by Andrew Potok
I am thoroughly confused. It’s the first time I hear that Miron is expected to return the inflated proceeds from the property or that I am to expect an annual income rather than the money from a sale of the recovered property. And then, could they really be expecting Miron to simply mail a check or willingly show up in a Polish court? Artur and Basia do not threaten with a lawsuit, and Miron, undoubtedly feeling safe from prosecution, seems not to care one way or another.
For the moment, the entire process is being slowed by my newfound second cousin Philippe’s request that everything be translated into French and sent to his siblings in Paris. And as Artur’s Krakow office is about to close for the summer, Basia forwards a note from the archives of Statens Utlänningskommission (State Aliens Commission), the Swedish National Archive. “The Potok family got a visa for travelling through Sweden for the period 30 September to 16 October 1939,” it reads. “They arrived in Sweden on 6 October 1939. They applied for prolongations of the visas, which were granted for the periods 17 October to 16 December 1939, and 17 December 1939 to 25 January 1940.”
I read this over and over again, having so little documentation about the four-month journey from Warsaw, through Lithuania and Latvia, then to Sweden, and from Bergen in Norway to New York. Our crossing into Lithuania occurred on probably the last day before the Soviets occupied that country. The Lithuanian border must have closed around the seventeenth of September. The dates given by the Swedish Archives are puzzling because I remember nothing between Lithuania and Stockholm, not until Anita informs me that we stayed a week in Riga. I had assumed that Latvia fell to the Soviets about the same time as Lithuania, which would have made a week’s stay in Riga impossible, but this turned out not to be true. Latvia was not occupied by Russians until 1940, and by Germans in 1942, after which the killing of Jews inside Latvia was monumental.
Anita’s story of her mother’s arranging for an airplane to fly us from Riga to Sweden had never been a part of my exodus story before, but neither had many other moments, none of which will ever be substantiated, there being no survivors left who can speak the truth about our history. Even when our parents were alive, their stories were suspect, often self-serving. As far as any knowledge of our murdered family was concerned, they either didn’t know or the horror back there was better left without comment. Why even discuss it? In any case, truth was always trumped by expediency, the need to please, to mollify, to heal, even though attention was always paid to words spoken by the powerful, the celebrities, the wealthy patron, the doctor, anyone in a position of authority.
Recently, Anita also claimed to have seen not only her father’s passport but a car registration that identified our van not as a Citroen but a Chevrolet. I am amazed. Our Polish diminutive for the Citroen automobile, Citronka, still reverberates in my ears, not only from my childhood but from its being referred to by my mother over many years.
I have often dreamed about finding a receipt of gasoline bought on the road to Lithuania, the registration of the sky blue Packard, the airplane ticket from Latvia to Stockholm, a note from the school Anita and I attended there, the steamship ticket from Norway on the Bergensfjord, a photo of us arriving at Ellis Island. But even if photographs did exist, they would no longer be available to me, one of the little-noted losses of blindness. Missing from my life are photographs of my children as they were growing up, whatever photos exist of my family, alive and dead, of my beautiful Loie, of landscapes I once loved, photographs of any of us in Paris, Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca, Florence and Venice and Rome, Mytilini and Molyvos and Athens, the Saski Gardens in Warsaw.
2.
Still our woodpecker has not appeared. I sit on our porch listening to the blue jays and chickadees as I sniff the wild roses and black snake weed in front. I’m thinking of the “Polish shit” which has had such a profound effect on my life, both covering me in a carapace of hate and opening me to deeper reflection and retrospection, to a better understanding of human obsessions, the spectrum of emotional and intellectual striving, the power of imagination, the rage for the control necessary to sit in judgment of injustice, despair, war and peace.
When in a mellower mood, I try to imagine kinder ways to look at the perfidious Edward Prokocimer and his son Miron, born a year after his father’s testimony, whose casual dismissal of the attempt to correct the wrongful inheritance of Number Thirteen Stradomska seems to be working to his advantage. Now in his sixties, Miron most likely can’t accept, or even imagine, his father’s likely guilt.
Three years have passed since our Krakow excursion and, answering my questions about its progress, specifically about Miron’s participation, Artur writes that the Polish court is still waiting for proof of the death of three members of my murdered family. “The probate case in Krakow is suspended until that proceeding is closed,” he writes. “For now, no attorney representing Miron or his cousins has joined the proceeding. But this is not a problem because we have their addresses and the court will notify them of the proceedings by post.” All of this once seemed more urgent, more imminent. “The only problem is that this will take more time,” Artur writes. I’ll say.
“Best to forget about it,” Loie says. “But it’s not a dead end,” she adds. “Not yet anyway.”
“That woodpecker was all fucked up.”
“He should have been pecking at a ‘Beware of Falling Rocks’ or ‘Rogue Waves’ sign,” Loie says.
There seems to be no way of hurrying my case but, eager to know how it is proceeding, I again ask Basia who writes:
“We are not being in touch with the Prokocimer family because your case is totally independent. Miron and others are not holding up your proceeding, it simply takes so much time. It is hard to estimate how long will it take, but we are currently going through a necessary proceeding re declaring of your cousin—Ludwik Sereth and his father, Izydor—officially dead. Ludwik was Izydor Sereth and Maryla vel Maria Potok’s son. Maria vel Maryla was your father’s sister. Back in 1946, when Edward Prokocimer was declaring everybody dead, he “forgot” about Izydor and his son. According to the court’s understanding/law, when somebody is not dead (death certificate)—he or she is still alive. Such proceedings take about six or seven months at least, from announcement, that needs to be published for minimum six months, until official court’s decision and issuing of a new death certificate. After it is done (Ludwik and Izydor are declared officially dead), we will be able to move forward with the actual claim/proceeding.”
Easy does it, Potok. These people, the close relatives I knew nothing about, were murdered seventy-five years ago. With the exception of Maryla’s son who might have survived all these years as I did, the law requires death certificates of people who, if still alive, would be more than a hundred years old. Still, I learn that Maryla was married to a man named Izydor Sereth and had a son named Ludwik, to be added to the long list of strange names that preceded mine, Andrew being as distant from Wladyslaw or Zbygniew as humanly possible, my parents’ way of assuring themselves that their son would be prepared for inevitable flight.
3.
Though I’m imprisoned in my history, I am scratching my way out. In yogaland, I rock my pelvis, circle my knees, stretch into the pigeon, the frog, the downward facing dog. I concentrate on my breathing without help from higher powers, without sending energy into the ether. I do it in part to be physically flexible but also to rid myself of the outside world. “Breathe, breathe, put all your awareness on your breath,” Robert the yoga master says. He directs yoga sessions in his “yoga hut.” When I confide my various psychic pains, Robert often says, “It’s moment by moment” or “day by day.” I try to find the wisdom in this and suspect that I’m not looking deeply enough. “Breathe into it,” Robert says, words that might be the ultimate wisdom, as much as one person can say to help another. I love this man’s mind for its encyclopedic knowledge of baseball. He might repeat himself giving psychological advice, but he can make the 1951 World Series come alive, the who, the
where, the how, plus the numbers. Robert has an altar enshrining a smiling, androgenous Buddha, a photograph of the Dalai Lama, and one of Mickey Mantle. The numbers 21 and 42, once on the back of Paul O’Neill’s and Mariano Rivera’s uniform, are numbers Robert celebrates. What’s not to like?
But my moods vacillate wildly. At certain moments, I look back on the events in my life and their probable causes as extraordinary, stories worthy of careful mining; I scratch for themes, then give them order and shape, my life as parabola or pyramid, a one-way street with no exits, no U-turns allowed. Moments later, I’m aware only of a pile of unresolved chaos, small pleasures and pains, one damned thing after another. Post-Krakow, the awakening of dormant issues in my mind stoking a burgeoning anger, I miss the role painting once had in my life, transporting me from the harsh realities outside my skin into momentary playfulness, away from the world of objects, the world of power and lies and anecdotes, back to the purity of hand and body movements, back to the fresh stirrings of the imagination, back to work that is the consequence of a profound, relentless, unquenchable need for an experience that is by nature intense, immediate, vivid, another mode of thought.
I think daily of painting again, this time with no vision at all. In my mind’s eye, very large surfaces are thick with ochres and lemon yellows, textured with sandy particles and enriched by dripping cadmium reds, all threatened by walls of impastoed black. My body trembles with emotion. I return to normal breathing, the territory behind my eyelids back to its irritating sickly greenish yellow, the color of blindness. Next time I conjure up a painting, it is full of faces and bodies, mute or shrieking, still or wriggling, crowded humanity. An artist friend wants to help me put whichever of the images I choose onto canvas but, as we begin to make preparations in the attic of my house or an extra room in hers, I find excuses, frightened by the craziness of the venture, the nightmarish frustration that is sure to accompany the act.
The entire painting process for people like me is outside the parameters of “normal,” and any departure from normal—painting while demented, schizophrenic, bipolar, drunk, high on drugs, or blind—puts one in a special category, with an asterisk beside the name, like the baseball player who breaks the record on steroids or during a longer season. Given all the abnormal states of mind or body, it’s difficult to determine if the work is based on deep visions and convictions—made in creative struggle, an art that takes us to another level of knowing and understanding—or if it’s gibberish, meaningless, contrived.
On the other hand, much exquisite work in every art is the product of one “abnormality” or another. Some artists pine for pain and suffering, making it up if it doesn’t exist, feeling in their guts that it’s a prerequisite for inspired work. The great American poet John Berryman wrote, “I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this. The artist is extremely lucky to be presented with the worst possible ordeal which would not actually kill him . . . Beethoven’s deafness, Goya’s deafness, Milton’s blindness, that kind of thing. And I think that what happens with my poetry work in the future will largely depend not on my sitting on my ass as I think mmm, a long poem again? but on being knocked in the face and thrown flat and given cancer and all kinds of other things. Short of senile dementia . . . I hope to be nearly crucified.” Berryman’s severe depression did not lead to greater poetry but to suicide.
Most artists and writers stop trying by their eighties at the latest, but when one knows that there is little time left, the late work produced can be a generous emptying of an old or disabled man’s mind, offered with abandon, representing the man in all the stages of his life. Of course, not all such work is a calm emptying out. Often, it is irascible, uncaring, immensely demanding. Edward Said, a great music critic, wrote: “The accepted notion is that age confers a spirit of reconciliation and serenity on late works, often expressed in terms of a miraculous transfiguration of reality . . . but each of us can supply evidence of late works which crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavor. Rembrandt and Matisse, Bach and Wagner. But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty and contradiction? What if age and ill health don’t produce serenity at all?” How has the Krakow experience influenced not only my writing but the possible images that might still emerge from this old but eager mind and body? At the age of seventy-six, Samuel Becket said, “With diminished concentration, loss of memory, obscured intelligence, the more chance there is for saying something closest to what one really is.”
4.
My Polish rant has given me—and this is a word so hackneyed that I have a hard time using it—the journey, the existential journey. As the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy wrote over a hundred years ago:
When you set sail for Ithaca,
wish for the road to be long,
full of adventures, full of knowledge . . .
Ithaca gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
When I began this book, its trajectory seemed clear. It would record my facing the old devils once again, the righting of wrongs and the collecting of rewards by way of a deus ex machina, a satisfying resolution. Improbable things do happen. Some people do survive in spite of great odds against it. We got out of Poland, not a gift of God but a sequence of, say, twenty random, often lucky, events—not nineteen but twenty.
But though Cavafy’s journey to Ithaca has become a tired concept, it is nevertheless true that the lessons inherent in the pursuit itself represent the real treasure. The recovery and sale of the Thirteen Stradomska Street property might happen one day but probably not in my lifetime. Whether it is the fault of the Polish legal system or the ineptitude of Artur and his colleagues I do not know. Even if the property were somehow wrested from Miron’s hands, given the fact of its decrepitude, its sale for more than a token amount of zlotys seems improbable.
As unsatisfying as the lack of a magical denouement might be, the pain and pleasure experienced through the writing of this book has been the primary reward. I have not emerged victorious, but enriched. The process began with my dramatic performance at the Warsaw Airport, the breakdown unleashing a year of awareness, a release of old baggage and openness to the new. Waiting at the Frederic Chopin Airport in an unmoving line, the regular working security crew on strike and replaced by non-professionals, a connecting flight about to leave without us and, above all, not seeing. I was stranded inside echoing stone walls, surrounded by a whispering, grumbling crowd. I was ignorant, invisible, having no say, no control over a seemingly life-changing situation. I was living the helplessness of a terrorized eight-year-old facing the unknown, the end of life as he knew it, his only reality nothingness, sitting terrorized in the Citroen van, the helpless child, seeing only blackness and extinction, all of life in the hands of others: the man who showed up to furnish gasoline for the van’s empty gas tank, the hateful farmer’s wife who boiled two chickens for an Apfelbaum mink coat, the snarling soldiers at border crossings, replaced now in the same Polish language by the scabs who controlled our passage.
Until this third trip to Poland, I had transformed the bombs and bullets, the improbability of our escape, into war stories, an adventure. It came easily, evoking not pity but wonder. It was Andy’s golden childhood, innocent Andy bombed in the middle of an unkempt field, brave Andy making a new life for himself. The movie, the hermetic story, then exploded into shards of pain, depression, and anger. I was forced to face reality from a new perspective, reading new histories of the war, memoirs of the Holocaust, books about anti-Semitism and Judaism. I forgot how to smile, even how to love. But better understanding a life lived does not necessarily lead to euphoria or resolution. There is no closure, no expectation of justice. There can be no moving on, no forgiveness, no clarity, no abatement of rage. My bl
ood still boils but more often these days it merely simmers, still unable to tolerate perpetrators, bystanders, nations acting like nations, anyone whose life is influenced by babble from holy books or television serials, anyone who truly believes that their God doles out only what humans can handle. On each of my visits several Poles have recommended forgetting and reconciliation. “Pan Andrzej, you must let bygones be bygones. That was then; this is now.” But what was then has not disappeared and I doubt that I will ever find a way to forgive priests and bishops, mullahs and imams, the establishment, for hating my kind. After the damage that faith has caused in the world, the concept of faith remains a danger, the lurking cloud that doesn’t go away, forever threatening the planet.
Delving deeper into any aspect of human behavior does not fill me with hope. On the contrary, it is frightening. It does not get better. A surfeit of hatred does not prevent future hatred. The more I know, the more hopeless the plight of this planet and its inhabitants becomes. Human morality has not improved and everything I experience, everything I learn anew, hammers that truth home. Perhaps Poland really is no worse than anywhere else on the planet. Perhaps the immorality of our species is dictated by natural selection and we can’t escape it.
If one doesn’t learn to move on, to let go, to let bygones be bygones, then what? Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, almost everywhere in post-colonial Africa, as well as Mexico and Central America, have forced the world to rethink its purported humanity, and the response has been predictably inhuman. Poland has voted in a far right government—bigoted, Catholic in its most medieval, primitive sense, utterly reactionary—whose aim is to assert its hateful Polish Catholicism by rejecting the immigration of Muslims. According to my Swedish cousin Anna, even Jews are seen as preferable to those new others. In building the Jewish historical museum, the Poles knew they could safely honor the part that Jews once played in the life of the country, knowing that they are not about to witness a new influx of Jews. Of course it’s not just Poland but the once admired democracies of Europe that now feel threatened by another loathsome religion. Here in the United States, half the country would like to send the dirty, leprous Latin Americans back to be murdered in the countries of their origins, made unlivable by American corporate and military thugs and death squads.