Polish Roots

Across the street where I lived for the first years of the childhood I remember was a statute of Casimir Pulaski.  He fought unsuccessfully against Russian occupation of Poland and then, with the assistance of Benjamin Franklin, joined the War of Independence in America.  Pulaski is credited with saving the life of then General George Washington during the Battle of Brandywine in 1777.  Pulaski reformed the American cavalry and demonstrated its superiority over infantry.  Although he died at the age of 34 during a battle in Savannah, Pulaski is one of only eight persons ever to be conferred honorary citizenship by the US Congress…..President Obama signed that action into law in 2009.

The population of the town where I was born and raised was, while I lived there, more than fifty percent of Polish descent.  If their grandparents hadn’t shortened their names to a single syllable, many of my classmates and teammates had last names with long, complicated spellings……the kind that most people mispronounce but I find easy to state correctly.

So when we arrived in southern Poland this summer, my wife thought I might be able to communicate with the locals.  But I could not, except by pointing and smiling.  When I consulted with a guidebook to brush up on Polish words for everyday transactions, I was stumped.  The spellings looked like random collections of letters.

One Polish word I did know was the word for “thank you.”  But when I checked with the guidebook, the letters did not look at all like the sounds I knew I was supposed to make.

Many people where I now live in the USA know one Polish word…..”paczki,” pronounced “ponch-key”…..the almost softball-shaped, fried and filled pastry popular on “Fat Tuesday” prior to Lent.  That’s the only time each year when these treats are available for purchase where I live.  But in southern Poland this summer we found these caloric catastrophes for sale everyday, everywhere, in both large towns and small…..even at a hut in a meadow near the end of our four-hour hike in the Tatra Mountains…..a blueberry paczki for “sugar replacement therapy,” we rationalized.

JER