History takes place in language before it manifests itself in events. In first grade, at seven years of age, I started catechism classes like everyone else in my school. A part of me was excited about it, and a part of me was scared. Today I know that the part of me that was scared was precisely responsible for my…
Continue reading →The first was red socks. I grew up in communist Poland, and I knew few people who didn’t dream of leaving. I was one of them, and I emigrated as soon as the ban on traveling to the West was lifted. The place we all wanted to live was the United States of America, the greatest country in the world….
Continue reading →The absurdity of the judge’s order threw us back into our Kafkaesque reality. That we could, as we do, live in the realm of eternal mirrors,working our way at the same time through unmowed grasses. Czesław Miłosz When on December 13th, 1991—the tenth anniversary of martial law being declared in communist Poland to crush the political opposition—I stepped on the tarmac…
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