“In Poland women set the tone and reign over men.”

Those were my mother’s words for as long as I could remember. Poland, she told me, was matriarchal, always had been, always would be. It was like this in her own home and that made it true for the entire country. I’d always felt at ease around my grandfather and felt a lot of love for him. Even when I was going off into a strop when I was eleven and told him not to talk to me because I was mad at the whole situation we were in,* he sat opposite of me at the kitchen table and started making rabbit ears. It broke the tension and made me laugh and even in my rage I was still able to intuit that he’d done this to break the tension and make me laugh while still respecting my boundaries because he had not said a single word. 

My grandmother was a harder shell to crack. Because even as a child, I didn’t like her. It wasn’t something I articulated, because grandmothers are there to be loved and every movie, novel or TV show I’d ever watched spoke about just that. I never knew what to talk about with her. And even though we interacted my only memories of feeling bothered that she had come on a walk I’d taken with my parents and grandfather at age ten, sitting in front of me at the kitchen table about a year later with a bowl of cheese pierogi she’d just made, which meant I had to eat the whole thing, her knitting me a sweater in cream and pink after she’d asked me which color combo I preferred when I was twelve and never wearing the sweater because I hated it, and getting – as I remembered it – a combo of honey and garlic and an egg in hot milk when I was five and had a cold when we visited her. I never sent her cards or a present for Christmas or even her birthday. I didn’t even know when her birthday was. 

Two people do not a country make. Nor do a hundred, or even a thousand. But look at people in the context of the society that shaped them and things come to light that can be true for several others. Five years ago I decided to dive deeper into this business of roots and where I might come from on the Polish side. I replied to a comment on a site that’s essentially a Russian troll farm, received a reply, we started talking in private and that led to an incredible friendship filled with love, adventures and inner growth. It is also a friendship that allows me to be safe as I dig deeper into family history and untangle the fantasy and the lies from reality in a quest to find out what’s real vs what lies beneath a patina of fake. 

Interestingly in this setup my grandmother was said to come from pure Polish peasant stock (her blonde hair and thirteen siblings lay credence to that aside from her name) while my grandfather’s lineage was steeped in secrecy and silence. Something about a very Ashkenazi name from Vilnius on his mother’s side (even though the house my grandfather grew up in had its own private chapel in which she was photographed praying) and that “very rare family name no one could really trace” on his father’s side. I witnessed firsthand how the relatives whitewashed people to fit their own narrative when I was told that the woman my mother’s brother married had an Italian mother and Armenian father (who just happened to bear a very Ashkenazi name, but that was treated with the method of if we don’t bring it up, it doesn’t exist). I never asked my grandfather about his own family background because to me he was just that Catholic but in a good way, meaning he practiced more than he preached and accepted everyone as they were. My mother told me he could talk to anyone on their level without talking up or down, and thinking about how he was with me and my mother and my grandmother (all very different types), I could see a lot of that as truth. Prayer and church were important to him because they were a huge part of his life and was what helped him get through the day. According to my mother’s tales he and my grandmother helped the less fortunate every step of the way on top of running soup kitchens out of the shop they were allowed to run during socialism. And I think on some level I just accepted that like me he was cross-cultural and most likely didn’t know that much about his parents’ past, never mind the past of his grandparents. 

My opinion of Poles as a nation has never been good, largely due to the experiences I’ve had within my own family and the Poles I met as immigrants in every country I’ve lived in. My relationship with Poland has led me to clearly distinguish between relatives and family. Relatives I’m connected to by blood (due to unfortunate events) whereas my family are the people I choose to have around me and who have chosen me in turn, people I love and am able to trust completely. People who will leave no stone unturned in lifting you up and display no hesitation when it comes to letting you know when you stepped out of line, and then support you all the way through. 

Despite that, I don’t want to turn any writing or research on Poland into a slam piece. I want to look at what I experience in a very neutral way, guided by my own experiences, which are invaluable in providing guidance when it comes to looking beneath the surface and understanding some concepts. They are especially handy when it comes to detecting the kind of subtleties you can only pick up when you’ve been exposed to a culture through its worst sides, the sides that only come out when the mask slips for whatever reason – due to carelessness or neglect, neglect in keeping up the facade you have so carefully created.   

I remember being eleven and hearing this song on the radio while visiting relatives in Poland. It must have been at my godmother’s place because she wouldn’t have visited my grandmother’s place, partly due to my mother’s sister who had moved herself and her husband into a three-room apartment during communism to act as carer for my grandparents. It always made me wonder why if that was the case she and her husband had their own bedroom and room to hang out in while my grandparents were relegated to what was really the drawing room. In practice this meant they were sleeping on a couch that had to be folded up every morning to hide any traces of their presence. I knew already then that I had good instincts when it came to people, and the relatives weren’t exempt from that. I was too young to avoid meeting them, and aside from their cruelty and mindset they also cut into my playtime with my cousin, who lived at the other end of town, so was hard to get to. Moonlight Shadow had always been a song I loved and I was just figuring out that the songs I would listen to in one country (US / France) weren’t as easily available in another (Germany). So hearing this song in Poland, a country I knew back then had limited access to the things I’d been used to all my life, seemed to me like a very special bonus, (almost) like a protective shield