Manic Bookstore Cafe

Yesterday evening we ran into a friend whom we haven't seen in a while. "You look fantastic!" I told her. "Really?" she replied -- and I thought she might dissolve into laughter. Apparently, the idea was utterly absurd to her. It turns out that her father died a week ago. Not entirely unexpected, she said, as he had been ill for some time. But somehow he kept rallying, so when it finally happened it was still a shock. I never met him, but I was able to go home and read about him that evening: he was eulogized in the New York Times. Weird issue to bond over. My mother died five weeks ago today. But as Anna pointed out, there is something about death that resembles other issues we've bonded over in the past. "When you are pregnant," she noted, "you get all kinds of clues that things will be changing. The baby kicks and moves, and you can't wait to meet it. Someone throws you a baby shower, you prepare a crib and buy a car seat, a...

Several years ago I was teaching an honors Russian literature course in the winter quarter. When I assigned a short analytical essay, my students seemed confused, so I offered to sit down and write a sample for them. The resulting 4 page paper explored the 1944 Ivan Bunin story "Cleansing Monday" in light of what I was working on at the time -- my book on war and the Russian literary hero. Ivan Bunin in 1937 Bunin fled Russia after the Revolution, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1933. But during the war he was trapped in occupied Grasse in southern France, and he kept thinking about the German army advancing further and further. As much as he hated the Bolsheviks for what they had done to his country, he began to root for Stalin and the Red Army to save Russia from further devastation at the hands of the Nazis. I revised that paper and continued to work on it, and it was published last week in the Slavic Review . How fitting that my analysis of "Cleansing M...

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...