Here’s my latest column for the Chicago Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America. Whether you like what I say or hate it, feel free to leave a comment on the paper’s website, linked below. The website is popular both in this country and in Poland and wherever Poles live.
OLGA TOKARCZUK AND THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE
When I woke up yesterday morning, the first thing I saw on my iPad was a news note from one of the online news services that Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk had just won the Nobel Prize for Literature along with Austrian novelist Peter Handke.
Despite my 71-year old bum knees, I leapt immediately out of bed. I was so excited and happy when I saw Olga Tokarczuk’s name and the word Nobel. Although I have not read much of her fiction, what I have read I have found to be absolutely engrossing and imaginative and inspiring.
Hearing that she won the Nobel Prize for Literature reminded me of when I heard that Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz won the prize. His winning in 1980 pretty much changed my life. Up to that point, I was a Polish immigrant who wanted nothing to do with Poland or Polish-American culture. In college and in grad school, I worked on my BA, MA, and finally my PhD in American Literature, and the last thing I wanted to think about was the poets and novelists and writers of Poland. Poland was that Old World on the other side of a dark and expansive ocean, and as far as I was concerned it should just stay there.
That all changed when Milosz won the Nobel Prize and I started reading his books of poems and essays. He showed me a Poland I had never seen before, a Poland that inspired me to read its history, re-learn its language, meet its people, and even be one of its people – if only as a tourist. For the first time, as I read Milosz’s writings, I felt I wanted to be as Polish as I could be.
So when I heard that Olga Tokarczuk had won the prize, I felt again much of what I felt when Milosz won the prize. Not only did I again feel reconnected to Poland, I thought that there were readers in the Polish Diaspora who would have the opportunity to connect with Poland the way I did when Milosz won.
And I’m sure that there are such readers, reconnecting with Poland through the voice of Olga Tokarczuk, but there are other voices, many other voices, that are trying to silence Tokarczuk, drown her virtues as a writer, and turn everyone away from the gifts she has.
Almost immediately after discovering Tokarczuk had won the Nobel Prize, I went online to see what social media was making of this great honor given to her. What I found was not what I expected to find.
On one of the popular Facebook pages devoted to Poland, people were calling her a “bitch,” a “cunt,” a “traitor,” and an “idiot.” They were saying she wasn’t even Polish, that in fact she was an anti-Polish Ukrainian. They were also condemning her for being anti-Catholic, pro-Semitic, pro-LGBTQ, a man-slamming feminist, and a Nazi – interestingly — all at the same time. In fact, one of the frequent images of Tokarczuk I saw at this social media site and other social media sites was of her standing with a group of people at a modern art exhibit in front of what looks like a painting of a cross being transformed into a swastika.
or me, one of the interesting things about this onslaught of attacks on Olga Tokarczuk is that no one, I must repeat, NO ONE, has said a single word about what she has written. The accusations and attacks are there, but there is nothing in all of the social media sites I’ve gone to that indicates that anyone making these accusations has read even one of her novels or other writings. One commentator in fact says he refuses to read anything by Tokarczuk because of what other people are saying about her on social media.
So, what should you and I do faced with this deluge of negative accusations and insinuations against Olga Tokarczuk?
The answer is simple. We read her books.
I plan to read her novel Flight next, and after that The Books of Jacob, when the English translation appears in the near future. I may even re-read her novel Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead.
Join me in discovering your own sense of what Olga Tokarczuk is up to.
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