could possibly be fair for the
accused that CourtTV showed criminal trials in progress in the U.S. They as-
sured me this would never happen in Poland. I assured them it was a difficult
balance to strike between a “public” and a “fair” trial.

I also told them about my favorite part of the BG News, the student paper at

B.G.S.U. It is called “The Blotter” and it is a list of everyone arrested in the
city of Bowling Green the night before. I said a typical entry read like this:
“John Smith of Perrysburg was cited for public urination behind The Corner
Grill at 2:39 A.M.” They laughed, but said such a thing would never happen
in Poland. Even famous people would be referred to by just their first name
and last initial. They asked if the paper printed stories about people who were
acquitted of the crimes they were accused of in the blotter, and I told them no.
Of course they asked me if I’d ever been mentioned. I pleaded the fifth.

In my final course of the day—Introduction to American Government—I

was at my worst. “Interest Groups” were the only topic to be covered in the
90 minute lecture, and even in the U.S. I’d have a hard time filling more than
an hour with that topic. It’s not that I don’t know a lot about the topic or that
I think it’s not important. It’s just not that interesting. So I offered them the
“pluralist” and “elitist” interpretations of James Madison’s Federalist Num-
ber Ten

and sent them home after 40 minutes. It was the right thing to do, but

it felt like cheating at the time. They didn’t seem to mind getting out of class
early. Students almost never do. I resolved to do better next time.

I ate dinner at Chłopska Izba, an old fashioned Polish karczma on Pi-

otrkowska Street. The food was beyond delicious, especially the fried sheep’s
cheese. The music was terrible, not because I didn’t like it, but because they
played the same seven English and Polish Christmas carols in a boring loop.
After dinner, I made my way up to Kresowa.

The place was nearly empty. Kresowa does not look good when it is empty.

It looks downright seedy, in fact. The beautiful brown haired woman was sit-
ting with a new guy. A man named Adam, whom I’d met the night I talked
with wild Darek, sidled up to me immediately.

“Dzień Dobry,” he slurred.
“Dzień Dobry, I replied.

Fitting In

Zbyszek immediately brought me a beer. The drunk begged me to buy him

a beer, and I complied. It cost only two dollars, and he really seemed to need
it. Zbyszek laughed, because we both knew Adam and I would not be trading
rounds for each other.

“Hej,” I said to Zbyszek, “your music is all over the United States now.”
“What?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said, “I’ve sent your kolędy to people in Michigan, Ohio, Geor-

gia . . .”

“That is great,” he said.
“Here,” I said and handed him a cigar I’d bought next door, “for you.”
“Thanks,” he said, and we both lit up off drunk Adam’s lighter.
“Do you know what those songs are about?” Zbyszek asked.
“Seven of them, yes,” I said, “but the first two I have never heard be-

fore.”

“Because we wrote them!” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The second song, ‘kolęda odrzuconych,’ means ‘carol of the abandoned.’

The words are about the sad old men in the soup line on Piotkowska, men
who fought for Poland’s freedom during the war but who are homeless now.
I wrote the music, and Andrzej wrote the words.”

“I had no idea,” I said, “I had a bit of a sense of the meaning, but I didn’t

know all this.”

“Make sure your American friends understand what the songs are about,”

Zbyszek said.

“I will,” I said.
“I am a Polish patriot,” he said. “I am not afraid to say it.”
“Why would you be afraid?” I asked.
“Because of how it used to be,” he said.
“Rozumiem,” I said. (“I understand”).
“You really pronounce our words well,” he said.
“Dzię Kuje,” I said. “You know, I try to be a Polish patriot too, even

though I am not a Pole. When my mom was here we visited the “powstanie”
museum in Warsaw.”

The Powstania of 1944, the Warsaw Uprising, saw tens of thousands of

Poles killed in their failed attempt to liberate their city from the Nazis. Con-
troversy remains about the role of the Red Army in the affair, because it did
not move from the east side of the Wisła River while the uprising was being
crushed on the west side.

“It failed because the Russians sat on the east side of the river and let the

Germans kill the Poles,” he said, more angry than I’d ever seen him before.

“That is how my grandfather told me the story,” I said.

Chapter Eighteen

“Your grandfather was right,” Zbyszek said, “I am a patriot. That is how

it is.”

Then Adam asked me for two zloty for some ryż. Not just any rice mind

you, but “poor man drinking in a poor man’s bar” rice, which means white
rice with some smalec (old lard with bits of pork in it) melted on top of it.
Nobody asks for this unless they really need a meal, so I gave Adam five
złoty—three more than he needed for the rice, but still short of another beer.

Then the beautiful brown-eyed woman threw the cell phone belonging to

her boyfriend of the moment against the wall. He crawled around the floor to
pick it up, but showed no signs of hostility toward her for what she’d done.

“She owns him,” Zbyszek said. He also gave her a stern warning about her

behavior. He said there had to be limits.

I asked him for more details about her. “Her name is Kinga,” he said. “She

is the fiancé of any man who buys her drinks.”

“But why?” I asked.
“Her father was murdered when she was just 12, and her mother became a

total alcoholic,” he said, “She has been on her own for 12 years. When I call
for a cab, they know who they are coming to get.”

“Murdered?” I asked. It’s not a word you hear very often here.
“By a gypsy gang,” he said.
“Gypsy gang,” I repeated, a little incredulously. But then I let it go, be-

cause I didn’t really want to know the details. I decided to believe he had been
involved in something bad and had gotten what was coming to him.

“Do you think she is beautiful?” he asked.
“Yes, yes I do,” I said.
“And her shape?”
“I love her shape.”
“Pocahontas!” Adam yelled.
“Jescze Raz?” I said.
“Pocahontas!” he repeated.
“They call her Pocahontas, for how she looks” Zbyszek explained.
“From the Disney film?” I asked. She did have more than a passing re-

semblance to the Disney character: long brown hair, big brown eyes, dark
complexion.

“Yes, and they call him ‘Gypsy,’” he said and pointed to Adam, who was

snarfing down his bowl of greasy rice.

“Because he steals?” I asked.
“He doesn’t steal. He begs. He’s drunk. He does not want to get better. He

is called ‘Gypsy’ because he has it in his blood.”

“Does he understand any of what you say to me about him?” I asked, because

Adam had used a few words of English earlier in the course of his begging.

Fitting In

“He understands nothing.”
“Ale fajnie,” I said, which means something like “but great” or “lovely.”

I said it for a reason. It is the chorus of the song “Cyganeczka,” which is a
popular polka performed Polish-American bands. It is a song about a gypsy
girl who is drowning, and a man who doesn’t have a boat to save her. Here is
an English translation of the chorus:

Oh Oh Oh, ale fajnie, ale fajnie, ale fajnie
Oh Oh Oh, ale fajnie, ale fajnie, ale fajnie tutaj jest
Oh Oh Oh, it’s so lovely, it’s so lovely it’s so lovely
Oh Oh Oh, it’s so lovely, it’s so lovely it’s so lovely here with you

The English is not a literal translation, which is more like “But great it is
here,” but it makes the point. I’ve always taken it to mean that it’s lovely
that the gypsy is drowning, which seemed kind of mean and racist. Anyway,
I don’t know if that chorus is part of the Polish version of the song, because
it’s not shown in the lyrics at www.chords.pl. But when I said “ale fajnie”
everyone laughed. I know they didn’t laugh because of bad pronunciation. I
know they didn’t laugh because the phrase made no sense in the context of
the conversation: it did. I wondered if they laughed because it was a quote
from a song about a gypsy drowning, but I didn’t have the skills to explain
my interpretation to them.

I decided to leave Kresowa early. A few more people had shown up, in-

cluding two pretty young girls who ordered grape juice and called Zbyszek
“Zbyszku,” but the place was a little too dreary for me. As I left I said
goodbye to Zbyszek and said “do jutro,” which basically means I’ll see you
tomorrow.

Christmas 2007 was the first time in my 38 years that I did not spend any of
the holidays with my family. Being practical people, my brother, sister and I
had decided that, since I wasn’t going to be home for Christmas, we wouldn’t
buy each other gifts. I didn’t expect missing Christmas to be too difficult
emotionally, because my mother had already visited me in Poland and I’d be
returning to the States in early February.

I didn’t really do much on Christmas Day, except trade a few emails with

my extended family back home as they were eating dinner and exchanging
gifts. I walked to a BP gas station about a mile from my apartment, because it
was the only place that was open. I bought a can of peanuts, a sack of potato
chips, and two four-packs of Tyskie beer. Standing in that line felt more fa-
miliar (i.e., more American) than any experience since my arrival in Poland. I
think a line of people paying for gas, snack foods and beer on Christmas day
feels just about the same everywhere.

The married couple who run the American Studies program had invited

me to their apartment for lunch the day after Christmas—the second day of
Christmas Elżbieta called it. I eagerly accepted.

Their apartment has been beautifully renovated, with light hardwood

floors, cream colored walls, and new windows. It’s spacious, if not huge.
Wiesek picked me up at my little apartment and told me that he and his wife
had lived in it for a few months during the renovations. I couldn’t imagine
two fully grown people sharing the small space.

The Oleksies are very successful entrepreneurial academics, running the

American Studies program and the Women’s Studies center at the University
of Łódź. They seem to choose young faculty well, because my colleagues are
brilliant, hard-working and serious. These young professors are also chang-

Chapter Nineteen

Christmas and Boxing Day

Christmas and Boxing Day

ing the traditional adversarial relationship with the students, expecting a lot
of work from them, and not tolerating cheating. The Oleksies have brought in
many Fulbright fellows over the years, and they’ve been Fulbrighters them-
selves in the States.

I was pleased to find that I was not the only guest invited for lunch. Their

friend and colleague from the philosophy department, Barbara (Basia), was
there too. The meal started with herring. It was layered with cooked potatoes,
beets and onions in a cream sauce, and even though I don’t much like herring
I thought this was a pretty good way to eat it.

“Our son made this,” Elżbieta said, “do you like it?”
“It would be better without the herring,” Basia said. I agreed, but I didn’t

say so.

Unlike on Christmas Eve, this time I wasn’t going to be able to get out of

eating carp in aspic. I cut out a small piece, squeezed a lemon over it, and put
some horseradish on it—anything to drown the flavor and alter the slippery
texture.

“Do you like it?” Wiesiek asked.
“Well, honestly, it’s not my favorite,” I said
“Perhaps we should drink some vodka. It goes well with herring,” he said

and went to the kitchen. He came back with two shots.

“The Polish way is to drink it all down at once,” he said, “Cheers!”
“Na Zdrowie” I said, and we drank them down.
“What is this awful music?” Basia asked.
“They are medieval English Christmas carols,” he explained.
“Don’t you have anything with a little more pep?”
“Of course,” he said and began messing with the remote control. He suc-

ceeded only in restarting the English medieval disc.

“Our son gave us this for Christmas. I have no idea how to control it,”

he said and pointed the remote at the machine. Eventually he made it play a
Louis Armstrong disc.

“Won’t you have some carp, Basia,” Elzbieta said.
“You know I don’t like it very much,” she answered.
“You do not like herring, carp, or vodka!” Wiesiek said, “we should take

away your Polish citizenship,” and we all had a good laugh.

The main course consisted of quiche and a variety of meats, which went

well with the red wine we were drinking.

“What is this dark one?” Basia asked.
“Ostrich,” Wiesek said proudly.
The smoked kielbasa was more like our family’s recipe than any other I ate

in Poland, and I commented upon its familiarity.

“It is very special,” Wiesiek said, “it has veal in it.”

Chapter Nineteen

Well, there it is: I guess I’m totally off the vegetarian wagon, I thought.

Eighteen years down the drain. Herring, carp, veal and ostrich in one meal.
The thought of it made me a little queasy.

We finished the meal with a dessert of cheesecake and a plum flavored

liqueur, which was very sweet. Soon I said I had to leave because I was
scheduled to get together with my Fulbright friends, Alex from Warsaw,
and Trevor, Ashley and their daughter Anna. Holidays are like that every-
where.

Not many restaurants on Piotrkowska Street were open, but we managed

to find a “Sphinx” that had room, although the waiter who greeted us at the
door was quite surly.

Alex and Trevor speak wonderful Polish, but when we ordered our waiter

insisted on speaking English, which was just fine with me.

I made funny faces with Anna, ate only a plate of French fries, and drank

three beers. Alex asked what I planned to do with all my free time during the
winter break.

“Well, I’m writing about my experiences in Poland,” I said, “and you’re

all in there.”

“I hope you’re able to present a richer picture than most of that kind of

writing does,” Alex said.

“I’m relying mainly on cliché and stereotypes,” I said, and we all had a

good laugh.

“Trevor is always called Trevor the Mormon, T.T.M. for short. Ashley,

you’re A.T.M., Ashley the Mormon, and Anna is A.T.M. Junior.”

“And Alex is?” Trevor asked.
“A.T.F.G.S., of course: Alex the feminist grad student,” I said. “Everybody

gets exactly one dimension,” I added.

We ate, drank and laughed, but soon it was time to go, because later that

evening, Alex and I were attending a party at our friend, and my colleague,
Ola’s place, and we needed to bring some beer. Trevor asked the waiter in
Polish where an open beer store might be.

“Trevor the Mormon helps the heathens find booze,” I said.
On our short walk off Piotrkowska to find beer, young Anna was practi-

cally bursting at the seams with excitement. She waved her arms around in
the stroller and shouted out little happy nonsense sounds.

“Anna the Mormon is having a really big night!” I said to her excitedly.

“It’s not every night you get to help your friends buy beer, is it?” and she
laughed and laughed.

I bought six Warka Strong beers, the beers with Pułaski on the label, and

then we said our goodbyes. The little family took a cab home, while Alex and
I walked fast, too fast, down Piotrkowska to Ola’s apartment. She lives near

Christmas and Boxing Day

Lódź’s cathedral, which was quite a popular destination for families that night
because of its nativity scene that featured real, live animals.

At the party, the talk quickly turned to American politics, of course. A

young man best described as a close-talker told me it would be wrong to vote
for Obama because he has no experience.

“But a candidate with too much experience usually loses,” I said, “look at

how they savaged John Kerry’s record. Better not to have too much experi-
ence.”

“That is a fair point,” he said.
“So, what do you do?” I asked to change the subject.
“I work in government. With the European union,” he said. Then he added

this non sequitur, “have you ever been to Key West?”

“No, I have been to Florida, but never to the Keys,” I said.
“I love it there. My parents live there.”
“Are they retired?”
“No, they are illegal immigrants. They work in hotels.”
Before long I became “The Proselytizer” in a way I never had before. I’d

burned a CD of what I think are some of the best Polish-American polka
songs, especially in terms of the quality of their Polish (many of the younger
bands sing the songs phonetically now, and really can’t speak Polish at all).
I had given it to Ola when I arrived in the hopes of hearing it played during
the party. With each additional Warka Strong I became more insistent about
hearing the CD. To her credit, Ola never gave in.

Before I knew it I’d drunk all six of the Warka Strongs, a poor decision.

They contain seven percent alcohol. I made a quick mental list of what food
and booze I’d consumed that day, and began to feel a little sick. I asked Ola to
call a cab for me, and made to leave. I made it home before I blew, for which
I am grateful to God or fate or whatever kept the contents of my stomach
inside me while I was in my friend’s apartment, the cab, and the hallway of
my building.

My friend Alex sent me a sarcastic e-mail the next day, suggesting that

since she hadn’t found me in the alley she assumed I’d made it safely home.
When I apologized to Ola for my behavior, she assured me everyone at the
party had been pretty drunk and I hadn’t really stood out at all. I thought again
about what Czesław Miłosz had written about the effect of alcohol on Polish
men’s feelings about themselves and thought that it might apply to Polish-
Americans as well. But I really didn’t hate myself in my heart of hearts. I just
felt like a fool.

The bus from Lódź to Warsaw pulled into aisle six of the Fabryczna station
and I pushed for the door just like a Pole. During the communist times, Poles
may have been great at respecting the queue, but no more. At airports and bus
stations, especially, it’s everyone for himself. As we were jostling our way on
board, I noticed just behind me a small woman with jet black hair, a very high
forehead and big brown, almost black eyes behind fashionable glasses.

“Hello Professor,” she said.
“Hello,” I answered. “going to Warsaw?”
“No, I need to go to Płock.”
This is one of my favorite Polish place names—the kind of place I’ll say

over and over in my mind for a while after the first time I hear it during the
day. It’s pronounced “Pwohtsk.” Say it fifteen times in your head and you’ll
see what I mean.

“I don’t think this bus goes there,” I said, disappointed I would not be able

to ride to Warsaw with one of my students.

The crowd continued stuffing itself into the bus, and she disappeared be-

hind me. She knew I didn’t speak Polish so she asked the leggy blonde in
front of me who was already buying a ticket from the driver to find out if
the bus went to Płock. I understood from their conversation (and previous
experience with this bus line) that it did not, but when the blonde turned back
to tell my student, it was clear she did not hear her. I told her the bad news,
and she said goodbye.

The ride to Warsaw was the first stage of a journey to Linz, Austria.

Friends there had invited me for New Year’s, and I welcomed the opportu-
nity to visit another country. During the trip, sections of the bus would erupt
in different ways and at various intervals. First a bald man in his fifties got
into an argument with the driver after he had been made to move back a few

Chapter Twenty

Poland, Slovenia, and Austria

Poland, Slovenia, and Austria

rows from the seat nearest the exit—a kind of extra seat situated almost in the
doorway and meant for tour guides.

Then came the first pop! of a beer can from the young hooligan behind me.

Covered in tattoos, listening to screaming-loud hip-hop on his ipod, and occa-
sionally hollering into his cell phone he epitomized much of what I hate about
the modern world. But I chose not to hate him on this ride to Warsaw—why
bother? Just another annoyance in a world full of them, I thought.

Two girls in front of me giggled together at each display of his crassness,

which I thought encouraged him. As the trip wore on, however, I reconsid-
ered and decided these girls really weren’t encouraging his behavior. Then,
when I sneezed and they said, in harmony, “sto lat,” which wished me a
hundred years of health, I knew they were okay.

The bus rolled into the station at Jana Pawła Street just as it was getting

dark, and I walked the short distance to the Marriott Hotel, which is quite a
bargain on weekends in January. I ate dinner at Pub 7 on Plac Konstytucji,
drank a few beers at a student bar near the Politeknik, and decided to see what
a bar near the Marriott called “Champ’s” was all about.

Well, it was all about what it sounds like it would be all about; it was

a U.S. style sports bar. I sat down next to a beer-gutted, dark-haired man
who was talking to the young Pole working behind the bar. The kid had the
haircut and sideburns of the younger guys who play in nouveau rockabilly
bands in the States. I ordered a beer and was pleased to find it cost only seven
złoty—among the highest one should ever pay in Warsaw, but I expected this
place to cost 9, 10 or 11.

“You are from Germany?” the fat man asked.
“No, no,” I said, “U.S.A.”
“When you speak Polish, you sound German,” he said.
“Cool,” I said and felt like a stupid American for having said it. He laughed

a little.

“I do not want to sound German,” I said, “Are you from here?” I asked.
“No, I’m from Slovenia,” he said, “but I have been in Warsaw for twenty

years. I am Gaspar.”

“My name is David,” I said.
“Is it okay if we speak English?” he asked, “I get no practice anymore.”
“Of course,” I said as casually as I could.
“What do you do here?” he asked.
“I am a professor in Łódź,” I answered.
He laughed the laugh of all Eastern Europeans who have ever visited Łódź:

sarcastic, disdainful, understanding.

“I am now unemployed,” he said, “you know of the famous market

here?”

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I knew exactly what he was talking about. After the war the Polish govern-

ment built a stadium to hold over 70,000 people for sporting events and big
communist party gatherings. It is said they literally built it from the rubble
left over from the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Well, it couldn’t have been built
very well, and by 1983 the government abandoned it, and after the collapse
of communism in 1989, the area around it grew into what many said was the
largest open-air market in all of Europe. People from places other than Rus-
sia sold there, but it came to be known as the Russian market, and everything
from AK-47 rifles to pirated music was available there.

“Yes, I know of it,” I said, “I hear the days are numbered.”
“Numbered? Ha! They are finished,” he said. “They have already closed it!

To make way for the big future.”

The stadium site is to be cleared, and a new 70,000 seat national stadium is

to be built for Poland’s hosting of the Euro 2012 soccer tournament.

“I had read of that,” I said, “but I did not know it happened already.”
“They wanted us out, so we are out,” he said.
“Progress . . .” I said.
“They say so,” he said, “I don’t know. Do you like it here?”
“I think I do,” I said, “the prices are good, the women are beautiful.”
“Polish women . . . no way!,” he said. “You want a good wife? Go to

Odessa.”

“You went there?” I asked.
“Damn right,” he said. “We are happy for 15 years. But I cannot get her

a visa.”

“Visas are easy now,” said a young man in a business suit sitting a few stools

down from me. They argued in Polish for a bit, and Gaspar assumed I under-
stood what they’d said when he looked back to me. I’d understood some of it.

“Easy for him, maybe,” I said, playing off his obvious businessman

looks.

“Yes, easy for him. With his relationships,” he said. He said the last word

like an obscenity.

“Why don’t you move to Ukraine with her?” I asked.
“I cannot go there now, with nothing. I need to make money again. Maybe

I will go to Germany or Austria. I am part German, you know: Schmitt is my
father’s name. Maybe I can make money there.”

“I hear there is money to be made in England and Ireland.”
“I am too old for that. I tried it for two weeks. Work like dog, live like pig,

you understand?”

“I do,” I said.
“Now I live here, and there, and everywhere. Sometimes I sleep in the train

station,” he said.

Poland, Slovenia, and Austria

101

“That’s terrible,” I said.
“None of my old associates help me. I am on my own. But I will sur-

vive.”

I bought us a round of beers. We said “na zdrowie” and clinked our glasses.

I left him there around 11:00 because I wanted a good night’s sleep before
my flight to Vienna.

Of course, before leaving the Marriott I ate breakfast there, which is the

most comprehensive breakfast buffet I have ever experienced: Polish, English
and American tastes are each satisfied. You can get British beans, Polish ham,
and American bacon.

The flight to Vienna was uneventful, as was the bus ride from the airport

to the Westbanhof train station, where I had to catch a train to Linz, where
my friends live.

I bought a second class ticket and made my way down the cars, looking

at the tags in the windows that indicated seat reservations. I finally found a
car of six seats which was completely empty and had only one window seat
reserved. I sat in the other window seat.

As our departure time approached, I was happy no one had come to claim

any of the other seats, even the reserved one across from me. Minutes before
we were to leave, an older man, with thin grey hair and a pale face marked
with glowing red splotches appeared at the door to the compartment with a
young woman, most likely his daughter, I thought. He opened the door and
yelled something in German. Yes, he yelled. I had no idea what he had said,
so I motioned them into the seating area. He had a tremendous belly, which
he could hardly conceal under an expensive looking wool coat. He walked
into the cabin and stood in front of me. His presence caused the cabin to reek
of alcohol—liquor, not beer. He yelled at me again, in German, as if speaking
louder would help me to understand. His daughter said something in English,
but I didn’t make it out over the din of the drunken tyrant.

“Stand up!” he finally yelled.
“I’m sorry. I have a window seat reserved,” his daughter interjected. “He

thinks you are in my seat.”

I stood up and faced him.
“Sit in the hall!” he yelled.
I did not move. Here is how I feel when I am challenged in a foreign lan-

guage environment: first I feel bad, wrong, certain I am at fault. I apologize.
Then, if conditions indicate I am not wrong, I feel incensed if the native
speaker is trying to push me around. Clearly that is what this Austrian was
trying to do. I stood my ground to him, but offered my seat to his daughter,
and moved over one. She took the seat, put her belongings on the overhead
shelf, and spoke a stream of angry German at her drunken, out of line father.

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Then he left the train without speaking another word—of German or Eng-
lish.

The confrontation with the angry Austrian was by far the most unpleas-

ant experience I had during my entire stay in Europe, and even that wasn’t a
very big deal. A drunk turned a small misunderstanding into an embarrassing
event for his daughter, and I suspect her apology to me was not the first time
he’d put her in a spot where she’d had to do that.

I spent a few days in Austria with good friends, but I can’t imagine any

of what we did would be of interest to anyone but us. But when I returned to
Poland, even more strongly than during my return from England, I felt like I
was going home.

103

How much can you learn about Poland in two hours in a bar?

I walked into Kresowa around 8:00, and Zbyszek greeted me on his way

out to buy lottery tickets. His numbers hadn’t come in for a while, so he
felt like they were due. Ania poured me a Warka and gave me a pack of
zapałki—matches—to light my cheap cigar.

I sat at the bar two seats over from two slightly suspect looking characters.

The one closer to me was young and muscular and constantly in motion. He
shrugged his shoulders, he turned to look at the door behind him, and he
tapped a pen on his half-filled half-litre glass of Warka beer. The older man
to his left was bald and sullen, and he occasionally muttered something aimed
more at the pack of cigarettes and the two one hundred złoty bills on the bar
in front of him than at anyone sitting nearby.

Soon Zbyszek returned and took over behind the bar. As always he trans-

lated for me when the locals wanted to talk. It seemed the locals always
wanted to talk.

“He wants to know if you are ‘the professor,’” Zbyszek said, referring to

the question from the bald and sullen Pole.

“Why does he think he knows me?”
“Come on! You have been coming here long enough to be a little famous,”

Zbyszek teased.

“Tak, tak. Jestem profesorem,” I said (“Yes, yes. I am a professor”).
“He wants you to drink with them,” Zbyszek said, and so I moved over

two seats.

We introduced ourselves. The man in motion was named David, just like

me, and the sullen one was named Vincent. These, of course, are anglici-
zations of their names. They are actually Dawid and Wincenty. Each of
them spoke a little English; certainly more than I spoke Polish. So simple

Chapter Twenty-One

Fighting Poland

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Chapter Twenty-One

things they could tell me themselves, but more complicated ideas required
Zbyszek’s translation.

“You like Wiśniówka?” Vincent asked. I told him I did, and he told

Zbyszek to pour us three shots of the eighty-proof cherry-flavored vodka.

“To America,” Vincent said, and we drank them down.
“My brother is in America, in Nowy Jork” Vincent said, “I hate him.”
“That’s rather harsh,” I said, a bit taken aback.
Then he explained everything to Zbyszek, who in turn explained to me that

Vincent hated his brother because he’d abandoned him to move to New York,
and he has never so much as called or written in ten years. And even with a
brother in America, Vincent cannot get a visa.

“I am all alone,” Vincent said, and David laughed, which seemed cruel.

Then I noticed a rough, poorly healing cut on David’s nose.

“What happened?” I asked, and pointed.
“I was bitten,” he said, “by a man.”
He told me he works in a kitchen, but that he is also a “fighter.” I asked if

he meant karate or something like that, and he said yes, but the kind of fight-
ing he does is different.

“It was invented by the Jews,” he said.
I had no idea what he was talking about, and I’m always a little suspicious

when Poles in bars talk about Jews. But in later research I learned there is a
rich tradition of Jewish martial arts, and that new masters have begun teach-
ing it the world over. Who knew? At the time I tried to make a joke.

“Jew Jitsu?” I asked, but nobody seemed to get it, and it didn’t matter,

because Vincent wanted to talk about the history of Lódź. He also wanted
to buy another round of vodka. Of course I agreed, but I asked Zbyszek if I
should pay for a round.

“He says tonight you are his guest.”
We drank them down, and Vincent ordered up another round. I’ve learned

that you can slow down the drinking in some Polish bars, but you can never
stop it, except by leaving. I knew that if I kept my third shot on the bar for a
few moments, they would too, and so I did.

“Americans wrong,” Vincent said, “Much wrong. Nazi kill Jews. Not

Pole.” Then he said a lot to Zbyszek, who in turn relayed it to me.

Vincent wanted me to understand that the largest Jewish cemetery in

Europe is in Lódź. He said it is in Lódź because the city had “allowed” the
Jews to live here. Allowed was his word. He said Americans come to Poland
to find the “Polish” concentration camps, but they aren’t Polish: they are
German, Nazi German. He seemed to want me to believe there were no Pol-
ish collaborators in the Holocaust, no Polish anti-Semitism then or now, no
blame for Poland for anything, ever.

Fighting Poland

105

“We don’t do it!” Vincent yelled, “We fight!”
His face turned red and his hand shook a little as we drank up our shots

with a toast to Poland. When I first met these guys I was afraid that if there
were to be trouble, it would come from the young fighter. But as the evening
had progressed, it began to seem I had more to fear from Vincent. More evi-
dence for the unreliability of first impressions, I thought.

“Don’t be afraid,” David said, sensing my fear. Then he slapped my upper

arm, hard. Possibly friendly, too.

“Should I be afraid?” I asked Zbyszek.
“No way,” he said, “you can trust them.”
I said, “You trust them, but I trust you.”
Vincent instructed Zbyszek to pour another round of cherry vodka.
“You want big beer too?” Vincent asked me. I had been drinking a half-

litre of Warka when he called me over. “Big beer for big man,” he said. David
feigned a punch at my beer gut, and we all had a good laugh.

The vodka seemed only to make me more thirsty, so I drank the beer

quickly, and another one arrived. I asked Zbyszek if I should pay for any-
thing, and he said it would be rude to try to do so.

“Next time,” Vincent said.
“You have four weeks,” I said, reminding them, and myself, that my Ful-

bright semester was over in just 28 more days.

“Big beer for, big man,” Vincent repeated, “I am tiny man.” Of course

David laughed at that, but added, “I am tiny man too. But not forever. Him,
tiny man forever.”

“You have a plan?” I asked, “Maybe go to England for a while?”
This offended him, but he didn’t beat me up. He said he would never go to

England, as hundreds of thousands of other young Poles have recently done.
He told Zbyszek to tell me of his plans.

“For now he makes dumplings, pierogi, you know, in a restaurant,”

Zbyszek said, “but he does favors for a big man, so things may change.”

I left it at that. I didn’t want to know what kind of favors they were talking

about.

“Rozumiem,” I said. I understand.
Then Vincent started up again. He wanted to know if I had heard of the

Warsaw Uprising, the Powstanie Warszawskie. I told him that of course I
had. Then I thought: why should it be “of course?” All they know about me
is that I’m a large American professor, not that I’m Polish-American and
have been steeped in things Polish since birth. That my grandfather was the
first to tell me of the Allies’ betrayals of Poland at the end of World War
Two.

“My Grandfather dead in Powstanie,” Vincent said.

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Chapter Twenty-One

“He said he keeps a tie with a bullet-hole in it that his grandfather was

wearing when he was killed by the Nazis,” Zbyszek said. I had no reply for
that.

I would like to say we raised our glasses in honor of Vincent’s grandfather,

but we didn’t. Vincent’s monologue soon degenerated into gibberish, and he
asked Zbyszek for a pen so he could write a note to me. The note read: “Silly
boy. Robert DeNiro protect you.” Then a boisterous crowd of young people
arrived, and David went off to drink with them.

As Vincent drifted in out of consciousness I asked Zbyszek to order me a

cab, and I was back in my apartment by a little after 10:00.

107

On a warm night in January, I ended up back at Raz Na Wozie, the place
where Trevor and I had dined some weeks before. The name means some-
thing about “time on the wagon,” and the logo includes a wooden cart with
some hay on it. They serve standard Polish food in a large dining room
decorated with wagon wheels and other rural Polish kitsch like antique farm
implements and dried flowers and vegetables.

For a time early in my stay in Lódź, Raz Na Wozie had been a regular

hangout for me. A few weeks into my time in Poland I started going there
around 6:00, after my three Wednesday classes, but before the karaoke and
dance- music started around 8:00. They were good times. I would sit at the
bar and watch sports on TV with the wait staff as they got ready for the big
night ahead. We couldn’t speak each other’s languages well, but we tried to
be nice to each other: the bartender who could juggle would juggle; the pretty
waitresses wore cat ears on Halloween; I ate good soup and potato pancakes
covered in meat sauce.

It was good to be back. I sat down on a faux rural bench, and ordered up

a Tyskie duże, żurek soup, and a big potato pancake with meat sauce on top.
The first Tyskie tasted as good as beer has ever tasted, mainly because I was
parched after a long day of teaching. The day had begun well enough, but had
briefly gone downhill, before I executed a nice recovery.

When I left my apartment around 10:00 in the morning it was sunny and

forty degrees, which is quite warm for Poland in early January. In quick suc-
cession the three trams that go close to where I teach rolled through the stop
near my building. I didn’t feel like running to catch one (Trevor had broken
his ankle once doing just that!), and I knew that when they stack up like that
it’s going to be a long wait for the next one, so I decided to walk to a stop
closer to campus.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Three Good Classes

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Chapter Twenty-Two

That worked out just fine, because as I arrived at the stop, the good old

number 15 tram rolled up. The stop is one of the scary ones, with a lane of
traffic between the sidewalk and the tram line, and it’s in front of an elemen-
tary school so sometimes there are crowds of kids among the cars and trams.
And Poles are terrible drivers. They take unnecessary risks, and drive far too
fast on all qualities of road surface and in all kinds of weather. They take off
with a squeal of spinning tires and they never coast to a stop, choosing instead
to slam on the brakes a few feet before the sign or signal—as if it was the first
time they’d ever seen it there.

So I stepped off the curb with great caution. In fact, I waited until a few

people to my left stepped into the car lane so that any wayward vehicle would
get them before it got me. But the traffic stopped in time, although a few cars
skidded noisily on the wet road.

The same cannot be said for the little green car that ran the red light as

our tram was entering the Rondo Solidarności. I was sitting near the front
when I saw the car through the windows of the front door of the tram. I
knew right away we were going to crash. The tram driver rang his warning
bells and I braced my hands on the seat in front of me. I didn’t expect too
jarring an impact, and the dull thud and hard stop barely moved any of us
from our seats.

The tram driver got out to inspect the damage, as did the driver of the car.

He was unhurt. The tram had crushed his back driver-side door—had the im-
pact occurred a second or two sooner, I think he would have been seriously
injured. The fiberglass bumper of the tram had popped off at one corner, but
otherwise the multi-ton monster was undamaged and could have just been
driven off from the scene. Of course, that’s not how it works anywhere. And
how it worked in Poland was very entertaining.

After some angry convincing from the passengers, the tram driver opened

the doors to let us out, even though the two-car tram was stopped over several
lanes of traffic. But those cars weren’t going anywhere, so letting us out in
the street didn’t put us in any danger. Most of the passengers scattered from
the accident scene to catch other trams or to walk to their destinations, but
because I had a little extra time before my first class at 11:20 I stuck around
to watch the events unfold.

An old man stayed behind too, not just to watch the investigation but to

participate. In a loud voice accompanied by grand, sweeping hand gestures,
he criticized the driver of the green car for causing the accident. The tram
driver wanted nothing to do with the old man; he looked sad and defeated
by the fact that the rest of his day probably would be spent dealing with the
heavily bureaucratic and inefficient investigation of a small accident that
clearly was not his fault.

Three Good Classes

109

I watched the old man argue with the car and tram driver, even seeking

to engage passersby who had not been riding on the tram or anywhere near
the scene at the time of the accident. It was clear he was planning on stick-
ing around so he could make a richly detailed report to the police. I wished
I could have stayed longer, but because I had a bit of a walk in front of me,
and a little less than an hour before my first class, I went on my way. About
a hundred meters from the accident scene, I slipped and nearly fell on some
ice hiding in the midmorning shade produced by an apartment building. Al-
though these were minor incidents in the grand scheme of things, I reminded
myself that misfortunes come in threes. I feared my first class could finish
the trifecta.

My first class, Canadian Government, went well because I brought a

printout for each student of the central ideas of the three topics we were ex-
amining: language and politics, diversity and politics, and Canadian foreign
policy. We followed the outline, and I didn’t have to write anything on the
chalkboard. Students asked questions where appropriate, and as I looked
down on the desks I could tell most of the students were filling in crucial
ideas on the handout, just as I had intended for them to do. I delivered a lot of
serious academic content, they asked great questions and laughed when they
should have. It was a good class: I would grade it a B+.

In the next course, Media and Politics, I started with a discussion of the

Iowa and New Hampshire Democratic primary elections.

“Who won Iowa?” I asked.
“Obama,” they answered.
“Right. What percent?”
They weren’t sure, so I told them 38.
“And what did Hillary get?” I asked.
Again they weren’t sure, so I told them 29.
“Quite a defeat?” I asked.
They didn’t seem sure what to make of why I thought that was funny. So

I explained that a common assessment by pundits of Hillary’s defeat in Iowa
included the observation that a full 71% of Democrats voting in Iowa had
voted against Hillary.

Then I said, “But, didn’t 62% vote against Obama?”
They nodded their heads in agreement. They understood. Throughout the

semester we’d discussed the idea that the news media set the expectations for
candidates, and that campaigns contribute to the expectations game by raising
or lowering them based on where they think their candidate will finish. But
now we had actual examples, hot off the presses as it were, which always
helps to illuminate concepts.

“And what about the Republicans? How did they finish?”

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Chapter Twenty-Two

They knew Huckabee beat Romney in Iowa and McCain beat him in New

Hampshire.

“So Romney is . . . toast?” a student asked, appearing quite pleased with

his use of American slang.

“Quite possibly. But what about Giuliani?” I asked, “He has finished far

behind in New Hampshire and Iowa too. Is he . . . toast?” I deliberately
paused the same way my student had, not to mock but to bond through a
little humor.

I would like to say they responded in unison that Giuliani was, in fact,

not toast, because his campaign had succeeded in setting media expectations
low enough in New Hampshire and Iowa that poor showings there wouldn’t
really hurt his campaign. Instead he was focusing on the delegate rich states
that vote on February 5th. But that didn’t happen. I let them think about it
for a while: applying theory to events to produce knowledge, as a B.G.S.U.
“learning outcome” puts it. When it became clear that the observation I hoped
for wouldn’t be forthcoming, we worked through it together. So at least they
now had two real world examples.

Then we talked about “momentum.” Candidates coming out of Iowa with a

victory are supposed to do better in the states that follow. Again this is a me-
dia-constructed expectation. Why should a candidate who does well among
a handful of Democrats in one un-representative state necessarily do well
among a differently un-representative sample of Democrats in another state?
But that’s how the game is played.

Naturally we then discussed the fact that Hillary Clinton had won in New

Hampshire. I had to admit that political scientists were somewhat baffled by
the outcome, and we tried to discuss some of the questions raised by the inac-
curacy of the pre-election polls.

Why were the polls wrong?
Where were Obama’s young voters in New Hampshire?
Did voters change their minds?
Did voters abandon Obama because he is black?
I didn’t have any easy answers for the students, and it felt great admitting

it. Why should I have all the answers? This is political science I told them,
not rocket science. We are examining the fluid motions of an open system, so
any predictions are by nature very risky. Sure, I’d told them earlier in the se-
mester that what differentiates political science from other “lesser” attempts
to analyze the world (e.g., the efforts of journalists, pundits) is that we make
predictions, just like the big boys in the natural sciences. I didn’t tell them
that the problem with the “scientific” study of politics is that we are so often
wrong in our predictions. But I think they already knew that, and the New
Hampshire results made it even more clear.

Three Good Classes

111

One point I really wanted them to understand is the unreliability of polls

concerning African American candidates, sometimes called the “Bradley
Effect” for how the overestimation of the prospects of Los Angeles Mayor
Tom Bradley when he ran for governor of California in 1982. In general,
surveys overestimate the support for black candidates. It’s part of a larger
point about how difficult it is for pollsters to gauge accurately public opinion
about controversial topics. I told it to them exactly as I tell it to my American
students:

“If you ask someone a question that has a socially acceptable answer,

you’re more likely to get that answer than you are to get the truth.”

Then we switched gears to talk about the subject scheduled for the day:

U.S. media coverage of foreign affairs. That really took the wind out of the
sails of the class, but I felt it essential that we work on some of the assigned
material. This is a tension every professor and most teachers I’ve talked with
feel: the seeming zero-sum trade-off between the exhilarating experience of
having a really good discussion about a topic, and the sometimes deadening
process of transferring information, usually through a lecture. The best teach-
ers I know use both strategies during each class period. I try to emulate them,
but it isn’t easy.

I also wanted to discuss foreign affairs coverage because I think it’s really

important, and I thought the students would appreciate the example from our
textbook of how 24-hour cable news channels have radically sped up the
news-cycle in the U.S. When the Berlin Wall went up in 1961 J.F.K. waited
eight days to make a public statement about it; as it came down in 1989,
George H. W. Bush had to comment as it happened, and act as if everything
was going as planned, or at least anticipated. No wonder modern presidents
look less well-prepared when it comes to events in other countries! I think
they understood and appreciated the example, but not as strongly as I had
hoped. Then again, many of my students were born around 1989, and any-
thing that happens before a 19 year old is born is ancient history to them. It’s
true of my American students, and it seemed to apply to my Polish ones as
well.

By the time for my American Government class 4:30, I was as tired as

usual. Normally I can wing this class on just adrenalin and excitement for the
night ahead. This night was no exception, and it didn’t hurt my cause that the
topic was elections.

It turned out to be a great class. I explained the seeming contradiction that

while survey evidence indicates Americans want third and fourth political
parties to play a significant role, we do not have them. I assured the students
that political scientists know the reason why; and it’s one of the few features
of political life we describe as a “law.”

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Chapter Twenty-Two

Duverger’s Law, named for the scholar who introduced it, is elegantly

simple: if your legislature consists of districts which each elect one member,
and if you choose that member through a plurality electoral system (where
the winner need not get a majority of the votes, just at least one vote more
than anyone else in the race), then you will have a two party system. Because
all the winning candidate needs is one more vote than his nearest opponent,
supporters of minor parties have a massive incentive to throw their support to
the major party they find least offensive: exercising the “lesser of two evils”
option.

We also discussed what some political scientists call Duverger’s Hypoth-

esis, which suggests, again elegantly and simply, that if your electoral sys-
tem is a proportional one in which political parties win seats in a legislature
roughly in proportion to the percentage of the popular vote they received,
you will end up with a multiple party system. The “lesser of two evils” op-
tion need not be exercised when almost every party has a decent chance to
win seats.

We talked about hypothetical and real examples of the phenomena; I en-

couraged them to think about the psychological factors surrounding the idea
of “wasting your vote” on a third party; we talked about the idea of a “spoiler
effect,” and it surprised me that most of them were quite familiar with the role
of Ralph Nader’s 98,000 votes in Florida in producing George W. Bush’s 537
vote margin in that state. It was exhilarating. It felt like education!

Then two guys sitting in the front row started whispering about something

other than the class content. Yes, it was in Polish, so I can’t be sure. But I’m
sure. Professors know. I shushed them, and while it was not a big event, the
great good feelings were gone in an instant. Maybe I was “crashing,” because
during my walk to campus after the tram accident I had forgotten to purchase
my usual snacks, and had eaten nothing all day. I know I’m getting too old to
teach all day on an empty stomach, but I continue to do it anyway.

I plodded through the remainder of my notes. I wasn’t so much angry with

the students, as I was just drained. Even the chatters really weren’t bad stu-
dents. In fact, one of them runs the American Studies Student Association,
and in our discussions there he has demonstrated a better grasp of some of
the technical details of American politics than I have. It’s just a lot to expect
a group of twenty year olds to pay attention to one non-electronic source of
information and entertainment for 75 minutes in a row. I know I’m interest-
ing, but not as interesting as television or the internet.

After class I headed to Raz Na Wozie, about a 25 minute walk. As I neared

the busy intersection of Narutowicza and the southbound street that leads to
the train station, I heard a fast- moving set of footsteps come up behind me.

“Hello professor!”

Three Good Classes

113

It was Piotr, the smart chatter. We walked together for a while and he told

me about his love for Chicago, where he’d spent the summer of 2007. Previ-
ously, he had lived and worked in Delaware , and had hated it.

“No Polish food!” he said, “but Chicago, ‘ooo la la.’”
I asked if he’d ever eaten at my favorite Polish restaurant in Chicago, an

all you can eat place called the Red Apple.

“I lived no more than fifty meters from there!” he said.
When we split up he said enthusiastically, “Now I am off to drink with my

friends!”

“Ask them about the impact of electoral systems,” I joked.
“No way!” he said.
Neither the juggling bartender nor the pretty waitresses who wore cat-ears

on Halloween were working at Raz Na Wozie that night, but the soup was
good, the potato pancakes hit the spot, and the beer was cheap, cold and
delicious. I left before the music began. I walked carefully to avoid hidden
ice, dislodged sidewalk blocks, and the many holes and obstacles on Lódź
sidewalks. I didn’t want number three to happen after what had been a pretty
good day.

114

I sat down at the bar, and Zbyszek said, “Warka?” I answered in the affirma-
tive and had a beer in front of me in less than a minute. At that moment, I
believe I became a regular.

I sat next to an attractive woman about my age. She was drinking beer with

juice—a typical Polish woman’s drink. She and Zbyszek seemed to be old
friends and they would talk quietly when he wasn’t busy serving customers.

Within minutes of my arrival a small, almost tiny, bald man sat down next

to me and started trying to speak to me in the most halting English I have
ever heard.

“I . . . you . . . very . . . here?”
“Nie rozumiem.” (“I don’t understand”)
“Speak Polish?”
“Przepraszam, nie.” (“I’m sorry, no”)
“Aha . . . I . . . you . . . go . . . England?”
I decided that meant he thought I was from England.
“No, no. U.S.A.,” I said.
“Aha, U.S.A . . . very . . . very good . . . understand?”
“Yes,” I said.
Zbyszek and the woman were obviously enjoying my introduction to one

of the stranger regulars at Kresowa. I learned his name is Ryszard. He wore
thick wire-rimmed glasses, had a few days of scruffy stubble, and terrible
breath. He curled his little fingers backwards when he spoke, sometimes
pressing the index and second finger together, or overlapping them as in
the good luck sign. Sometimes he would push both his hands forward, like
someone releasing a bird, when he made what he thought was a particularly
important point. Some younger guys next to him ribbed him a bit, but it

Chapter Twenty-Three

Zbyszkuuuu . . .

Zbyszkuuuu . . .

115

seemed to be more or less good-natured. I could see them over Ryszard’s
head, and during a particular long speech which I could not understand one
of them rolled his eyes, and I made my best “it’s okay, he seems harmless”
face in response.

“What’s with him?” I asked Zbyszek after Ryszard had made his way to

the W.C.

“He’s just Ryszard,” Zbyszek said, “strange, but harmless.”
“I see,” I said, and got up to throw some coins in the jukebox. Andrzej

the owner noticed me from his seat across the bar and nodded a greeting. I
nodded back. He was eating liver smothered in onions and reading Polityka
Magazine. Reading up on the collapse of the Polish right, I thought.

Then a group of three men in their twenties burst noisily through the door.

Two of them sat down at one of the tables, and the third came to the bar to
order beers. He shook every man’s hand and said, “dobry wieczor,”—good
evening -- and he kissed the hand of the attractive woman. It was clear no-
body at the bar knew the man, but it was not the first time I’d been formally
greeted in this way when sitting at a bar.

Then I noticed a chubby young girl standing behind the boys at the bar.

She looked to be underage (the legal drinking age in Poland is 18). She had
short, dyed-black hair, and wore lots of black eye make-up, and garish red
lipstick. She pleaded with Zbyszek for something to drink. “Zbyskuuuuuu
. . .” she nearly sang as she was asking. When Zbyszek returned to our corner
after serving up several rounds, I asked him about her.

“A prostitute,” he said, “she is only 16.”
“Oh my god,” I said, “that’s terrible.”
“I know, I know. She wants drinks, but I never give them to her.”
“I . . . you . . . very . . . recording . . . Abba,” Ryszard said.
“He’s trying to tell you he likes Abba,” Zbyszek said.
“Tijuana Brass!”
“And the Tijuana Brass,” Zbyszek said, then said a few sentences in Polish

to Ryszard about being a pest.

“Zbyszkuuuuu,” Ryszard sang.
“How many ways are there to say your name?” I asked.
“Probably a thousand,” he sighed. He knew for the rest of the night he was

going to be called Zbyszkuuuuu: pleadingly by the teenaged whore, patheti-
cally by Ryszard, and mockingly by the young men at the bar.

I asked Zbyszek for another beer and tried to buy one for the attractive

woman to my left, but she turned it down. After Zbyszek poured my beer he
explained her situation to me in English, certain she would not understand a
word of it.

116

Chapter Twenty-Three

“Her story is very sad. Her husband died in a crash on the way home from

a business trip to Germany. She has two daughters. One is 21, the other 13.
She lives with her mother and the 13 year old.”

Neither of us looked at her when he spoke, which maybe made it seem

we were not talking about her. “How very sad,” I said lamely. But what else
could I say?

“Zbyszkuuuuu” she said, and he laughed.
Then I noticed that two old men sitting next to Andrzej the owner were

eating giant red Gołąki and bright yellow potatoes. I knew there was a kitchen
(remember Adam’s pathetic rice?), and I knew some decent food occasion-
ally emerged from it (remember the liver and bigos eaten by the big owner?),
but I hadn’t known real food might be available for sale.

“You serve food here?” I asked Zbyszek.
“Yes, and it is very good,” he said, “but Polish food only.”
“I love Polish food,” I said, and nodded toward the two gentlemen’s plates,

“those look delicious.”

“Pigeons,” he said.
“Yes, yes, gołąki,” I replied.
“Ohhh, so you know . . .” he said, “here they are delicious, with raisins.”
That didn’t sound too good to me, but I didn’t say so.
And so the evening went. Ryszard insisted on talking to me, even though

in general I had no idea what he was talking about. The teenaged whore came
and went, and finally convinced Zbyszek to give her something: the darts
for the electronic board. I made a mental note to keep an eye on where she
threw them. The young men messed with Ryszard, and Zbyszek made quiet
conversation with the attractive widow whenever drink orders slowed down.
After a couple of hours, she accepted a beer from me. I pumped occasional
money into the jukebox, and Zbyszek cranked up the volume whenever a
song he liked played.

In my way of thinking, here is all you have to know about how cool

Zbyszek is. I played Janis Joplin’s version of “Me and Bobby McGee,” and
before he cranked it up, he said, “Kris Kristofferson.”

“He is one of my heroes,” I replied.
“Fantastic songwriter,” he said. Then he sang, “help me make it through

the night . . .”

He turned down the juke box a little when the next song played. I think it

was something by Leonard Cohen. I just loved hearing Leonard drone over
the noise of Kresowa.

“Somewhere near Salinas,” Zbyszek said, “in California, right? Steinbeck

wrote about it.”

Zbyszkuuuu . . .

117

“He did,” I said, “and with great sympathy.”
I stayed past the time when the trams stopped running, and Zbyszek called

a cab for me. I’d already finished reading East of Eden, but when I returned to
my apartment, I made a point to add it to a pile of books I planned to donate
to the American Studies program’s library.

118

Since my time in Poland was growing short, I began to visit Kresowa more
frequently. Early one evening, while I was drinking my usual half-litre of
Warka, a man and woman sat down next to me. He was about 60, bald and
rail-thin. He was a serious and somber looking fellow. She looked to be a bit
younger and was as wide as she was tall. She was jovial and loud. He ordered
a big beer and she ordered a small one. She asked Ania, Zbyszek’s ladyfriend
who was tending bar that night, to heat up the beer for her. Ania must have
kept the beer in the microwave too long, because the rotund woman com-
plained to her partner about it. So he drank down about a third of his beer and
then poured some of hers into his. Then he refilled her glass. This seemed to
produce the right temperature and she began drinking her beer.

The sad thin man offered me a cigarette, but I politely refused. Then he

asked me a question I did not understand, and I told him I didn’t speak Pol-
ish. He apologized with one word in English which he repeated a few times:
“sorry . . .” I wanted to tell him he had nothing to be sorry about, but all I
could say back was “sorry” in Polish: przepraszam.

Then they began to argue. Well, more accurately, she began to holler at

him, and he hung his head and listened, interjecting an occasional syllable,
not even a full word. They smoked cigarette after cigarette right down to the
filter. She was definitely loud and a little annoying, but it was far from the
worst behavior I’d seen in a bar in Poland. The one time he managed to get
out a whole sentence, I think it was about me and went something like, “I
think the American understands a little Polish,” which is true. But I under-
stood only that comment, not any of the substance of their argument.

During this one-sided argument, Andrzej, the owner of Kresowa, drove up

onto the sidewalk in front of the bar. He and a couple of regulars got out and
started unloading the trunk. They brought in several bags of flour and some

Chapter Twenty-Four

Breaking Glass

Breaking Glass

119

medium sized white boxes. I never did find out what was in the boxes, but
the flour was put to immediate use in the kitchen.

The two women who work back there began methodically and carefully

producing pierogi and arranging them in neat rows on plastic trays. These
were beautiful pierogi. No two of them were the exact same size or shape,
although there was nothing sloppy about them either. They were just hand-
made, home-made pierogi and I knew they would be delicious.

So there I sat drinking tasty Polish beer, listening to the one-sided Polish

argument, and just really enjoying being in Poland. Evidently the kitchen ladies
were not as pleased with the situation, because after finishing three or four trays
of pierogi, one of them came out from the kitchen and yelled at the fat woman
with the warm beer. I didn’t understand all the details of her short tirade, but I
got the major point: take your argument out onto Piotrkowska Street!

Humbled and silent the woman put on her scarf (she hadn’t taken off her

jacket because it was quite cold in the bar), smoked her last cigarette down to
the filter, and walked with her silent man out onto the street.

I felt bad for them because they really weren’t that annoying—certainly I

didn’t think they were annoying enough to deserve to be kicked out of Kre-
sowa. In fact I enjoyed the classic spectacle of the fat jolly woman berating
her skinny whipped-dog husband. It was reassuring to see that tradition in
Poland, having seen it often back in the States. I also hoped they hadn’t put
them out because they thought they were annoying me. But, I decided that
was pretty unlikely and ordered another Warka. Then Pocahontas walked in.

She hadn’t been around the bar for a while. I’d asked Zbyszek about her

absence and he’d said she was in trouble. “She stabbed him,” he’d said. I
didn’t want to know who, so I didn’t ask. But there she was, back in the bar,
smiling and seemingly happy. She sat down right next to me.

“Hi,” she said, and I returned the greeting. She speaks no English so I knew

we weren’t going to have much of a conversation. A few minutes later one of
her friends arrived and I switched stools so they could sit side by side.

Pocahontas and her friend drank a few big beers, then Pocahontas left the

bar without her jacket. I guessed she was going next door to buy cigarettes,
but she was away too long for that simple transaction.

When she returned, she had with her a small bottle of Jack Daniel’s whis-

key, which she poured into her beer. She drank that down pretty quickly
and continued chatting with her friend in a friendly way. But I noticed Ania
nervously keeping an eye on her. After pouring Pocahontas a shot of vodka,
Ania made a phone call.

Zbyszek arrived just after Pocahontas had thrown a heavy glass ashtray

into the liquor bottles behind the bar. Without any warning or obvious provo-
cation, she’d just stood up and whipped the ashtray across the bar and into

120

Chapter Twenty-Four

the bottles. Quickly Andrzej was in her face, yelling at her, while Ania was
sweeping up the pieces. A young giant of a man, bald and brutal looking, tried
to intervene between Pocahontas and Andrzej. He seemed to be taking her
side. Ania called the police.

“This happens when she drinks more than beer,” Zbyszek said.
“She didn’t have very much,” I said.
“She doesn’t need very much,” he replied.
Things settled down for a bit while everyone waited for the cops to arrive.

Then Pocahontas screamed, and went to throw her beer glass across the bar,
into the bottles she’d hit with the ashtray. But Andrzej grabbed her arm, and
the glass fell to the floor behind the bar and shattered. She broke free from
Andrzej’s hold and climbed onto a table. She didn’t seem to know what she
was going to do once she was up there, and after a few seconds she accepted
the brute’s assistance and climbed down. I’d seen enough action for one eve-
ning and decided to leave.

“Is it okay if I leave?” I asked Zbyszek.
“Of course,” he said, “the police will want witnesses who speak Polish.”
I put a ten złoty bill on the bar as a tip for Ania, and Zbyszek translated

her reaction.

“She says we should pay you for seeing all of this,” he said.
I smiled, shrugged my shoulders and said, “jest jak jest,” which means “it

is what it is.”

I stopped off at the Ramzes restaurant for some dinner to take home, and at

the Żabka across from the downtown tram stop for a four-pack of Warka. It
was about ten o’clock and half a dozen people were waiting for the tram.

Then a figure emerged from the alley next to the tram stop. He was yelling

primitive nonsense and staggering pretty badly. Another lovely Polish drunk,
I thought. As he walked toward me I noticed that he’d been pretty badly
beaten, and recently. His face was covered in blood, and only the thinnest
spots had begun to dry.

“Graaaaa, graaaa. . . .” he said and put out his hand, which contained a few

coins. I gladly gave him a handful of change and he staggered toward the
others waiting for the tram. They gave him wide berth. “Graaaaa . . .” he said
and collected a few more coins before staggering off into the night.

121

As my departure approached, the food tasted better, people seemed nicer,
even the weather warmed. I had recently discovered a restaurant about a
block from my office called Bar Sznycelek. Technically I didn’t “discover”
it—my student Piotr recommended it. It’s a real no-frills operation: you read
the menu off a big sign on the wall and give your order to a middle-aged
woman behind a counter. You sit at tables with people you don’t know, and
when your food comes out of the kitchen it’s placed on the counter under
the big menu sign. The cook or order-taker hollers out what it is so the right
person can come and get it. After you finish eating, you take your dishes and
silverware to a little window, where an old lady who peels potatoes when
she’s not washing dishes, takes them away to clean them.

The food is incredible -- by far the best Polish food I’ve ever eaten in a

restaurant in Poland, or anywhere else for that matter. The first day I went in,
I expected to order a chicken cutlet, but I saw an order of meatballs in mush-
room sauce come out of the kitchen and ordered that instead, with dill pickle
soup. The soup is what really makes the place special. Huge bowls of very
flavorful Polish soups such as kapusniak and żurek for under two dollars. In
fact, a meal consisting of soup, entrée, potatoes, cabbage salad, and a bottle
of Coke cost just over five dollars. I ate at Bar Sznycelek every day for my
final two weeks in Łódź.

My colleagues were saying their goodbyes as well. Some of that was for-

mal stuff in the department, but the better kind were dinners and drinks with
colleagues who had almost become friends. One night my American col-
league David LaFrance and I went out for a beer. He drank only one because
he had a 3:20 A.M. bus to the Warsaw airport the next day. I had more than
one. We drank at the Baghdad Café. It’s about a five minute walk from my
office, and this was my first visit. I’d tried to find it before and failed because

Chapter Twenty-Five

Firsts and Lasts

122

Chapter Twenty-Five

I’d assumed it was located in one of the commercial buildings along Jaracza
Street, but it’s actually in the basement of a mansion that used to belong to
one of the industrialists of old Lódź.

After LaFrance and I said our goodbyes, I walked to the new tramstop that

had just re-opened in front of our office building. I got on the number 13 tram,
thinking its new route took it to the stop right in front of my home building.
When it reached an intersection not very far from where I lived, instead of
going straight toward my home, it turned right. Oops. So I got out at the next
stop, which was high atop a busy elevated roadway, and walked under the
tracks on a walkway that connects the two tram lines, and waited for one to
take me back to the intersection. It arrived pretty quickly, and as I got off I
decided to walk the remainder of the way home. Successfully making the
adjustment after riding on the wrong tram felt like one of those little achieve-
ments that mean you’ve really settled into a place.

During the walk home, I decided to visit a pub I’d walked past a few

times which looked interesting. It’s called Pub Buła (pronounced Boo-Wah)
and its symbol is an ancient Egyptian Pharoah head. The word Buła means
a kind of bread roll in Polish, but that’s not what the bar is named for. The
Polish name for the University of Lódź Library is Biblioteka Uniwersytet
Lódźki, so the name is a play on the acronym: B.U.Ł. However, what had
really caught my attention about the place was the big sign out front, whose
English translation read, “bottomless pit of cold beer.” How could I resist
such a challenge?

The crowd was of mixed age—young and middle. A long bar (with no

stools) ran almost the entire length of the place, with tables along the floor-
to-ceiling windows that formed the front wall of the pub. Just as I walked in
the cook emerged from the kitchen to place a pizza on the bar, and I recog-
nized him. It was Dawid, the Jewish martial arts expert I’d met a few weeks
before at Kresowa. I noticed that his nose had almost completely healed. We
said our hellos and he told the bartender something that must have included
“speak English to this guy,” because that’s what he did. I ordered a half-litre
of Żywiec, but the keg blew just as he began to pour it, so I said I’d take a
Warka instead. It cost 4 złoty, 50 groszy, which made it the second cheapest
pint I’d found in Lódź (the cheapest being one for 3.50 at a bar I wouldn’t
return to on a bet).

I sat at a table behind three Polish guys who looked to be students. I

quickly inferred that they must have had something to do with the demise of
the Żywiec keg because in front of them was a long, narrow wooden board
with the Żywiec logo printed on it and seven beers on it too. The bits of their
conversation I could hear indicated they were pouring down the beers and
eating pizza to celebrate the end of the semester studying law.

Firsts and Lasts

123

I drank just two pints and walked home past the library, the “American

Corner,” and the new business administration building. It’s the collection of
university buildings that looks most like an American campus, and I liked
walking through there. I wanted to make it an early night because the next
day at noon there would be a little send-off in the office, and a dinner and
drinks that night with some of the younger faculty members. I thought it
might become a late one.

The next night five of my young, beautiful, and smart colleagues and I ate

dinner at Anatewka, a Jewish restaurant. A small musical group consisting of
violin, accordion and clarinet played long sets of songs in the minor key, and
in between a woman violinist perched on a chair halfway up a wall played
for the crowd. She climbed a ladder to get up there. It was very strange. She
played “hava nagila” three times during dinner. Afterwards, three of us went
to Kresowa.

The place was nearly empty, and Zbyszek was in a foul mood. We drank

one beer, listened to the snoring drunk passed out on the bench behind us, and
left for Lódź Kaliska, one of Lódź’s best-known night clubs. My colleagues
still had stacks of exams to grade, so we decided to make it an early night,
and left after just one beer.

Grading exams in Poland and assigning grades turned out to be one of the

most hilariously complicated processes I’d ever experienced. Normally bu-
reaucratic bullshit makes me angry, but I realized there was no point in that
this time. And it wouldn’t have made any difference.

During exams, only a handful of students cheated—by attempting to copy

from one another. I stared them down, and most of them ceased. Two young
men in my Saturday class were not deterred by this, since Polish students get
a second chance to pass any exam they fail. As punishment for their cheating
I lowered their grades to just above the point of failing. If they complained,
I would say I had punished them for “insufficient citation” of each other’s
work. But they didn’t complain.

Polish students carry with them for their entire academic careers what are

called “Indekses.” This is their personal record of each class they took, the
grade they received, and the number of times they’d had to take the exam in
order to pass. Professors must write in a grade and sign each of their students’
indekses. At first it was a little intimidating to have to look the students in
the eye as I gave them their grades—especially poor grades—but only one
student out of 132 complained about the grade I gave him.

There is a lot more to giving grades than just signing the indekses, includ-

ing filling out forms and entering them into a computer. I spent most of an
eight hour work day signing indekses, filling out forms, and signing my
name.

124

Chapter Twenty-Five

After a full day of bureaucratic nonsense, I walked over to Kresowa for

my final visit.

The place was packed with young revelers, many of whom looked to be

university students celebrating the end of the semester. I sat on the side of
the bar where Andrzej and his cronies normally sit and waited for Zbyszek
to get a free moment to pour me a Warka. Andrzej and I exchanged “dobry
wieczors” (“good evening”).

Zbyszek brought me a beer, and I said, “This is my last night here until

September,” when I planned to return for an academic conference. Zbyszek
immediately told Andrzej in Polish that I was soon to leave. He appeared
characteristically unmoved by the news of my impending departure.

Then Dawid, drunk as can be, stumbled over.
As I have mentioned before, when he talks to you he invades your personal

space, and this time was no exception. He put his arm over my shoulder and
patted my back when he wanted to make a point. He speaks very broken
English.

“Come to Buła. I cook special for you.”
“In September,” I said.
He didn’t understand.
“My English terrible,” he said, “but I study.”
Andrzej told him I was leaving. Then he and Dawid engaged in a conversa-

tion I didn’t understand. Zbyszek poured me another Warka.

“May I ask you a question?” he said.
“Of course.”
“What is a ferris wheel?”
I didn’t expect that, and it’s not as easy as you might think to describe a

ferris wheel to someone who speaks English well, but with a somewhat lim-
ited vocabulary.

“It is a kind of ride,” I said.
His confused look indicated that explanation hadn’t worked.
“It is a wheel,” I said, conscious of the fact I was using part of the term to

define it, “that is thirty or forty meters high, that has seats hanging on it that
you ride . . . for pleasure.”

The word “pleasure” seemed to be the key. I thought about asking for a pen

and paper to draw it, but he was summoned away to pour more beer.

After he finished talking with Andrzej, Dawid turned to me and said,

“Sorry. I must sit with my girl,” and pointed behind me to where she stood.
It was Ewa, the beautiful redhead from Raz Na Wozie.

I know this seems really unlikely, but it’s true. John Irving is right when he

responds to his critics who complain that there are too many coincidences in
his novels: but they happen! This happened. There she stood, and she looked

Firsts and Lasts

125

even better than I remembered. Her hair was cut shorter, which accentuated
her pretty face. We shook hands and I said “hi” in Polish: cześć.

After they had gone to sit down at a table with their friends I wondered

if she would tell him I’d tried (lamely) to pick her up at Raz Na Wozie, and
if that would make him want to kick my ass. I decided it was unlikely, then
Zbyszek returned.

“Another question,” he said. “what is a county fair?”
Again, think about explaining this to a non-native English speaker. I’m

most certainly not disparaging Zbyszek’s English or intelligence. It turns out
that I’m not great at explaining things, which given my profession, reflects
poorly on me. But this time I knew of a Polish term that would help: dożynki,
which means harvest festival. So that’s what I told him it was which, while
not entirely accurate, did the job well enough.

“And it is a place where you will find a ferris wheel,” I said.
“These words are in the lyrics of a song on the new Eagles album,” he

explained.

Then an older man with a small grey pony-tail sat down next to me. He

took some time ordering his drink, and I understood almost all of the conver-
sation, which made me very proud. He wanted a bottle of Leżajsk beer, and
Zbyszek informed him that he had only one left.

Then he took out a complicated and expensive looking camera and took

some photos of people as they were giving Zbyszek their drink orders. In bro-
ken Polish and English he managed to tell me he was a professional photog-
rapher, and I told him I was a professor. Zbyszek told me many of the photos
on the walls are his work, and the photographer wanted to take my picture.
I happily agreed. He snapped a couple of me from the side, just talking to
Zbyszek. I was smoking a cheap cigar, and he asked me to take a couple of
puffs. I obliged. He showed me the photos on the little screen on the back of
the camera, and never have I seen myself look more like Charles Bukowski. I
absolutely loved the picture, and he told me, through Zbyszek, he would leave
prints in a few days. Zbyszek promised to mail them to me.

By then I’d been in the bar for about two hours, and the last trams of the

night were rumbling past. I asked Zbyszek for some pierogi and goląbki to
go, and somehow managed to drink down three more beers in the fifteen or
so minutes it took for the food to come out of the kitchen. Zbyszek called a
cab, and it seemed to arrive almost immediately. All too soon I was saying
my goodbyes. I shook Andrzej’s hand, then Zbyszek’s.

“I am very glad we met,” he said.
“Me too,” I answered.
“See you in September,” he said.
I walked out of Kresowa, got in the taxi, and told the driver where to go.

127

I spent the night before my departure from Poland in Warsaw, because even
though my flight out didn’t depart until noon, I always like to be no more
than a cab ride away from the airport the day I have to take a flight. I met up
with my friend Tony for a beer before dinner. He asked me how I was feeling
about leaving.

“I feel like I’m abandoning something,” I said.
“You’re not,” he said, “but if you want to stay you should ask the Fulbright

office now, to find out if it’s possible.”

“I don’t want to stay, and I don’t want to leave,” I said.
I’d already thought over the possibility of asking for an extension, but had

decided against it. By returning the States I would have six months off from
teaching, which would allow me a lot of time to write. I knew I was leaving
a substantial amount of money on the table by not asking for an extension,
but I’d thought of something my friend Kevin had told me: if the choice is
between time and money, always choose time. Intellectually, I was very com-
fortable with my decision, but emotionally, in Warsaw on the night before I
was scheduled to leave, I felt pretty bad about my choice.

“You’ll feel different once you’re on the plane,” Tony said.
He was right. But I still felt pretty ambivalent about leaving. Once again,

lyrics from Chicago polka king Eddie Blazonczyk summarized my feelings:

Back across the ocean to my home away from home
I’m glad to be returning, but sad to have to go
I’d like to find a way to be two places at one time
It’s easy going back again, it’s hard to say goodbye

Knowing that I was coming back in a few months for a conference made me
feel better. Professor Wiesiek Oleksy, who helps to run the American Studies

Conclusion:

Warsaw One More Time

128

Conclusion: Warsaw One More Time

program, had reminded me about a Fulbright program to fund shorter guest
lectures by U.S. faculty. I’d told him I’d be happy to come back to Łódź
every year to do that, if it were possible. In Polish, the word for “good bye”
is “do widzenia.” That’s the formal, and therefore always the correct, way of
saying good bye. On the other hand, the less formal “do zobaczenia” means
something like “see you later,” and that’s what I felt like I was saying as I
left Poland in 2008.

I had wanted to achieve a number of objectives on my Fulbright, and I

think I did pretty well. First, and most importantly, I wanted to teach my
classes effectively. By and large, I think I did that, although had I taught
for an additional semester I am certain I would have challenged the students
more. For example, instead of a final exam based mostly on objective ques-
tions as the only graded work for the courses, I would have required some
in-class writing assignments as a means of rewarding the students who were
actually keeping up with the readings, and punishing those who were not.

Throughout the semester I had talked with Tony about the challenges of

teaching in Poland. We faced many of the same dilemmas, including large
numbers of students who rarely or never attended classes. Tony used a short
quiz at the beginning of each class session to encourage attendance, while I
decided it was up to the students to decide if coming to class was worth their
time. We discussed how difficult it can be to get students to express them-
selves in class, and I told him how I’d gotten lucky on that front. About three
or four weeks into the semester a very bright and talkative young woman be-
gan attending my classes, and whenever she would speak up in class (which
was often), other students (especially the women), would feel emboldened to
speak up as well.

My second goal as a Fulbrighter was to maintain and build relationships

with Polish colleagues. I was less successful with that than I was with my
teaching. I don’t mean to suggest that I offended anyone I worked with or
that relations were not always cordial and professional. That most certainly
wasn’t the case. I still have a good relationship with Elżbieta and Wiesek
Oleksy, who run the American Studies program. I liked my colleagues and
got along well with them, but the academic environment at Łódź is a little
different from the one I am used to at B.G.S.U.

I consider myself to be pretty good friends with all of my American col-

leagues who are around my age. We frequently eat lunch together, gather
for happy hour at a local pub, and go to parties at each other’s homes. Little
of that happened while I was in Poland. Naturally, had I stayed longer than
just one semester, there would have been more informal contact. But, I think
other factors were at work as well. First, Polish colleagues spend less time
in their offices than my American colleagues. It seems that when they are

Conclusion: Warsaw One More Time

129

not teaching or holding office hours, most Polish professors would rather
be somewhere else. Since we all shared office space, perhaps it’s easier for
them to get work done at home. Also, I got the feeling that Poles in general
do not become friends quickly. An American colleague said this is especially
true in their relationships with foreign professors. Why invest much emotion
in a relationship with someone who won’t be there very long? But I think it
goes even deeper than that though. Americans become friends very quickly,
and the Poles see the relationship as superficial. Poles take longer to become
friends, but the relationship that develops is more meaningful. Or perhaps
Poles are just a little cranky by nature . . .

I had also wanted to learn more about Poland, the Polish language and

culture, and Poles as people, and I think I did. I still can’t speak Polish very
well, but I can speak it better than I could before I spent five months in Łódź.
Almost every day I refer to facts I learned during the crash courses in Polish
history, politics and culture we attended at the orientation. I know a lot more
about the Polish academic culture and the stifling effects of bureaucracy in
higher education. But most importantly, now I know more Poles. Any time I
feel like it, I can write an e-mail to one of my Polish colleagues, and I’ll see
them at conferences in the future.

And there’s a pub on Narutowicza Street, just off Piotrkowska, where I

know I can go for a half-liter of Warka and a good conversation with my
friend Zbyszek, and whomever else wants to talk politics with me. I know I’ll
hear good music there and opinions passionately defended. I’ll see beautiful
women I can barely communicate with (even though I’ll try), and I might see
breaking glass or a broken nose. The trams will rumble past, and I’ll wonder
if I should try to catch the last one, or wait until later and take a taxi. Maybe
I’ll buy some pierogi or gołąbki for a late night snack. In other words, I’ll be
in Poland.

131

Blazonczyk, Eddie. 1995. “Polish and Proud of It.” Polkatime: 20 of the Best. Bel-

Aire Records.

———. 2000. “Home Away from Home Polka.” Smokin’ Polkas. Bel-Aire Records. In

Your Pocket Guide to Łódz´

, http://www.inyourpocket.com/poland/city/lodz.html.

Irving, John. 1996. The Imaginary Girlfriend: A Memoir. New York: Ballantine

Books.

Lightfoot, Gordon. 1976. “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” Summertime

Dream

. Reprise Records.

Miłosz, Czesław. 2001. Miłosz’s ABC’s. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.
Phelps, Christopher. 2004-2005. “Fulbright on the Mind.” “Teaching: the View from

Poland.” “Being There.” “Polish Autumn.” “Prepare for Departure.” The Chronicle
of Higher Education

, retrieved 19 May 2008 from http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/

archives/fp/authors/christopher_phelps/fp_articles.html.

Steinbeck, John and Robert Capa. 1948 (1999). A Russian Journal. New York: Pen-

guin Classics.

Supertramp. 1979. “The Logical Song.” Breakfast in America. A & M Records.

References

Document Outline

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: City of Colors
Chapter 01. Kresowa
Chapter 02. Choosing Łódź, Heading for Wrocław
Chapter 03. Return to Kresowa
Chapter 04. (Dis)Orientation
Chapter 05. Friendly Fulbrighters
Chapter 06. To Work in Łódź
Chapter 07. Meanwhile, Back at Kresowa
Chapter 08. Poland for the First Time
Chapter 09. Names and Pictures
Chapter 10. Polka, Polka, Polka
Chapter 11. A Great Day of Teaching
Chapter 12. Warsaw, London, and Oxfordshire
Chapter 13. Another Bar
Chapter 14. A Day on Piotrkowska Street
Chapter 15. Wigilia
Chapter 16. My Grandfather’s People
Chapter 17. Comments
Chapter 18. Fitting In
Chapter 19. Christmas and Boxing Day
Chapter 20. Poland, Slovenia, and Austria
Chapter 21. Fighting Poland
Chapter 22. Three Good Classes
Chapter 23. Zbyszkuuuu…
Chapter 24. Breaking Glass
Chapter 25. Firsts and Lasts
Conclusion: Warsaw One More Time
References

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