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Jacob Mikanowski

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71

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2023-10-18

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2023-10-18

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1. “No, actually, I think the reverse. I think there's a split in the 20th century. Maybe I'm biased. Maybe I read them in both. But I think a lot of Polish poet, I think the troika of great post-war poets, Biswava Shamborska, Czes ⁇ w ⁇ Miosz, Zbikini of Herbert, I think they work really well on translation and they don't rely on the things that make Russian poetry so hard and older Polish poetry so hard, which is rhythm and meter and extremely untranslatable word play. There's a poet I love also Fleshman, who's from the early 20th century has really barely been translated, extremely difficult even in Polish doesn't work at all in English, but I think especially Herbert is so spare in Polish as well. There's so little, it's such a poetry of ideas. I think it comes through really well. Where should a person start?”

   2023-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Jacob Mikanowski on Eastern Europe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “You know, the best food I have in Poland, there's some really good Vietnamese restaurants because there's a Vietnamese minority that goes back to the 70s and 80s. But Polish food is best when it's made by Bobches, by Polish grandmas. So I go to milk bars and it's always the best meal. I was up in the Suvalki gap two years ago in Suvalki, went to a milk bar, which is a kind of a communist relic. They meant that it was a kind of a daytime cafeteria we would get Polish standards, but you couldn't get any alcohol. And usually in the bad days, they wouldn't let you have even the utensils, the forks who have two tines so no one would steal them. Great food. Very cheap, very good. There are more levels to Polish gastronomy now. You can get really fancy food. You can get incredible...”

   2023-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Jacob Mikanowski on Eastern Europe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “It's true. I mean, there's so many other points of flexion, of tension in Moldova and Transnistria and Belarus and Ukraine. That's where I would focus. Kaliningrad, it's odd, but we could kind of, I don't know, it's like the Malta. Or Luxembourg, it could kind of maybe exist for a long time. But I'm not sure.”

   2023-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Jacob Mikanowski on Eastern Europe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “That's true, but I mean, it's really Russian there, though. Who would take it back? There aren't any Polish people there. There are no Lithuanians. There's a Lithuanian nostalgia for part of it. Part of it had Lithuanian culture that's been almost wiped out. So unless it goes independent.”

   2023-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Jacob Mikanowski on Eastern Europe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Part that they swapped post World War II, there was Bulgaria used to cross down. Have a little bit more of the Bulgarian, what's now the Bulgarian coast. So there's a piece of southern De Brugia, I think, that they swapped. But as a whole, the river, you know, used to be the frontier of the Roman Empire for a long time. It's still a solid Bulgarian-Romanian border, a real linguistic frontier. So that's a solid, long time. Frontier? Are there others? The Carpathians are one of the few natural boundaries. That's Slovak, Polish, border is pretty set for a long time.”

   2023-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Jacob Mikanowski on Eastern Europe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Do I expect Knowish tanks storming the Kant's birthplace? Not really. I think as much as those exclaves used to be and still are in Nagorno-Karabakh, very precarious. In nuclear power is an awfully big Trump guard. I can't see any of the countries surrounding that oblast making a big move. It'll be, I don't think it's even that big of a deal to the, in Poland, you never talk or think about it a little bit. But I think it's hard for the Russians to stage anything major from there, but it's also hard for any of the surroundings to do a lot against it. So I think it's a curio. I don't think it's the Crimea of the Baltic. I think it'll be a... Issue, but not a huge”

   2023-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Jacob Mikanowski on Eastern Europe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “One part went to Prussia and became kind of economically prosperous but culturally uninteresting as the kind of agricultural hinterland of an industrializing state. The Russian part became the industrializing core, like center of a more economically backward state, became the war sun, Wuji became the big factory hubs centers. And then Galicia, the south, joined An empire that was the Habsburg Empire that was kind of in between economically, but was left extremely underdeveloped, extremely poor up to independence up to 1918. And I think that may be incubated and kept some of that folk life intact. It was neither industrializing nor westernizing the way the Prussian. And that's speculation. It might just be that the paint's better.”

   2023-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Jacob Mikanowski on Eastern Europe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “It is. It is from southern Poland. I'll venture a guess. That's hard for me to say for sure. Some of it is the mountains are a little different. The south of Poland is the only place it has real terrain. All the rest of it's flat. The south has our Carpathian Mountains, has a difference. And the culture there is a little different was different. There are Gourals in the China People in this direct south Zakopana. And then the past groups called the Boix and Lemks, or Lemkos, Orthodox groups. It was a more multicultural area. And it was Habsburg. And it was under the Habsburgs. It was kind of the most underdeveloped, the most rural Rauritanian part Poland. It was, because Poland's kind of a nice natural experiment. It was split into three parts in 1795.”

   2023-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Jacob Mikanowski on Eastern Europe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “There's a nostalgia towards, but they're not moving back very much. So I think it's from what contexts are, what influences are from labor migration.”

   2023-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Jacob Mikanowski on Eastern Europe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Germanic influence comes from Living and working in Germany, and especially Silesian. Silesia, that part of Poland that's on that side, has people there, a larger percentage of them, have German or mixed German roots. There's an area in the south that had a larger number of Germans stay. Most Germans left or were forced to leave. There's some influence. But the bigger thing is that that border area, people really go to Germany and Switzerland and Austria to work. People from eastern Poland, the pattern has been to go to the UK and France and Belgium or America. So the influence, I think, comes from return migration and cross-border travel. Germans don't aren't going that much back to Poland. They do people with roots and there are a lot of Germans with roots in both northern Poland and Western Poland. They go, they see the old church, the old cemetery, the old house. A lot of that stuff is actually intact.”

    2023-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Jacob Mikanowski on Eastern Europe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “ethnic and religious makeup. That if you had asked me that 15 years ago, 10 years ago, I'd say no. Poland is what it is. Poland is, you know, the white eagle, the pope, the Catholic Church. It's a pretty set thing. It's amazing how much I think the war in Ukraine has changed things that we're going towards and the influx of Ukrainians and actually Belarusians too and people from actually they're also Chechens in a smaller number, people from the former Soviet Union. And because of that work, I think perceptions of difference have really shifted in Poland. It's become from a very close society, I think it's opened up a little bit in a very meaningful way. And it's recovering some of that polyethnicity that had lost. We'll see how lasting that is. But I think something that's really shifted in the last few years.”

    2023-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Jacob Mikanowski on Eastern Europe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Interesting because it really was deeply rooted deep in the Middle Ages, definitely in early modernity, that old, mostly supposedly mostly Polish Poland actually was hard to recover, actually was kind of west of the western part of Poland. It had tons of Germans, which people forget. It was also in a different way, different balance, multi-ethnic. The 20th century did so much to change Poland's geography, Poland's borders, Poland's”

    2023-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Jacob Mikanowski on Eastern Europe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “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 Piest, Poland, and Jagiellonian Poland. And Piast is that more narrow, one culture, one religion. That's what's been assigned to it. And that's the kind of the dominant view. And the Agilonians are this bigger where a confederation of peoples, we're a bigger country. We have kind of a big tent. And I kind of come from that. So I think there's more to it than most Americans know, and also in a way than some Poles know.”

    2023-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Jacob Mikanowski on Eastern Europe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “See Poland and have grown up in a Poland that's largely monocultural, mono-ethnic, mono-religious, 99% Polish, Polish speaking, 99% Catholic around there, their little bit of erosion, and now there's a lot bigger Ukrainian minority than there used to be. But up to recently. And that people project that back into the past. That's what Poland's been always. And 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 are under Polish rule. It was multi-religious. Jews were part of this state and entity for centuries and included other minorities like Belarusians, who are deeply tied up with this other part of Poland that Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In Poland, there is a name for their kind of two.”

    2023-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Jacob Mikanowski on Eastern Europe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “And I feel I come at Polish culture a little bit askance from the way most Poles come at Polish culture. So 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,”

    2023-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Jacob Mikanowski on Eastern Europe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Ranted, the right to an apartment. You didn't have a hope of a car. And jobs were kind of not exactly crapshoot, but you were going to assign something. So you could actually start. If you went through college, even if you didn't, you might be in a position to have a place to live and income to support a family at 21, 22. And nothing much to save up for. No real way to save up, no real goal to save towards. And that's completely shifted. People are trying to wait. And in a pretty unstable In Poland, a volatile economy, at least in the past 20 years, growing, but with some tremors. And people have that more Western of like save up for now. You can buy a house. You can apartments have become expensive. So it's a much more Western life track that people are on.”

    2023-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Jacob Mikanowski on Eastern Europe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “Interesting, that's actually very true of my aunt who stayed and put my mom came to America to visit her aunt, and my aunt stayed in Poland and had her first daughter at 21, had that kind of first short marriage and then a later marriage with another daughter. And that has kind of changed. I think it's a shift to those more Western, more career-oriented. Omen car oriented, savings oriented lifestyles. I mean, it's a really different political economy in the 70s and 80s. You were not waiting to save up for an apartment. You were usually on a list that your parents put you on, and you were waiting to be.”

    2023-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Jacob Mikanowski on Eastern Europe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Think you're right. I think it's growth plus the hegemonic West expanding, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but a certain set of cultural mores has crumbled, especially in kind of the big, like in Warsaw. I remember how shocked I was when I had like really good customer service in a cafe in maybe 2006, 7 with the kind of that extra American, would you like anything more with that? And I'm like, what are you saying? Why are you talking to me? And the Morays had started to shift, that kind of old confrontational dour way of interacting had Inflected, and now it's really changed. Now there's a new generation that seems much more Western, seems much more American. And it is like it's visible in customer interactions, stores, fashion. And yeah, and how people even.”

    2023-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Jacob Mikanowski on Eastern Europe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “That's not really a unique European thing to punctuate sentences with a laughter, you know, just sort of introduce yourself. I'm Bob from Ohio. Very strange. So there is a little bit of a microcultural disconnect. I grew up believing that completely. And being told that by my parents do.”

    2023-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Jacob Mikanowski on Eastern Europe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “Well, no, I grew up in America in a Polish family, and that'd go back and forth a few times. And I grew up in a family that kind of got, the parents got stuck here. Inadvertently in 1981 when martial law was declared, they were here, they were in America for either six weeks or six months. They had different visas and they kind of got trapped. And they lived in a kind of a Polish cultural bubble. They didn't know English when they came here or very little. And I grew up kind of in that culture. And yeah, that's absolutely. I don't smile that much. My mom doesn't. We often get asked if we're very serious. Are we sad? Are we depressed? And I do find, and I did find, our American habits are a little odd, like nervous laughter.”

    2023-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Jacob Mikanowski on Eastern Europe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Eastern Europeans have a real sense of humor. I don't know what Western European humor is, but a sense of the tragic sense of the absurd, sense of how those two go together. I think... That's a great question binding. Laughter in the worst situations, finding a way to laugh at really dark things. I think that's a feature of German Jewish hewer, Ashkenazi humor, and I think it's found everywhere across the region. I know there's a Romanian saying to kind of laugh at your tears. And I think that kind of sums it up. Laugh at your sorrows.”

    2023-10-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Jacob Mikanowski on Eastern Europe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source