Manic Bookstore Cafe

Chatting with Polish journalist Witold Szabłowski last week, we began to reminisce about lines. Funny, since he was born in 1980 and almost didn't experience them in Poland -- at least not the way his parents and grandparents did. He is descended from generations of school teachers (what does it mean that he became a journalist instead?!), and his grandfather was the director of a school. In Communist days that translated into respect. He was a good school director -- fair, open, reliable. And whenever rumors began to go around about some important, desirable product (refrigerators, electric stoves, you name it) that was about to arrive in nearby stores, his neighbors would come knocking on his door. "Will you organize the queue?" they would ask.  This spontaneous, organized queuing was a constant across the Socialist bloc. Someone would keep a list, and according to that list of names a "line" emerged for desirable goods. Often supplemented by actual s...

Recently the Polish journalist Witold Szabłowski of Gazeta Wyborcza came to my home university, Ohio State, in Columbus, Ohio. When he discovered that I spent the recent spring semester teaching in Warsaw, he was fascinated. “How did you find Polish students?” he asked. And I got to thinking. My courses at the Studium Europy Wschodniej (Center for Eastern Europe) gave me the opportunity to teach out of two of my recent books. With my undergraduate students, I taught a course entitled War in 20 th Century Russian Culture , and we considered everything from poetry and novels to films, memoirs and monuments in the Russian and Polish experiences of war in the 20 th century. This was a fairly small class, almost a seminar, and I had the students reading chapters of my Chapaev and his Comrades: War and the Literary Hero across the 20 th Century (Academic Studies Press, 2012), so they had the opportunity to practice many of their English-language skills: reading, summarizing...

I have to admit it. I'm a fraud. I learned most of my Russian cooking from a truly Soviet girl. Komsomol member, former factory worker, daughter of Udmurt peasants, Nadya taught me much of what I know on the hotplate in the tiny entryway to our Soviet university dormitory blok . Fried potatoes with onions and garlic. Soup made with (yes) potatoes and onions and garlic. I watched her and my other Siberian roommate, Liuda, bake  chicken tabaka or assemble the occasional elaborate salat olivier  for a special meal, but as a committed lacto-ovo vegetarian, I didn't even partake of those beautiful holiday tables. What I mostly learned was how to make bliny  -- Russian pancakes, so light and delicate and buttery that even when they were tiny my children could consume 5 each. They begged for Russian pancakes most mornings, and I made them almost every weekend. Rolled up and filled with jam for my son, American-style (drenched in real maple syrup) and cut into bite-si...