Milosz and Me

 Czeslaw Milosz and Czeslaw Milosz and Me

 

Milosz and I have had a stormy relationship.  For most of my writing life, I wanted nothing to do with him and the Poland he came from.  They represented everything that I wanted to get as far away from as I could.  I wanted to say to both of them what Jesus says to the devil, “Get thee hence, Satan.”  How did I come to feel this way?  

Well, let me explain.

I was born in a refugee camp in Germany in 1948.  My parents were both Polish-Catholic who grew up and lived in Poland until they were taken to Germany as slave laborers.  My father spent 4 years there, my mother 2 and a half.  After the war, my parents refused to return to Poland and spent 6 years living in displaced persons camps in Germany.  My mother, my father, my sister and I came here to America as DPs in 1951.

When we landed at Ellis Island, we didn’t speak or understand English.  We dressed in black and brown wool that had been given to us by a UN relief agency.  My mother wore a babushka on her head, my father a cloth wool cap with a broken brim.  They both wore their best shoes, leather boots that came to their knees.  My mother’s brother made those boots. 

Everything we owned was in a wooden trunk my dad made with a friend who was left behind because he couldn’t pass the quota requirements to get into the US.  In this trunk, there were some plates, a wooden comb, some barley bread, a crucifix, two goose down pillows, a frying pan, some letters from Poland, a blue sweater my mother knitted for me in Germany, two letters from America.  We were as poor as mud, and prayed for little: We prayed to find my mother’s sister who was also taken into Germany, to work, to not think about the dead we had left behind, to live without anger or fear.

When we prayed for these things we said our prayers on our knees and in Polish.

Our lives were hard: America then – like now – didn’t much want to see a lot of immigrants coming over and taking American jobs, sharing apartments with two or three other immigrant families, getting into the kind of trouble that immigrants get in to.  We were regarded as Polacks, as dirty, dumb, lazy, dishonest, immoral, licentious, anddrunken Polacks.  

I felt hobbled by being a Polack and a DP.  It was hard karma.  

I started running away from my Polishness as soon as I could, and for most of my life I’ve been running.   As I started moving into my early teens, I didn’t want anything to do with my Polish parents and their past.  I thought of it as all of that “Polack” or immigrant past.  It was so old world, so old-fashioned.  I had parents who couldn’t speak English, couldn’t talk about baseball or movies, didn’t know anything about Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe or James Dean, couldn’t spend a night without fighting with each other in Polish, the language of misery, poverty, and alienation.  I wanted to spend as little time as possible thinking about my parents and their Polishness and what my mother sometimes called “that camp shit.” 

Literature helped me run away from my Polishness and our past.  But it was American literature.  

In high school, I started reading and studying American literature: Emerson, Whitman, Melville, and Thoreau.  What I learned was that the mass of men (all of those Americans out there who thought of me as a Polack) lead “quiet lives of desperation”!  I learned if I stayed true to the essential and existential me-ness of me, Walt Whitman promised me that not only would I be okay, but I would also be downright successful as a human being despite what all those Americans living their quiet lives of desperation thought.  I could both shrug off the people who called me a Polack and I could shrug off my parents’ desire and need for me to be “a good Polish boy.”  I could and would be free.

This was great news for me.

The writers I started discovering on my own confirmed all of this.  They were the beat writers:  The French Canadian American Kerouac and the Jewish American Ginsberg and the Italian American Lawrence Ferlinghetti.  These beats were mainly immigrant or the children of immigrants.  They were writers who had read their Thoreau and Emerson and Whitman and figured out how to be free of their ethnicity AND free of all those Americans who wouldn’t allow them to be free of their ethnicity!

In all of that time, as I read Emerson and Henry James and Kerouac and worked my way toward that PhD in American literature that I would eventually receive, I never read Milosz or Zbigniew Herbert or Thaddeus Rozewicz or Wislawa Szymborska(wiswava shimborska).  They were part of that Polack world I wanted to leave behind with my parents and their sorrows and immigrant concerns.

Milosz was the writer I especially wanted to get away from.  He received the Nobel Prize in the year I completed my PhD and got my first university teaching job.  When he won the prize, my colleagues all wanted to congratulate me on this honor bestowed on Milosz, Poland, and (indirectly) me.  (They also, truth be told, wanted to ask me how to pronounce his unpronounceable name.)

But I didn’t want to tell them how to pronounce his name, and I didn’t want to talk about him or his poems or his Nobel lecture or his novels or any of that Polish stuff.  By that time, I had been working for almost thirty years on getting away from it and everything he represented to me.  

Get thee hence, Satan.

So why am I here at this celebration of the writing of Milosz and why am I writing poems about being the Polish-American child of Polish parents?

The answer is easy.

A funny thing happened after Milosz won the Nobel Prize and after I started teaching American literature in an American university in the middle of the heart of the heart of America.  

I got homesick.  I developed this need, a hunger to know about Poland.  I had gotten so far away from it that it was becoming unreal to me.  I lived among people who for the most part didn’t know where it was, or what it was, or what it had suffered in the war.  I remember one day introducing myself to a new class and having a student ask me if my name was Italian or Spanish.  When I said it was Polish, he seemed confused as if I had said I was a parrot or a prairie dog.

I think a lot of this hunger was also fueled by who my parents were. If my parents had been Illinois farm people raising soy beans and corn or if they had been Italian gelato sellers, I don’t think I would be writing about them. I would be like ever other poet in America: writing about the weather or what it’s like being driving a big car west or east on I-80. But instead my parents were Polish people who had been struck dumb and quivering by history, by the Second World War, by their lives in the labor and DP camps.

 

I grew up with people who had seen their families killed, babies bayoneted, friends castrated and then shot to death. My mom came home to find her mother raped and murdered by the Nazis. 

Even if people don't want to read what I write, I feel that I have to write my poems about my parents just to make sure someone does. Really, there just aren't a lot of people writing about people like my parents and the other DPs. And if I didn’t write, who would? Imagine all of those hundreds of thousands of Poles who came to this country as DPs. Who wrote for them? They couldn't write for themselves. I sometimes feel that I am writing for all those people whose stories were never told, whose voices got lost somewhere in the great cemetery of the 20th century, and I have an obligation to listen to those voices and give them a place to be heard.

I sometimes think that I am not only writing about their lives, but also about the lives of all those forgotten, voiceless refugees, DP's, and survivors that the last century produced.

All of history’s Polacks.

And to write about their lives, I had to know about their lives.  That’s when I started reading Milosz’s poetry and Reymont’s Cholpi and Isaac Singer’s novels and Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Trilogy and Ryszard Karpucincki’s journalistic writings.  

I could never know the Poland my parents knew and had to leave, but I could know the Poland of words and literature, the Poland of sounds and images.  And these writers gave that to me—especially Milosz with his rich sense of recent Polish history, the war, the years under communism, his life as an émigré trying to make sense of a world that he was not born into, a language he never imagined as a small boy growing up.

It’s hard to talk specifically in prose of how much Milosz has meant to me so I would now like to read a poem I wrote about him.  It’s called Polish Poets.

Polish Poets

 

They have stood 

At the end of time

 

Hearing the wind

Moving the snow 

 

Hard and cold

cold and hard

 

And this is what

They’ve learned:

 

There are voices

In the wind

 

There are voices 

In the snow

 

That know poetry

Is only a bit of wood

 

But the shore

Is a long way off