Manic Bookstore Cafe

We were out of town for the commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and we missed the opening of the new Jewish History Museum. But this week I was invited to the Collegium Artes Liberales "spring open seminar" about the Holocaust and Ghetto Uprising, and it was fascinating.  Among other things, I learned that the first person to use the term "Polish Concentration Camp" was Zofia Nalkowska, the Polish fiction writer. And she was referring to the location of the camps, not to who invented them. If only President Obama had been able to cite this fact a few months ago when he got into trouble with the Poles for his own comment.  I also learned that it was Mircea Eliade who began to use the term Holocaust to describe Hitler's gas chambers. It's a problem. Should we use the "Holocaust," or does it have the wrong connotations? The word comes from the Greek and refers to animal sacrifice, thus some find it offensi...

Holding onto one’s heroes can be tricky in today’s world. Pavlik Morozov turned out to mostly be a fiction. Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya shouldn’t have ever gotten herself involved with those fascists. But Valentina Tereshkova? There was nothing so sacred in my childhood as the space race. I can still remember staying up as a young child to watch Neil Armstrong step onto the moon. Our television was black and white, of course, but more importantly I think it was somehow in the middle of a light brown wood console – it’s that I remember, the large piece of furniture in the corner of our “den,” with a fairly fuzzy, smallish screen in the center. More important to my future was Yuri Gagarin. After all, there’s no way my suburban Chicago high school would have offered Russian language if it weren’t for the threat of that brave young man, that spaceman, the reason Neil Armstrong was so eager to enter space, and his commanders so eager to send him. (True, I’ve heard it ...

I would be remiss in my assessment of life in Warsaw not to comment on the quality of Polish hot chocolate. Three words: O My God. We were first introduced to czekolada na gorące during our very first weekend in Warsaw. The rain and 38 degrees that greeted us on January 30 quickly turned into snow, daily snow, white and fresh and constant. So on the weekend we ventured into Łazienki Park, just fifteen minutes walk from our apartment, which is the largest park in Warsaw and features one of the 18 th century royal palaces, the “Palace on the Isle.” Also to be found in the park are squirrels, many many squirrels, of the Polish variety – reddish, or in some cases quite red, with bushy tails and oddly furry ears.  These squirrels are rather tame, and one of the favorite leisure occupations of the residents of Warsaw is to walk through the park with nuts and feed the squirrels. Orzechi włoskie , walnuts (for some reason called “Italian nuts” in Polish...

Fatalnie. That’s what my Polish teacher, Pani Paulina, was forced to exclaim when she heard the changes that have come over my family since we came to Poland. After all, she knows what Americans are like – everyone does. Americans drive around in big SUVs and eat at KFC or McDonald’s. Americans watch a lot of television, buy their goods at Walmart or over the internet through Amazon.com. Americans are constantly on-line. Amusing when you compare this capitalist habit to the “lines” of the former Eastern bloc: Poles and Soviets used to be “on line” constantly too, but for entirely different reasons. On line for hours to use sugar ration coupons in the late 1980s in Moscow, or on line for seven or more years at a time to receive an apartment or a car in the 1970s. But “on-line” in the 21 st century means that Americans are toggling between devices: iPods and iPads and MacBooks and Kindle Fires, listening to music through earbuds or noise-reducing headphones;...

Russian Warsaw. We've only just begun to explore the physical manifestations of Russian influence on the Polish cityscape. Everyone knows about Stalin's gift to the Poles -- the huge "wedding cake" Palace of Culture that sits right in the middle of the city. But there's more. In 1830, the Poles were ready to throw off the tsarist yoke in Warsaw once and for all. The revolt was started by local Polish army cadets and carried out in November. Fighting continued through October of 1831, but in the end the Poles were vanquished. And reprisals rained down on those rebellious Poles. The tsarist government, not willing to give up this European outpost of empire, lay the foundations for a great citadel, intending to house troops in the city to keep a better handle on the population and to have somewhere to house the many intransigent Poles who would never really accept Russian rule (and who would continue to rise up in coming years). The cornerstone was set in place ...