13 Stradomska Street

by Andrew Potok

  I call P. in Warsaw and the next day he drives down in his little Polish Fiat to spend a day with us. He has a favorite bar in Krakow named Spokoj (meaning peace) where, as in the bars of Warsaw, he loved being among artists and would-be artists. Down a long passage and up some stairs, he is immediately recognized, “not so much for the films I now make,” says he, “but the former me.” P. is known not only as a clever movie maker but a lifelong drunk, the latter characterization not terribly special among the Polish literati.

  I heard that soon after Solidarity took over and Poland leaped happily back into the market economy, P., no longer the darling of the oppressed, drifted easily into television commercials in which near-naked women sprawled lusciously over Ford and Chevy hoods. Freed from one oppression, he seemed to enjoy mucking about in another.

  “Do you miss the thrill of making idiots of the censors?” I ask him.

  “I have learned to tolerate change,” he says and downs the first hundred grams of vodka. “Speaking of change, Andrew,” he says, “when I visited you in Vermont, you were thinking of painting again. I tell everyone I know about my blind American friend who paints.”

  “I painted for a few years. It was pure joy but I stopped when my eyes totally gave out.”

  “What did they look like?” P. asks Loie, who has been silent until now, probably people watching, one of her most pleasurable activities.

  “I love them,” she says, “a series of canvasses; all of them figure paintings including a portrait of me which actually looks like me.”

  “So,” he says, “no more abstraction?”

  “I’m thinking that any old blind guy can lay on colors, mush them around. Not me, not this blind guy. So I found a narrative.”

  “Narrative? What narrative?”

  “An old goat, me, a fleshy seductive woman, Loie, a young buck waiting in the background.”

  P. yells to someone in Polish a few tables away, raises his glass, and continues with me. “So how did you do it?” he asks.

  “I Brailled the color name on the tube, squeezed globs onto a glass palette in a given order. Loie had come into my life at the time.”

  Loie is nursing a glass of white wine. “Benny Goodman is blaring on the CD player,” she says, “Andy is wiggling his ass to the music, the happiest I’ve ever seen him.”

  “My arms and hands remembered how to paint,” I tell him, “and with the smell of oils and turps in my nostrils, I felt as alive as a kid flying on his first bicycle ride.”

  He raises his drink and the three of us clink glasses. A group of hippie types ambles over and they high-five P., who is in his element. He introduces them to us and, in my defensive mode, I wonder which of them hates Jews—another unpleasant, suspicious moment in my Krakow psyche because, after the group of artists and wannabe artists go back to their table, P. tells us, perhaps because he has read the interior of my deranged mind, that the best filmmakers in Poland are Jewish. “Isn’t that wonderful?” he asks, then adds, “Who is it that said that there is hope only in art, that in reality there is none? We have art in order not to die of the truth.” He bends his head back and downs another vodka, then orders a bottle of champagne. “I made four movies, a couple of shorts, some TV shit. It’s been good. I miss Poland in the bad old days but it’s really better now.” He pours three flutes of champagne. “I’m more serious now,” he says, “more thoughtful, not a clown, but I still love having the players improvise. Remember Lolek? He really liked you. Well, he’s become a first-class actor.”

  P. brings a wonderful part of Poland back into focus. I don’t think we ever spoke about the so-called Jewish problem either in Warsaw or Vermont. I admire this man immensely and can’t imagine him hating anyone.

  After a couple most pleasant hours, we follow him to his car. In spite of the alcohol P. consumed, he insists on driving us back to the hotel, and from there, in spite of our begging him to stay the night, he drives the several hours back to Warsaw.

  2.

  Artur picks us up in his sporty Mercedes to drive us to the courthouse where he introduces us to his partner, Marcin, and a female translator, Katarzyna, whose English is perfect. She and I talk of the poet Tuwin, whose children’s books she knows well. “Men and women in black robes are running from office to office,” Katarzyna says. “I don’t know how the women do it wearing high heels.” I listen to the high heel clatter with some pleasure, a syncopated polyphony.

  “Very cute,” Loie says. “Under their robes, tight jeans and spike heels.” We are called into chambers, and before entering Artur’s partner puts on a black robe, which, so the translator tells me, lawyers are required to wear. “Jesus, Andy, Artur is not putting on a robe,” Loie whispers in my ear.

  “Oh shit, it’s all coming apart,” I whisper back but, as soon as we enter the chambers, Artur grabs one from a rack of robes and slips into it.

  “Phew,” says Loie.

  The judge enters the room and everyone stands. The silence is broken as Loie, whispering so softly now that I can barely make it out, tells me that the judge is a woman and that she is putting a curly white wig over her blonde hair. Katarzyna says something to the judge, probably about my blindness, and then the judge proceeds to ask me questions in Polish which Katarzyna translates. My replies, transmitted via Katarzyna, are then repeated by the judge to a court recorder on the judge’s left: the year of my birth, our arrival in America, the name of the boat, the year of our naturalization, the years of each of my parents’ deaths in New York. I confirm that Paulina was my grandmother, Solomon my grandfather, Stanislaw my uncle—all the judge wants to know to prove that Edward Prokocimer, my Prokocimer grandmother’s nephew, lied to a Polish court in 1946; the information is needed to clear the way to my wresting the Stradomska tenement from its wrongful owners. After a half hour, we are dismissed but required to appear the following day before the same judge but in different chambers, where she asks me pretty much the same questions.

  “Why this second time?” I ask Artur as we make our way out of the building.

  Shrugging his shoulders, he smiles. “This is Po-po-po-land,” is all he says and, as he drives us back in his Mercedes SL500, Artur tells us about a beachfront property he bought in Zanzibar. Who is this guy? Does he really care about this slum property? Why is he even bothering? Surely he hasn’t made all his money pursuing little jobs like this one. “Jesus, Loie, this whole thing is beginning to smell bad,” I say as we step into the hotel lobby.

  “Don’t start worrying yet,” she advises as we wait for the elevator.

  “Loie, do we really want this property?” Inside our room she sits down to rest. “What am I doing joining lawyers and bureaucrats? It’s all about money. There is something loathsome about it.”

  Late that night, I conjure up my grandparents again. My grandmother is smiling. Her face is round, lined but beautiful. I ask her if she and Solomon were on guard when they walked in the streets. “Did you trust the people in the shops? Did you smile? Did you have Polish friends you could trust?”

  “Oh yes,” she tells me, sitting up straight. “We had a few friends who were not Jewish. I must admit that it was more comfortable being with Jews than the others but it certainly had nothing to do with religion.”

  “We weren’t very Jewish ourselves,” my grandfather adds.

  “Were you angry? Did you hate?”

  “People are not all good,” Paulina admits, “but there were bad Jews as well as bad Poles.”

  “But the Poles hated you because you were Jewish,” I proclaim. “Knowing this makes me hate these people.” I swallow hard. “Surely you don’t forgive them.”

  “It’s better not to spoil your time on earth by hating,” she scolds gently. “It makes for a bad appetite.”

  Okay, she’s right. I change the subject. “My father, your son, never told me a joke,” I complain, having no idea where this will lead.

  “Your father was a sick man,” my grandmother says. “Even when he was small
, he liked to be alone. He was not happy. He liked staring out the window at nothing.”

  “But you, what jokes you must have known, stories you must have told.”

  “So Moishe and Shlomo who had been riding in the same street car after work for many years finally speak,” my grandfather says. “‘Every day for over twenty years we meet and never say a word,’ Moishe says. ‘Let’s have a conversation. Let’s get to know one another.’ So Shlomo says, ‘What a fine idea, and about time. So tell me my friend, how is your health?’ And Moishe says, ‘Don’t ask, don’t ask.’”

  3.

  The next day, having performed our duty testifying, we wait at the Hotel Rubinstein bar for Artur or Basia to drive us to the Krakow airport. “By the way,” Loie says, “Basia told me that younger generations are not nearly as anti-Semitic as the old folks. Only in rural areas do vestiges of old hatreds remain.”

  The young, charming bartender asks us how we slept last night, reporting that there was a party of noisy Jews on our floor. “Jews? How do you know they were Jews?” I ask her.

  She says nothing for a moment, wondering, I am sure, why this question. She smiles, moves closer to me. “Jewish noise,” she whispers and offers to pour me a daytime vodka.

  “Tell me, Jadzia, how is Jewish noise different from Polish noise?”

  She seems unperturbed. I have no idea what’s going on in her mind. She smiles and tells me about the klezmer band that sometimes plays a few blocks down the street. “Do you like that awful music, Mr. Andrew?” I tell her that I like it and she steps back a little, takes a deep breath. “You are Jewish, Mr. Andrew?” she asks.

  “I am Jewish,” I tell her, hating to use the Polish word for Jew, its sound ugly, accusatory.

  Loie does not translate this into anti-Semitism and I suspect that she is right. Jewish noise? I’ve had reactions like that inside a loud Jewish deli in New York. Also, truth to tell, I’m not all that fond of klezmer music either, though I’m defending it as if it defined me. My over the top sensitivity to Jew hatred appears every time I step into the land of my birth. If I lived here, I would have learned by now to shrug this off as simply part of the language, a low-grade virus that won’t go away. Although I am quite bored with enshrined political correctness, I have been thoroughly sensitized by America liberalism to anything remotely smelling of racism. I hate racism everywhere and, for a sobering moment, I realize that, in my anti-racist zeal, I could be accused of it at moments such as this, pinning a label on poor Jadzia, the Hotel Rubinstein bartender, who would probably be shocked and insulted if she thought anyone considered her anti-Semitic. Though it might be true that this younger Polish generation has shed blatant Jew hatred, I can’t help wondering if its remnants are stored in some part of the amygdala which, among its various capabilities, must have a special corner reserved for racial memory. I wonder whether every Polish Jew revisiting his place of birth is as supersensitive as I am to even an unexpressed anti-Semitism. Is he, like me, liable to erupt at a moment’s notice, a kind of cellular reaction, antibodies lined up to fight infection?

  It is Basia in her little Fiat Polonez, not Artur, who drives us to a small airport not far from the center of the city. “The only way Artur could get you back to the States Friday is on Air Berlin,” she tells us.

  “Shit,” I say to Loie. “What a way to end this week.” After saying good-bye, we are subjected to that language which, even in the dulcet tones of the flight attendant, puts me on edge. The thought of Mozart or Schubert speaking this harsh and jarring German is disturbing. I prefer Polish.

  PART TWO

  9

  BACK HOME

  1.

  A few days after we get back to Vermont, I have a dream. Walking along a rocky beach, I’m surprised by an incoming tide. Little by little the water rises to my ankles and I start backing up toward the cliffs that loom above the beach. The ocean does not stop rising and I climb higher. There is no time to dawdle and I grab rock after rock, the water outracing me, now up to my knees. It doesn’t let up. I’m breathing hard but keep climbing. With the water at my waist, I reach a ledge, an outcrop of land, and a little boy appears. He begins dancing around me, clapping his hands, cheering me on. “You can do it, you can do it,” he sings, and I recognize him. He is the eight-year-old me and I awake, smiling.

  A month later, Anita calls to remind me that it is the nineteenth of April, the seventieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. On that day long ago, hundreds of adults and children, sparsely armed with handguns and gasoline bottles, had had enough and were ready to fight. Surely they did not view their actions as an effective way to save themselves or to inflict the kind of damage that must have filled their wild revenge dreams. It was a battle for the honor of the Jewish people, and a protest against the world’s silence. The uprising was the largest single revolt by Jews in the war, and it ended when the poorly armed and supplied resistance was crushed by the Germans, who officially finished their operation to liquidate the ghetto on May 16, razing every building within it and blowing up the Great Synagogue.

  By coincidence, a conference began in Bermuda on the first day of the uprising, in which the Allied powers decided that saving the Jews would prolong the war and damage the war effort. Thus US immigration quotas were not raised, nor was the British prohibition on Jewish refugees seeking refuge in their Palestine Mandate lifted. I wonder if the delegates to the conference smiled, recognizing that it was only Jews, those pestilent Jews. I assume that cocktails were served after their decision, but in London a member of the Jewish advisory group to the wartime Polish government-in-exile committed suicide in protest.

  2.

  Basia sends me a copy of her e-mail to Philippe Prokocimer, a nephew of the perpetrator, Edward.

  “I am contacting you on behalf of Mr. Bobrowski, who represents Mr. Andrew Potok, your cousin from Vermont,” she wrote. “Let me draft a brief historical background, so that everything sounds logical. The property was owned (before the WWII) half and half by two brothers, namely Szewah and Abe vel Abbe Prokocimer (your great-grandfather). Szewah’s daughter, Rosa Saphier, sold half of the property after WWII to a Polish family. After your great-grandparents’ . . . death but still before the war, the other half went to your grandfather, Wolf Wilhelm, and his five siblings, including the grandmother—Paulina Potok née Prokocimer—of our client.

  “In 1946 your uncle, Edward Prokocimer, testified before the court in Krakow that he was the sole survivor of the Prokocimer family. He even concealed the existence of his own brother—Bruno, your father. That is how Edward came into half of the property, while, lawfully, he should have acquired a one-eighth interest, and your father, Bruno, also a one-eighth interest. Sons of Paulina Potok—Leon Potok (father of our client) and his brother Stanislaw Potok (who died childless in the UK in 1984)—should also have received a one-eighth interest each. According to the current status of the property, half of the tenement is titled to Edward’s son, Marian [aka Miron], and Edward’s wife, Helena, who are residing in Israel.

  “On behalf of our client and your cousin, Andrew Potok, we have filed a petition for reversing the 1946 court’s decision, under which Edward Prokocimer received your grandfather’s [Wolf’s] interest. . . . On request of the court, Mr. Potok came to Krakow in order to testify the truth. After the hearing, the court have requested and obligated us to present all information of and contact details to Bruno Prokocimer and, in case he is not alive, to his natural heirs, namely to you and to your siblings. Since it is neither known, nor confirmed, if your father is alive, he is represented (in all proceedings) by a delegated custodian. . . .

  “We know from experience that no-one is ever willing to return assets worth circa 2,2 million PLN—according to the today’s currency exchange rate, approximately $600–700,000. (One-eighth interest would be worth at least $150–180,000.) We expect, therefore, Marian Prokocimer to try to contest the petition, though we believe this may only generate additional costs for him, becau
se if he loses, he will have to cover all court’s fees and expenses.”

  Even though my grandmother Paulina was a Prokocimer before she married Solomon Potok, I knew little about the Prokocimers until now. As a result of Basia’s e-mail, Philippe Prokocimer calls me from his office in San Diego. To my surprise, he seems to know nothing about the Krakow property. “Your father Bruno never mentioned it?” I ask.

  “Nothing at all,” he says with a captivating French accent. I ask if he knows his cousin Miron (Marian) Prokocimer in Israel. “Just a little,” he says. “My brother Didier, sister Beatrice, and I are born in Paris where my father Bronek—that is his Polish name—settled and where he lived during the war years. But tell me, Andrew—I may call you Andrew?” he asks. “After all we are cousins.” I assure him that he can call me Andrew. “It is my uncle Edward who takes the whole property?” he asks.

  “That is what I understand.”

  “This is difficult to believe,” he says, “but I am going to Paris to visit my family in a month and will ask them what they think of this whole business.” He gives me several phone numbers where he can be reached and the best times to call. “You must keep in touch,” he says. Philippe is the chief medical officer of Trius Therapeutics in San Diego and, according to Basia, earns a huge salary, making me question how much attention he will pay to the recovery of a tenement in Poland not only because, to him, the amount might be financially insignificant, but also because of the bother of being forced to appear in Polish court and the possible sowing of family feuds.

  My contact with a Prokocimer gives me no special sense of family, a similar feeling to the emptiness I experienced when Anita and I found no remnants of a house in Wieliszew, the locus of my transformation from innocent child to battered, untrusting, and empty little body . . .