Manic Bookstore Cafe

Yesterday's tragic events in Ukrainian skies bring the world's attention again to the border of Russia and Ukraine. It has been a tough year. Initial student demonstrations on Maidan Square, renamed EuroMaidan because of the protestors' orientation toward European ideals of free speech, democracy and accountability for elected officials, led to bloody repercussions in Kiev, the Russian takeover of Crimea, and separatist movements in Luhansk and Donetsk. Ukraine hasn't been in the news this much since ... well, probably ever. More will emerge about the shooting of Malaysian Airlines flight 17 (which already has its own Wikipedia page). Investigations will be conducted, opinions aired, perhaps international courts convened. And eventually a memorial will be erected in the midst of those Ukrainian wheat fields. I have for some time been planning to write about my former student, Andriy Lyubka, a poet and writer whose time on the barricades in December and January di...

Last week my students at the University of Warsaw responded to my assignment and gave terrific presentations on war memorials: one in Warsaw, one in Moscow, one in Murmansk. (Tomorrow another student will speak about a memorial in Budapest.) The "Four Sleeping Soldiers" monument is currently again controversial, because the new metro line being built on the "Praga" side of Warsaw (the right bank of the Wisla or Vistula) runs right through its former location. The class was split. On the one hand, of course, this monument -- like the hated Palace of Cultures -- was a "gift" from the Soviets in 1945. The soldiers represent the Soviet military and economic influence over Poland after WWII, and the location of the statue makes the destruction of Warsaw by the Nazis after the Warsaw uprising of August 1944 that much more bitter -- everyone knows that the Soviets sat on the right bank and watched the Nazis dynamite Warsaw's downtown. The beautiful ...