Roots Trip to Galicia, Part I

The problem with telling the story of my trip to Poland is getting started:  Do I cut to the chase, my visit to my grandmother's hometown, Przeworsk?   That was day three after we landed.  There's too much that comes before.   And the visit itself -- is that the highlight?  Not necessarily.

Waiting for the first leg, Newark to Toronto.

 

Then there's the disconnect -- even if I expected it -- between the place in my head, with all its significance and history, and the places I actually touched: a minor monument with a weathered, barely readable inscription, in a corner of a bus station -- that one visits for a few moments, leaves a pebble on, takes a photo standing in front of, and leaves to make time for all the other plans in the itinerary.   A street that bears no sign of its historical Jewish inhabitants, nevermind my grandmother's home.  A wooden door around the corner on an old brick building that's faced strong morning sun for who knows how long, with the gouged-out hollow of a mezuzah on its doorpost.

First view of Rzeszow Airport

Was it a mistake to hope for a thrill?  Should I blame Google Street View for having seen it virtually before?  No. 

Now that I'm back home, Przeworsk resumes its historic, far-away quality.  If I can look at my visit there, the pictures I took, the people I met and the things I saw,  from the same great distance, then maybe the two conceptions will line up.  Actually, I wish I'd spent more time there, just walking around.  Just sitting in the park that now occupies the market square, imagining back a hundred years.  Perhaps finding the school my grandmother attended. Or the train station. Just trying to channel the ghosts...

Just like Google showed me, Przeworsk is a modern little town today.  Parking is a problem.  There's a park with lovely plantings and benches in the rynek, what every Polish town calls its original market square.  The town hall is on the square, recently repainted and mostly converted to restaurant.  But let me back up, and start at the beginning.

When I first asked my grandmother decades ago where Przeworsk was, she told me it was between Rzeszow ("Zheshov") and Jaroslaw (Yaroslav).  Easily found on the map, all three towns sit along the major Galicia A4 east-west highway, running east of Krakow. Then years later, on a trip to Europe 101 (Italy), I was very excited to see Rzeszow listed on an airport arrivals board in  in Munich.

Of course, it doesn't take much to be an international airport in Europe -- one-hour flights will take you across a good number of international borders.  But I think my grandmother would have been surprised to know you could fly there.  And that's what we did, after changing planes in Toronto and Warsaw.  The name of this mythical place was spread wide across the glass front of the terminal, for the amusement of the grandmother living in my memory.  We walked right through it after stepping  onto the tarmac from our LOT Polish Airlines puddle-jumper.

Marek, from the next seat on LOT Toronto-Warsaw

We'd spent most of our eight-hour flight, the Toronto-to-Warsaw leg, talking to Marek, a fit, grey-haired man in the window seat. Even though this flight ended in Warsaw, we had the same destination: he, a Rzeszow native, was going to his niece's wedding, and would see his brother and family for the first time in two years.  I was surprised when he told us he was 63. He lived with his wife, also Polish, in London, Ontario, and worked installing staircases.  He'd also lived in Spain and Germany, and had left Poland shortly after the fall of Communism. He was well spoken and had a recognizably amiable and ironic sense of humor. His family (at least the Drozd part) was originally Czech.

I told Marek the point of my trip without explaining that we were Jewish; I bet he'd figured that out, since he never asked, that I recall, if I would see any family there.  But we wondered if he had. There was this sense of traveling incognito, perhaps unsuccessfully,  for the first few days in Poland. 

We followed Marek like ducks off the plane; he had by now felt a little duty, or desire, to see us to our next location. We made it together through Warsaw's Chopin airport to our connecting flight to Rzeszow, and off the small LOT plane onto Rzeszow's tarmac. Inside the terminal, a shiny baggage carousel or two, car rental desks, an equally shiny  snack bar, rest rooms.  On the other side of the terminal Marek met and hugged his brother and introduced us.  We exchanged email addresses and got a cab.

The driver spoke almost no English and a little German.  Since I can only rudely approximate German by guessing at the vowel substitutions from Yiddish, we pretty much left it at "Hotel Bristol." Poles over 38 or so were schooled in Russian but don't care to speak it; people younger than that have studied English and are perfectly happy to use it. (The two generations have also been taught two different versions of recent European history, the older one learning of Soviets as liberators, the younger one learning of Soviets as occupiers. They've also grown up with different statues and monuments, economies, entertainment, mass media, and living standards.)

Rzeszow turns out to be a fairly big city, with big traffic circles, "Galleria" malls, billboards, ATMs, wireless stores and lots of banks and colleges. Also a lovely rynek, with a baroque town hall built in 1897, other Baroque pastel buildings, a statue of Kosciuszko dressed like George Washington (his brother-in-arms), a lit gazebo, a performance space, and hundreds of tables, chairs and umbrellas extending from restaurants on every side, just like an Italian piazza. The cobble-stoned square buzzed from afternoon to late at night with attractive young people.

Rzeszow's Rynek, Hotel Bristol in the center

Rzeszow's 1897 town hall

Kosciuszko. Everyone know's he's got a bridge named after him between Queens and Brooklyn. Few people know he fought in the American War of Independence.  The plaque there in the corner notes that the Germans destroyed the statue in 1940 and it had to be rebuilt.  Note me still in the same clothes I left Newark in.  

The Hotel Bristol is right on the rynek; the driver had to go from the streets behind the square into the hotel's dark basement garage, pointing us and all our bags at the even darker hallway to the elevator.  Which, we were relieved to see, went up to the lobby.