Everything I Know About Being Polish

 

I’m an American with a Polish surname, but I am not very Polish. I don’t speak any of the language beyond a couple words, or know any of the folk dances and many of the traditions. I have for years maintained that everything I know about being Polish could be contained in a small essay. Here is an attempt at the essay.

For starters, in my mind, there is no color in Poland, or in the early days of the Polish-American experience. That’s because all the pictures I have of my grandparents and their parents are in black and white. I think most people readily admit that their memories and imagination are affected by media, especially the media of photography and film. This has had both a lamented and lauded effect on the way we think. Lamented, because we cannot help wedding an image to our thoughts impacted as much as or more than the magazines, movies and television we have seen, to the point where we can even wonder if what we remember actually happened or was something we saw in a movie once. Lauded, because we’re better able to visualize some things, have, I think, a greater scope to our imagination than generations informed only by written or oral record. In any case, when it comes to Poland, and what it means to be Polish, it’s like Hamtramck existed in grayscale. 

 

Unidentified Hamtramck bar, from the Facebook group Hamtramck Memories - Back in the Day

Hamtramck, pronounced “Ham-tram-ick,” is a suburb of Detroit within the bounds of the city, as opposed to those that ring and expand outward from it. It was primarily Polish when my grandparents were born and raised there from the 1910s until after the war, when they moved to the suburbs. Hamtramck is still there, and a lot of the streets and restaurants still have Polish names or evoke Polish experiences, but the demographic has changed. Still, it more than Poland is where I really imagine my lineage originating. My grandparents, Thadeuz “Teddy” Kondek and Jane Kurz (also, bafflingly, spelled Kurtz or Kurcz), told me that growing up in Hamtramck Polish was spoken in the home, the streets, and the school connected to the church, St. Florian’s. They passed on none of this language to my dad and his siblings, probably because, like many first- and second-generation immigrants, they didn’t think their kids should bother speaking the mother tongue. My dad, aunts and uncles tell me their parents would speak in Polish when they didn’t want the kids to know what they were talking about, and if you heard your name in the midst of a string of Polish words, you better watch out. As mentioned, I only know a few of them, and none of the correct spelling. “Dupa,” butt. “Jenkuya,” thank you. “Pivo,” beer. “Nostrovia,” cheers, the drinking salutation we share with other Eastern Europeans.

By the way, can I take a moment to reflect on what a pleasure it was to be raised by the Greatest Generation, to have them as grandparents? That’s another essay in itself maybe, but it occurs to me a lot of currently younger people can’t imagine their grandparents being born in 1920 and living through a Depression, a World War, and a baby boom. It’s why I still have a hard time throwing out plastic bread bags. But when I think of being Polish, another thing that comes to mind involuntarily is that all pollocks—sorry, Polish-Americans—have blue collar jobs. I know Poles and Polish-Americans were and are engineers, lawyers, doctors and financiers, but in my imagination that whole Hamtramck generation was blue collar like my grandparents, and a lot of the Polish-Americans I grew up with in the extended and still extending suburbanization of Detroit have had the same experience. I’ll have to look this up, but I think the reason for it is because the people that came to this country were blue collar or unskilled workers seeking opportunity. Those were the people they packed into Ellis Island; bankers were fine where they were.

I already mentioned St. Florian’s so I can add here that in my mind all Polish are Catholics and the atmosphere, tone, and rhythm of Polish-American life is Catholic. Mass on Sunday was never missed. Sin, Confession and Reconciliation were never far from our minds, as was the everyday reverence for the mundane and saintly participation in the mundane. Catholic kitsch, that motif of art, accessory and furniture that decorates the faith, especially as interpreted or appreciated by immigrants and the descendants of immigrants, was ever present. Plastic statues of saints, some lit by interior bulbs, lurked on end tables. Framed photographs of adult or infant Jesus and Our Lady and, fervently, portraits of Pope John Paul II covered the walls. Marian devotion to motherhood, that pagan theory that there is a fourth, feminine person in the Trilogy informed our thoughts and religious impulses. Nuns were personal emissaries of God, Marian minions. Here, too, is possibly another essay on this notion I have that all humans regardless of faith instinctively include house gods in their worship, but let’s leave that for now. 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/areese/

 

Just as I know there are Protestant or atheist Polish-Americans, I’m sure there are Republican ones, but growing up I never saw one. Polish people voted Democrat always, for the political party that valued them as recent arrivals to America, helped relieve their poverty in the Depression, carried them through the War, and gave strength to the labor unions that helped them prosper afterward. Just as they valued their political team, they valued their sports teams. Sports was, in fact, not that distinct from politics in that both expressed your loyalty to concepts, practices and geography. Baseball in particular was and is popular among my people, to the point where rooting for your team, following them on the radio and, when possible, attending the games felt like religious observance or political duty. You may well have laid the Detroit Tigers alongside a pantheon that included the afore-mentioned Pope and FDR.

We drink. Some of us destroy ourselves with drink. We especially drink beer, and shots of whiskey with beer. You’d think it’d be vodka but for whatever reason, it’s whiskey. I had a shot and a beer with my grandpa for my 18th birthday, and it was the first thing I legally bought myself when I turned 21. Here is another opportunity for digression, the culture of booze, but for now let me just say my associations with being Polish involve beer as a setting-inducing, bond-forming sacramental practice, to the point where “the beer tent” is a necessary visit to any religious or civic festival, and I cannot think of beer, or hear a Polka song referencing it, without feeling immense happiness.

In the end, beer is food, and another thing I know about being Polish is food, but again I must be selective. One time I went to a restaurant that served the kind of Polish food they eat in Europe and I recognized almost nothing on the menu. Kielbasa (sausage) and pierogi (dumplings) are the foundation of the Polish pyramid, along with sauerkraut and other cabbage dishes, dill pickles and bread. Grampa Ted had a fondness for something called duck’s blood soup and I tasted it and liked it, although it tasted like staunching a wound with your tongue. Meat is holy to Poles, it seems. I was a vegetarian for a few years after I quit smoking in my 20s, and my grandma said to me, “Let me know when you’re done with that. I’ll make you a nice plate of kielbasa.”

It's probably for the best that we no longer tell ethnic jokes, although when I was growing up in the ‘70s and ‘80s they were plentiful. The jokes about Irish were that they were drunk and Catholic, the jokes about Italians were that they were murderous and Catholic. Jokes about “pollocks” was that they were stupid (and Catholic). Allow me to conclude this essay with a Polish joke. If you’ve hung in there with me, you may well imagine this occurring in black and white, scented with fried sausage and dill, and under sepia-toned photos of the Infant of Prague and JFK.

Guy walks into a bar and says to the bartender, “Have I got a Polish joke for you.” Bartender says, “Just a minute, friend. Now you see that mean-looking, barrel-shaped guy at the end if the bar? He’s Polish. And you see those two knuckle-dragging pipe-fitters at the billiard table? They’re Polish. And me, I’ve got an axe-handle behind this bar, and I’m Polish. Still want to tell that joke?”

“No,” the guy says. “I don’t want to have to explain it four times.”

And that, aside from some personal stuff, is all I know about being Polish.