About
UsContents
Contributors
Archives
Submissions
Links
Home
 No. 8 |
Winter 2005 |
Christine W. Jablonski
Of Feast and Faith: A Travel Memoir
Grandma leans over my simmering pot of homemade dumplings. "You're a bona fide Polish pierogi maker," she declares. I am tempted to ask during our monthly visits which she thinks is more Polish, the cook or the pierogies?
I've been fiddling with my recipe, veering from tradition, concocting different fillings and experimental sauces. I've stuffed my pierogi with lamb, veal and pork; added sun-dried tomatoes, oregano and sage; cooked them in homemade beef and chicken stocks; and accented them with port, cream, and Vidalia onions. But not today. Grandma likes the traditional version best: finely chopped mushrooms and sauerkraut stuffed into unadorned pockets of dough.
"These smell delicious," she says, "Just like we had in Poland, at that restaurant in Krakow." She crosses herself and adds, "I think of that trip every day."
I have never confessed to her that our pilgrimage was an accident.
One September afternoon in 1998 while on vacation in Rome, an older couple sat down beside me at a bus stop. A picture of the Coliseum and the word Polska graced the cover of their guidebook.
"You're Polish?" I asked.
They smiled and nodded.
I clapped my hand to my chest. "I'm Polish!" I announced, to my own astonishment. Being Polish on Dad's side of the family, German, French, and Scandinavian on Mom's, not to mention English and Irish on both, I had never considered my ethnicity any more distinctive than a mutt's. "Actually, my grandmother's Polish," I added.
They looked at each other and then at me, blankly.
"Grandmother," I repeated.
"You," they said, pointing. "Polska."
I touched my face. The last time I had visited my grandmother, I saw a picture of her taken when she was in her early twenties, my age then. I had inherited her high, Eastern European cheekbones, her eyes, too. If anyone else in the family had noticed the resemblance, they never told me.
The couple and I mimed our way through their broken English and my non-existent Polish. They asked me about America, to which their son had moved nine months earlier. I asked them about Poland, from which my great-grandparents had emigrated nine decades ago. Recently, I had begun dating a man of Polish descent named Kord. He had ignited in me a longing for all things about the land of Conrad, Chopin, and the poet Czeslaw Milosz. (For two uninterrupted days after Kord and I met, I inhaled all 616 pages of James Michener's novel Poland.) Kord wasn't particularly imbued with Polish culture, but I found it much more romantic to attribute our instantaneous connection and similar philosophies about life to a shared, exotic history rather than to a common middle class upbringing. The Polish couple at the bus stop confirmed my suspicions that their country might be mine, too. The idea possessed me for the rest of my vacation.
Fueled by gelato, I scoured the Eternal City from Piazza del Poppolo to Porta San Sebastian for English-language guide books of Poland. Sleepless from too many after-dinner espressos, I called United Airlines at three o'clock one morning to frequent-flier a ticket to Warsaw for the following spring. Snacking on figs at the Trevi Fountain, I made a mental note to research academic sources when I got home and scrawled a postcard to my grandmother, describing my visceral need, and plan, to visit her parents' homeland.
Just back from Italy, I checked my voicemail. Mom's message was first: "Why does your grandmother think you're taking her to Poland, and when are you planning to travel? She wants to schedule a vitamin B-12 shot before she goes." Grandma's was second: "Oh honey, bless you. My mother, God rest her soul, would be so happy knowing that one of her children got back to Poland, even just to visit. It broke her heart to leave, you know."
It hadn't occurred to me to invite Grandma. I preferred traveling alone, well beyond the snow globe and refrigerator magnet vendors. How could I get to the heart of my new-found country chaperoning an 86-year-old woman? Especially one I felt I hardly knew?
My family had moved nine times while I was growing up, but never near her. Except for the occasional holiday, we rarely saw each other. Although once, when I was in high school and my parents went on vacation, Grandma came to stay with me. She got me up every morning in time for the bus. In the afternoons she proctored my homework while ironing my father's shirts, rolling the sleeves as she went so they wouldn't crease. At night she taught me how to play samba, a three-deck version of canasta. Our pot was a dollar a game.
Unpacking from Rome, I tossed my passport into a drawer. It landed next to a stack of playing cards wrapped in a yellowing slip of paper, with samba rules and instructions written in Grandma's cursive, and secured with a rubber band.
We arrived in Warsaw late in the morning and had just sat down to lunch in the restaurant of the Bristol Hotel when Grandma asked me the time.
"Almost noon," I said.
"My programs are starting soon."
"Grandma, it's a lot earlier back home. Your programs aren't on for quite a while."
"Oh." She picked up her menu. "What time is it back home?"
"About five in the morning."
"You're right. My programs aren't on for a couple of hours."
I pressed my fingertips to my temples. This was going to be a long week.
Grandma stuck her foot out from under the table to show me her brand new walking shoes. "Mephistos. Very expensive but supposed to be good, so I can keep up with you. What do you have planned for us?"
I suggested an eating tour. I have never outgrown the infant instinct to explore the universe by putting everything in my mouth. Food shapes my understanding of the world, especially when traveling. Surrounded by pyramids of oranges offered to the dead, I had learned to meditate in Hong Kong's temples. Sweating after a breakfast of spicy eggs and black beans in Costa Rica, an imaginary breeze had dried me. Flamenco dancing in Spain had seemed the natural conclusion to a meal of mussels steamed in tomatoes and saffron. Where ever I went, local delicacies became my guidebooks, restaurants my museums and cathedrals. Each morsel was a gift from cultures completely unrelated to my own. I believed that eating in Poland would be like Christmas.
Kord had warned me about Polish food: "It's a lot of cabbage and tomato sauce -- canned tomato sauce." For other reasons, my grandmother had never cooked it herself. "Food to her was about nutrition, first, last and only," my Aunt Rae explained to me. "A meat, a potato, a vegetable -- the American version of bland. It was Grandma's sister who slaved over the pierogi and golumpke," she continued. "But even then, there were few spices and nothing was very fresh." Nevertheless, I fantasized about discovering packets of exotic nibbles found only in Poland and returning home armed with notes, ready to recreate recipes from the country of my origin.
Grandma put down her menu. "What about Mass?" she asked.
"What about it?"
"I go to Mass every day."
Despite a Catholic school education, I hadn't seen the inside of a church since Charles' and Diana's nuptials were beamed into our family room. "But you're on vacation, Grandma."
She folded her hands in her lap. "You don't take a vacation from God and I've already missed this morning's service."
The maitre d' interrupted us to explain the menu. Asparagus was the highlight of this month's Seasonal Harvest Feast. "Everything is prepared 'Italian Style,'" he said.
"May we see the regular menu?" I asked.
"We only have the Harvest menu."
Oh. "What is 'Italian style'?"
"Italian food."
Asking 'Northern or Southern' seemed pointless.
While I labored over the menu, the maitre d' turned to Grandma, who immediately ordered the Delikatna salata z tunczyka i zielonych szparagow z dresingiem ze skorki pomaranczy as an appetizer, and Makaron Penne z sosem kremowo-szparagowym zapiekany z serem Gorgonzola for her entrée.
I handed my menu back to the maitre d' and asked for the same.
Grandma sipped some water to swallow her blood pressure pill. "I can't get over how much Polish I remember. My parents never learned English, so we only spoke Polish at home, but that was 70 years ago."
I sank into the deep upholstery of my chair and consulted my Lonely Planet guidebook for information on Warsaw's holy houses. "How about if we just visit churches? Must we go to Mass every day?" I asked.
"Well, I guess that would be okay. I want to light a candle for your Aunt Rae -- that she'll meet somebody nice."
I shut the guidebook and looked up at her. "Grandma, Rae's been divorced for forty years."
"I lit candles and said novenas every day since you turned eighteen that you'd meet a nice Polish boy. And now you're marrying one."
I rolled my eyes but hoped she was right.
"I just met him, Grandma. We're not engaged. No one's getting married."
"Just you wait."
Our post-prandial stop was St. John's Cathedral. According to my map of Old Town, it was one of fifteen places of worship in this neighborhood alone. For a people whose country was reestablished only two generations ago, after being partitioned out of existence for over one hundred years, religion is a source of national and personal identity for Poles around the world. My grandmother shared this mantle. Although born in the United States several years after her parents immigrated, Grandma considered herself Polish, not American. Her national pride reached its zenith on October 16, 1978 (coincidentally her 65th birthday) when Karol Jozef Wojtyla was elected Pope John Paul II. "A Polish pope, can you imagine? We are so blessed."
While Grandma lit candles in the cathedral, I consulted my Lonely Planet, retracing our steps, marking everything we had done and seen. I underlined the passage that said this church held the tombs of the last Mazovian dukes, as well as that of Henryk Sienkiewicz, a Nobel prizewinning writer. Obscure facts became important. In lieu of a revelatory initial food experience, I craved proof that Poland had touched me.
We walked through Old Town. I scurried ahead like a terrier, peeking down alleys and reading plaques, then running back to collect Grandma standing in front of one church or another, her back arched and chin tilted skyward as if she were admiring the world's tallest skyscraper.
"Grandma, right across the square there's a museum about the history of the city. It looks wonderful. Do you want to see it?"
She shifted her boxy, oxblood pocketbook from one shoulder to the other. "No. I'm not really interested."
"How can you not be interested in the history of your own country?"
"It's enough for me just to be here," she said. "Now what church is this?"
I fumbled for my guidebook.
"Doesn't matter." She grabbed my arm with one hand and the railing with the other and started pulling me up the stairs. If I could have ground my heels into the stone steps, I would have. As she neared the top, though, I took the stairs two at a time and opened the door for her.
Over the next few days, in between shrines, I poked my head into a couple of grocery stores. I had expected small, specialized European food shops or barren, communist-era shelves. I had not expected worn and unloved spaces, like grungy 7-11s. I rationalized that the packages of HIT cookies, containers of Dannon yogurt, and cans of Coca-Cola wedged haphazardly among spotted bananas were a testament to our tourist locale.
One afternoon, we spotted a farmer's market in the square between The Church of the Nuns of the Visitation and a monument to Cardinal Wyszynski. (Thinking it was Pope John Paul II, Grandma photographed me next to the statue.) I charged into one of the two striped tents where a few dozen vendors displayed their wares. I stalled amid red, white and purple petunias, coffee-colored women's knee high stockings, men's undershirts, and Hello Kitty stickers. Finally, in the market's lone produce booth, I photographed Grandma flanked by waist-high heaps of carrots and towering piles of cabbage.
Discouraged by our inability to forage at the farmer's market, I suggested we find some place for lunch that served local cuisine. I persuaded Grandma to pass up the Irish Pub and Le Petit Trianon in favor of Restaurancja Pod Samsonem, a modest eatery off the town square, guaranteed by the concierge to serve authentic Polish food.
I sounded out a few menu items to myself, stammering through silent pronunciation. Consonants elbowed out vowels. Nothing made sense. I had never expected to speak the languages while traveling in Asia, but for the first time in my travels though Europe, I could not communicate enough to order food. Unlike in Italy, France, or Spain, I couldn't even fall back on a related romance language. "What looks good to you?" I asked my grandmother, at last.
She ordered us two plates of golumpke -- meat filled cabbage rolls -- and two beers.
"Smacznego," the waiter said when he arrived with what looked like dishwater-grey Twinkies.
"That's Polish for 'enjoy,'" Grandma whispered.
I gulped a swig of Pilsner and cut into my golumpke. Both the meat and the cabbage were the color of masking tape. I rolled a mouthful around my tongue. No taste bud quadrant registered appreciably more than another. The overwhelming sensation was texture, not flavor. The golumpke was filling, but not satisfying. I reached for salt and pepper shakers that weren't on our table -- or any other. The waiter brought me a bottle of ketchup.
"How's yours?" I asked Grandma.
She guided a fleck of cabbage from the corner of her lip into her mouth. "Good. I was hungry."
I mounded, flattened and rearranged little meat and cabbage piles on my plate. Unlike previous trips in other countries, I felt no desire to buy the cookbook, quiz the chef, or see the kitchen. I hadn't unearthed a single delicate, complex surprise for my palate to log in its culinary archive. I recognized no clues to the culture I had hoped was my own. A bead of distress ricocheted around my brain as if in a pinball machine. How could I connect with my heritage when I could find nothing redeeming about what nourished it?
"You're not hungry?" Grandma asked.
I pushed my plate away from me. "I am, but not for this."
"That's ok. We'll have it wrapped up for later."
"We'll do no such thing," I snapped.
"You don't want it to go to waste. How much does it cost?"
I converted zlotys to dollars in my head. "About three bucks."
"Do we have enough?"
I took a long, purposeful drink of my beer and placed the mug quietly on the table. "Yes. Grandma. We have enough."
"Are you sure?"
"Positive. Why are you so worried?"
"What if we run out?"
"We're not going to run out. And if we do, I'll get more from the cash machine. It's not a big deal." I could feel myself getting shrill.
"Ok, Ms.-World-Traveler-who-can't-read-the-menu." She stabbed at my plate with her fork. "You really should finish that. You don't want to be hungry later."
I went to the bathroom to cry. I had never felt more disconnected or out of place in my life. I was convinced that if I were traveling alone or with Kord I would appreciate the country more and be irritated with the basics of getting by less. When I returned to the table I studied the guidebook while Grandma finished her meal so I could match the shapes of letters on the maps to those on the street signs.
"This isn't working," I sobbed to Kord during an $800 transatlantic phone call. "Time zone differences. Money obsession. Force feeding me. And God help me if I see one more Madonna and Child . . . She's driving me fucking crazy."
"That's what grandmothers do," he said. "Look, she's 86 and not going to be around much longer. Besides, she's your translator." He paused while I blew my nose. "I'd be pretty disappointed if you came home early."
Shit. The 'disappointed' card.
"What else is wrong?" he asked.
I considered our meals thus far: potatoes, cabbages and beets accompanied only by sour cream or eggs. "So many tubers and so few spices," I whined.
"When you're running away from the Cossacks, flavor isn't a priority."
During the six hour train ride from Warsaw to Krakow, my great-grandmother's hometown, Grandma either fingered her St. Christopher pendant or read and re-read the worn newspaper clippings of her parents' obituaries, which she kept in a pocket calendar in her purse. I read the "Facts about the Country" section of my Lonely Planet guide book. The Ice Age had destroyed most of Poland's vegetation and left behind poor, depleted soil that supports few crops other than simple grains and potatoes. Some herbs like marjoram, dill and caraway thrive in the wild, but vegetables other than mushrooms are scarce. Any arable land that was left after invasions by, but not limited to, the Russians, Ottomans, Ukrainians, Tartars and Swedes was decimated by decades of communist agricultural policy.
I laid the Lonely Planet beside me on the seat and looked out the window at a patchwork of tiny gardens. In the late 1800's, the Russians, Prussians and Austrians ruling Poland redistributed large tracts of land in an attempt to marginalize the gentry and encourage favor from the burgeoning peasant class. But few families received enough land to support themselves. Many abandoned their farms for the salt mines and textile mills.
We passed fields dotted with fragile shoots. I saw a woman plowing by hand. When Poland was partitioned, women were left to tend the fields when their husbands were drafted into military campaigns for whichever imperial power ruled their region at the time. My great-grandfather had been conscripted into the Russian cavalry, leaving his pregnant wife and two toddlers to bring in the harvest.
I noticed my grandmother looking out the window, too. She had rested her right elbow on the sill, cupped her chin in her hand, and curled her little finger under her lower lip. "My mother used to talk about the poverty in Poland, and how little food there was," she said. "The cavalry practiced drills in the fields to ruin the crops so there'd be nothing to eat in the winter."
I twirled a section of hair behind my right earlobe into a knot. The name 'Poland' is believed to be derived from Polanie, meaning 'dwellers of the fields.' What sustained those dwellers when, by nature or malice, the soil couldn't any longer?
Our train arrived in Krakow late in the afternoon. Grandma and I were both worn out from reliving a previous generation's history. As we unpacked, I suggested an early dinner.
"You go. I'm just going to rest," she said, changing into her pajamas.
"Do you want me to bring you something?"
On the nightstand she set a container of yogurt and a spoon that she had stashed in her purse during breakfast. "Maybe some fruit. An apple would be good for the fiber because the yogurt is very binding."
I walked to the town square. The dining choices were abundant but I wasn't sure what I craved. For every Indian, Italian, and Chinese restaurant I saw, a Polish one offered a tourist menu. Posters directed me toward a Pizza Hut relegated to the outskirts of Old Town. McDonald's employed a fleet of red and yellow golf carts advertising city tours and a Golden Arches several blocks away. Nothing appealed to me.
In the middle of the square in front of the Cloth Hall, The Kapela Krakowska, a group of men wearing long burgundy velvet vests, pantaloons, boots and fezzes, played polkas for a group of tourists. Once a trading hub for the textile industry, the Cloth Hall had become a souvenir arcade on the first floor and a museum on the second. I was drawn through the building, past the men hawking Krakow coffee mugs and women selling lace, out to the back of the square, toward St. Mary's Cathedral.
I had toured more opulent churches, but here my skin tingled from seeing what can come of faith. St. Mary's was built, destroyed, rebuilt, and added to over the course of seven centuries. The legacy of her worshipers' perseverance is an eclectic combination of turreted medieval spires and Renaissance domes, 500 year-old stained glass windows and contemporary murals. Mary's historical importance to the peasants is paramount. She is the patron saint of rain and good crops. Catholic holidays in Poland honoring Mary outnumber those for any other religious figure.
I imagined my great-grandmother praying here and wondered what she would have asked of Mary. For her husband's safety when he deserted the Russian cavalry for Rhode Island's velvet mills to establish a better life for his family? For sufficient harvests so she and the children, while waiting for him to send for them, wouldn't have to eat the seeds intended for the next spring's planting? For America to be as bountiful as promised so their survival would never be jeopardized again?
I said my own little prayer to Mary, grateful that the Polish peasant experience had not been mine, but humbled to be descended from it. When my great-grandparents lived in Poland, they knew little but turmoil and chaos. The hard history of their country was written in its cuisine and evident in its faith. Any morsel reaped from the unforgiving land under such oppressive circumstances was considered bounty from above, meriting fervent thanks and worship. Three generations and an ocean had altered my perceptions of feast and my appreciation of faith. Although I could never fully comprehend what my ancestors had endured, I could understand their utilitarian relationship with food, and the importance to them of their religion. Both thrived in the woman with whom I had shared my meals all week.
The stained glass windows were dimming in the waning sun when hunger pangs reminded me that I still had to find dinner. I grabbed an apple, a hot dog and a single-serving cup of chocolate Haagen-Dazs from a few different street vendors and hurried back to the hotel to challenge Grandma to a game of samba.
As I dealt the last hand she said, "I'm tired but relaxed. Like I'm at peace." Then she laughed and pointed to my mustard-smeared napkin and empty ice cream container. "And you finished your dinner. Although, that's not much of a dinner."
"I just picked whatever I thought would fill me up," I said, then muffled a burp.
She discarded and laid down her hand. "Gotcha. I'm out. You owe me a dollar."
"You stinker," I teased. "Best two out of three. Or you'll have to take it in zlotys."
Grandma shuffled the decks slowly, the cards slipped between her arthritis-swollen knuckles. "We should sleep in tomorrow and have a big breakfast," she said. "We haven't done that yet and we're going home soon."
I suggested we go to church. "Tomorrow's Sunday and the hotel desk clerk told me that services at St. Mary's run all day."
Grandma squeezed my hand before going to sleep. "I can't believe it. Taking communion in the cathedral of my mother. I feel like I've come home."
As we left for Mass the next day, we asked the bellman where we should eat lunch. He was too engrossed by The Karate Kid, dubbed in Polish, on television in the lobby bar to offer any advice. After the service, Grandma asked a taxi driver to take us to a good restaurant. He pointed to the square and told us we could find Indian, Italian, and Chinese food.
"No, no. Polska," she said.
"No tourist menus," I said.
It took seven clicks of the meter for him to think of some place that served good authentic Polish food, longer than it took to drive to Orbit, a small establishment in a quiet residential neighborhood outside Krakow's tourist zone.
I recognized a few things on the menu and ordered pierogi for us.
"This is such a treat," Grandma said. "My mother made pierogi every Sunday when I was growing up. I'd help her pick the mushrooms before church."
The waiter brought us complimentary glasses of vodka with lunch and said "Smazcnego."
I winked at Grandma. "That's Polish for 'enjoy.'"
"I see you've learned something."
Indeed. I lined up the pierogi that looked most like squares on the left side of my plate, the roundish ones in the middle, and the semi-rectangular ones on the right, then speared one from each pile onto my fork. I lingered over every bite, savoring the taste of survival imprinting on my tongue. The loamy mushrooms and pungent sauerkraut in bland, oddly-shaped dough pockets balanced perfectly: each ingredient strong enough to stand up to overwhelming flavors, yet subtle enough highlight to the tender ones that I might include in my own recipes. Both versions would have a place at my table. One was the building block for the other.
Copyright 2005, Christine W. Jablonski nidus is an online publication supported by the Writing Program
at the University of Pittsburgh's English Department.