Manic Bookstore Cafe

My calendar tells me that today is the annual reception at my university to honor the Fulbright scholar exchange program and its grantees. Cancelled, of course. But I woke up thinking about the Fulbright exchange program --what it has given me and my family, the opportunities it has created for students and scholars all over the world. It was April 2012 when I learned I was under consideration for the Distinguished Slavic Scholar position at the University of Warsaw, and we spent spring semester 2013 in Poland. Since then I've been back to Poland several times in spring, and I meet up with former students who are doing amazing things, stop by the Polish Fulbright Commission office to see what's new, share a meal with a friend from the American Studies Center. She has had formative intellectual and cultural experiences while in the U.S. on a Fulbright grant, and she regularly interacts with visitors from the U.S. to Poland. We were grateful to the American Studies Center...

This evening I saw a pretty amazing film at the Warsaw DOCs against Gravity festival -- a documentary by a Finnish filmmaker about Alexander Sokurov. Sokurov during filming of "Voice of Sokurov" Photo credit: Christine Kalshnikova You may know Sokurov from his most famous film in the U.S., the 96-minute 2002 film about Russian history filmed in one take at the Hermitage Museum. But Sokurov is much more than that -- a lyrical and contemplative filmmaker, intensely humanistic, whose early films were shelved but who "came out" in the period of perestroika with many wonderful fictional and documentary films and who has been producing films regularly ever since. I think I may only have seen Russian Ark  and Mother and Son , but I now have a list a mile long of films I want to see, including a very early one subtitled "peasant elegy" about a Russian woman named Maria. Currently Sokurov (according to filmmaker Leena Kilpeläinen) is persona non grata  ...

Here is the Palace of Culture -- in the tradition of me not knowing how to take a selfie The Warsaw Film Festival has a new name -- "Against Gravity." One of the main venues is Kinoteka , housed in the Palace of Culture (beloved, or hated, depending on whom you ask). I find Kinoteka  at any rate to be fantastic -- eight different screens with an elegant lobby and intimate cafe spaces on either side. Today I saw two documentaries, one a French film called "Ashes" and the other a Norwegian film about Poland called "I am Kuba." Both, in the end, are about family and being foreign, and both ask questions about the process of making documentaries while themselves being documentaries. Perhaps that's what a documentary film festival is supposed to be about? "Ashes" follows a woman who has gone to Paris to attend her mother's funeral. Her mother Kyoko, it turns out, was born in Japan, near Hiroshima, and when in 1945 her older sister...

Recently I spent the day in the kitchen, putting together a dinner for my husband's colleagues. We had just returned from Poland, and I was happy to be back in my big Ohio kitchen with its warm orange walls and smooth black concrete countertops. We love to entertain, and yet between the complications of daily life, unfamiliar ingredients, and minimal kitchen gear we had actually not had anyone over at all during our months in Warsaw. So there I was, and once I got started I went a little crazy. I remembered a fantastic, elegant dinner last summer at my friend Bruce's in Swarthmore when he served a Tuna-Lemon-Oregano mousse. I was also remembering Warsaw, and the wonderful evening our friend Gabrielle put together -- wine, warm conversation, and flatbreads with cheese and asparagus spears, among other dishes, including cucumber rounds with mackerel filling... As we wended our way back to the States we had shared a meal with friends in Copenhagen, who had put spring roll fixin...

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 ...

On our first day in Warsaw, I went to the Tesco. Yes, there's a Tesco -- the British supermarket -- just 100 meters from our apartment. When we got to the checkout, the cashier asked me (in Polish, of course) whether I had a Tesco card. In the Polish I use (i.e. faking it, guessing wildly based on my Russian and what I hear around me, plus what little I remember from 20+ years ago), I then said: "No, I don't, but I wish I did." She handed me a form. I filled it out. I became the proud owner of a Tesco card. Success, of a kind. Now, when these cards were first introduced at various grocery stores in the US, I resisted them. I know that they collect information about me as a shopper, sometimes generate coupons and offers to my email, and generally make me a tad uncomfortable that some Big Brother is watching when I buy a Twix bar and checking on my brand of tampons. On the other hand, often "sale" prices only apply to those with a card, and I can g...

Warsaw. Today was just above freezing and a light rain fell much of the day. But we ventured out anyway and did a little exploring -- of the buses, the subway system, and the mall. The 141 bus goes along Chelmska street in the direction of the children's school. We got off a few stops before the school right next to a huge section of garden allotments. These were set off by a fence and each allotment had its own fence, some with sheds and others with cottages that made me wonder if anyone actually lives there. We walked to the subway station and took the metro up to a huge new indoor mall near the Gdansk metro stop -- and right there, too, there were new luxury apartment buildings going up, and another set of garden allotments. When Lewis Mumford talked about the "layered history" of the city, he might very well have had Warsaw in mind. The mix of 18th century French-influenced mansions, country cottages, Soviet monumental blocks, and luxury highrises is really som...