“I got a Nikon camera, I love to take photographs…” —Paul Simon The following essays were written at various moments during my two year stay in Poland as a Fulbright lecturer in American culture at the University of Łódź. They were prompted on the one hand by my need to fix that remarkable adventure on paper,…

It is early evening, and Michelle and I are crossing the traffic circle where Nowotki Street intersects Źródłowa and Strykowska, on our way to a party hosted by Violetta Chląd, one of the fourth-year students. Classes are done for the year, the weather is warm and clear, and the American literature exam is still two…

Whatever this curious synthesis is, it will not last long: the paradoxical cohabitation of managed economy and free-market capitalism; of militant Catholicism and, still, a lot of communist mental references; of cheap tram service to the edge of the countryside and shiny metallic-blue VWs, silver-gray BMWs and bright yellow Mercedes; of horse-drawn hay ricks and…

The big story in Poland 1989-91 was economic, and that story was bipartite. Inflation, as everyone remembers, was horrendous, despite self-serving claims by the new government and American economic advisor Geoffrey Sachs that economic “shock treatment” stopped inflation dead in its tracks during the first quarter of 1990. No such thing: all prices rose continuously…

During official opening hours you can enter the Jewish Cemetery in Łódź through the main gate: trams 1, 15, or 19 to the Strykowska terminus, or the 51 bus in the direction of Wilanów. But the essence of this place is a growing horror which, like most nightmares, develops imperceptibly by degrees out of the…

The essence of Kraków is Old: layers upon layers of Norman, Gothic, baroque, Renaissance, neoclassical, Victorian, art nouveau, renovation, decay, restoration, war, more decay, redecoration, vandalism, remodeling, additions, weatherings, losses, reclamations, now all cross-seasoned in one magnificent Polish bigos. Kraków is Old old enough to be just a little fallen, and thus not as full…

It is best to go just at opening time, shortly after the bread has been delivered, when the store is heavy with the rich, yeasty smell of raised dough. Show up at seven, take your loaf of angielka directly home, cut a thick slab, and watch the butter melt from residual heat. On a winter…

Understand from the beginning that Łódź is not exactly the Star of Africa in the royal sceptre of Poland. Arthur Fromer’s Eastern Europe on $25 a Day claims that Łódź “is considered Poland’s ugliest city, even by the Poles,” and mentions it only for the sake of readers traveling between Warsaw and Wrocław who need…

It is not written that dark, Satanic mills must be constructed of red brick, but brick is absolutely correct, embodying as other surfaces do not the mindless and mind-deadening replication of product units by endless lines of workers manning endless lines of machines running endless hours and days and weeks. Brick in Dubuque. Brick in…

It seems like a good idea this October of 1989 to two Americans as yet unacclimated to East Bloc gray: use a long weekend to visit old friends in West Berlin. Take an overnight train from Warsaw on a Thursday, return Monday (also on an overnight train) in plenty of time to meet the first…

Saturday, February 24, 1990. Temperature near 60, skies clear and bright, buds swelling on the trees and crocuses blossoming on the ground. Last October was a cold, ugly month, full of menace and growl. All of us shivered, physically and spiritually. But December and January moderated, and now February as well, and it looks as…

Night driving in Poland is dangerous. East European headlights are about as bright as a forty-watt bulb. Polish country roads, especially in the south, snake around in woods and ravines, and Poles above the age of fifteen dress in dark colors: blue denim and black leather for the teens and twenties, gray and dark blue…

The three steel crosses that comprise the Gdańsk Shipyard Monument rise through brick pavement deliberately fractured, as if to suggest three towering steel flowers thrusting irresistibly skyward from some great organic bulbs buried deep in the Polish soil. Rough a their bases as dried, husky stalks of corn, they smooth as they rise to streamlined…

I met him in the fall of my first year in Łódź, before the collapse of the old East Bloc and long before the collapse of the Soviet Union, when 50-50 was considered generous odds on Tadeusz Mazowiecki’s Solidarność government lasting half a year, when private shops, open borders, and a two-day-old International Herald Tribune…

“I can almost guarantee you it’s benign,” says the doctor at the British Embassy. “It’s in the wrong place, and it doesn’t feel like cancer… although one cannot say with absolute certainty, and a lump is a lump and ought to be removed. My advice would be to have it taken care of as soon…

When it comes to souvenirs, I am more eccentric than most Americans: I go directly for the workaday, the off-beat, and, usually, the cheap. No cuckoo clocks from Bavaria, no overpriced Hummel figurines, no coffee table picture books on The Royal Wedding. From a two-week stay in Great Britain a couple of years ago, I…

(in which are exhibited certain national character traits of Poles, Germans, Greeks, Americans, Brits, and Czechs) We arrive at the Yugoslav border just after eleven a.m., coast to a stop behind a short line of Volkswagens, BMWs and Mercedes, and turn the ignition off. We’re a little short tempered after several times losing our way…

No old leaded glass and no oil paintings in heavy gold frames. No shining mosaics, except one over the front entrance, quite plain and quite dirty. No elaborate bronze doors, like those on the cathedral in Poznań; no eighteenth century memorials on floors or walls, like those which grace churches in Gdańsk; no mediaeval or…

The joke goes something like this: “What’s the best view in the whole city of Warsaw?” “I don’t know; what’s the best view in all Warsaw?” “The view from on top of the Palace of Culture.” “Why’s that?” “Because from there you can’t see the Palace of Culture.” Yuck, yuck, yuck. Joke’s on Warsaw. Humbled…

I am no economist, and no political scientist either, but I do know enough to understand that what failed in Poland, and in the rest of the former East Bloc, was not communism as a recognizable economic or political system, but an experiment in high idealism: a system which undertook to feed, clothe, house, educate,…

“It was so much easier then,” she says wistfully, eyes bright with remembrance but just a hint of weariness in her voice. “There was only here or there, and you knew where you had to be.” She is Docent Dr. Agnieszka Salska, Director of the Institute for English Philology at Łódź University, author of several…

“It is no matter. They all build palaces, so I had one built. They have grand rooms; so have I. People ought to know that Müller has a palace of his own.” —Reymont, The Promised Land They lived well back then, the owners. You can tell that just by walking past their mansions, many of…

A hell of a time we’ve had getting here. Łódź to Warsaw in the late evening, train packed because of the holiday, ten in a compartment designed for eight, and every one a Polish type: one drunk and ineffectual looking male; one stiff and long-skirted mother who crossed herself at every church we passed; one…

“The occupation of a bureaucrat may be very necessary; it was not long, however, before I had made up my mind (later my conclusions were verified) that bureaucrats are parasites.” —Czesław Miłosz, Native Realm “This is a country that has lost control of its bureaucracy,” observes our dinner guest, Robert Jones, visiting Poland for the…

They are an early-to-bed-early-to-rise lot, already busily at work when I catch the 7:30 bus to the Institute, and usually finished their work—or nowhere to be seen—by early afternoon. I doubt they are paid much (when my students complain of Polish “workers” being paid more than doctors and intellectuals, they mean shipyard workers and coal…

“Rock Jarocin 1991” reads the T-shirt, black on white or white on black. It costs $3. Small only, this being the third day of the festival, but the woman does have two XL in a loud shade of peach. I buy two of those (they fit; the smarter black-and-white models will be of no use…

It’s hard to say what astonished me more: the Polish naiveté regarding fundamentals of capitalism, or the speed with which Poles learned their sometimes painful lessons in free-market economy. For example, the notion that a product’s price must exceed its cost of production seemed entirely foreign to their minds. Who could even tell what the…

The Great Romanesque buildings of the old Kaiser’s palace hunker heavily on St. Martin Street, just outside of Poznań Główny railroad station, their gray stone walls now blackened by auto and bus exhaust. The black accentuates their squat, stubby, square towers capped by low pyramids, the heavy, low arches framing small windows, the broad, horizontal…

“Modern Poland’s problems are rooted in symbols,” a friend meditated aloud one afternoon shortly before I left Łódź. “The old symbols are dead. All our lives it’s been the Party or the Church, but neither works any more. The red flag, however illegitimate its authority, however illusory its promises, however corrupt its method was in…

A cop stops a farmer in a wagon, wanting to know what he is carrying. “If it’s only hay, why are you whispering?” the cop wants to know. “I don’t want the horse to hear,” the farmer answers. *     *     * A Russian has finally saved enough rubles to buy a new Lada, so he takes them…

Ewa Bednarowicz looks out the tram window at the long queue of women in front of the milk store. “This trip is a journey into Polish history,” she says. *     *     * This nine-day excursion to Leningrad is costing Michelle, Ewa, Neil, and me 850,000 złotych each, plus $50 spending money, plus $40 hard currency for tourist…

29 Źródłowa was a middle-range Polish flat, beige cement walls on the outside, beige cement on the inside, not as modern and airy as the suburban residences some Poles have managed to construct for themselves around the perimeters of Łódź, not as high-ceilinged elegant as flats in surviving pre-war urban bloks, but larger and quieter…

I entered Poland in September of 1989, and returned to the United States in August of 1991. During that two-year period Łódź—and the rest of Poland, and the rest of the old East Bloc—was transformed and retransformed three or four times over. Change continued after 1991, and change continues today. ’Tis not, sir, the same…