Manic Bookstore Cafe

This is the week of the year when one should sit and reflect -- what good came of the year just ending? what adventures did we have? what mishaps might have been avoided? what conclusions can be drawn, and how might we proceed more wisely into the year to come? And for what, and whom, do we feel grateful? One of my friends has launched what she calls "The 2013 Gratitude Project" -- twenty-five acts of gratitude in 25 days to mark the year passing. We were excited to receive a "gratitude" package consisting primarily of Christmas cookies, with a lot of love to go with. We made the list in part because I had shared a pot of borscht with her and her family. (I love Darra Goldstein's vegetarian borscht, which includes almost every vegetable you can think of, more even than Molly Katzen's version , and every time I make it I think of how grateful I am to have a Cuisinart, and how useful it would be to have an army of serfs to do the chopping if one didn...

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...

Yesterday was another holiday in Poland, but not one that causes school to be cancelled or banks to be closed. It was a "Holiday of Freedom" -- the 24th anniversary of the elections that led to the fall of the Communist system in Poland. At the Presidential Palace, there was a fabulous transparency celebrating the events of that day. And this week at the "Dom Spotkanie z Historiem" (House of Meeting History) there are all kinds of things going on -- public meetings, documentary and feature film screenings, collecting oral histories -- in conjunction with the project Europeana 1989 (see here ). Ironic, when you think about it, or maybe poignant: John Wayne strode into Poland at high noon, marking the end of a repressive state, and democracy followed in his footsteps, while on the very same day in Beijing tanks crushed the student demonstrations that called for reform and led directly to martial law and the repressions that continue today. One journalist i...

Somehow this week I've had an extraordinary number of pedagogical experiences. Sure, I'm a professor and I teach every week here in Poland (yes, just one day a week -- what a luxury!), and I have learned quite a bit about myself as an instructor, as a lecturer, as a creator and coordinator of instructional materials over the course of the term. But I am also a student, taking Polish language lessons about once a week with my private teacher, Pani Paulina. And observing some classes and seminars recently has put me in the student seat, which gives one an entirely different perspective. At the unique Artes Liberales  college within the University of Warsaw I've been on both sides of the podium: I guest-lectured last week, and this week I observed "Academic Writing in English," taught by a young Polish PhD, and I attended an international interdisciplinary PhD program seminar. Finally, on Friday afternoon I sat and listened to my daughter's violin lesson w...

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...