Manic Bookstore Cafe

At last, queuing has come to my small Ohio town. It's Saturday morning, and I sit here in my study, listening to the birds and the lawnmowers, feeling shock and awe at the merging of two worlds. Not often do my Soviet experiences translate into my American life. I remember when I first arrived in the Soviet Union as a 21-year-old, and people asked me: "what did you expect to find? bears wandering the streets?" I would simply reply: "nothing. I had no expectations. I came to find whatever was here." And it was a rich and sometimes bewildering experience. Recently my daughter wrote a graphic novel for history class about me. She needed a person to interview who had lived through a "historic event," so we chose perestroika and the demise of the Soviet system. Certainly my stories seemed exotic to her -- standing in line, being chastised on the street by grandmothers who thought I should be wearing a warmer hat, standing in line, having my mail arri...

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...