By TERESA CADER [Perihelion] –I do not see any individual as separate from history. Biography and history are completely entwined. In that sense, I have a very Emersonian view.
If you are asking about my personal history in relation to Poland, I’m happy to answer that, but it’s complicated. I feel that I am a product of two cultures, Central European and American and that I don’t belong to the same shared cultural experiences that many of my peers have. I don’t write about American pop culture because I grew up in a house that didn’t allow it. We didn’t have TV, went only to classic foreign films, lived in a working class neighborhood and had books like Leaves of Grass and Poems from the Chinese. And yet, we were fairly poor and ethnic. My father was born in Poland in 1913, my grandfather escaped in order not to fight for the Austrians in WWI (Poland didn’t exist; their section ‘belonged’ to Austria), and after a lengthy stay during the period of independence, my grandmother and some relatives escaped just as the Nazis were invading. Polish is a language in my blood. Part of the family didn’t speak English.
I grew up with history as a personal companion, not an abstract idea. I won’t recount the losses and horrors. It was a complicated history, too. We became Protestants, my brother later converted to Judaism. When his cantor greets me, it’s in Polish with an admonition—’Why aren’t you speaking Polish to me?!’ He was saved by a Polish family. When the realities of WWII all became more universally discussed, I had questions for history, arguments with history, and confusion about identity. (Interviewed by Jennifer Flescher.)
Continued at Perihelion | More Chronicle & Notices.
