from left, great uncle, great grandmother, grandfather.
10/27/2011
sometimes my mom goes into what would best be labeled as intermittent fugue states. sometimes it’s about something she doesn’t want to forget, a bill she has to pay in two weeks’ time, or some task that needs to be done eventually. it’s an effective way to remember life’s necessities, repeating them constantly with no breaks for anything else to enter conversation. but sometimes it’s bigger than the everyday.
“i want to go to ukraine,” she started saying five years ago, when we first learned the name of the village where my grandfather had been born. sometimes the statement would have a strong emphatic drive, “i WANT to GO to UKRAINE,” and sometimes it would resemble a soft, forgotten whine, but it was always there, repeated multiple times, whenever there was any mention of her arrival anywhere in europe.
it got worse when i moved to europe in 2009, and even more so when i got the chance to go to ukraine myself in 2010. granted, i was in kiev, which might as well be the other side of the world from l’viv, the closest city to my grandfather’s village, but still … i had broken through the barrier, i had taken the first step. i had made contact with ukraine and i could be her guide. she really really wanted to go to ukraine. i had just made it a little easier, but i had also stoked the fire.
dapper
my grandfather was tight-lipped about his life, and when he died prematurely, in his 60′s, my 20-year-old mom was left with a large pile of questions that apparently festered and festered, prompted by various events, especially the death of my grandmother 30 years later, to grow and grow until it exploded all over the place and, in 2006, she paid to help her near-indigent daughter accompany her to the land of her father’s birth.
i recently unearthed my travel journals from that trip, and they are hilarious. what i thought was going on most of the time was very much not what was going on. most of the time. my interpretations were skewed less by my american-ness and more by my comfort with the Polish culture nurtured in me by my youth in an expatriate community. my confidence in my knowledge is appalling, and often misplaced. but the record is there, and i’m going to start posting some of that story here, somewhere. it goes along with this story, for that is when my mom saw her cousin for the first time in 40 years, and first heard the name of the village. wacowice.
(not at all to be confused with wadowice, near krakow, which is the birthplace of national hero karol wojtyła, otherwise known as pope john paul II. not at all)
at the time that my grandfather was born, at the end of the 19th century, Poland did not strictly exist, at least not on any map. it had been partitioned by its three powerful neighbors, a state that existed for over 100 years and was finally put to an end after WWI, when prussia (germany), russia and austria were all too broke and depleted and exhausted to put up a fight against a burgeoning independence movement. at the time that Poland had been partitioned, a great deal of what is now ukraine actually lay within its borders. so my grandfather was born in a village that was austrian territory at the time of his birth, polish territory as he came of age (a territory which he fought and paid dearly for) and ukrainian territory after WWII.
phew.
my grandfather fought in l’viv, against the soviets, in the war directly after WWI. called “the polish-soviet war” in english, it seems to have no name to speak of in Polish, but is rather considered part of WWI. well, that’s according to a few of my students and a cursory internet search that clearly demarcated the current boundaries of my Polish language abilities. but what i know is that it was about independence, about supporting a newly-sovereign nation, but it also seems to be about which of the put-upon got to claim which pieces of land for themselves.
grandfather, with head wound
but, whatever. my grandfather fought. he was wounded when a bullet went through his head. considering that his three oldest brothers were killed one after the other in WWI proper, his mother deemed his survival a miracle and decided a life path for him. since god had saved him, god would call him to service. he would be priest.
this is an exciting story. really. it’s about pride and sin and excommunication and renegade religions. but it’s also one i can’t get into right now. the important thing for you to know is that he left wacowice when he was 18, he went to l’viv to fight. and then he went to l’viv to study. he studied religion and he became a priest and then he left the area and never ever returned.
he also never ever told his daughter, my mother, about any of these details.
eventually he ended up in the US, where he married a crazy woman, whom he shortly divorced. he had a crisis of faith and left the priesthood. and then he somehow met and married my grandmother. he had three children with her, my mom the youngest. and he never talked about where he was from, what happened to him, how he was shot in the head, his youth, his hubris, his inability to disappoint his mother.
what he DID talk about was the beauty of Poland, the poetry of the birch trees, the songs of the land. his homeland. he missed it, his entire life.
so maybe you can see why my mother drove me crazy with this declaration of want. no, more a pushing need. this fall, when i came back to Poland from my summer vacation in the US, she came with me. and she told me, over and over, about her desire to go to ukraine. and i wracked my brains trying to figure out how to do it. first we had no housing when we got back. then we got a flat, but i was pretty broke and had very little work. then i got too much work and had no time. and the whole time this statement repeated, as it does. “i want to go to ukraine.”
it wasn’t until it changed, just a little, that i was spurred to action. “i want to go to ukraine” became “i guess we’re not going to get to go to ukraine.”
and i thought, “fuck it. WE are GOING to fucking UKRAINE.”
to be continued …
