POLISH JOKES: SCENES FROM A LIFE

By Julia Kite

My only memory of my Polish Catholic grandfather is a dance. When I was eight, he came from Brooklyn to visit us in my hometown, the second-biggest city in Poland‹-Chicago, Illinois.

“It was a mistake,” my mother groaned, years later. “He should have never come here and scared you, Maddy. He only did it because he knew I would take care of him, and he couldn’t be bothered to take care of himself.” She was referring to the rapidly-spreading foot infection Dziadziu had brought along with him from Brooklyn, which landed him in our local hospital with the threat of amputation. Of course, I thought, Mom couldn’t have had anything against a young girl meeting a grandfather who had been separated from her by multiple states, a few social classes, and a religion. I had grown up in Chicago surrounded by my father’s massive extended Jewish family; surely nothing was wrong with treating a girl to the other side of her heritage.

But back in 1990, I hadn’t been thinking of class conflict or what the Vatican and the Lubavitcher Rebbe would think about the child born to one Catholic and one Jewish parent when my mother, grandfather, and I strolled up Milwaukee Avenue. I was thinking of something slightly more elusive: what’s carried in the blood. Everyone always told me I looked like my mother, and in my eyes she resembled her father, but when I peered into reflective shop windows I couldn’t see the slightest connection between the old man and myself.

After a few hours, stuffed with pirogi and with my ears buzzing from incessant polka music, I began to wilt in the August heat. “We should head back to the car, Dad,” I remember my mother suggesting, brushing my damp black hair flat against the crown of my head.

“What? I haven’t gotten a dance yet!”

“Dad, she’s really tired.”

Dziadziu clumsily knelt down to my level, steadying himself against the bleachers. I was too young to have recognized the gait of an alcoholic and too grumpy to have cared.

“Madeline, Maja dear, you’re not going to dance with me?”

In three years time, my grandfather would be braindead following a tumble down the stairs of his Brooklyn home, and four years later he would be actually dead. Maybe I would have been more enthusiastic back in 1990 if I had known this would be the basis for my only recollection of the man who was Walter Cygan.

“Go on, Maddy,” my mother conceded. In my red-and-white summer dress, I clumsily skipped along to a clarinet polka, inadvertently stomping on my grandfather’s sneakers now and again. I barely knew this old man, I remind myself now. My mother told me what to call him and I obliged. But who was he? A relic from the past my mother had willingly rejected for the sake of marrying up, marrying Midwestern, and marrying Jewish. Marrying into a group of stable in-laws, a family branch with no pesky history of alcoholism, inability to keep jobs, and sometimes, from what I could catch from the heated conversations she had with her brother, just plain stupidity. And, thanks to that decision, I came into being. I might as well honor the sacrifice and quit clinging to her belt loops, pestering her for the keys to whatever she had locked away in Brooklyn in 1979.

So I logged the Taste of Polonia into my short history, treated it like a vacation from my life as a middle-class Jewish girl. Some kids in my class had been to Disney Land or Door County--I had gone to Milwaukee Avenue and forgotten to take photos. Ever the good daughter, I absorbed my mother’s resilience, what I would later call her Brooklyn legacy. I went to Hebrew school, but when my classmates jeered that I wasn’t a real Jew because my mother had been born Catholic, I told them to go to hell and was promptly chastised for being sacrilegious in temple.

But by high school, I became militant. Half a heritage wasn’t enough. It was a miracle that the school bookstore bought back my European history textbook with the degree of geographic mutilation I had inflicted upon it: every map that named a town on the Baltic coast Danzig, I altered to read Gdansk. Breslau showed up less frequently, but it, too, felt the slash from my pen and was returned to its rightful name of Wroclaw. Posen? Poznan. And the most famous place in twentieth century Polish history received extra-special treatment. After all, digging back some decades, I could call it home.

I had always known my mother’s family hailed from some backwater outside Krakow. In the summer of 2001, the money my parents had deposited year after year with the Jewish United Fund was going to finally pay off in terms of a subsidized trip to Israel with a convenient three days in Poland. I wanted a town, I wanted a field, I wanted a dilapidated little shack to call my own.

“Mom?” I piped up, forefinger hovering above the Carpathian Mountains, drinking in the garbled consonants of each place-name: Szczekociny, Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, Zakopane, Bielsko-Biala. “Where, exactly, was your family from?”

Without even looking up from her knitting, she sighed, almost apologetically, “Oswiecim.”

No history book ever said Oswiecim because everyone knew the town by its German name: Auschwitz.

“But were they still there when--”

“I don’t know.”

It’s a joke, I thought. This has got to be a goddamned joke. A half-Jewish Polish girl traces her non-Jewish family back to Auschwitz. As if both sides of my heritage didn’t already have enough of a legacy of being persecuted, partitioned, and plundered, I couldn’t even go back to anything alive and thriving. Not like it mattered--the threat of violence in Israel meant the trip was cancelled. I found myself surprisingly undisappointed. Who needed to spend a month with the Jewish-American Princesses and their ironed-straight, meticulously highlighted hair, their fake-baked tans, the high-pitched nasal whine that was the signature of every spoiled girl on Chicago’s north side? “You need to go to Israel. It’s your home,” the girls at my temple pestered me while whispering among themselves about my “lesbian haircut” and no-name clothing.

“And be a tourist in a war zone? No thanks. I’m not going to pretend everything’s fine when random people are getting blown up in cafes and people on both sides are suffering.” Nah, Israel was not, would not, be my home. Who from my family ever lived or died there? Who needed to? Chicago’s my home. New York was my mother’s. And before both my parents, my family wandered around the Baltic. That’s home. The girls could keep their designer handbags and pedigree status. I wasn’t a Rosenblatt, a Goldstein, a Greenberg. No one could look at a class roster and immediately pick me out as the Jewish girl. After all, I wasn’t gold or green or rosy, I was, on my mother’s side, a Cygan. Gypsy, in Polish. Not that I was ashamed of being Jewish‹-I loved the foreign sound of Hebrew in my mouth, and I loved the liberality of my Reform sect. Hell, my rabbi had officiated at the civil union of two men, which, in my teenage far-left mindset, was just about the coolest thing any clergyman could do. I was just ashamed of having anything in common with girls who spent more on one handbag than I did on a year’s worth of clothes. I relished the thought of being a mutt. For eighteen years I had given Chicago free reign over my identity. It was time to look East, not to Jerusalem or even Krakow, but to Brooklyn, New York.

I got my kicks on Thursday nights down the Polish National Home in Brooklyn. Without even so much as an audition, I joined the dance company.

We were no Radio City kickline; our physicalities testified to centuries of invasion and intermarriage in the one place, but one thing we had in common: Poland. Our dancers ran the gamut: Laura and Maciek were Mazury, their long limbs accustomed to the flowing gallops that characterized the dances of their region. Tiny Martyna, who had an awkward, pained face but the grace of a professional, came from the lowlands of Kaszuby where every generation of women up to her had looked out, bored, at the surface of the Baltic Sea, waiting for any ship to arrive. I inhabited the highly undesirable middle ground: thin as the handles of the highland axes nailed to one wall of the studio, but without the height to make much of it. Tent-like in my practice uniform, I often stumbled where I should have skipped, wobbled where I should have glided sylph-like across the stage under lengths of brocade or satin. I chalked it up to inexperience. It will get better, I assured myself, as if clumsiness were some sort of long-term illness.

I wonder when most of them figured it out. After all, at our annual Christmas shows, I sang along with the best of them: Glawr-ya, glawr-ya, GLAAAAWR-YA, een excelsis day-ay-o. But maybe my pronunciation was off‹-a clue that while the rest of them had been sitting in mass, I had been sleeping late on Sunday mornings. Maybe someone noticed that I just happened to miss rehearsal on Yom Kippur. Or maybe it happened when I first wrote my name on a sign-up sheet and the hyphen made me suspicious: Madeline Cygan-Gordon.

Or maybe it was just the looks.   

Polish girls weren’t supposed to be dark. The men, no problem, but a room full of my fellow dancers proved that the Polish girl should possess a yard of golden-blonde hair--natural or otherwise--and either blue or green eyes. A little variation was permissible in one of the features, but in the lineup, I stood out for my ability to literally blend into the woodwork. “Damn, Polish girls are hot,” I had overheard one man comment to his friend during our dance at Manhattan’s Pulaski Day Parade. He had meant the blonde-blue-busty Polish girls. Those who looked like me were foils to make the other girls look even more stunning.

“Are you Goralka?” Martyna asked me one night. Goralka: A highland woman from the Carpathians in the south. She has her own dialect, her own accent, her own corner of Polish culture. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, and quick to age. “Is many Goral in Chicago,” she added.

“Nah,” I replied. “My family’s from round about Oswiecim.”

No one asked again.

This story is an excerpt from a larger novel which is currently a work in progress.