Burning Harry Potter Books

Earlier today, I read about some priests in Poland burning some of the Harry Potter books written by J. K. Rowling.  At first, I thought it was just another ridiculous news story, but I soon discovered that people in fact were taking this burning of the Harry Potter books very seriously.

I’m a moderator for a Facebook page dedicated to Polish-American issues, and someone posted a piece about the burning there.  The discussion that ensued got very very hot (no pun intended).

The people who are for the burning of the Harry Potter books are basically opposed to what they see as the tendency toward cultural paganism in Harry Potter, an attack against the Catholic Church not that different from what they see as the Muslim attack on western religion and civilization.  The people who are against the burning see the burning of books as an assault on civilization reminiscent of the kinds of book burnings that characterized the rise of Nazism.  Hitlerism, this group feels, is coming back to haunt us. As I said, the argument got very very hot. One woman, in fact, — who felt the priests were justified in burning the books because she felt the books advocated a totally anti-Christian view –eventually told another woman to go have sexual intercourse with herself.  

The woman who opposed the burning told the other woman to do the same.

The discussion became so heated that the person who runs the Facebook page asked me finally to delete the discussion.  It was all arguing and ugliness — nothing else.

Is Harry Potter’s magic wand a symbol of the end of civilization as we know it?

Or is burning Harry’s magic wand a symbol of the end of civilization?

Who knows?

If we are headed toward the apocalypse, we are probably going to get there in more ways than one.  The arguments between Catholic priests and Pagans, between the alt right and the left, and between the Muslims and the Christians, all of these suggest divisions that are just going to get more and more divisive.

And then on top of that I also read this morning that an enormous glacier (the size of Florida) was going to break off from Antarctica, and once it melted there would be 4 feet more of sea water in all the world’s oceans.  And if this isn’t bad enough, this glacier breaking off is going to cause other glaciers near it to break off. And all of this will raise the level of the sea by about 13 feet.

Imagine the world’s oceans rising 17 feet and what that will do!

Whatever fires are burning Harry Potter books will surely be extinguished along with life as we know it.

All I can say is holy smokes!  (Really, I think that the proper response is „We are fucked” — but even though the world is coming to an end, it’s still not considered correct or polite to say that.)

PLEA FROM A FEARFUL AMERICAN

Plea from a Fearful American

My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the Polish Daily, is about gun control and what it means to me.

At the paper's website the article first appears in Polish and then in English. Please drop a comment there. It tells the City Editor that I'm worth keeping around.

Now here's the article I wrote:

PLEA FROM A FEARFUL AMERICAN

In 2014, about 12,500 people were shot to death in the US. In 2015, the number was about 13,500, give or take a couple. In 2016, it was about 15,000. In 2017, about 15,600. Last year in 2018, it was 14,700.

The number seems to go up and down some, just a little. In the last fifty years, it’s been as low as 8,000 and as high as 20,000. Some of these deaths took place in mass shootings, about 300 a year, but that leaves about 12,000 or more a year are just plain ordinary shootings.

The numbers kind of get confusing and ultimately boring, but what seems to be awfully clear is that there apparently is a type of American who likes to kill people.

I grew up in a neighborhood in Chicago where a lot of those people who like to kill people lived. It was the area just east of Humboldt Park. Sometimes the newspapers and the reporters on the local news broadcasts back then called it Murdertown.

There was a lot of that going on. Murders I mean.

I had a school friend who was murdered by some gang guys. They shot him in the back of the head and put him in some garbage bags and left him in an abandoned apartment a couple doors away from my home. He was the only one of my friends who was killed. My parents, however, lost four friends over the years we lived in that neighborhood. Their friends just seemed to be the victims of average sorts of murders. A couple of people even died on the sidewalk in front of my house. (The cops told me to just move along and stop staring.)

All that was back in the 1950s and 1960s in Chicago, and if the newspapers are to be believed it’s not that much different now. Even here in Lynchburg, Virginia, where I live, you hear about Chicago on the news, especially after a bad weekend where maybe 70 people are shot and 12 of that number are shot fatally.

Yeah, there was a lot of killing in my neighborhood. And a lot of fear there too. When we could, we finally left. We moved into a bungalow north of Diversey, just east of Oak Park Boulevard. It was a nice place. We were able to sit on the front porch in the new neighborhood and not fear getting shot.

As the type of American who is generally still fearful, I would like it made as difficult as possible for those other Americans to kill me or other people. You can understand my fear. I sometimes think it’s easier to buy a gun in America than it is to get a driver’s license. I just want it to be as hard to shoot someone to death as it is to drive a car.

So, if you know a politician, please pass my concern onto him or her.

Thank you.

________

Here's the link to the article: Just click here.

Charity in America

Charity in America

Here’s my latest column from Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the Polish Daily News.  It’s about the people who helped us when we first came to America as refugees in 1951.

Please leave a comment at the paper if you like the piece.  The link is below following the English version.  The Polish version is at the site.

To read more about our experiences as refugees please see my book Echoes of Tattered Tongues.  

CHARITY IN AMERICA

When we first arrived in Chicago in 1952, we were lost. My family had spent 6 years in the DP camps in Germany after the war and another year outside of Buffalo, NY, working for a farmer who paid our passage over to America.

But now we were in Chicago, and we were lost. We had nothing, just the things we brought with us from Germany. I remember years later asking my mother what we had brought to America in the wooden trunk my father built. She shrugged and went through the list: some plates, a crucifix, a wooden comb, some goose down pillows, a frying pan, and letters from a friend in America.

In Chicago we lived in dark rooms in small apartments in that we shared sometimes with two or three other DP families from the camps in Germany.  We were all people who had lost so much and had left so much behind, our mothers and fathers, our grandparents, our brothers and sisters.

We were alone and didn’t know where anything in this new world was.  I remember one time my father was going out looking for a store where he could buy some Polish sausage, and my mom stopped him and said, ”Maybe they don’t have kielbasa here.”

I was 4 years old that first winter in America, and I remember staring out a window at the snow falling on the buses moving slowly up and down Milwaukee Avenue, and begging my father to take us back to the refugee camps in Germany. I said it was too hard for us here.

We were lost in America — but sometimes people helped us.

We didn’t know who they were or what their names were or why they helped us.  But they did.

I remember one time two women who came to our apartment. They didn’t speak Polish, and the only English my parents knew was “Thank you, Missus.” These two women came and brought a dress for my mother, rubber boots for my dad, cans of pork and beans and loaves of bread for all of us, and for my sister and me, they brought some comic books, a hard rubber toy, a doll and a red truck with a missing tire.

We didn’t know who these two women were or how they found us. We didn’t even know their real names, so we gave them names. We called one woman “dobra,” and the other one “fajna.”

We knew what these two words meant. 

These were “good” and “fine” women.

_____

Here's the link to the Dziennik Zwiazkowy site where the article appeared 

http://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/guzlowski/dobroczynnosc-w-ameryce-charity-in-america/

Writing

Writing

I'm always writing.  24 hours a day I got my antenna up waiting to hear from the muse.

Most of the time the signal is weak, creaky.

But sometimes it's perfect.

Either way, I write it down.

And what happens is that I have a house full of little sheets of paper.   Everywhere.

Sometimes I find one, and I say that's it. That's right and I put it in the pile of stuff I'm working on.

Sometimes I find one and wonder where it came from and where it's going.  I put it back where I found it.

Here's one of the poems I put back where I found it.

Hurry Home -- It's getting late

1.

Black man came out of the dark woods
singing a song

2.

White man came out of the dark woods
singing the same song

3.

Here's what they sang:

The graves of the dead
are the graves of the dead

4.

In Jerusalem they do
the hokey pokey
and they turn it all around

Suitcase Charlie is Back

Suitcase Charlie is back in Print

The first edition of my novel — about a serial killer in a Polish immigrant area of Chicago — sold out following the reviews in the terrific New York Times and Wall Street Journal, but it’s back and Amazon has it. 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1948403048/

The Controversy over "Growing Up Polack"

The Controversy over "Growing Up Polack"

What's the most controversial thing I've ever written?
It's not the poem about my mother people raped by German soldiers, and it's not my novel Suitcase Charlie with it's serial killing and dead kids in suitcases, and it's not the poems I've written about being a drunk and stupid -- almost homicidal -- hippie back in the 1960s.
The most controversial thing I've ever written is an essay called "Growing Up Polack." It's my personal essay about what it was like growing up a Polish refugee immigrant kid in Chicago in the 1950s and 60s.
I say controversial because it apparently is. I've had Polish Americans tell me that they have felt every word of my story in their own lives, and I've had other Polish Americans tell that me that I should be ashamed of myself for writing stuff like this that portrays Poles in such a damning light.
This essay has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize this year, and it's also been banned from Facebook pages for even using the word "Polack"!
‪Honestly, I don't understand the hatred this piece has generated, and I'm sure there will be more coming my way since this essay has just been republished in the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America!‬
Check it out. In Polish and English. ‬And leave a comment whether you like it or not, whether you think I should be lauded or lashed. (Click on the word LINK and it will take you to the essay. It appears first in Polish and then when you scroll down in English.)

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My father tells me how he met my mother

My Father Tells Me How He Met My Mother

We came upon a small slave camp in the woods, three or four buildings, a fence of barbed wire, a closed gate.

Some of us were dying and fell to our knees right there. Others kept walking and stumbling toward that gate. There was no one around, no German guards, no soldiers. They must have run away because they thought the Americans were near. There were no prisoners either that we could see in the barracks beyond the fence. We thought that maybe the ones who’d been there had been taken like us on a death march.
It was so quiet.

One of the men, a Frenchman, stepped up to the gate and shouted hello. That’s all he said. He said it in German first and then French, but no one answered. It sounded funny in French, “Bonjour, bonjour.”

An army truck stood in front of one of the barracks buildings, and I thought I saw some movement there. Even with only one good eye, I could see it. Someone moving near the back of the truck. I pointed this out to the Frenchman, and he saw it too. And we both shouted then, him in French and me in Polish. I shouted, “Dzien dobry, dzien dobry.” I felt foolish saying, “Good day.” There had not been a good day for a long time.

A woman then came out of one of the barracks.

Like us, she was dressed in rags, striped rags. She stumbled to the gate and stopped there. She looked at us, and we looked at her. No one said anything for a while. I could see she was weak. She held the gate so tightly with her hands so she wouldn’t fall.
I couldn’t speak. I had not seen a woman for months and had not talked to one for years. The Germans would kill you for talking to a woman.

Then she spoke, in Polish, slowly. She said, “Co teraz?” What now?

I didn’t know what to say. My tongue was like a rock in my mouth.

She said it again, “Co teraz?” And I still didn’t know what to say, or what would happen, or if the world would end that day or not. I was hungry and spent, and I didn’t know anything.

I looked at her and felt so weak, felt like I was going to fall and join my brothers dying behind me, and your mother pulled the gate open and said, “Proszę wejdź.” Please come in.

And I did.

______

This is something I wrote for Dziennik Zwiazkowy.  If you get a chance please go there and leave a comment.

http://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/guzlowski/jak-spotkalem-twoja-mame-my-father-tells-me-how-he-met-my-mother/

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