On being “Polish”

In my last post I speculated that the fact that I pronounce H as /h/ and CH as /x/ when I speak Polish, contrary to everything written about Polish phonetics, may be due to my being raised in a Jewish environment where Polish was spoken alongside Yiddish, and that the phonetic distinction may be a carryover from Yiddish.

My recent trip to Poland brought up two more reasons why I, like most Polish Jews, cannot consider myself a Pole.

The national dish of Poland is bigos; I got to taste several versions of it. And while recipes for bigos vary greatly, ham, bacon and kielbasa (usually made with pork) are almost always present.

Obviously, bigos would not be a typical part of Polish Jewish cuisine. I often heard my mother use the word, but what she meant by it was “a delicacy” or “a delicious dish”; she had no idea that it was actually the name of a specific dish, even if not a uniform one. When I told her about it, she was surprised.

On a visit to the Warsaw Historical Museum I saw an original copy of the Polish Constitution of May 3, 1791, widely hailed as the first modern constitution in Europe (though the Corsican Constitution of 1755 antedates it considerably). And I read the first article (I’m taking the translation from polishconstitution.org):

The dominant national religion is and shall be the sacred Roman Catholic faith with all its laws. Passage from the dominant religion to any other confession is forbidden under penalties of apostasy.

And things don’t seem to have changed very much. The identification of Polish nationality with Catholicism continues to be strong; references to the Virgin Mary as the Queen of Poland or to Pope John Paul II as a Polish national hero abound.

No wonder, then, that the Jewish and Catholic populations of Poland have traditionally been referred to as “Jews” and “Poles,” respectively.

I will give only one example, from a book that I’m currently reading. It’s about Chaim Rumkowski, the head of the Judenrat of the Łódź ghetto (which the Poles prefer to call by its German name, Getto Litzmannstadt) during World War II, and is based on the memoirs of  Estera (Etka) Daum, who as a young woman worked as a secretary in Rumkowski’s administration. The title is Byłam sekretarką Rumkowskiego (“I was Rumkowski’s secretary”) and the subtitle is Dzienniki Etki Daum (“The diaries of Etka Daum”). The author, a journalist named Elżbieta Cherezińska, in fact rewrote the memoirs in the form of the diary that Etka supposedly kept during the war but which was lost.

The introduction is by Szewach (Shevah) Weiss,  a Polish-born Israeli political scientist, politician and diplomant (he was the Israeli ambassador in Poland from 2001 to 2003).  On on the first page, Weiss writes (my translation): “… this is not a story about Poles and Jews. The age-old Polish-Jewish questions never exist in it. This is a story about Jews and Jews.”

And so it is. Difficult as it may be to explain to Americans and other Westerners, though I was born in Poland and Polish is my native language, I am not and have never been a Pole. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course.

Afghanistan and Belgium

There is a remarkable similarity between Afghanistan and Belgium with regard to linguistic makeup. In both countries, most of the population is divided into two roughly equal language communities, speaking languages A (Pashto or Flemish) and B (Persian or French), respectively. In both cases, A is a local language without much international standing, and is shared only with another community in a neighboring country (the Dutch of the Netherlands and the Pathans of Pakistan), while language B is shared with another, much larger country and enjoys, at least historically, great international prestige, with a literary tradition going back to the Middle Ages. Moreover, in each case language B was for many years the dominant language of government and culture, and came to be used as the primary language of the upper class of A-speakers.

In both cases, A-speakers refer to themselves by a name similar to that of the language (Pashtuns, Flemings). B-speakers, on the other hand, do not call themselves Persians or French, but, at least for those communities that have traditionally spoken the language or related dialects, have special designations (Tajiks, Walloons).

In both countries, also, the capital is located in what is historically A-speaking territory, but most of its population speaks B. A part of this B-speaking population consists of immigrants (or their descendants) from historically B-speaking territory, but a larger part is made up of descendants of A-speakers, and not only of the upper class.

It is here that the similarities end and the differences begin. The French-speaking Bruxellois of Flemish ancestry (as evidenced by their surnames) do not regard themselves as Flemings but as francophone Belgians. Together with the Walloons proper they form the French Community (Communauté française), where French refers only to language.

Persian-speaking descendants of Pashtuns, on the other hand, retain their Pashtun identity, which includes a knowledge of Pashto at least as a secondary language.

Another difference: in Belgium, the principal minority group alongside the two major groups is the German-speaking Community (Deutschsprachige Gemeinschaft), whose members regard themselves as German-speaking Belgians, not as Germans. The comparable group in Afghanistan would be those who speak Uzbek, but they are not simply Uzbek-speaking Afghans; they are Uzbeks.

We see here the effect of the Seipel line, which separates Western Europe (where citizenship is the primary hallmark of nationality) from Eastern Europe and Asia, where it’s ethnicity that matters above all.

There it (the New York Times) goes again!

Alexander Vinokourov is in the news again this week, first for his spectacular victories in Stages 13 (time trial) and 15 (Pyrenees) of the Tour de France, and again today because he was discovered to have benefited from an illegal blood transfusion. And once again the media, with the New York Times in the lead, refer to “Alexander Vinokourov, the Kazakh cyclist.”

When not dealing with Vinokourov, for the past few years media references to “Kazakh” have typically involved Borat. Now Borat Sagdiyev, the character invented and performed by Sacha Baron Cohen, is represented as a Kazakh, but in fact nothing about him has anything to do with the Kazakh people or Kazakhstan. His appearance, and that of the other supposedly Kazakh characters in the Borat film (most of whom are played by Romanians), is typically Southern European, and the supposedly Kazakh language that Borat speaks is in fact Hebrew. Real Kazakhs are Central Asians and their physical appearance is close to East Asian, or what in the United States is called simply Asian.

Vinokourov is blond and looks quite typically Russian. His name is Russian, as is his Russian Orthodox way of crossing himself. He is, in fact, a Kazakhstani Russian — that is, a citizen of Kazakhstan who is an ethnic Russian. Wikipedia gets it right by calling him “a Kazakhstani professional road bicycle racer.”

The fact that in Eastern and East Central Europe, and in most of Asia, nationality is defined by ethnicity and not by citizenship is something that the Western media seem to have a hard time with. I have written a number of essays on the subject. The issue affects me personally because I am a native of Poland, and my ancestors lived in Poland for hundreds of years, but my family and I are Polish Jews and we never regarded ourselves, nor were regarded by others (except ignorant Westerners), as Poles.

But there, again, goes the New York Times. In a recent article titled In Poland, a Jewish Revival Thrives — Minus Jews, the reporter, Craig S. Smith, tells us that “[b]efore Hitler’s horror… [o]ne in 10 Poles was Jewish.”

I sent Mr. Smith a message informing him of his error. Needless to say, there was no response. The high-and-mighty New York Times will publish misinformation, apologize for it if it is blatant enough, and keep on doing it. My nationality issue is minuscule when compared with Weapons of Mass Destruction.