This Second World War "photo thriller" is a worthwhile documentary from Deutsche Welle.

It's another fine Deutsche Welle documentary, this time with a few uncharacteristic twists. If you're interested in the World War II period, especially the little known Polish side of the story, this one's for you. I enjoyed the film.

A box full of photos from the Second World War serves as the starting point for a historical thriller. It was found by a Polish filmmaker whose grandfather had served in the German army. But what does it mean for Michal Wnuk’s family history?

The photos show prisoners of war in France and Russia - and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 from a German perspective: Snapshots of the war in black and white. On closer inspection, however, it becomes apparent that Michal Wnuk’s grandfather could not have taken the photos himself, because he never served in those theatres, so Michal sets off to find out where they came from. He discovers that the box belonged to his great uncle, who was in the Polish Home Army. How did he get them? Booty? Evidence? And the films are also puzzling, showing an excursion in the summer of 1939. But who are the people in the pictures? Michal’s search finally takes him to Germany. This German-Polish co-production is a historical thriller, full of riddles and surprising twists, as a hoard of private material turns into a sounding board for great historical events.

BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: In which the quest for draft Żywiec Porter concludes in Gdansk, 16 years later.

Way back in the spring of 2002, I organized a small group tour of selected beer heritage sites in Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Czech Republic and Austria. We flew in and out of Budapest, and rented a mini-bus. A wonderful Los Angeles-based Hungarian expat named Jeno was our guide and master of ceremonies.

In the middle of the 10-day itinerary we spent an evening on the Slovak side of the Tatra Mountains. Some of us had a meal of locally harvested mountain oysters at a restaurant called Stary Mama's (Grandma's), and then the next day the minibus executed a flanking movement to the east and north, winding up in Krakow, Poland.

Our reasons for visiting Poland included mead and porter. We found both, although not without considerable effort.

The city of Żywiec (ZHIV-yets), roughly 65 miles to the southwest of Krakow, was our choice for a namesake brewery tour. We set off for what was billed as a journey of 90 minutes and arrived just shy of three hours later. Luckily I'd factored in some extra time for strolling, so we weren't very late -- and we didn't have time to stroll, just drink beer.

By way of background, arguably Żywiec and Okocim were the best-known Polish breweries during the Communist period. Sporadically during the 1980s these beers and other ones like them from the East Bloc (for instance Krakus, which was a Żywiec label) were available in Indiana, which is nothing short of amazing even though they weren't always in the best condition. I remember the rough cardboard cases and vintage throwback labels -- still in everyday use in Poland at the time.

Most of them had the name of Stanley Stawski attached to them, and therein lies a story.

Stawski Imports’ market of beers, wines, cordials, and spirits started over 50 years ago by the man who’s name is over the company’s door: Stanley Stawski.

Born in Poland in 1924, Stawski survived the 1939 invasion of his country by the Germans. In 1944, he took part in the Warsaw Uprising as a member of the underground Home Army. Captured and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp, Stawski headed to Italy after his camp was liberated, and joined the 2nd Polish Corps.

Two years after the war ended, the British sent his unit to England and when the British demobilized his unit in 1951, Stawski left for the United States. He had $20 in his pocket.

By 1954, Stawski was working as a liquor and wine salesman in Chicago. Six years later, he opened his own company, importing beers from Poland and Austria.

As with any new business, the beginning years were difficult, especially in dealing with countries that were, at the time, run by socialist governments who distrusted anything American. Sales were appropriate for a small operation.

Stawski credits its success to “hard work and perseverance.” This perseverance is now bearing fruit. Stawski Imports’ dealings with the state-run liquor monopolies of the Central European nations are successful because of its product-knowledge and personal contacts to bring over the best and newest products.

I've looked high and low, and there seems nothing reliable to indicate whether Stawski remains in business, although the company seemed to exist just a few years ago. It appears that the company's founder is still alive, now in his nineties, and accordingly, I drink a toast to his health.

After Communism ended, many breweries in the East Bloc were snapped up by foreign interests. Okocim has long since been Carlsberg's possession, and Żywiec has been a subsidiary of Heineken's.

When we finally arrived at the brewery in Żywiec on that day in 2002, the tour was exhaustive and the hospitality bountiful. It was afternoon, and when the tour was over we were seated in a rustic tap room. Draft golden lager beers began appearing, along with platters of hot food, including soup and an entree.

However, I'd been having trouble all afternoon conveying to our marvelous hosts that my group was interested in Żywiec Porter far more than the brewery's admittedly pleasant lagers. As we ate, one of the representatives disappeared, then returned with a single crate of 11.2 oz bottles, which we quickly dispatched.

It was the only case he could find of a beer we thought had been brewed a stone's throw away from our tables, and this discrepancy confused me until I learned much later the rational explanation: Żywiec Porter wasn't being brewed in Żywiec at all. So little of it was being brewed during this period that production had shifted a sister brewery in Cieszyn (CHESH-in).

In 2008, award-winning British beer writer Roger Protz described his visit to Cieszyn in search of the nectar: POLAND: LIVELY LAGERS AND THREATENED PORTERS (All About Beer Magazine).

 ... The opportunity to see Zywiec Porter brewed at source was therefore not to be missed.

But the source had moved. Since 1994, Zywiec has been owned by Heineken and the small volumes of porter did not suit the new plant the Dutch giant has built to churn out millions of hectolitres of pale lager. Porter has been transferred to Archduke Albrecht’s original brewery at Cieszyn.

On the map, Cieszyn looks a short drive from Krakow, but the highways are poor and under repair, causing endless delays. We drove for three hours on rutted roads that curved through dense woods at the foothills of the Tatras. At one point I was given the chilling information that I might catch a glimpse of the towers of the Auschwitz concentration camp through the trees. I couldn’t make out the towers but I needed a calming beer when at last we drove up the twisting road from the town of Cieszyn to the brewery with its mellow brick buildings, cobbled courtyard and a brewery cat on rat patrol.

Protz detailed the brewing process.

Zywiec Porter is now a cold-fermented black lager, but at 9.5% ABV it has all the richness and complexity of the warm-fermented original. It’s made with pilsner, caramalt, Munich and roasted grains, and hopped with Magnum, Nugget and Taurus varieties. As Poland grows hops of excellent quality in the Lublin area, I was surprised to find the brewery importing most of its supplies from Germany.

The porter has an astonishing four-hour boil in the kettle as a result of the high level of grain used. It then has 15 days primary fermentation in open square tanks before it’s transferred to the lager cellar, 15 meters below ground. The cold cellars, with the temperature held just above freezing, holds 100 small lager tanks with a total capacity of 20,000 hectos.

Porter is held in the tanks for a maximum of 60 days to ripen. The beer that emerges has a deep coffee color, with powerful hints of espresso, licorice, molasses and burnt grain on the palate. Dark fruit and hops build in the mouth and a long and intense finish is packed with rich fruit, burnt grain, silky coffee and bitter hops.

I hope this lengthy tale provides partial explanation for the expression on my face on October 31st when I realized the Żywiec Porter on the menu at the bar/restaurant in Gdansk was draft.

I'd never had it before, not even once. One and a half of them left me loopy, but feeling vindicated. I contend that irrespective of Żywiec Porter's brewery of birth, it remains one of our planet's finest beers. Unlike humble Krakus in 1985, we cannot get Żywiec Porter in Indiana.

Can someone book me a minibus to Cieszyn?

Eight Days of Gdansk, November 2: Marcin Gortat on Polish basketball, and prospects for a game in Tricity.

A native of Łódź in Poland, Marcin Gortat currently plays for the Los Angeles Clippers. This is Gortat's 13th season in the NBA, and in this essay from 2016, he tells his own basketball story and describes the sport's progress in Poland.

How We Play Basketball in Poland, by Marcin Gortat (The Players' Tribune)

... The state of basketball in Poland right now is … well, it’s not great.

Understand, in Poland we don’t have four or five guys making it to the NBA every year like in France or Spain. I’m the fourth Polish guy to ever make it to the NBA, and given the state of our national-team program, there probably won’t be another one for a long time.

That’s because we don’t really have a program to teach the game to young kids. I’ve been doing my best to help, with youth camps and an initiative that sends promising young players to America to play AAU ball, and then brings them back to Poland to play for the national team. But it will be a few more years until the first group of players completes the program.

It wasn’t always this way. We used to be better. Poland used to love basketball. In the ’60s and ’70s our national team played in almost every Olympics, and we were competitive. But since 1984, the year I was born, Poland hasn’t qualified once for the Games.

There was even a time when NBA games were on TV in Poland. After watching Michael Jordan, Grant Hill and Shaq, kids would want to go outside and play street ball. But when basketball left public TV due to something called the Broadcasting Act of 1992, that’s when everything started to really fall apart.

Gortat surely is the best male basketball player from Poland. The finest female player might have been the late Margo Dydek, who was 7' 2" and played in the WNBA prior to her untimely death in 2011.

The Confidentials enjoy their off-season travel, and this has meant the occasional opportunity to watch basketball games in Europe, first in Bamberg and most recently in Porto, Portugal in February.

The Polish cities of Gdansk, Sopot and Gdynia are known collectively as Tricity (Trójmiasto), with a combined metropolitan population well north of 1,000,000.

Sopot lies between Gdansk and Gdynia.

Tricity supports two teams in the Polish Basketball League, which has existed in various forms since the late 1940s: Asseco Gdynia and Trefl Sopot. Ironically, the primary indoor arena in Tricity is located within the boundaries of Sopot, which lies between Gdansk and Gdynia; holding 15,000 spectators, the home of Trefl Sopot is the largest arena in the league even though Sopot itself has a population of only 40,000.

Perusing the schedules in advance of our departure, I see there are three possibilities for seeing a game, with two dates for Asseco Gdynia and one for Trefl Sopot.

We'll do at least one of them, and I'll tell you about it once we're back home. If there is beer and kielbasa, that's even better.

ON THE AVENUES: Three books by Polish writers.

ON THE AVENUES: Three books by Polish writers.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

In recognition of our ongoing Polish travels, today's column combines two previous posts: "ON THE AVENUES: Two books by Polish writers" (22 March 2012) and "Book review: Pornografia, a novel by Witold Gombrowicz" (5 February 2014).

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Pornografia, a novel by Witold Gombrowicz, translated by Danuta Borchardt.

By the second world war’s end in 1945, the Polish capital of Warsaw nearly had been obliterated from the face of the earth, first razed by the occupying Nazis, and then flattened by Soviet armies in the process of annihilating the retreating Germans. Poland would again rise from non-existence and take its place as a Soviet satellite, but not just yet.

Two years earlier, with the worst still yet to come, the situation was becoming grim for the capital’s artsy urbanites. Two intellectuals languishing in Warsaw’s wartime malaise, with little to do apart from debating abstractions and drinking vodka, are offered the chance to perform an obscure errand (never explained), requiring them to leave the city and travel to the country estate of a provincial squire, whose bucolic days of regional pre-eminence also are ticking down.

After a sweaty, grinding train trip, they find themselves far removed from their familiar milieu, riding around in horse-drawn carts and observing, though not genuinely embracing, the time-honored, unchanged agricultural lifestyle. Rural Poland has yet to be touched directly by the war, although the tumult is keenly felt, contributing to a palpable sense of paranoia. Verily, things aren’t what they seem. Then again, they seemingly never are in works by Witold Gombrowicz, whose novel Cosmos I read in 2012.

Appropriately, Pornografia’s narrator also is named Witold Gombrowicz, and yet in this instance, truth is certifiably stranger than fiction. The real-life writer was far away at the time of the fictional story. He had boarded a cruise ship destined for South America just days prior to Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, and was unable to return after his country’s quick collapse, as it was dissolved and divided between the Nazis and Soviets. Abruptly stateless, Gombrowicz remained abroad, living in Argentina until 1963, and spending the remainder of his life in France.

Perhaps his personal experience with the surreal helps to explain the deep psychological issues inherent in novels such as Pornografia and Cosmos, where a thinly veiled collective delirium seems always to be simultaneously obscuring and exposing the motives of his characters.

In Cosmos, two city slickers visiting the sticks become fascinated with patterns of cracks running across a plaster ceiling, and are obsessed by conspiracy theories pertaining to their host family. Similarly, Pornografia’s two bored Warsaw escapees shift their attention to Henia, the 16-year-old daughter of the estate’s owners, and Karol, son of a neighbor and also 16, who is working on the farm again after an abortive stint (also never explained) in the resistance forces.

She’s a good looking girl, betrothed to an older lawyer from a nearby city. He’s a good looking boy, neither completely adolescent nor a full-fledged adult. They’re a fine couple, except they’re not; Karol and Henia have known each other since childhood, and are chums, though never before regarding one another romantically.

Fevered and voyeuristic, and with a dash of their own latent homoeroticism added for good measure, Witold and his friend Fryderyk convince themselves first that Henia and Karol belong with each other – not in spite of her fiancé Vaclav’s continual presence, but precisely because of it – and hatch an elaborate plan to choreograph the union.

With Fryderyk in the driver’s seat, constructing an ever-more elaborate web of instigation, the ensuing quasi-theatrical campaign becomes progressively creepier. But there is more to the teenagers than meets the eye of the visitors, who conclude that only by manipulating their youthful innocence can the interminable wartime muddle of the adults be made sensible -- except that the children turn out to have seen and experienced far more of the world than is immediately evident.

It only strengthens the Warsaw duo’s resolve, and the plot moves tautly toward a conclusion, one complicated by two unexpected developments.

If Witold Gombrowicz did not meet Rod Serling, he should have. The two could have discussed the razor’s edge of sanity, in the twilight zone, where reality and imagination meet … sometimes with palpable consequences.

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Cosmos, by Witold Gombrowicz.

Most often, the act of writing is purely vocational, although conveying coherent thoughts in memos, reports, post-it notes and tweets is a certifiable skill, one not always as simple as it seems.

Instruction manuals are a prime example. Most of them are illustrated with drawings, lest mere words fail in their intended purpose – or in case the product’s purchaser is unable to read the directions, whether owing to illiteracy in a native language or speaking a different tongue altogether.

Obviously, writing can be a forum for artistic expression and experimentation. This is the genre of writing as art, which human societies tend to value just enough to keep the idea alive amid the everyday vulgarisms of popular cultures everywhere.

As an example, there is Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos. It was the exiled Polish writer’s penultimate novel, published in 1965, and although not every reader takes the time to peruse introductions and forwards, the new edition’s comments by translator Danuta Borchardt are very much worth reading.

Borchardt’s translation was prepared directly from the original Polish language edition (not subsequent French and German translations used for the original release of Cosmos in English), and this is especially important for a novel that above all else explores nuances of language, perception and expression – hence its experimental nature, and an overall theme paralleling that of the old Seinfeld television series: In the end, it’s about nothing.

Cosmos has been described as utterly plotless, and while there actually is one, it is quite sparse. At an indeterminate time (probably the pre-war 1930’s), two students from Warsaw arrive in the southern Tatra Mountains to spend their summer holiday. They randomly board with a local family, and quickly are drawn into the household’s daily life. Eventually they accompany their hosts for a weekend outing in the woods, and abruptly, the story comes to an end.

As recounted by the narrator, who is one of the two students, the novel’s progression is resoundingly interior and solipsistic, occurring within his own increasingly meandering consciousness, as opposed to taking place in any setting approximating the world outside. Far fewer real-life interactions are recounted than episodes of brooding and imagined ruminations. It is almost as though a dazed victim of malnutrition or high fever is describing the altered state of reality as it seems to him, which may or may not jibe with actuality.

Philosophically, it makes perfect sense: Is there a reality outside our minds, and can we ever know anything about it?

In Cosmos, this search is by turns comic and tragic. The city-dwelling students react to their own ennui and the relative boredom of their bucolic interlude by concluding quite early in the narrative that a vague conspiracy is taking shape around them, and they become tantamount to bumbling detectives, self-assigned to track obvious clues to their source.

These clues include a dead bird, literally hanged by wire from a tree branch (who would do such a thing?), suggestive patterns of water stains on a ceiling, a scar that has shaped the mouth of the plain housekeeper into something suggestive, the way her altered mouth is suggestively linked to the mouth of the young married daughter’s, and a pile of haphazardly jumbled garbage in the shed. Their conclusions lead to minor, awkward mishaps (and one more serious), but little of consequence comes from it.

The only true jolt comes at the end, has nothing whatever to do with the expanding conspiracy inside their heads, and is barely mentioned.

The novel’s characters occupy perfectly normal spaces in a mundane world, and do their best to define themselves accordingly. They fail – and life goes on. For those properly respecting the value of melancholy in daily life, Cosmos is an unsettling read. It left me contemplating vignettes from my own past, times of irresolution and disgruntlement, especially when exhaustion or weakness had convinced me to invest more psychic energy into imagining an outcome than might possibly justify a conceivable result, even if it were to happen (and never did).

In Cosmos, no one is saved. Then again, we seldom are.

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In Search of Lost Meaning: The New Eastern Europe, by Adam Michnik.

While the Communist-era career paths of Adam Michnik in Poland and the late Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia were not precise mirror images, both played epochal roles in their respective countries as the Iron Curtain wound inexorably down.

As indicated by Havel’s forward to this collection of essays, there always existed considerable mutual professional admiration between the two noted revolutionaries, even if Michnik did not become head of state, or found himself cast in the position of rock star, like Havel.

Instead, Michnik was the supreme revolutionary multi-tasker, performing a series of invaluable jobs for the Solidarity-led opposition to Poland’s Communist regime, generally in a subordinate position. He served as journalist, jouster, jester, rabble-rouser, intellectual, organizer, virtual poet laureate and all-purpose public figure, eventually assuming a role approximating that of being his country’s conscience, and appropriately, these essays are primarily concerned with the conscience (and consciousness) of Poland’s history both before and since socialism’s collapse in 1989.

Clannish fractiousness in Poland is the stuff of European legend, and Michnik confronts it head-on, tracing the origins of “gutter” (or “septic tank”) politics from the inception of modern Poland in the aftermath of the First World War to the institutionalized abuses of Communism, and recurring during the past twenty years. Irrespective of ideologies and governmental forms, Michnik sees his country as a place where a pathological need do settle past scores too often usurps all future considerations.

He would feel right at home in New Albany, wouldn’t he?

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Recent columns:

October 23: ON THE AVENUES: I'd like nothing more than to go for another ride with Kevin.

October 18: ON THE AVENUES: As long as the Democratic hierarchy keeps the Human Rights Commission under its thumb, it's hard to be optimistic.

October 11: ON THE AVENUES: Clamming up is hard to do, but I'm trying my best.

September 30: ON THE AVENUES SPECIAL EDITION: As David White's mayoral campaign begins, let's briefly survey the electoral landscape.

Eight Days of Gdansk, October 30: Gdańsk raises the flag (again) against a wave of populism sweeping Poland.

I've wanted to visit Gdansk for a very long time, since at least the mid-1980s when Solidarity faced off against the Polish communist regime. For various reasons, I never made it to Gdansk until now.

When it comes to the lengthy history of a place like Gdansk, it can be exhausting just reading the Wikipedia article. However, we need to begin somewhere.

Gdańsk (formerly Danzig) is a Polish city on the Baltic coast. It is the capital of the Pomeranian Voivodeship and the capital of Kashubia, Poland's principal seaport and the centre of the country's fourth-largest metropolitan area.

The city lies on the southern edge of Gdańsk Bay (of the Baltic Sea), in a conurbation with the city of Gdynia, spa town of Sopot, and suburban communities, which together form a metropolitan area called the Tricity (Trójmiasto), with a population approaching 1.4 million. Gdańsk itself has a population of 460,427 (December 2012), making it the largest city in the Pomerania region of Northern Poland.

During the coming week, as we're on the ground, there'll be pre-written daily posts highlighting a few interesting aspects of Gdansk.

As an introduction, a pertinent question: Does the emergence of the reactionary, xenophobic and authoritarian Law and Justice party in Poland imply an opposite and equal reaction -- or, something like a Solidarity Mach II, with the city of Gdansk again leading the resistance?

The answer goes beyond the merely academic. After all, this troubled planet is the real world, not the Disney variety.

Free City of Gdańsk – How Poland’s window to the world rises against populism, by Wojciech Ciesla (Investigate-Europe)

Gdańsk, Poland’s window to the world and cradle of the Solidarity democracy movement, raises the flag again against a wave of populism sweeping the country.

In an icy chill, residents of Gdańsk, never before connected to any movement, are protesting outside a local court against a new law of the Law and Justice party (PiS) that seeks to subordinate the judiciary and local elections to government authority. Around 400 people have gathered in the cold. They carry lit candles, their symbol of defiance. Across Poland tens of thousands more have taken to the streets to protest against a wholesale power grab by the governing PiS.

Two years of democratic backsliding have already passed in Poland under the leadership of the PiS. Step by step the party has stripped the judiciary of its independence. The latest law has provoked protests in more than 40 cities. In Gdańsk the few hundred protestors risk easy identification by the police, who, according to Roman Daszczyński, journalist and editor-in-chief of the www.gdansk.pl portal, record the protest from beginning to end. People are well aware of this but still come out despite the fear among those who work in state-controlled enterprises or institutions of reprisals. Gdańsk city is controlled by the liberal Civic Platform, but the voivodship, the next level up of regional administration which employs thousands of people, is controlled by Law and Justice. It’s much easier to find anonymity among the tens of thousands of people protesting in Warsaw, says Daszczyński.

A familiar figure emerges

From within the crowd, candles flickering in the cold breeze, a corpulent figure with a familiar grey walrus mustache steps out on to the stairs. Lech Wałęsa, the legendary Gdańsk shipyard electrician who in 1980 led the march to freedom of a 38 million-strong nation. Wałęsa, the first President of independent Poland after 1990 and still a resident of Gdańsk, stands with the protesters.

“You have probably noticed that things are going badly with Poland,” he says. “PiS are destroying everything we have gained so far. We are fighting it with the whole world behind us. I had thought I would be able to take a rest. I’ve already worked a bit in my life. But from what I see we have to wake up and get back to work. I do not agree with the destruction of Poland. We must do everything to reject this group from power as soon as possible!” says Wałęsa to huge applause ...

ON THE AVENUES: From Baltic to Mediterranean, the diary of an unrepentant New Albanian Europhile.

ON THE AVENUES: From Baltic to Mediterranean, the diary of an unrepentant New Albanian Europhile.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

In less than two months, the Confidentials will travel to Gdansk, Poland for a long overdue appointment with my bucket list. It’s sweet of the missus to indulge me.

In 1980, the Solidarity trade union was established at Gdansk’s Lenin Shipyards, an act made provocative by the fact that Communist doctrine of the time in Poland precluded such an independent challenge to orthodoxy.

In theory, the Polish Communist government already was protecting the interests of workers, and for Solidarity to suggest this stewardship was deficient plainly represented a threat to the established order.

Unfortunately for the party bosses, it wasn’t their only problem. The Soviet Union had imposed communism on the devastated territory of a revamped Polish state following World War II, but the indigenous Polish variety of red star rule was capable neither of collectivizing agriculture nor curbing the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Smallholders and clerics remained as obstacles to "enlightenment." 

In combination with these obvious resistance sources, Solidarity proved to be a mortal contagion. Nine tumultuous years after the trade union emerged, Communism collapsed both in Poland and across the “East Bloc,” a demise attributable to socio-economic pressures from within as well as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s calculated gamble of jettisoning the USSR’s vassal buffer states to buy time for an ultimately doomed effort to reform his homeland.

By all rights I should be preparing for the trip to Gdansk by learning a few words of basic Polish, like numbers, greetings and restaurant menu items, but instead I’m suddenly immersed in the Southern Peloponnese -- specifically, the Mani Peninsula, where a tangle of jagged mountains on the Greek mainland yields to the cooling breezes of the Mediterranean Sea.

As my preoccupation with Europe has been throughout the past four decades, so it continues for me in 2018. I am an unreconstructed Europhile, an enthusiastic scattershot generalist fascinated by all things European irrespective of where they’re located on the continent, and as yet stubbornly unwilling to concentrate on any one facet of Europe long enough to become an expert, whatever this word means.

Except as it pertains to beer.

The process of boning up for Pints&union led me first to the United Kingdom and readings about traditional pub culture, cask-conditioned ale and the history of Guinness in Ireland, pausing for a digression into Bavarian wheat ale, and recently followed by an overdue re-reading of Michael “Beer Hunter” Jackson’s seminal Great Beers of Belgium, last updated shortly before the legend’s death in 2007.

Stuck somewhere in the middle of Fuller’s, Weihenstephaner and Duvel samples came The House of Government, a lengthy tome by Yuri Slezkin, which gently lured me back to previously dormant Kremlinology via the history of a 1,700-unit Stalinist apartment block built on the Moscow River embankment.

Cast against a 2018 summer’s backdrop of raging Putin paranoia in America and the World Cup successfully held in Russia, this book had me contemplating the eternal Matryoshka “Slavic enigma” dilemma all over again.

Rest assured, it has not been resolved.

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Christianity of the Russian Eastern Orthodox persuasion connects Mother Russia to Greece by way of Byzantium -- or Constantinople, now known as Istanbul.

Hence my current serendipitous choice of reading: Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, written by Patrick Leigh Fermor. My friend Ken loaned me two of Leigh Fermor’s travel accounts some months back, and last week my internal alarm clock serendipitously reminded me it was time to begin, Gdansk or no Gdansk.

Regular readers will recall that Greece was a prime motivation for my first trip to Europe in 1985. Toying with the idea of studying in Greece, I actually was accepted into a “year in Athens” university program, but decided against it, and instead spent three weeks in the country as a tourist (including an idyll in Istanbul) before returning to Italy by boat.

I haven’t returned since, and I've no idea why.

Thanks to my cousin and mentor Don Barry’s recommendation, my lone visit 33 years ago was encouraged and prefaced by a travel book by the American novelist Henry Miller, called The Colossus of Maroussi.

Following is background from a previously published piece.

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For someone as renowned for his bawdiness as Miller to pen an entire book with nary an explicit mention of the horizontal arts will come as a surprise to some, but The Colossus of Maroussi is just that volume.

Written and published as World War II made ready to welcome the United States as participating/liberating belligerent, it recounts Miller’s months-long holiday in Greece in 1939, a respite coming at the conclusion of his Depression-era tenure as a Parisian urban expatriate, and immediately prior to his relocation and reinvention as tree-hugging primitive in California’s Big Sur.

Ostensibly, Colossus is a travelogue about Greece as a country caught in transition during the middle of the 20th century, with one foot in the grubby present and the other very much rooted in an epic (and generally exaggerated) past. Much of Miller’s narrative focuses on a larger-than-life Greek poet and raconteur named George Katsimbalis, and therein hides a significant clue, because as readers have understood virtually since release, the book actually is all about Miller …

… For all its flaws, The Colossus of Maroussi was essential and compelling reading, and I cannot underestimate its profound influence on me during the early 1980s. Upon request in 1984, the Greek tourist office in New York had mailed a huge package of brochures and maps, and as I read Miller’s account that winter, I plotted his progress with their assistance. At the time, Ernest Hemingway meant more to me as a writer, but he hadn’t written about Greece. Spain would come much later.

There I was, finally in Greece, well aware that the intervening decades would render dated Miller’s descriptions unlikely, and this much was true. 

Many things had changed, but happily there were moments of timelessness when the pre-war mood still jibed, and when, not unlike the writer, I stood at Mycenae, Epidaurus and Delphi, brushed off the dust from the journey by bus, and felt the weight of millennia … when I’d hear a tinkling bell and see a shepherd’s profile on a hillside, and later devour tomatoes, cucumber and feta doused with oil, kick back a cool beer or tumbler of Retsina … watch the grizzled old men nursing their cloudy drams of ouzo at breakfast … and then be reminded that back at the hotel, one was officiously instructed to keep toilet paper out of the commode lest the too-narrow sewage pipes became clogged.

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Patrick “Paddy” Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) was the son of a well-to-do English family, not a product of Miller’s hardscrabble, working-class Brooklyn. However, their shared obsessions with Greece are mutually evocative.

I’m chagrined to concede that until seeing Leigh Fermor’s obituary in The Economist seven years ago, he was completely unknown to me. Had I been aware of his incredible life story, perhaps a trek to the Mani Peninsula would have been in order back in the day. He’d have been 70 years young then, and still a working writer. He might have helped me with my Retsina education.

In 1933 at the age of 18, Leigh Fermor -- later described by a journalist as "a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene" -- departed London on a journey to Istanbul by foot, first to Germany and then along the Danube into the heart of the Balkans.

In all this walk lasted almost six years, until Leigh Fermor returned home to enlist in the fight against Hitler. Later in life, he authored a trilogy of books documenting these pre-war travels; the final unfinished volume was published after his death. They’re acclaimed to this day as incredible snapshots of Europe, pre-destructive spasm.

During the war Leigh Fermor, a master linguist, was a special forces operative in Nazi-occupied Crete, where he famously orchestrated the kidnapping of a German general. Remarkably, the two soldiers became friendly owing to their shared love of antiquity, and met again two decades later on a Greek television show based on “This Is Your Life.”

Eventually Leigh Fermor settled among the Greeks in his beloved Mani with true love Joan Rayner, a photographer, in a house they built on a hillside at Kardamyli. The book I’m reading now begins with the couple trekking from Sparta with guide and mule through wild forbidding mountains into the Deep Mani, and a first glimpse of their village of destiny.

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Such is the agony and ecstasy of the aging Hoosier hick as persistent Europhile, frustratingly wrestling for the 34th consecutive year with nagging expatriate thoughts that have been tamed in twilight, though never altogether dispensed.

Might it all have unfolded differently?

It's a stupid question, and I avoid it 98% of the time. My oft-aborted escape plan from the 1980s would have been furthered had I hailed from a wealthy family, possessed some semblance of a skill (linguistic, literary or artistic), or displayed more raw ambition.

At the same time, as crazily fortunate as I’ve been in this charmed life, it would be ridiculous to lament spilled milk. After all, I hate milk.

If there exists any such thing as a celibate expatriate, I suppose that’s me. Nothing wrong with that; a voyeur from afar, looking not touching, and scratching the itch with short trips like the one to Gdansk, and later, Munich.

Someday if we liquidate everything we own and get just a little bit lucky, a period of retirement in Europa might be an option. A collegiate classmate has done this in Ecuador, which comes recommended for affordability. She loves it there. The problem for me is an utter lack of interest in places like Ecuador. Nothing personal; I'm just a Porto kind of guy.

I’ll hold onto this pleasant retirement dream for a moment or two, until reality rudely intrudes, and then as always regroup, channeling the mad European impulse into a beer travel story from the salad days. This tale will be told at Pints&union, hopefully to someone who hasn’t heard it before.

I may still be stuck inside of NA with the Mechelen blues again, but whenever passing along the chronology, I'll at least have done my job as cantankerous wannabe expatriate.

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Recent columns:

August 23: ON THE AVENUES: The "downfall" occurs when we all fall down.

August 20: Non-learning curve: This ON THE AVENUES column repeat reveals that since 2011, we've been discussing the safety hazards on Spring Street between 10th and 9th. Too bad City Hall is deaf.

August 9: ON THE AVENUES: There's only one way to cure City Hall's institutional bias against non-automotive street grid users, and that's to #FlushTheClique.

August 2: ON THE AVENUES: Daze of future passed.

The Road to Gdansk, a primer on Polish history and the first flowering of Solidarity.

This hard-nosed, old-school, just-the facts documentary was released in 1983, only a short time after the events being recorded. I can't find much about it, except here.

This is my kind of history lesson, and what makes the film unique is testimony from both "sides," the workers/reformers and the Communist apparatchiks. It's as if everyone involved knows that martial law isn't the last word, and the cards are being dealt. As it turned out, Gorbachev was wild.

To take you forward through the final act in 1989, when Communism crumbled in Poland, this brief report from BBC Two's Curriculum Bites suffices fairly well.

Previously: Damn it, I want to go to Gdansk and visit the European Solidarity Centre.

THE BEER BEAT: You may need pickle brine after the Stupor Bowl, or throughout Trump's term.

Welcome to the pickleback: A whiskey shot with pickle brine as a chaser. Thanks to K for the link.

Pickle Brine Is Why the Polish Don’t Get Hangovers, by Kamila Rymajdo (Vice)

 ... As our photographer looks on in disgust, I down the whiskey and brine shots McGraw offers me. I’m surprised—I rather enjoy the taste, despite not usually liking whiskey. Pickle brine, on the other hand, I can’t get enough of. Essentially vinegar infused with herbs and spices such as garlic, dill, peppercorns, and chilies, it’s a well-known hangover tonic back in my native Poland.

If you've ever been to points throughout the Slavic East, the notion of chasing shots with food will be very familiar. The beauty of dining out in Russia on black market money during Communism wasn't the main courses, but the openers, lots of salted, pickled or smoked nibbles for downing along with the bottle of vodka. It's been a while for me, but surely this cultural tradition remains intact.

“I discovered pickle juice when I started drinking vodka as a teenager. I didn’t like vodka cocktails so I started having shots. Some people don’t need to chase vodka with anything but I did and I always preferred chasing them with food. Slices of tomato or cubed cheese—whatever, really. Then someone recommended pickles as a good chase. I tried them and it became my favourite. I wasn’t able to drink vodka without them. One day, I woke up after a night of drinking and there was half a pickle jar left. I ate them and then I had the juice too and I started feeling much better.

“Basically you drink and eat all night. Nobody ever drinks on an empty stomach. Snacks like pickled cucumbers, marinated mushrooms, and ham are of most importance—hence we are able to drink vodka straight from the glass or by the bottle. Pickled juice is like an easy transition: you’re no longer able to chew but you’re still able to swallow!”

Reverse graffiti? Nah, that'd never work here -- not that we'd allow it, or powerwash ANYTHING.

Our mercifully concluded Great Street Piano Bottleneck of 2015 has me thinking about public art.

You Missed a Spot (and Made a Mural): Powerwashing has transformed Poland’s Solina Dam into a work of art, by Linda Poon (City Lab)

Poland’s Solina dam, completed in 1969 and the tallest dam in Poland, has been collecting dirt and grime on its walls for decades. But when it came time for the 269-foot dam to get a good powerwash, the energy company Polska Grupa Energetyczna had an idea.

PGE worked with emerging comic book artist Przemek “Trust” Truściński to design a giant eco-mural honoring the wild and plant life found in the Bieszczady Mountains in southeast Poland, where the dam is located. At almost 300 feet wide and 177 feet tall, the mural is painted with a technique called “reverse graffiti” ... 

New Albany doesn't have a dam, but there's the Firing Squad Wall down by the levee at the foot of Bank Street.

We may be compelled to develop a public art strategy, seeing as there is none at present.

Does the city of New Albany own this wall? I'm thinking not, or else it would have been given over to mayoral re-election signs by now.

Lanzmann, Shoah, and a persistence of memory.

I'm surprised to learn that Claude Lanzmann is still with us, but he is, at the ripe age of 87. The English translation of his 2009 autobiography has been published.

The Witness: ‘The Patagonian Hare,’ by Claude Lanzmann, reviewed by Paul Berman (New York Times)

The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs approached Claude Lanzmann in 1973 and suggested that, with Israel’s backing, he make a documentary film about the murder of the European Jews.

When I'm asked to reveal my "favorite" film, it's always difficult for me to answer. Do documentaries count? If so, how can a work as grueling as Shoah be considered as "favored" in the intended context of pleasurable entertainment?

Ask me the most "influential" film of my life, and the answer is easier.

In retrospect, my initial viewing of Shoah in 1988 was the culmination of my free-lance, post-graduate education. I was the cliched sponge, voraciously soaking up books and documentaries about European history, culture and any related matters in an effort to achieve greater understanding during periods of continental travel. Lanzmann's relentless imagery has been with me ever since.

Living memories then are academic memories now, making remembrance in whatever form even more imperative. I wrote about it in 2006, and the entire essay is reprinted here.

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Shoah, again.

This weekend, the Confidential household probably will begin watching the DVD release of director Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary film Shoah, an oral history of the Holocaust that runs almost ten hours and demands an effort on the part of the viewer that goes somewhat beyond that required to indulge the pablum of the typical Hollywood blockbuster.

I’ve not seen Shoah in its entirety since the early spring of 1988, a year or more after videotaping it from public television. Then, for a solid ten days, I set the alarm an hour early each morning and made my way through the film in bits, pieces and chunks before heading off to work.

While not particularly enjoyable in the conventional sense of entertainment, the Shoah documentary experience proved visceral as well as essential for my understanding of the Holocaust in the context of European countries I’d already been, and other places that were slated for future visits.

I’ve discussed Shoah with Mrs. Confidential on several occasions, and with the videotape long gone (Joe?), she took the initiative to check the appropriate Netflix boxes and kick off the process. It may take a couple of weeks, but surely after all these years it will be worth the effort to view the film a second time.

Shoah is an unconventional, brutally effective documentary that depicts and describes historical events without the use of archival footage or reenactments.

During the 1970’s, Lanzmann began filming real people – Jewish survivors, serenely acquiescent Poles and even (surreptitiously) an unrepentant SS officer – all of whom had lived through cataclysmic and unspeakably horrible events that primarily took place in areas of dense pre-war Jewish population, which during the Nazi occupation became dotted with planned centers of systematic slaughter.

These memories and recollections were filmed in a dozen or more then-Communist locales in Poland and Eastern Europe, with occasional side excursions to Israel, Germany and elsewhere in the world in conformity with the post-war diaspora of victims (and perpetrators), then organized into stories woven together with consummate skill as the hours pass, leading to an emotional crescendo guaranteed to leave the viewer both drained and fearing for the future of humanity.

It’s true that we manage somehow to survive. It’s unclear how we manage to do it.

At the time Shoah was released, its director was fiercely criticized for including footage that unflinchingly exposed lingering anti-Semite tendencies on the part of ethnic Poles, this coming at a time when Poland – through the activities of the Solidarity trade union movement and a sitting Pope – was being lionized by anti-Communists throughout the world as the best extant hope to commence the toppling of the Bloc’s socialist dominoes.

I’d studied the Holocaust in college and devoured Abba Eban’s Heritage: Civilization and the Jews PBS series. As a philosophy major, debates pertaining to the ethical culpability of ordinary Germans in atrocities committed during the war were certainly familiar to me – but when I watched Shoah in early 1988, it had been only a few months since my first trip through Poland.

This fact made for uncomfortable mornings in front of the tube.

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In 1987, I was in Krakow, Poland with my friend Barrie (who’s now a Scribner Middle School history teacher) and two fellow travelers from Florida. We’d taken an unscheduled detour from the Soviet/Baltic/Poland youth and student package tour by hopping a Friday night train from Warsaw, an experience that taught us the dubious (and embarrassing) value of handing the conductor $5 cash and watching him evict people from their seats to make room for us.

We rationalized: It was the system to blame.

On a Saturday morning, after overnighting in Krakow for $2 each in a pensioner’s shabby flat, we rustled a few grams of greasy salami and bread, then found the dingy bus station in the city’s crumbling and neglected downtown, and joined several dozen Polish weekend trippers on a bumpy, grinding, two-hour SRO journey to Oswiecim – in German, Auschwitz. There were no English speakers around to help, but we managed to guess the correct stop near the entrance to the museum and memorial.

Once there, we paid a fee and wordlessly passed through the numbing exhibits inside the old brick barracks buildings of Auschwitz 1, a strangely bureaucratic and tidy introduction to the supreme horror a few hundred meters away at Birkenau, the epicenter of the assembly line death camp. You’ve probably read or heard about the rooms filled with abandoned luggage, eye glasses, artificial limbs, shoes, children’s toys – all confiscated from prospective victims as they were paraded off cattle cars to perish within the gates that read, “Arbeit Macht Frei” … or, work will make you free.

Intense? Chilling? Insane? Yes, and so much worse than these and any other inadequate words that we have little choice except to pretend might encapsulate some measure of the emotion felt at a crime site with a scale of aspiration well beyond the imagination of a twenty-something Hoosier bumpkin.

After two hours, we’d had enough. To get back to Krakow – and return to Warsaw later that evening – necessitated a short walk into the center of Oswiecim, where we boarded a train that ran roughly half the distance back to the city before abruptly disgorging us to change at a rural crossing point.

The day had become hot and sultry, and activity at the station was minimal. There was a simple buffet offering plates of mystery meat in gray sauce, but we weren’t so much hungry as thirsty – not just thirsty, but fairly desperate for an adult beverage or three to ease the transition from wartime Auschwitz back to shabby 1980’s-vintage Poland.

Pivo? Wodka?

Alas, there was no succor for the bibulous at the train station. Resigned to temperance, and waiting at the platform, there were green fields and crops visible in the distance beyond the tracks. Clean but roughly dressed people were walking in little groups toward the settlement – surely even in a Polish farm town there’d be something happening on Saturday night – and just before the train finally limped in, a horse-drawn cart clattered across the weathered cobblestones nearby.

I’d been looking at the older folks among the crowd. With memories of Auschwitz still raw, It’s obvious what I was thinking … and I kept those thoughts to myself.

Later, watching Shoah, the parched rail platform reverie and the native Poles populating it came back to me with a vengeance, and they wouldn’t let go throughout the remainder of the film over that period of days as Lanzmann meticulously peeled away the dusty layers of memory and forced the viewer to think: What did it all mean?

This is by no means a denunciation of Poland and the Poles, or an attempt at facile erudition with respect to their places in the historical record, only an observation that there are times when very little makes sense, especially when one’s own senses are being burdened with the unsettling melancholy of time.

Or, of time passed.

It has been thirty years since Lanzmann’s film went into production, and certainly all survivors he chronicled are dead. The people I saw in Poland in 1987 are twenty years older, and many of them have passed on, too. While I am reasonably confident that the readers of this blog need not be reminded of what the Holocaust meant, to be honest, I’m not so sure when I look out the window of my office toward the rental properties lining the other side of the street – or toward the streets in parts of Europe where anti-Semitism persists in spite of what happened there more than a half-century before.

Nature or nurture – or both? We’re classified as human by biological default at birth, but mustn’t we learn how to be human? If no one is there to teach us what it means to be human, or shirks the responsibility, aren’t we condemned to repeating these instances of man's inhumanity to man?

I'm told that a new translation of Elie Wiesel’s Night is back on the paperback bestseller list. I sincerely hope that’s a good omen.

George W. "Gitmo" Bush might even read it.