Jacob Mikanowski: belief

Transcript context

…You’ve studied Poland; you’ve lived there; you’re fluent in Polish. If you compare your understanding to, say, your highly educated American readers, what’s the key thing you feel you understand about Polish culture that maybe they don’t? Let’s say they’ve been to Poland once and they’ve read two or three books on it, but they’re not experts. It’s an interesting question. I feel I come at Polish culture a little bit askance from the way most Poles come at Polish culture. I might say I feel like I have a different approach to Polish culture than Americans who come to Poland cold and from a lot of Poles who see Poland and have grown up in a Poland that’s largely monocultural, monoethnic, monoreligious. Ninety-nine percent Polish-speaking, 99 percent Catholic — around there. (A little bit of erosion, and now there’s a lot bigger Ukrainian minority than there used to be — but up till recently.) People project that back into the past, that that’s what Poland’s been always. I come from a Polish Jewish family with Lithuanian roots: split Polish and Jewish, not just Jewish. Historically, Poland’s been much more mutable. It’s expanded and contracted. It’s included many people who we wouldn’t call Poles now but who were under Polish rule. It was multireligious. Jews were part of this state and entity for centuries. And it included other minorities. Belarusians were deeply tied up with this other part of Poland. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In Poland, there’s a name for — there are two schools of thought on what Poland is and should be. They come from the two dynasties that ruled Poland, the first two dynasties: there’s Piast Poland and Jagiellonian Poland. Piast is that more narrow, one-culture, one-religion — that’s what’s been assigned to it. That’s the dominant view. The Jagiellonians are this bigger, “We’re a confederation of peoples. We’re a bigger country. We have a big-tent version of Polishness.” I come from that. I think there’s more to it than most Americans know and also, in a way, than some Poles know. This polycultural background: How much do you feel it has strong, deep roots? Is it your view that “Well, now it’s mostly gone; it really will not come back”? Or the fact that what we now call Poland was so strongly polycultural, say, 100 years ago, 150 years ago — that this will, in some sense, reemerge, and it will reemerge because it had been part of the past for so long?…

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