Hungry Hearts by Anzia Yezierska

Tales of Jewish immigrant life told and retold

A young Jewish woman from Russian-occupied Poland emigrates to America, where she hopes to find love, education, and personal freedom. Although only in her early twenties, she is considered an old maid in her home country. Her family’s poverty means she has no dowry to attract suitors. Once arrived in America, she lives in a squalid tenement building in a Jewish ghetto and slaves away sewing “shirt-waists” in a factory sweatshop. Then she meets a man, also Jewish, but educated and of a higher financial class than herself. She falls in love at first sight, but the feeling is not mutual. Because of her lack of means and sophistication, he shuns her, breaking her heart. She then vows to raise herself out of the poverty and ignorance of her station in life so that she may make herself worthy of him.

While I don’t know much about the author Anzia Yezierska (1880–1970), I’m guessing that’s her life story, because at least half of the short stories in her collection Hungry Hearts, published in 1920, bear this exact same narrative. Perhaps these stories were originally published individually in various periodicals before being gathered together in this book. When assembled, however, they comprise an extremely repetitive whole. The best story in the collection, “How I Found America,” is also its longest. Told in the first person by an unnamed narrator, this selection might very well be Yezierska’s autobiography. It is the most believable glimpse into immigrant life that Hungry Hearts has to offer. As the book’s closing selection, however, by the time you get to it you’ve already read the same plot six or seven times.

I like realist writers who capture the history of their times in their works. In America, the heyday for literary realism and naturalism was the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I’m always looking to discover previously unfamiliar writers of that style and period. After stumbling upon Yezierska’s name, I was hoping I might find in her an unsung virtuoso of American realism, but I was mostly disappointed by the stories in Hungry Hearts, especially after I read essentially the same plot for the third or fourth time. The reader does get a bit of muckraking realism from these stories, but it’s mixed up with too much romantic fantasy (see next paragraph). The best work of literature to capture the Jewish immigrant experience from this period is Abraham Cahan’s novel The Rise of David Levinsky, published in 1917. Yezierska’s stories here really don’t hold a candle to it.

What really undermines the realism of Yezierska’s stories is her attitude towards love. Not only does she believe in love at first sight (and includes a subplot about it in almost every story), she also seems to believe that love means abject worship at first sight. When a young woman in these stories meet a man, within a half an hour she’s ready to either have his babies or kill herself. In matters of the heart, Yezierska’s otherwise spunky heroines exhibit a total lack of self-esteem. Rather than romantic tales of courtship and heartbreak, these love stories read like evidence in some case study of neurosis. 

Yezierska also wrote a handful of novels, which I suspect cover much of the same ground as the stories in Hungry Hearts. It is admirable that she rose from humble beginnings to realizing her dream of being an author, and it’s good that someone has chronicled the struggles of immigrant women. Within that milieu, however, I think there are more stories to tell than the one Yezierska keeps repeating.

Stories in this collection

Wings

Hunger

The Lost “Beautifulness”

The Free Vacation House

The Miracle

Where Lovers Dream

Soap and Water

“The Fat of the Land”

My Own People

How I Found America

Being There by Jerzy Kosinski

The sagacity of a blank slate

Jerzy Kosinski was born and educated in Poland. As a young man he fled the communist regime in his native country and emigrated to America, where he became a successful novelist. He enjoyed great commercial success and critical acclaim in the late ‘60s and 1970s. He was even somewhat of a minor celebrity, making multiple appearances on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and acting in a few feature films, most notably Warren Beatty’s Reds. Kosinski’s name is not so well-known nowadays, but many will recognize the title of his 1971 novel Being There because of the popular film adaptation starring Peter Sellers.

Being There is the story of Chance, a humble gardener who has led a very unique existence. Orphaned as a young boy, he was taken in by a wealthy lawyer referred to only as the Old Man. Chance has lived his whole life in the Old Man’s Manhattan mansion, working as his gardener. He receives no pay but is provided with food, shelter, and clothing. Though he’s probably in his thirties or forties at the time this novel takes place, Chance has never been outside the walls of the Old Man’s property. Everything he knows about the outside world he has learned through television. The garden and his television are all he needs to be content. Chance was never formally adopted by the Old Man, and there is in fact no record whatsoever of his existence. When the Old Man dies, therefore, the estate lawyers evict him from the premises, and Chance is forced to make his own way in the world. 

This is a comedic novel, the running joke being that no one Chance encounters in the outside world seems to recognize his childlike intelligence and lack of almost any life experiences. He falls in with wealthy and powerful people who misinterpret his every simple utterance about gardening as sage wisdom. Thus, with very little effort or intention on his part, Chance rises to great heights of political power, commercial success, and media celebrity.

Being There is a very short novel that barely qualifies as a novella. The edition I read was 142 pages, but I’ve never seen a trade paperback with so many blank pages and so much white space. The story is based on a very simple premise, and it sometimes reads like the same joke being told over and over again. Nevertheless, it is very cleverly done. Kosinski satirizes American political and media culture, and some scenes really do inspire laughter. Kosinski has said that he based the character of Chance on a real person, a guru of transcendental meditation. Polish critics, however, accused Kosinski of plagiarizing a previous Polish novel. I’m sure Being There was probably very unique and innovative at the time it was published. Over the past half century, however, we’ve seen many variations of this theme in film and television­—the childlike blank slate who is perceived as a savant. There are touches of Chance in Forrest Gump, Rain Man, and Woody Allen’s Zelig, for example, as well as many other comedic protagonists who suffer from amnesia or stereotypes of autism. I wouldn’t say those later productions necessarily copied Being There, but one’s accumulated familiarity with such plot lines renders Kosinski’s novel somewhat predictable.

Despite such predictability, overall I enjoyed Being There. It’s a quick and fun read. I doubt it is Kosinski’s most profound work of literature, but there are certainly depths of insightful social commentary beneath the simple storyline. After reading this, I definitely would like to check out more of Kosinski’s novels.

Poland: The First Thousand Years by Patrice M. Dabrowski

Two different books before and after the Enlightenment

My interest in Poland springs from my partial Polish heritage. Researching my family’s history led me to an interest in Polish history, literature, and film. Unlike the history of some Western European countries such as England, France, or Italy, however, Poland’s past is not common knowledge taught in America’s schools. It can be difficult to appreciate a nation’s arts and letters when one doesn’t have the historical context upon which its cultural works are based. For a while, therefore, I’ve kept my eyes open for a concise yet comprehensive history of Poland, one that’s neither too academic nor too dumbed-down for the layman. I found what I was looking for with Patrice Dabrowski’s 2014 book Poland: The First Thousand Years. This history nails the sweet spot where erudition and accessibility meet. For her distinguished career as a scholar in Polish studies, Dabrowski was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland in 2014.

Thematically and stylistically, Dabrowski’s Poland reads as if it were two different books stuck together between the covers of one volume. The dividing line is the Polish Constitution of May 3, 1791, which occurs about 60 percent of the way through the book. Everything up to that point is an old-school royal history. It’s all about the succession of kings from one to the next, along with the battles, royal marriages, and elections that influenced the path to the throne. One gets almost no idea of what life was like for the Poles who were not high up on the ladder of nobility. This portion of the book reads a lot like a high school history textbook (if there were a high school course devoted exclusively to Poland). The text, though very informative, relates events in a rather cursory, just-the-facts fashion that imparts the necessary names, dates, and places to the reader. There isn’t much analysis beyond these facts, no social history, and Dabrowski doesn’t really elucidate any broader historical trends or push any thesis. I suspect this approach is due to what’s available in the historical record from these earlier centuries and the sheer volume of a millennium of events that Dabrowski feels she’s obligated to cram into one volume.

After the 1791 constitution, however, this becomes a totally different book, and a much better one. While Dabrowski still manages to deliver the names, dates, and places of all the important historical events, the writing in the book’s latter half is much more thoughtful and penetrating. All facets of Polish history and society are covered. The reader gets a vivid impression of what life was like for Poles of all classes and backgrounds. The text reads as if Dabrowski were actually shaping the historiography of Poland (as she should be, since she’s a historian and an expert in this area) rather than just relating events. Her coverage of the 19th and 20th centuries is everything that anyone interested in Polish history could hope for­—comprehensive, fascinating, erudite, and thought-provoking.

I’m not a historian, but I imagine the one-volume history, as a scholarly endeavor, is a bit of a thankless job. The author is expected to include everything, and for every event she discusses there’s a scholarly monograph that examines it more deeply and thoroughly. Nevertheless, it takes a very knowledgeable scholar and a very competent writer to put together an all-encompassing synthesis that’s suitable for general readers but also passes muster among academicians. Dabrowski deserves commendation for her formidable achievement in compiling and composing this welcome history of Poland. The reader comes away with a very enlightening education in that nation’s turbulent past.  

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Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz

If Eugene Ionesco wrote Billy Madison

Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) is one of Poland’s internationally best-known authors of the twentieth century. Ferdydurke, published in 1937, is his debut novel, after having previously published some poetry and short stories. I have an outsider’s interest in Polish culture, and I like to explore Polish literature old and new. I had previously read Gombrowicz’s 1965 novel Cosmos, which I enjoyed quite a bit. Like Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, or Eugene Ionesco, Gombrowicz is known for his absurd sense of humor and for pushing the envelope of narrative form in his fiction. In Ferdydurke, however, his envelope-pushing challenged my attention span, and his absurdity failed to inspire laughter.

Like much of its content, the word “Ferdydurke” is simply nonsensical, and isn’t even used in the text. The narrator of the novel is Johnnie, a 30-year-old writer whom critics have accused of immaturity. Such criticism is taken very literally when a professor named Pimko, an old acquaintance of the narrator, demands that Johnnie relive his youth. Pimko sends Johnnie to a school for boys, where everyone inexplicably perceives him as roughly a 15- or 16-year-old. Also inexplicable is why Johnnie doesn’t just say no to Pimko and refuse to be demoted to youthdom, but then there wouldn’t be much of a story to tell. Eventually, Johnnie becomes infatuated with a teenage girl and vies for her affection with other suitors, young and old, with comic results.

Ferdydurke is a satirical novel. In fact, it satirizes just about everything—the young and the old, the rich and the poor, the liberal and the conservative, the urban and the rural, literary criticism, the educational system, class distinctions, the pretensions of intellectualism, love, nostalgia, conventions of masculinity, so-called modernity, and the fetishizing of youth. Unfortunately, I found very little of this satire to be actually funny, and only small portions of it to be mildly amusing. Maybe with some good comic actors and some rapidly paced direction, this might amount to a somewhat entertaining movie, but on paper it felt like a witless waste of time.

What I do like about Gombrowicz’s writing is that even though it’s experimental and intended to be humorous, he does tell his story through actual sentences with correct syntax. It’s not an anything-goes modernist language game like something by James Joyce or Gertrude Stein. As he did in Cosmos, Gombrowicz does repeat a few choice words over and over again like a beat poet beating a bongo. In this case, those words are “thighs,” “youthful,” “stable-boy,” “fraternize,” and “bum” as in buttocks (from the English translation by Eric Mosbacher).

Ferdydurke is now considered a cult classic, which probably means many people like to think they’re cool for liking it whether they understand it or not, something like the Polish equivalent of William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. I suspect probably the only people who really understand Ferdydurke, however, are Poles or their European neighbors who lived through the 1930s or thereabouts. Rather than a satiric masterpiece, I thought this was just a self-indulgent exercise in nonsense. It didn’t offend me with its self-indulgence like, say, Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum. Instead, Ferdydurke just bored me. It was like listening to a silly children’s song repeated over and over again until it just makes you want to go to sleep. Cosmos was also innovative and goofy, but I felt it had a purpose, whereas here the satire just seemed simplistic, pointless, and unfunny.
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The Promised Land by Wladyslaw Reymont

Ambition and corruption in Poland’s Industrial Revolution

The Promised Land is a novel by Polish author Wladyslaw Reymont, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1924. This novel was originally serialized in a Polish newspaper from 1897 to 1898 before being published in book form in 1899. Reymont is considered one of Poland’s greatest authors, and The Promised Land (Ziemia obiecana in Polish) is generally regarded as one of his best works, along with his four-volume novel The Peasants (Chlopi).

The Promised Land is a story of ambition and greed set during the Industrial Revolution in Poland. It takes place in Lodz, presently Poland’s fourth largest city and apparently an industrial center. Reymont’s descriptions of the city call to mind the traditional American view of Pittsburgh as a factory town. Instead of steel, however, the main export of Lodz is textiles. Several successful factories operate in the city, and questionable business ethics are rampant. As the novel opens, three young career climbers have plans to try their hands in this competitive market by opening their own factory. Charles Borowiecki is a Polish nobleman currently working as the right-hand man to Lodz’s top cloth manufacturer. Moritz Welt is a Jewish trader in fabrics and raw materials. Max Baum, a German, wants to break away from his father’s business, an old-fashioned handloom factory in decline. As the three are raising capital for their venture, Borowiecki comes across an insider trading tip. To take advantage of this knowledge, the three partners agree to send Welt off an a business trip to secure a lucrative deal. Meanwhile, Borowiecki makes the rounds of the social scene among the rich industrialists of Lodz and, though he’s engaged to a woman from his rural hometown, he embarks on an affair with a married woman.

My favorite author is the French writer Emile Zola, who in my opinion took the art of the novel to its apex. Reymont is the one writer in the world who is excellent enough and stylistically similar enough to be mistaken for Zola. (If Reymont had published as many books as Zola, maybe he’d be my favorite author.) It’s hard to say whether Reymont was a “disciple” of Zola and his school of Naturalism, or if their two styles developed coincidentally. Either way, Reymont is a world-class writer of prose fiction who deserves to be better known and more widely translated.

The Promised Land is deliberately and brutally unromantic. Reymont describes Lodz as an urban mud puddle shrouded in smog. At least two of the book’s three heroes are decidedly unheroic and would sell their souls to be rich and successful. The relationships and prejudices between the three prevalent races in Lodz—Poles, Germans, and Jews—are explored throughout the story. Anti-Semitism is a factor in the plot, as some characters are anti-Semitic, but I wouldn’t call the book itself anti-Semitic because it exhibits both positive and negative portrayals of Jews, as well as Poles and Germans, for that matter. The vilest villain in the novel is capitalism itself, which drives the characters’ behavior. This is emblematic of the Naturalist school’s focus on how social forces shape human beings and control their lives.

The problem with The Promised Land is that it takes a long time to get going. The final quarter of the novel is riveting, but you have to trudge through a lot of description and exposition to get there. At first it seems the novel is going to be about these three friends and their factory, but Reymont departs from the trio for extended periods to introduce dozens of other characters. In his desire to capture the broad scope of real life in Lodz, there are too many plot threads, too many romances, and too many dinner parties. Some narrowing of focus would have been an improvement. The Promised Land doesn’t quite measure up to The Peasants, but this is a classic work of literature by a superb author and will appeal to anyone with an interest in Polish history and culture.  

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Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz

OCD: The Novel

Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) is widely considered one of Poland’s greatest modern writers. His novel Cosmos was published in 1965. It won the Prix International (International Prize for Literature) in 1967. I read the 2005 translation by Danuta Borchardt, who did a very fine job of interpreting Gombrowicz’s avant-garde prose into lively, smooth-flowing English.

The narrator of Cosmos, also named Witold, and his friend Fuks are scholars of some sort. They leave Warsaw for a sojourn in Zakopane, a Polish vacation destination, where they hope to relax, study, and write. In a sort of B&B arrangement, they take up lodging with a family in their country home. As they enter the grounds of their new home, the pair discover a dead sparrow hanging from a string. Who would do such a thing? This is seen as a bad omen and immediately sparks paranoia in the two young men. After taking up residence in the household, Witold and Fuks notice other possible “signs” of what they perceive to be some intelligent design concealing a message or a warning. These signs could be as esoteric as water spots on a ceiling that form the shape of an arrow, an arrow that the two can’t resist following until it leads them to other clues, real or imagined, to this mysterious puzzle. Katasia, a member of their host family, has a disfigured lip that Witold fixates on and inexplicably becomes obsessed with until he sees the form of this woman’s mouth just about everywhere he looks. Any repetition of visual or audial cues, such as two straight lines, two pieces of string, or two banging noises, are interpreted by Witold and Fuks as part of a sinister pattern. The pair are compelled to decipher this secret code that may only exist in their paranoid minds.

Not being a psychologist, I don’t know the textbook definition of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), but my amateur diagnosis would be that these two are suffering from an extreme form of that behavioral malady. Cosmos is quite comic in its initial chapters, as the lengths to which Witold and Fuks obsess over every detail of their surroundings is absurd, ridiculous, and delusional. The strange humor and Gombrowicz’s creative use of language reminded me a bit of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels. The book takes a darker turn at about the midway point, however, as Witold’s obsessions become sexual in nature. His attraction to one of his housemates is as obsessive as his compulsion to establish patterns where there are none. One not only fears for his sanity but for the safety of those around him.

Written from the point of view of Witold, the prose reflects his obsessive-compulsive nature. The text is riddled with the constant repetition of key words and phrases, basically all the “signs” over which Witold is obsessing. Usually I don’t care much for modernist writers who play a lot of word games, but there’s a method to Gombrowicz’s madness that I appreciated and enjoyed. His style is not just verbal masturbation but actually enhances the narrative rather than obscures it. The best thing about this novel is that it is so unpredictable. The plot could just as easily end in violence as in comedy, and the reader can never be sure if the grand design that Witold and Fuks are pursuing is real or imagined. With so many options on the table, I was disappointed with the ending, which felt like a weak resolution to a fascinating novel. Overall, however, I found Cosmos to be a very thought-provoking and satisfyingly original work of literature.

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American Warsaw: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Polish Chicago by Dominic A. Pacyga

The epicenter of Polish American history

Since the first major wave of Polish immigration in the mid-19th century, the city of Chicago has been home to the largest concentration of Poles outside of Poland, making it the de facto capital of Polonia (people of Polish descent living outside of Poland). In his 2019 book American Warsaw, Chicago native and historian Dominic A. Pacyga provides a detailed history of this Polish American community. The importance of this ethnic enclave is heightened by the fact that for much of the last two centuries Poland has been conquered, occupied, and partitioned by various subjugating powers—Prussia, Russia, Austria, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union. Many of Chicago’s Poles were exiles or refugees who fled political upheaval and oppression in their homeland. The Polish community in Chicago, therefore, often served as a sort of polity in absentia who lobbied and fought for Polish independence, upheld Polish customs, and organized massive charitable efforts to support Poles in Europe.

I am one-quarter Polish American; not via Chicago but rather from a heavily Polish town in Wisconsin. Even though I have no direct connection to the Windy City, I still found this to be a very good history of the Polish American experience in general. Because of Chicago’s high population of Poles, many of the major Polish American political, cultural, and charitable organizations are headquartered there. Pacyga’s account of the ways in which Polish Americans and Polish exiles in Chicago responded to events occurring in their Old World homeland is in many ways relevant to other Polish American communities throughout the United States. Major events in Polish history such as the two world wars, the Soviet occupation, the election of Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II, and the Solidarity labor movement inspired strong feelings and noble actions on the part of Polish Americans, and Pacyga does a fine job of recreating the experience of these decisive moments in time.

Throughout the book, Pacyga examines the changing perception of Polskosc (with acute accents over the last s and c) or Polishness. The collective idea of who could really be considered Polish changed over time as a result of conflicts between Polish immigrants and American-born Poles, Catholic Poles and non-Catholic Poles, working class Poles and aristocratic Poles, Jewish Poles and anti-Semitic Poles, old-timer immigrants and latecomer immigrants, nationalists and assimilationists, Polish speakers and English speakers, or inner city Poles and suburban Poles. Even with the outbreak of World War I, there was at first a split between those Poles who supported Russia and those who supported Germany and Austria. All these schisms between factions contributed to the molding of Polish identity within Chicago’s Polish American community.

Pacyga draws much of his research from Chicago’s Polish newspapers. Poles love a parade, and sometimes the text reads like a series of parades, neighborhood festivals, and political rallies, as chronicled in those papers. Due to the prominent role of Catholicism in the lives of many Poles, there’s also quite a bit about church history. At times, the text can get bogged down in demographic and financial statistics, but for the most part American Warsaw is an engaging and interesting read. The publisher overlooked an awful lot of typographical errors in the ebook, however, which is a shame.  

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Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

Hunters are for killing

Polish author Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was first published in 2009. It was published in English in 2018, shortly after Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The title is a quote from William Blake, a favorite author of two of the characters in the novel. In between buying this book and reading it, I made the mistake of watching a Polish movie called Spoor, which, unbeknownst to me until the closing credits, is an adaptation of this novel. So before I even started reading the book, I knew the ending and all of the secrets behind its murder mysteries. Nevertheless, I enjoy Tokarczuk’s writing and can certainly recognize that this is a worthwhile work of literature, despite the spoilers. The book is far superior to the movie and does a better job of pacing and parceling out its reveals and surprises. The movie adds one ridiculous plot device at the end (involving a hacker) that thankfully is not present in Tokarczuk’s book.

The narrator of the novel is Janina Duszejko, a woman who seems to be in her 60s. She lives in a mountainous region of Southern Poland near the border of the Czech Republic. Her rural village is full of tourists and part-time residents in the summertime, but Duszejko is one of the few who lives there year-round. She lives alone, looks after the vacation homes of absentee landlords, and teaches English courses at the local elementary school. One night, Duszejko (she hates being called by her first name) is awakened by her neighbor Oddball (she assigns personal nicknames to her friends and acquaintances), who informs her that another neighbor, a poacher called Big Foot, is dead in his home. His death seems to have a natural explanation. In the weeks that follow, however, a series of deaths occur in the village that appear to be murders. Duszejko and her friends are not particularly sorry for the victims, who were into some bad activities, but they nonetheless take an interest in the murders and come up with their own theories on the suspicious deaths, with Duszejko’s theory the strangest of all.

The most interesting aspect of this novel is the complex character of its narrator. Duszejko has two obsessions. The first is astrology. She believes everything is governed by the stars, and if she knows a person’s date and exact time of birth, she can pretty much predict the course and outcome of their life. Duszejko’s other defining characteristic is her emphatic belief in animal rights. She abhors all violence and cruelty towards animals, whether from abusive pet owners, hunters for sport, or consumers of meat. This conviction clashes with the community in which she lives, where hunting is a way of life. She lives down the road from a fox farm, and all the men in town are hunters. When she expresses her views on animal rights she is scoffed at as merely a crazy old woman.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is not a conventional murder mystery, in that there isn’t much emphasis placed on finding clues and solving the puzzle. It’s more about the people who live in this town, how they deal with the murders, and what it reveals about their characters. The actual identity of the killer is not difficult to guess, neither in the book nor the film. The killings in this hunting community, however, allow Tokarczuk to examine from a new and interesting perspective the ethics of how people relate to animals and nature. This is not a mystery for mystery genre fans, but the unique narrator and setting, along with Tokarczuk’s talent as a storyteller, make this an intriguing and compelling read for just about everyone else.

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Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature in Prose and Verse, translated and edited by Paul Selver

Eastern European stories and poems in English translation

Wladyslaw Reymont

As the title suggests, Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature in Prose and Verse is a collection of short literary works from Eastern Europe. In this context, “Slavonic” means the same as “Slavic.” The book includes selections from Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Serbian, Croatian, and Slovenian authors. This volume was edited by British writer Paul Selver, who also translated all of the works into English. In addition to writing his own novels and poetry, Selver was a multilinguist who also translated German, French, and Norwegian works. He was primarily known for his Czech translations, in particular the works of Karel Capek (who does not appear in this book). This anthology was published in 1919, but the works included date as far back as 1845.

The prose section of this volume includes short stories, brief essays, and a couple of one-act plays. A few recognizable names appear in this volume. The great Russian master of short stories Anton Chekhov provides a finely drawn comical tale, “In a Foreign Land.” Polish Nobel Prize-winner Wladyslaw Reymont is represented by a scene excerpted from his novel Promised Land. Polish author Boleslaw Prus’s story “From the Legends of Ancient Egypt” calls to mind his novel Pharaoh, set in the same era. The rest of the names on the table of contents will likely be new to the vast majority of English-language readers. The better entries include Czech author Jan Neruda’s “The Vampire,” which is not the horror story its title implies, but it does deliver a surprisingly morbid ending. Polish writer Wiktor Gomulicki’s portrait of an aged farmer is the literary equivalent of a gritty Gustave Courbet painting. Ukraine’s foremost poet of the 19th century, Taras Shevtchenko, tells his own story in an autobiographical essay written for a literary journal. Reymont’s selection is the best in the book, but if this were a short-story Olympics, the Russians would take the gold with strong showings by Chekhov, Dmitri Merezhkovsky, and Fyodor Sologub.

The latter half of the book is devoted to poetry, about 130 pages worth from the authors of seven nations. Almost all are written in rhyming verse, with Selver doing his best to preserve the rhyme schemes in his English translations. Many are romantic evocations of nature typical of the late 19th century. The more interesting selections deal with subject matter unique to the authors’ nationalities and ethnicity, the most obvious example being Czech poet Petar Preradovic’s anthemic “To Slavdom.” Shevtchenko’s poem “If Lordlings, Ye Could Only Know . . .” depicts a hellish view of serfdom. Petr Bezruc, in his series of poems, laments the plight of the oppressed Silesian Czechs. One surprising entry is Czech poet Antonin Sova’s “To Theodor Mommsen.” Rather than a tribute to the German Nobel laureate and classical historian, Sova’s poem is an extended insult that attacks Mommsen as the “arrogant spokesman of slavery.”

Classic Slavic literature is hard to come by in English translation. Selver’s welcome anthology does the valuable service of introducing the British or American reader to many hitherto unfamiliar authors. He even includes helpful mini-biographies of each writer. If you discover authors you like here, however, it may be impossible to find further samples of their work in English. Overall, the good and bad entries in this volume average out to a middling collection. Those with an interest in Eastern European culture, however, will appreciate the bits of history, artistic heritage, and national customs revealed in these stories and poems. Because of the large quantity of verse, it will especially appeal to readers who enjoy poetry.

Stories in this collection
(Also 130 pages of poems, not listed below)

In a Foreign Land by Anton Chekhov

My Life by Dimitri Merezhkovsky

The Tiny Man by Fyodor Sologub

The Demigod by S. N. Sergeyev-Tsensky

Autobiography by Taras Shevtchenko

The Ploughman by Wiktor Gomulicki

From the Legends of Ancient Egypt by Boleslaw Prus

Chopin by Stanislaw Przybyszewski

In the Old Town at Lodz by Wladyslaw Reymont

Sonia by Jan Svatopluk Machar

The Vampire by Jan Neruda

The Advent of Spring in the South by Arne Novák

June (play in one act) by Frána Srámek

The Latin Boy by Simo Matavulj

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The Tin Drum by Günter Grass

German history obscured by nonsensical humor

The Tin Drum, published in 1959, is set in Poland and Germany during the rise of Nazism and World War II, but it views this history through a lens (or perhaps more accurately, a fun-house mirror) of absurd humor and obscure metaphor. It is also surely one of literature’s strangest coming-of-age novels, since it features a protagonist who literally refuses to come of age. German author Günter Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999 largely on the strength of this, his best-known work. The Tin Drum has been critically acclaimed as a masterpiece of modern literature, but it is a tedious ordeal to read.

The Tin Drum is the story of Oskar Matzerath, who is born in 1924 in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland). Oskar relates his story thirty years later from his bed in a mental hospital. Much like the city in which he was born, Oskar’s heritage is a mixture of Kashubian, Polish, and German. His mother has two lovers, and which of them is Oskar’s biological father is a matter of speculation throughout the book. At the age of three, two momentous events occur in Oskar’s life. First, he is given a tin drum as a birthday present. This drum becomes his lifelong companion and primary means of self-expression. Second, Oskar makes a conscious attempt to stop growing, thus suspending his physical development.

The Tin Drum occasionally provides a vivid glimpse of life in Danzig and Düsseldorf during the 1930s and ‘40s, but more often than not Grass opts for deliberately weird, disturbing, and satirical imagery that steers the narrative down a more comical and frivolous path. For example, Oskar discovers that he has the power to shatter glass with his screams. This is pleasantly surprising the first time it happens, but Grass trots out the same image ad nauseam, to the point where Oskar is developing this talent to ridiculous and tedious lengths. Meanwhile, members of the supporting cast begin committing suicide in bizarre ways, further divorcing the story from reality. As he grows up, Oskar becomes precociously horny, and despite his childlike appearance women seem to find him irresistible. This results in a number of sex scenes, all of which have something disgusting about them, such as his partner smells bad or is asleep during the act. Even in its repulsive or tragic moments, the novel is really too whimsical to be offensive, but it seems to constantly invite the reader to laugh at jokes that just aren’t very funny.

If The Tin Drum has a saving grace, it is Grass’s inventive use of language. He plays with words and phrases the way an innovative jazz musician experiments with notes and keys. This would be quite admirable were the book not so inordinately long and relentlessly repetitive. The novel feels like a self-indulgent exercise by an author more interested in hearing himself talk than in conveying anything meaningful to the reader. On the bright side, the 2009 translation by Breon Mitchell does an outstanding job of interpreting Grass’s complex verbal gymnastics into readable English prose.

Though normally I wouldn’t make such a recommendation, before you spend 20+ hours reading this book you might want to watch the movie to see if this story is really your cup of tea. The film adaptation only covers roughly the first two-thirds of the book, but is otherwise mostly faithful to the text. If you like the film and think you want to tackle the novel, be prepared that Grass’s gratuitous wordplay draws out every scene to five times its necessary length.
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Stories of Poland by Robin Carver

Polish history for 19th century American youths

Stories of Poland, a book by Robin Carver, was published in 1834. I don’t know anything about the author, other than he or she was likely a Bostonian who also wrote a History of Boston and The Book of Sports. Carver also did something that probably few Americans of the 1830s could claim to have done—traveled to Poland—which makes him or her relatively qualified to write a book on the nation in question. Despite the word “Stories” in the title, this is a nonfiction book, not a collection of literature. A scanned digital copy can be found at the HathiTrust web site.

Stories of Poland was written for a young audience. Children’s books of the 1830s, however, were apparently a more serious affair than the kid lit of today, since a relatively advanced reading level and substantial attention span would be required for a kid to understand and maintain interest in this book. Carver’s prose is familiar in tone, sometimes addressing young readers directly, but can sometimes be confusing in its relating of events. Most of the historical content is about politics and warfare, with very little softening of the harsh realities for a young audience.

The book contains a dozen engravings illustrating various aspects of Polish life. These are all ganged up at the front of the book, prior to the title page. The text consists of 21 brief chapters, some of which serve as a travelogue of contemporary Poland, such as descriptions of Warsaw and Krakow, a visit to the salt mines, or a fancy ball at the villa of a family of Polish nobility. Most of this travel writing concerns the upper classes, though a brief attempt is made to describe the living conditions of the peasants in their thatched cottages. Carver does succeed in granting the viewer a cursory, sanitized view of what life was like in Poland in the early 19th century.

The majority of the chapters, however, are devoted to tales of Poland’s history, from the 17th century to just prior to the date of publication. These condensed historical narratives read like part history and part folklore, the purpose of which is to present the reader with a series of Polish heroes, including King Jan III Sobieski, King Stanislaw I Leszczynski, Karol Stanislaw Radziwill, Casimir Pulaski, and Tadeusz Kosciuszko (these are the spellings from Wikipedia; Carver’s spellings vary). The narrative also occasionally includes villains, like the tyrant Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich of Russia, brother of Tsar Alexander and tyrant governor of Russian-occupied Poland. Carver gives quite a bit of coverage to the recent November Uprising of 1830, a failed Polish rebellion against the Russians. Antonina Tomaszewska, a teenage military heroine of the Polish-Russian War, is hailed as a sort of Polish Joan of Arc.

This book is unlikely to interest youths of today. It will primarily be of interest to adults intrigued by Polish history. Carver provides only the briefest, romanticized summary of events, the details of which are of questionable veracity. This book can, however, generate enough interest to lead the reader to seek out more info on these historical figures and events from other sources. Carver doesn’t cite any references, except for the material on the November Uprising, much of which was drawn from the account of Major Joseph Hordynski, author of the 1832 book History of the Late Polish Revolution. Though Carver’s book may have been written for children, most Americans are basically kids when it comes to knowledge of Polish history, so Stories of Poland can serve as a primer to those readers who are interested in finding out more.
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The Argonauts by Eliza Orzeszkowa

Polish literature, though you’d hardly know it

Eliza Orzeszkowa

The Argonauts, a novel by Polish author Eliza Orzeszkowa, was first published in 1900 under the Polish title of Argonauci. Translator Jeremiah Curtin published an English-language edition in 1901. The story opens in a luxurious mansion, the home of Aloysius Darvid, a self-made tycoon who through ceaseless toil and prodigious business acumen has amassed great wealth. His riches allow him to associate with princes and counts, but, not being of noble birth, he knows he will never be considered one of them. This workaholic pushes himself to the limit, not for the money but for the thrill of the conquest and the cachet of prestige. In pursuing his business interests, Darvid has neglected his family, leading to his wife’s affair with another man and his older children viewing him with contempt. When Darvid decides to put his house in order, he does so with an uncompromising iron fist characteristic of his autocratic business tactics.

One good reason to read Polish literature is to learn more about Polish history and culture. Orzeszkowa may be a Polish writer, but you’d hardly know it from reading this book. The only indication that the story takes place in Poland is that the characters call each other Pan and Pani (the Mr. and Mrs. of the Polish upper classes). It would be difficult to imagine a French novel in which location, either Parisian or provincial, plays no part whatsoever in the story. The city in which The Argonauts take place, however, is never mentioned. The words “Warsaw,” “Krakow,” or “Poland” don’t appear anywhere in the book. The word “Polish” does appear once (as opposed to “polish,” which appears 11 times). Orzeszkowa has more to say about French, English, and German culture than she does about that of her Polish motherland. Her characters gush over the works of Arthur Rimbaud, William Morris, and the Pre-Raphaelites, but I don’t recall a single Polish artist or writer being mentioned in the text. Russian authors sometimes satirize the upper classes of their nation for shamefully trying to deny their Russian heritage by pretending to be French. Orzeszkowa seems to be doing the same thing here, not as a satirist but as a culprit, by excising every element of Polishness from her own novel.

A phrase that appears over and over again in The Argonauts is “painted pots.” This is meant to signify old-fashioned values, outdated conventions, and conservative mores. This epithet is frequently uttered by characters of the younger generation, essentially 19th-century libertine hipsters who consider themselves iconoclasts. They refer to the older generation as Arcadians, a pejorative indicating stuffy old fogies with passé tastes who couldn’t possibly comprehend the sublime beauty and daring intellectualism of contemporary arts and literature. Though Orzeszkowa may have intended the opposite, the reader wants to side with the Arcadians since all the men and women of the younger generation come across as despicable human beings. In fact, almost all the characters in the novel are contemptible. Besides an innocent young girl who’s an easy target for the reader’s sympathy, the only character one really feels for is an aging member of the petty nobility who one day comes to the realization that he’s become a has-been.

The Argonauts is not a bad novel, but there’s not much notably compelling about it either. Orzeszkowa draws vivid characters who act out some valuable moral lessons, but she does so in a rather heavy-handed manner. The exaggerated histrionics, slow plot, and repetitive exposition call to mind the very dusty “painted pots” her characters find so repugnant.
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Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

A tangled web of wanderlust and mummification
Flights, a work of fiction by 2018 Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, was originally published in 2007 under the Polish title of Bieguni. Though not a novel in the traditional sense of the word, Flights is considered a novel because there really isn’t any better word to describe its narrative structure. The text consists of 116 very loosely connected scenes, some of which are long enough to qualify as short stories, but most only a page or two in length. These vignettes are a mix of contemporary and historical fiction, as well as mini-essays, all jumbled in sequence both chronologically and thematically.

Much of the text is written from the first-person perspective of an unnamed female narrator who is a writer by trade. In the book’s early scenes, this narrator explains that she is essentially addicted to travel and leads a nomadic globe-trotting existence. Of all the wonders the world has to offer, the sites that most fascinate her are “cabinets of curiosities,” particularly those museums and exhibitions focusing on human anatomy. Like an Atlas Obscura junkie, this traveler seeks out the curious and the bizarre, relishing every opportunity to gaze at centuries-old organs preserved in jars, relics of freakish physiological anomalies, or dissected human bodies encapsulated and displayed in blocks of transparent lucite. Thus, two thematic streams flow throughout the book: travel and anatomy. While Tokarczuk expounds very eloquently and creatively on both subjects, the connection between the two is very tenuous at best, which often makes Flights feel like you are reading two separate novels that have been shuffled together like mismatched decks of cards.

In the travel portions of the book, the narrator sometimes relates the stories of fellow travelers she has met in her journeys. Other passages describe the sights, sounds, and customs of exotic locales. Usually the destinations are not named, which can be frustratingly disorienting. Often the shorter entries read like nonfiction asides, consisting of the kind of observational humor on airports, hotels, and the inconveniences of travel that Jerry Seinfeld might come up with if he had a PhD in psychology. Of the fictional vignettes, the most interesting “short story” concerns a Polish family vacationing on a Croatian island. The husband pulls their car over to the side of a road to let his wife and child go to the bathroom in the bushes. They never return to the car and appear to have vanished, leaving him to figure out what happened. Unfortunately, like many of the scenes in Flights, the fragmentary nature of the storytelling proves unsatisfyingly inconclusive.

The anatomical vignettes, in general, are more compelling. In addition to the narrator’s visits to modern medical museums, Tokarczuk delves back in time as far as the 17th century to deliver fictional sketches on pioneering anatomists of the past, including some characters based on actual historical personages. The common thread uniting these flashbacks is the scientists’ search for an ideal method of preserving, embalming, or “plasticizing” human tissue—­a problem ultimately solved by the polymers used in today’s anatomical exhibitions.

Judging from the English translation by Jennifer Croft, Tokarczuk is a very talented writer with an expert command of language, keen insight into human nature, and an acute and amusing wit. Each scene in Flights is captivating in its own way, but the work as a whole feels disjointed, indeterminate, and meandering. Though its parts may be greater than its whole, Flights is nonetheless worth a read, and it makes one want to delve further into Tokarczuk’s body of work.
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