Rediscovering the Old Country My journey to peace with my Polish heritage. This story was published in the November 2010 issue of In the Fray, an online magazine that promotes global understanding. When I was growing up in a Polish neighborhood in upstate New York, I wasn’t so interested in the Old Country. My grandparents … Read more
Krakow
Not Great Grandma’s Babushka
I just had to touch these headscarves on sale in Warsaw. I’d seen them many years before, in the Polish neighborhood in Amsterdam, New York. Old ladies wore them to church. I fondled them in Warsaw and Gdansk and in the touristy market in Zakopane. Nostalgically, regretfully. I wrote one of these scarves onto Regina’s … Read more
My bags are packed and I’m ready to go…
Well, not quite, but the Peter, Paul and Mary song, Leavin’ On a Jet Plane, is running through my head this week. We have our plane tickets. The weather in Poland will be in the 70s during the day and sunny, and in the 50s at night (and dark, as George Carlin might say.) The … Read more
In Search of Regina
This afternoon, I printed out the manuscript of my novel about my ancestor, Regina Culisz. She lived in the 18th century in the Austrian Empire, in what is now Poland. I’m a memoir writer, but I know very little about this woman, so I’m going to have to tell her story as fiction. In other … Read more